Doug Downs defines rhetoric as the operating system by which humans make meaning and interact through symbolic communication. He views rhetoric as encompassing all aspects of human interaction, including nonverbal cues and the interpretation of sensory information by the brain. Downs identifies several key elements of rhetoric, including motivation, ecology, knowledge making, and identification. He also discusses Aristotle's canons of rhetoric and concludes that rhetorical acts are situated, motivated, contingent, interactional, epistemic, and embodied.

1. RHETORIC:
Key Ideas from Doug Downs’s “Rhetoric: Making
Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning Making”

2. What is rhetoric?
• Downs starts by discussing what he doesn’t mean when he talks
about rhetoric:
• Find the other concepts (constructs) of rhetoric that Downs lists.
• Downs maintains that rhetoric refers to “a set of principles that
explain and predict how people make meaning and interact” (460).
He compares it to an operating system on a computer.
• “Given that it is an operating system for human meaning-making and
interaction, any time we are making meaning and interacting—
otherwise known as “being human”—we are using rhetoric” (Downs
460).
• How does Downs’s definition of rhetoric fit, in your mind, with
Gee’s notion of a “Discourse?”

3. Beginning with Bodies
• Language is closely linked to how we understand the world.
• We primarily understand the world through out senses.
• So, as Burke has shown, rhetoric “always involves symbolic acts, in
which meaning is made when one idea stands for another” (qtd. in
Downs 461).
• Language is a “vehicle for symbolising” but so are non-verbal forms
of communication, which make up most of human communication
(461).
• Our senses help us create meaning, but our brains contribute
meaning by interpreting sensory data (462).
• “Human interaction and meaning-making is at heart…the
experience of encountering a vast range of sensory signals and
interpreting them by associating them with networks of our existing
knowledge” (Downs 462-63).

4. Implications:
• Implications of the biology/physics discussion of rhetoric (Downs
463):
• 1: “Bodies matter to knowing, meaning-making, and interaction,
so rhetoric must be about bodies as much as minds.”
• 2: “Human interaction can never be based on complete,
objective knowledge.”
• 3: “Rhetoric must be a system for and art of interpreting
other people's actions.”
• 4: “Our bodies' ways of making meaning by putting new
information in terms of known information (symbolism) or
figuring out its relation to known information (association)
suggest that rhetoric is always a matter of the symbolic.”

5. Rhetorical Elements
• Rhetorical Elements: all the different components that
make up “rhetoric”
• Motivation
• Ecology
• Knowledge Making
• Identification
• Canons

6. Motivation
• Rhetoric is always motivated.
• We must pay attention not only to the motivations of the
rhetors, but also to the audience’s motivations.
• The motivations of any given rhetorical interaction will be
extremely complex, even hidden or unknown.
• The motives of the rhetorical interaction are central to the
interaction. (Downs 464-65)

7. Ecology
• This is a new use of the term ecology, and doesn’t refer
literally to a study of the natural environment.
• Instead, it refers to the “rhetorical situation” in which a
rhetor works/exists.
• The components of ecology include: Rhetors/Network,
Context, Exigence, Kairos/The Moment, and Interaction &
Collaboration. (Downs 464)

8. Knowledge Making
• “Rhetors need to build their readers’ knowledge of what they’re
proposing and why it’s a good idea.”
• They must not only transmit existing information, but also
create new knowledge (Downs 468).
• This is done through:
• Narrative: writers and readers should “imagine just about any
text or discourse as a narrative or a story, and to frame the
work of rhetors as storytelling” (Downs 469). These
narratives must also be made “present” for the audience.
• Rhetorical Appeals: Logos, Pathos, Ethos (see discussion on
469-74).

9. Identification
• A rhetor is “trying to get their reviews to see, feel, believe,
and think what the writers themselves do” (Downs 475).
• This is done through:
• Ethos: “how does who you are influence what you
are saying and how others should respond?”
• Adherence: we don’t so much “experience
identification as all-or-nothing, or absolute…rather,
we experience it as ‘other people more-or-less going
along with us, to varying degrees” (Downs 477).

10. Canons
• Aristotle’s Five Canons (involved in the making of any
text or discourse):
• Invention
• Arrangement
• Style
• Memory
• Delivery

11. In conclusion….
• “When we say that something is rhetorical, we’re saying that it has the qualities of
rhetoric, which are these:
• This rhetorical thing is situated, meaning that it happens in a particular place, time,
and moment, and therefore that it cannot be universalised.
• It is motivated, meaning that there is some motive behind it, and therefore it is
subjective rather than objective, and that our interpretation of it will depend upon
our understanding of its exigence.
• It is contingent, meant that its shape depends on the situation and it must be unique
to its situation, not purely determined by pre-existing rules.
• It is interactional, meaning that it can only exist in the interaction between itself and
the rhetors who shape its meaning.
• It is epistemic, meaning that it creates knowledge for the rhetors interacting with it.
• It is embodied, meaning that it take material form and that its material form shapes
the interaction and rhetors’ interpretations of it; it cannot be ‘just ideas.’” (Downs
480)

12. work
cited
• Downs, Doug. “Rhetoric: Making Sense of
Human Interaction and Meaning-Making.”
Writing about Writing: A College Reader,
3rd ed. Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug
Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
2017. 276-95. Print.