Approaching the human experience as a rhetorician requires thinking critically about how we use language to influence the responses of others. The methods of rhetoric also spring from the belief that discourse provides the richest pathway to understanding the human experience.

It’s a common view that our words are instrumental and disposable: a means to achieve larger goals in the material world. But a rhetorician usually takes a different view.

The goals we seek in our daily lives do not always terminate in movement, but in rhetorical action.  Communicating through language is often the most meaningful thing we do.  Ask a business or civic leader what their job is, and it frequently comes down to effectively connecting  with others. Someone examining the rhetoric of science, or health care or religion is engaged in discovering how these distinct realms of discourse create identity, acceptance and support for their sources.

Because our rhetoric is less photographic than additive–language use is more a projection of the self than a “perfect copy” of reality–we use it to bend impressions to match our unique view of the world.  It’s little wonder that a person’s stories about a vacation are almost always more interesting than their pictures. The stories are more fully them.

This general idea of worlds verbally created suggests a whole host of questions that point to the primacy of rhetoric. Some examples:

• There are about 15 minutes of actual play in a nearly three hour-long football broadcast.  In fact, the narrated game itself is the rhetorical spectacle. If that seems impossible, why did so few who watched an experimental presentation on NBC a few years ago avoid the game that was broadcast without commentary?
• Why are we compelled to describe the motives of others, even when they have not been disclosed?
• Pick a social context (i.e., wedding, funeral, a party you’re attending with work associates ). Do you find yourself rehearsing what to say and what to suppress?
• Every field has its tropes: routine patterns for expressing ideas.  What are the most common ones that reappear in real estate marketing? Popular music?  State of the Union addresses? Romantic fiction?
• What effect does it have on readers when journalists “mark” their subjects by inserting adjectives  in front of the names of certain newsmakers?
• Why are we so frequently the intellectual captives of metaphors like the “war on drugs” or “social media?

All of these questions suggest why rhetorical analysis can is anchored in everyday experience.  It is much more than the analysis of formal speeches.  What the philosopher Kwame Appiah concluded about philosophers is probably true of rhetoricians as well.  A rhetorician is “someone who thinks that what goes without saying goes even better with saying.”  Bringing everyday discourse under closer scrutiny is almost always rewarding.

Peitho, the goddess of persuasion was the companion of Aphrodite. It comes as no surprise that the mythology of love has long been entwined with the mythology of rhetorical seduction.  Both represent forms of human action that define our species.