In Hauser’s essay Rhetoric As A Method, he compares rhetoric and dialectic in many ways. Rhetoric is a kind of methodical thinking. When you are addressing your audience with rhetoric, your material should be focused more on the “how” instead of focusing on the “what”. Rhetoric is supposed to be persuasive and needs to appeal to the general audience. Where as, dialectic writing is much more specific. There are more opinions in dialectic work and it should appeal more to and expert or a specialist rather than a broad range of people that may not know much about the topic. When trying to write an essay or come up with a speech, you must consider who the audience you are addressing will be and how you will actually say what you have thought up. For example, someone who is going to a high school to talk to kids about preparing for college may be put in different kinds of environments. From my personal experience, I was put in front of small classes and also very large audiences inside an auditorium. The way I spoke to the small class was in a way more personal and a little bit more relaxed. When addressing a large audience you carry yourself in a different way. You stand taller, you speak with more confidence trying to make sure that you can get your point across to hundreds of people. When talking to the smaller class the kids there were also more comfortable with me because when they asked questions the were not scared to speak up in front of a ton of other kids. When I was talking to the large crowd, kids were nervous to ask questions, so in turn I had to come up with more to talk about and basically give them endless information rather than give advice on how to be successful in your college search. Essentially, your audience can make or break your essay or speech and that is why before you even begin to do either one of these you must think of all the possible audiences that could be reading your essay or listening to you speak.
Weekly Response #1
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