Perhaps you’ve heard the word “decorum” before. In rhetoric, it is the meeting and creating of expectations in speech. Figures of speech and thought can be found through decorum. When someone says something like “history repeats itself,” this is a figure of speech. It sets up the expectation that the speaker believes what this figure of speech states, and that they have an upcoming point to make. You won’t often hear a figure of speech like this in a professional setting, because figures of speech in particular tend to be more casual in nature. Decorum also involves tropes, a sort of categorization of common thought chains in language. Metaphors and similes are tropes, because they can be applied in certain circumstances and lead into specific thoughts. All these things can and must be used to hold the attention of the audience at just the right level. Decorum is using all of these expectation-crafting terms in tandem with each other.

Because decorum has to do with speech, it’s hard for me to choose an artifact that I can apply it to. Instead, I’ll look at a similar but different medium.

Podcasts are a rising form of entertainment today, as well as a new way to share information. They are an auditory medium, very similar to radio shows, which have been phasing out. Usually, one or more hosts produce and record episodes. These episodes can be about anything, from lectures to active discussions, from storytelling to reviewing any number of products, books, songs and artists, television shows, and more. Since podcasts don’t have a visual component, they’re good for listening to during car rides and while doing other activities.

How does decorum tie into podcasts? Long story short, the same way it ties into other forms of rhetoric. I’m not going to leave it at that, obviously. We need to look at least a little closer than that.

The Adventure Zone is a well-known podcast created by the McElroy family. Like most podcasts, its goal is entertainment. It is an episodic story told by three brothers and their father, through the medium of the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons. It is quite a niche form of media, even among podcasts, but it accomplishes much more than simple entertainment.

The game Dungeons and Dragons is played by one player taking the position of the “Dungeon Master,” who controls and directs the story events, and therefore guides the players. The players take the roles of characters within the fictional setting, and help the Dungeon Master (or DM) tell a story while remaining as true as possible to their characters’ personalities. The Adventure Zone started in this very fashion, with Griffin McElroy acting as Dungeon Master for his brothers and dad. The podcast began as a simple, just-for-fun project, but ended as not only one of the family’s most popular podcasts, but also as a far greater story than what was expected at the beginning.

The expectation, in this case, was extremely simple: For the fans of the family’s other podcast, My Brother, My Brother, and Me, it would be a fun experience to listen to the brothers playing D&D together. Initially, the McElroys didn’t take themselves seriously, cementing the expectation of a pure comedy show. The first few episodes of The Adventure Zone are full of jokes and crude humor, and plenty of difficulty as the family learned to play the game.

There was a point, according to Griffin, where he decided he wanted to turn the podcast into something more. Very early on, he saw how much the fans enjoyed the show. At first, he was using a pre-made story that had come with the game set, but he decided he wanted to diverge from this as quickly as possible. He set upon crafting a larger world of his own. From here on, the show started to take a different direction, changing expectations. There was still plenty of comedy, but now there was something deeper, a continuity of characters and a consistent world that grew more every episode. Fans (the audience) began to think about what was happening during the story more. In terms of meeting expectations, the show had suddenly begun to not only exceed the previously set expectations, but change them.

During the chapter The Eleventh Hour, Griffin dropped a metaphorical bomb on the audience. (Warning: this article may contain spoilers.) He had established a series of powerful items in the world that were created by “red-robes,” a lost order of wizards who were dangerously strong. The players became enlisted to collect these powerful relics and destroy them, so no one would be endangered by their power. Up until this point, the audience and the players alike had been led to believe that the red-robes were dangerous and evil. However, right at the end of The Eleventh Hour, Griffin included an “epilogue” scene where one of the players’ characters, Magnus, discovered a blueprint. The blueprint was for a statue of one of the red-robes, whose face was obscured by a hood on the final statue. On the blueprint there was a preliminary design where the face was uncovered. Magnus was disturbed to find that it was his own face.

(End of storyline spoilers.)

This was a turning point in the show. All of a sudden, it seemed much more serious. There was a sudden shock among the listeners of the podcast, and it caused a flurry of activity and discussion of possibilities. The expectations were suddenly spiked upwards by this reveal, showing another way expectations can be dramatically changed. Though at this point the podcast had been going on for quite some time, nothing had happened that was even close to this shocking. In speech, a sudden and dramatic shift will often change expectations, for the better or worse. If not executed well, it can change the audience’s expectations so negatively that it can completely disconnect them from being interested, which ruins the purpose of everything prior that had kept them engaged.

