Is Rhetoric Black and White?

Now that we are at the end of the semester it only seems appropriate to think about the beginning, that first day sitting in class when all of us were full of questions and wonder. We so badly wanted to master what it was that we were about to learn and had so hoped that it would come easily.

Week after week, we read all different kinds of rhetorical compositions. Some focused more upon eloquence, some concentrated on oratory and the list goes on and on. With each reading throughout this semester I found myself becoming so confused. Each reading left an impression on me of rhetoric and what it should mean, and those meanings tangled, and twisted, and wrapped around each other. But not a single reading left me with an impression of rhetoric that mirrored another.

But of course, not until our very last reading of the semester does it all come together. In Royster’s piece everything made sense to me at last because of the way that she explains the way most of us view rhetoric and how that can be changed to provide a different outcome.

The entire time that I was trying to find one single definition of rhetoric that could be applied in all situations so that I could have an easier time making sense of things. What I should have been referring to Royster’s ideas about landscape.

When I think about rhetoric as a landscape it all makes so much sense to me. Rhetoric has many different textures. Some poetic and flowing like a river, and some are more academic which have a clear high and a clear low, just like a mountain. But the important thing to remember is that the landscape is always changing over time. Over time, rhetoric is studied and analyzed immensely, this is kind of like the whether that erodes away at the original landscape and makes it something slightly different. Another way that the landscape is changing is with the addition of new landscapes or new studies of rhetoric.
Another really interesting point that she brings up which has allowed me to come full circle in the class is that we can learn the most about rhetoric not by defining it, but by questioning it. So often in the course I was just trying to pin down a solid idea of rhetoric, but in reality when we look at rhetoric through all types of lenses, and ask questions, we learn more than we had ever anticipated.

Royster's work has been the most influential to me in this course by teaching me that learning about a certain subject does not have to be black or white. There is a lot of gray to rhetoric which use to scare me but now I know it is something to be embraced.