| Resumo: | Following Fairclough's social-theoretical approach to discourse within the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis, the main concern of this paper is to gain an insight into the rhetorical strategies used by George Ridpath, a very influential Scottish journalist and pamphleteer during the Stuart period. To this end, we analyse a sample of Ridpath's political writings excerpted from one of the Whig leading journals at that time, The Observator, and draw attention to the different persuasive devices of verbal manipulation that Ridpath resorted to in an attempt to shape belief and defend his views in the first decades of the eighteenth century. The results obtained pro vide evidence for the fact that Ridpath used language as a political weapon: he attempted to influence public opinion through verbal persuasive devices like boosters, hedges, rhetorical questions and (metaphorical and non-metaphorical) dysphemistic terms, among other rhetorical devices of a lesser quantitative relevance in the corpus consulted.
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