viz.

Image Credit: Rhetological Fallacies

As an instructor teaching an introductory rhetoric course, I sympathize with my students, I truly do.  I don’t mean this in some sort of self-effacing “so sad for them, they lost the instructor lottery, I suck.”  To the contrary, when one considers the fact that I have to engage 18-year-olds at 9:30 in the morning on matters as dry as the differences between Aristotelian and Platonic notions concerning rhetoric, and/or the finer points of JSTOR navigation, I’d say that I do a halfway decent job.

However, “halfway decent” frequently falls short for my early-morning audience.  Hell, I could be a Dewey Finn/Mr. Chips hybrid, and I’d still fail to grab them.  But, like I said, I don’t place any sort of blame on them.  To the contrary, I admire their temerity and- remembering the 8:00 a.m. French class I was blessed with my freshman year- I don’t just sympathize; I empathize.  As if watching me draw some lame rhetorical triangle on the white board, they had a couple of days and reading assignments regarding rhetorical fallacies was in their not-so-distant future (unbeknownst to them).

I was almost as happy for myself as I was for them when I stumbled upon a page about something called “Rhetological Fallacies.”  In short, this Rhetological Fallacies project added sharp, simple illustrations to about 50 rhetorical techniques and logical fallacies (not wanting to be restricted to the rhetorical nor the logical, they mixed them all together and created a new word to describe their finished product: rhetological).  Here are just a few, which I picked at random:

“Rhetological Fallacies” was the brainchild of the absurdly talented David McCandless, on his thoroughly engaging website.

I saw a nice class exercise in the form of what McCandless calls Rhetological Bingo, wherein players search for faulty rhetorical or logical moves during a speech of a politician or other public figure.  He provides an example of the matrix he came up with while listening to a speech on same-sex marriage from the U.K.’s most senior Catholic bishop.

He’s even kind enough to provide a cheat sheet for those of us (take me, for example) that might be a little rusty with respect to some of these terms.

So, I’m hoping my next class will provide my students with memorable illustrations of otherwise esoteric terms, which we will all apply together watching our politician of choice bullshit his or her way through another press conference.  The only problem will be finding an example where the bullshit isn’t so prolific as to overwhelm them as they try to identify all of them.