Rhetoric: To target an audience through your vocabulary, pacing, and choice of supporting media.
That would be my definition of the word, which more or less matches up with the official definition, in more casual wording. What it basically boils down to, is that you can change the way you present whatever it is you are trying to get across, in order to appeal to different groups. For instance, if I were to go into a kindergarten class and explain something technical, I'd probably break it down to its simplest forms, use lots of visuals, and ultimately give up since I suck at teaching.
Another thing to take into account, besides making big nice looking posters, is your actual word choice.
I wouldn't walk into an IT convention, and talk about packet loss with terminology like "And then, when the signal (Just like what comes out of radios) comes out of the wireless internet wand, some of it gets lost on the way home!". I'd probably be called a pretentious jerk and laughed out. I'd straight up just say "And when the wifi signals get transferred to the modem/router (Can't quite remember which one specifically), it can get jumbled by all sorts of crap like radio signals, cell phone signals, even stray microwave radiation."
The difference there is that, with the kindergarteners, I'd have to break it all the way down to its lightest, easiest to digest form possible, maybe using a couple of bright visuals displaying what was going on. In said IT convention, I could just use the normal terminology, and skip straight to the solution.
Anyways that's a little over 200 words, so I'm done for tonight.
This is a good way of thinking rhetorically, especially when thinking about your audience.thank you
ReplyDeleteI liked the way you contrasted one example by looking at it from different angles. I agree with your analysis, but based on your definition, could it be said that only writing designed to focus on a specific group can be rhetorical?
ReplyDeleteThese two examples were similar to examples that I thought of while doing this assignment. One thing did not think of, however, was choice of supporting media. This is very important, like you said, in teaching situations where knowledge of the subject is not already known by the audience.
ReplyDelete