Retoriikan

Retoriikan is the Finnish term for rhetoric, the study and practice of persuasive communication. It covers how messages are constructed to influence beliefs, attitudes, and actions, and how audiences interpret and respond to those messages. Core concepts include ethos (character and credibility), logos (logical argument), and pathos (emotional appeal), as well as considerations of kairos (timeliness), telos (purpose), audience analysis, and delivery.

Historically, rhetoric has its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, where thinkers such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian developed theories of argument and public speaking. In Finland, retoriikan emerged as a formal field in education and humanities scholarship and has evolved to encompass discourse analysis, media rhetoric, and digital communications.

Practices within retoriikan include analyzing rhetorical situations, structuring arguments, crafting persuasive texts and speeches, and employing stylistic devices and figures of speech. Scholarly approaches range from traditional Aristotelian frameworks to contemporary critical and computational methods, including discourse analysis and genre studies. Rhetorical work is often categorized by genres or functions, such as deliberative, forensic, and epideictic rhetoric, and by modes of delivery, from spoken to written and multimodal forms.

Applications of retoriikan are widespread: in education, politics, law, journalism, advertising, public relations, and online media. In the digital age, emphasis on multimodal persuasion, audience segmentation, and credentialed authority has grown, as has attention to ethical considerations and misinformation.

See also: rhetoric, rhetorical theory, argumentation, discourse analysis.