Rhetoric has as its purpose to persuade. It is for the sake of persuasion that we educators torture our students with essay writing. We want them to be able to express their ideas persuasively and well.
For the purposes of writing, there are three ‘canons’ of rhetoric, not the sort of cannons that go ‘boom’, but ‘canons’ with just one ‘n’, the accepted principles and standards in the field of rhetoric. Those are: the canon of invention (figuring out what you are going to say), the canon of arrangement (figuring out in what order you want to say it), and the canon of style (figuring out with what style you are going to say it).
In this not-so-short blog, I will discuss the canon of invention.
Imagine yourself back in the good old days when you were a student. You have been given an essay prompt, and you now have the task of spending the rest of your week, thinking about, writing, and editing (and re-editing) your essay.
You need help, and to that end, the canon of invention is at your disposal — should you choose to make use of it.
The canon of invention helps you decide what you are going to say (as well as what you are NOT going to say). The canon of invention is where you generate your thesis statement as well as the arguments to support that thesis statement.
Invention
First of all, let us discuss invention. Most of us think of Edison with his light blub, or of physicists inventing atom bombs. Rhetorically speaking, what is ‘invention’? It comes from the Latin ‘in-venire’ which means ‘to find’. Invention is where we find a list of thoughts to think through in response to the the essay prompt. It is a tool we use to make sure we have investigated the issue raised in the essay prompt comprehensively.
Invention stipulates the occasion for the writing, the audience that you are writing for (college professor, perhaps), as well as the message (of the essay) exhaustively.
Included in invention are the following:
Rhetorical Occasion
Rhetorical Situation
The Special Topics
The Three Appeals
The Common Topics
and finally
Stasis Theory.
Most of those terms should be unfamiliar to you. Let us unpack them, one at a time beginning with ‘the rhetorical occasion’.
Rhetorical Occasion
Why are you writing? Well, bluntly put: you’re a student; you were given an essay assignment; you’re writing because you have to. But as artificial as a college essay feels, teachers try to make the essay writing experience real by imagining real-life situations where you may be called on to write. They ask you to write in that spirit. People in real life do write political speeches, funeral orations, court room sentences, magazine articles, law codes, cook books, or dubious Internet blogs on writing education :). Worse, some of us write whole books that are over five-hundred pages long, and we haven’t even said half of what we intended to say yet.
But back to your specific rhetorical occasion. You are writing an essay for a class. And this occasion combined with your rhetorical situation serve as the background for your essay.
Rhetorical Situation
Whom are you writing to and what are you going to write about? Simple questions, but ones that need to be considered carefully.
First of all there are two types of people involved in your communication attempt here (ahem… your essay):
1. you—the writer
2. your audience (or reader[s]).
You know yourself, or at least you think you do.
(But, even so, in invention you will take a closer look at yourself and how you present yourself).
More to the point: Do you know your reader? Who is he? What state of mind is he in? What does he already believe about the topic you are writing about? What level of education, religious background, political predispositions does he? How might you best convince himm of what you are about to say?
What you are about to say is your ‘message’. It consists of the position that you are taking on the issue you are writing about.
The Special Topics: Deliberative, Judicial, and Ceremonial
Now you have an occasion, you have a reader, and you have a message (your response to the essay prompt). The next thing you need to consider is what type of rhetoric you going to be using.
The special topics help you with this. They define the purpose of your essay. There are three special topics, one dealing with issues of the past, one dealing with issues of the present, and one dealing with issues of the future.
Are you writing to condone or condemn and act of the past? Are you writing to celebrate or vilify a person or an event in the present? Or are you writing to recommend or reject a course of action or an idea for the future? The special topics that deal with those three types of writing are judicial rhetoric, ceremonial rhetoric, and deliberative rhetoric.
Judicial speeches deal with justice and injustice. They assert whether an act committed in the past was right or wrong, or whether a person accused of a crime was guilty or innocent.
Ceremonial speeches address the issues of virtue and vice. They tell the reader whether something or someone in the present is noble or base.
Deliberative speeches may speak of the good, the worthy, and the advantageous. Or they may speak of the bad, the unworthy, and the disadvantageous. Deliberative speeches speak for or against our plans for the future.
The Three Appeals: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos
Now, you have an essay prompt (rhetorical occasion), you have a reader and a message, and you have identified which one of the special topics that applies to your essay, and now you need to consider what sorts of appeals you need to use in your essay.
