Douglas Eyman’s Defining and Locating Digital Rhetoric made me think differently about writing. How we use language across media to persuade, inform, and connect. And digital rhetorical strategies. When I think about intertextuality, I think about the relationships between texts, and in this case, that relationship plays out between print and digital spaces.
Both forms are rhetorical because they rely on appeals and strategies to shape meaning. However, the techniques used in print and digital environments differ in important ways. Print texts often lean on traditional rhetorical tools carefully chosen language, linear structure, and appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos making them feel more “author-centered,” with the writer controlling the pace and order of reading.
Digital rhetoric strategies
Digital text is multimodal, as it uses images, animation, and videos to persuade readers. It also has the freedom to be creative. The author doesn’t have to follow a format. The reader can jump around the text without feeling obliged to read straight through to gain an understanding. Although there are differences between the methods used to write digital and print text, we can’t just adjust old rhetorical techniques. We need to create new ones and continue using some of the classic rhetorical methods in digital text.
Take pathos, for instance. In print, emotional appeal is crafted primarily through deliberate language choices. In digital rhetoric, pathos can also emerge through images, video clips, soundtracks, or even the tone of a social media post. Similarly, classic concepts like lexis word choice and style still matter, but in digital contexts. They show up not only in sentences and paragraphs but also in headlines, captions, emojis, hyperlinks, and hashtags.
All in all, I agree with the author that if we use classic rhetorical theories, we also need to create new ones that can cover all the things the older methods do not cover.
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