My Rhetoric

To write a topic about rhetoric may take hours because thousands of smart minds starting with Aristotle, who simply defined rhetoric as persuasion, talked a lot about rhetoric. We use rhetoric everywhere: from writing email to verbal conversations with friends and relatives and even our bosses whom we try to persuade that that’s not our fault. There are 3 categories of rhetoric that define all communication ether:
¨ Ethos, or ego, I
¨ Pathos, or path (pathetic), emotion
¨ Logos, or logic
However, these three categories of rhetoric are not firm. Boundaries between them are blurred. Any of them could be equally applied to the same set of information depending on what we try to emphasize. As we discussed an example of web advertisement of house cleaning company earlier in our class students saw all categories in the same text. So, it might be controversial but, again, boundaries between ethos, pathos and logos are overlapping. For me it is sometimes confusing to create a writing in specific rhetoric category, because others can see a different rhetoric in the same writing. For me it seems to be never-ending question.