Rhetoric

        Rhetoric is effectively communicating an idea or ideas, whether arguing, agreeing, persuading, informing or otherwise addressing an appropriately engaged audience through speech or writing, keeping a balance between form and content. "Rhetoric" encompasses any kind of tool or technique used to improve writing, speaking, or any kind of communication. Studying rhetoric means studying how to share ideas efficiently to any given audience, so in order to study rhetoric one must study grammar, language mechanics, vocabulary, and they also must practice thinking, which is the root cause of rhetoric: complex or novel concepts that people need to be made aware of.  This is an aspect that people often overlook. Rhetoric is often viewed as a synonym for eloquence, but rhetoric, as well as focusing on how something is being said, focuses just as much on what is being said. As the website states, the great philosopher Plato was among the many who thought that rhetoric only "deals with the superficial at best, the deceptive at worst".

        I think that rhetoric is the synthesis of thinking and creating paired with the language skills required to inform others of what was thought or created. Often people see a false dichotomy between skills in form versus skills in content. Articles that convey massive amounts of information like medical journals, scientific articles, and sometimes even journalism can be very dry and indigestible to the average reader. There is a lot of value in the "propositional content" of these works, but people are deterred because these writers, not being fully educated in the art of rhetoric sacrifice aesthetics and appeal in order to cram as much information in as possible. The only people who read these works are the ones who are strongly motivated or forced to. On the other hand, some (not all) literary works, poetry and prose alike, focus so much on the form of their language rather than the complexity of the ideas they are addressing. While it is more rare in literature, as authors are usually well versed in rhetorical skills, people reading their work can still get lost in the beauty of the language, and the message behind the words is completely lost on them. Obviously these are the two extremes and there is a lot of space between them, where many good authors and writers fit in. However, these examples illustrate how important the balance between form and content is in rhetoric, and that's something that many people don't understand about rhetoric.

        A common rationalization for not bothering with skills like rhetoric is "I'm not an English major, I don't need to know how to write a novel or a poem". While there is an element of truth in this statement, the people who might say this simply haven't thought through what rhetoric really is, and where it applies in life. Everyone needs rhetoric for job interviews, business majors need rhetoric for memos and meetings, engineers need rhetoric to communicate with accounting or corporate. Everyone needs to know how to analyze and communicate with good form and content.

Burton, Gideon O. "The Forest of Rhetoric." Silva Rhetoricae. Brigham Young University, n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2015. <http://rhetoric.byu.edu/>.