where should we start in class? With organization? Research? Developing an audience profile?
Wherever you start teaching in a speech or argumentation or debate course, that is where you are positing the start of rhetoric.
The question of a start is the establishment of ends. What is the purpose of rhetoric? Why learn and study it?
I was gifted this great textbook from 1900 the other day, and the authors start with style. Most public speaking instructors probably cover style, near the end of the term, along with ethics, in the sense that “audiences expect different things so speak the way they want. Now, back to the importance of a bibliography.”
This attention to style could be seen as evidence of the simplistic refutation of rhetoric as being surface-only, an affront to the deep consideration of the true that philosophy, et. al. deal with.
It could be the understanding that style is the only way we have to understand truth. If it comes across in one way rather tha another it wont matter how true it is.
in starting with style, this book doesnt mince words. Theres a much better understanding of acceptability than we get today. Most public speaking courses convey an obsession with facts. Facts are the only style needed. Bring your references of various types and you’ll be believed. Qe grade a lot more on references than oration, as if we have lost faith in rhetoric as a productive, creative force for good.
Where is the faith in oratory to make the world? probably in the same spot we left our faith in students. The last time students were praised as a group I cant remember. Instructors at my university praise an I individual student, but with the tone of surprised exception. The student is impressive because students are supposed to be terrible, and this one isn’t. It’s a sad situation.
Where is our belief or sense that the world is more than a selection of careers? That making money means you are successful? that good grades mean you know things? All of these questions should be able to dissolve easily in the hands of the trained orator. Then be reconstituted as immutable truths.
But no. Far more important they learn how to cite a scholarly source isn’t it? That’s our style and hence our truth. If the facts dont work, we just shrugand call others stupid. If only we had a practice that could be used to reconstitute stupidity and facts into a pliable substance for making things, attitudes, people, and thoughts.