Subverting the audience’s expectations is a tool that is, in my opinion, essential to a successful piece of media. It’s often good to take a common trope and flip it on its head just when the audience expects the trope to be completed normally. It will shock the audience and give them a feeling of intrigue and suspense. It can also be done badly, however, and sometimes the destruction of a trope can cause a reaction in a very negative way. If, for example, characters are killed off suddenly and for no reason other than to subvert a trope, it would be negative – there is no thought in this, no larger purpose. Subversion has to be done with purpose, and with thought. Subversion for its own sake is pointless.

It’s also important to know the expectations of the audience, as well as those collaborating with you. There is a point in the story of The Adventure Zone where Griffin presented his family with a choice to make. (Warning: spoilers ahead once more.) It takes place in a “flashback” to the past, and would directly affect events that, in terms of the podcast’s release, had already happened. During the arc The Stolen Century, Griffin gives his players a choice whether to destroy a collection of human consciousnesses trapped inside a large cybernetic mind, or to preserve them. The characters decide to save the minds. It was only later revealed that initially they had chosen to destroy the larger mind, which would have created continuity errors. However, they all felt so bad about their decision that they went back and re-recorded the event, changing their decision.

(No further story spoilers beyond this point.)

This is only one point that shows how well Griffin knew his family – he was able to include such elements in his story. He could accurately predict exactly what his brothers and dad would do. It also showed that he knew what the audience wanted, and that he could control their expectation levels extremely well. Griffin controlled these things to craft a beautiful story. This beauty derived from decorum is known as ornatus. More specifically, ornatus is described as “beautiful order to achieve distinction.” Griffin used his knowledge of his family to create this beautiful order, causing The Adventure Zone to be distinguished as a unique podcast and story that could scarcely be replicated anywhere else.

There is far more that could be said about this podcast, and how it changed from a simple, crude-humor comedy show into an unparalleled emotional tale. I think there is plenty to see how decorum comes into play in storytelling, though. Even though most rhetors do not consciously realize it, decorum is in everything they do, whether it is writing, speaking, or recording a podcast story.

Ethos, Pathos, Logos. These are three of the most well-known terms in rhetoric that most people don’t actually connect to rhetoric. During this week we used these artistic appeals to analyze very modern artifacts, namely the Super Bowl commercials of 2020. If Aristotle’s appeals can be applied to things today, they certainly can be applied to the most ancient of rhetorical artifacts. Rather than only looking for modern ways to apply the artistic appeals, I want to look back through history as well. That leads me to the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is believed to be one of, if not the oldest manuscript ever recorded. It is the story of Gilgamesh, a corrupt and powerful man who became a king, turned into a hero, and sought answers to life and death. It is undoubtedly one of the most significant pieces of writing in all of history.

I think the most appropriate Aristotelian artistic appeal to use for analyzing this work is Ethos. All of the appeals can certainly be applied, but Ethos is superior in my opinion because it applies best to the story’s content and subject.

The story begins with the people of the city Uruk complaining about Gilgamesh’s wickedness, and asking the gods for help. The gods respond by creating a man called Enkidu, designed to be Gilgamesh’s equal in strength. Gilgamesh befriended Enkidu instead, and the two became more inseparable than brothers. They work together to kill great creatures including the forest giant Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. Because they killed these heavenly creatures, the gods curse Enkidu, giving him a dream that he will die. Enkidu falls ill, and dies after several days of suffering. Gilgamesh becomes haunted by this, mourning his friend for two weeks before burying him. He is haunted by death from now on, knowing Enkidu died so easily despite his great strength. Gilgamesh then travels the world as a hunter, seeking the gods for answers. He eventually finds the home of the gods after traveling through twelve leagues of darkness, and they give him an answer to his question that he has been traveling for so long to ask. There is no immortality for men, no permanence. After all he has gone through, Gilgamesh must return to his home and learn to accept his mortality.

The author of the story quickly proves their knowledge of the story. In the prologue, the author describes how Gilgamesh was born, and expresses knowledge of the city of Uruk. After the prologue, the author stops using language referring to “I” or addressing the reader, focusing exclusively on telling the story. It’s clear that they wanted to place focus on the message, which is the human nature to question mortality, rather than the telling of the story.

