Rhetorical analysis of a Letter

The five basic elements of Burkean pentadic criticism are act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose, serving as guides in discovering motives. Kenneth Burke developed the dramatism approach to unify rhetoric and poetic in a single analytical framework under which statements about motives can be studied and compared in terms of the ways in which they treat the dramatic elements of human relations through the pentad, or five elements of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. This pentad is meant as a way of analyzing descriptions of human behavior and is not the human behavior itself. Burke is concerned with the analysis of language and not reality. Burke's method is dialectical, though by today's standards it might also be termed deconstructive as he reveals contrary meanings in supposedly positive terms and places an emphasis on the way language "defeats" reality. A pentadic analysis is intended to be internal:

Burke developed the pentad to be used int

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, which the reader believes have been inflicted upon him by students at college. He says that all students are snobs, that too much is spent on athletics, that all students have low moral standards, that they are a disgrace to their parents and their communities. He cite anecdotal evidence to the effect that many college boys and girls go to wild parties and end up either in jail or dead on the highway, presumably drunk. He says they are not religious. He also says that college students have turned to criticizing some of our political and economic institutions. He takes recourse to name-calling and says that they are traitors, comparing them to skunks. The pentad analysis links the various elements of the communication and shows the relationships among the agent, that which has motivated him, and the means of communication he selects. I many ways, though, this is a mechanical means of analysis, better at describing a rhetorical situation than at explaining the rhetorical choices made by the individual in trying to communicate. The pentad enables one to describe any rhetorical situation in a brief statement, but describing and explaining are two different things. The pentadic analysis does point to certain connections whic
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Approximate Word count = 1488
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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