Rhetoric of Love

Liefde & Retoriek. Interessante teksten:

RHE 309K, The Rhetoric of Love and Seduction Course Homepage Spring 2004

Why Rhetoric?

Neem, Johann N. (2008), ‘Obama's critics overlook an important point: Ideas matter. The Seattle Times.

Een reflectie over de waarde van retoriek: daden versus woorden. Verwijten van de kanidaten: John McCain stelt dat retoriek geen vervanging is voor harde politiek, Hillary Clinton contrasteert de retoriek met vroegere beloftes.

Neem (2008) constateert: “What all these criticisms ignore, however, is that ideas matter”.

Ideas matter. Rhetoric is not just rhetoric. Words define for us — political elites and ordinary voters — what problems we are facing and what kinds of solutions we have for them.

Johann Neem gebruikt de metafoor van de “lens”:

Parties must have platforms that inspire voters. The test for any candidate is how well he or she crafts the lens voters wear to make sense of the world. Obama's challenge — the Democrats' challenge — is to do for his party what Reagan did for the Republicans.

But ideas, once accepted, create a new context.

If Obama helps the Democratic Party find focus, his followers will expect him to make good on his promises. Ideas are not effervescent. A successful idea changes how we think and what we expect; it becomes the barometer by which we then assess our leaders.

Scientific Prose

A discursive examination of scientific prose by Eric Knickerbocker

This essay is designed to argue that, no matter how cleverly disguised behind technical terms any given piece of scientific writing may be, it reflects its own form of rhetoric: rehashing, reinterpreting, and reprocessing the claims made from previous scientists in an effort to cajole and persuade.

Blogs

Weblogs about rhetoric, rhetoricians, and the teaching of communication skills.

Rhetoric Website

Rhetoric
This website is intended to list a variety of resources useful to rhetoricians.

While many rhetoric and composition pages on the Web are written in conjunction with writing centers or specialize in computer-mediated communication, this page also has links to works of classical rhetoric, articles on literacy and education, comprehensive bibliographies in the field and a few miscellaneous but useful things--how to suscribe to some highly-trafficked mailing lists and links to glossaries of rhetorical terms, for example.

If you have any suggestions or documents you think should be added, please use the "join" option below to join one of our editorial teams; we're particularly interested in getting more contemporary writing about rhetoric online.

Rhetoric Obama

How to Inspire People Like Obama Does
by Carmine Gallo
BusinessWeek

Public speaking skills are critical to the success of every leader. Here are four techniques you can borrow from the Presidential candidate

Over the past several years, I have been interviewing, observing, and writing about business, academic, and political leaders who have the ability to influence their audience—leaders who fire up the rest of us. Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is one of them. For a look at what makes Obama's public speaking skills so effective, I outline four techniques he's mastered and explain ways to use them in your own repertoire.

1. Parallel structure We can thank the ancient Greeks for this rhetorical tool—they called it "anaphora." It simply means repeating the same word or expression at the beginning of successive sentences or phrases (…)

2. Alliteration.

3. Rich Imagery Persuasive speakers have long understood the power of imagery to stir emotions—the creation of mental pictures through the words.

Exude Confident Body Language

Pay attention to what your body is saying (BusinessWeek.com, 4/30/07). Communicate confidence, competence, and control.

Use Dynamic Vocal Delivery

A monotonous speaking style lulls the listener to sleep, regardless of the power of the content. Obama knows how to enhance (BusinessWeek.com, 5/16/06) his delivery. Consider these three aspects of his delivery.

Zie verder

Rhetoric Pop Music

ROCKWRITE pop music as a site for rhetoric and inquiry

WHY ROCKWRITE?

Usually people use this term, "rockwrite," to talk about writing about rock -- rock criticism, like Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Paul Williams -- some of the people who started the contemporary rock criticism movement. But it also describes the spirit of the writing they did, writing that was like rock, that rocked, even when it was not about rock. Rockwrite combines the two verbs into a new verb that can do twice as much.