On Blogging on The Rhetorical Tradition

This is a picture of a book that changed my life: The Rhetorical Tradition by Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. 

You may be wondering why, if this book is so important to me, it is so damaged. Well, my dog ate it...literally. He really ate part of it. I was so angry and upset. When I walked into the room where I had been working the night before and found my rhetoric book on the floor, partially eaten, I felt my heart break. I am still surprised at my reaction. I cried. I cried hard. I realized then how much that book had meant to me, how much that book had changed me. It was dog-eared and worn, full of notes and questions from years of use but mainly from its first use, and those notes meant everything to me.

Contrary to what you might think, I did not stay angry at my dog. After all, I did leave it on the floor, and dogs love book glue--or so the book binder says. He told me dogs keep him in business because, once a dog "gets a taste for the book glue," there is no going back. I like this book binder. I have noticed my dog lurking around the book shelves.

Of course, the good news is my rhetoric book is now with the book binder being rebound with a leather cover that will, perhaps, or so I hope, be beautiful enough to match the beautiful content. 

My story with this book began in 1997, the first year of my graduate program at Texas Woman's University. To get my Master's Degree in English, I had to take three rhetoric courses: two of them were rhetoric and composition theory courses, which were not heavily focused on rhetorical theory. 

The other rhetoric class that was required, which just so happened to be my first graduate course ever, was 20th Century Rhetorical Theory, and I was lost. We were reading from the end of The Rhetorical Tradition, which, for those who do not have the book, covers the history of rhetoric from the classical period to modern times, and I didn't know a thing about the beginning, the middle, or any of it.

I had just had my oldest son, who had colic. I was recovering from a difficult pregnancy, one so difficult that, near the end, I developed life-threatening toxemia. I was exhausted and came to school most days on about two hours sleep, covered in spit up. Honestly, I was scared to death that, somehow, having a baby had ruined my brain. I remembered learning in my women's studies classes about how, back in the day, men thought women could not handle higher education because their reproduction organs made them ignorant. In the back of my mind, because of the way I felt, I started to panic that these sexist men were somehow right. I remember thinking "Oh my God, they were right! I went stupid."

I would later understand that my inability to concentrate was, of course, related to hormones, lack of sleep, and my struggle to recover from nearly dying from the toxemia. To make matters worse, I had one of the worst professors ever! Seriously, he would have to be in the top 100 worst professors in the history of the world--at least by my standards, which, really are pretty reasonable. 

I had no frame of reference for 20th Century Rhetorical Theory, and he was not giving me any. I read diligently, spending hours pouring over the chapters the end of this book. I had not read the beginning, nor did I have time. I was spending all day, every day reading and then re-reading the works he was assigning--Burke, Fish, Cixous. I was dealing with some heady stuff with a professor who used fear and humiliation as his teaching tools. He would yell at me "That is an F answer!" when I got the answers "wrong." And, he did this in front of the other students. We know from research on the brain that learning cannot take place under duress like that. I was most certainly under duress. 

I was 21 years old, a new mom, and, generally, a good student. I was so scared of failing this class, and I could not drop it because of financial aid. Because of my toxemia, I had incompletes from the previous semester, and I was on financial aid probation. If I did not finish what I started that next semester, I could have lost my ability to get student loans, which, for me, would have meant no more education.

I had no choice but to pass the class--and I had to get at least a B. I remember looking up one evening and seeing my oldest son, so teeny tiny, asleep in his baby swing, and I realized he had been in that swing for about two hours. I had not changed his diaper before he had fallen asleep. I had been reading and reading and reading--almost in a panicked state--and I felt like a horrible mother. I cried and told him I was sorry. I am still sorry. I am about to cry as I type these words. It was an awful time. My professor was teaching chaos theory, and I was living it.

