Rhetoric and Civic Life | Jacob Glenister

Sun Tzu, master of military strategy, wrote in his seminal work The Art of War "He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight". Of course, rhetoric is not a military art, but it is still strategic (i.e., it involves assessing one's circumstances systematically and identifying what to do to reach some goal) and so this advice still holds true. If we reinterpret this statement along rhetorical lines, we might summarize it by saying that no rhetor will be successful unless they speak (or write) their message at the optimal time. In fact, given this rephrasing, we could easily say that Sun Tzu was talking about the military equivalent of the rhetorical concept of kairos. Kairos is a Greek concept that is roughly equivalent to the English word timing. It means possessing the right confluence of current trends and events as well as audience beliefs to convince an audience of a concept. An argument without good kairos will inevitably fail, while a well-timed ...

Photo Credit: Fireside Chat, undated. From UNC Greensboro Special Collections and University Archive's Photostream Imagine yourself as an average American on a Sunday evening in March of 1933. The Great Depression has reached its peak and for the past few days every bank in the nation has been closed. Unemployment is at record highs and shows no sign of improving. You are afraid for your own future and the future of your country. Then, the President's voice comes over the radio. Less than 15 minutes later, your fear is assuaged and you know what you must do to help the nation's economy recover from the crisis. That will be the hook for my civic artifact speech, which will be about FDR's first Fireside Chat (which you can listen to here ). The Fireside chats were a series of speeches broadcast over the radio throughout FDR's presidency directly to the American public. The first, made shortly after FDR was inaugurated as president, dealt with what was then a ver...

Anger by Saurabh Vyas I have noticed through watching the news and occasionally listening to the radio that angry people seem to be the most engaging. According to  PBS , twice as many Americans listen to the always-angry cable news than famously level-headed NPR. As such, in the name of making sure my blog is engaging to its audience, I decided to adopt an angry tone in my blog. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for me, however, there is nothing that aggravates me so much that I can rant about it for 5 blog posts. I therefore found myself in a bit of a conundrum as to what I was going to use as a topic for my passion blog. It was at that moment that I remembered my favorite party game: Don't Get Me Started. The premise of the game is that all of the players sit in a circle and take turns going on angry rants about different subjects. The fun of the game comes from the conventionally benign and mundane topic of the rant. It is the job of the player whose turn it...