Rhetorical Style The Uses of Language in Persuasion

A comprehensive guide to the language of argument, Rhetorical Style offers a renewed appreciation of the persuasive power of the English language. Drawing on key texts from the rhetorical tradition, as well as on newer approaches from linguistics and literary stylistics, Fahnestock demonstrates how word choice, sentence form, and passage construction can combine to create effective spoken and written arguments. With examples from political speeches, non-fiction works, and newspaper reports, Rhetorical Style surveys the arguer's options at the word, sentence, interactive, and passage levels, and illustrates the enduring usefulness of rhetorical stylistics in analyzing and constructing arguments.

Introduction. Part I. Word Choice. 1. Language of Origin. 2. New Words and Changing Uses. 3. Categories of Word Choice. 4. Language Varieties. 5. Tropes. 6. Schemes and Figures of Word Choice. Part II. Sentences. 7. Sentence Basics: Predication. 8. Sentence Construction: Modification. 9. Sentence Architecture. 10. Figures of Argument. 11. Series. 12. Prosody and Punctuation. Part III. Interactive Dimension. 13. Speaker and Audience Construction. 14. Incorporating Other Voices. 15. Situation and Occasion. Part IV. Passage Construction. 16. Coherence. 17. Passage Patterns. 18. Amplification. References.

Jeanne Fahnestock is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Rhetorical Figures in Science, and co-author of A Rhetoric of Argument.