Modes of Discourse vs. Rhetoric

Before reading Horner's and Herrick's articles, I didn't know that the birth of teaching composition happened in Scotland (my Scottish ancestors' blood pulsed with pride for about 48 hours afterward). I loved thinking about the romantic start of these Dissenters' schools, with farm boys walking eighty miles across the rugged terrain to attend college. It was exciting to think of a country so abused and neglected by the glorious trade centers and majesty of the country just below them to suddenly become the academic center of the British Isles (maybe Europe? What were all the other countries' schools like?).

But I was really intrigued in class on Thursday when we talked about some people's theory that the modes of discourse actually get in the way of rhetoric.

I've been studying the history of print in my research/bibliography class; apparently there were many poets and writers who were a bit embarrassed and sad about having their words go into print because it lost the artistic presence of handwriting and all the flairs and aesthetic that went into the cursives of the day. Now, handwriting is used less and less--even notes are typed out on laptops in many high schools these days.

But print today is not the same as the print of yesterday, and I feel like if Dr. Rice is right about composition classes and writing becoming more and more a digital thing, I think rhetoric is going to have replace the traditional modes of discourse that Bain came up with. If students understand logos, ethos, and pathos, that is going to guide them in knowing what their future websites should look like, what fonts (perhaps their own created fonts?) should look like to serve their purpose, and what the OVERALL communication of their piece (not just the words themselves) is going to express to a chosen audience.

Right now, students don't "get" this. I disagree with Dr. Rice about PowerPoints being graded on the thinking that went into them. The whole point of comp. classes is to learn to communicate student's thinking to an audience and to have words go from one person's head into another's. If a PowerPoint's aesthetics get in the way of this rhetoric, the student shouldn't do as well as another student whose PowerPoint is more effective because of not just the ideas but the ethos and the pathos. I think teaching rhetoric is more important than teaching essay genres. Particularly in this globalizing world, where everyone's Facebook accounts and blogs can be Googled by future employers, potential stalkers, and neighbors whose kids their kids play with, rhetoric needs to be understood and practiced so that we can all communicate ourselves and our ideas in the right ways.

Final thing I have to say: I like the idea of the "smart mob," and it reminds me of an Alduous Huxley article I used to teach called "Propaganda Under a Dictatorship." Huxley coined the phrase "herd-poisoning" to describe groups of people who thought the way they were raised to think, without questioning or re-examining traditions or ideas. He used Nazi Germany as an example of an entire nation "poisoned" from Hitler's rhetoric. Mark Twain covers this ground in his essay "Corn-Pone Opinions," where he quotes a slave he once knew as saying a man gets his opinions the same place as he gets his corn pone. If we don't know how to think critically of ourselves and the groups we choose to identify ourselves with, our minds will be poisoned, brainwashed. I think Huxley would say it takes a group of skeptical, questioning intellectuals who form together to make "smart mobs."

I think we should rename the term "composition course" to "rhetoric course" and teach just that: not just the spitting out of words, but the ability to sift words in, question them, study the rhetoric of them, digest them, add to them, and send the created, synthesized words out in their own devised rhetoric in order to reach other ears and eyes. And in this age, we don't just communicate to each other in 5-page double-spaced essays. Which is why Dr. Rice is making us blog to each other instead of collecting reflections each week.