Valedictorian speech rejected  for being too original. link

I don't know why I haven't until now thought to keep some chreia examples laying about:

One who would persuade others has to admit he needs other's help. No introvert would do this willingly or happily if willingly. The fundamental rule of persuasion, know your audience, is unnecessary for people who live among and with and for people. But it is practically inscrutable for those of us who don't tend to live among others.

People who are interested in how things work tend to focus on subtle distinctions and curious words. We are focused on what interests us, which is only relevent to others to the extent that we are aware that we are not other than ourselves. And this simple truth doesn't come quickly to introverts beyond the intellectual level. Yeah, of course the the rugged individual is nonesensical architype today. No one really lives alone among others no matter how deeply he lives in his head. Still, the I suppose some would say childish, tendency to focus inward obliviates the outwardly obvious.  

If the primary question for one who would be persuasive is, "What is in it for them?" and one's default answer is, "I'd rather not care.", one has a devastating rhetorical problem.

From The Affluent Society

"The creation of artificial wants through advertising and the propensity for emulation shifts resources toward private goods and away from public goods that have greater inherent value. New automobiles are seen as being more important than new roads; vacuum cleaners in the home are desired more than street cleaners. Alcohol, comic books, and mouthwashes take on a greater aggregate importance than schools, courts, and municipal swimming pools."

classify / categorize -- assigning specimens to their taxa (class)

class / category

taxonomy (rules of arrangement) -- science of classification of living things grouped by similarity

taxis (engl. classify or categorize)-- an arranging, drawing up, ordering -- a line of soldiers

division is seperating someting into parts, whether the parts are natural or not
analysis is seperating someting into parts, where the parts are natural segments

analysis (gk merismos) -- breaking a complex thing (a whole) into its component parts (elements)
and discovering the relationship among the parts

given "jake"
what characteristics are properties --  curly tail, blunt nose, faun color
what characteristics are attributes -- thief, shaddow, companion
what characteristics are accidents -- snoring, wagging tail, yoddeling
which characteristic is essential -- the pug dog at 38 sycamore station

http://classicpersuasion.org/

need to add this to /8170 when you get back from wpa.

Some books on delivery

A good critical thinking through writing assignmetn might be to have studnts respond to an editorial using their discipline's specific questions about evidence and inference, rather than their unquestioned political opinions. Below is a link to bio fuel and world food supply. It would make for an ineresting starting point.

http://newstatesman.com/200804170025

Amen David Simon

"Rhetoric, Theory and the imperative of performance: Byzantium and now" Margaret Mullett 151 170. Rhetoric in Byzantium. Elizabeth Jeffreys. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

Elaboration is an ancient assignment : given a proverb or adage, say more, explain where it came from, who used it, what it means (explication) or how it can be used. Erasmus's Adages is a fine example. One in particular attracted my attention as I was casting about for bits on rhetoric and power:

"The man who lays in ambush for his enemy does so in silence; the man who trusts his own strength charges down with shouts upon the foe"

This quotation is from item 72, "No sooner said than done" , Erasmus says of the adage, "the Greek gives the same meaning in a single word autoboei, with the shout, which looks like a metaphor from the shouting of soldiers, by which the enemy is sometimes put to flight before the battle has been joined. It is so used by Thuscydides. Thepompus has it in the sense of 'with all one's might,' and not from ambush"

So, weirdly, "with a rebel yell" is a classical allusion.

Bryan Garsten. Saving Persuasion: A defense of Rhetoric and Judgement. Harvard UP, 2006

Cato the Elder (234-149 BC)

"Rem tene; verba sequentur" Grasp the subject, and the words will follow."

"orator est, Marce fili, vir bonus, dicendi peritus", frag. 14

I just cut and pasted this whole article. If you click on the title, it will take you to the original publication.

Coffee makes us say 'yes'

You're more open to suggestion with a cup of coffee in your hand, research shows (Image: iStockphoto)

A software developer named Christopher Hawkins has an entry on his blog that I'm going to quote with elipses at some length because it's an interesting side-bar to Bernays' Propaganda.

