Rhetoric?

First of all, Eric Whitacre is the man! That was so cool! I’ve never seen anything like that. Yet again, TED talks find a way to absolutely blow my mind. I was very pleased with those videos.

I have never studied rhetoric to this extent before, so all of these readings have been both a great challenge and a great reward at the same time. Many of the questions that I had while reading Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents were actually answered within the text. I love reading things like this that don’t send me on a wild goose chase for the answers to the questions! In the beginning, I originally thought that we, the rhetors were actually the audience. I soon learned that the audience of a rhetorical situation is meant to be influence and the rhetors are the analyzers. I also wondered why the author portrayed constraints as being bad. But then, it was mentioned that there are both positive and negative constraints that tend to “lead the audience to be either more or less sympathetic to the discourse”.

An Introduction to Rhetoric was definitely the text that I understood and gleaned from the most. The most interesting concept that I noticed was the concept of potentially active texts. These are the types of texts that the rhetor intends to do something with. It is meant to inspire and spark a change of some sort. It seemed to be a way of intentional persuasion. These active texts can also be used to change the actual audience itself. Active texts seem to me to be the easiest form of trying to accomplish a certain goal with writing. I feel like Eric Whitacre is a fine example of active rhetoric. Through his call for singers on YouTube, he was able to influence a very specific group of people (the musically inclined) in participating in a huge project that was his “brain child” of sorts. He used rhetoric and media to make this possible and it turned out to be a huge success for him.    

The reading section on intertexuality was definitely the most difficult for me to follow. After about an hour of my brain literally writhing in pain because of the complexity of this, what I got out of the intextuality reading is that authorship is incredibly important in relation to the audience, relating texts to each other are crucial to understanding them, and intertext constrains the writing. These were the main points I got, but I didn’t realize why this text was even necessary or important at all. Aren’t these all things that we have been learning since high school? This text and intertexuality definitely stumped me on its purpose for sure.