Do you primarily want to engage your reader’s mind or heart in your essay? Is your focus primarily to show him that you are an intelligent and thoughtful and sympathetic writer (appeal to ethos)? Do you want to engage his mind with clear and persuasive arguments that will convince him (Appeal to Logos)? Or are you trying to evoke his sympathies for a particularly difficult and perhaps outrageous situation (Appeal to Pathos)?
We use all three appeals when we write, but in general we can classify an essay in terms of its dominant means of persuasion. You may wish to persuade your reader that something is true; to this end, logical arguments (appeal to logos) may be employed. However, it is usually not enough that your reader should agree with you. Often a writer will want to stir his readers into action: Vote for me; don’t buy this product; demonstrate against this or that bill in Congress. To this end, the writer may seek to arouse the reader’s emotions (appeal to pathos). But— no amount of emotional appeal is successful unless the reader trusts the writer. Before we allow our emotions to be engaged by something someone says, we must believe that the writer is a man of intelligence and good will. Therefore, as a writer, you must appear attractive and trustworthy (appeal to ethos).
Stasis Theory
Now, if your essay involves judicial or deliberative rhetoric , stasis theory is a useful tool that you may employ. Stasis theory clarifies the nature of the argument and defines the specific issue that people are in disagreement about.
Stasis theory can be used in the court room where the job of both the prosecuting and the defense attorney is to tell the jury what it is that has brought the defendant to court. What is he accused of doing? How far do both parties agree on what happened, and where is the exact point (‘the stasis’) where they violently disagree on what happened.
Let us say John Smith is accused of murder. Then first of all, what does the word ‘murder’? Define it carefully without reference to John Smith or anything specific that he is accused of doing. Once the word ‘murder’ has been defined, it is the job of either lawyer to establish whether or not John Smith did in fact commit this murder. Of course, the prosecutor is arguing that John Smith did commit the murder, the defense attorney is arguing that John Smith did not commit the murder. Sometimes.
Sometimes both attorneys agree that John Smith did commit murder, but what kind of murder did he commit? Did he do it in self-defense? Was it an accident? Did he lose his temper, or did he plan this act for months in advance?
Stasis theory includes four steps, all designed to answer the questions we posed above:
1. Definition (The event of the past)
2. Conjecture (What happend and who did it?)
3. Quality or degree (What kind was it?)
4. Procedure (What shall we do about it?)
Stasis theory can be particularly powerful in helping you generate thesis statements for your judicial or deliberative essay.
The Common Topics
Now that you have considered your occasion, reader, type of rhetoric, special appeals as well as generated a thesis statement, you need to dig into the specific content of your particular essay.
To this end, you use the common topics, a list of topics from which you ‘invent’ arguments for each paragraph of the essay about your subject, X.
Do you need to define what X is? Do you need to show how your use of the term X differs from how people normally understand it? Are you going to show how the issue associated with X is actually very similar to issue Y (an issue your audience already has sympathy for)? Are you going to quote a famous expert who agrees with you? Are you going to construct a long logical argument that will prove you point? Will you need to explain the reasons why X has gotten as bad as it is today? Are you going to present examples from history or literature? All those types of paragraphs can be generated from a list called the ‘common topics’–a part of invention.
Progymnasmata
So, how does all this (rhetorical occasion, rhetorical situation, special topics, three appeals, common topics, and stasis theory) fit in with the progymnasmata?
Most of Classical Writing’s students are used to the term progymnasmata, but for those who are new, the progymnasmata were a series of writing exercises that Greek boys of antiquity used to learn speech writing. The exercises introduced them to the basic concepts and techniques of rhetoric that I mentioned above.
One of the earliest exercises was narration, which taught the student to present a clear, concise and plausible account of events. Later, the paired exercises of refutation and confirmation brought the student back to narrative, and taught him to take a critical view of narration (written narratives).
The student would then learn deliberative rhetoric by writing essays about common proverbs, telling why the proverbs were wise. Students also took common legends and myths and wrote essays for and against each myth, telling why it was credible or not credible.
The students would write essays praising and blaming people, praising and blaming a virtue, writing descriptive detail, writing dialogue, as well as writing a research paper.
In other words, the progymnasmata were the ‘textbooks’ that the ancients used to teach rhetoric to their students. Rhetoric was the curriculum of the ancient schools, because without being able to understand material and express oneself in writing and in speaking, how can we communicate anything about what we have learned?
Stay tuned. Canon of Arrangement is next.
Lene