This course is about communication on various levels. Over these 9 weeks we will cover a number of theories, cases and applications in the field of communication science. We will start with the foundational concepts of communication theory, defining what the theory is and going through a number of approaches to communication itself. Each week you will have a test to check on your progress and understanding. We also have a final text in the end of the course and a little bit of writing. As Oscar Wilde said, if you cannot write, you cannot think. If you cannot think, others will do thinking for you. So we find writing and reflecting pretty important for our classes. Along the course we provide you with in-class materials: lecture presentations, articles and additional readings. If you really want to get into the topic, don’t avoid this extra work. Although a substantial part of this course is theory-based, communication theory has a very practical application. Communication is an underlying process which creates and develops relationships, communities, societies. We communicative on a daily basis via a variety of means and channels. In our globalised and increasingly interconnected world, communication skills are essential in both the personal and professional spheres. It is our goal to leave you with a contextualisation and conceptualisation of communicative processes that will poise you to hone your own communicative skills — in other words, to put theory into practice.
Introduction to Rhetoric
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Do curso por National Research University Higher School of Economics
Communication theory: bridging academia and practice
13 classificações
National Research University Higher School of Economics
13 classificações
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Public Rhetoric and Persuasion
The main focus of this lecture is to introduce student to the field of rhetorics. This class focuses at theoretical approaches to persuasion and the ways how to craft messages that influence the audience. Here we discuss approaches to the public speaking and online communication.
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Olga SolovyevaLecturer
Integrated Communications Department, Faculty of Communication, Media and Design
Maria MordvinovaHead of BA Program in PR and Advertising
Integrated Communications Department, Faculty of Communication, Media and Design
Hi, and welcome to the week four of our Communications Theory course.
This week, we will focus on rhetoric.
We've already discussed a little bit about the group communication,
how decision making is going on,
how shall we persuade maybe other people within
this group decision making and how do we
manage relationships within the interpersonal communication.
So let's focus during this week on
the crafting of these messages and the delivery of these messages,
which basically refers to the rhetoric.
We used the word rhetoric quite often.
We can speak about good rhetoric within the message,
about bad rhetoric within the message.
But what does it mean? How do we define this good or bad?
How do we persuade others and what is rhetoric in general?
Let's take a look at these issues and figure it all out.
But to start with, we need to focus at the ancient rhetoric.
Well, it all roots in ancient Greece,
and we'll try to investigate the main approaches on the way
how rhetoricians would manage their teaching and practice of the great speeches,
as rhetoric usually is defined as an art of public speaking.
So how do we define rhetorics in the very beginning?
Well, sometimes we talk about rhetoric as empty words,
which we use to distort the truth or tell the lies.
This is the very bad connotation of the rhetoric,
and we don't really rely on this.
Actually, what Aristotle would focus on would be that
rhetorics is the power of finding the available arguments suited to the given situation.
So, here, we are focusing at the persuasion as it
is the way how we can communicate our ideas to people
and maybe somehow we can adopt their behavior or
their attitudes towards the initial goal of ours.
Let's first focus on people who are called Sophists,
Sophists means the wise one or a teacher in the ancient Greek,
and these group of people were actually focusing on the way how to teach the rhetoric,
and they consider the rhetoric to be in our eyes.
It was the knowledge generalized from the experience,
and it can be very useful for people.
Why did it actually all started in the ancient Greece?
Oh, well, it was all about the democracy so that inquired a lot of communication
as you need to come to the square and then
communicate your ideas for others in order to be heard.
And the whole art of the situation would be focused on the public speaking in general.
Sophists were a little bit skeptical that anyone could easily discover the truth,
so they played with little tricks on
the persuasion and on the way how you need to arrange your speech,
how to make maybe flattering in some way or maybe persuasive in another way.
At the same time, they would focus on the political part and the ethical as well.
So even though they have this a little bit of ethical conflict as they would
say that you can actually define or you can actually argue in favor of anything,
they would still try to outline their ideas and try
to communicate the knowledge of public speaking to the rest of the audience.
Sophists actually believed that people had to adjust their notions of what is good,
useful and true to the circumstances in which particular communities found themselves.
So they were the ones who would place
a very essential point at the context of the speech or the whole situation.
Plato and Aristotle as two fathers,
I would say, of the ancient rhetoric would have quite different approaches.
As you might remember from other courses that Plato was the one who is focused on
studying the souls of humans and developed the whole concept of ethos and the ideas,
which are embedded in what we call different phenomenon.
He actually believed that learning how to properly define and divide an issue into
the constituent's part would be an essential part of the rhetorical process in general.
Aristotle, a student of Plato contributed very much on the development
of the rhetoric and its focus on as a particular discipline.
He developed the main principles of the rhetoric,
and he identified three actors of the persuasion process.
So instead of just arguing in sake of the argument or trying to talk about
our ideas what Sophists would do and try to
provide a solid argumentation but in order to influence,
Aristotle would focus on what is essential.
So he outlined three actors which were the speaker,
the speech, and the listener.
And, now, when we have these three components of the rhetorical process,
we can move closer to the rhetorical analysis,
and we can understand how each of the actors and
what is the process and how they would behave in the different situations.
Despite Aristotle's current fame,
his rhetorical theory was completely leaps during his lifetime by Isocrates.
Isocrates started out as a logographer.
This refers to someone who is writing speeches for people who,
for some reason, couldn't compose their persuasive speech for themselves.
