blog 3

Reading this week's assignment, I kept thinking about how this was relevant to my preparation as a teacher, and also how I would potentially use this in my classroom. What do a bunch of dead guys matter to me or my students? Furthermore, with all these definitions of rhetoric crashing into each other, how is anyone supposed to get a solid idea of what the word really means?

I'll focus of the second question first. my saving grace for a definition of rhetoric came on page 2: "the focus on examining how people use language to attain certain ends." I felt that all Williams' other definitions were not really clear. I think this was because there are so many different uses and different definitions of the word that it's hard to nail down a single definition, but the one on page 2 nailed it.

I began to think how this definition related to the rest of the chapter. By looking at different orators throughout history, we see how people influence others. This, to me, is rhetoric. And this is what any writer is trying to do. As we've learned in class, we are always writing for an audience, so we are always trying to write to have some sort of influence on our audience.

So now the first question: why should we care about a bunch of dead guys? Well, I think we can learn a lot from them. They influenced so many people with just words. And that is the skill we are trying to teach kids: writing to express an opinion and trying to persuade people to listen to their views and maybe believe them.