The rhetorical stance (quote)

Wayne Booth, “The Rhetorical Stance” (1963)

The common ingredient that I find in all of the writing I admire (excluding for now novels, plays, and poems) is something that I shall reluctantly call the rhetorical stance, a stance which depends on discovering and maintaining in any writing situation a proper balance among the three elements that are at work in any communicative effort: the available arguments about the subject itself, the interests and peculiarities of the audience, and the voice, the implied character, of the speaker. I should like to suggest that it is this balance, this rhetorical stance, difficult as it is to describe, that is our main goal as teachers of rhetoric.

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