Rhetoric is like a car for many people. They use it all the
time to get where they’re going, but that doesn't mean they know exactly how it
works. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Everyone, from a two year-old begging
his mother for candy to an academic hammering away at his next book chapter,
uses it, albeit with varying levels of skill. Not a day goes by when I’m not
seeking to persuade someone of something, though some of my uses of the art of rhetoric
are perhaps better compared to stick figures than to the works of Michelangelo.
While English departments themselves are relatively new to
academia, only appearing about one hundred and fifty years ago, rhetoric itself
has been recognized since the time of the ancient Greeks. Since the time of
Plato and Aristotle, those venerable old figures who were so integral to the
foundations of western civilization, rhetoric has been studied and defined. It
was the Greeks who first proposed the five canons which lay at the heart of
classical rhetoric.
First there was invention, then arrangement, style, memory,
and delivery. Combined together and used properly these canons allowed for a
powerful persuasive speech in a time when oratory was vitally important to
communication.
Following the Greeks came the Roman ideas of rhetoric,
including Cicero’s stasis theory which allows one to come up with a more
powerful argument after finding the middle ground from which to argue. Growth in
literacy in more recent centuries has led to the greater importance of
rhetoric, not only in the oratory, but also in the written word.
Perhaps the aspect of rhetoric that most of our students are
most likely to be familiar with is the idea of ethos, pathos, and logos—the appeals
to authority, emotion, and logic. They are certainly the aspect that I am most
familiar with, as I still remember sitting in my English class my freshman year
of high school and memorizing the definitions of the three appeals in between
making flashcards of the Greek gods and being thoroughly taken aback by my
first reading of Oedipus Rex. I left
high school with these definitions lodged somewhere in my brain, but with only
a rudimentary sense of how to use the appeals I had so dutifully memorized at
age fourteen.
I think it likely that many of the students in our 1301 program
are in a similar situation as they start the class. They’ve probably heard of
rhetoric, but just because they’ve heard of it doesn’t mean that they know what
it is our how to use it. I’ve heard of ice sculpting, but that doesn’t mean I
know how to do it. Therefore I hope that this class will strengthen my own
understanding of rhetoric, so that when I become a classroom instructor I can
better communicate these ideas to my students. I want to be able to teach them,
not just dry definitions and abstract techniques, but how they themselves can
employ rhetoric to succeed not only in my class but as effective communicators
and writers in their future lives and careers.
