By far, the most impactful thing I encountered in school was this thing called “rhetoric”. It was a word I’d heard a few times before, though most memorably as a lyric in a song called “The Artist in the Ambulance” by a band called Thrice.
“Rhetoric can’t raise the dead / I’m sick of always talking when there’s no change / Rhetoric can’t raise the dead / I’m sick of empty words, let’s lead and not follow”
— “The Artist In the Ambulance” (Dustin Kensrue)
The words are belted out into the bridge of the song and, for some reason, stood out to me. Still, I had no real understanding of what the word meant. I remember stepping into my first rhetoric class in grad school without a real grasp of what I was about to study. My understanding was limited to hearing people speak of “rhetorical questions” with no further explanation of what exactly a rhetorical question might be. What made it “rhetorical”?
After that first class, rhetoric colored my world. In practice, it required the type of active attention and critical focus I already gave to things that I found interesting. In theory, it resembled the literary criticism I had encountered as an English Major.
Of course, I also credit my passion for rhetoric to factors outside of academia, though still part of my immediate “scene” to borrow a term from Kenneth Burke, whose Dramatism plays a major role in my own classroom. At the same time I was taking this class I was well into my 7th year working as upper management at a local movie theatre chain. I was also in my second year of working as a teller at a bank in east Los Angeles. Florence & Central; the bank was synonymous with busy, yet it wasn’t the easiest place to make “a sale”. It was an excellent environment within which to own my rhetorical skill, even before I knew this had anything to do with such a thing as rhetoric. Having to exist in different spaces, at different levels of authority and responsibility, all while pursuing the similar goal of making a profit provided rhetorical insight — especially when I was put in charge of marketing campaigns that very literally use the same rhetorical strategies one studies in a rhetoric classroom.
By studying (some fraction of) the vast body of work devoted to the study of rhetoric, I’ve come to see its scope extend into every field and situation that deals with language and human thought, although many will contend that these extend beyond the reach of rhetoric. You see, it is a field riddled with as much drama and intrigue as an Episode of Game of Thrones. Life itself, both at the scale of human history and private memoir does resemble and ongoing drama, in the end.
Professor Gomez 