Showing papers on "Rhetorical question published in 1985"

The Rhetoric of Economics

Abstract: In this revised second edition, Deirdre McCloskey demonstrates how economic discourse employs metaphor, authority, symmetry and other rhetorical means of persuasion. ""The Rhetoric of Economics"" shows economists to be human persuaders and poets of the marketplace, even in their most technical and mathematical moods. It is further enhanced by three new chapters and two new bibliographies.

Facilitating ESL Reading by Teaching Text Structure

Abstract: Recent research has shown that the rhetorical organization of narrative and expository texts interacts with the formal schemata of native English-speaking readers (the readers' background knowledge of and experience with textual organization) to affect reading Researchers have recently shown that formal, rhetorical schemata have similar effects on reading in English as a second language Moreover, the research in native English reading has shown that explicit teaching of various aspects of text structure can facilitate first language reading This article reports a controlled training study designed to answer the related question for second language reading, Can we facilitate ESL reading by explicit teaching of text structure? The results indicate that training on the top-level rhetorical organization of expository texts significantly increased the amount of information that 25 intermediate-level ESL students could recall

Prejudice, categorization and particularization: from a perceptual to a rhetorical approach

Abstract: This paper seeks to offer an alternative approach to the study of prejudice than that based upon the notion of categorization which is currently influential in cognitive social psychology. It is argued that the categorization approach assumes the inevitability of prejudice and ignores the issue of tolerance. The assumptions of the categorization approach are criticized, and it is suggested that, by focusing on categorization as a cognitive process, it has overlooked an opposing process—that of particularization. The result has been a rather mechanical and bureaucratic model of cognition. A less mechanical view is possible if the relations between the two processes of categorization and particularization are considered from a rhetorical perspective, which examines the argumentative nature of thought. For theoretical and empirical reasons, this perspective does not equate prejudiced thinking with rigid categorization; instead a rhetorical approach permits a distinction between prejudice and tolerance on the basis of content, rather than form, and thereby avoids assuming the inevitability of prejudice.

HERACLES' BOW: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law

Abstract: The law has traditionally been regarded as a set of rules and institutions. In this thoughtful series of essays, James Boyd White urges a fresh view of the law as an essentially literary, rhetorical, and ethical activity. Defining and elaborating his conception, he artfully bridges the fields of jurisprudence, literature, philosophy, history, and political science. The result, a new approach that may change the way we perceive the legal process, will engage not only lawyers and law students but anyone interested in the relationship between ethics, persuasion, and community. White's essays, though bound by a common perspective, are thematically varied. Each of these pieces makes eloquent and insightful reading. Taken as a whole, they establish, by triangulation, a position from which they all proceed: a view of poetry, law, and rhetoric as essentially synonymous. Only when we perceive the links between these processes, White stresses, can we begin to unite the concerns of truth, beauty, and justice in a single field of action and expression.

The Force of Fantasy: Restoring the American Dream

Abstract: In this book, first published in 1985, Ernest G. Bormann explores mass persuasion in America from 1620 to 1860, examining closely four rhetorical communities: the revivals of 1739-1740, the hot gospel of the postrevolutionary period, the evangelical revival and reform of the 1830s, and the Free Soil and Republican parties. Each community varies greatly, but Bormann asserts that each succeeding community shares a rhetorical vision of restoring the "American Dream" that is essentially a modification of the previous visions. Thus, they form a family of rhetorical visions that constitutes a rhetorical tradition of importance in nineteenth-century American popular culture.

Law as Rhetoric, Rhetoric as Law: The Arts of Cultural and Communal Life

Abstract: In this paper I shall suggest that law is most usefully seen not, as it usually is by academics and philosophers, as a system of rules, but as a branch of rhetoric; and that the kind of rhetoric of which law is a species is most usefully seen not, as rhetoric usually is, either as a failed science or as the ignoble art of persuasion, but as the central art by which community and culture are established, maintained, and transformed. So regarded, rhetoric is continuous with law, and like it, has justice as its ultimate subject. I do not mean to say that these are the only ways to understand law or rhetoric. There is a place in the world for institutional and policy studies, for taxonomies of persuasive devices, and for analyses of statistical patterns and distributive effects. But I think that all these activities will themselves be performed and criticized more intelligently if it is recognized that they too are rhetorical. As for law and rhetoric themselves, I think that to see them in the way I suggest is to make sense of them in a more nearly complete way, especially from the point of view of the individual speaker, the individual hearer, and the individual judge.

