Mr. Murphy's Essay: The Rhetorical Stance

In his 1963 essay “The Rhetorical Stance”, prominent literary critic Wayne C. Booth (Fox) states that in all of the non-fiction writing he admires he finds the presence of what he calls the “rhetorical stance”(Booth, 141). In his view, the rhetorical stance is the proper balancing of three key components used in communicative writing which are described as “the available arguments about the subject itself, the interests and peculiarities of the audience, and the voice, the implied character of the speaker.”(Booth, 141) In contrast to this balance he also describes three “perversions” or “corruptions”, all of which result from the over reliance on one of the three legs expressed above (Booth, 141). These are referred to as the pendant’s stance, the advertiser’s stance and the entertainer’s stance respectively. Booth admits that a proper, balanced rhetorical stance is hard to describe and is often best seen through these …show more content…
Elements of this error can be seen in Rex Murphy’s “What We Are Fighting For”. In this otherwise excellent essay, Mr. Murphy provides an organized and highly logical presentation for Canada’s continued military intervention in Afghanistan while ignoring the great emotional impact a subject like war can have. At its most extreme, this overemphasis on facts over an emotional connection results in a brief set of “ABC” style bullet points at one location (Murphy, 438 – 439). It should be noted Mr. Murphy does make a brief emotional appeal, he concludes by reflecting on the “very mixed effort” of Parliament, but it’s tacked on to the very end of an otherwise cold piece of writing (Murphy, 439). While this essay isn’t quite the “writing for bibliographies” Booth describes (Booth, 141), it does seem to lack any sort of emotional connection with the