History of rhetoric

After reading Williams history of rhetoric I know why I call myself an “illiterate, literate”.

Writing our own literacy narrative really pointed out to me my feelings towards writing.
I have always wanted to write but because of my past failures with writing from high school to college I always shied away from it. Not until I read this history did I realize that I had been set up to fail at writing due the influences of history.

Like Williams points out I learned how to write apparently according to the Harvard Model. Writing as an “inductive process” where most of the emphasis on writing revolves around sentence structure, spelling, punctuation and word choice. I know I still start and stop as I write, reading and rereading sentences because they don’t sound correct. I edit them and then when I move on I have lost my flow of thinking. But from what I remember in high school most of my papers were not really graded on content just grammar.

I would have to say that my desire to be a writing teacher stems from my own struggles with writing. There must be a better way than how I was taught to help students with rhetoric. If the definition of rhetoric according to this book is “something people study and something that they apply to influence others” then we do have to look at the history of rhetoric as an evolving process. This should be a process that takes the good parts of all the theories, and morphs them into something flexible, practical, and usable.
Those are three areas I feel from my own experience were not available to me.

It seems obvious to me that throughout history theorists were influenced not only by each other but also by politics, religion, and economics. I think we still have those influences maybe not in the exact same ways but they play a role in educating students in rhetoric. Today we have the added influence of technology and I am not sure how long it will take to see the effect that has on student learning. Once it can be seen I’m sure a new theory will have to be developed to counter all the changes in the way people communicate.