Ancient Greek rhetoric gave rise to and contributed to the (initial) development of many terms that even today attract the interest of philosophers and rhetoricians round the globe. Among those terms is logos, perhaps most characteristically described by Aristotle in his Rhetoric. But Aristotle is not the sole ancient Greek representative of rhetoric who considered the term. In this essay, I explore how selected ancient Greek figures—i.e. the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and a few others—understood logos in the context of rhetoric. I assert that, despite some differences, they essentially viewed the term similarly, as connected to discourse involving argumentation intended to exert influence for socio-political or philosophical purposes.

Typically, one might expect a review to highlight similarities, but here, I choose to place these books side by side for their contrasting perspectives.Before delving into the essence of the comparisons, it is important to recall the mission of the AK Peters Visualization Series.This series aims to capture what visualization is today in all its variety and diversity, giving voice to researchers, practitioners, designers, and enthusiasts.It encompasses books from all subfields of visualization, including visual analytics, information visualization, scientific visualization, data journalism, infographics, and their connection to adjacent areas such as text analysis, digital humanities, data art, or augmented and virtual reality ("AK Peters Visualization Series," n.d.).Both authors are practitioners who bring their expertise in communicating through visualized information and data.Jen Christiansen, who graduated in geology and art, is a senior graphics editor at Scientific American, while Nancy Organ, formally trained in statistics, has experience as a data visualization designer and educator.Each utilizes her unique skills for effective communication.Traditionally, rhetoric is understood as "a discipline concerned with the effective use of language, to persuade, give pleasure, and so on" (Matthews 2007).While this definition seems self-evident, it is essential to note that contemporary rhetoric encompasses all modes of communication.Interestingly, practitioners, educators, and researchers frequently refer to "the language [bold -EM] of data visualization," exploring its grammar, vocabulary, and stylistics (DataVis Lisboa 2020; "Visual Vocabulary," n.d.; Ben-Joseph 2016; Kandogan and Lee 2016).This context invites a closer examination of three key aspects: first, how various authors describe persuasive communication through information and data visualization, or as some call it, data storytelling; second, how to expand our rhetorical framework to include data, numbers, and statistics; and third, a deeper exploration of the audiences-crucial for rhetoricians-of data and information visualizations.As Burns et al. (2020) state.When designers create visualizations for communication, they make choices about encoding and design that they think will accurately and persuasively communicate their interpretation of the data.The ultimate interpretation of a visualization depends on both the designer and the reader. InventioBoth books target distinct audiences, as indicated by their titles.Building Science Graphics serves as both a textbook and a practical reference for anyone looking to convey scientific information through illustrations for articles, poster presentations, and beyond ("AK Peters Visualization Series," n.d.).In contrast, Data Visualization for People of All Ages is more approachable, specifically aimed

The attacks of September 11 stand among the most rhetorically charged events that have shaped the collective imagination and political discourse of the twenty-first century. The global aftermath redefined national security, identity, and, crucially, the rhetorical function of borders. In the post-9/11 landscape, borders became discursive constructs, rhetorically framed to delineate justice from injustice, inclusion from exclusion, and served as rhetorical tools of exclusion and control rather than protection and unity. These shifting borders targeted marginalised communities, particularly migrants from third-world countries and those of Muslim descent deemed as a threat. Guantánamo Bay came to embody this ambiguous rhetoric of confinement, where language and law were manipulated to evade accountability. This study analyses how the film Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush (2022) displays the formation and enforcement of physical and ideological boundaries. Through the lens of American exceptionalism as a rhetorical strategy, the film exposes how national security discourse redefines borders to justify exclusionary practices and extraordinary legal measures. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical framework of the ‘state of exception,’ the study examines how sovereign powers suspend legal norms while strengthening systemic control. Crucially, the analysis investigates how the film enacts rhetorics of resistance through its portrayal of the agency of migrants such as Rabiye Kurnaz, and the demand for visibility, dignity, and voice. By focusing on the rhetorical dimensions of national security, legality, and citizenship, this article contributes to an understanding of how borders are lines on a map but powerful rhetorical devices that shape lived realities.

