When I was a college student, many years ago, I took a course that changed how I viewed every form of communication in the world. It was simply titled, “Intro to Rhetoric.”

What is rhetoric, you ask? And how could it possibly have such an impact on me? In strictly dictionary terms, it’s the art of writing or speaking effectively and/or persuasively.

Webster’s definition seems most appropriate for the world where rhetoric, as an art form, was celebrated centuries ago in ancient Greece. But our avenues for speaking and writing and interacting with each other have expanded vastly since then. A closer look at rhetoric reveals that it is relevant to all of the many and varied ways that we communicate with each other today.

In many interactions we have with others, we seek to be persuasive, as you would expect in written content like marketing copy, or to be effective in guiding others, as you have seen in the seemingly infinite how-tos that flood the internet as articles, videos, and more. In all of these situations, we hope to be effective or persuasive, so we shape our communication based on our goals and the people we hope to reach. First, we decide what we need to communicate, and then we decide how to convey it based on what we know about our targeted audience.

We now live in a digital age where rhetoric remains a critical player, and as a result, I would argue that it has expanded far beyond Webster’s definition. In the emergence of career fields like graphic design and UX/UI, we have seen rhetoric take on visual and interactive facets, as well.

The images in our ads need to be persuasive and enticing to users who spend mere seconds looking at web pages. User experience teams design visual interactions that effectively communicate unspoken directions to users to guide them through applications. In both cases, the shaping components remain the same: what do I want to achieve with this design? Who do I want it to impact?

It is in this visual, interactive arena that rhetoric and coding collide. Whether in web or software development, most code is useless if we don’t, at some point, effectively communicate with our users and consider the end-use goals of our work. Even back-end development requires that we consider the ultimate functionality of our code in the user’s hands, because after all, most projects start with a real world problem that needs solving.

Rhetoric is what made me fall in love with my career as a writer and editor, and its more complex application in web development is what sparked my career change. Want to talk more about the rhetoric of code? Please reach out!