Understanding Rhetoric . . . Or maybe just getting a slippery grip on it

Like Kaylee, I feel like I don't really have a true grasp on what I take "rhetoric" to mean. I feel like every time we come to some conclusion, some meaning, I lose grip on what I thought I knew about the thing and start getting a new and much more slippery grasp on rhetoric. And so it seems it must go. Don't feel alone in your struggle for understanding rhetoric Kaylee, I don't think anyone REALLY gets it even if they sound like they do . . . You never know when you're going to encounter something that totally shifts your view of rhetoric and tears all of the things you thought you knew to pieces! It seems to happen to me a-freaking-lot.

As with Kaylee, I tend to believe that rhetoric must come from human intention and creation. Although, this could simply be the way I think of the subject today, tomorrow I might see it in an entirely different light . You see, simply defined, I work on the idea that rhetoric is human interaction and communication of all forms. It doesn't necessarily have to be alphabetical. The odd thing is, is that if rhetoric doesn't have to revolve around the use of words yet it does have to be intentional, how can we say that animals are not intentionally communicating among each other? Here I am just playing devil's advocate to my own understanding of rhetoric, but you see the snag? Even in a definition as broad as the one I am working with as of late, there is still room for broadening it and making it even more discombobulated. I am not against the expansion of my own current working definition of rhetoric, but including animals as rhetors just seems a bit too far out there for me at the current moment.

For me, Ramage drew a more agreeable response from me in regards to the way rhetoric is presented and the way that I tend to see rhetoric. Much like Anjeli, I found myself highlighting certain things that really seemed to align with or expand upon my thoughts on rhetoric. One passage that really resonated with me was on page 10, "Rhetoric rejects the idea that the world consists entirely of true things that are real and untrue things that are illusory and that reason is the process by which we sort them out and rid the world of error and illusion. For rhetoric, the world is full of overlapping partial truths and the task of reason is to figure out which is truest--most meaningful, most effective--in a given situation, setting the others aside for the time being, possibly holding them in reserve for a different occasion when on of the may be the more appropriate choice." Of all of the things Ramage states in the first chapter, this is the truest for my current understanding of rhetoric.

While sometimes it seems that rhetoric is an all-encompassing umbrella, to me it seems more like a fashionable man putting on a different hat to suit the occasion spending his time beneath the umbrella of partial truths. No two occasions call for the exact same outfit, nor do any two occasions call for the same truth that rhetoric offers. I just found that profoundly instrumental in helping me to further get a firmer grip on the way that I see and understand rhetoric. I wouldn't say my grip is strong, or secure yet, but maybe a little less slippery than it was before I walked into this class and indulged in these readings! (PS today's rhetoric hat, I decided, was a nice bowler hat!)