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Wayne Booth is considered one of those principally responsible for the revival of the study of rhetoric, a skill that was valued by the Greeks in their debates and later re-visited by enlightenment-era neo-classicists. His concern for the matter couldn't have been more timely; the late 1950's and early 1960's saw the first televised debates (such as those between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon,) the popularity of shows such as 'Meet the Press, a substantial growth in the legal profession, and a new emphasis on the study of media by MacLuhan and others.
Because Booth is proposing a formula for the proper criticism of essays, we are tempted to approach his essay with an attitude of extreme scrutiny; we are thus able to discern the critical from the merely hypocritical.
Booth illustrates the necessary construction of a speech or essay as a trichotomy: the author must present facts, appeal to his audience, and maintain a proper tone. As a nod to the progenitors of rhetoric, he gives these aspects of proper speech Greek names; he calls them logos, pathos, and ethos. He begins his essay by deriding a hapless graduate student for being a mediocrity, boring his audience with attempts at over-intellectualization.
He refers to the stance that this hapless student makes as the Pedant's Stance: the essay is too factual and dry. Pedantry is considered by most people to be pretentious and boring;...
Booth's pedant is a brain without charm, unfortunately, he claims, academia is replete with such personalities. Pedants make the fundamental mistake of refusing to consider the concerns of their audience or make their speeches clever and instead regurgitate data in order to please themselves. Any research-intensive field is plagued with this problem.
The second rhetorical position he critiques is the Advertiser's Stance. This stance has too much pathos; an essay geared towards the audiences tastes without making a point. Such essays may often include pleasantries in order to win someone over: we might see this as the Dale Carnegie approach, as Carnegie considered all constructive criticism utterly pointless. This is the approach favored by salesmen; it completely gears a set of ideas at an audience. We are left to think: if the audience is pleased, from where can we derive our objective impetus for criticism? It is usually under more careful analysis that such speeches or essays are revealed to be devoid of content.
The third rhetorical position is the Entertainer's Stance. Such a stance has too much ethos; the deliverer is more concerned with matters of form and poise than of content. Such a speaker or writer could be witty or clever without…
He repeats a popular gimmick in academia; breaking a certain problem, such as the nature of public speaking, into a simplistic illustration with only three permutations. People have been doing this for centuries; even things as special and beautiful as love were broken down into easy-to-digest components by academics that possessed a desire to over-simplify for a broad-based target audience. The best example of such a breakdown proving to be wildly wrong was that of the elementals: Earth, Water, Wind and Fire. The litmus test of Booth's ability to illustrate a proper architecture for rhetorical speech is to be found in whether or not its conceptual employment is universally applicable.
The three stances Booth illustrates are in many respects three of six - one can be strong on two of the three points. Usually entertainers also please their audiences. It's hard to be entertaining without pleasing your audience and the opposite scenario; entertaining by saying the opposite of what your audience thinks, is extremely rare. It might be said that entertaining speech and advertising speech are more correlated than either of these with pedantic speech. Booth may have hesitated to develop a more comprehensive set of mandates for proper rhetorical speech because he didn't want to sound too pedantic.
Interestingly, it was also during the 1960's that semiotics was re-discovered by French philosophers such as Saussure and Levi-Strauss under the heading of structuralism. With some of the key elements of structuralism in mind (the idea of encoding messages, the sociological 'structure' of things that are said or advertisements) it is possible to develop arguments specifically designed to make a specific portion of the audience change their thoughts or opinions in a pre-calculated fashion; this methodology is used without exception in political campaigns. However, to Booth's credit it can be said that such methodologies and his are not mutually exclusive.
Rhetorical Stance Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. is celebrated four decades after his death because he was an effective and persuasive civil rights advocate. A holiday marks the birthday of Doctor King because of what he accomplished using nonviolent civil disobedience in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi. However, the holiday also reminds students of English, of History, of Speech, and of Law how to be a persuasive rhetorician. King was so
Rhetorical Theory & Practice Analysis of "The Rhetorical Stance" by Wayne C. Booth Wayne Booth's article entitled, "The Rhetorical Stance" provides a discussion and analysis of the role that rhetoric plays in allowing writers, students, academicians -- everybody -- to create a "polemic, unpretentious, stimulating, organized, convincing" compositions and arguments (25). In the essay, Booth makes his own argument and illustrates this through an enumeration of three examples of rhetorical stances that are
Arguers as Lovers" and My Own Rhetorical Stance Toward Customers While Building a Small Business In his article "Arguers as Lovers," Wayne Brockeriede suggests that the argumentative stances of rapists, seducers, and lovers are different from one another. As Brockeriede states, in relationship to these examples: Some communicators are not primarily interested in gaining assent to warrantable claims. Instead, they function through power, through an ability to apply psychic and physical
Henry uses stirring words about the value of liberty, but he also attempts to win over people who are uncertain if revolution is the correct path: "I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past," he states, and notes a real-life event in his persuasive efforts, namely England's lack of consideration of the colonialist's recent petition, comparing England's action to the false kiss of
However, according to Thoreau, as modern connivances evolve, people become removed from nature. This removal from nature therefore causes people to not understand the importance of preserving it. Without preserving nature, people will loose their historic connection to nature and thus fail to truly understand their existence. To prevent this, Thoreau argues that everyone must learn the true art of walking. Walking is from the naturalist and transcendentalist genre of
The two notions are not comprised in one definition, contrary to what is thought by all those who are confused, and there is nothing in common between the two except the name alone. The author relates this view to the realization that the goal of human existence is the attainment of the knowledge of God. It is through this knowledge that the secular and social world becomes to a great