A Pause: Why Do We Do All of this Rhetoric Stuff?

 I thought it would be fun to talk, for a little bit, about why we do all of this rhetoric stuff.

Dr. Newman and I both have degrees in "rhetoric, scientific, and technical communication."  What that means is that we have studied the ways that people deploy rhetoric to communicate about technical and scientific issues.  

Rhetoric, is, then, from one perspective, how people get things done in the world.  It's a set of strategies and tactics and even tricks to help people do things, accomplish goals.  Rhetoric is how a politician convinces people that their positions are worth a vote.  Rhetoric is how a preacher convinces a congregation that they should donate to charity.  (The rhetoric of preaching even has its own name, "homiletics."

Rhetoric is also a tool for analysis -- it's a tool that helps us explain why or how a communication strategy might have contributed to human history.  We can't guarantee that a politician's rhetoric explains why they are successful -- sometimes, it might also come down to the price of eggs.  But rhetoric can surely be part of the story.

(At UMD, Drs. Wright, Gore, and Pfau are most interested in rhetoric as a body of criticism.  I tend to be most interested in rhetoric as a set of tools.  Both are important for different ways.

The Jay Heinrichs book has some problems.  One of them is that he simplifies things, maybe too much.  Scholars get bothered by oversimplifications.  But I don't need to understand how my car works, the way a professional mechanic does, to be able to use it to get to school.  All this book promises is how to use rhetoric to get to school, metaphorically.

The second problem is a tougher one.  A students stopped me once to tell me that the book upset them.  After all, they said, it felt like I was teaching my students how to manipulate other people.

I mean, kind of?  Hopefully there is enough in the book about the importance of working with other people that it doesn't feel like evil manipulation.  And there are enough defense tool chapters (not assigned) that help you defend against bad manipulation.

But yeah, when I teach students rhetoric, it's because I know that for at least the last thousand years, all the most important and most powerful people were taught rhetoric as a tool set.  And I want you to have that tool set too.