Rhetoric isn’t something that is just taught in schools. It can be discovered anywhere, like the experiences that shape us into who we are today. From this day on, it still surprises me that I did not realize this in a classroom but rather through a screen. I think back to the time I was standing in my room while recording my first YouTube video about mental health. I used my words very carefully so that people would feel seen, heard, and understood.
Although rhetoric is generally persuasion, I have come to realize today that it is so much more. Through my experiences with digital content creation and academic spaces, I argue that rhetoric is also a multimodal and ethical practice that shapes identity, fosters connection, and boosts mental health based on different situations.
I could imagine followers watching from all around the world. I kept rehearsing by re-recording myself. I knew how there were many people struggling with mental illnesses like me and that they took value in these words like I did. My goal was to be a positive role model and make a difference by bringing mental health awareness to others.
At that time, I didn’t realize that what I was doing itself was a part of “rhetoric.” This itself shows that rhetoric isn’t just playing a part in academic spaces, but also in digital practices, such as YouTube and other social media platforms. Here, audience awareness and emotional connection are valuable and highly regarded. For example, it is highlighted that “Social media platforms provide innovative and unique features that enable revolutionary changes in how communication and persuasion occur” (Nelson, Hodgetts, & Chamberlain). After all, the “key to composing is the role of audience and the social nature of writing, an aspect of writing process that received attention later rather than earlier during this time, and that, as we will see, has become a central feature in the new models of composing emerging now” (Yancey 4).
Looking back, I can see that these early experiences with vlogging, creative writing, and blogging were all a part of persuasion. When I create videos, it is for my audience. When I write a short story, it is to leave my readers feeling empowered. Every day, I make rhetorical choices about how to interact, connect, and positively influence others whether through writing, using images in my blogs, or doing a YouTube video that requires audio. As mentioned, this “deals with combinations of speech, writing, image, sound and other expressive resources, which are ubiquitous in human communicative practices and which appear, for example, in magazines, radio broadcasts, films or social media posts” (Pflaeging & Stöckl).
These echoed Aristotle’s idea that rhetoric is ‘an ability, in each [particular’ case, to see the available means of persuasion’ (Aristotle 37). This is because every choice of word, gesture, or story I shared was an intentional effort to influence how my audience felt and thought. As Andrea Lunsford mentions, “the course shifts focus from invention, arrangement, and style to rhetoric’s fifth canon, delivery” (11). This proved to me that in my vlogs and blogs, style isn’t quite about my word choices I use, but rather it’s also about how I portray my message through pacing, tone, voice, and visuals. Just like style, it shapes how audiences interpret and respond to my content.
Through all of this, I have come to the resolution that this is what shaped how I engage and work with rhetoric. Shipka highlights that “By asking students to examine the communicative process as a dynamic, embodied, multimodal whole—one that both shapes and is shaped by the environment—students might come to see writing, reading, speaking, and ways of thinking and evaluating as “a function of place, time, sex, age and many other elements of life” (26). As someone who always creates projects that center around mental health and personal growth, I see myself as a fluent communicator and as someone who has faced these hardships myself. My identity as a vlogger, writer, and mental health advocate allows me to be both careful with what I say and how I say it, thus who I imagine my audience to be.
Additionally, I’m also a Writing Specialist, which allows me to understand how important it is for my students to want to feel empowered and recognized for their writing. I have come to find that what students use could be multimodal when expressing themselves as well, not just through essays, but PowerPoints and videos.
Moreover, I believe one’s diagnosis shouldn’t define their worth. My approach to this thinking aligns with how I come about rhetoric, where I choose to use language that approves unique differences, complexity, and self-worth rather than reinforcing limiting narratives.
For these reasons, rhetorical spaces expand in front of me, affecting how I understand others, how I want to be understood, and how I take initiative for the messages I share. The same goes for my students when they’re writing papers and giving speeches. They want to feel like they’re relatable through the message they share. Therefore, rhetoric is a way of building empathy, trust, and connection with others who may see themselves through my words or my students’ words.
My experiences with vlogging and blogging connect to what Melanie Gagich describes in “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing”: rather than just having words written down on a page, a multimodal text is “a piece of communication that can take many forms,” where sound, visuals, spatial design, and language come together to create meaning (66). Every choice I make, from choosing words to editing videos and implementing visual design, is a rhetorical decision that shapes how my audience interprets and receives my message. By thinking deeply about how these different forms communicate, I can inspire my viewers and convey ideas that words alone might not be able to say.
