 1)
your closest friend
 2)
your mom
 3)
the owner of the car
 4)
on facebook
 5)
people at a party
 How
did your word choice change?
 How did you frame the story differently?
 Did your tone shift?
 Did you leave anything out?
 In order to succeed in communication,
you have learned to use rhetoric.
 Rhetoric
is the way we make meaning in
words
 Using communication in such a way as to
influence your listeners or readers to
hear your side, favor you, agree to your
position
 Rhetoric could include non-linguistic
signs as well, such as images,
photography, gestures, clothing, dance,
form, architecture, etc.
 Much
of English 101 deals with rhetorical
awareness because you don’t write
writing, you write ideas that are
presented rhetorically and that have a
rhetorical effect on your readers.
 Author’s Intention vs. Effect
• We often cannot know an author’s intention, but
we can describe the effect of their words
What is said or written,
“logic” of the argument
Subject
(Logos)
Audience’s emotions and the
response of the reader
Reader
(Pathos)
Implied character, voice,
and values of the writer
Writer
(Ethos)
 How
ethos, pathos, and logos are
incorporated in a piece of writing
 All three are present in any piece of writing
 However, some genres lean more to one
point of the triangle than the others
• Persuasion (reader focused) involves winning the
audience’s assent.
• Argument (text focused) involves discovering the
best reasons, making claims and offering evidence
in order to support the writer’s position.
• Understanding (writer focused) involves describing
how you came to hold a certain belief or perspective
and showing how and why you think the way you do.

In your notes, draw a triangle to outline
Rose’s rhetorical stance in terms of ethos,
pathos, and logos
 What
do you notice about his approach?
 Diction
• Word Choice
 Detail
• Providing specifics
 Imagery
• Using sensory detail
 Syntax
• Word order and sentence structure
 Figurative Language
• Departing from everyday language to achieve
comparison, emphasis, or clarity
Different rhetorical situations have different levels of
formality associated with them. This affects our
choices of language, style, and level of detail.
 The relationship between writer and reader or writer
and subject can be expressed in terms of the
distance.

W = Writer; R = Reader; S = Subject
W
R/S
(Informal, intimate)
W
(Formal, distant)
R/S
R/S
W
(Honorific, respectful, favorable, etc)
W
R/S
(Critical, pejorative, disdainful, etc)
W
R/S
(Symmetrical, neutral, equal, etc)
 How
would you express Rose’s attitude and
tone toward his subject and audience?
 To what extent does his tone differ from
some of the other authors we have read? Do
you see any similarities ?
 Find passages that you think are good
representative examples of: (1) his attitude
toward the subject of education and
schooling and (2) his tone toward his
readers?
 Be ready to share and explain your
examples
With your table, list the top 5-7 most
important ideas everyone should have
learned about rhetoric and tone.
 How
would you express House, Emmer, and
Lawrence’s tone toward the subject of
cultural literacy? Toward Hirsch?
 How would you express Hirsch’s tone toward
the subject of cultural literacy and his
imagined audience?
 How would you express any of the other
writers’ attitude and tone toward their
audience and subject?
• Bartholomae and Petrosky? Rodriguez? Gee?
Shorris? Professor X?