Invitational Rhetoric - Blog Post 3 - Schechinger

For this week's blog post, I found the reading by Lozano and Cloud to be rather interesting. I think they brought up some really strong points in the section about invitational rhetoric and real-world agency. I have never heard of invitational rhetoric before, so this concept took some time to understand. After doing some additional research about the topic I was able to understand more of what the reading was discussing. I think the idea of invitational rhetoric was, for lack of better words, coming from a good place. The notion of invitational rhetoric is to "create an understanding rooted in equality, immanent value, and self-determination. It is a form of communication designed to generate understanding among individuals with different perspectives (Littlejohn, Foss 569)." It was also mentioned that invitational rhetoric takes an extra step further past rhetoric since we aren't trying to persuade; we are building an understanding. 

I think in even non-conventional scenarios, we can see that invitational rhetoric plays a role in our everyday lives. While this theory is geared for more social changing topics, we all use invitational rhetoric, even if we don't recognize it. 

I recall a conversation last fall I had with one of my roommates about a political opinion. It was during the election and we were just catching up on the news about the race. We were both talking about our beliefs and what both candidates stood for. We disagreed on many of the sub-topics we discussed, but we were able to have an open conversation about what we believe in. Looking back at this conversation, I can tell now that this theory of invitational rhetoric is what happened during this conversation. We were able to go back and forth about our points, but ultimately, we were able to have an understanding conversation. 

Citation

Littlejohn, Stephen, and Karen Foss. “Encyclopedia of Communication Theory.” 1995, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412959384. Accessed 2 Oct. 2021.