Rhetoric 

is characterized by the Greek philosopher Aristotle as the ability in each case t
o see the means of persuasion available.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle defines rhetoric as the ability in each case, to see the available
means of persuasion. Writers often begin to gather all of their available ideas through what is
called invention work, in which they extract ideas on their topic from their mind and put them
down on paper. Invention activities help you formulate and understand your ideas through the
process of writing them down. Such writing also helps you see how your ideas connect to one
another.

Prewriting consists of activities that help you begin the writing process. You start simply by
thinking about the writing task at hand, letting it come into focus. It can be helpful to do some
of this thinking on paper, by jotting down what you already know about the subject, as well as
any questions you might have or might expect your reader to have. Prewriting can be an
excellent way to overcome the writer’s block brought on by a blank piece of paper.

There are a number of prewriting activities. It is up to you to determine the one that work best
by trying several to see which one produce the most useful information. And, as is the case in
other aspects of the writing process, your rhetorical situation helps determine the prewriting
activities you might find useful: for a letter to your grandmother, jotting down a few ideas might
help you begin, whereas for a formal report to the president of your company, you’d make and
perhaps support them with documentation.

Try these activities to help you begin:

Television violence

Action shows – guns, police, car chases

Cartoon violence: does the coyote still get smashed all the time while the roadrunner gets
away?

Don’t they have some rating system on TV now? I don’t remember seeing any rating
information.

What about the local news? Someone’s always getting into a car crash.

Or someone gets shot – how many guns, do we have in in this country?

Sports – think of hockey on TV. Even professional basketball, the way they fly around hit the
floor.

And what’s football but a contact sport?

Does slapsticks comedy count where someone falls down it’s supposed to be funny?

Where in our society does all this violence come from?

Brainstorming: quickly list as many ideas about your topic as you can think of, without worrying
about writing complete sentences or determining the value of any of them. Brainstorming gives
you a chance a amass a body of raw material. Some of it might be inferior. Some of it will
probably be interesting but not quite right for your paper. The rest of it, developed, supported,
and connected, will provide a basis for drafting your writing project. Figure 1.1 shows he types
of ideas someone brainstorming about violence on television might jot down.

Freewriting: Write about a topic for a set period of time, say five minutes, without stopping.
Don’t pause if you run out of things to say – even if that means I can’t think of anything else to
write about. Try to pour out onto the page everything that you can call to mind about your
topic: thoughts, questions, connections, concerns, anything. The point of freewriting is to get
something on paper that can shaped later. See figure 1.2 for an example of freewriting on the
topic of television violence.

Idea mapping: When making an idea map, you begin by writing your topic in the center of a
blank

Violence on television

Okay, I have to get down what I know about violence on television, and keep writing all the
time. I can’t even lift up my pen, I have to keep writing. What was that show me watched last
night, something about cops and there was a car chase. Big wreck. Sirens, flashing lights, an
ambulance, what else, what else? And right after that, a shootout, right downtown, on the local
news. Two or three people hurt, badly. Why is the was that hockey player who was really hurt.
Wow – think of the violence in sports and I wonder why they always focus on that: sure, you get
the scores, but there’s always some player who gets hurt, no matter what sport it is.

I can’t think of anything else, I can’t… I wonder if there if there are still a lot od cartoons with
violence? I haven’t watched cartoons in years, but boy, they used to have the action and the
characters would be squashed or blown up…

Sheet of paper. Circle it and draw a line outward to another circle in which you write a word or
idea associated with the topic. Extend your web out to another word or idea map about
violence on television, you might begin with the words television violence. Your second bubble
might contain the words kids and violence. Your third, following this trail of associations, might
contain violent cartoons. The lines between idea bubbles should indicate relationships.
Whenever you exhaust one line of thought, you go back to an idea for which you have
additional thoughts. In the end, you should have a fairly extensive web.
Different types of prewriting have different advantages. Some people find an approach that
works well for them and stick with it; others use different approaches to match the kind of
writing they’re doing or the topic. There’s no reason you can’t combine prewriting activities,;
for example, you can freewrite and then use an informal structure like clustering to organize
your thoughts.

Analyzing the rhetorical situation – commenting in writing on your thoughts about the occasion,
purpose, topic, audience, and writer – can be one effective use of prewriting. Remember that
everything you do in your writing involves making conscious choices about all aspects of the
writing process. This means considering your occasion for writing (why bother to write at all?);
your purpose (what you’re trying to accomplish); your topic (what you already know about the
topic and what aspect or perspective you’d like to focus on); your audience (what they already
know and what information you need to supply); and you; the writer (what you bring to the
situation), by consciously thinking about all ascepts of a writing situation, you’ll learn several
things:

You’ll gain a better of your own writing process.

When you face similar writing situations in the future, you’ll already be familiar with what’s
difficult for you and what’s not (

Organizing ideas

Once you’ve generated raw material through your invention activities, you should begin to
think about the structure of your paper. A few short, simple sentences that briefly summarize
of your central points can help give you a sense of where you are going and how you expect to
get there. Later, when you begin drafting, you may find the structure of your paper changing. A
brief summery that reminds you where you intended to go can be helpful.

