Week 2_1/23/16_Defining Rhetoric

My previous experience in writing has taught me that rhetoric is a form of persuasion, not only in writing but in speech as well. The author of this website, Gideon Burton, confirms this definition by claiming it to be, “the art of persuasion. And many other things.” This definition is helpful because it creates a simple understanding that rhetoric is about persuading you’re audience, but by saying it is many other things shows the complexity of how to display this “art”. An important aspect of understanding rhetoric that Burton observes is the ability to divide form and content, not only understanding what is being said but how it is being said. This idea of understanding how versus what is said initiates in phrasing from Aristotle who coined the terms logos, logical content of speech, and lexis, the style and delivery of speech. We can utilize these concepts to help improve our own rhetorical writing and analysis of such writing. Understanding the differences between form and content can create more effective writing and help the writer more accurately convey their thoughts to their perceived audience. This is a key concept of our They Say, I Say book which attempts to help the writer understand their audience and better convey an argument or conversation with whomever their audience may be. The use of prompts and templates in They say, I Say is one of the ways we as a class can help display our arguments better to our audience, which seems the ultimate goal of strong rhetorical writing and speech. In Thursday’s class, we directly applied these ideas on how to convey our ideas to our audience in our discussions of which form of reading was better, digital or physical. In these discussions we had to organize our arguments to convince each moderator of our point of view, by not only presenting useful content, but also in how it was presented. For example, as moderator of my discussion, one of the arguments, while I did not necessarily agree with the content, was extremely well organized, making her argument more convincing. This showed that how she presented her argument was just as important as what she was saying.

                This site was remarkably interesting in its organization of information, only furthering the points the author was emphasizing on rhetoric and how something is presented. The symbolism with the forest and trees was helpful in organizing my thinking and bettering my understanding of rhetoric. Each category was organized in a way that progressed my knowledge of rhetorical writing and speech as I continued through the site. One aspect of the site that may have seemed overwhelming was the sheer number of terms associated with rhetoric. As this site seems to be targeted towards more inexperienced readers and writers, going about understanding these terms seemed challenging, as they were not as organized in the way that the rest of the information on the site was. Perhaps, going along with the nature analogy, these terms, the “flowers”, are simply more difficult to see than the “trees”, the main categories of information. In other words, it is harder to comprehend each individual term relating to rhetoric, than it is to understand the more general ideas that the author was trying to get across to his audience, without more in depth reading.

Burton, Giedon O. "The Forest of Rhetoric." Silva Rhetoricae:. Brigham Young University, 26 Feb. 2007. Web. 23 Jan. 2016.