Response 1

1. Hi, my name is Rob. I enjoy long walks on the beach, sports cars, and consuming excessive amounts of alcohol. I swear too much and like alternative rock. I can't figure out what the hell to do with my hair, and the fact that break is over and I'm back in class makes me want to vomit. I'm a senior professional writing major at KU, but I love it so much that I'll be back next year. What else is there to say?


2. It irritated me that rhetoric was never narrowed down to anything more than a sort of abstract concept. I like to deal in absolutes and definites because anything less than that doesn't seem real enough to me to make me care about it. There were times I was reading where I was like, "what the hell is he talking about"? Maybe Ramage never narrowed down rhetoric beyond vaguely hinting that it's a type of persuasion/persuasive language/way of thought because in rhetoric there is no single solid idea or absolute truth. I suppose he did hint at that in places. Well, good for him, but it still irriatated me.

I found it interesting that on the second page of the book Ramage immediately begins presenting criticisms of rhetorical thinking. I wonder if this was really a strong presentation strategy; to knock rhetoric down before he even clued us in to what his definition of rhetoric is. Sure, he refuted these criticisms by saying that they were, in fact, rhetorical themselves, but still... I felt the rest of the chapter was all over the place, and it was sort of hard for me to follow or even decide what the rest of the book might be about, or in which direction it might go. Is it going to teach us how to persuade people? Is that the idea? I don't really know. Needless to say (and I know you were dying to know this), I didn't particularly like this chapter.