This article explores how Peter Santenello’s Border Series, viewed more than ninety million times on YouTube, depicts U.S. migration in the early 2020s. After years abroad as a travel vlogger, Santenello returned to the United States determined to show the country from the ground up, arguing that mainstream outlets overlook crucial realities. His Border Series is part of this turn. Through close readings of selected episodes, the paper identifies three recurring rhetorical patterns in his coverage of migration to the U.S. First, Santenello’s hand-held camera gains entry to police trucks, farm fields, hotels, and desert contacts to the mainstream representations which are considered to be politically biased. Second, each video functions as a “third space” where roles remain fluid: migrants appear as commodities or humanitarian cases, sheriffs shift from protectors to reluctant aid workers, and viewers assign these labels through real-time debate. Third, Santenello’s civic-traveler style combines storytelling with witnessing; by rejecting the journalist label yet featuring multiple viewpoints, he widens the circle of voices that narrate the border and resists classical media framing. Taken together, these patterns show that digital, personality-driven reporting is remapping migration discourse, turning contested ground into a shared arena for seeing and arguing.

The article analyzes the rhetorical strategy of the public health campaign “Stop udarom” (Stop Strokes), treating it as an example of health communication within the framework of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM). The aim of the study is to examine how the campaign employs classical persuasive appeals - ethos, logos, and pathos - to guide the audience through three stages of communication: conveying knowledge, eliciting emotion, and motivating action. The analysis shows how various modes of expression, formats, and linguistic devices serve persuasive functions. The study contributes to the growing body of research on the rhetoric of health discourse and may serve as a reference point for the design of future preventive campaigns.

Trump’s presidential announcement speeches and presidential nomination acceptance addresses were analyzed through the lens of a functional approach to political campaign discourse. In order to present themselves more favorably than their opponents, candidates typically engage in one of three rhetorical strategies: acclaiming, by emphasizing their own strengths; attacking, by diminishing their rivals' appeal; or defending, by responding to criticisms. This analysis focuses specifically on instances of acclaims and attacks in which themes related to immigration and immigrants are foregrounded. The findings indicate a discernible upward trend in the frequency of attacks directed at immigrants and foreign “Others”. A recurring metaphor in Trump’s rhetoric on immigrants is that of THE COUNTRY/NATION IS A HOUSE. Once established, this metaphor is employed with rhetorical precision, enabling the strategic manipulation of political discourse. Trump’s rhetoric thus contributes to a politics of fear and entrenches the binary opposition between “Us” and “Them.”

The article presents the results of a multimodal analysis of the covers of British, German, and Polish opinion weeklies, aiming to identify language-image configurations that we term verbal-visual collocations. In our view, verbal-visual collocations give rise to so-called visiotypes, which we define as ubiquitous, one-sided, highly simplifying, standardised visual routines for perceiving reality. These are processed automatically and reflexively, often without the support of verbal cues. They significantly influence and shape the awareness of specific discourse communities. As media-staged, connotation-rich, and highly symbolic images present in the public sphere, visiotypes reflect universal patterns of thought, similar to stereotypes, and are increasingly employed on magazine covers. Since visiotypes represent specific condensed and established combinations of image and text, we utilize a modified version of the model by Stöckl (2011, 2016) and Stöckl and Pflaeging (2022) for their multimodal analysis. Keeping pace with current times, we focus on key figures in international politics: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The analysis addresses questions such as which stereotypical representations and images of these politicians are (re)produced or evoked on the verbal and visual levels and what relationships between verbal and visual codes (possibly metaphorically reinforced) are employed to present the editorial stance on the cover and/or shape and reflect readers’ opinions. Furthermore, one of the goals of this analysis is to examine whether the category of verbal-visual collocation appears adequate and scientifically justified.

This article analyzes President Biden’s 2024 executive order banning asylum for undocumented immigrants, along with other similar examples of U.S. Democratic Party rhetoric, as emblematic of a latent fascist stance within the ostensibly liberal Democratic Party. Employing Alberto Toscano’s conception of late fascism, I contend that the border rhetoric of U.S. Democrats has long evinced a fascist discourse that uses the supposed threat of the immigrant body to retrench the conditions of capitalism. As I argue, this political disposition, rather than representing an overt challenge to Donald Trump and the increasingly xenophobic GOP (U.S. Republicans), has brought the parties into alignment and helped inaugurate a new era of ascendant nativism and racist violence.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the anti-Ukrainian rhetoric concerning migrants in Polish social media based on the category of topos, as in Discourse-Historical Approach, in order to evaluate the threats and dangers generated rhetorically. The research material comprises a corpus of far-right anti-Ukrainian comments and posts collected from Facebook and Instagram profiles. Based on quantitative insights into the corpus, the paper conducts a qualitative study to classify the topoi and highlight specific rhetorical strategies employed by the far-right toward Ukrainian migrants. The analysis shows the patterns which the users of extreme discourses employ to verbalize and rationalize their disdain for the migrants. These present the Ukrainian migrants as a threat to Polish independence and social order, argue that the support they receive is undeserved, and present ruling politicians as inept and ignorant of the needs of Poles.

