Rhetorical Me

I believe that I was wandering around aimlessly during my first two years as a English major. I did not have a focus I did not have a goal other than graduating in 2010. I did not particularly feel ecstatic about being an English major and there was a time that I seriously considered switching to another discipline.

That all changed for me when I took English 450 Rhetoric/Composition. For the first time as an English major I really looked forward to learning more about the English language. Everywhere we look we are being persuaded, or at least someone is attempting to persuade us, to buy, read, sell, or feel one way or another about any given topic or item. How do we persuade others into taking our side of a story. How are we persuaded into buying one product over another. How do logos, pathos, and ethos come into play with rhetoric and how do the five canons of rhetoric move there audiences into action.

To me rhetoric was an epiphany of the the AH variety. Suddenly I had a new purpose and a new take on written and oral arguments and this in turn allowed me to view the English language in a manner that I had never even conceived of before. And the thing of it was I seriously considered dropping the class because rhetoric initially bored me to tears.

While many see rhetoric as being "full of hot air" or being "an empty/pointless art" I see as an art full of promise and excitement. Ever since I discovered rhetoric I looked at arguments and epistemology in a whole new light. With my new found rhetorical skills I attempted to discover what method that the writer is using to attempt to convince her/his audience that they are correct or at the very least should be given the chance to prove that they are correct. And what particularly interests me is why an argument works or fails. What could the writer have done differently to persuade her/his audience that they were correct?

Also I find it interesting that we are all rhetoricians, philosophers may not like the sound of that though, whether we like that lable or not after rhetoricians are concerned with human discourse and knowledge. When someone has a message and they have an audience then what we have is a rhetorical situation. It is particularly interesting to me that there are be many truths out there in the universe at large but if enough people can't be convinced of the validity of those truths then those truths won't be recognized as truths. After all everything we think that we know was successfully communicated as a truth to enough people to eventually began to believe it as a truth. The world was once thought to be the center of the universe. The earth was once believed to be flat. People once thought the sun revolved around the earth. It took a brave and clever orator to convince enough people that these views were incorrect and not only that their views were correct. Fascinating.