Eureka!

It seems that all of the philosophers of yesteryear had a difficult time understanding rhetoric and writing. Aristotle was one to defend the "art of rhetoric" by relateing it to the "discovery of knowledge." The only problem that seems to arise is that rhetoric can lead to falsifying the truth, and the only way to see what is rhetoric and what is truth is to be a wise and well-rounded reader: "Aristotle did not believe that teh way to protect students from the harmful effects of the skilled rhetoricians was the aviod teaching the skills" (pg. 10). This all ties with the general idea of the piece that writing is "the ongoing reflection of students' developing understanding of ideas.

Get Your Grammar War On

I've just begun reading a book titled The War Against Grammar, by David Mulroy, a professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In our class last week, we began discussing misperceptions of a writing or communication center as a place to get grammar "fixed"--whether that means seeing the center, in Michael Pemberton's words, as a hospital, a prison, or a madhouse.

I've always tried to make clear to students, tutors, and fellow teachers that I like grammar (look--I'm reading a book about it at home! for fun!) and I like teaching it; I get strange comfort from diagramming a sentence. I do think that the way we should teach grammar to, say, a fifth-grader should differ from how we teach it to a first-year college student, and I think the kinds of things we emphasize differ, too. I would love a world in which every student used perfect grammar (and punctuation and mechanics and syntax) all the time, and I would never argue that it doesn't matter. But I do often wonder how we can break a 19-year-old of a comma splice habit besides just circling it a dozen times on a paper. And I do think carefully about the way a center like ours identifies itself on campus. I noted that one anonymous tutee made this comment on a tutorial evaluation last year: "I don't appreciate having the Writing Center tell me they're too good to help me with grammar." So I think we (I, tutors, mentors, and others who support our work in their classrooms) need to clearly articulate what we mean and why we believe what we do; I'm sure I'll muse more about this and seek more comments later.

For now, I'll quote one paragraph from Mulroy, in which he argues why it's important for every one to be able to list and define the eight parts of speech [can you?]:

The meaning of a sentence is created in part by the rules of grammar. Of these, the most important apply not to individual words but to whole classes of them--i.e., the parts of speech. For example, a declarative sentence is a proposition about a subject, which is represented by a noun or a pronoun. The sense of the proposition is contained in the predicate, which begins with a finite verb--not a participle, and so on. Though we understand the sense of most utterances intuitively, the only reliable way to interpret obscure one is through grammatical analysis, and that presupposes knowing the parts of speech.

Agree?

Rhetoric: Black Hat or White Hat?

I know we've already been discussing the fact that while "rhetoric" in itself should be a neutral term, people (at least outside of academics who study and teach rhetoric for a living!) tend to use it in a negative sense. Out of curiosity, I searched a few news sites for recent articles in which the word "rhetoric" was used; here's just a sample (the first four are from the New York Times; the second is from the UCLA student newspaper):

"Iranian Rhetoric Aside, It May Be Time to Talk"

“The common complaint about the government is there is a lot of lofty rhetoric, but the achievement always falls short,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said.

"But some critics say Mr. Huckabee’s crusade has more rhetoric than substance."

"...Council meetings where rhetoric has traditionally predominated over substance."

"As a person who does not share her views, I want to sound back to her that the use of some of the more rhetorical hot buttons, like 'religious right,' is a huge turn-off."

...I glanced through a hundred or so hits from my "rhetoric" search, and about the only non-negative use I saw came in an obituary of a professor who had taught courses in rhetoric. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I thought that perhaps some reporters and commentators out there would have a sense of the positive uses of the word, too.

So...my challenge to you: Report back to this blog with any quotation from any media (from news on TV to a website to a book you're reading in another class) or from daily life in which someone uses "rhetoric" not as a pejorative but as a positive concept. Ready?

Replacement: A Possibility?

