I don't understand the Author's thought process in writing this essay; he clearly states that "no utterance is fully intelligible unless meaning-context and utterance are understood," yet he wrote an entire essay that is by my standards, and most other in our class, quite difficult to follow. Not impossible, but not only is it not written to be interesting, it is also evidence of the author attempting to much on building up his ethos or credibility. I feel as if the man is that one annoying kid in class that tries so hard to sound smart and will throw every large word he possible can in a sentence so that everyone in the class understands that they are not on his high academic level.
Now the author did successfully explain what rhetoric was, but again in the most wordy was possible. The author even starts out saying that it would be short and it is a paragraph long explanation that ended with the definition of his wordy rant: "In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action. The rhetor alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change. In this sense rhetoric is always persuasive." So, basically he is saying that rhetoric is written to persuade a reader, but never has to come out and say that the rhetor would like the reader to do something. He goes on to explain further rhetoric, but I found it almost daunting to read as he spoke in circles and continued to redefine rhetoric using larger and larger words.
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