Empty words?

I love rhetoric, and I love studying it.  Right now I am in a critical rhetoric research methods class and in combination with 105P I am beginning to truly understand the many layers and depth of rhetoric.  As a person in our society you here over and over again, “Oh that is just rhetoric.”  Meaning, “Oh those are just words,” or worse yet, “those are just empty words.”  Words are never empty.  Each word holds an insurmountable amount of meaning.  First I want to clarify the meaning of rhetoric as it is not “just words.”  Rhetoric, as described on p. 235 in Thinking through Communication (Trenholm, 2011), is “the art of designing public messages that can change the way in which audiences think and feel about public issues.”  As you can see there is no way that rhetoric could be “just empty words.” Trenholm goes on to explain some of the social functions of rhetoric such as 1) Discovering facts, 2) Testing ideas, 3) Persuading others, 4) Shaping knowledge, 5) Building community, and 6) Distributing power.  As a critical rhetorician it is my, our, job to research the information and or artifacts for our audience make an educated decision and then impart that information to our audience by means of persuasion.  It is not the outcome that is as important to a critical rhetorician but the process and the instigation of an audience to come to their own decision even if it is not the same as ours. Oh no, rhetoric is so not “just empty words.”

The Fur-Kid