11 Text Elements & Rhetorical Devices
In this chapter, students will:
- practice identifying specific multimodal text elements and how they make appeals
- learn and begin to recognize rhetorical devices speakers create through text components
- think about how elements, appeals, and strategies work together to evoke a response
Identifying Text Elements/Components
In the previous chapter, we talked about how texts are made of manifold elements and how different media forms influence the kinds of components speakers (can) use. In this chapter, we’re going to begin to break down and out these components that, individually and collectively, make meaning, make messages, make appeals, and engender affects. Remember, a text is made of choices the speaker had and the decisions and selections they, consciously or unconsciously, made. Remember, too, that medium and genre are always at play, delimiting the choices speakers can make if they want to be legible and recognizable to particular communities and audiences.
We can feel overwhelmed when we start thinking about all the things of which a text is made and all the things from which we can make a text. You can break down text components in the following ways in order to see and think about your work and the work of others more clearly:
- Content: What claims, information, and evidence did the speaker choose to include to reach their audience? What information or evidence did they choose NOT to include?
- Arrangement: How has the speaker has put their content together to align with their purpose? In what order is it presented to their reader and why? What content have they made more important or less important?
- Style and form: What kinds of words, media, colors, tone, images, description, syntax, grammar, and formats did the writer choose to engender particular appeals and affects? What rhetorical devices did the speaker choose to leverage? What decisions have they made regarding genre?
Text components across media forms
Text components look different across different media forms. You are still thinking about content, arrangement, and style, but you have to be able to see these pieces across diverse texts. The following chart is intended to help you start seeing components across media.
Speech |
Written |
Image |
Film |
| Presentations, public addresses, radio shows, podcasts, conversations, interviews, | Articles, books, tweets/posts, blogs, comments sections, journals, textbooks, reports, editorials, newspapers | photographs, illustrations, paintings, cartoons, charts, graphs, Instagram, data visualization, sculpture, | commercials, movies, news broadcasts, TV shows, TikTok, YouTube, |
| Words, statements, sounds, voice intonations, diction, descriptions, questions, repetition, rhythm, colloquialisms, slang, sensory language, tone, jargon, syllable stress, syllable articulation, accent, language, loudness, softness, sound effects, white noise, background noise, music, vocal tics or fillers, pauses, sil