(Note before I get started on this: because I am discussion argument, I present as examples a number of arguments. These are purely hypothetical, and should not be taken as either an attempt to influence your views on the topic or even as my personal opinion on that matter).

Most people know the word "rhetoric." Certainly in almost every political election, it gets tossed around enough. "Rhetoric won't solve this problem." "My opponent's inflammatory rhetoric is uncalled for." Generally, when people use rhetoric in this way, they mean empty words, language with style but no substance, and oftentimes language that verges on dishonesty.

That's not, however, what rhetoric has always been. How it came to be viewed that way is a long story (short version: blame Plato), but originally, rhetoric was both the science (study) and the art (practice) of discourse.

You can find a lot of good and interesting definitions of rhetoric here, but perhaps the oldest and best known is the definition given by Aristole in Rhetoric: "Rhetoric is the art of discovering the available means of persuasion in the given case." Persuasion, in this case, is the use of language to affect the behavior of other people. Rhetoric, in other words, is the study and practice of using language to get people to do (or not do) things.

We most obviously think of persuasion in the form of political speeches, or advertising, but the truth is, much of our language use is persuasive. "Please pass the salt" is an attempt to affect someone's behavior. The policies on this web site are an attempt to affect your behavior. For that matter, the first sentence on this page attempts (rather weakly) to use a little humor to catch your interest and thus persuade you to read further.

(See how I used a little self-deprecation there to establish a sense of personality and thus a bond with you, my readers? Rhetoric).

One of the keys to understanding rhetoric is that it doesn't just look at the text; or more precisely, it doesn't just locate meaning in the text. Rhetorical theory (or at least the good kind) argues that the way words come to mean things/are constructed/are interpreted is a complex combination of many elements. We call that combination:

(Note: Normally this is done in a sort of triangle, but I'm trying to avoid complex graphics).

First and most obvious is the text, the actual words/images/sounds/etc. Simple enough.

The rhetor is the person who constructs the text. For example, the rhetor of this lecture is me. Well, except for the stuff I'm getting from other people, like Aristotle. And see, that's why I don't just put "writer" - it's a bit more complicated than that. Who is the rhetor of a presidential State of the Union Address? The president is the one who delivers it, puts his (and someday, her) inflections on the words, gestures, facial expressions. Presumably he (and someday, she) contributes a great deal to the ideas that go into it. However...everyone who thinks presidents write their own speeches, raise your hand. "Rhetor" is a catch-all term for the various people who construct a given rhetorical act.

And there's no denying that who that person is influences meaning, both in construction and interpretation. We've all had situations where who was saying something had as much to do with our reaction as what was being said. The influence goes both ways, as well. Who a person "is" in a text can be very different depending on the context, purpose, and audience. Don't believe me? Read this. How much of the person you see in this lecture, or in my other messages to you, do you see in that?

This brings us to audience, or the people who will read/hear the text. Most texts are aimed at very particular audiences, and for very particular reasons. Sometimes that is because that audience is the only one that matters. If, for example, you were asking to be allowed to turn an assignment in late (not that any of you would ever ask for such a thing), only the teacher can allow that, and thus she/he is the only audience that matters. You don't need to persuade your friend in that instance, and therefore wouldn't tailor your appeal to her/him. Other times, it's less a question of whether the group matters than whether the rhetor has any hope of persuading them in the first place. Did George Bush's comments about marriage in his State of the Union alienate some people? Yes. Were very many of those people going to vote for him anyway? No. A skilled rhetor will choose her/his audience based on (1)the people she/he is most likely to persuade (not the ones that agree already, but the fence-sitters or people moderately on the other side) and (2)the people most likely to bring about the desired change.

Audience affects a number of things, from what kind of support will be persuasive to what type of language is appropriate. For example, in my field of study (rhetoric and composition) anecdotal evidence ("this happened in my classroom") is very common and thus very accepted. In biology, not so much. To use a more controversial example, except in very rare instances, an academic audience is not likely to accept quotations from religious texts as support for an argument, particularly on social policy (the exception would be if your topic was an exploration of some religious topic, and the quotations were used to support contentions about dogma related to that policy). Oftentimes, questions of audience and support can lead you into a corner known as "preaching to the choir," where by the time you get an audience who will accept your support, they already agree with you on the issue at hand (in which case, why bother making the argument?).

