Rhetoric and Critical Thinking

International audienceThe aim of this article is to show how rhetoric and critical thinking are intrinsically interrelated. I will explain why, in keeping with the history of the discipline itself, rhetoric can be a powerful tool for critical literacy. It can help raise our awareness of how social, political, ethical issues are always rhetorically constructed and why they are always the outcome of arbitration about the right linguistic and rhetorical choices to make in particular rhetorical situations. One of the basic epistemological tenets of this article is that, instead of confining ourselves to a single rhetorical theory, we can choose among the huge rhetorical heritage at our disposal to elaborate a coherent analytical framework to investigate the message conveyed by a text, be it oral, written, visual, or one that combines these three modes. In this article,I have drawn from Chaïm Perelman’s New Rhetoric and Kenneth Burke’s Dramatism to analyze a multi-semiotic document