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I Identification The act of crossing individual boundaries to gain another person's or group's perspective through shared characteristics, experiences, objects, assumptions, beliefs, goals, or languages. A key strand of the lore passed on to initiates in rhetorical studies is the shift from persuasion to identification as the goal of the New Rhetoric. This is, among most rhetoricians, "gospel"—not only in the sense of being treated as a fundamental truth but also in the sense of being understood as "good news": After all, identification is said to be less adversarial, less coercive, less individualistic, more collaborative, more mystical, and more feminist than persuasion.