1. What is Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric? What are the key parts of Aristotle’s definition? How does that definition help you re-view your writing this term? How could it help you revise your essays? 250 words
we’re going way back to 350 B.C.E. to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Don’t worry, you don’t have to read the whole text, only a part of one chapter. Read Book 1 Chapter 1 Part 1 at the MIT Classics archiveLinks to an external site.. You may read the entire chapter at that page if you wish, but for this discussion you only need to read to the end of Part 1.
2. As you review your classmates’ posts to follow up, what do you notice about their connections between Aristotle and their views of writing? Of analysis? Of argumentation? 250 words
Peer reply: Aristotle starts by saying “Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science.” What this means is that they both deal with topics that most people know and aren’t specific to any particular field of study. He says that most people already know how to use rhetoric and dialectic on a base level, it’s something that is intuitively learned through simply learning how to talk to people about things. He also says: “It is clear, then, that rhetorical study, in its strict sense, is concerned with the modes of persuasion. Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.” So rhetoric is the art of convincing people of things. To clarify, dialectic is the art of talking about the facts/ the truth of opinions. Aristotle says that is important to understand rhetoric even if you want to speak only the truth, you shouldn’t only occupy yourself with dialectic because it’s still necessary to convince people of the truth. He says it’s also important because those who want to not tell the truth will make use of rhetoric because they want to convince people also. Therefore, it would be important to understand their methods of persuasion in order to prove that they are wrong. I think the definition helps me review my writing because simply displaying facts does not constitute an argument really. You could post a chart, that would be dialectic. But how you interpret that chart could be different. That would be rhetoric. This could help me revise my essays because it would show me what parts of my essay are the facts and which are my opinions on the facts. That’s important when you’re writing an argumentative essay because you can’t argue facts, only opinions.
