The Rhetorical Situation, Appeals, and Strategies, Essay Example

It matters how a writer passes their message to the audience. Therefore, writers consider rhetorical situations, appeals, and strategies in their work. Rhetoric is how the writer uses manipulation of language to entice an audience. These techniques are crucial in any kind of writing because they make the audience understand the texts better. Rhetorical strategies revolve around narration and comparison: the wording used to convey the text’s meaning.

On the other hand, the appeals are focused on persuasion, whereas the rhetorical situation focuses on the surrounding circumstances of the texts. This paper analyzes three documents and compares and contrasts the styles employed by the writers of each text. The first document is JFK’s inaugural address; the second is a news article concerning the speech. The third is a picture capturing part of the inaugural address as the oath was being taken. The writers have started with the rhetorical situation in all the texts, but appeals and strategies are different.

Comparison and contrast of the styles used across the three texts.

Rhetorical situation.

Firstly, every text explains the surrounding situation of the texts, thus employing the rhetorical situation technique. For instance, the first document, which is the president’s address, starts by “painting a picture” of the situation surrounding JFK’s address, “Given on a cold January afternoon in 1961, John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address was hailed as a return to the tradition of political eloquence…” The first part explains the surrounding environment, a cold morning, and gives the timeline, 1961. Therefore, the readers are drawn into the circumstance as they study the text. Additionally, the speaker, JFK, “makes his subject, not policy proposals, but the common heritage, purpose, and obligations of the American people” (72). The rest of the texts are similar.

The news article “inside Kennedy’s Inauguration, 50 years on” makes use of the rhetorical situation as well. The writer sets the audience’s mind on the circumstance surrounding the writer as they write, “This article, in which friends and family of JFK share their memories of the inauguration with reporter Eleanor Cliff, originally appeared in January 2011 on the website Daily Beast and was then reprinted in Newsweek” (74). To the same effect in the last document, a picture also employs this technique. The three documents have similarly used this technique at the top of their documents before starting the texts helping the reader paint a picture of the circumstance or the situation surrounding the respective texts.

Rhetorical strategies and rhetorical appeals.

However, the use of rhetorical strategies and rhetorical appeals vary across the texts. The first document’s strongest appeals are pathos and ethos, the third document’s strongest appeal is to logos, and lastly, the second document employs ethos, logos, and pathos. Focusing on strategies, the first two documents successfully employ many strategies, such as similes and narration; however, the third document does not employ many strategies to convey the message as the picture is self-explanatory. Nevertheless, it employs illustration as its strategy.

Rhetorical appeals. In the first document, “the JFK’s inaugural address,” the speech’s strongest appeals are pathos and ethos. Appealing to pathos, JFK psychologically reaches the audience as he asks them to consider the things they can do for their country, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” (73). JFK makes the audience tap into their patriotism to America in doing this. He successfully employs ethos appeal all over the speech, for example, as he calls out for help to the poor around the world. He uses vivid description, displaying the poor people’s situation, which is effective in drawing the audience to sympathy, “To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves” (70).

Further, the speaker makes use of the words “we” across the speech, which also appeals to the audience’s emotions. They are included in the speech as JFK says “we,” making them feel valued and thus triggered to action whenever the president calls for action, for example, when he says, “To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not…” (70). The second document appeals to logos as the writer causes the audience to view the speech and what happened logically. In addition, the writer gives a timeline of “50 years” (75). Appealing to pathos and ethos, the writer evokes the reader’s emotions as they explain the aftermath of the speech and how the people still feel about the situation. The third document appeals to logos through the picture. The picture is objective to the audience, a captured moment as the chief justice was leading the oath-taking ceremony; thus, this is logical.

Rhetorical strategies. Writers in the first two documents have successfully employed rhetorical strategies. However, the third document does not employ this technique to convey its message since it is self-explanatory; the picture says it all. For example, in the first document, the writer uses antanagoge, “if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich” (74). Also, the writer uses amplification to evoke senses of change, for instance, as he calls for help to the poor and patriotism for the country. The narration is highly used in the second document.

Works Cited

LOC Chapter 2. 69-78