what is rhetoric? what is the history and theory of rhetoric? What do you want to do with the content from this course?
I have always understood rhetoric to be the art of persuasion, and this seems to me to be a definition that encompasses nearly every speech or piece of writing. Rhetoric is delivering a message to an audience, and part of this definition includes why and how the message is being delivered. We tend to think of rhetoric as a formal exercise, or even as a pejorative term that dismisses the message or messenger as being manipulative, but the definition is much broader than that. When we introduce rhetoric to students, we teach them how to build an argument, and how to clarify a message, and maybe this exercise of teaching better helps us to understand just what we mean when we use the term.
When I think of the history of rhetoric, I think of its classical origins, and its formal explanation by Aristotle, and it's been my experience that most students have a vague understanding of this history. Certainly, many of them are familiar with the terms ethos, pathos, and logos, and those who are not pick them up with ease. There is something fundamental and instinctive about the art of persuasion, and we take to its parts well, and in particular, we grasp pathos and logos almost without second thought.
Our readings this week on the history of rhetoric have been fascinating, however. I had no idea of the relatively young age of the English department, and to discover that Oxford and Cambridge were two of the last universities in the English-speaking world to hire an English professor shocks me. I do think of 19th century historical fiction that I read when I was much younger (books like the Little House series and the Anne of Green Gables series), and I remember the role of oration in a 19th century education, even in remote areas, at least insofar as these tales can be trusted to represent a true snapshot of society. (Also, as a parent with children of school age, I've been interested in elementary curricula lately, and have found books like the McGuffey Readers and other primers that were reportedly used by many students who may or may not have had access to formal education. These readers reveal a pretty rigorous expectation of basic elementary reading and writing, but I'm not sure how widespread their use was.) All of this is to say that reading, writing, and the study of literature seem quite naturally to me to go together, and I'm surprised that this was not always seen to be the case. Parker presents some convincing arguments that I think this only because this is the way I have always known it.
One final note on the history of rhetoric and where exactly it belongs in the academy, and that's that one of the reasons rhetoric seems so clearly linked to composition to me is that the study of each one is a refinement of thinking and then this refinement of thinking is therefore translated to a refinement of expression. In creative writing workshops, I've often heard it said that a story or an essay does not have a writing problem, but a thinking problem. With this said, I can understand how composition might easily fit under another academic banner -- one such as logic, perhaps -- but that means that as an English teacher, I have to bring that logic to my field.
When I think of what I want to do with this course, I keep this point in mind. I've heard we learn language mostly through osmosis, through absorbing what we read and write, and I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. We don't, however, learn this art of persuasion, and many of our best readers and writers have not been taught a formal rhetorical logic but have a great grasp of conventions. (I remember when I went to a pre-quarter training to teach a similar course at OSU and the director asked how many people were teaching the course who had themselves never taken it because they'd tested out; nearly every hand went up. We knew how to write and were managing to write researched papers, but we were just fumbling towards them without this crucial training. It seems that most people don't inherently know how to write a researched persuasive paper.) Other writers don't have the same reading background, and as teachers, we need to help them bridge this gap and teach the conventions of writing. When I think about what I want to take from this course, it's an understanding of how to further these two distinct goals as a teacher. That is, I'd like to be able to help my students become better writers, but also better thinkers.
