Today the word "rhetoric" often has negative connotations.  If we say of a politician's speech that it was just "rhetoric," we mean that it sounded good but didn't really say anything important.  We might even mean that it was manipulative--it used language in a slick way to get us to agree with something we wouldn't otherwise agree with.

But it wasn't always so.  In fact, for much of Western history, "rhetoric" was considered very important.  From ancient Greece   through the Middle Ages in Europe, rhetorical skill was prized as a way of succeeding in life.

As with so many other founding principles of our culture, our understanding of rhetoric derives from the fifth century B.C. in Athens, Greece.  Many thinkers talked about and wrote about the importance of rhetoric.  The word implied a use of words, even a manipulation of words.  The emphasis was on oratory--public speaking--since at that time writing (whether on stone, bronze, wood, wax, clay or papyrus) was difficult and limited mostly to public records.  The primary mode of expression was oral.  At this time it was even common for people not to trust writing. Plato, for example, said that it gave people the appearance of knowing something when  they didn't really know it. 

Aristotle was the philosopher who first discussed rhetoric in detail.  Much of what he said is still useful today.  According to him, logic was one of many available means of persuasion.  People could also be persuaded by an appeal to emotions or to the character of the speaker, for example.

The ancient Greeks discussed the different aspects of rhetoric--such as how to find topics, how to organize the information, how to remember the points of the speech, how to gesture, etc.

In the Middle Ages rhetoric was one of the main subjects of the curriculum. Skill in oratory (public speaking) or written discourse were the major ways for someone to get ahead in the courts, the forum and the church.

In the Renaissance, after the invention of printing, rhetorical principles were applied on a large scale to written discourse. But since books were scarce, teaching was done by "lecture," which meant reading aloud from a book so that the students could make their own copies.

Despite its beginnings,  over time "rhetoric" came to take on   negative connotations, as mere ornamentation or worse--manipulation.  As printed books became more common, people started looking at the printed language as somehow more trustworthy than spoken language.  And teachers of "English" tried to focus on the words themselves, without reference to how they might be spoken or how they might be arranged on the page.  It supposedly made no difference how the words were printed.  The meaning was supposed to be the same. Whatever might have gone along with the words, whether it be gestures or intonations, or large, bold type, was largely ignored or treated as mere ornamentation.

Probably when you took an class (composition or even literature), you were encouraged to disregard everything except the words themselves.  You were encouraged not to look AT the words, but THROUGH them to the meaning.  You were not encouraged to think about how the way the words were pronounced or the way they were laid out on the page might influence the meaning of the text.

But

today with the advent of , the prevalence of desktop publishing and the almost universal creation of Web pages, people are starting to pay attention again to what had been ignored, namely what accompanies the words themselves. 

Today being "literate" no longer means just being proficient in the use of language.  It is now important for us to know how to use graphics and other elements to reinforce the verbal meaning of a message or to contribute to a different meaning.   It is becoming common today to talk of the "rhetoric" of visual art--the means at its disposal to contribute to meaning.

This doesn't mean that we can pay any less attention to language. In fact, since we will be using fewer words and coordinating those words with visual and other nonverbal elements, it is important that we use language as effectively as possible.

One of the aims of this course is to encourage you to pay attention to what surrounds, supports and modifies verbal meaning.  In terms of Web pages, this means paying attention to the various elements of graphic design--color, shape, arrangement, and so on--so that you can become an effective communicator in this new medium.

A term that is being used quite a bit now to describe how information is organized and presented is information architecture.

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