Popular Environmental Rhetoric

Paper Summary:

The use of rhetoric in popular culture is often used to shape public opinion in favor of political and commercial agendas. This paper explains how popular environmental rhetoric raises awareness about certain issues and shapes the audience's ideas in favor of their views, whether this includes a vote, invoking action, or changing habits of the consumer.

From the Paper:

"Popular culture is a major contributor to our understanding of many facets of life. This influence is created with the use of rhetoric, the study and practice of featuring content, which includes any reasoned discourse, images, dialogue, text, ect. Its function can serve as a tool for "special interest groups," which select and configure language so that certain terms are privileged and endorsed, and others ignored in the interest of that specific group. (Covino 1995, 4). The language choices that are made have to do what media, what audience, and what issue is involved in pushing an agenda. Rhetoric is activated by and affects changing manners, minds, and lives as it constructs knowledge (Covino 1995, 5). Ideally the audience should comprise of people who have a reason to be concerned about the issue, who are capable of acting on it or being acted upon by it, or who have the capacity of being sympathetic to the issue. When addressing an audience their attitudes must be accessed, these are values that can be financial, moral, transcendental, and serve either personal, global, or business interests. The ways of life of that audience are constraints that the speaker or writer must be aware of in their choice of media (Coppola 2000, 32)."

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