Logos,ethos, pathos and the marketing of higher education

ABSTRACT

This article utilises rhetorical analysis as a method to investigate course level marketing communications for undergraduate fashion marketing degrees in England. The purpose of this method is to explore the persuasive appeals of Aristotle’s triad of logos, ethos and pathos, how they are used and how these appeals could differ by university type. Sixteen course pages were analysed, with the analysis of course web pages shows a clear distinction between ‘types’ of university, with Post 92 institutions relying heavily on appeals to emotion (pathos) and giving more focus to ‘value for money’ that would be a concern to their students. Russell Group and Specialist universities rely more on appeals to ethos (credibility) and logos (fact/data) to market their courses. This research finds evidence of market segmentation, demonstrated through the different use of persuasive appeals to express the course focus, and giving insight to their target audience.     

Common Rhetorical Devices in Written English

Rhetorical devices are kinds of literal form of expressions.Their application is to make the idea more striking and effective,for they have the strength to express and illustrate.An appropriate rhetorical device appeals to the imagination,gives us vivid pictures and makes the written English impressive and interesting.For this reason,written English often uses various rhetorical devices to improve the readability and attract readers' attention and to arouse readers' interest of reading their materials.This paper mainly discusses common rhetorical devices in written English so as to help readers understand the written materials better.     

古希腊时期主要修辞学派的修辞批评视角

在古希腊时期．以苏格拉底和柏拉图为代表的哲学派从伦理、真理、知识、正义等角度出发,对以高尔吉亚和普罗塔哥拉为代表的诡辩派以及他们的诡辩修辞提出了批判,在批判中逐渐形成修辞批评的伦理视角。诡辩家则对哲学家提出了反批评,并指出了哲学家表面追求真理和正义,其实同时也是通过迎合受众来追求名誉,从而形成了修辞批评的或然性视角。亚里斯多德则抹技术的角度对诡辩家和诡辩修辞提出了分析,并在这种分析中形成了修辞批评的技术分析视角。     

Environmental Melodrama

Rhetorical scholarship criticizes melodrama for its tendency to simplify and reify public controversies and valorizes the comic frame as an ethically superior mode of rhetoric. These judgments are rooted in the discipline's reliance on Burkean categories, a reductionist conception of melodrama, and an implicit assumption that social unification should be the telos of rhetoric. In response, this essay advances a concept of melodrama as an integrated set of rhetorical appeals. It uses examples of environmental rhetoric to illustrate how the inventional resources of melodrama can transform public controversies and oppose dominant discourses that rationalize or obscure threats to the quality and existence of life on Earth. Based on these arguments, the essay endorses a sophistic critical perspective that foregrounds timeliness as the primary ground for rhetorical judgment and refuses to treat any rhetorical frame as inherently superior to another.     

Sanitizing the Struggle: Barack Obama,Selma, and Civil Rights Memory

In this article, I examine Barack Obama’s use of collective memory during his 2007 campaign speech in Selma, Alabama. Specifically, I argue that Obama appeals to collective memory to challenge the Black community’s relationship to the past. He reframed the memory of the Civil Rights Movement in a manner favorable to his political aspirations. While this frame was politically expedient, it weakened Black political agency. It robbed the Black community of crucial rhetorical resources used to challenge structural inequalities in society. This article offers insight into the complex relationship between metaphor and collective memory. Specifically, I interrogate the role of metaphor as a crucial site where public memory is formed, disrupted, and rearticulated. Furthermore, I consider the implications of his use of memory for the future of the Black freedom struggle.     

Rhetorical analysis in critical policy research

Rhetorical analysis, an approach to critical discourse analysis, is presented as a useful method for critical policy analysis and its effort to understand the role policies play in perpetuating inequality. A rhetorical analysis of Character Matters!, the character education policy of a school board in Ontario, Canada, provides an illustrative example of the method’s contributions to the field. I identify rhetorical appeals of Character Matters! texts that aim to persuade the policy’s audience to support a predominantly traditional approach to character education. I then present contributions of rhetorical analysis for critical policy research and possibilities of rhetorical analysis for democratizing policy processes. I conclude by considering possible implications for York Region if the rhetoric of Character Matters! successfully convinces its audience to support the traditional approach to character education it advocates.     

Nothing to See or Fear: Light War and the Boring Visual Rhetoric of U.S. Drone Imagery

This essay theorizes a transformation in twenty-first-century war rhetoric in which obstructions in public sensation insulate war from opposition. In contrast to overt persuasive appeals for the mass mobilization of society characteristic of “total war,” “light war” is a mode of violence that operates more freely by placing fewer demands on public reception, participation, and approval. Through an analysis of U.S. drone imagery between 2008 and 2011, I argue that light war cultivates social acquiescence to violence through boring visual rhetoric that subverts the capacity to sense the material consequences of war. In the process of theorizing the anesthetizing force of boring rhetoric, this essay assesses the prospects of peace and outlines future directions for rhetorical scholarship in a post-9/11 landscape.     

Genetic rhetorical criticism: An alternative methodology for studying multi-versioned rhetorical works

This essay presents genetic rhetorical criticism as an alternative methodology for the study of multi-versioned rhetorical works. In contrast to methodologies of textual authentication, which focus on the synchronic delivery of public address, genetic rhetorical criticism focuses on the diachronic movement of writing that both precedes and exceeds the work’s introduction to public history. It does so by affirming the value of unauthorized versions of rhetorical works, which deepen the field’s understanding of both particular rhetorical works and the textual dynamics of rhetoric. To support these claims, this essay reassesses the textual histories of both Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives. Engaging both works simultaneously shows that there are fundamental features of textuality that unite speech-centered and writing-centered rhetorical works. It also demonstrates that the textual histories of rhetorical works can support multiple scholarly interpretations.     

