Plain Style Rhetoric
As you may recall, rhetoric is a form of speaking or writing that attempts to persuade the listener or reader. In order to do this, the Greek philosopher Aristotle said that three things should be present: ethos, pathos, and logos.
Ethos: Aristotle believed that the character and credibility of a speaker can influence an audience to consider him or her believable. There are three qualities Aristotle contributed to a credible ethos, and they include perceived intelligence, virtuous character, and obvious goodwill.
Pathos: This is the use of emotional appeals to alter the audience's judgment, and pathos can be done (or maybe accomplished instead of done) through metaphor, storytelling, or presenting the topic in a way that evokes strong emotions in the audience. These are appeals that may not be seen as fact but as opinion-based judgments. For this reason, the speaker must choose his or her pathos carefully and be sure to have a strong connection with his or her audience.
Logos: The use of reasoning and fact to construct an argument. To effectively implement logos, a writer or speaker appeals to the logical nature of his or her audience. This may be done with examples, statistics, organizations, math, or objectivity. Ideally, a logical appeal will leave no room for doubt in the minds of the audience.
Unfortunately, it is not enough to know the elements of rhetoric. You must also understand when the appropriate time to act arrives and how to best handle a situation. Exigence is often used to define the occasion or appropriate time for acting out. For example, imagine your school’s cafeteria has recently made changes to the weekly menu. For health purposes, your principal announced nothing with any amount of sugar will be served. This eliminates cookies, many drinks, and any dessert from the menu. This situation would provide the exigence for you to speak out against the new rule. Now that you have a purpose and an audience (the principal), you must decide the proper way to act. Kairos is the ancient Greeks’ word that means combining the proper moment with the proper behavior. If you decide to hold a food fight in the cafeteria to protest the new changes, this would be considered poor Kairos; there is little chance the principal will respond positively to a chaotic food fight. Instead, if you wrote a petition that you got students, parents, and community members to sign and presented it at the local school board meeting in a professional manner, you would then have achieved appropriate Kairos. Effective speakers and writers keep all these elements in mind as they talk and write.
Shift in Rhetoric
If you have ever read much English literature from the 17th and 18th centuries, then you know it is difficult to read. One reason for this is that speaking and writing in a formal style was popular and was considered to be the proper form of literature for the educated. Many authors used high-level vocabulary words, lengthy sentences, and complex paragraph structures. "Flip" through this book to learn how the English language in America shifted away from this formal style. Click the player button to begin.
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Rhetoric and Plain Style Review
Check your knowledge of rhetoric and plain style by completing this non-graded activity. Answer each of the questions by following the directions on each slide. Click the player button to get started.
Grammar – Subjects, Verbs, and Direct Objects
Although the English language is considered one of the most complex languages to learn, this is NOT because of grammatical structure. The English language is considered complex because of the vast number of words in the language and the use of figurative language. Grammatically, the English language is fairly simplistic. Unlike some other languages, English does not have feminine or masculine versions of nouns and adjectives, nor does it have formal and informal pronouns. The English language does have a rather large list of irregular verbs, but it makes up for it by having only eight basic sentence patterns. You will be looking at two of them in this topic.
Subject and Verb
To be considered a sentence in the English language, every phrase must have a subject, a verb, and be a complete thought. This sentence contains the basic structure with a subject and a verb.
The athlete ran.
There may be a host of descriptive words, phrases, or clauses, but the basic subject and verb is all that is necessary to the basic sentence, as in the following examples:
The stalwart athlete ran.
The stalwart, world-class athlete ran in the marathon.
The stalwart, world-class athlete ran in the Rock-On Marathon.
The stalwart, world-class athlete ran in the Rock-On Marathon, finishing first.
The stalwart, world-class athlete ran in the Rock-On Marathon, finishing first out of a bevy of tough contenders.
What is the subject and verb in every one of those sentences? Athlete is the subject, and ran is the verb. Everything else in each sentence ONLY serves to describe that subject or verb. With every word or phrase, an image is built, but you do not need to understand every word or concept (like the word stalwart or the Rock-On Marathon) to get the basic meaning of the sentence. The point is that the athlete ran.
Subject, Verb, and Direct Object
The second basic sentence structure in the English language includes a subject, verb, and direct object. Sometimes the information that needs to be conveyed in the sentence includes not only the subject, or doer of the action, but also a direct object, or receiver of the action. To find the direct object, question what the subject and verb are doing to what or whom. For instance, in this sentence, the athlete ran what? The athlete ran the marathon.
You can see in the following sentence that a sentence may only be composed of the subject, verb, and direct object, but sometimes there may be other descriptors used. Regardless of the length of the sentence, the main parts -- the subject, verb, and direct object -- can be pulled out, and the remaining sentence will make perfect sense on its own.
The athlete ran the marathon.
The athlete ran the marathon after recovering from a knee operation.
The athlete ran the marathon to make his family proud.
The athlete ran the marathon wearing a Halloween costume.
Grammar Review – Subjects, Verbs, and Direct Objects
In this non-graded activity, identify whether the underlined word in the sentence is a subject, verb, or direct object. Click the player button to get started.