An important portion of the Ethos appeal is the way Aristotle looked at virtues. He saw virtues as balance between excess and deficiency; Someone who is loving is virtuous, but an excess of love, to Aristotle, produces lust, a vice. Deficiency of love causes indifference. Gilgamesh, at the beginning of the book, clearly lives in excess. This is a case for his bad character, according to the virtue concept of Aristotle.

The Epic of Gilgamesh has valuable lessons within, and the narrator, or the rhetor who is telling the story, wants to share them. Lessons like “death comes for all people, and we must come to terms with it” and “Corrupt people have the potential to change and become good” are for the good of everyone who reads them. This is a staple of Ethos, the concept of goodwill. Because the Epic of Gilgamesh tells how even the greatest of men struggles with the same basic human problems, it is relatable to even today’s audiences. It shows how little humanity in essence has changed.

While Ethos is largely about why an artifact is worthy of belief, The Epic of Gilgamesh is certainly not a true story. Why, then, am I looking through the lens of Ethos at a story that is not true? As Aristotle believed, knowledge and belief are different. The author of this artifact likely believed in the gods that appear in the story. Today, it is likely that very very few people believe in these gods. However, that belief does not mean the author was wrong. Belief cannot be proven, and knowledge can. Regardless of the story’s content, the author wants to pass on the life knowledge they have found.

Craig R. Smith’s book Rhetoric and Human Consciousness has a lot to say about the Aristotelian artistic appeals. I believe there is one passage that describes the main message of the author very well, speaking of goodwill. It is the second paragraph on page 74 that includes the words, “Aristotle compares it to friendship, ‘wishing for someone things you believe to be good, for his sake and not for your own, and being ready to do these things to the extent possible.'” From my perspective, this is what the author wanted. They wished to pass down what good things they believe in, for the sake of anyone who reads the story even long after death. In a way, this mirrors the author’s story. By sending this message of goodwill for the future people, the author finds their own acceptance of death, just as Gilgamesh did in the end.

We recently read some excerpts from writings by Plato, in which Socrates has discussions with Gorgias and Phaedrus about rhetoric. They were interesting to read, though I wasn’t sure how to feel about them. Plato seemed to depict Socrates in an odd way, and it makes me wonder if Socrates had anything remotely to do with these works, or if they’re true stories or fiction. Plato’s Socrates spoke at length, and his dialogue felt as though he spent most of his time leading his conversation partner into a corner where he could ask them a trapped question about rhetoric. Perhaps that’s how Socrates actually spoke, or perhaps not.

At any rate, some of the things Plato wrote could still have many applications today, as a lens to view current events objectively. I’ll apply a few things to Christianity as an example.

Christianity is a fairly widespread religion that has many divisions that fall under the general umbrella. It has a message (that of belief in God) that it tries to spread, which fits the rhetorical objective to persuade others of what the rhetor believes. People who challenge Christianity are generally the same people who challenge religion in general, or the existence of a God at all.

Socrates did not believe in a divine being, but he did believe in a world beyond our own, which mirrors the Christian belief in a Heaven. However, Christians believe in God, a divine being who is said to be returning one day to take the faithful people to Heaven. Socrates did not believe in any sort of divine being, much less a creator, instead saying that humans had to reach this next world on their own. This would be grounds for Socrates to debate with Christians about their beliefs.

Socrates also disliked rhetoric and was quite open about believing that it was not a way to find reliable truth. Dialectic was his preferred method of speech, because it did not rely on belief. Rhetoric, according to Plato’s versions of Socrates and Gorgias, is based primarily on the rhetor’s belief in what they say. Its purpose is to persuade, but it is not the only way to persuade. Because Christianity is based entirely on belief in something that cannot be proven, Socrates would likely dislike Christianity’s methods and teachings.

Plato also made a point to distinguish between knowledge and belief, between learning and believing. Socrates preferred to focus on the provable, the learning of knowledge, rather than belief and faith. Despite his belief in a world beyond, he focused on the here and now, trying to teach his students how to hone their souls so that they might reach their potential in the next world.

