“In Lieu of a New Rhetoric” by Richard Ohmann

From RhetorClick

In “In Lieu of a New Rhetoric,” Richard Ohmann starts by acknowledging the past perceptions of rhetoric as a “mysterious power” and as a “calculated procedure” bond in the similar characteristic of dealing with persuasion (298). He continues by contrasting the views of many of the new rhetoricians like I.A. Richards, Daniel Fogarty, and Richard Weaver--to name a few. He then states his purpose: “suggest one way in which contemporary ideas of rhetoric...resemble each other more than any of them resembles older ideas” (300). This similarity between the contemporary ideas is that they open the term rhetoric to incorporate a broader spectrum of linguistic activity; this is different from the classical view of rhetoric as persuasion. Ohmann outlines these relationships using five aspects: the relationship between the rhetor and the audience in which new rhetoric encompasses a more mutual relationship, rhetoric as a pursuit versus the transmission of truth, candor as a necessary condition of making rhetoric, the attribution of how much a work reflects the author (only in style says new rhetoricians), and rhetoric reflecting the concepts of a world view (of the world, community, group, or an individual). Ohmann continues to discuss rhetoric in terms of teaching freshman-level college students. He states that the current methods of grammarian rules, etc. are not affective in the classroom. Rather, he proposes a “four-part framework” for teaching freshman. First, the students must understand “the relationship between a piece of writing and its content.Then, they should be taught the “relationship between a piece of writing and its author” and its relationship with the audience (304). And, final idea they should learn is that of the world views previously discussed by Ohmann.