Rhetoric

June 2025

• Jun 21, 2025ExplainersEvolution of Communication TheoryColumbia researchers tracked 600 registered voters through the 1940 Erie County campaign expecting to document direct media effects. Published as The People's Choice in 1944, the study instead found most voters credited friends, family and neighbors over radio and print, with a small set of opinion leaders interpreting coverage for everyone else. That two-step flow broke the hypodermic-needle model and still frames the field.26 MIN25.9k

May 2025

• May 8, 2025CulturePersuasion Through WordsLanguage moves people through mechanisms that work whether or not a claim is true, which is why repetition alone raises perceived truthfulness. Cialdini's Tempe hotel towel cards show how the effect scales with closeness of the reference group: a standard environmental appeal produced 35.1% reuse, a general social norm 44.1%, and a norm naming previous guests of that same room 49.3%.23 MIN55.9k
• May 7, 2025CultureRhetoric Explained SimplyAristotle's three appeals still organize persuasion, and parts of his account survived testing: Hovland and Weiss showed in 1951 that identical messages persuaded more when credited to a high-credibility source. The sharpest modern finding is Green and Brock's transportation research from 2000, which showed that how far a reader is absorbed into a narrative predicts attitude change more strongly than the strength of the arguments inside it.20 MIN37.3k

May 2022

• May 30, 2022ConceptsRhetoric: Mastering the Art of Persuasion and CommunicationWhat rhetoric is and why the field was rebuilt in the twentieth century. Aristotle defined it as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion, a capacity rather than a formula, and built it on ethos, pathos and logos. Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 Metaphors We Live By then recast figures of speech as cognitive machinery: we understand argument through ARGUMENT IS WAR, attacking and demolishing positions.14 MIN3.6k