After the First Class Readings on Rhetoric

Interesting stuff, this rhetoric. I graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from a nearby *major* midwestern university without ever having touched on the topic. Hmmm....

Anyway, some comments on the texts. First, Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of RHETORIC. A definition of rhetoric by Andrea Lunsford (1998) appears in chapter 1, page 8, as follows: "Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of [all] human communication." Of the eight definitions Booth includes, this appears to be the broadest, but what exactly are we to understand from this catch-all description? I agree with Booth as he points out on page 9, "If you expand the term to cover all attempts at effective communication...doesn't it become meaningless, pointless?"

But I thought James Herrick's inclusion of the concept of symbols (The History and Theory of Rhetoric -- An Introduction) was an important point that Booth did not cover. Herrick's statement in chapter 1, page 7 that "The art of rhetoric can render symbol use more persuasive, beautiful, memorable, foreceful, thoughtful, clear, and thus generally more compelling" called to mind a TV commercial for chemical company BASF that declares, "We don't make the ____________, we make it _____________" (implying that they improve whatever product they partner on).

So, like BASF's ability to make consumer goods better, if rhetoric has the ability to improve simple communication by making it richer and "more compelling," let's take the application a step further and apply it to "hard" disciplines such as physics: Rhetoric doesn't make the laws of physics, it makes them more understandable and acceptable.

After doing the readings, I'm beginning to see a line of sight between rhetoric and science on which I was a little fuzzy when I wrote my first post.