Audience's effect on language is most often scene in the arena of jargon, or the specialized language of a group. The article I linked to above, for example, is full of jargon that makes it nearly incomprehensible to anyone not in the rhetoric and composition community (or so says my mother, who's tried to read it), but which is very familiar to anyone in it. Jargon is not limited to academia, by the way. Get me in a room full of fellow Batman fans, and we'll start flinging around terms like "retcon" and "Pre-Crisis" and "TPs," or names like "Jason Todd" and "Oracle," and we won't bother explaining who they are. Well, maybe if you ask.

Finally, one thing that must be acknowledged is that many texts are written for multiple audiences who are reading for multiple purposes. For example, a newspaper column is written both for the newspaper's readers (or the readers of multiple newspapers), but also for editors, who are reading as evaluators as much as "readers." Sound familiar? That's very much the audience you have for your papers in college: a (largely fictional) audience you are trying to persuade, and your teacher, who is evaluating your work.

The purpose is what the text is designed to accomplish. What is the rhetor hoping will happen as a result of putting this text out in the world? Now, often times, people will say "to change people's minds," but the question that comes after that is, why? Why do you want to change people's minds? Why do you care what's in their minds? And in the end, the answer is always an action. Do I care what you think about the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes? Not all that much, really. I mean, it makes for interesting conversation, but I'm not going to lose sleep over potential disagreement. Do I care how you vote on the issue? You betcha.

The context is just what it sounds like: the time, place, culture, and situation in which a rhetorical act takes place. These can influence your purpose, the urgency of the purpose, the expectations of your audience. As part of context, I would also include medium. Writing has vastly different conventions than speech, and more recently, on-line writing has vastly different conventions than print text.

Once you've plotted the rhetorical situation, you need a way to break the argument down. One way to do this is:

The Toulmin Method is a basic breakdown of the different parts of an argument. It looks a little something like this:

The claim is pretty much what it sounds like: the point being asserted and supported. You might know it by its more common name, the thesis.

The warrant is a bit hard to explain. It's the unstated assumption or values on which the argument rests, and which the audience must be presumed to share for the audience to work. Let's say you're arguing in favor of seatbelt laws, and one of your reasons is that seatbelts save lives. Certainly this is true. However, the power of the argument rests on the assumption that anything that saves lives is not only good (which we can all more or less accept) but should be mandated into law (which not everyone accepts). A libertarian might counter that it is not the function of the law to "protect" people from their own behavior, and that liberty is a higher value. Now, when discussing seatbelt laws, this seems like a trivial thing, but the warrant is hardly trivial: the function of laws in this country is at the heart of a good many debates, and the question of how far we should limit personal freedom in the name of saving lives is a very real and timely issue.

(Note, by the way, how "personal freedom" is a warrant in what I just wrote. A good many arguments about U.S. government and law has the unstated value that "personal liberty" is of the utmost importance. Warrants. Can't get away from them.)

Qualifiers, again, are pretty much what they sound like. The set the parameters, and thus the exceptions, for the claim. Qualifiers often take the form of phrases like "On the whole" or "Except in cases of."

The reasons are the primary support for the claim. To put it simply, if an argument is "X is Y because A, B, C," reasons are the A, B, and C. To give a more concrete example, if I were to argue that the death penalty should be abolished, my reasons might be that it's applied in racially suspect ways, that it costs more than just keeping someone in prison for life, and that the recent number of death row inmates found innocent calls into question the accuracy of our judicial system. Reasons can be evaluated on their relevance to the issue, on their relative importance, and on the amount of support given for them.

Supporting each reasons i the evidence. Now, the word may make you flash in C.S.I. (a friend of mine devised a drinking game wherein you take a shot every time Grissom says "evidence") and thus of objective, factual data: statistics (which aren't actually as objective as we think), studies (see "statistics), etc. Now, it's true that this is a kind of evidence. However, logical reasoning is also evidence. Testimony (personal stories or expert opinion) is also evidence. Even emotional appeals (see pathos) can be evidence. The key to figuring out what constitutes credible evidence lies mainly in the audience.

