A Journey Through The Land of Rhetoric

Rhetoric is what my professor said we would be reading. As he brought up the blog page on the first day of class, I was in no way ready for what would be revealed. During the weeks before that, winter break, I was so concerned about all of the reading I would have to do for my Teaching of Adolescent Lit. class. Jumping back and forth between Half.com books and Amazon, I was able to acquire the book for the course I'm in now. When I looked at the thin blue and beige book I thought to myself, “Hey this will be a easy read”. As we went through the blog page and Dr. Mahoney explained the reason for the blogg and the results of it being used for the course; I thought wow this is going to be a piece of cake. Then we proceeded to read some of the old postings as a class and that’s when I realized that this one book, Rhetoric, by Ramage was going to be the reason for my death. I just figured I would have to suck it up and just read the book and try to get something out of Rhetoric. So I laid out across my bed, opened the book, and that’s when my journey began.
There were tons of abolishing signs at the first place I came to. As I began to read them I noticed they were all about abolishing rhetoric. It seemed that this was a big deal. Reaching the center of the town, there were people everywhere giving various reasons as to why rhetoric should be abolished. I was so confused here I was in the mist of all of this and I didn’t even know what rhetoric was. I asked myself aloud, “Rhetoric, what the hell is it?” Well, I guess someone next to me assumed I was speaking to them and answered me with one idea of what it was. The answer I got was, “the capacity to find the available means of persuasion in a given circumstance.”(Ramage 6) I still didn’t understand what it was and of course saying this aloud to myself again, another person responded with their explanation of it. The explanation they had for me was, “ 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 one of them may be the more appropriate choice.”(Ramage 10)