While disinformation is often equated with fabricated content, its impact extends beyond falsified information to the way narratives are linguistically constructed. This article explores the role of argumentative structures in disinformation strategies, focusing on how linguistic devices shape the reader’s interpretation of events. By analyzing argumentative operators and connectives in articles published on the Spanish-language pro-Kremlin news portal Sputnik Mundo, the study demonstrates that manipulation is not only a matter of content but also of discourse structure. The research is based on Anscombre and Ducrot’s theory of argumentation within language (1994) and framed within an interdisciplinary perspective, combining linguistic analysis with insights from disinformation studies and military theory, particularly the notion of disinformation as a weapon in hybrid conflict. Through an examination of selected articles covering NATO’s Steadfast Defender exercises in Europe, the study reveals how argumentative mechanisms are used to challenge official Western narratives, delegitimize NATO’s actions, and promote a Kremlin-aligned interpretation of geopolitical events.

The article examines how the Ukrainian language has become a strategic battlefield in Russian propaganda, acting as a front in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. It reports on the analysis conducted within the Discourse-Historical Approach of media statements made by Russian politicians and propagandists. It shows how current attacks on the Ukrainian language are a continuation of historical practices of linguistic repression. It reveals that the rhetoric of delegitimization of Ukrainian is based on recurring topoi, such as artificiality, primitiveness, and hostility, and on well-established mental models that legitimize Russia’s takeover. The results confirm that Ukrainian is not seen as a neutral communication tool but as a hostile element in the narrative of the uniformity of the “Russian World.” Russian depreciations and delegitimizations aim to deny the existence of a distinct Ukrainian national identity as a neo-imperialist strategy to subjugate Ukraine.

This article examines various dimensions of persuasive communication during protest actions undertaken by Polish farmers in public spaces in 2023 and 2024, thereby disrupting social order. The source of information regarding the strikes is the popular general news portal rmf24.pl, which prepared a special report dedicated to these events. The analysis draws on the paradigm of the rhetoric of anger, which is conceptualised at the beginning of the article and compared to hate speech, rhetoric of violence, and similar concepts. The study employs several methodological approaches from the intersection of social sciences and humanities, including discourse analysis, semiotic analysis, and action analysis. The last section summarise how the Polish farmers' protests can be situated within the rhetoric of anger and point out fields for further research.

Building on a critical study in Cap (2024), the present paper broadens the framework of critical cognitive discourse research with tools drawn from rhetorical theory to explore patterns of conflict-charged communication and legitimization discourse used by Polish political parties to claim and enact state leadership. The first part studies the discourse of Law and Justice, a far-right party ruling Poland in the years 2015-2023. It examines its strategies of leadership legitimization involving ideological polarization, strategic generation of internal and external conflict, threat construction and crisis management. The second part analyzes the more moderate and cooperation oriented discourse strategies implemented by three opposition parties in the lead-up to the October 2023 elections, in which the party lost power. The aim of the paper is to apply the broadened discursive-rhetorical apparatus to compare and contrast the two kinds of discourse to speculate about the longevity of an essentially conflict-charged rhetoric. It is argued that radical populist discourse can be an extremely powerful tool, able to grant long-term political leadership. However, in a yet longer perspective, such a discourse runs a considerable risk of “wearing out” and becoming vulnerable to more forward-looking and pragmatic leadership rhetoric.

