Blog post #4 - Jackie Cialone

Burke’s theory of identification is the persuasion used by the speaker towards the audience. You have to “identify” with the audience. It is a way for the audience to create similarities between the speaker’s ideas and their own ideas. This theory not only creates identification with oneself but also the exterior world. One can identify with objects other than oneself. 

Ratcliffe explains the importance of rhetorical listening. “For rhetorical listening turns hearing (a reception process) into invention (a production process) thus complicating the reception/production opposition and inviting rhetorical listening into the time-honored tradition of rhetoric” (Ratcliffe pg. 220). Rhetorical listening is meant to open the viewers’ mind to the possibilities of what the speaker is saying. It is a way to look at a text and see it in a broader sense. 

Ratcliffe builds on Burke’s identification theory because they both are explaining how the audience should have an open mind when listening to the speaker. The audience openly listens without prior judgments and tries to identify with the speaker. Rhetorical listening is a way that identification can be used.