Some Final Thoughts on Rhetoric

At the start of the semester, I said, after examining the definition of rhetoric from Merriam-Webster and Dr. Gideon Burton of Brigham Young University, "Rhetoric is writing or speaking that serves either to inform or persuade an audience." And as the semester went along, I just thought rhetoric as nothing more than "another tool in the drawer" and a very broad, vague concept; something that is boring and invariable. However, when I started looking at the infamous vocab list and saw rhetoric defined as "the art of effective expression," my preexisting belief that rhetoric belonged to the mundane world of English was shaken but at the same time, was only further a reinforcement that the definition of rhetoric is vast as the sea because now rhetoric was defined as an art form, and I had a hard time accepting this. 

By defining rhetoric as "the art of effective expression," one could say that definition is the singularity of any creation ever (as long as in some way, shape, or form, this theoretical creation could be considered art and something expressive). For example, being a long-time musician who expresses himself by playing notes on a guitar with some friends on stage, I could say that this example is one of rhetoric because music is a form of art, and I am effectively expressing myself since playing guitar and composing songs/guitar parts for a song is how I express myself, therefore, rhetoric. The main theme I am trying to get at is that as long as something can be considered an art form that accurately (therefore effective) expresses the artist, it is rhetoric. Technically, yes, when a writer composes a piece of literature or an essay of some kind, according to the incredibly loose definition of rhetoric, this is art and a form of effective self-expression, therefore, rhetoric. This newer definition and understanding of rhetoric demonstrates the problems with my old definition and the common understanding of rhetoric.

One of the main issues that word rhetoric has is that it has a connotation that assigns it to only a realm of English. This is evident by when somebody says a rebuttal of, "Oh, that's just rhetoric" because the person saying this confines and restricts the definition of rhetoric to a world of manipulated words. Nobody wants to admit that music, painting, any form of art or self expression, is rhetoric.  By saying that these forms of art are rhetoric (something with a rather ho-hum connotation), this seems to detract from some of the inherent value and colorful aspects that these art forms provide. This might be due to the mindset that many people have the idea that rhetoric is something seen in an insipid and vanilla court room or in a high level literature or philosophy class in the world of academia, not something that could be in the bright, colorful, fun world of music, painting, etc. However, this is not the case. 

I have been enlightened to understand that rhetoric is not some other vapid instrument that belongs in a closed drawer full of similar constructs, rather, rhetoric is just as beautiful and bright as any other form of art. I have grown to understand that writing a story or a blog post is just as creative in its own unique way as sculpting a beautiful sculpture out of marble and limestone, or writing a passionate song from the inner thoughts of a human mind; both of these elements are beautiful and human in their own way. I realized that writing a story involved creativity since one has to map out a story line, yet, I never considered this a form of self expression because I could not directly associate the relation be between composer and creation. But as the semester wore on and I was further exposed to the ways of rhetoric, I began to use my strong sense of intuition and fondness of thinking imaginatively to connect the myriad of floating ideas I had in the clouds about rhetoric to the ground. If there is one thing I have learned from this course, it is that rhetoric is much more than what I had originally constricted it to be. 





P.S. Professor Strickland, I hope that if you've read this, you feel a certain sense of excitement since one of your students (who is primarily of the brain of "I want hard facts and quantified data derived from complex equations that state specific things.") has grown to develop a deeper understanding of such a fundamental yet simple, therefore (as used in the fields of Physics and Math) elegant word and has let his naturally curious and always thinking mind run free with the bulls in the world of English and rhetoric and now see it as something fun and different than what he used to see it as: boring.