Old Rhetoric is focused on debate and persuasion while the New Rhetoric sees “persuasion [as] only one among the aims of discourse” (24). For calls these also “the purpose for which we speak or write; in brief, the functions of language” (28).
The Old Rhetoric sees “ambiguity as a fault in language, and hoped to confine or eliminate it” (40). New Rhetoric holds that “meanings, from the very beginning, have a primordial generality and abstractness…The theorem holds that we begin with the general abstract anything, split it, as the world makes us, into sorts and then arrive at concrete particulars by the overlapping or common membership of these sorts” (31). Continuing this, Richards extends the definition of context: “In these contexts one item – typically a word – takes over the duties of parts which can then be omitted from the recurrence. These is thus an abridgment of the context only shows in the behavior of living things…When this abridgment happens, what the sign or word – the item with these delegated powers – means is the missing parts of the context” (34). This also means that (nearly) all discourse is metaphor. This works against the Old Rhetoric belief that metaphor is reserved for those adept enough to do it and that it is embellishment for language. Richards states that there are two parts that make up metaphor: the tenor and the vehicle. The vehicle is the utterance and the tenor is the concepts that the vehicle stands for.
The Old Rhetoric sees particular words and usages a good or bad. The New Rhetoric believes that “no word can be judged as to whether it is good or bad, correct or incorrect, beautiful or ugly, or anything else that matters to a writer, in isolation” (51). Richards then comes to interanimation, which is the idea that words “are resultants which we arrive at only through the interplay of the interpretive possibilities of the whole utterance. In brief, we have to guess them and we guess much better when we realize we are guessing, and watch out for indications, than when we think we know” (55). Put otherwise, we do not immediately understand a phrase or sentence or paragraph. We begin by reading or hearing the first few words and guessing at the meaning. As the sentence proceeds, we change our guesses to take into account the new inputs. Richards also points out that each word is “being backed up by other words that are not uttered or thought of…Words, for example, which we might have used instead, and, together with these, the reasons why we did not use them” (63).