Chapter Three

Ramage, oh Ramage. You remind me of two people.
1) The boy I had a crush on in elementary school. He was smarter than everyone else, and he knew it. I once hit him with a book in fourth grade.
2) Me, when I’m around small children. They bother me. So I use big words to confuse them in the hopes that they’ll leave me alone.

Unfortunately, I can neither leave Ramage alone, nor hit him with a book. As it is, no matter how irritated I am by his style- which screams, "Look at me, look at me! I am ever so smart!"- I must swim through his overuse of language in order to find points and comment on them.

I liked the bit about rhetoric being like Kenneth Burke’s view of persuasion as a sort of courtship. However, that was more Kenneth Burke’s clever idea than Ramage’s.

In class the other day, I think someone said that Ramage reminded them of the sort of person who would take a joke and analyze it so much it’s no longer funny. He actually did that in this chapter with Jack Benny’s joke. It does illustrate his point in sort of an extreme way, as Ramage does imply (but does not clearly state, as is his infuriating style).

It was in the section "The Continuum of Persuasive Practices: From Propaganda to Literature" that I began to wonder if by ‘authors’ he meant himself. Especially in the sentence, "Just as the way of rhetoric encourage us to slow the production of symbolic acts by taking into account the particulars of our circumstances, the products of pure persuasion force slower, "thicker" readings of themselves on us through self-referentiality and dialect."
Aha! I said, "He’s revealed his evil plan to us!" But it really doesn’t do much good. It’s like a mad scientist saying, "Mad scientists might have secret plans to take over the earth by secretly reprogramming microwaves!" That’s super, but even if it’s true, there’s nothing we can do but unplug our microwave and keep going.

By the way, "self-referentiality" isn’t a word.