Writing and Knowing: Toward Redefining the Writing Process.

Abstract: Composition Studies was transformed when theorists, researchers, and teachers of writing began trying to find out what actually happens when people write Over the last decade or so, members of the discipline have striven primarily to discover and teach the special kinds of thinking, the processes, that occur during composing' The goal has been to replace a prescriptive pedagogy (select a subject, formulate a thesis, outline, write, proofread) with a descriptive discipline whose members study and teach "process not product" Although the methodologies of process research have been challenged, its contributions to our understanding of composing have been applauded by theorists and practitioners alike The consensus has generally been that process researchers have done a good job of answering the questions they have asked Still, some are beginning to point to questions that, if they've been raised at all, have certainly not been answered Richard Larson, for example, has asked, "How does the impulse to write arise?" And, "How does the writer identify the elements needed for a solution [to a rhetorical problem], retrieve from memory or find in some other source(s) the items needed in the solution, and then test the trial solution to see whether it answers the problem?" (250-251)

Examining the Target of Receiver Elaborations: Rhetorical Question Effects on Source Processing and Persuasion

Abstract: A replication and extension of the Petty, Cacioppo, and Heesacker (1981) study on the effects of rhetorical questions is used to demonstrate the importance of considering the target of receivers' elaborations in theory testing and development. An examination of source-related elaborations provides new insight into how rhetorical questions influence persuasion. Implications for the Elaboration Likelihood Model are discussed.

‘Commerce and Christianity’: The Rise and Fall of a Nineteenth-Century Missionary Slogan*

Abstract: ‘“What,” some simple-minded man might say, “is the connection between the Gospel and commerce?”’ Speaking in Leeds in May 1860 on behalf of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was characteristically robust with his rhetorical question and no less direct in furnishing the answer. ‘There is a great connection between them. In the first place, there is little hope of promoting commerce in Africa, unless Christianity is planted in it; and, in the next place, there is very little ground for hoping that Christianity will be able to make its proper way unless we can establish a lawful commerce in the country’. Britain's part in forging the connexion was abundantly clear. It was effect of training the human race to a degree of excellence which it could never attain in non-Christian countries', giving ‘value to life’, ‘dignity to labour’ and ‘security to possession’, with the result that a Christian people would tend to be ‘a wealth-producing people, an exporting people and so a commercial people’.

Verb form and rhetorical function in science writing: A study of MS theses in biology, chemistry, and physics

Abstract: Variability in the grammatical profile of finite verbs, a feature which has been demonstrated across different genres of science writing, is here examined within one genre, reporting of research work in Master of Science theses. For this purpose, a sample of 20 theses in biology, chemistry, and physics was divided into five rhetorical sections (introduction, review, methods, results, discussion), and the use of finite verbs in each section, for each of three fields, was analyzed with respect to voice, tense, aspect, and modality. A number of significant differences emerged and were related to the changing content and communicative purpose of the discourse. The main findings include the following. Active verbs exceed passives in all rhetorical sections of the text except in methods, where passive verbs predominate. The present tense exceeds the past except in methods, and its frequency is very high in the introduction. There is uniformly little use of perfective and progressive aspects. The occurrence of modals is highest in the discussion and lowest in methods. Physics shows an interesting difference from biology and chemistry; there is no predominance of passive verbs in the methods section of physics theses, reflecting the more theoretical nature of research in that field.

E.T. As rhetorical transcendence

Abstract: This essay explicates a cosmological evolutionary perspective termed “the perennial philosophy” in order to interpret how various scholarly and popular discourses constitute a collective exigence of fragmentation and a rhetoric of transcendent wholeness. The framework is then used to analyze the mythic rhetoric of E.T., which is based on collaboration rather than combat, transcendence rather than dialectic. E.T. is seen as an oxymoronic child who embodies the past, present, and future and who may represent a proto‐type of an emerging cosmic hero.

