Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the “art” of persuasion, of convincing the hearer or reader of a particular line of argumentation. Handbooks of classical rhetoric constitute a codification of practically any expression possible in words. At the same time, classical rhetoric is based on an engagement with the audience as recipient and recognizes that the situatedness of communication includes the writer/speaker, the audience, and text.

Together with grammar and dialectic, rhetoric formed part of the ancient trivium that was the basis of education from ancient times until well into the 19th century. However, as early as the 16th century, rhetoric began a period of progressive narrowing and decline until it fell into complete abeyance. During recent times, the power, complexity, and subtlety of rhetoric as a feature of all discourse and of persuading a particularly constituted audience has produced, among other things, a view of all texts as representations that are the product of the reworkings of other texts and an understanding of the research practices of human inquiry as essentially rhetorical.

An approach to data in terms of genre, difference, definition, division of an assertion into its parts, etymology, and comparison corresponds to the “places” or “topics” of rhetoric that operate as potential guides to choices, possibilities, and alternative ways of thinking about data. When, for example, a qualitative researcher thinks about the kind of questions that will obtain “rich” data, he or she is engaging with the first step of rhetoric—invention. Integral to further steps of rhetoric are models of organization, arrangement, contiguity, and amplification. The latter, for example can take several modes such as providing examples, the use of icons, visual devices (e.g., diagrams), concordant authorities and theories, cause and effect, and detailed description and repetition with modifications.

Much of the data of qualitative research is in the form of partial situated knowledge from which the researcher, in the process of analysis, moves from the known to the unknown, abstracting some distinguishing mark or [Page 793]governing metaphor. Metaphor is one of the main figures or tropes of rhetoric. However, this is not to say that rhetoric can be mapped directly onto qualitative method; rather, it serves to deepen the researcher's thinking about the possibilities of representation in terms of style, the articulation of knowledge, and the production of rational modes of inquiry based on different argumentative structures.