Connects with Stoner and Perkins, chap 2

critique

critical stance

to review

Stoner and Perkins (chap 1) list five characteristics of rhetoric - five characteristics that are not so much a litmus test for deciding whether a text is rhetorical but that provide a way of reading messages as rhetorical.

• rhetoric typically addresses public audiences
• rhetoric is purposeful
• rhetoric responds to and creates more or less obvious social concerns
• rhetoric relies on verbal and non-verbal symbols
• rhetoric shapes the way people think, act, believe, and feel

In coming to understand how messages work, we an start by considering what elements are rhetorically active in a message. The purpose of this exercise is not to come to any conclusions or evaluations but to start to see what can be seen as rhetorical affordances.

Take a critical stance - a balcony view - to consider what elements are rhetorical in the message you've been given. That is, identify the elements the rhetors can use and do use to address what rhetorical ends, and how they seem to use those elements.

Consider both the text and the medium, in light of the apparent aim of the message. Look at

• arrangement of the text: progression from sentence to sentence, para to para, section to section...
• style of the text: formal, informal, semi-formal ... close to the audience or more distant
• use of space and layout of the page
• selection of an use of images
• use of color and shape and placement: for aesthetic ends, for rhetorical ends (including informational ends)
• ...

• Evening Standard
• BSU Home page
• Saturday Fun Page, Bemidji Pioneer
• Weblog page version 3.1
• 2 page spread from The Joy of Cooking
• 2 page spread from Wired magazine.
• MySpace page
• antidea
• Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer, 1660 to 166.
• E-Rhet Statement

A note on portraiture as rhetorical. From a critical perspective, a portrait becomes a rhetorical message; and as a rhetorical message, we focus on something other than the revelation of a self.