Ramage chapter 2

Like many others said in the class last week, I found myself glazing over most of the reading due to the wordiness of the whole thing. However, I also find myself being drawn back to it by certain standout points that really made me think. Chapter 2 was much the same as Chapter 1 in that manner. I found it interesting where he discusses how people tend to define themselves. Mostly, people define themselves by certain traits they believe they posess, but rhetoricians view someone's life as a work in progress. There really are no words that are really fitting to define someone's life because you would only be able to define a portion of it, because only a portion of it has been lived.
Along with this idea, I found it interesting how Ramage pointed out how people often can tell (or think they can tell) alot about someone else by their vocation. It is often assumed that someone who is a doctor is automatically very intelligent, but why would you want to think anything different of someone who is going to possibly perform an operation on you. Would it make any difference if that doctor was the top of his/her graduating class or just scraped by? They have the degree, they have the title. As mentioned a little later on in the Chapter, if you can't figure enough out about a person by their job, you could also look toward the type of car that they drive.