This professor finally eased up on me when my American Literature professor heard him berating me in his office one day. I did not cry in front of him, but I cried when I left. I noticed, as I walked down the hall, that my American Lit professor looked angry. I saw her get up from her desk in her office and head to my rhetoric professor's office. I do not know what she said, but the worst professor ever seemed to find someone else to pick on after that. I am forever thankful to that American Literature professor. I did not learn much about rhetorical theory that semester, but with my professor off of my back, I was able to do better. I studied so hard and memorized enough of what he said that I did well on my exams, wrote papers that were good enough to pass, and finished the course with an A. Fortunately, I am a really good test taker. I memorized the material, but I did not learn anything.

I knew I didn't know anything about rhetorical theory, and I wanted to know about it. I wanted to know about it so badly. It was a challenge, and I am such a curious person. I knew I wanted to be a writing teacher, so this rhetoric stuff was really a "must." But, more than these things, I had this suspicion that there was a "truth" in that book for me. With the exception of the worst professor in the world, I remember admiring so much the way my rhetoric professors behaved, thought, and viewed the world. I kept that book, awaiting my next rhetoric class, and after such an awful experience, I put those rhetoric classes off awhile.

In 2001, I had a new professor of rhetoric. He taught the first half of a sequence of courses in the history of rhetoric. I knew I was in better shape because this professor was good. He was my kind of professor--mild, kind, brilliant, not judgmental about students who weren't brilliant. He was sometimes tough for a novice to rhetoric like me to understand, but he would read my face and try again to be clear. He was what I needed. But I still had a really hard time with the readings. 

Every time I would move beyond some basic classical rhetoric, the writing would get so philosophical that I had a really hard time processing it. I cannot help but think that my struggles related to my background. I was a first-generation college student, and I grew up in a world of black and white, right and wrong, where truths were arrived at through the Bible. Learning things like "the truth is a relative concept" did not come naturally to me. I had to work hard to understand even the most basic concepts of rhetoric. Concepts like kairos were Greek to me on SO many levels.

Finally, I remember sitting on the floor of the living room one evening and saying to myself, "I am going to read this chapter until it makes sense." I concentrated harder than I ever remember concentrating. I read it once, twice, three times, and then it started to happen. The sense came. I felt a kind of joy that is difficult to describe, perhaps something akin to enlightenment, and I felt it all over my body. I continued to read, and read, and read. It was all making sense. The connection had been made, and there was no stopping me. I made notes in my book, meaningful notes. I had questions. I had original insight. I fell in love with the ideas in my book, The Rhetorical Tradition.

Eventually the concepts in this book would come to change my life. I came to fully understand that the world is not black and white, and that that is okay. This, in turn, would make me a better person. I was relatively meek, and coming to an understanding of the power available to me through rhetoric was an profound awakening.

So I am creating a blog to honor that book. Ironically, my dog eating my book inspired me to share my love of rhetoric with others. If it has meant so much to me, maybe it can mean something to others. I realize most people are not that keen on reading about the history of rhetoric just for fun, but, perhaps, they should be. Life is all about rhetoric. Rhetoric involves our language, our emotions, our logic. It plays a role in how we communicate professionally, with our families, with our children, online, and even on Facebook. If we all learned about rhetoric from childhood, we would all be wiser. Of course, the psychopaths would still use it to try to manipulate the masses, but the masses wouldn't stand for it. 

This blog will address every single entry in The Rhetorical Tradition, which will cover almost fifty rhetoricians--from Gorgias to Burke. In each entry, I will look back at my thinking when I originally read the material and make connections to our modern lives. How does each entry relate to religion, politics, education, relationships, spirituality, wisdom, manipulation? I will work to address those points in context of my own experiences as writing teacher, a citizen, a wife, a mom.

I hope you will enjoy it--and maybe learn something. And, while my target audience is certainly graduate students making their own way through The Rhetorical Tradition, my secondary audience is anyone who is curious about learning a little more about a field thousands of years old yet continues to be relevant today. I hope many are curious. I am pretty sure the rhetorical ideas encompassed in this book, especially when taken in as a collective, have the potential to change people.

My first blog on the Sophists will be posted next week.