Rhetorical analysis

In their professional papers scientists wish to persuade their readers, almost exactly as a lawyer in a court of justice wishes to persuade his listeners. They therefore carefully prepare the rhetorical structure of their discourse, and even its details, in order to make the greatest impact on the audience. Werner s paper is no exception to this rule, and a simple rhetorical analysis provides some interesting results. 

Rhetorical analysis, informed by feminist theory that attempts to examine the silences in written texts, can make visible the viewpoints lost at critical moments of transformation. Such an analysis, we argue, can help us resolve the dichotomy between incommensurable post-modem relativism (all viewpoints are equivalent) and the limitations of a perspective that privileges a single distanced perspective (the so-called androcentric viewpoint of the Archimedian observer). ... 

Such a project will necessarily draw on research in many different disciplines. Rhetorical analysis can tell help us reexamine our understanding of workplace discourse in the context of risk. Psychological and linguistic studies tell us much about gesture and cognition in controlled laboratory situations. Researchers in human computer interaction and new media are just now wrestling with the question of how to represent dynamic, three-dimensional communication in the limited bandwidths available to most users. Social studies of science can help us understand the nature and complexity of... 

I preface my lectures on quality assurance in the chemical laboratory by asking the rhetorical question, why bother with quality The answer is because it costs a lot to get it wrong. There are many examples of failures in chemical analysis that have led to great material loss, but as a first example here is a success story. 

Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (London printed by T. R. for J. Martyn at the Bell, 1667 new edition, St. Louis Washington University, 1958), 37. For a careful analysis of Sprat s rhetorical stance in writing this official apology, see Brian Vickers, The Royal Society and English Prose Style A Reassessment, in Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth (Los Angeles William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985). 

Macquer and Baume, Plan d un Cours de Chymie experimentale et raison-nee, avec un discours historique sur la chymie, (Paris, 1757), xix. It must have been written by Macquer, since it was reproduced in the Dictionnaire (1766) without much alteration. For an analysis of the rhetorical structure, see Wilda C. Anderson, Between the Library and the Laboratory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 19-34. 

Many other large-scale resettlement schemes can be subjected to much the same analysis. If, in the Tanzanian case, Chinese and Russian models as well as Marxist-Leninist rhetoric play an important ideological role, we should not imagine that these were the only sources of inspiration for such schemes. We could as easily have examined the huge forced removals under apartheid policies in South Africa, which were far more brutal and economically destructive. We could also have analyzed any number of the many large-scale capitalist schemes for... 

Although the Rhetoric is the only text in which Aristotle offers something like a systematic analysis of the emotions, it is not the only one. In addition to various references scattered throughout the corpus, there are extensive analyses in the Nicomachean Ethics and important references in the Politics. In trying to pull together these texts,... 

Porter, Theodore. 1992. "Objectivity as Standardization The Rhetoric oflmpersonality in Measurement, Statistics, and Cost-Benefit Analysis." Annals of Scholarship 9(2) 19-59. 

By assembling these distinct strains of thought, I am drawing attention to a broad-based grievance with a rhetorical figure that remains vague by definition but that has nonetheless become a popular trope in recent years the black-white, monochrome analysis of race. In the mass media, a recent Newsweek article boldly announces that the color line in the post-civil rights United States is not just a matter of black and white anymore the nuances of brown and yellow and red mean more—and less—than ever ... 

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