On page 6 of "What is Rhetoric?" Covino and Jolliffe write, "all utterances are texts, and all texts have the potential to change auditors." They expand this thought to say that all texts have "potential activity," both intentional and unintentional, which all relates to the concept of "kairos," a kind of climate of rhetoric.
Reading this made me think back to the first day of class, and Doug pulling up random things on the computer, and me thinking "is this a writing class?"
The point is that the internet and every electronic device that can connect to the internet have changed everything. MySpace was bad enough, but now Twitter is extremely popular with older professionals (I say this because I still refuse to get a Twitter account). These days, it is admirable to summarize your most epic epiphanies in very few words, and honestly it's the only way anybody is going to read about them in the first place.
So basically, I have to resign to the fact that a Twitter post is a legitimate form of rhetoric, and is in fact a genius way of communication in the kairos of the digital world.
My roommate's dad is a pastor, and she has a modern translation of the Bible called "The Message//Remix: The Bible in Contemporary Language." Take, for example, Hosea 9.1:
"Don't waste your life in wild orgies, Israel.
Don't party away your life with the heathen.
You walk away from your God at the drop of a hat
and like a whore sell yourself promiscuously
at every sex-and-religion party on the street.
All that party food won't fill you up.
You'll end up hungrier than ever."
The times are changing, we must keep up. What's next, Biblical books summarized in Twitter posts?
I may have digressed a bit, but if "rhetoric is the art of knowledge-making" (C&J 8), it's hard to drop knowledge on the "digital generation" in old-school Biblical prose. So I think this class is very relevant, and also a legit writing class, because all of us writers want people to read our stuff and know what we're talking about.
Both Grant-Davie and C&J discuss Bitzer's 3 elements of a rhetorical situation (exigence, audience, rhetorical constraints). I like Grant-Davie's specification that both the rhetor and the audience are "real or imagined" and "dynamic and interdependent," so while a rhetor might write something with a particular exigence, that doesn't mean that everybody who reads it will read it with the same exigence in mind. In the digital world today, it is so easy to read things out of context you basically have to write them for people who have no idea what your context is.
This blog is for WRIT 371, but who knows what audience it will reach?
I can't believe they rewrote the Bible in modern day language, and that I didn't know about it before! That creates an interesting thought for me; if we're discussing exigence and how the wording and feel of a piece can greatly alter how an audience accepts it, then isn't there a possibility that changing the text of the Bible is going to alter the message? (Slightly off topic, but interesting nonetheless).
ReplyDeleteI shared the same thoughts about the class, but my doubts have been erased as I realize that while rhetoric is something I have thought about subconsciously (changing the wording in a facebook status perhaps, since a younger sibling/cousin could read it) studying it and learning about it professionally can and will greatly help my writing in the future.