Rhetorical Analysis

The art of persuasion is a key component in communication and is especially pertinent in the debating arts. That being stated, an individual’s ability to use rhetoric has the potential to effectively change others’ viewpoints on divided topics (Edinger, 2013). In his article titled Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle, Edinger (2013) introduces Aristotle’s three-prong system to persuasion known as “ethos, pathos, and logos” (para. 2). I believe that while this model is sufficient in explaining the core areas of rhetoric, it does not account for the cognitive biases that people can have when they are presented with controversial information. By critically analyzing Aristotle’s three parts of rhetoric and tying them

Per Sunstein (2012), biased assimilation is defined as when “people assimilate new information in a selective fashion” (para. 7). From my understanding, it is when people are biased to accept information that supports what they initially believed and conversely, dismiss contradictory information (Sunstein, 2012). I suppose that while this selective information processing has its benefits in maintaining self-harmony (i.e. opposite of cognitive dissonance), it is detrimental in situations such as debate judging as it can compromise fairness. Since persuasion is at the core of debate, it becomes critical that judges remain impartial to both sides, however, the reality is that they are often dismissive of arguments that do not align with their personal

Since I started debating in high school, I found that complaints about the quality of the judging was constantly prevalent in high school debate and this is due in part to the rule that the competitors must bring their own judges. For example, while planning the 2016 competition, the University of Alberta Debate Society explicitly attempted to replace the parent judges with university debaters. While this replacement could have led to greater impartiality in judging, it was simply not feasible due to the disconnect between the limited number of university debaters and the number of judges we needed. As a reaction to this limitation, the other organizers and I tried to implement better training for judges, however, it still yielded outlier comments concerning poor judging. This relays back to what I have stated in my discussion post: “it can be extremely frustrating […] to be prepared with the right analyses and proper reasoning [and] not place due to the judges’ biases (Liu, 2017, para. 3). As an organizer, I try not to take the responses of poor judging upon myself personally however, I find this issue at constantly at the back of my mind because again, I know first-hand how it feels to have a biased