The conquest of America brought with it the introduction of rhetoric as a model of teaching and as a practice in the different manifestations of religious discourse, of which the preaching or sermon was the most important for scholars of the colonial era (16th-18th centuries) who, on the other hand, gave little importance to the three political genres: deliberative, epideictic and judicial or forensic, although these had not disappeared as discursive practices. The great classical deliberative oratory had taken a backseat in New Spain but continued to develop in the consistories of the mayoralties and in public debates; the judicial genre continued to be exercised in lawsuits before the Inquisition and local judicial bodies and the epideictic genre was manifested in the lives of saints and praises of various kinds. This situation changed during the 19th century, particularly in the second half, when great parliamentary oratory, civic and patriotic speeches that flooded the republic and judicial oratory flourished because of the new political conditions brought about by the struggle for independence and the triumph of liberalism, in addition to other important genres such as history and journalism. The purpose of this essay is, first, to offer an outline of oratory practices and rhetorical teaching during the Colony, emphasizing the importance of sermons and the oblivion of other discursive expressions and, second, to show the emergence of political genres during the 19th century, which reached their greatest splendor in discursive practices and liberal education.

The article focuses on the paragraph 30 from the epideictic speech of Gorgias The Defense of Palamedes (B 11a in: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker 1956, 291), where the noun μνήμη ("memory") appears. Through a contextual philological analysis, the Author manages to establish the full semantic range of mneme and determine the role it plays in this passage (B 11a, lines 188-198). The title character of the speech, Palamedes, defending himself against a false accusation, presents his inventions as the main argument for his innocence. One of the most important inventions is writing, which mneme - "memory" entrusts stored information, becoming its confidant. Based on a detailed contextual analysis, it can be convincingly concluded that the proper meaning of mneme in the examined fragment is "intellectual ability, power" to collect, organize and store messages, understood as a "reservoir" of remembered facts and events. Written word is the real guarantor of their preservation in an unchanged form. In this way it becomes the guardian of "memory", moreover, as its confidant, writing removes the "troublesome" excess of information from it and thus makes it regenerated, efficient and accessible for humans to acquire new information and knowledge.

This paper demonstrates the connections between certain cultural traits of Scandinavia, a scholarly interest in rhetorical practice and the workings of rhetoric, and a recent interest in audience-oriented research methods. Scandinavia is characterised by a tradition of practical rhetoric, egalitarianism, high trust, and low scores on power distance and masculinity in Hofstede’s culture comparison tool. This, I suggest, is reflected in an interest in the everyday pragmatic functions and workings of rhetoric, paving the way for the use of audience research.

This pair of complementary books, Debasing Political Rhetoric: Dissing Opponents, Journalists, and Minorities in Populist Leadership Communication together with Political Debasement: Incivility, Contempt, and Humiliation in Parliamentary and Public Discourse, charts a comprehensive and highly informative review of such subjects as impoliteness, incivility and political debasement in the contemporary democracies consistently remaining under the threat of opportunistic strongmen.While the former collection concentrates on statements of specific national leaders in the public realm (even taking into consideration the politicians' informal activities when these statements are voiced), the latter is devoted to analyzing the language of selected political leaders, such as Donald Trump (USA), the recently re-elected Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoan, together with the former presidents Rodrigo Roa Duterte (Philippines), and Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil).The latter volume also covers political discourses of parliamentary exchanges, including Spanish politicians' adversity in the parliamentary as well as social media setting resulting in an increased level of incivility (Chapter 2).Chapter 4 traces incivility in the case of British politicians, with a special emphasis on a sample of five (deputy) Prime Ministers addressing the parliament.The focus of Chapter 5 is how irony, ridicule and politeness (or lack thereof) are recruited as frequent rhetorical tools by Japanese politicians sarcastically addressing specific social groups.In Chapter 6, the study interrogates the manners in which the derogatory language of Chinese leaders has changed after Mao Zedong.The contributions also include Hindu political context (Chapter 7) showing the extent to which Indian culture supplements the literal denotations of class, origin and gender, thus influencing the overall level of political debasement.In Chapter 8 the analysis

This essay offers a pluralized conception of local rhetorics. The local has traditionally been conceived as the backdrop or flat surface where rhetoric/discourse is situated, or at best as a contextual dimension of rhetorical situations. The history of usage of this term – evoking a fix and inert connotation that often indicates a bounded locality or site – has contributed to its neglect as a tool for rhetorical theory, while its actual use in rhetorical praxis has proliferated in conjunction to the turn to field and site-based methodologies and practices. By drawing on fieldwork about the rhetoricity of a post-disaster locality to ground my theoretical reflections, here I offer a conceptualization of local rhetorics via multiple ontologies and ecological theories. Finally, throughout the essay, I suggest a rhetorical-topographic approach as a methodological orientation to integrate existing theoretical and methodological pathways for exploring the multiple rhetoricity of the local.

