The Use of Rhetoric in Everyday Life

Rhetoric is a significant part of our everyday lives. Whether it's convincing our friends to go to a concert on the weekend, to go to a certain place for lunch, or even convincing yourself to do something that you should but don't want to do. Rhetoric is all around us today. Billboard ads, television commercials, newspaper ads, political speeches, even news stories all try, to some degree, to sway our opinion or convince us to take some sort of action. If you take a step back to look and think about it, rhetoric, in all actuality, shapes our lives. Every day we have an array of options of things to do or things to buy. So every day, our opinion or actions are being influenced, however minutely, by rhetoric.

We learn, practice, and get more efficient at using rhetoric at a very young age, even if we don't realize it. During childhood and preadolescence, most of our rhetorical situations consist of us trying to persuade our parents to buy us something or let us do something. As a matter of fact I remember just such an instance during the early stage of my adolescence. First, a little history of my life is needed. I was born during the spring in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. My parents divorced a few weeks after I was born, but my parents tried their best to not involve me in, or let me be affected by it, so I still had a lot of day to day contact with both my mom and my dad. When I was around three years old my dad started working as a carpenter in Germany, but came back to visit for a week or two about every two months. Then, when I was four years old, I moved to the United States with my mother so we could have more oportunities. I started visiting my father every year when I was summer when I became seven ye...

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...d no reason and not to trust me, that I back home I sleep over friend's houses all the time and nothing ever happens, and by him being reassured by Sergio's mom that I'll be okay. All of these things allowed me to point out to my dad that he, logically, had no reason to be worried or not let me sleep over. The time and place were also of significant importance. It was a amazing day outside, my dad was well rested and in a very good mood, and my dad was very relaxed because he had four days off from work to look forward to. All of these things made it the perfect time to ask my dad for something. I really wouldn't do anything differently, as I was successful in my attempt. I could have started off with suggesting that he talk to Sergio's mom first, which that could have given me another logical appeal to make and perhaps saved some time and saved me some breath.