Most good arguments include a counterargument, wherein the opposition's strongest arguments are considered and refuted or mitigated in some way. This demonstrates that the writer has fully researched the topic and are aware of all relevant arguments and issues, thus eliminating the possibility that the audience might be thinking, "Well, she/he only thinks that because he/she doesn't know about X." It also gives the claim more weight by minimizing the opposing claim.

(Note: Rhetoric, while a vast source of information, is actually dry as dust. Far better to use an outline for information.)

From this vast amount of information, we are pulling a concept called "proofs" (these are called topoi when speaking of writing an argument rather than analyzing it). Now "proof" is something of a misleading term, because what these really are are "supports." Now, Aristotle divides these up into many, many categories (now you see where I get it from), but in general, we can divide them into two: inartistic and artistic.

The inartistic proofs are basically the material you have to work with, the information you have been presented or have discovered. Again, there are many, many kinds listed in the Rhetoric (my personal favorite is information gathered under torture), but for contemporary uses, some major ones include:

Now, these can be evaluated in a number of ways. You can consider, for example, whether the statistics are applicable (do they reflect the population the argument is about?), if they are distorted in some way (in a famous example, Fredric Wertham once found that a majority of juvenile delinquents read comic books; what wasn't examined was whether they read comic books in greater number than juveniles in general), if they are outdated (statistics on higher education from the 1970s, for example, would tell us little about current trends). Is the scientific data from reputable scientific organizations (the American Family Association, for example, will often publish "scientific" information about homosexuality; however, given that they are not a scientific organization, their information does not hold the same weight as information from the American Medical Association or the American Psychiatric Association would)? Is the expert truly an expert (oftentimes this gets right back to audience; to a popular audience, "Dr. Laura" might work as an expert on a psychological matter; an academic audience is more likely to point out that she's not actually a doctor of psychology)?

Now, inartistic proofs are the stuff arguments are built out of. The way in which they're built gets us into artistic proofs, also known as pisteis. And here, once again, we get an attempt at a triangle:

	Ethos
/		\
Logos	----------------------	Pathos

We're actually going to start with ethos, or the ethical appeal because according to Aristotle, all things flow from ethos. Despite the name, ethos is only tangentially connected with ethics. Ethos is argument based on the character and credibility of the speaker. In other words, believe what I say because I am saying it.

Ethos can be divided into three major components, and just for fun (and in order to show off a little), I'm going to throw their technical terms at you: phronesis is "practical wisdom" (or common sense); arete is virtue; and eunoia is good will (generally toward humanity and specifically toward the audience). You don't have to remember the Greek, just the basic idea: in order to be persuaded, we must trust the rhetor knows what she/he's talking about, is an honest person, and has good intentions towards the audience. If we believe all of these things, we are more likely to accept all the other proofs offered. If we do not believe these things, we will approach the other proofs with skepticism and disbelief.

(Ethos, by the way, is why teachers hammer you on grammar and spelling. Many spelling mistakes, particularly early in the paper, can kill your ethos - if, after all, you couldn't bothered to check for spelling, how can your reader sure you know what you're talking about elsewhere? It's also why insulting your audience is pretty much never a good idea.)

Now, you actually have the single best example of ethos right here in this document.

No, really: why do you believe me when I tell you all this stuff? I could be pulling all this out of thin air. I'm actually quite good at that.

Now, the cynical answer would be, hey, I'm writing the paper assignments and grading them, so it really doesn't matter if the stuff I tell you is actually true.

The less cynical answer is, of course, that I'm the teacher. That means that I'm the person entrusted by Parkland (the institution you entrust your tuition money to) to teach you. This means that, at least in theory, my knowledge, honesty, and good will are vouched for by the institution.