Populism can be treated as an ideological attribute of political parties, but in this study, it is operationalized as a feature of argumentation that allows populists to claim to be the only ones to represent the interests of the nation. Such anti-pluralist arguments could be observed during US midterm elections in 2018 in online discourses of the right-wing political movement Tea Party. This article reports on a mixed-method study of the Tea Party’s official website obtained through scraping the All News feed. The quantitative linguistic analysis of keywords, concordances and couplings in the newsfeed sample is complemented with a qualitative rhetorical analysis of some topoi and argumentative fallacies. The analyses reveal such strategies as: (1) homogenizing the representation of true patriots, (2) polarizing between “good us” and “evil them,” (3) discrediting opponents through analogies, “worst” examples and ad hominem attacks (4) conspiracy theorizing, and (5) mobilizing modes of pathos and ethos in relation to mediatized and historicized cultural imaginaries. The study showcases the advantages of a mixed-method approach to the so-called populist rhetoric.

The article combines methods pertaining to Rhetorical Genre Studies and Discourse-Historical Approach in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of Krzysztof Bosak’s nomination acceptance speech which he delivered during the 2020 Confederation presidential primaries. The discussed genre of political speech is rarely realized in European contexts. Given various differences between the American and the Polish political systems, Bosak did not follow every pattern of the standard variant of the genre. Rather his speech appears to be more similar to a nomination acceptance speech of a third-party candidate. Overall, Bosak emerged as the leader of a divided and heterogeneous party, which was not given much attention by mainstream media. The paper investigates how these factors contributed to the structure and content of the speech. Moreover, recent decades have seen a rapid rise in significance of (far) right-wing movements in Europe. As Confederation is a relatively new political formation, there is a gap in research regarding the properties of its discourse. Thus, the present paper compares the discourse of the coalition with practices of politics of fear (Wodak, 2021).

The aim of this article is to provide an analytical introduction upon the ways of representation of transgender minority in new media. Through rhetorical analysis of selected content related to two high-profile transgender YouTubers, we identified five building blocks of given discourse: reduction of a structural problem to a personal one, reduction of a person’s reality to feelings, tokenization, psychiatrization of transgender identity, and ingroup gatekeeping.

Food is never just food; it is also an instrument of power in a Foucaultian sense. Food is simultaneously a rhetorical tool of dominance and a means of insubordination/defiance. As depicted within slave narratives food is a site of material and symbolic struggle, serving as a means of oppression and resistance. In this study I will examine how enslaved African Americans used the production and consumption of food, as well as discourse about food, as a rhetorical means of resistance. While Michel Foucault produced the theoretical scaffolding that rethinks power and resistance, his theories can be placed in a productive dialogue with the rhetorical studies of Kenneth Burke, Gillian Symon’s general conception of rhetorical resistance, as well as more specifically with James Scott’s and Elizabeth Janeway’s theories of the everyday resistance of the “weak.” Through these analytical lenses, I will place particular focus upon the role of food in slave narratives as a rhetorical means of defining and disputing identity, of establishing and violating various boundaries, and of challenging the status quo of plantations.

Modern discourse is often characterized by such extreme polarization that participants operate from entirely different sets of facts. These alternative facts represent a new line of inquiry for rhetoricians, who must determine how false facts gain credibility. This article outlines Memetic Rhetorical Theory (MRT), a model for understanding how information evolves to become credible in a given environment.

The article undertakes a detailed analysis of The Day the Laughter Stopped – a simple text-based browser game about rape, told from the perspective of a young teenage girl. While seemingly straightforward, the game uses choice poetics to build expectations of agency on the side of the player, only to subvert them at the most climactic moment, provoking emotional responses and serving as a commentary on the experience of loss of control and loss of words in the face of a traumatic event. Following existing approaches to rhetorical, emotion-evoking qualities and capabilities of digital games, the article explores the potential of the digital medium to communicate the unspeakable, overwhelming dimension of trauma, as illustrated by the game. The analysis not only explores the medium-specific means of expression which the game utilizes to encourage the audience to explore the perspective of a rape victim in an engaging way, but also leads to the conclusion that in doing so, the game aims to make persuasive statements about the social and cultural discourse around rape trauma and its representations, and therefore contributes to the larger socio-cultural discourse. As such, the article aspires to add to pre-existing studies on the specific rhetorical means of digital fiction, as well as on the approaches to cultural renditions of trauma.

