Here’s my most recent version of a talk I wrote about three years ago and have altered over time. This was the talk I gave at Cornell University on September 11, 2017. I thought it would be somewhat interesting to put a few of the recordings here for comparison. 

I play pretty loose with a lot of concepts that other professionals might find to be not so great. I think the purpose of this talk is to get people interested in rhetoric as simultaneously a thing to study, a method for the study of other things that are mostly made of words, and a thing of historical interest that has shaped our view of communication and rhetoric today.

Here’s the last one, from 2015 to see how different the approach is:

And another iteration, this one from February right after – I changed it a bit between the break. 

The changes are based on feedback from the students as well as talking to the hosts to make sure I’m presenting something that makes sense for helping the students understand “the rhetorical” enough to be able to study it for a term. This is an institution that has no rhetoricians and no rhetoric program  – although I do think they have rhetoricians in composition.