Discourse and power: on the limits of ethnographic texts

Abstract: "language is . .. the institutionalization of subjectivity" An interest in the making of ethnographic texts the rhetorical conventions of how anthropologists convey their material and establish their authority ? has become a thriving cottage industry in certain quarters of anthropology in recent years [1]. These attempts have varied from unpretentious and highly successful attempts at integrating other voices, photographs and a certain ethnographic humility into a basically stan? dard ethnographic presentation [2], to more ambitious programmatic calls, heavily influ? enced by deconstructive practices, which seek (or so they proclaim) truly radical recasting of ethnographic writing. We already have several influential overviews of this material [3]. What I intend to do here, is to begin from the given (although hardly widely recognized) that ethnographic texts are in? deed texts, and to question some of the critical claims made for this insight. Barthes asks: Who speaks? Who writes? To answer this question adequately we would need a sociology of language. Barthes gives us only a semiotics. But semiotics provides us with commonplaces and commonplaces, as any student of rhetoric who has read her Cicerco knows, are necessary to advance any and all arguments. During the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (Barthes calls this the "entire classical, capitalist period", dem? onstrating his disinterest in sociology) the person who wrote was the author. The liter? ary profession (with its rigid rules of use, genre and composition) sanctioned, protected and surveilled by state institutions, was charg? ed with the production of language. The writer, Barthes tells us, emerged during the time of the Revolution, when language was seized, and used for political ends. Barthes should have added that the Academie Fran caise has always used language for political ends [4]. Perhaps Barthes means by polit? ical the self-conscious use of language in ex? plicitly instrumental ways. The replacement of the "author" by the "writer" was a slow process. Although the revolutionaries began the process of turning language into a trans? parent instrumentality, revolutionary orators still employed the Classical rhetorical embel? lishments and perorations. Only with the emergence of modern intellectuals, during the Zola affair, did this historical transition finally establish a new place and a new use for language. "The writer ... is a transitive man, he posits a goal (to give evidence, to explain, to instruct), of which language is only a means; for him language supports a praxis, it does not constitute one. Thus lan? guage is restored to the nature of an instru? ment .of communication, a vehicle of "thought." Even if the writer pays some at Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Biblical Epic and Rhetorical Paraphrase in Late Antiquity

Abstract: The turning of biblical texts into Latin poetry - biblical paraphrase - was a significant literary activity in late antiquity (third to sixth centuries AD). The most important surviving examples of this form are Juvencus and Sedulius (of the Gospels), Arator (of Acts), "Cyprianus Gallus" (Genesis to Judges), Claudius Marius Victorius (Genesis) and Avitus (parts of Genesis and Exodus). Generally described as biblical epics because they are written in hexameters and imitate pagan epic (especially Virgil), they have also been widely recognized to have drawn for their technique of composition on the rhetorical school exercise of paraphrase. Dr. Roberts analyses in convincing detail how the epic genre interacted with the biblical text through the medium of paraphrase to produce a distinctively Christian literature. He begins by offering the first modern study of paraphrase; two chapters describe its theory and practice, taking into account the standard rhetorical handbooks and recently discovered papyrological evidence. From this perspective, he analyses the types of alterations biblical epic writers made to the biblical text, thereby demonstrating the literary effects they were trying to achieve.

The functions of rhetorical structure: A study of Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo discourse

Abstract: Discourse structure in Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo (CAY) narrative and conversation is examined, and a general notion of rhetorical structure is proposed, growing out of recent work in the poetics of Native American oral literature. Rhetorical structure in a given language would consist of prosodically and intonationally signaled phonological phrasing along with whatever other significant formal features consistently pattern or interact with it (minimally surface syntactic constituency, typically also the system of sentence adverbs and conjunctions, further intonational features, and patterns of parallelism and repetition). Findings for CAY as well as other works in the literature indicate at least four important communicative functions for rhetorical structure in addition to its role in verbal art: organization of information, expression of affective meaning, indexing of genre, and regulation of dialogic interaction. (Discourse, syntax–phonology–discourse interaction, ethnopoetics; Native America, Alaska, Yupik Eskimo)

Ordinary explanation in conversation: Causal structures and their defence

Abstract: It is argued that the social context of ordinary explanations encourages them to be more complex than single attributions, and to be defended by a variety of rhetorical devices. Explanations of personally-relevant political events were collected from articulate respondents in a setting allowing conversational freedom. Structural analysis showed that single-cause explanations were rare. Modestly elaborate causal networks were used, and personal, group and societal attributions tended to appear at different points in their structure. Rhetorical analysis of how explainers conversationally defended causal structures showed that they used claims about the descriptions of events, data supporting their claims and warrants in virtue of which their arguments were valid. Qualitative analysis suggests that explainers use data to exemplify rather than induce, and explainers use either data or warrant in defence of a claim, but not both.

