Thoughts on Rhetoric

In the study of writing, the term 'rhetoric' is guaranteed to show up eventually. Rhetoric is a term that is difficult to define because everybody has their own definitions for it. I define rhetoric as the quality of communication. It's a simple definition, but that's the only way to cover everything that rhetoric covers.

Writing at its core is communication. You have thoughts, pictures, emotions, all in your head, and you want to put them in other people's heads. It's like a radio signal. The source sends it out and the receiver picks it up. Like a radio signal, though, there is going to be a degradation in the quality of the transmission. There is no real helping it; it simply happens as the signal travels from the source to the receiver. The weaker the signal, the less like the original it sounds to the receiver.

When you write, you are the source and your writing is the signal. Your goal is to have your writing be so strong a signal that your audience gets in their heads exactly what is in your head. And again, the rhetoric is the quality of your communication (or the strength of your signal).

The more your audience gets, the stronger and more effective your rhetoric is. At the basic level, you want your audience to understand what you are trying to say. If you are telling a story of a funny conversation you had, your audience should never get confused as to who was saying which line and what exactly they were talking about. On the next level, there should be an atmosphere about it. Effective rhetoric makes you feel like you are part of the story. The audience feels like they were there, watching it happen themselves. On the final level, there is the emotional state. This is what we usually think of when we talk about rhetoric: making other people feel the same way that you feel. The most effective rhetoric make s people laugh at a funny story and cry at a tragic one. Ineffective rhetoric will make a potentially funny story merely be a recollection of events that happened. And the worst rhetoric will be a confusing jumble of nonsense.

Of course, the means of achieving strong rhetoric are a whole other matter. That requires a great deal of study and practice. But it's not the kind of thing that requires a college degree in rhetoric. It's the kind of thing that requires practicing writing. If you are an effective writer, you have effective rhetoric. If you know how to make people interested in what you have to say, then you know your way around rhetoric, even if you don't know all the academic terms for it. And in the end, the skills in rhetoric are more useful than the knowledge of rhetoric. (I will grant, though, that it would be ironic if one was good at rhetoric, but lousy at explaining it.)