Aristotle's and Plato's Influence on How We Communicate Today

Aristotle and Plato are some of the world's greatest philosophers. They are viewed by many scholars as the pioneers in the written discourse in English composition. Aristotle and Plato have both had a big impact on how we, as writers, use rhetorical analysis and how this has affected how we communicate today.

To being with, Aristotle was the first to devise a total rhetoric for arguing toward probable truth and deduction to convince one's audience. He made the rules, a systematic method for rhetoric. It uses deduction to convince the writers audience. This has, over time, degraded to the point where the rules have made for predictable, if well-structured, persuasive discourse. Students tend to become complacent when using Aristotle's method of rhetorical analysis. he used three methods to achieve a higher level of deductive reasoning, ethos, the appeal to the will, logos, the appeal to the intellect, and pathos, the appeal of emotions. All three are needed to write a good composition. But these can cause problems as well. Today, we are so accustomed to having to keep these three proofs , that we tend to ignore everything else but making sure that our composition is grammatically correct and includes all the proofs. This forces us to focus our attention on the superficial aspects of out paper, instead of going in deeper to find a more in depth analysis.

On the other hand, Plato says the writer discovers new knowledge. His method is of a more contextual conversational method. This is sometimes seen as the weaker method compared to Aristotle, because it needs an outside force, like a teacher or professor, to direct conversation into a goal that can be the subject of a composition. Plato believed that dialect were the key to a great discourse. By being able to debate, finding contradictions and counterarguments, students are more able to find new ideas and knowledge. Plato's three part structure consists of defining particular terms, analyze subject matter into smaller categories, and moving up from concrete thoughts to more abstract thoughts to reach a satisfactory conclusion. This method is more flexible and inductive than Aristotle's method.

Aristotle's system of invention is influential in teaching writing, but Plato's dialectical invention is also important because it affords a communicative context for writers to rehearse and practice their thinking relative to the composing processes.