Entry #8: On Rhetoric (CG)

These readings, especially the Lindemann chapter, take me back to my first year teaching high school. I was asked to teach AP English Language and Composition a few days before the semester began. I became very nervous, not because of the difficulty of the course itself, but because I barely had any clue what rhetoric was, especially since all my coursework focused more on literature. Overtime, I obviously had to learn more and more - I had no choice because I was teaching it! Since then, I fell in love with rhetoric. It is everything, really, and that year teaching AP English Language is the reason why I chose to focus on rhetoric and composition.

Rhetoric itself continues to be refined; as Lindemann points out, its very definition continues to grow by many scholars and critics. Interestingly enough, these "fathers of rhetoric" began understanding it through oral presentation, and now, rhetoricians apply philosophies in every aspect of our being, our actions, and our motives. As writing instructors, our rhetoric as the expert in the classroom demands self-awareness, indicated first by the end comments we leave on student papers that Summer Smith discusses. Her case study identifies three genres of comments, which itself is a fascinating discourse because it provides research-driven suggestions for successful communication between teacher and student through these end-comments. Smith also acknowledges student fragility, which by no means implies the student as weak, but illuminates instead the delicate line between mistrusting and discrediting the teacher when comments "cross the line" from constructive comments to judgmental comments. 

Comfort support the teaching of rhetoric that Lindemann presents as well. For Comfort, she suggests embedding one's identity explicitly alongside one's essay as ethos, establishing one's self as the expert because of shared or similar experiences that the subject of the work is based on. Eleanor's comparison between Mike Tyson and June Jordan accomplishes what many students wish they could say, but instead, they just think it or internalize it without explicitly stating it in the essay, which is to say, she could not share or create a reconciling connection to Jordan's defense of Tyson and their perspective of the "other." Eleanor uses her own identity as ethos, which Comfort leverages to demonstrate the necessity for students to "locate themselves as effectively self-authorizes knowers for their evaluative audiences" (553). It is clear, after reading these essays, that teaching rhetoric alongside composition is necessary if only to make the process of writing more convenient and accessible to all students.