This paper introduces the potentials of crossing critical rhetoric and Critical Discourse Analysis in analyzing public discourse concerning one of the “corona topics”, namely institutional communication about the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. The application of two complementary theoretical frameworks reveals discourse negotiation and naturalization of power and ideology in a persuasive discursive practice of issuing successive contradictory messages regarding the vaccine’s safety.

Aggressive rhetoric in Croatian political discourse became particularly prominent during the parliamentary election in 2015. A deep polarization of society yielded a new political option, one of the strongest since the beginning of Croatian independence in 1990. After the great election success, MOST got the opportunity to form the new Croatian Government either with HDZ or SDP, the two most influential parties in Croatia. This situation caused enormous tension in the postelection period and consequently intensified the politicians’ aggressive rhetoric. The aim of this study is to describe, interpret and explicate linguistic and rhetorical devices which contributed to the aggressiveness, and ultimately conclude which of the political options listed above is the most aggressive.

Taking a cognitive lexical semantics perspective, the article introduces the concept of conceptual silencing as a rhetorical tool. Understood as a process of conceptual dissolution of meaning to offer a more coarse-grained sense of an expression, conceptual silencing is demonstrated to have a potential rhetorical value in that it allows for more opaque reproduction of ideology. From a cognitive linguistic standpoint, the process of conceptual silencing hinges upon a polysemous nature of a lexical item and boils down to triggering a given sense of a given lexical item in a given context. To illustrate the workings of conceptual silencing, the article reports on a case study of the lexical item Europe in the Guardian press discourse. It is demonstrated that the ultimate effect of conceptual silencing is silencing the ‘European Union’ senses under the guise of the lexical item Europe.

This article aims to investigate narrative reports based on the use of reported speech frames from a pragmatic-cognitive perspective. As rhetorical means of image creation and (de)legitimisation, they are frequently employed to represent utterances that constitute integral elements of short narratives incorporated into American presidential speeches. This paper’s main objective is to propose an original taxonomy of sayers, namely speakers of words reported (Halliday 1981, 1985; Vandelanotte 2006) in political discourse and to investigate their potential for self- and other-presentation and (de)legitimisation of one’s stance, actions and decisions. The data used for illustrative purposes comprise extracts from Barack Obama’s speeches delivered during his presidency (2009 and 2016) and have been selected from a bigger corpus of 125 presidential speeches by three American presidents: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy. Findings in this study indicate that specific sayer types have greater potential for effective image formation and contribute to (de)legitimisation of events.

This paper is focused on the contextual use of the term “whataboutism” in contemporary American politics, specifically in the language of political news commentary. After tracking the word’s emergence in political discourse, some analysis of the term’s recent use in examples of commentary articles is done to explore what the term means as a rhetorical device that structures political conversations in the media and shapes political identities in the public sphere. Overall, “whataboutism” is found to be part of an asymmetrical media ecosystem polarizing the American electorate, and one of the rhetorical tools systematically used in maintaining political group divisions. How “whataboutism” is deployed in  political discourse and then grappled with or normalized by journalists is emblematic of trends in American journalistic discourse after the election results of 2016, and the term’s newfound prevalence is illustrative of the degree to which American identities have become politically tribalized.

This article identifies and analyzes a rhetorical pattern in the Algerian negotiator Hamdan Khodja’s responses to the French occupation of Algeria in 1830. In his book The Mirror, published by a Parisian editor in 1833, Khodja sophistically and obliquely builds anticolonial critique on expressions of sympathy and identification with France, a manoeuver that makes him appear relevant. Speaking from an ethical vantage point that is shared by the French reader, Khodja’s criticism becomes credible and influential. In other words, Khodja’s appreciative judgments permit him to attack the opponent from within enemy lines: his argument is grounded in his opponent’s ethical pretentions. By the same token, Khodja displays that the inhabitants of Algiers that he represents are morally and culturally mature; they are not the uncivilized masses that colonial discourse will often have them look like. By carefully decontextualizing Khodja’s anticolonial tract, and reading it not just as a historical document but also as an articulation of personal themes and desires, as well as sympathy for the colonizer, the study contributes to our understanding of early anticolonial expression as more intricate and heterogeneous than it would appear when studied from a purely politico-historical or rhetorical perspective.

