What is a Rhetorician?

What is a Rhetorician?

As an English teacher, I've been very fortunate to teach at a school (Brookline HS) that gives me great leeway when it comes to deciding upon curriculum.  For the past six years, I've been the only teacher of the public speaking course, a course I designed myself--so I've been pretty much on my own, for better or for worse.

This has enabled me to figure out one of the most important elements of any class: what the class is really about.

As any rhetorician will tell you, it's all about how you frame it; the frame is what makes the contents make sense.  Change the frame, and you change the meaning.

So, after six years, I've discovered that what I really teach--what I really WANT to teach--is rhetoric.  I am a rhetorician.

And what, you may ask, is a rhetorician?

Well, for starters, a rhetorician is someone who studies how words shape meaning, how words encourage meaning, and how words limit meaning.

As a meteorologist might study the flow of clouds to understand the working of weather (and tomorrow's forecast); as a hydrologist might study the flow of water to understand tides and erosion and drainage; a rhetorician studies the flow of words for how words encourage, enable, and limit the making of meaning and understanding.

For example:

A man walks into a bar.  He's confronted by a local tippler who asks, "Are you for or against abortion?"

The rhetorician, sitting upon a nearby bar stool, knows that said tippler has deployed one of the most powerful and destructive of all rhetorical tools known to man: the question.  First off, the question demands an answer.  How can anyone not feel obligated to answer a question?  Second, a question frames the discussion.  The poor interlocutor is either for it or against it.

The rhetorician intrudes.  "Excuse me, but what does it mean to be 'for abortion?'" he asks.  He notes that neither man is likely to ever have one and that the word "abortion" might refer to a variety of different things.  Actually (he points out), the debate the question provokes is really one about the RIGHT for women to have an abortion, but that's actually a different question than if one thinks abortion is a good idea or not (as one can be Pro-Choice and still see abortion as a bad thing).  He goes on to remind both parties that in the 18th century, many doctors focused on procedures to re-start the menstruation process, so that even the concept of "abortion" is already biasing the discussion.  The formulation assumes that the focus of the medical procedure in question is to end a process rather than to re-start one.

One can easily see how some rhetoricians have come to be seen as a public nuisance.  They seem to turn the apparent clarity of language into an opaqueness that halts all discursive progress.

Socrates was made to drink hemlock.

So why (you might ask) would I want to be one of those people? and why would I want to train my students in this apparently annoying art?

[stay tuned]