Rhetoric

Rhetoric should mostly be practiced rather than theorized. Rhetoric classes should involve very little lecture from the teacher, and a lot of writing and speaking on the part of the student. However, teachers can provide something that few students can provide for themselves: initiation into literary culture and a high perspective on the online arenas of fiery intellectual debate.

Students almost always struggle with essays, forming opinions, and developing their own rhetoric that isn't just fed to them by adults. Usually this is because they don't know enough about anything yet to form decisive opinions and seriously back them up. The more you read about history, as well as experience in your own life, the more rich and thoughtful your arguments can be. And the more you read eloquent people argue in the present, the more context you can have to sort out your own thoughts and ways of phrasing things.

Furthermore, the younger students are, the less likely they are to be conscious about their political interests within their city or within their nation, and what talking points they should push to defend their way of life, or what sort of positions are worth defending in public.

My recommendation is for students who care seriously about advancing their skill in rhetoric is that they begin reading Arts and Letters daily, an aggregator of the top articles being published across the most prestigious literary magazines online, as well as the blogs of writers and theologians they respect, on a daily basis. Regularly reading short essays not only gives you much more intuitive awareness about how to write essays yourself in a satisfying and flowing manner, but also gives you a lot of interesting source material you can quote and riff off of in your writing directly.

Furthermore, students should seek out eloquent people online who represent their political and religious views and follow their accounts. Many of these accounts are anonymous, and students should form an anonymous account of their own, revealing no personal details other than to argue opinions with others and see what gets a reaction and what is ignored, what gets pushback and what is popular.

Anonymous participation in radical online literary and political groups is the most efficient way for young people to grow adept at mapping out the live rhetorical playing field. However, these circles can also be deceptive and unpleasant. So parents should be very careful about what sort of influencers their children are reading and listening to online.

Rhetoric classes today should be focused on developing savviness in the student regarding political philosophy, online epistemic communities, media spectacle, and cultural criticism -- including how to deal with critical theory. Ideally the student would grow adept at handling all of these cultural fronts, but for the many not called, all students can at least grow familiar with many forms of deception and manipulation in public speech, issued from the institutions that seek to persuade their souls -- the news, the academy, the church, the entertainment industry, and so forth.

Expectations:

Students express themselves with eloquence in person and online.

Students have thoughtfully determined what issues in culture, politics, and religion they are willing to fight for and what they are willing to be diplomatic about.

Students have their fingers on the pulse of the most persuasive work being done in literary and political circles, highbrow and lowbrow, and are beginning to find personalities they respect and disrespect.

Students grow in respect for the strengths and limitations of their own epistemic community while learning to acknowledge there may be intelligent and well informed people in other epistemic communities, without conceding to them just because they seem shiny and powerful.

Lessons

Rhetoric involves more exercises than discrete concepts, but there is still a groundwork that can be a helpful foundation for years of reading, writing, and oratory.

Quintilian

Cicero

Ethos

Pathos

Logos

Invention: Research, Copiousness

Style

Arrangement: Exordium, Narratio, Divisio, Confirmatio, Refutatio, Conclusio

Memory

Delivery

Stasis Theory:

Rhetorical Devices:

Epistemology and Rhetoric

Political Philosophy

Critical Theory and Wokeness

Cultural criticism: movies and shows as ethical and social allegories

Orators, Great and Terrible:

The Greatest Short Essays:

Twitter Rhetoric

TikTok Rhetoric

Streamers

Bloggers & Substacks

Essay Culture Online

Senior Thesis:

Exercises

Rhetoric work should primarily involve weekly exercises. Here are ideas of exercises that could be repeated day by day, week by week, or month by month.

1: Write a 200 word opinion piece and read it publicly. The larger the crowd, the better.

2: Write a 500-1000 word essay comparing different talking points and articles you've read about a cultural issue or controversy involving faith, science, law, medicine, feminism, sexuality, race, economy, politics, etc.

3: Disagree with someone on twitter by quote tweeting them, either with a short snappy response or a long thread with qualifications.

4: Create a youtube video comparing different talking points of popular online figures and refuting them.

5: Basic progymnasmata -- retell fables or stories from history; make or refute an argument; praise or condemn a public figure; speak in the voice of a famous person of the past; provide a detailed journalistic description of a person place or thing; argue against or in favor of a law.