Technical Communication Quarterly Jul 2019

A Computational Approach to Assessing Rhetorical Effectiveness: Agentic Framing of Climate Change in the Congressional Record, 1994–2016

Zoltan P. Majdik North Dakota State University

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to consider rhetorical effects as the propagation of rhetorical expressions across large sets of texts, measured by the extent to which rhetorical expressions, structures, or practices become replicated in texts and sites of rhetorical in(ter)vention. The paper draws on lines of scholarship in the digital humanities and computational rhetoric – primarily, sequential structuring of semantic contexts, semantic parsing of unstructured text, and diachronic tracking of textual expressions – to extend their conceptual and methodological insights into a computational framework for assessing rhetorical effectiveness. It offers a test case for this concept through an analysis of how Congress has framed human agency toward addressing climate change.

Journal
Technical Communication Quarterly
Published
2019-07-03
DOI
10.1080/10572252.2019.1601774
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
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Citation context

Cited by in this index (12)

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