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Home / What Does It Mean to Read Rhetorically

What Does It Mean to Read Rhetorically

xix Reading Rhetorically, or How to Read Like a Author

Liza Long

By Liza Long

As with any skill, writing rhetorically begins with reading rhetorically. Only what exactly do we mean by rhetoric? Reading rhetorically is really just reading like a author. When yous read rhetorically, you are joining the conversation with the writer as an active, engaged, and critical participant. This type of reading is non a strategy similar active reading or a formula that we tin can utilise to every text. Instead, reading rhetorically is a habit of mind that life-long learners work to adopt. This addiction of mind volition help you appoint with texts–from social media posts to peer-reviewed journal articles and everything in between–instead of passively consuming them. Rhetorical reading will make you a better thinker and a meliorate writer.

Rhetorical reading begins with asking questions most the rhetor, or the speaker. Essentially, reading rhetorically is reading critically, starting with a critical interrogation of the text's author, where nosotros enquire ourselves a series of questions about the writer, their worldview, and their intentions.

In the approach beneath, I have used the Greek philosopher Aristotle's elements of argument to help us retrieve near the rhetor, or author of a text. These aforementioned elements of argument (besides called Classical Statement) are also used by writers, as we will see in later chapters.

Here are some questions we can inquire about the rhetor:

Ethos (Graphic symbol):

  • Who is the writer?
  • Why is the author qualified to write about this topic? Does the writer have lived experience? Are they an expert?
  • How does the author constitute themselves equally apparent to readers? Does the author seem credible to me? Why or why not?

Desolation (Emotion):

  • What relationship does the author have with their intended audition?
  • Who is the intended audience, and am I part of that grouping? Why practise I recall that I am or am not part of the intended audience?
  • What is the author's overall tone? (humorous, emotional, logical, etc.)
  • How does the author engage the reader? Do I experience engaged equally I read? Why or why not?
  • How practise I feel every bit I read this text? Do I agree with the writer, disagree, or both? What emotions, if whatever, does this text bring up for me? How does the author invoke these emotions?

Logos (Reason)

  • What question(southward) or topic(s) does this text address?
  • Why are these questions or topics of import? (so what? Who cares?)
  • What group of people cares well-nigh this topic? A community? An organisation? A demographic group? (case, Boomers or Zoomers)
  • What types of reason or evidence does the writer use?
  • Are these reasons and testify credible? Why or why non?

Allow's combine the questions nosotros asked to a higher place into a checklist that you can use every bit yous read a text:

  1. Then what? Who cares? What questions does the text accost? Why are these questions of import? What types of people or communities/organizations care nearly these questions?
  2. Who is this text written for? Who is the intended audience? Am I part of this audience or an outsider?
  3. How does the author support their thesis? What types of prove are used? Personal experience? Facts and statistics? Original observations, interviews, or enquiry?
  4. Exercise I find this argument convincing? Whose views and counterarguments are omitted from the text? Is the counterargument or counterevidence addressed or ignored?
  5. How does the writer hook the intended reader's involvement and continue the reader reading? Does this hook piece of work for me? For example, the writer may utilize emotion (pathos), authorization or character (ethos), or reasons and evidence (logos) to introduce the argument.
  6. How does the author make themselves seem credible to the intended audience? Is the writer credible for me? Are the author'southward sources reliable?
  7. Are this writer's basic values, beliefs, and assumptions similar to or different from my own? Do the writer and I share the same worldview or do we have different perspectives?
  8. How do I respond to this text? What are my initial reactions? Exercise I concur, disagree, or both? Has the text changed my thinking or made me reconsider my position in any manner?
  9. How will I exist able to employ what I accept learned from the text in my own writing? Remember almost the type of writing assignment where this source might be useful, and how you would use it.

At present, let's practice. Here'due south a passage from Ta Nehisi Coates'due south National Book Award winning volume Between the World and Me, written in the course of a alphabetic character from the African American public intellectual and author to his 15-year-sometime son. As yous read the following passage, keep the questions above in listen. You lot may desire to jot down notes and use agile reading strategies.

Americans believe in the reality of "race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and and so humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and i is left to deplore the Center Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an convulsion, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that tin exist bandage as beyond the handiwork of men.

But race is the kid of racism, non the male parent. And the process of naming "the people" has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as i of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is quondam. Simply the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are enduring—this is the new idea at the heart of this new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.

These new people are, like united states, a modernistic invention. Just unlike us, their new proper noun has no existent significant divorced from the mechanism of criminal ability. The new people were something else before they were white—­Cosmic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—­and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, so they will have to be something else again. Peradventure they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. Every bit for at present, information technology must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was non accomplished through wine tastings and water ice foam socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and country; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the auction of children; and diverse other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny yous and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.

Ta Nehisi Coates, excerpt from Between the World and Me, Penguin Randomhouse, 2015, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/220290/betwixt-the-world-and-me-by-ta-nehisi-coates/9780812993547/excerpt

Think well-nigh the types of arguments we run across on the Internet today. Are people reading each other's tweets and posts rhetorically? Are they responding every bit if they are using rhetorical skills to listen? Or are they using rhetorical skills to win?

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Source: https://idaho.pressbooks.pub/write/chapter/reading-rhetorically-or-how-to-read-like-a-writer/