As I ponder what rhetoric means to me and how I use it I always come back to the simplest terms in which I describe rhetoric to my friends, family, and students who have no idea what I do or what I research. The way I describe rhetoric simply as, "The art of persuasion" which is broad enough to send other rhetorical scholars in to a rage or deep debate with me, but just narrow enough for me to get across what I mean. Through writing, speaking, and communicating rhetoric encompasses the faculties in which we, as humans, push to persuade or convince each other in different situations. This leads me to how I use rhetoric in my every day life.
The main facet in my life (at this moment) in which I use rhetoric and its teachings is in my two sections of English 1301 here at Texas Tech. It is the only course required by every student no matter what major they are in and it is based specifically in rhetoric. I have to teach a class full of fresh faced freshman the complexities and nuances of something that I've been studying since my Junior year in college and which I am attempting to get my Master's in. This is a daunting task. I usually draw my principles and pedagogies from the classical era of rhetoric, mainly I enjoy Aristotle's definitions of rhetoric even though they are limited. There aren't any real hard and fast rules that rhetoric is or isn't. Rhetoric is constantly changing and evolving to fit the needs and demands of society and politics. The development of new technology in the last two decades has radically altered how rhetoric is constructed and consumed. I try my hardest to include some of these technologies in my classroom in teaching rhetoric to show the varied forms in which rhetoric is created and delivered to the general populace. It would seem that we, as a society, would be so far from the ancient Greeks in our approaches and definitions to rhetoric. However, I find a lot of the time we still use the same founding principles that made up rhetoric in the past here in the present. This interesting evolution of rhetoric, but at the same time its homeostasis in principle is intriguing and gives many angles to the approach of rhetoric that I plan to continue to study and develop in my own life and my classrooms.