So, classrooms shouldn't be replaced by writing centers, right? But the fact is that many of our teachers today are semi-illiterate, all except for Hillory Oakes. Many ask for students to write papers, and grade them according to their taste, as opposed to actual structure and form. Students too are seldom taught in high school the basics of grammar and language. Writing in college after so many years of neglecting the rules of English, a writing center can effectively re-establish the rules of our language.

Geography Major

Mary will have to correct this post to be exactly right, but I'm pretty sure this is what I overheard while she was tutoring a student this past Friday: "Apparently Manhattan is actually in New York City, which I guess everyone knew but me."

(Close to how you remember it, Mary?)

Punctuation Marks + Comedy = Rhetoric (?)

Remember that rhetoric is, at its core, an examination of language (we'll leave the nonverbal out of it for now)--the words chosen, the meanings intended, the purposes achieved or not, etc. On the first day of the Rhetoric and Communication class we demonstrated this with the exercise in which we compared, say, what people mean when they say "euthanasia" as opposed to what other people mean when they say "doctor-assisted suicide."

But even smaller units of the sentence can have rhetorical weight...like my use of ellipses (the dot, dot, dot) just there or the question mark at the end of sentences, titles, even fragments. The Daily Show continues to offer some of the best rhetorical analysis around, as in this segment synopsized by one of the bloggers at Language Log thus:

Stewart observes that CNN uses question-marked story captions as a way to establish "existential" topics -- roughly Rumsfeld's method, though sometimes applied to flag outlandish subjects like "End Times" -- whereas Fox News uses rhetorical questions as a sneaky way to insinuate things that it doesn't dare assert.

Voice, Audience, Purpose?

Any teacher of writing or speech can recite "voice, audience, purpose" in his or her sleep--the rhetorical decisions a writer or speaker makes must be based on a determination of these three things. That's not to say that VAP (as I usually abbreviate them) dictate the content you will explore--I'm not suggesting, for example, tailoring what you want to say to the perceived whims of your audience so much that you don't even believe what you're saying/writing anymore--but you have to constantly remind yourself of VAP as you discover what it is you really want to get across.

So...Listening to President Bush's speech on the 5th anniversary of September 11, I was struck by how slightly askew his (or, more aptly, his speechwriter's) sense of voice, audience, and purpose was. [See the Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca quote from our Herrick text: "The important thing...is not knowing what the speaker regards as true or important, but knowing the views of those he is addressing" (9).] In a speech made on this particular anniversary, a speech that should probably be purely commemorative [epideictic is the term for ceremonial, "praise or blame" speeches], he did get political and somewhat off the day's most important topic. But what my ears really picked up on was this, fairly early in the speech:

For many of our citizens, the wounds of that morning are still fresh. I have met firefighters and police officers who choke up at the memory of fallen comrades. I have stood with families gathered on a grassy field in Pennsylvania, who take bittersweet pride in loved ones who refused to be victims - and gave America our first victory in the war on terror. And I have sat beside young mothers with children who are now five-years-old - and still long for the daddies who will never cradle them in their arms. Out of this suffering, we resolve to honor every man and woman lost. And we seek their lasting memorial in a safer and more hopeful world.

Do your eyes catch what my ears did? Look at all those I's: "I have met firefighters...I have stood with families...I have sat beside young mothers." Maybe I'm just being too rhetorically sensitive, but for a speech that was supposed to honor thousands of dead, thousands of survivors, and thousands who helped out firsthand in some way, why should we care about--to be more precise, why should or would we be persuaded by--what President Bush's "I" did? He's managed to shift the focus, subtly or not so subtly, from what the families and firefighters and mothers have experienced and done to himself. Not an accidental rhetorical move.

Rhetoric Lives at SLU

Welcome to St. Lawrence University's Munn Center--soon to be known as the WORD [Writing, Oral Communication, Research, and Design] Studio--blog. All current and former tutors are welcome to contribute here. (Students taking the Rhetoric and Communication Theory and Practice course this fall will be posting on a regular basis.) Bring here anything substantially--or tangentially--related to rhetoric, writing, speechifying, dialogue, research, design, or more. Enjoy!