Basically, he was hired by different people and he was doing his job,
and it was he's very important duty.
Later, Isocrates would establish a famous and influential school of rhetoric that
was attended by ambitious young men from many Greek city states.
He repeatedly argued that achieving his goal of
the rhetoric would require three very important things.
The first one is a native ability,
so you have to have some kind of a background or some kind of
a natural predisposition to conduct influential speeches.
Then he relied on studying the study as you can understand the whole process as you
can implement it into the message creation and how you actually do craft your messages.
And the last one, very important part of the rhetorical teaching,
studying and practicing is finally practice.
So if you practice more,
the more you practice,
the better you become in the rhetorics.
And this means that, basically,
we all can acquire the knowledge and acquire the skill of the public speaking,
which sounds quite ambitious and which can be very useful for many different situations.
As the background of the ancient rhetoric,
where should we focus our attention at when we are delivering the public speech,
or we're preparing to this delivery?
Well, first of all is the invention of the message. We need to craft it.
We need to think of what our arguments are and what would we focus on within the speech.
Secondly, this is arrangement or the disposition of these arguments.
How do we place it in the correct order?
How do we make it attractive?
What kind of logic should be followed or should not be followed?
Maybe we really need to get out of this logical pathway,
and we need to embed some emotional messages within our all speech.
The next point would be the style, how you're delivering.
So the focus on the audience and the focus on the way how
this particular behavior in this particular speech would
be accepted or not accepted by the audience is essential.
We know it as so like speaking publicly, within the classroom,
and speaking publicly here with a camera would be quite different for me and
speaking in front of the big crowd would be extremely
different while you speak in a small group,
but still you need to be persuasive.
Ancient Greeks would focus on the memory as we do
need to understand and we need to keep in mind what are we trying to say.
So it would be helpful in order of some crisis situations when something goes wrong,
and your brain would still carry out
the main idea and the way how it's supposed to be arranged.
And the last one is finally delivery.
Delivery would rely on first four steps
here as it does go very close with the style, with the arrangement.
So you need to understand your target audience,
and you need to understand the way how you would deliver a particular message.
So these would be five basic steps,
which we need to think of while we are preparing for our public speech.
And I hope this part would be quite useful for you.
But even though classic rhetoric is really important and while it was actually
the basis for the further development
of the theoretical background so for persuasion and public speaking,
we can try to think of what have changed during recent times.
So let's now switch from the ancient to
the modern form and take a look at what actually is changing.
So if ancient Greeks would consider rhetoric as an art of public speaking today,
testimony would be quite essential.
Ancient rhetoricians, they did not really value factual proof,
while the facts and testimony would be
virtually the only proofs that I discussed in the modern rhetorical theory.
Also, relying on the opinion was one of the underlying processes there.
As we did not really,
not we, but in ancient Greece,
they wouldn't rather have the means of mass communication
or Google so they wouldn't be able to check out what is the fact.
So basically, people back then would rely on
the opinion and the personal interpretation of the phenomena of different people.
It should sound solid, it should sound interesting,
and it should sound somehow persuasive for the person.
Nowadays, even while you were in the class,
you can just Google what are the basic assumptions of this
or another theory and you can check on what your lecture is sailing you.
And when you are in a public meeting,
you can just track down what really was the case and what are the basic points there.
So, relying on the opinion is not
that important anymore as we really do need to find some very solid basis there.
The role of the context and
the crafting universal message would be the third and very essential difference here.
As ancient rhetorician situated there teaching in a place and time with the constraint,
with the habit in more rhetoric treating
rhetorical occasions is there were pretty much all alike.
We talk about the globalization a lot,
we talk about our messages being used in different locations,
in different parts of the world.
So we try to find out what would be universal,
what are the universal laws of public speaking.
And this is the focus of the modern rhetoric.
So even with all this difference between ancient Greece and modern rhetoric,
we still are focusing what is the essential
and like first core part of the whole process.
This is influencing the other person,
this is achieving our goal on the persuasion.
What is persuasion?
We can talk about this definition.
The human communication that is designed to influence
others by modifying their beliefs, values or attitudes.
So this is a goal-oriented process,
and the main intent here is to achieve this goal of changing behavior or changing values.
Also, we are focusing here at the communication means as you can't really go
and change the behavior of others within the
rhetoric's just forcing them to do something.
This would be forcing,
that would not be the persuasion.
Also, the process of persuasion requires and it
implements the initial part of the free will,
the concept of the free will of the recipient.
As we believe that the person who's being
influenced or who is being persuaded would have its own opinion.
And this is not again about forcing someone to do
something rather than this is working with
his or her beliefs and trying to make them change
their idea or maybe adopt their idea to what our initial goal is.
And as we mentioned here already,
we are talking about the attitudes.
Attitudes, what we consider,
are the learned evaluations as we come here into this world with nothing.
We don't really have attitudes in the very beginning.
If we never tried something,
we don't have attitude towards it,
but even though for example,
I don't have any children,
I would know that there are some good source
of the baby's food and there are some worse things.
How do I know it? Well, I learn from my experiences,
from experiences of others and from the advertising, generally.
So these attitudes and learned evaluation and learned ideas of
something else are the essential core focus of the persuasive process,
as we will be focusing during this lecture on the way how we can
shape attitudes which might finally come out to the change in the behavior process.
So let's move on to the particular theories which would tell
us and explain us how the persuasion process occurs and
how we can try to adapt to
our communicative patterns and our communications style in order to be more persuasive.
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