Rhetorical conversation, time, and moral action

Abstract: This essay argues that if Alasdair MacIntyre's moral philosophy is extended by integrating a classical sense of rhetoric with a language‐action conception of temporal narration, rhetoric and moral action can be reunited in rhetorical conversation.

Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist

Abstract: The confusion and obscurity surrounding Mikhail Bakhtin's life compounded by the complexity and semantic density of his books and articles has made this Russian theorist into a kind of Zorro figure, the Masked Marvel of theoretical criticism. Who is this exotic character born in Orel in 1895, exiled to Kazakhstan during the 30s, returning finally to the center of Russian academic life in the 1950s? How is one to talk about Bakhtin's major book on the 18th-century German novel when Bakhtin used the only existing copy as cigarette papers during World War II? How are we to value a man who so undervalues himself that he stores unpublished manuscripts in a rat-infested woodshed in Saransk? What can one say about a writer whose very authorship is in question-since two of his major works (Freudianism and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) were published under the name of V. N. Voloshinov?' Add to this that Bakhtin is known as a literary theorist (and is thus remote indeed from composition and rhetoric), that he refuses to define his terms, and that his language resists interpretation and paraphrase and we have some idea of the formidable task ahead. To ignore Bakhtin because of these difficulties, however, is to deny rhetoric an important influence. Although much of Bakhtin's work is considered literary criticism, his conceptions of discourse develop implications about language use in the widest possible terms. Bakhtin modifies the communications triangle by 1. Scholars disagree on this point, which may never be resolved. In his introduction to The Dialogic Imagination, Michael Holquist explains that "There is a great controversy over the authorship of three books that have been ascribed to Bakhtin: Freudianism (1927) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929; 2nd ed. 1930), both published under the name of V. N. Voloshinov, and The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), published under the name of P. N. Medvedev. ... The view of the present editor is that ninety percent of the text of the three books in question is indeed the work of Bakhtin himself' (xxvi). This is a reasonable conclusion. The ideas presented in these works are sufficiently complex and sophisticated that it is difficult to imagine two individuals writing so similarly at the same time within the same community. More likely, Voloshinov may have readily agreed to publish the works under Bakhtin's name so that the latter's ideas could be brought into academic currency. Some intellectual collaboration among the individuals in Bakhtin's circle was inevitable in any case. In the final estimate, it makes little difference whether there was one author named Bakhtin, or several

Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction.

Abstract: Throughout most of its history as a college subject, English composition has meant one thing to most people: the single-minded enforcement of standards of mechanical and grammatical correctness in writing. The image of a grimfaced Miss Grundy, besprinkling the essays of her luckless students with scarlet handbook hieroglyphs, is still a common stereotype; it is only recently that composition instructors have seriously begun to question the priority given to simple correctness in college-level instruction. What could the forces have been which turned "rhetoric" into "composition," transformed instruction in wide-ranging techniques of persuasion and analysis into a narrow concern for convention on the most basic levels, transmogrified the noble discipline of Aristotle, Cicero, Campbell, into a stultifying error-hunt? In this essay I would like to examine some of those forces, both cultural and pedagogical, which shaped nineteenth-century rhetorical history and resulted in the obsession with mechanical correctness which for so many years defined the college course in written rhetoric.

Transforming scandal into tragedy: A rhetoric of political apology

Abstract: This essay claims that Richard Nixon, Edward Kennedy, and their apologists drew upon popular meanings of tragedy and other related terms of fiction to obscure moral responsibility for behavior connected with Watergate and Chappaquiddick. In general, the media uncritically accepted and imitated this misappropriation of fictional language and thereby contributed to a dubious rhetorical strategy of exculpation. The unstated arguments derived from the morally positive and formally satisfying suggestions of tragedy are explored and rhetorical critics are advised to be alert to similar confusion in public discourse.

The Longman dictionary of poetic terms

Abstract: A note on the essays and appendices pronunciation key dictionary and handbook. Appendices: selected topics rhetorical, poetical and logical devices.

