ABSTRACT
Modern rhetorical theorists have tended to neglect the rhetorical use of examples in persuasive discourse, somewhat surprisingly given the importance that Aristotle gave to examples in Rhetorica. Because this chapter cannot be based on a lengthy review of recent research, the authors present three case-studies to show the rhetorical power of examples. It is argued that examples make claims about the world, even if only to claim that the example exemplifies a wider category. By presenting their three case-studies, the authors treat examples both as a topic of analysis and a means of analysis. The three examples share a property in common: they involve someone misusing an example to make untruthful or misleading claims. Two of the examples involve political speakers: a speaker in the Portuguese Parliament and Boris Johnson, the British prime minister. The third example comes from a commercially successful “pickup artist”, who trains men in the so-called persuasive skills of seduction. The close, rhetorical analysis shows that the speakers/writers are doing different things with their examples, thereby illustrating the complex and varied ways that misleading claims can be rhetorically supported by the use and misuse of examples.
