In Jaws (1975), officials treat the summer tourist economy as essential, dismissing warnings about the shark as threats to stability.
Establishing Shot
In Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee define a commonplace as a statement that “regularly circulate[s] within members of a community.” Commonplaces function as shared assumptions or starting points that do not require argument because they are already accepted within a given rhetorical community. Rather than inventing entirely new claims, rhetors often rely on commonplaces to activate values that audiences recognize as obvious or self-evident. Because they arise from the “common sense of a community,” commonplaces are shaped by the political, ethical, and social beliefs that circulate within that community.
Key Scene
In Jaws (1975), the town officials operate from a circulating commonplace: protecting the summer tourist economy is necessary for the community’s survival. They do not repeatedly defend this assumption; it is treated as practical wisdom. As a result, warnings about the shark are framed as overreactions that threaten stability rather than as urgent public safety concerns.
Framing
The commonplace in Jaws influences opinion and structures what counts as a reasonable response. Because the need for economic stability is treated as a given, alternative priorities – such as immediate safety – are positioned as excessive or disruptive. In this way, the commonplace shapes the stasis of the debate by determining which questions seem worth asking. Rather than asking how to respond to a lethal threat, the town’s deliberation becomes organized around preserving normalcy. Commonplaces thus guide interpretation by making certain lines of reasoning appear natural while rendering others less visible or persuasive.
Continuity
If stasis identifies the point at issue in a dispute, commonplaces help determine which issues are recognized as legitimate in the first place. Shared assumptions can narrow or redirect the scope of disagreement, influencing what participants take to be the central question. As Clay Spinuzzi shows in “Working Alone Together: Coworking as Emergent Collaborative Activity,” even basic definitions within a community are constructed through shared discourse and can vary across participants. Similarly, commonplaces do not reflect universal truths, but instead highlight the assumptions that a particular community has come to treat as given. In this way, commonplaces shape the conditions under which arguments can occur as well as support those arguments.
Stakes
Commonplaces are central to rhetorical study because they reveal how persuasion often depends on what goes unquestioned. By drawing on widely accepted beliefs, rhetors can make arguments feel intuitive rather than contested. At the same time, unexamined commonplaces can limit deliberation by constraining which perspectives are considered reasonable. Understanding commonplaces allows rhetoricians to identify the assumptions that guide public discourse and to question whether those assumptions should remain in place.
Passion Project
I encountered a version of commonplace while studying screenwriting, particularly in the often-cited remark by William Goldman that “Nobody knows anything” about what will succeed in Hollywood. In Adventures in the Screen Trade, Goldman clarifies this claim: “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” Read in full, the statement is a recognition of uncertainty within a specific industry, rather than a rejection of knowledge. However, when the shorter version circulates on its own, it can become a commonplace that suggests expertise is meaningless. This shift has made me more attentive to how statements travel and change in meaning. What begins as a situated observation can become a generalized assumption, influencing how people think about creative work and decision-making.