Metaphor in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Abstract: Analysts of human conduct have become increasingly cognizant of the fragility of their subjects and objects. Even empiricist forms of social science, now less dependent on an orthodox understanding of the application of the scientific code, have become more accepting of the inevitably rhetorical component of knowledge related communication. And alternative philosophies of the social sciences, departing from the austere scientific subject the uninvolved, objective analyst have, like phenomenology, construed knowing as an active, meaning constitutive force, wherein the objects of knowledge are linked to the knowing subjects for whom the objects are knowledge related. While these trends remain marginal to mainstream social and political inquiry, they have encouraged a genre of analysis that is sensitive to the speech practices of the persons whose conduct is under analysis, the various individuals (e.g., a political leader or a person who changes sex) and groups (e.g., helping professionals or law enforcement personnel) who are seen as complicit in creating the meaning frames within which their conduct is rationalized and legitimated. But all this has left the language of analysis itself out in the cold. Methodologies tied to various forms of imagery for knowledge and understanding dwell within methodological/epistemological discursive practices and conduct themselves as if their form of writing/

The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch's Secretum

Abstract: A NUMBER OF critics have recently argued that the aim of literary studies should be not the interpretation of individual texts but the study of the conventions of interpretation, and thus of the production and reception of texts, in different historical periods.2 Scholars in the field of Renaissance studies have accordingly made renewed attempts to characterize the changing role of the reader from the early Italian to the later Northern Renaissance. Both Terence Cave and Cathleen Bauschatz have suggested that the active role of the reader is only recognized in the sixteenth century. Before that time, the text itself is seen to be authoritative and the reader the passive recipient of its meaning.3 Whether this reception is governed by a patristic, Augustinian notion of allegory or by a conservative Ciceronianism, the imperative is the disappearance of the reader as a "willful, independent subject" (Cave 150). In Augustinian terms, the problematic act of reading is replaced by an "epiphany of grace": "caritas equals claritas." With Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne, on the other hand, an active rhetoric of quotation is said to emerge from the earlier passive or submissive practice of imitation (Cave 156).4 The literary text is no longer the privileged authority but, rather, something to be dismantled or plundered by would-be authors who, in critically appropriating other texts, redefine the roles of the eventual readers of their own. The redefinition is apparent not least of all, according to Cave, in the fact that "the figure of the reader emerges in textual practice" (152). In other words, the reader in the act of making sense is a theme of sixteenth-century texts in a way that is not true of earlier works. The first problem with this "history" is that it ignores the programmatic statements and rhetorical practice of the early quattrocento humanists who were concerned about defining reading not simply as an act of allegorical or Ciceronian appropriation but as the productive, practical exercise of the reader's judgment (see Kahn, "Pontano's Rhetoric" and "Rhetoric of Faith"). In fact, it was because these authors recognized the potential arbitrariness of interpretation that they wanted to engage and thereby actively educate the reader. Furthermore, this process of education was seen to be not only compatible with but actually dependent on the rhetoric of quotation (i.e., the willful manipulation of prior texts) that Cave and others find characteristic of sixteenth-century works. What is new in the sixteenth century is not the stress on the activity of reading but the refusal, by some authors, to make moral and pedagogical claims for that activity. Yet ambivalence about these claims, an ambivalence embodied in the literary representation of the reader, is apparent in many works of the early Renaissance. This ambivalence leads us to the second problem with Cave's and Bauschatz's histories. While the suppression of the act of reading may be the ideal in some texts of the earlier Renaissance, there are so many exceptions-so many ironic commentaries on this hermeneutic utopia-that the argument soon loses all heuristic value. As the epigraph from the Familiares illustrates, Petrarch in particular was aware of reading as a dangerous activity, one that could only succeed if guided by divine truth, that is,

Family Rhetoric as Social Order

Abstract: Taking the social order of family life to exist in its signs and rhetoric, we interpret field data gathered in human service settings to show how family order is sustained and transformed through representational practice. We address four aspects of family rhetoric: (1) scope of application, (2) rhetorical transformation, (3) signification and order, and (4) rhetorical predominance. The organization of native understandings and interpretations of enduring family conduct suggests that the social order of individual families is as manifold as its representations, and as stable as its confirmations.

Parables as metaphors and examples

Abstract: This essay surveys previous research on the rhetorical nature of parables and presents a revised view of their functions as metaphors and examples. It then considers the implications of this analysis for the study of narrative in religious and secular discourse.