However, even if I am very confident in the content that I create, there are times in academic spaces where I feel like my voice doesn’t quite belong based on the rhetorical situation. As Lloyd Bitzer explains, a rhetorical situation is “a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence” (6).Sometimes, in class discussions, I get anxious and tongue tied, overthinking every reaction I make and stumbling upon my words while questioning if I will be understood or taken seriously.
Even in class meetings on zoom, I become very vulnerable and over cautious about how people might catch my words, which, at times, makes me turn too quiet. As Vershawn Ashanti Young explains, “code-switching is not just an isolated school practice… but rather another social construct ‘perpetually thrust upon Blacks to prove themselves when communicating” (Young et al. 235). This emphasizes how adjusting language in academic spaces can make students feel pressured.
This changed the way I viewed rhetoric. I came to the solution that rhetoric is more than just expressing our thoughts and ideas but allowing us to have space to be heard. My awareness of audience, which gives me strength in digital spaces, was quite limited in academic ones. It is within this moment that I found out how important rhetorical listening is. This comes from Krista Ratcliffe, which is a practice that highlights understanding and ethical engagement across a diverse range of people. As she argues, rhetorical listening ‘functions productively as a code of cross-cultural conduct’ (203).
By being an active listener and noticing my academic audience, I now try to apply my voice more confidently. What helps me is writing down the main points I want to express in class on a flashcard, so when I get an opportunity to speak, I can do so with advanced preparation. This is my first step to becoming a better speaker. This struggle between self-doubt and wanting to speak showed me that rhetoric is deeply tied to power, confidence, and belonging.
My interest in mental health rhetoric extends beyond my personal content creation. For example, right now, I am presently working on my graduate thesis that examines how mental health discourse functions in digital spaces, including researching cyberbullying campaigns that are promoted to prevent stigma. This allows me to reflect on how my own vlogs and blogs come together as rhetorical acts, forming audience understanding, building empathy, and testing harmful narratives online. By connecting my lived experience with academic research, I see firsthand how rhetoric can be used to build supportive communities and catch stigma or misinformation in digital spaces.
My identity as a mental health advocate and writer is also connected with my experience in creative publishing and academics. For instance, being published in the Word Gathering: Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature gave me the opportunity to create my own kind of short stories that include personal lived experience while considering style, audience, and emotional impact. Here is a snapshot of a part of my short story “Reborn” that was published in this journal:
I stand tall while I stare at the mirror although I am very small. I don’t look at my height anymore; I look through my own eyes. I was getting closer and closer to my best version. My brown eyes were lighting up like golden honey. The dark circles under my eyes were no longer as deep as they used to be. My cheekbones didn’t stick out as much. My face looked like it was filled with vivacity. There was an immense worth that I didn’t see in myself before (Mehbub).
Next, below you can access my blog “Fight Depression: 6 Ways to Overcome Negative Thoughts,” where my post is organized to guide readers through my experiences with rhetoric. After I wrote this piece, my dear editor has included images and headings to create a multimodal reading experience that reflects how I think about audience engagement. By adjusting tone, using word choice, and implementing visual layout, my purpose was to connect, persuade, and build empathy with my readers, which reveals how digital spaces allow me to practice rhetoric in ways that combine audience awareness, style, and multimodality.
Finally, all these key terms, rhetorical listening, rhetorical situation, intersectional rhetoric, style, persuasion, and multimodality unite in one under the general concept of rhetoric. That’s what I love about rhetoric: its ability to allow people to create spaces for voices to be heard. For these reasons, rhetoric can enhance one’s mental well-being by helping others feel connected, grow confidence, and have agency across different situations.
Works Cited:
Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Translated by George A. Kennedy, 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2007.
Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 1968.
Gagich, Melanie. “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing.” Writing Spaces, 2010.
Lunsford, Andrea A. Writing Matters. University of Georgia Press, 2007.
Mehbub, Samia. “FIGHT DEPRESSION: 6 Ways to Overcome Negative Thoughts.” The Mindful Word, 2023.
Mehbub, Samia. “Reborn.” Wordgathering, 2022.
Nelson, Nick, Darrin Hodgetts, and Kerry Chamberlain. “From the Agora to the Algorithm: Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a Theoretical Framework for Understanding Social Media Persuasion.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 1, Jan. 2026. https://doi.org/10.1177/09593543251407228.
Pflaeging, Jana, and Hartmut Stöckl. “The Rhetoric of Multimodal Communication.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 40, no. 3, June 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/14703572211010200.
Ratcliffe, Krista. “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a ‘Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct.’” College Composition and Communication, vol. 51, no. 2, Dec. 1999, pp. 195–224.
Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Writing in the 21st Century.” NCTE, 2009.
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. Other People’s English. Teachers College Press, 2014.
