English Rhetoric Test

Rhetoric

Rhetoric

the faculty of finding all the available means of persuasion in a particular case

Who is Aristotle?

the father of rhetoric

Exigence

problem, incident, or situation causing the writer to write the piece

How is the rhetorical triangle labeled?

What are the four purposes in writing?

Persuasive, Informative, Expressive, Literary

What should you consider in a rhetorical situation?

Your audience

What kinds of responses might your audience have?

Immediate response, or intermediate response

What do speakers use to find their attitude toward a subject?

Thoughts and personal experiences

Subject/message

The writer/speaker evaluates what they already and needs to know, investigates perspectives, and determines kinds of evidence or proofs that seem most useful

Audience

Speculating about the reader’s expectations, knowledge, and disposition with regard to the subject writers explore

Speaker

Writers use who they are, what they know and feel, and what they’ve seen and done to find their attitudes toward a subject and their understanding of a reader

Voice or persona

The character the speaker creates as they write

Logos

An appeal to reason or logic; a statistic or fact

Logos strategies

Analogy, cause/effect, comparison, cites statistics facts hard evidence, cites authority, established precedent

Ethos

An appeal to ethics or ones character; a credible expert on the topic

Pathos

An appeal to emotions; a happy, funny, or sad approach

Pathos strategies

Sensory description, adjectives and adverbs that label something as good or bad, objects of emotion

Context

The situation in which writing and reading occurs

Purpose

The reason for writing or speaking (to inform, persuade, entertain)

Circular reasoning

When a speaker begins their debate with the point they’re trying to prove (I like chocolate because its my fav and chocolate is my fav cuz I like it)

Cherry picking

when a speaker only chooses the evidence that backs up their argument, while ignoring the other side (participants in workout program get really positive results cause only ppl with positive results responded)

Ad Hominem

Against the man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A claim is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of the argument (Sophie: we should review these data sets to make sure we did them right. Mckenna: ofc you suggest that since you’re a bit slow when it comes to math)

Straw man

When a person simply ignores a person’s actual position and uses a distorted exaggerated version (Ava: I think we should hire something to redesign our website. Briana: you’re saying we should throw our money away instead of building up our company products?)

Appeal to Common Practice

Most people doing something is used as evidence to support something (Sophia: the majority of people believe advertisers should spend more money on billboards, so billboards are objectively the best form of advertisement)

begging the question

X is true. the evidence for this claim is that x is true.(god must exist because the Bible says so because the Bible was written by god)

slippery slope

A person asserts that some event will inevitably follow from another (mckenna: we have to stop the tuition increase! before you know it they’ll be charging $40k a semester!)

false dilemma

reducing a complex issue down to one of two choices-either/or argument. (Briana: either 1+1=4 or 1+1=12. 1+1+4 is not true so 1+1=12.)

Red herring

an irrelevent topic is presented in order to divert attention from og issue (reporter: reports of a massive leak! executive: well we invested billions in clean energy)

Post Hoc Ergo propter hoc

when it is concluded that one event causes another simply because the proposed cause occurred before the proposed effect (Carly is scratched by a cat while visiting her friend and was diagnosed with autism two days later, the scratch must have caused it)

hasty generalization

when a person draws a conclusion about a population based on a population that isn’t large enough (Ariana grande is a stuck up arrogant celebrity! they all must be that way…)

appeal to authority

when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject (cigarettes filter smoke! as your dentist I recommend these)

Diction

A speaker’s choice of words

Sophisticated

Highly educated or refined

formal

strangers, notables, pros

informal,

friends and colleagues

colloquial

family and close friends

slang

close friends

nominalization

the process that changes a verb into its noun form

showy vocab

be concise and don’t try to show off the words you know

Syntax

the arrangement of words into phrases, clauses, and sentences, this includes word order, length and sentence structures, schemes