Bryant, Donald C. "Rhetoric: Its Functions and Its Scope"

From RhetorClick

Donald C. Bryant’s purpose is to discuss the “functions and scope with any system will embrace” (268). There are many confusing meanings to rhetoric, making it difficult to actually analyze. One example of a confusing meaning is rhetoric as the use of empty language (“language used to deceive, without honest intention behind it” [269]). Rhetoric is also referred to as a way of saying anything. Bryant understands rhetoric to be the “rationale of informative and suasory discourse” (271). This rhetoric does not include symbols (stop signs, pictures, colors, sirens, etc.). Rhetors, though they don’t have to be specialists in the subject, must thoroughly understand their subjects, so they can find a way to get their audiences to understand and move. This also implies rhetoric is concerned with appearance; truth has to look true, just as dishonest rhetoric should be realized as dishonest.

Bryant also talks about rhetoric being unavoidable, and that it helps validate the “relations in the idea-audience-speaker situation” (282). The function of rhetoric is to adjust ideas to people and people to the ideas; this has to be done without modifying/distorting the ideas, and the audiences must be prepared “through the mitigation of their prejudices, ignorance, and irrelevant sets of mind without being dispossessed of their judgments” (282). Rhetoric, therefore, works alongside psychological and logical studies and uses imagination and emotion to support reason. Rhetoric is “the organizer of all such for the wielding of public opinion” (285). Rhetoric is used in inquiry and in education (we should teach people rhetoric). Regarding poetry, Sir Philip Sidney claimed poetry can’t lie because it only presents. Rhetoric, however, presents and affirms, so it is characteristic (297).