Rhetorical Theory

Messages and the meaning they produce are an essential result of public relations. Practitioners are in the message and meaning business. Among other concerns, public relations theory and professional best practices require a solid understanding of messages and the meaning they can create. Practitioners are paid to influence what people know, think, and do. The rhetorical heritage provides a long-standing and constantly developing body of strategic and critical insights to help practitioners be effective and ethical in the way they create messages and participate in the process by which society creates meaning.

Systems theory is useful for understanding and shaping the process of public relations, but it fails to help practitioners and scholars understand the messages that are strategically and ethically relevant to each task. For over 2,000 years in Western civilization, the rhetorical heritage has examined the nature of messages and the strategic challenges in addressing rhetorical problems that demand the formation of shared meaning. Critical studies complete the troika of leading approaches to public relations. Some lines of critical investigation grow from the rhetorical heritage. Other approaches to criticism draw heavily on social theory to investigate and critique the roles large organizations play in the discourse of society.

Rhetorical theory features the role information and fact play in shaping knowledge and opinions as well as motivating actions. It addresses the ways that evaluations are debated and confirmed or challenged through discourse. People compete in public debate to assert the strength of their ideas and their interpretations of facts. They know that others may disagree. They often respond because they disagree. This spirited debate is the essence of the rhetorical heritage that values the right and ability of people to get messages and make judgments accordingly.

Rhetoric, as a term, has fallen on hard times in the past four decades. During the antiwar and activist protest era of the 1960s, the cry of the agitator in response to any establishment statement was “That is pure rhetoric.” Rhetoric, instead of signaling informed and reasoned discourse, came to be associated with sham and hollowness. Media reporters picked up this meaning of the term.

By this influence, many people acquired a narrow and limited understanding of rhetoric as deceptive and shallow statements made falsely in an effort to manipulate and control rather than to reveal or assess fact, value, and policy. It is associated with spin, vacuous statements, propaganda, and pandering to audiences' interests. Some may see it only as telling people what they want to know or are willing to accept, rather than relying on judgments of knowledge, truth, and reason.

Adhering to the best Western rhetorical heritage, academic programs in English and speech communication include courses in rhetoric and rhetorical studies. Studied and taught in that context, the term rhetoric refers to the strategic options of communication influence within ethical standards. It is the rationale for suasive discourse. As a discipline, it addresses the ways people persuasively assert and challenge fact, value, and policy. It recognizes that humans deal with their lives through words and other influential symbols. They create collective action by appealing to one another. They dispute, cajole, agree, identify, challenge, and confirm. All of this is the domain of rhetoric, the rationale for forging conclusions and influencing actions. Rhetorical theory explains how people co-create meaning through dialogue that can define and build mutually beneficial relationships.

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