Week Six - Believe It Or Not, Dragons Are Real

Rhetoric is an art of persuasion and is widely used in the communication world, and this includes the visual world. I would, however, concentrates on the rhetoric used in documentaries.

As cited by Gill Branston and Roy Stafford in their ‘The Media Student’s Book’ (2007), documentary is ‘the creative treatment of actuality’ (page 455). In other words, documentary represents reality and most would agree with this statement. Unlike any other shows, documentary usually deals with facts such as history and science and these are conveyed ‘academically’, in terms of tones, visual outputs and words. Hence, documentary is perhaps one of the trusted medium other than news programmes.

Rhetoric is commonly used in documentaries though it is not as obvious as that use in public speaking and debates. The rhetoric in documentaries is more subtle, and could be traced in the words spoken by the narrator and the visual shown.

Below is some clips from a documentary called ‘Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real’:

Notice how the narrator speaks of the dragons? It is as if dragons are real…in fact, they are real that they have a dragon carcass to prove it, and the unknown-source scars on the fossil head of a tyrannosaurus rex which then are concluded from the talons of a flying dragon. People may say that the carcass is a fake and the fossil head of infamous T-rex is altered. However, the way the documentary is shown from the beginning is like of those in ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ or ‘Meerkat Manors’. It is so believable that no wonder a lot of viewers are beginning to be convinced that dragons are as real as the dinosaurs, especially those who happen to be fantasy lovers.

When the narrator proceeds to the so-called Jurassic life of the dragons, he begins to talk about the T-rex and the dragons in co-existent and even informs the viewers a bit of information on the dragon’s defence systems, adding more credibility to the theory of the dragons’ existence. It is worth noted that the narrator does not use probability words, such as ‘if’, ‘might’, ‘probably’ or ‘maybe’ when he talks about the dragons; in fact, he talks like all of them are just mere facts.

And by the end of the documentary, it would not be a wonder if most viewers are convinced that dragons are real, except now only leaving fossils as their remnants:

This is how rhetoric is used in documentaries. They do not say what to believe or not, much less forcing someone to change opinion of something. But, they present evidences which are coupled effectively with convincing explanations and this creates a very persuasive ‘argument’ and one of the factors that contributes to the ‘truthfulness’ of documentaries.

Reference:

§  Griffin, E. (2008). A First Look At Communication Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill.

§  Branston, G & Stafford, R. (2007). Documentary And Reality TV. The Media Student’s Book (page 455-460). New York, United States of America: Routledge.