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December 07, 2011 Professional Writing

Defining Digital Rhetoric

What is digital rhetoric?

This is a difficult question to answer. There are so many facets to explore, all coming back to the choices made by the author for their audience.

This piece was created with non-expert, digital natives in mind. I used a program called Spicy Nodes, which allows me to create granular pieces that are all a part of digital rhetoric. Take yourself on a self-guided journey through the ideas of digital rhetoric. Navigate to any node to learn more about a specific part of my definition. Each node will lead you to smaller sub-sections, all adding to an overall understanding.

Can’t see this presentation? View it here.

So what?

You’re wondering, why do I care about this presentation? What does this have to do with me.

If you didn’t already know, this piece is a form of digital rhetoric; this blog is a meta-version, analyzing the purpose of digital rhetoric. And YOU are making a choice, by sitting on an internet-enabled device (be it a Mac or Windows PC or a mobile device) to indulge in my rhetorical choices.

You use the canons of rhetoric every day. Every time you communicate, you make a choice in invention (what the argument is), arrangement (order of your argument), style (figures of speech and metaphors), memory (is it memorized or read from a script), and delivery (a video, text message, email, etc). It doesn’t matter if the message is a speech to 10,000 people or a conversation with your closest friends; you make deliberate choices that revolve around your message and most importantly, your audience.