Now, we all know that sometimes that system falls down. Plus, Aristotle argues that ethos is entirely a function of the text, not of outside credentials. Now, we've sort of imported credentials into it, but even within the "text" of this class, let's look at how my ethos is constructed. I did sort of casually let you know I had a Ph.D., which would tend to speak well for my knowing my stuff. Also, within this web page, I've linked to many other sites that bolster what I've said, thus using inartistic proofs to further my ethos (see how this gets all twisty?). This also speaks well for my honesty in such things, although my honesty is largely something you have to take for granted. My good will I try to demonstrate through things like promptly answering emails and helping solve problems and even nagging you to post so as to keep your grades up, but this is really where language comes into play. In a classroom, I could use things like smiles and nods and gestures to convey good will. More importantly, I have a human face, and it's far easier to assume good will of a human face than of words. So, all the little jokes, the smileys, the tone of my posts, even things like the names of your discussion groups are my way of conveying my own humanity to you. Hopefully, it works.

Now, just to reiterate: the reason ethos is so important is that everything else hinges on it. If we don't trust the rhetor, we won't trust anything he/she tells us.

That said, let us move on to logos, or the logical appeal. As the name might suggest, this is argument through logic, through deduction and induction (don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to keep those straight). The two most common kinds of logical appeals are the syllogism and the analogy.

Now, you'll notice that the syllogism only works as long as lines 1 and 2 are absolutely true. And we know how seldom things are absolutely true in this world. Let's try something a little more realistic.

Well, what? Can you conclude that I like Star Trek? Well, not really. Line 2 only says that most geeks like Star Trek. What if I'm in the .0005% that doesn't? On the other hand, it's not entirely useless information either. One can reasonably guess that I would like Star Trek, or argue that there is a high probability that I do. Notice how these statements hedge your bets, allowing for the exception while maintaining the probable deduction. The difference is all in the language.

An argument's syllogistic logic can be evaluated on a number of levels, but many of them come down to "that does not compute" (or as Buffy Summers would say, "Your logic does not resemble our Earth logic"). We've all seen instances where logic took some kind of leap. Often, what has happened is that the rhetor has made a hasty generalization or used an unrepresentative sample. Or, it may be that one of the contentions in the chain of reasoning is simply not true.

The second most frequent kind of logic is the analogy, or an extended comparison. Generally, analogies argue that similar situations can be used to illuminate the situation being discussed, both in terms of how the situation might be understood, and how it might be solved. For example, people often like to compare the rates of gun violence in the U.S. to rates of gun violence in other countries. The key to watch for in the case of analogies is the false analogy, when the two situations being compared are not sufficiently similar to warrant the conclusion.

Now, logos is a powerful tool, but it's a bit too dry to be really persuasive. To really get people moving, you need emotion, which brings us not pathos, or the pathetic appeal (where the wording really breaks down).

Pathos is simply that: an appeal to emotions. Which emotions you appeal to depend generally on what result you are hoping for. If you want people to maintain the status quo, you will generally appeal to their sense of well-being and contentment. If, however, the status quo is being threatened, and you want them to act against that threat, you would appeal to their fear of that change. You can see a lot of both of these in the "Defense of Marriage" arguments being raised right now.

Now, we are in general deeply suspicious of pathos. In part, this is a human distrust of anything that smacks of manipulation. Those truth tobacco commercials tend to make my partner want to go buy cigarettes in protest (me, I find them effective, which just goes to show). The other reason, though, is that history has shown us just how much destruction can be wrought with emotional appeals, particularly appeals to fear, to hatred, and to bigotry. It should be kept in mind that like many things, pathos is a tool that can be used for powerful good as well as powerful evil.

Now, what's interesting about the proofs is how they intertwine and affect one another. For example, we've already talked about how a poor ethos can cause the audience to doubt the inartistic proofs the rhetor puts forward. However, if a rhetor gets a fact wrong, or cites a disreputable source, that can damage her/his ethos.

Now, a great deal of what I've presented here is stuff we do unselfconsciously. We evaluate arguments every day, and we frequently do so in terms of their support, their emotional power, and the characters of the speaker. What you need to begin doing as a researcher is to evaluate arguments deliberately, to determine both their persuasive power and their credibility as potential sources. These are but a few tools of the trade.

	Purpose
Rhetor	Text	Audience
	Context

	Claim
	Warrant
	Qualifiers
Reason	Reason	Reason
Evidence	Evidence	Evidence
	Counterargument