Rhetor 

Meaning, the Writer or Speaker

The Rhetor is the Who of every rhetorical situation. Well, half the Who. (The other half is the Audience [link TK]. A rhetor can be a writer, a speaker, a songwriter, a singer, an advertising copywriter—just about anyone who performs a rhetorical act, moving or persuading an audience.

This persuasion-creator type uses a number of tools to get an audience to change its mood, its mind, or get it to take action (or to stop doing something). She adapts her argument to the Audience and the Occasion. She responds to a need (called, unfortunately, the Exigence. She employs a style suitable to the occasion—formal for an academic paper, informal for a gig at a comedy club. She may pull together some facts (Aristotle called anything not created by the rhetor “inartistic proofs.” And she might tell a story or deploy a figure of speech (“artistic proofs”).

When you analyze a speaker, it helps to know the rhetor’s background. Since you won’t have the omniscient answer gods Google and Wikipedia during most exams, you’ll need to suss out the rhetor’s background through the hints given you in the introductory information. The 2016 AP Lang exam, for instance, included a speech by Cesar Chavez, a famous labor leader and human rights activist. Students who knew who he was got a real jump on that section. But those who didn’t know a thing about him could glean a hint from his Hispanic name. Oh, and another thing you can get right away from the name: how to spell it properly. You’d be amazed how many students misspell the names of rhetors in the exam.

Who’s the rhetor for Q1 and Q3 in that exam? You. The best way to prepare for these sections is to practice your writing. Check out these four tips. 

Full disclosure: Tania disagrees with Jay on this. Jay argues that the best writers develop a style long after they graduate from high school, and that they benefit from imitating the style of the last book they read. He thinks that the style should suit the occasion, pleasing the particular audience—such as the teachers and scholars who read the AP Lang exam. Tania, on the other hand, believes that, by the end of the year, your teacher should be able to know your work without seeing your name on it, just by recognizing your style. But both of them agree on these tips:

1. Write every day.

It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be a habit. 

2. Get in the details.

A mentor of Jay’s once wrote that it isn’t enough to write that the meal was delicious. Your reader wants to experience the tang of every hollowed-out radish.

3. Speaking of which, learn about enargeia [link tk], the “special effects” of rhetoric.

Enargeia has to do with imagery and the use of all the senses, including taste, smell, and touch. Make the reader believe he’s experiencing the scene himself.

4. (Actually, this should come first.) Read read read.

If you want to be a truly great writer, and train your mind way beyond what any class can teach you, take an essay or short story or section from a novel that you especially admired. Read it several times. Now close the book or turn off your device. Try to write the piece from memory. Now compare the difference. What did you miss? 

5. When you write a paper or a piece for publication, read it aloud to yourself.

Then read it aloud to another person. Fix it up after each reading. For some reason, your words will seem very different, depending on whether the audience is you, you hearing it aloud, or another person hearing it.

6. Outline before you write.

See TKLINK on how to outline during the AP Lang exam.

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