Rebekah, On the Art of Speaking Rhetorically

I’m putting this up early…I hope that’s okay, but I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t late.

What I’ve learned: I’ve learned that I can blog. Yes, for a semester at least I’ve joined that realm of laptop-toting college students who use the web to pursue their intellectual endeavors. My issue was that blogging reminds me of AIM, and I really, really hate AIM. It’s a waste of time and I’ve seen people fail classes because of it, but I’ve never seen anything good enough result from it to convince me to ever reinstall the wretched virus on my computer ever again. I understand now that blogging is different from AIM in that people don’t announce their presence and expect you to talk to them at strange hours of the day or night. Posting allows the blogger to peruse at his or her leisure, and so I give it some scholarly legitimacy now.

In addition to blogging, something I’ve learned in this class is what rhetoric is, and how it affects us today. I’d heard people say something “rhetorically” but would never ask them what they meant by it because I guess I thought I already knew! Now I see that that phrase is used incorrectly most of the time, and so I’ll be careful how I use it in the future. If I’m not too paranoid.

Finally, the recent re-acknowledgment of rhetoric in the philosophical realm explains the rise in the communications major, and others stemming from it. Communications majors still struggle with attaining equal status with other, more established courses of study (maybe I’m wrong – Comm majors, what do you think?), and so the fact that it is relatively new as a stand-alone major explains the reaction. It’s a lot like the rivalry between architecture and landscape architecture students; architects call larch students things like tree-huggers and hippies, and they call us pompous and snobby. I had a class once with arch and larch students, and the professor used the term “landscapers” to differentiate between us. They didn’t like that very much.

I took this class because I wanted to graduate in May…and Rhetoric 492 would get me there! I’ve really enjoyed the class dynamic and the way that very big issues are discussed relatively freely. I think that is in good part due to the blogs because they cause us to communicate with each other out of class, but also because we’re a pretty informal group as a whole. And it’s hard to be serious when you’re meeting over lunch. One thing I would improve upon, though, is more thorough discussion in class of the articles we’re reading. The blogs allow us to say what we’re thinking, but a lot of times we’re pretty off the mark because we misunderstood something. There’s a lot of good stuff in the articles, and I feel like I’m missing a lot of it because it isn’t reinforced later on.