What is Rhetoric?

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Surely you've heard the term thrown around: "That's all just rhetoric!" We are usually speaking about someone, like a politician, who is attempting to persuade the audience with little respect for the truth. But that's too simple. 

Let me explain.

In the 1970s and 80s, doctoral programs in Rhetoric and Composition began to emerge. Now, take a look at the job ads for English professors (Higher Ed Jobs, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Education, the MLA Job List). Most specifically ask for professors who specialize in Rhetoric and Composition or who direct writing centers or who lead composition programs or who teach technical and business writing or for those who simply teach the freshman composition courses as lecturers. Finding a job teaching literature is much, much harder to do. The usefulness of what we teach, and the way we prepare students for jobs or even just for their college writing tasks, means the field now dominates the job ads. 

However, that does not mean we are respected by those who have long held that a Ph.D. in literature is superior. Certainly Ivy League institutions, like Harvard or Yale, do not offer doctorates in Rhetoric and Composition through the English Department. 

Why not?

The definitions of rhetoric have shifted significantly over the centuries. It was really Aristotle who first tried to really explain it, to write a book detailing its techniques, its effects, its uses. On Rhetoric, published about the 4th century B. C., is still the bread and butter of many composition 101 textbooks, offering concepts like "ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos" to writers as tools of analysis as well as a means of persuasion for their own texts. 

In Aristotle's time, teaching rhetoric was a commodity, a means for men to earn a living in the courts or in politics or in the military as leaders. Over the centuries, it would emerge as a focus on elaborate language, then on the details of grammar and punctuation, then on psychological elements of persuasion, then on composition as a way to learn "taste" which meant literature. In the 1960s, teaching writing was overturned like an apple cart. Writers became professors and those professors threw away the methods that had emerged that destroyed creativity and that ignored process. And today, once again, rhetoric is a commodity but this time it's for students who wish to become technical writers, or professional writers, or those who just need those skills for the workplace. 

It's this "workplace" vibe, rhetoric's clear utility, that make it unattractive to Ivy League institutions. However, there are many state universities that offer Rhetoric and Composition programs to students who love language, who love the process of writing, and who love to explore language and possibility and power. 

And what about me? Did I begin to study rhetoric so I could get a professor's job? No, you fool! Of course not. At the time, I didn't even know how to become a professor. I only found that out during a meeting one kind professor held with us, and while I remember that meeting as if it were just yesterday, I hold even more dear the memory of sitting in my professor's classroom, Dr. Pittman, at the University of Central Oklahoma, and we were all gathered in a circle. I was reading Plato and his student Aristotle for the first time. Teaching was just then changing from lectures to engagement, and Dr. Pittman was trying this new method of asking us questions. As she pulled out meanings from the text, I remember thinking that I finally understood! I understood how others had trapped me in words of persuasion. How the social and religious and institutional systems that had normalized some truths and used them to trap me like prison bars were not bars but words and actually open for change! And I realized learning rhetoric would mean I would gain power over my own life, my own beliefs, my own mind. I could dismantle the words of others and choose what I would believe. 

It was an amazing moment and one that changed my life. I finished my bachelor's with a purpose, then entered the master's program at UCO. After a long break where I tried out a corporate job, I returned to UCO and plunged into the wonderful world of study. It gave me such joy to learn there. 

That same professor encouraged me to apply for a doctoral program, and I heeded her advice. I had felt the call to do so in the words of my pastor, in my prayers and the quiet, and in my dreams. In 2001, I started the doctoral program at the University of Arizona, never more happy and never more sure I was in exactly the right place. 

So what is rhetoric? It is the body of knowledge that helps us to use language, navigate systems of power, and analyze persuasion in all its forms. It is art and it is technique and it is not just about editing, but it is about shaping ideas, shaping truth, shaping the reader and the writer.