Rhetorical Terms

Any good writer knows that rhetorical tools are a must have in their work. I've gone over many different kinds such as plasticity, open-ended closure, visual gazes, compare/contrast techniques and others in my past blogs. As a writer, you need to be aware which specific rhetorical tools will best help get your point across to your intended audience. Some tools are used more effectively towards a certain group of people than compared to another. For example if you are a car salesman, you would probably want to use a compare/contrast technique to show a potential buyer how your cars are better than another car dealer's. You would not want to use, say, open-ended closure because it doesn't suit your needs as a salesman.

Some new rhetorical terms we learned today were persuasive themes, master narratives, content & technical signatures and audience resonance/effects. All of these are applied towards visual media. A persuasive themes aim is to make the audience feel emotions like nationalism, tradition or even scapegoating. It is universal and can apply to anyone. A master narrative is similar, but it applies to people in a specific area. Master narratives are rooted more in culture and context and they can reflect things like shared hopes and concerns of a particular community. Almost all visual communications have a tendancy to package the imagery and technical elements in a way that a viewer could identify a familiar structure or signature to it. This is called content and technical signatures. Signatures reflects distinct characteristics and choices for a piece of visual media. Last but not least is audience resonance and effects. It's a "return of investment". To clarify, it's a way to measure if a campaign had the desired impact of the audience it was intended for. Indicators can help to measure the amount of influence, for example, a soap commercial had on an audience once it was aired. An indicator in this case would be the number of bars of soap that were sold after the commercial started airing.