Rhetorically Speaking...

Although I think Ramage loves seeing his words printed on paper and overindulges in his ramblings, making them quite lengthy(I can almost see him sitting at a computer desk twirling his mustache while smirking at his “self felt” brilliance of his words), I do think he has some good ideas. The trick is filtering out the important things from the rest of his useless digressions. Though I should mention, I haven’t really mastered this yet.

I liked a lot of the things he had to say about identity. Probably the most interesting thing to me was the whole “Rugged Individual” thing, and how a majority of people will relate to that stereotype regardless of what their “group” is. And when I thought about it, so many of our culture’s icons thrive around that concept. Whether it’s advertisements or celebrities, the outsider notion always seems to have an appeal to a large part of the audience. I also liked the whole describing and defining something by telling what it’s not (the crab claw story at the beginning of chapter 2).

That said, I’m going to reiterate my frustration at his blatant overuse of words and letters. He really should have cooled it down a bit when writing. There are sometimes where he tries so hard to avoid using a cliché that the passage he comes up with is ridiculous. For example, “Light as gossamer, blown hither and yon by every new wind of change and fashion, never looking beyond whatever advantage is to be gained from each exchange, they hopscotch their way through life.” (It’s on page 8). I’ll give him credit for trying to be creative, but reading this definitely made me like him less. He doesn’t need to expand so much, and that sentence didn’t make me understand the point any better.

If he wrote a little less, we’d all probably follow his logic a little better; he has some great points. I love the fact that he doesn’t tell us what rhetoric is, because it’s sort of an abstract concept that can’t really be accurately defined. And I guess that's his whole purpose in writing so ambiguously--rhetoric isn't clear, and neither is he. Well that was a stretch, but I thought I'd try to justify his writing style.