Introduction

"RPS" stands for rhetorical requirements (R), problems (P), and strategies (S). What I call the "RPS" approach is not a formal theory but a framework for analysis, designed to guide both practitioners of persuasion as well as persuadees.

The guiding premises of RPS are as follows:

1. Social actors confront rhetorical requirements which to a great extent can be predicted from a knowledge of their roles, their interests, and the situations they confront.

In this respect, rhetorical requirements follow in a general way from sociological requirements. We would have very different predictions, for example, were the actors representatives of a drug company, or movement leaders, or if they were talking among friends or testifying at a government hearing. Situations impel and constrain social actors, in effect placing demands (and restrictions) on what they say to whom, how, when, and where. Rhetoric in this sense is rule-guided, if not rule-governed.

2. Conflicting rhetorical requirements create rhetorical problems. Broadly speaking, these too are predictable, such as the need to "tell it like it is" and the need to "put one's best foot forward."

3. The "test" of a rhetorical strategy is its capacity to resolve or reduce rhetorical problems and hence meet rhetorical requirements. The strategies employed to resolve or reduce problems will typically reflect tradeoffs among competing demands, and, hence, they are likely to create new problems. Michael Billig (1987) speaks in this sense of the "dilemmatic" nature of social life. Billig et al's Ideological Dilemmas (1988) underscores the pushes and pulls on social actors, as they struggle to balance conflicting demands on their teaching and learning, their talk about illness and wellbeing, and their self-understandings of prejudice and tolerance, gender and individuality.