37 Rhetoric is Cultural
Rhetoric does not belong to one particular culture, but instead has a rich history featuring different styles and approaches to the art of persuasion. Rather than thinking that one persuasive method is “right” and another is “wrong,” we need to recognize that persuasion depends on context, which involves cultural, historical, technological, and situational factors that determine successful arguments. Furthermore, the persuasive tools available to us today are very different from those used even in recent history. Think of the ways that social media has expanded our understanding of and connection other people living around the globe. The possible means of persuasion have expanded throughout history, which means that writers need to determine which tools can possibly help them in an argument.
One resource lies in an older set of tools for thinking about persuasion known as the five canons of rhetoric, which includes invention, memory, arrangement, delivery, and style.
Invention is the process of deciding what to write about. What topic do you want to learn more about? What process of inquiry will help you learn more about what you want to know?
Memory is the process of learning a topic so well that you can remember and share the information in everyday conversation or while speaking on the subject in more formal settings. What topics are so interesting to you that they might be easier to memorize? How will internalizing the information you are researching help you to share it with an audience more effectively?
Arrangement is about ordering what you write. What kind of structure will make your position more effective to your audience?
Delivery gets into the tactical details of conveying your message. For example, if it is in writing, would it be better delivered in a series of tweets, in a formal letter, or engraved into the side of a boulder? On the other hand, If you are speaking, is your message best conveyed as a strident improvisation, full of energetic physical gestures, or as a calm, or even boring, recitation?
Style is also very important, and is very connected to your intended audience. Do you think they would prefer a casual and friendly chat, or does the moment call for formality and fancy words?
In other words, the canons have always been closely connected to ideas about how people should be trained to communicate, and which skills are most important to their education as it relates to speaking and writing. The canons remain useful to us today in helping us to understand traditional rhetorical values, but why stop there? What other rhetorical skills and values should we learn about and develop? Perhaps looking at more than just the Classical Western tradition can help us with that.
We have received what we think of as the classical rhetorical tradition from the Greeks and Romans, but rhetoric is universal and at least as old as humanity itself. We can point to many examples of rhetoric around the world that may h