Socrates confronts Gorgias with the argument that even though rhetoric is used in courts of law, where legality and rules have the highest of power, it is primarily a method of persuasion and belief. A rhetor would be able to convince lawmen of an accused person’s innocence, to convince them what is right and what is wrong. This, he said, was not education, but creation of beliefs, whether or not they may be true. Gorgias says that of course this is true, that the power of rhetoric embraces all other arts, and claims he was able to convince patients to take their treatments even when the doctors could not, simply through rhetoric. However, he says that rhetoric is not to be used against anyone and everyone, but at a target audience, like any tool or art.

This is important because Christianity has a target audience as well – unfortunately, that audience is, in an ideal situation, everyone. The aim of Christianity is to spread the message of God’s salvation and the end of sin, so that everyone on Earth has heard the story. According to Gorgias, however, the tool of rhetoric, the persuasion, cannot be used on anyone and everyone. It is for this reason that many people become or remain atheistic, or at the very least agnostic. They believe religion is pointless and the church, the Christian institution, holds nothing for them.

I have no opinions on what the church does, but I do notice this important comparison of what Plato wrote, and what the church does today. Do I agree? According to rhetors, that doesn’t matter as much as how well I am able to present the issue. I hope this has provoked thought, and has been a reminder of the importance of past people’s discoveries – even outdated beliefs have value. That is why we learn from history. If we do not, we only repeat it.

This last week has mostly been studying certain Sophists and their differences. We already know their similarities, after all, and the central one is that they were all sophists, and believed that truth is subjective and dependent on the individual. This is a belief I can get behind to a degree, though perhaps not to the degree that the Sophists believed.

I particularly was interested in Lysias, a Sophist who crafted his rhetoric speeches custom tailored to the audience. He studied at first under the famed Sophist Protagoras, and used his skills to prosecute the murderer of his brother. He became a speech writer, and was known for his understanding of each client’s circumstances, and ability to weave this into his rhetoric. He called his art ethopoeia, which we define as the art of discovering the exact lines of argument that will turn the case against the opponent.

It’s easy to see how Lysias’ tactics apply even today. He wrote speeches to be effective in the moment they were delivered, and used simple language that appealed directly to the audience, never confusing them with high or grandiose words. These techniques can be applied to things other than speeches as well. In literature, the vocabulary of a book or work is always aimed at a specific audience. Often, books are directed toward a certain age group, since age is an obvious divider, and is easy to adapt to.

Children’s literature is very simple, keeping the words and the message short and easy to understand. A particular series of books I read when I was younger, Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, is a good example of this. Redwall was written for children who were anywhere from ten on into their teen years. Each book features animal characters who must defeat an evil that threatens their peaceful woodland life. Jacques once said in an interview, when asked about why he always made villainous characters into animals like rats and weasels, never giving them a chance at redemption: “The bad creatures are those which are traditionally bad in European folk lore and have come to be regarded as sly or mean or evil.The good creatures are mostly small and defenceless, with the exception of the badgers.” (Source) Jacques wanted to keep his morality black and white for the sake of young readers, so they would have an easy time understanding what made someone good and what made them bad. In his later books, his black and white lines of morality blurred, because his readers also grew older, and their understandings expanded as the world changed.

This is an example of Lysias’ adaptation. Whether his clients were young or old, he knew how to adapt his work to them. It seems like a common sense idea for us, that we should adapt our work in a way that fits our audience. Lysias, in his time, was possibly the best rhetor who employed this strategy in his speech writing, and even today he is able to teach us how important his technique is. This is what made Lysias stand out among his fellow Sophists.

I’d ask all of you readers to think about how your favorite works are adapted to you, or perhaps to a different audience that may not include you. I’ve found it can be interesting and fun to notice all the details that would probably go unnoticed otherwise. I plan to be more observant of this from now on, since it gives me an extra, more detailed perspective.

This week’s class focus has been Bitzer’s Metatheory. As I often am with new ideas and theories, I’ve been somewhat slow to grasp it and what it means. After looking around a little, I think I’ve found a good place for me to start. I want to take a short look at another blog, to apply some of Bitzer’s Metatheory to it.

Bitzer’s Metatheory has three main points: Exigence, Audience, and Constraints. I want to look closer at the Audience aspect of the blog I’ve chosen. I feel that it’s the most immediately relevant to a reader, and applies best to the blog’s content.

The blog I want to look at is titled “Science is our Home,” and it can be found at https://astrosanjeet.wordpress.com/. It isn’t a professional blog, rather it seems to be the author’s passion project. The focus of the blog is science, particularly focused on astronomy.

