Although rhetoric and city life have been closely aligned since ancient times, urban planning documents have received little attention as rhetorical texts shaping discourse about citizenship. The Plan of Chicago, a key document in the history of US urban planning, not only proposed improvements, but, more importantly, its visual and verbal language constructed an idealized and ideologically infused conception of the city and its citizens. By enacting what Burke called a representative anecdote, the Plan constitutes a specifically commercially oriented city and citizen, foregoing other possible identifications.

Using Colin Powell's 2003 pre-war speech to the UN as a case study, this essay illustrates ways in which discourse analytic methods can serve investigations of constitutive rhetoric. Prior to the speech, Powell's reluctance to go to war and his skepticism of the need for military action in Iraq was well known. His conversion to the administration's position was key to the persuasiveness of the speech. Thus, within the speech he needed to reconstitute his ethos from doubter to advocate. The analysis focuses on how specific linguistic qualities such as modality, positioning, narrative, and evaluation assist Powell in doing so. These discourse analytic tools reveal ways in which discrete linguistic moves contribute to the constitutive work of ethos formation and re-formation.