Rhetoric and Audience

I found Corbett’s article on classic rhetoric in the composition classroom to be the most influential for me, of the readings from this week…and no, this is not because it was the shortest of the three. I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of rhetoric is close to nil; my undergraduate studies of rhetoric left me with a sort of lofty definition: “the study of argument”. Now, I know there’s more to it than that, and I could extrapolate a little, but my ability to explain rhetorical studies is vague.

Still, I found Corbett’s explanation and defense of classical rhetoric terms and practices food for thought for my composition classes. I agreed with his statement that “students find theme-writing so unrealistic” because of the vague audience that they usually have to write to – the “general public”.

I also agree with and found that I have put into practice his idea that students need a solid, concise thesis statement before they can properly start an academic paper. I actually had them do an exercise in class yesterday (the day I handed out the assignment sheet for the research paper) that guided them through a self-questioning process in order to produce a thesis statement for their yet-unwritten papers.

I would be interested in what our creative writing focused people in this class have to say about his statement, near the end of the paper, of “But hasn’t the cult of self-expression had a fair chance to prove itself in the classroom? How often does the student with creative promise even show up in our classrooms?” He is basically saying, in my opinion, that classic rhetoric methodology should replace the majority of creative expression in academic writing. I don’t think they are mutually exclusive.

It seems like the theme for this week’s reading can be boiled down, yet again, to one word “audience”. In fact that seems to be one of the major themes for this class for the semester. All of which leads me to the question: How do we make a more concrete audience for our students to use for their Comp 110 papers? Or, how do we help them learn to seek their own audience? It seems that audience training is important to the English department here, but not to all of them. So, how do we teach them to help themselves in finding and/or creating an audience for future, non-110 papers?