Gender,Rhetoric, and International Political Systems: Angela Merkel's Rhetorical Negotiation of Proportional Representation and Party Politics

This article assesses the ways in which electoral systems present unique rhetorical challenges for women running for elective office, using German Chancellor Angela Merkel as a case study. In proportional systems, much of the rhetorical work occurs at the level of the party, requiring the political woman to capitalize on the rhetorical resources of the party structure in which she finds herself, advancing to party leadership, and eventually localizing the national election via the party structure. However, Merkel's performance demonstrates that the presence of women and of feminine norms of communication can sometimes mask the hegemonic masculinity that continues to govern democratic electoral systems. The authors conclude by considering the utility of the theory of “feminine style.”     

A Teacher's Response to ‘Reflection‐in‐action’

A teacher‐researcher questions whether Schon's Reflective Practitioner is an appropriate text for ensuring change in teaching practices. It is argued that teachers’ perspectives prompt a particular interpretation of ‘reflection‐in‐action’ that justifies individualistic, immediate and limited change strategies. Schon's rhetorical appeals can be interpreted as offering tacit approval for the existing craft culture; for the inhibiting effects of this craft culture to be effectively challenged, individual teachers need the supportive insights which collaboration can provide.     

浅析中西修辞劝说机制的异同--以广告语言为例

通过中西方广告语言中的情感诉求、理性诉求、道义诉求等三个方面的论述及广告语言修辞中诉求手段的运用,分析了修辞劝说机制在中西方广告语言中的差异,明确了广告语中运用修辞劝说机制能增强语言的艺术性和感染力,从而更好地实现广告的价值。     

浅析中西修辞劝说机制的异同——以广告语言为例

通过中西方广告语言中的情感诉求、理性诉求、道义诉求等三个方面的论述及广告语言修辞中诉求手段的运用,分析了修辞劝说机制在中西方广告语言中的差异,明确了广告语中运用修辞劝说机制能增强语言的艺术性和感染力,从而更好地实现广告的价值。     

Rhetoric and the origins of the human sciences: A Foucauldian tale untold

Michel Foucault’s famous history of the human sciences focused on “the order of things” and in doing so it overwhelmed a rhetorical perspective that can track the arts of moving souls: pedagogy, politics, and psychology. If we revisit Foucault from a rhetorical perspective there are consequences: (1) at the level of architectonic, we rediscover rhetoric’s role at the inception of the human sciences, and (2) at the level of thematic, we can make better sense of rhetorical phenomena such as the sixteenth-/seventeenth-century sacred arts of listening, which feature a “public ear.” Foucault’s late interest in the pastoral picks up this rhetorical thread, although he never was able to revise the disciplinary and biopolitical history implicated therein. This article initiates just such a revision, paying particular attention to historiographic questions, and to recent discussions of biopower that wind up looking very different from this rhetorical perspective.     

Books received

Frederick Wiseman's film Primate is a rhetorical documentary about the implications of human curiosity in an institutional setting—a primate research center. Wiseman uses comparison, sequence, and sound‐image relations to employ and transcend filmic and rhetorical genres, enabling him to engage the viewer in a reflective exploration of human being. Primate demonstrates how facts can be recontextualized into complex meanings, and how audiences can be actively involved in the process of constructing meanings.     

Rhetorical counteraction in Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and The War of Words

However esoteric Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives seems at first glance, it remains highly relevant to our contemporary moment. As a philosophy of rhetoric that centers on the nature of human conflict, it helps audiences interpret the vicissitudes of political warfare with greater precision and insight. The value of A Rhetoric of Motives becomes even more apparent in light of its recently discovered second volume, The War of Words. Together, these two volumes offer a novel method of rhetorical counteraction that helps specialist and non-specialist audiences redress the threat of nationalistic war. Burke's approach to rhetorical counteraction is distinguished by the study of rhetorical devices across history. By approaching these devices systematically, Burke believed he could help his audience reframe their attitude toward evolving political events. The purpose of this article is to present a thorough account of Burke's method so that it can enrich how we teach and engage in public deliberation today.     

Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art

The material rhetoric of physical locations like the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art creates “spaces of attention” wherein visitors are invited to experience the landscape around them as a series of enactments that identify the inside/outside components of sub/urban existence, as well as the regenerative/transformative possibilities of such existence. Such rhetorical enactments create innovative opportunities for individuals to attend to the human/nature interface. These rhetorical enactments also create and contain tensions that come to the fore when they are employed as authentic mediations of nature, when they function as tropes to promote development of natural space, and/or when they are translated into discursive environmental argument.     

生育决策与家庭人力资本积累——对孩子数量与质量关系的再考察

针对家庭经济学中孩子数量质量替代理论尚存的争议问题,使用我国农村微观调查数据,考察我国农村家庭规模对子女人力资本积累的影响机制,以验证理论在我国的适用性。研究发现,家庭规模越大,孩子数量越多,子女的平均受教育程度越低;但这一规律仅对女孩有显著影响,这也佐证了我国生育率下降确实有助于提高女性的人力资本积累的结论。另外,还论证了当前的生育政策调整,并不会造成农村生育水平的强烈反弹。