Right upon arriving at the blog’s webpage, I felt welcomed by a lack of intimidation. Many science articles use long and verbose language in their texts, leaving many readers to quickly grow bored or intimidated and overlook them. Science is our Home sports short articles in simple language, and adds illustrations to assist the reader with mental imaging. It was apparent immediately that this blog is not professionally managed, but more importantly, it was accessible to the most casual of readers. It explains science in simpler words and shorter articles. Its goal seems to be to share science with many people in a simple and fun way.

The audience of this blog is a wide one, and I would say that anyone who is interested in astronomy would be included in this audience, regardless of how casual or serious their interest may be. For the more serious reader, links are often included so that the reader might learn more about the subject of the short article, in much greater detail. Many articles are also about scientific history, which can help to give a frame to their contents.

Science is our Home does not have a blatant rhetoric, but the aim of the rhetor appears to be to garner and nourish interest in astronomy and physics. The author also takes a fantastic approach at times, meaning there is content that is not exclusively sound science. As Bitzer’s Metatheory states, the rhetor’s appeals shape their audience. Because of their casual approach, the audience the blogger gains will most likely consist of readers with a casual interest in science and history, astronomy, and possibly things such as extraterrestrials.

There is not much of an exigence to be seen in this blog’s content. One could say that it draws attention to space science after NASA’s recent issues, in an attempt to keep human interest in reaching away from our planet. This is not shown to be the rhetor’s intention, but in writing we often find that authorial intent becomes obsolete, and the audience’s perception becomes the most important view on the subject. The author does get some audience response on their posts, and the response seems to largely be reactions to the content shown in the articles, and encouraging the author to continue writing. While this doesn’t particularly show how the writing affects the audience directly, it does prove that the blogger’s rhetoric reaches them and moves them enough to respond. There are occasional comments that become a thread of deeper discussion, obviously started by readers who have a deeper knowledge of the article’s contents, but these are outnumbered by the simpler comments, just as the serious readers are outnumbered by the casual readers.

Science is our Home is a blog that takes a simple approach to rhetoric, and one that is not conscious of rhetoric devices. It has no intention to persuade audiences, no ideal audience to reach, and does not provoke its audience to consider any issue. However, its aim is to convince its audience to agree with the author’s enthusiasm and passion for science and astronomy. It has no ideal audience, but its audience is far wider for that fact.

Over the course of this review, I’ve seen how Bitzer’s Metatheory is highly tailored to rhetoric that has a more persuasive purpose. It is not as focused on analyzing the educational portion of an artifact as much as it is focused on the exigence of the work. This makes it much weaker to use in the analysis of a purely educational work. I don’t find that this invalidates Bitzer’s method at all. It is made for a specific kind of rhetoric, and when used out of its specialty, like all things it loses most of its integrity. I want to thank Sanjeet Patel, the blogger behind Science is our Home, for giving me new insight into the proper use of Bitzer’s Metatheory, and for posting an interesting blog to assess. If you’ve read through this post, give Sanjeet’s blog a look at https://astrosanjeet.wordpress.com/.

To kick off this project, I’ll be writing up a definition of what rhetoric is in my mind. Since this is a rhetoric blog, I’ll establish a meaning for it at the very beginning. That way, I’ll have something to come back to at the end, after I’ve learned a lot, and see how my definition measures up. I hope no one’s going into this thinking I have any idea of what rhetoric really is, because I’m arguably the most amateur of anyone who reads this. Yeah, let’s just establish that right now: I am learning and please don’t use this blog as a reference for anything.

Rhetoric is a word we hear occasionally, like when someone asks a rhetorical question. A lot of people don’t really know what it means, though, or even that it’s more than just a word. Technically there’s no real way to know exactly what it means, but the definition is something that each person develops individually.

To me, rhetoric is a way of communication. That is a grossly oversimplified definition, so I’ll explain a bit more. Rhetoric examines the methods and reasons people communicate, and both of those things have massive scopes. I line up with the more modern belief that all communication can classify as rhetoric. Rhetoric is about communications through symbols, in other words it uses one symbol to mean something else, another idea or word, that is indirectly related.

By the time we reach the last in this upcoming series of posts, I aim to have made a lot of progress in understanding rhetoric. I hope you enjoy the ride.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.