Why does everyone hate rhetoric?

One week ago I really had no idea of what rhetoric was. After reading the assigned articles and blogs from other classmates, I feel fairly confident in my grasp of the whole idea. The two readings helped to give an idea of the characteristics of rhetoric, where it is used, and how it is practical to our everyday lives. Our class discussion on Tuesday made the theory of rhetoric even clearer to me and I loved hearing everyone’s ideas. In Erin’s blog on rhetoric she explained how she had always seen rhetoric as very negative and even after the reading, some of her negative perceptions still remained. One question I had before our discussion was, why does rhetoric have such a bad reputation in the first place?

The second paragraph in Herrick’s introduction began talking about Plato and his negative attitude towards rhetoric, but I did not completely understand everything until our discussion in class. Scot talked about the long history of rhetoric and its origins in ancient Greece. He explained how Greek men wanted to learn the art of rhetoric and sophists were those who taught it. The sophists talked style. They would explain how to use language colorfully, and how to craft the message to each audience. Plato was really the first person to give rhetoric a bad name because he disliked the sophists since they were paid. Plato thought teaching should only be for the benefit of the students. So, this helped me to understand where these negative feelings began. I think that people who dislike rhetoric in our world today only focus on the ways in which rhetoric has perhaps been corrupted (politics) and completely overlook how rhetoric is used for good in our everyday lives. This can even be seen with Plato. When he made arguments against the sophists, was he not also practicing rhetoric? The last part of Herrick’s introduction was a great explanation of how rhetoric can be used for good as in building community and spreading knowledge.

The clips from the movie “thank you for smoking” were very interesting and I thought it was a great way to visually see the use of rhetoric. The first clip we saw was when he was talking to his sons classmates. In this clip he used one characteristic of rhetoric mentioned in Herrick’s introduction which is adapting your arguments to the audience. He made connections between his argument and things that were familiar to the children. However, he was basically trying to convince the children to try smoking and find out if it is really bad. So, here is a perfect example of how rhetoric can be used in a negative way. The second clip is when the father is trying to explain his job as a lobbyist to his son. They begin to argue about which ice cream flavor is better, chocolate or vanilla? Instead of his father arguing about how good vanilla was, he began talking about liberty and that people should have the right to choose their favorite ice cream flavor. He did not try to win the argument, he just tried to make the other person wrong. He kind of goes around the question and doesn’t answer it directly. This is an example of how rhetoric is planned. He knew what his intentions were when he first started his argument. This concept is also explained in detail in Herrick’s introduction. One other example of rhetoric I thought of in class was the movie "The Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore. The whole movie uses rhetoric to get his point across.

Based on all of our readings and class discussion, my overall perception of the art of rhetoric is that it is a good practice. However, like all things, it can be used in negative ways. We can try to reduce the ways in which rhetoric is used wrongly, but someone will always be eager to corrupt its use. Rhetoric is an ancient practice and it is not going away anytime soon, especially since it is essential to our everyday lives.