Looking into the definition of rhetoric in the digital space, one often encounters the view that rhetoric is too remote or too “ancient” to be used as a conceptual, theoretical or practical framework for researching digital media. However, a substantial body of contemporary media research applies the theory of rhetoric, using a modern conceptual apparatus (e.g. cognitive theories of metaphor). Based on Kenneth Burke’s model of the pentad, the article aims to show that media messages in the digital environment are based on the notion of the rhetorical situation and demonstrate that the rhetorical apparatus has a crucial role in discerning the ways to modify the discourse space in human-computer-human communication. The source of modification in the traditional model of a rhetorical situation is the interactive nature of communication in digital media and the fact that the recipient [agent a] is bestowed with the role of an active participant who can influence the content of the message. Thanks to the use of the rhetorical model of pentad, the argument goes that in contrast to traditional media, modifications in the model act 1 → agent → agency → act 2 are possible and they result from the inclusion of external participants [agent b] and changes in the ontological status of the digital medium from the role of an intermediary to an active participant in the communication process [agent c].

This article explores how rhetorically ambiguous speech acts can work as preventive negotiations of potential confl ict within a political party and how such acts can affect the ethos of the leader. I show how rhetorically ambiguous speech can be a way of performing rhetorical leadership and communicating a democratic ethos while motivating participation in a common action for ends understood differently by different audiences.

A statistic can be a powerful rhetorical tool in political discourse, but it can also be quickly dismissed by a resistant audience. This article argues that the statistic’s association with Aristotelian inartistic proof (in Greek: pisteis atechnoi, Lat. probationes inartificiales) can, counterintuitively, encourage resistant audiences to be dismissive, to think that statistics “lie.” By drawing from the concept of framing in media studies, I explore how the language used around a calculation can better serve readers when it is more explicit about the statistic’s creation from a social process—that it is invented rather than used in argument. If statistics rely on interpretation, rhetors should invite their audience to interpret rather than insist on an interpretation. I use examples from news articles covering immigration in the United States to explore a frame that does such insisting and a frame that invites.

The paper presents the results of the research conducted on the extensive corpus of press material. The purpose of the research was to show the frequency of references to the American scientific sources in the Polish press, specifically in popular science articles published in the weekly and daily papers. The analysis covered the period of 1975–2005 (and also the year 2015). The frequency of references to U.S. sources has been contrasted with the results on references to other countries (Poland, the former USSR, and Russia, in particular), as well as with the bibliographic data on the sum of citations of academic papers in individual countries. The research was carried out using quantitative methods (content analysis, bibliographic analysis of citations). The obtained results confirm the preference of the Polish popular science discourse for the sources originating from the Western culture, especially from the United States.

If the aim of argumentation is that of increasing acceptance of the orator’s thesis (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 49), then the ultimate goal of counsel, a widespread argumentative practice within the genres of discourse as well as literature, is indeed persuasion. The subject of this essay—that is, the rhetoric of counsel—allows us to observe the interpretative richness of this element of the “new rhetoric” through examples offered by Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, Lucrezia Borgia and Niccolò Machiavelli, straddling the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, bridging the fi elds of literature and history.

Since Thomas Kuhn’s revolutionary look at the social construction of science, research into the rhetorics of science has shown how science is a persuasive form of discourse, rarely as transparent and self-evident as is often understood. Rhetorical studies have taken this cue to examine how science is constructed through available means beyond mere logic. Arguably, the resurgence of creationist beliefs in political discourse has brought on a new impetus in science to persuade the “hearts and minds” of the American population, inspiring Neil deGrasse Tyson’s remaking of Carl Sagan’s 1980 documentary Cosmos. Using Rudolph Otto’s, The Idea of the Holy, this article will define religion as an ineffable experience that creates “creature-consciousness,” or a sense of awe and insufficiency towards something outside the self, while also producing a sense of identification or “oneness.” The ineffable experience is core to the public making of science, just as the ineffable experience plays a defining role in religions. Though science and religion are often seen as mutually exclusively (sometimes in opposition), identifying the ineffable experience as a shared ground can provide opportunities for science and religion to dialogue in new ways.