What is rhetoric?

             When starting English class this year I never fully understood what rhetoric was. In the past, I was always taught that rhetoric was a skill that many public speakers possess, but I was never told exactly what it is. In addition, the word rhetoric always had the same connotation to me as the word rhetorical, which now I know they aren’t the same. Throughout the course of English 1900, I believe that I’ve been able to create my own definition of the word. I believe that rhetoric is art of effective speaking and presenting. The issue with the definition is that the word deserves so much more than a simple definition. Throughout the course we’ve learned how to effectively express our own arguments through writing and in speech. Through fight club we were able to organize our own list of pros and cons and then were given the task of arguing for a certain side. This allowed us to effectively formulate an argument and be able to clearly and effectively explain it to our adversary. As we had more and more fight clubs, we as a class were able to learn to skills in the art of argumentation. Through time we were able to explicitly explain ourselves instead of babbling about a topic we barely know. I know that by the end of the year, I was able to articulate my side of argument clearly and was able to have solid conversations with my opponent that helped find a correct answer for the conversation. In addition to doing well with rhetoric in the public speaking aspect, we also improved our rhetoric throughout the paper. When we started the paper, we basically wrote down what we believed was a correct argumentative paper. In reality, as we went along in the year, we took our paper brick by brick. We began with finding who the correct audience was. We learned how to clearly propose what our solutions are. We learned how to correctly research and find information to support our clearly proposed solution. In addition, we learned through They Say, I Say to tie all of work together in order to fully flow and correctly combine our argument into one perfect essay. Once we finished these steps, the purpose was to easily be able to fully address our solution clearly, to the right audience, with resourceful and purposeful tasks, while being able to fully flow to the point that others fully understand what you are trying to say. That is what I believe is the definition of rhetoric. I believe the course was set up to help learn this definition in a long but successful class. Most of us didn’t know what the word meant but by the end of the semester, everyone in the class is able to define what rhetoric means. Now and days, everyone in the world needs to be fluent in rhetoric, because that is a concept that we are involved with every day. We must be fully prepared to express ourselves and our words correctly and effectively.