Thinking about organizing your ideas doesn’t mean constructing an outline before you begin
drafting your paper. Doing so would mean you already knew everything you wanted to say
before you began putting your ideas on paper, whereas the very act of putting those thoughts
on paper is a way to understand what you think. Instead, consider those few short, simple
sentences that briefly summarize your central points as only a beginning. You can rearrange
later, after you have a draft. Think of your organizing activity as a predraft, something to guide
your thinking as you compose the first formal draft.

Writing as learning

You often learn from what you write and how you write. Writing words on paper may lead to a
new perspective or may force you to address an argument that opposes your position. It’s a
good idea to begin writing without a final conclusion in mind, but rather to accept that you’ll
learn and change your views as you compose. Be open to changing your focus a bit, to wrestling
in writing with the beliefs you began with.
There are many ways in which to organize a paper. How you do so depends on your rhetorical
situation: your purpose, your audience, and context in which you’re writing. Think back to the
letter, class papers, or work documents you’ve written: in some, you probably got right to the
point and wrote as little as possible. In others, you may have spent some time introducing the
problem or issue before proposing your situation. In still others, you might have touched on
some personal issues before getting to the heart of your document. The form you used and
how you organized your words depended on the rhetorical situation in which you found
yourself.

Aristotle’s organizational scheme

One way to organize your paper so that you can incorporate the research you’ve collected is to
use a model developed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. This organizational scheme includes
answering possible objections to your ideas (discussed in detail under Anticipating and
answering objections later). Aristotle observed that the most effective examples of discourse
have five main parts:

An introduction, which introduces the topic by setting the stage and includes the main point.
A narration, which describes what is at stake in the discussion – what the main issues are and
why the topic is important.
The confirmation or main body of the statement, which includes the writer’s explanation of
why the argument is valid, as well as evidence to support the claim made in the text.
A refutation, which answers possible objections to the claim.
A conclusion, which pulls everything together and often contains a call for action on the part of
the reader.

Aristotle’s model is only one of many one of many ways in which to organize your ideas. It
allows you to combine your ideas and research into broad categories; then you can make
connections, move ideas around, and provide support.

Other organizational approaches

You can also organize a research paper by beginning with a list of problems and issues, along
with the strengths and weaknesses of each. Or you might begin by addressing he possible
objections to your own position. By identifying and eliminating, at the outset, any objections to
your positions, you indicate to your audience that you have a strong position. Beginning with
the ideas that are simplest to understand and then moving to the more complex ideas is
another way to organize information.

Anticipating and answering objections

Because people hold differing points of view on most issues, especially civic issues, you should
plan to acknowledge and attempt to come to terms with other views as you organize your
ideas. Answering objections is something you do all the time. Have you ever asked, say, to
borrow the family car, and when your mom and dad said no, you somehow talked them into
letting you take it after all? You probably convinced them by answering their objections. When
they told you why they objected, you had an answer for them.
Think about the last time you went to a movie with friends: did everyone immediately agree to
see the same film? Probably not. More likely. Someone suggested a film, and someone else said
she heard it was really bad. Them another friend suggested a different film, and someone else
chimed in with what he’d heard or read about it, and so on. In this way, you and your friends
came to a collective decision that everyone could live with. You agreed as a group to see a
particular film.

The same holds true when a group tries to decide where to go for dinner or lunch, or where to
go on a family vacation. You’re more successful in getting your view across when you attempt
to work with the others involved. This is what we mean when we say you must answer
objections: you must work with others to understand their positions and then come to terms
with them.

Answering an objection doesn’t mean simply disagreeing with it or stating simply that it is
wrong. Rather, it involves providing evidence to support your contention that the objection is
incorrect. If your parents object to loaning you the car because you never put gas in it, simply
answering yes, I do is not an effective response. It makes more sense to say well, I did put gas in
the car just last week – here’s the receipt, and remember when we all went to Trader Joe’s on
Sunday? I dropped you off so I could go and get gas. And today, you might add as you open
your wallet I’ve set aside fifteen dollars to buy gas. Our point is that you can’t answer an
objection simply by denying it; rather, you need to supply facts and examples to support your
point of view.

Here are some other ways of responding to objections to your ideas:

Agree with the objection, but then shift to a different point of view: I agree with you on that,
but if we look at it from this perspective, we see that.
Agree in part with the objection: yes although that might point of under those conditions, it’s
more important that we look at.
Refute the objection with facts or figures: although it might appear that this proposal would be
expensive, it would actually save us money. Here’s how it…
Answer the objection head – on: that objection is simply wrong. Then support your assertion
with facts.
Refute the objection as flawed in some way: the responses might appear to be positive, but the
results of the survey you mentioned were misleading because…
Characterize the objection as minor: in the big scheme of things, what you’re suggesting really
isn’t much of a problem because…

In many writing situations, your ideas will be on public display for others to read and to criticize.
You must be prepared to enter into a thoughtful, reasoned discussion about the issues and
problems inherent in your topic. You must respect the views of others while supporting your
own.
Once your prewriting work has helped you put some of your ideas on paper and you’ve thought
about the organizational scheme that might best serve your purpose, you’re ready to make
your first attempt to express your ideas in coherent form. This is called a first version or a first
draft. Don’t worry about spelling or editing at this point. Concentrate instead on the larger
structural issues – on organization. This is your opportunity to expand your ideas, to flesh them
out. In essence you’re writing to see how much you have to say about the ideas you’ve
generated in prewriting. Remember that drafting is an exploratory