The letter of recommendation (LOR) plays a significant role in the application process for many professional positions, offering descriptive rather than quantitative information from a third party about an individual’s potential fit within the hiring organization. Such letters, however, increasingly appear online, emphasizing existing problems within the genre and creating others involving trust, reliability, and confidentiality. Typically, the response has been that such digitization of the LOR minimizes its significance or standardizes it. This article analyzes the digital LOR genre as an exemplar of epideictic rhetoric situated within a Perelmanian framework and demonstrates how the digital LOR operates rhetorically, enhancing the adherence between candidate, writer, audience, and institutional values and providing a means of evaluating candidate fit. The article also offers a rhetorical heuristic that captures how audiences can more fruitfully read the epideictic, digital LOR, thereby demonstrating how to optimize the digital platform’s benefits and still use the LOR to its best rhetorical advantage.

This article contributes to recent efforts to add life and movement to rhetorical studies by focusing on the representation of movement in medical texts. More specifically, this study examines medical texts, illustrations, and photographs involving movement by Johann Casper Lavater, G. B. Duchenne de Bologne, Charles Darwin, and Étienne-Jules Marey. By identifying how figures of speech epitomize arguments, this examination follows a shift in the way arguments about movement are represented, a shift from static, visual arguments to gestural enthymemes, as they are named, arguments that are made in movements; these shifts are linked to developments in medical technologies involving photography. These arguments about and using movement attempt to “capture” or express the moments within which life, through the embodied gesture, resides. This extended understanding of the enthymeme broadens current understanding of argument to include delivery, links medical and rhetorical discursive practices, and informs how we make sense of and study the relationships between technology and rhetoric both in the past and present.

Research Article| January 01 2003 Remarks from the President Sara Newman Sara Newman Kent State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Advances in the History of Rhetoric (2003) 6 (1): x. https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2001.10500530 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sara Newman; Remarks from the President. Advances in the History of Rhetoric 1 January 2003; 6 (1): x. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2001.10500530 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressJournal for the History of Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC2003Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle identifies “bringing-before-the-eyes” as a capacity that is crucial to metaphors because it allows rhetors to actualize actions immediately before audiences, leading those audiences to insight. Because this description suggests that metaphors activate cognitive mechanisms on the part of their listeners, “bringing-before-the-eyes” has been considered a key element within Aristotle’s theory and the nexus of that approach to metaphor and contemporary conceptual ones. Yet, no study has probed these claims to any degree. Accordingly, this paper examines Aristotle’s references to “bringing-before-the-eyes” as well as to two associated concerns, energeia / actualization and sense perception. This examination demonstrates that “bringing-before-the-eyes” is not explicitly cognitive but instead a perceptive capacity. In this, Aristotle’s theory anticipates recent approaches to language because it allows the audience to participate in the persuasive process at a level that extends its role beyond the traditional Aristotelian understanding that it is the target of emotional appeals.

(2001). Recognizing a Rhetorical Theory of Figures: What Aristotle Tells us About the Relationship Between Metaphor and Other Figures of Speech. Advances in the History of Rhetoric: Vol. 4, A Collection of Selected Papers Presented at ASHR Conferences in 1999, pp. 13-23.

Classical rhetorical theory has been used for relatively discrete, practice-oriented purposes in its application to teaching Scientific and Technical Communication. However effective these appropriations are, they isolate these resources from a comprehensive framework and from that framework's role in shaping disciplinary practice. Because these theoretical assets are integral to each student's preparation to be an effective, responsible practitioner, I have developed and taught an upper level rhetorical theory course for STC majors that is grounded in Aristotle's On Rhetoric and in his understanding that effective communication is a systematic tekhne/art.