Reflecting on Rhetoric and Composing

In a reflection it’s troubling to tell where the real object begins and ends. We generally see the same object reflected in a different medium (an actual person and their reflection in glass, water, a shiny surface) and our mind immediately attempts to separate both images into the real and the reflected. How does this relate to what we’ve learned? It’s hard to tell where a lot of the concepts that we’re studying begin and end because so many of them are interconnected: immediacy and hypermediacy, remediation and re-purposing etc. All of these concepts are similar and only through clear definitions and MANY examples are we able to differentiate and better understand them.

I would compare my views toward reflection in rhetoric and composing to an episode of “What Not to Wear”. Before learning the true benefits of reflection I was walking the streets oblivious to my lack of knowledge. I would turn out assignment after assignment constantly looking forward and never reviewing what their connections really were to my studies. I guess WEPO would have to be compared to Stacy and Clinton. It’s put me in a 360-degree mirror and opened my eyes and broke down my composing process so that I could see all of the elements that I utilize and why. It’s taken my disheveled and disjointed views on composing and rhetoric and either tossed them or polished them, and it has taught me to put the elements that I frequently access into new and interesting theories and combinations. In the end WEPO has helped my knowledge of rhetoric and composing transform into something more concrete and substantial.

My key terms for rhetoric and composing are mostly dependent on what type of situation I’m presented with. So, that would make Bitzer’s idea of the rhetorical situation my main term in my personal theories. At the outset of any composition I consider my exigence (What is the purpose of this composition? Am I aiming to inspire others to action? What action do I want to inspire?), audience (Who is capable of changing this situation? What are their backgrounds?), and my constraints (How is the medium I’m choosing going to effect the message? Is the audience biased towards my subject?). Once I determine these three key factors I can employ my next key term in my process of composing – invention. Cicero told us how to use invention in types of oratory, but today I think that Janice Lauer relates invention in a more practical way to us as students. She states that invention is the process of exploring “ideas, arguments, appeals, and subject matters for reaching new understandings and/or for developing and supporting judgments”. Prior to this class I never realized that I was being taught and making use of invention strategies throughout my academic career. The last key element in my rhetorical repertoire would be style. The ancient Greek and Roman scholars (Aristotle, Quintilian and Cicero) termed the rhetorical canon of style (or elocutio) as one dealing with the clarity and mostly ornamentation of discourse through figures of speech, tropes etc. Style to me allows my own personality to come through in my writing, and what is the point of my writing if it doesn’t sound like it came from me?

I believe that today it’s difficult to truly create new knowledge in our field. After millennia odds are that someone has already come up with a theory about what you’re studying. This isn’t to say that we can’t expand on the knowledge that already exists. As student’s we’re asked to do this all the time – particularly in Kara’s class. Almost every paper that I’ve written in college has asked me to expand on a published theory and make connections to what I’m currently learning. In this sense I think that we constantly build upon knowledge that already exists in the fields of rhetoric and composition. Since creating truly novel knowledge is so difficult for us than I think it goes without saying that we rely on prior knowledge all the time. We constantly seek to make connections to minimize uncertainty and confusion, that’s why so many of our assignments ask us to draw upon our own experiences for examples. A great example would be from our discussion on remediation and the example of how the Harry Potter books have been remediated across multiple genres until ending up as a theme park. Or from all of our blog assignments where we’re asked to discuss our own processes of composing or our own theories on rhetoric.