The jeremiad and Jenkin Lloyd Jones

Abstract: Speakers themselves within a speech sometimes suggest standards by which a rhetorical critic might at least partially evaluate that speech. In his speech, “Who is Tampering with the Soul of America?”, Jenkin Lloyd Jones suggests a cluster of images, a set of related rhetorical roles, that a critic usefully can employ to analyze the workings of this speech. Through direct statement and indirectly through word choice, Jones assumes the rhetorical roles of a “calamity howler” and an evangelist in the genre of a secular jeremiad. First the tradition of the American Puritan jeremiad and the characteristics of the contemporary secular jeremiad are traced. Then Jones's speech is analyzed as a “paradigm case” to further illuminate the nature of the contemporary secular jeremiad. Significant dimensions examined are: (1) internal and external evidence of Jones's self‐chosen role of Jeremiah, evangelist, and calamity howler; (2) invocation of the Puritan heritage and the American Dream; (3) value appeals and condemn...

The rhetorical structure of Frederick Wiseman's primate

Abstract: Frederick Wiseman's film Primate is a rhetorical documentary about the implications of human curiosity in an institutional setting—a primate research center. Wiseman uses comparison, sequence, and sound‐image relations to employ and transcend filmic and rhetorical genres, enabling him to engage the viewer in a reflective exploration of human being. Primate demonstrates how facts can be recontextualized into complex meanings, and how audiences can be actively involved in the process of constructing meanings.

Audience Adaptation in the Essays of Proficient and Nonproficient Freshman Writers.

Abstract: This study investigated the assumption that proficient writers, unlike nonproficient ones, adapt their essays for a particular audience and occasion. Good and poor writers wrote a persuasive essay for a real audience that expressed topic-relevant attitudes and opinions in an interview presentation. Essays were then coded for ideas mentioned in the interview. Results showed that good writers take greater advantage of audience information than poor writers, but that good and poor writers both favor adaptations from explicit statements over more subtle statements. Studies of audience in human communication help to show how individuals manage in a world of diverse attitudes and opinions. Researchers in related disciplines, recognizing that effective discourse requires an understanding of situation including aspects of audience have shown many ways that people alter their messages for different contexts. In the field of writing, however, situational influences have received relatively little attention, though today's textbooks devote many more pages than before to matters of audience and intention. Overall, there seems to be little consensus about just how aspects of audience are manifested in writing. I use the term audience here and elsewhere as a general term to denote issues of audience awareness and adaptation. Where necessary, I distinguish between "audience awareness," which refers to a writer's or speaker's focus of attention on readers or listeners irrespective of the communicator's language behavior, and "audience adaptation," which refers to the audience-conditioned language behavior resulting from this awareness. What constitutes audience adaptation and how it can be measured is a question not always faced squarely by researchers. Some investigators have adopted quite general (and vague) criteria. In a study conducted by Flower and Hayes (1980), for example, categories labeled "audience" and "reader" and "response to the larger rhetorical problem" were used in analyzing protocols for evidence of audience awareness. Similarly, Hilgers (1980) rated audience adaptation in students' writing samples according to the criterion "attention to the specific needs of the audience." This article is adapted from the author's doctoral dissertation from the Department of Language Education, University of Georgia, 1984, under the direction of Donald L. Rubin. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

Rules and Rhetoric

Abstract: Mr. McLeod argues that the role of rules in judicial decision-making is commonly misunderstood by both the formalists and realists. The rehabilitation of rhetoric in fields of study outside law suggests a novel and useful insight for jurisprudence: judges neither mechanically apply legal 'commands' nor exercise arbitrary, subjective preferences. They engage in a process of argumentation structured by the 'wishes' of statute and precedent, and directed towards persuasion of their anticipated audiences. Mr. McLeod offers the reasons of the Supreme Court of Canada in Hunter v. Southam Press as an example of rhetorically structured argument. The Court was required to interpret the new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms section 8 which prohibits "unreasonable search or seizure". He argues that though the Court could not define 'unreasonable' with reference to any prior fixed rules, it was not compelled to exercise arbitrary and subjective preferences. The decision is best understood when analyzed in light of the Court's rhetorical obligations. This article is available in Osgoode Hall Law Journal: http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol23/iss2/4