Genre is the Mother of All Rhetoric

Genre is a limiting force because of audience.

I believe most people feel and act one particular way depending on the social milieu around them (one way at home, another at school, another at work perhaps, etc.). Hopefully without sounding too schizophrenic, I can admit that I do this as well. I will swear and joke around with friends in a casual setting but at home I speak plainly and calmly with my parents. More than making a statement about people’s personalities or lifestyles, I know that I do this consciously because of my audience.

I choose not swear at home because I know my dad hates swearing and will be upset and not listen to me. Or considering that my mom has multiple sclerosis I know that it is hard for her to remember things, so when I tell her something, I tell her about four times in four different ways over the course of an hour. Both an audience’s attitude and mental capacity/state in any genre is crucial for inspiring or inhibiting rhetorical success.

Genre is an excellent opportunity for tailoring a rhetorical strategy to the sympathies or outrages of a particular audience.

Genre can also be an excellent tool for the origination of exigencies and be the window for rhetoric to work in. For example, it is easier to write an essay on a prompt than on a concept you come up with vaguely in your head from many places. I can write right now about T.S. Eliot’s modernist influence but I cannot write about the economy. Sometimes a specific problem that you either know about or can research directly encourages the best-written papers. If necessity is the mother of invention, certainly genre is similarly the mother of rhetorical approach.

People are problem-solvers. We want to be able to explain why something is happening or decide what should be done about ‘x.’ When there is no problem ‘x’ there can be no solution ‘y’ and people continue on without the need for rhetoric. In this sense genre is the fountain for all rhetoric because genre and situation create a need for a solution and an audience for rhetoriticians to jump into (and in front of).

If a speaker must address an audience, as all speakers must—like Obama addressing an entire nation, he/she must use the audience as both a constraint and a clue for how to best employ rhetoric strategy. Obama had to look at issues and explain them in terms that the American people would understand and generally agree with if he wanted their support.

A good speaker or writer should use this to his/her advantage and trampoline from the constraint of genre into the possibilities of genre (like the ad we saw in class with the check and the homeless man geared toward persuading older women to donate money). In that sense genre is a beneficial set of cues for how best to get a message across considering that each audience has a different attitude and mental state which should be taken into account when discerning the best rhetorical strategy.