Page 165 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

In Their Own Words . . .

Patrick Murphy Speaks on House Floor to Oppose
Escalation in Iraq
I take the fl oor today not as a Democrat or Republican, but I served in Baghdad from June of 2003 to January of
as an Iraq war veteran who was a Captain with the 82nd 2004. Walking in my own combat boots, I saw fi rst hand this
Airborne Division in Baghdad. Administration’s failed policy in Iraq.
I speak with a heavy heart for my fellow paratrooper Spe-
cialist Chad Keith, Specialist James Lambert and 17 other Source: “Press Release: Patrick Murphy Speaks on House Floor
brave men who I served with who never made it home. on Oppose President Bush’s Escalation,” February 13, 2007. [Re-
I rise to give voice to hundreds of thousands of patri- trieved from http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/pa08_murphy/
otic Pennsylvanians and veterans across the globe who are 021307IrawqSpeech.html, 20 April 2007].
deeply troubled by the President’s call to escalate the num-
ber of American troops in Iraq.

The Rhetorical Situation

Understanding the nuts-and-bolts of the rhe-
torical situation begins with the history behind
the art and science of public speaking.
Although the specifi c term rhetorical situa-
tion wasn’t coined until the late 1960s, its roots
can be traced to ancient Greece and the fi fth
century BC . Then as now there was a need for
public speaking skills because democracy re-
quires that people talk about and debate pub-
lic policy. Further, there were no lawyers, and
people had to plead their own case in court.
A group of teachers of rhetoric, known as
Patrick Murphy, a decorated Iraq war veteran spoke out Sophists, taught the skills of speaking for a fee.
and was elected to Congress.
Plato opposed their approach to rhetoric as
dishonest and proposed his own philosophy of
rhetoric in two dialogues, the Gorgias and the
Phaedrus. Plato believed that one should fi rst discover the truth philosophically
and then use rhetoric only in service to truth.
Plato’s famous student Aristotle brought order and systematic focus to the
study of the rhetorical situation. Aristotle wrote the Rhetoric, probably the most
infl uential writing on the subject to this day. Aristotle defi ned rhetoric as the
1
“faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” He
specifi ed that rhetoric consisted of three modes of proof: ethos, the personal cred-
ibility of the speaker; pathos, putting the audience into a certain frame of mind;
and logos, the proof or apparent proof provided by the actual words of the speech
(logos being the Greek word for “word”). In many ways this classifi cation fore-
shadows much of contemporary communication research with its emphasis on
source credibility (ethos), audience analysis and reaction (pathos), and message
construction (logos).
The study and practice of rhetoric was further refi ned by Roman rhetoricians
132 such as Cicero and Quintilian, who developed the canons of rhetoric we dis-