2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The popularity of Twitter in our daily lives and in the public forum has us reading shorter and shorter messages. Nevertheless, effective tweets employ the same rhetorical devices for the same purposes as other modes of argumentation. They increasingly influence public life from campaigns to advocacy (and governing). How do we negotiate meaning in 140 characters? In this paper, we will analyze the ongoing debates from the twitter feeds of the Democratic and Republican national parties. We will code individual tweets based on their classical rhetorical modes and see what patterns we can find over time.
The three classical rhetorical modes are forensic, deliberative, and epideictic rhetoric. Judicial or forensic rhetoric places blame or praise for something that happened in the past, including accusations and defense. Deliberative rhetoric (also called political) makes a case for or against future action. Epideictic rhetoric commemorates or blames in official contexts and special occasions and focuses on the present time period. Our analysis of the DNC and RNC twitter feeds will show frequency of each mode as used by the two parties and whether or not the mix varies over time, or from issue to issue, or around a particular campaign. Does it change from election season to the off season? Does it vary from issue to issue? Which tweets get the most notice? What values do they celebrate? Which actions do they judge?
We believe these results will be interesting, and we also believe this makes a good assignment for students to think rhetorically about the modes they use and read. We will share the process we used in our analysis and include some tweets for the audience to code with us.
Initial sources include the following:
C. Cherry, “Semeval-2016 task 6: Detecting stance in tweets.” Proceedings of SemEval, 16, 2016.
J. H. Gross and K. T. Johnson, “Twitter Taunts and Tirades: Negative Campaigning in the Age of Trump.” PS: Political Science & Politics, vol. 49, no. 4.), pp.748-754, 2016.S. M. Mohammad, S. Kiritchenko, P. Sobhani, X. Zhu, and
J. Ausserhoffer, “Politics and Twitter.” Information, Communication and Society. Volume 16, 2013—Issue 3.
Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: ATreatise on Argumentation, trans. J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver, Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame Press, 1969.
Ch. Perelman, “The New Rhetoric: A Theory of Practical Reasoning.” In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,1990.