3. Key Terms: Rhetor, Primary Rhetorical Artifact, Secondary Evidence, Stasis

Rhetor

• The rhetor is the face of the particular communicative effort—the speaker, writer, or producer. In some cases, it's easy to see who the rhetor is. When you try to persuade a friend or family member to take some action or change to their mind, you're the rhetor. When I argue that learning to analyze rhetoric is important, I am the rhetor addressing an audience of students.

• Sometimes, though, we have what might be called an imputed rhetor. If a politician gives a speech in favor of legislation, audiences impute the communication to the politician, even if the speech was written in whole or in part by a speechwriter. Ad agencies prepare ads for corporations, but the public imputes the message—and responsibility for the choices that the message demonstrates—to the corporation. The university’s president communicates as the voice of the university on policy and priorities; what she says is imputed to the university as a whole.

• Rhetoric embraces how the rhetor (the speaker, the company, the influencer, the government, the writer, the protestor, etc.) in a particular context attempted to design communication (using words or other means) to prompt audiences to do, think, feel, or believe something—to adhere to some idea.

Primary Rhetorical Artifact, Secondary Evidence

• In this course, you will select and analyze primary rhetorical artifacts; that is, the primary evidence of a particular rhetor’s effort to reach an audience in a particular context. So, for example, if you want to analyze a speech by the President urging Congress to enact a particular bit of legislation, you might choose to analyze a video of the speech, a transcript of the speech, or the two together as the evidence of the President’s efforts to get the legislation enacted. Even if, say, the video of the President’s speech appears on YouTube, in this example, you would not be analyzing YouTube itself with all of its ads, comments, and other material.

• Nor would you analyze, say, a newspaper article that reports about the President’s speech because the reporting would not be the best evidence of the speech. But the reporting might be useful as secondary evidence to establish the background and context for the speech.

• Secondary evidence is essential for establishing background and context and can include reporting, previous posts or tweets, scholarly sources, web pages, “about us” information, government data, and many other sources. Remember: rhetoric never comes out of a vacuum or goes into one: context always shapes and constrains the rhetor’s efforts.

• To analyze a primary rhetorical artifact, you must set it in its context. You will have a lot of freedom to choose primary rhetorical artifacts that you are most interested in, as well as guidance. But the most important point to remember upfront is that you need to decide whose rhetorical efforts you are analyzing. If, say, the leader of the opposition party made a speech in response to the President’s speech from our earlier example and urged that Congress not enact that legislation, the opposition’s speech would be secondary evidence of how the President’s speech was received.

• But if you wanted to analyze the opposition’s speech, then that speech would be your primary rhetorical artifact and the President’s speech would become secondary evidence that establishes the background and context for the opposition’s speech.

Whose rhetoric are you interested in analyzing and what is the primary rhetorical artifact that best shows it? Notice how shifting the focus of your interest shifts what counts as the primary rhetorical artifact.

Stasis

Stasis is a range of possibilities for inventing claims and focusing an argument. If a writer and reader are going to have a meaningful, relevant exchange, they should first be on the same page about what the issue is and how to explain or argue about it.

For an explanation of stasis, see all the sections and subsections on stasis in this resource.