After reading Herrick's piece about rhetoric, I feel like I don't view this form of writing any differently, only with a little more empathy. He brought up lots of examples proving that we use persuasion in almost every part of our lives: business, music, love, etc. Prior to Monday, I reserved persuasion for essays in English class and political debates, both inherently evil enterprises, but now I see how persuasion can exist everywhere and don't know where we would be without it. Rhetoric, in the sense of Athenian decisions on war or twisting the truth in "Thank You For Smoking", is just one way of looking at the genre.
I particularly liked the definition that characterized rhetoric as
"Achieving clarity through structure"
and
"Sense of beauty through aesthetics"
I think it casts rhetoric in a different light, a light that makes it seem both technical (clarity and structure) and persuasive (beauty and aesthetics).
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