(link) 

Someone named Christoper Hawkins, who seems to be a software guy with an eye for business practices, has an interesting piece on his blog about what we might call the "new PR", since I've been reading Bernays. Below are a few quotations to get the gist. (link)

Thoughts for the new FYC

Concept: website with modules teachers can plug into their own course designs

• html
• page to screen
• evolution of the web
• static vs dynamic
• online practices changing RL
• cyberdentity
• collaboration
• email
• online research
• weblogging
• critique web page
• terminology test (automated)
• power point presentations
• tour of facilities
• wiki
• separation of form and content
• plagiarism
• layout and cognition
• parameters on what to do and not do re using computers -- don't touch their keyboard
• endnote
• contingency strategies

"Viewing the Dawns of our Past Days" Richard Leo Enos 8 - 21. Defining the New Rhetorics. Ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1993.

Daniel Fogarty, Roots for a New Rhetoric. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1959.

Fogarty is arguing for a new philosophy of rhetoric based on Burke, Richards, and the General Semanticists Korzybski and Hayakawa and Irving J. Lee. (3-4) He asserts that:

"On Distinctions between Classical and Modern Rhetoric" from Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Students, eds, Connors, Ede, Lunsford. Carbondale: SIUP, 1984. 37 - 49. Corbett's festshrift.

Lundsford and Ede also assert that "Wilbur Samuel Howell, whose works on sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century rhetoric have become standard texts, also identified persuasion as the goal of classical rhetoric and specifically argues that "new" eighteenth-century rhetoric explicitly embraced exposition and communication as goals. " Many contemporary rhetorical scholars "claim that the new rhetoric, on the other hand, stresses not coercive persuasion but communication, understanding, and reduction of threat through dialogue. (37-39)

Courage is to do something in the face of grave personal danger?

e.g. going into battle, snitching on the executives (whistle- blowing)

e.g., but also breaking into a house, robbing people

so if the given definition of courage stands, we can’t differentiate good courage from bad courage.

Which could lead to the alarming conclusion that the trade tower bombers were courageous.  So, we need to differentiate good courage from bad courage. Good is the opposite of bad, and cowardice is the opposite of courageous. But they still acted in the face of grave personal danger. So, maybe the definition needs to be refined

Courage is doing the right thing in the face of danger. If that’s the case, what’s the opposite of courage?  

One of the topics is to argue for something by dividing it into it's parts, often resulting in a sort of definition. Here's an example in reverse. From The Simpsons:

A standard piece of ancient rhetorical advice is that the virtues of diagesis or narration is clarity, brevity, and credability. Part of credability is that the speakers actions and words need to be reflective of his or her character and lifestyle. Here's an example from The Simpsons:

A chreia in the form of an enthymeme composed of the topos of the greater and the lesser, the cause of a greater good is greater than the cause of a lesser good.

From Progymnismata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric, George A Kennedy, "The Exercises of Aelius Theon"

Several of us have talked about how the blog is a modern commonplace book. As i went looking for references to the practice popularized during the Renaissance I happened across a notice from the Beinecke Library at Yale, announcing (it took place in 2001) an exhibit of commonplace books down through the ages. (link)

See also Earle Havens, Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century.  (link)

And "Renaissance Commonplace Books from the British Library" (link), introduced by William H. Sherman, refers to Ann Moss's Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, v). 

Sherman observes that the commonplace book well suited the erra's "emphasis on imitation and 'copia' rather than originality."

Sherman continues:

And he goes on to note

Joshua Ellis on Mindjack has an article in which he coins the phrase "taste tribes" to signify the phenomenon of people congregating online around shared appreciations. If I go to your blog and see you're reading Marquez, we have an instant if superficial and ephemeral connection. Ellis says this is how communities are made online. It seems to me also a bit like ethos of old. Whereas in the rhetorical past communities existed and one had to fit oneself in, now one has to construct a community by creating an attractive fit. (rambling, haven't thought it through).

(link)