englsh!

Shady used car salesmen.

Stephen’s revelation is an important one. Rhetoric doesn’t only exist in the domain of car salesmen.

sjshamp:

George Kennedy made an interesting point when he said, “Speech would not have evolved among human beings unless rhetoric already existed. In fact, rhetoric is manifest in all animal life and existed long before the evolution of human beings.”  Before this class, to me, the term ‘rhetoric’ meant something much different than what it does now. In my mind, rhetoric was to argumentation as small talk is to conversation – verbal fluff or filler.  Rhetoric was more about sound bites and sales, than persuasive and/or effective communication. In fact, in my mind, rhetoric was little more than a beautifully constructed stringing together of words that, while impressive as an artform, possessed little merit otherwise. Rhetoric was the stuff of marketing ploys, campaign slogans, and the questionable sales pitches of shady used car salesmen. Over the course of these past few weeks however, I’ve come to see rhetoric in a different light. As George Kennedy might say, rhetoric is not only fundamental to communication, it actually forms the basis of communication. Rhetoric, in fact, IS communication. As the author of the article we are currently reading has pointed out, “we could consider everything from poetry to pie recipes to parts lists as being rhetorical in some sense.” Now that’s an interesting thought.