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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

He was an ancient Greek — a rhetorician — a 'composition major' of his time.†
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The rhetoricians of ancient Greece were the first teachers in the history of the Western world.†
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The subject he'd been brought here to teach was rhetoric, writing, the second of the three R's.†
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To a methodical, laboratory-trained mind, rhetoric is just completely hopeless.†
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What you're supposed to do in most freshman-rhetoric courses is to read a little essay or short story, discuss how the writer has done certain little things to achieve certain little effects, and then have the students write an imitative little essay or short story to see if they can do the same little things.
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rhetoric = study of the technique and rules for using language effectively -- especially to persuade

What was depressing was that the text was one of the most rational texts available on the subject of rhetoric and it still didn't seem right.†
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The text started with the premise that if rhetoric is to be taught at all at a University level it should be taught as a branch of reason, not as a mystic art.†
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Therefore it emphasized a mastery of the rational foundations of communication in order to understand rhetoric.†
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He felt there was something wrong with it, but that the wrongness was not in this application of reason to rhetoric.†
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Another thing that depressed him was prescriptive rhetoric, which supposedly had been done away with but was still around.†
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There was a minimum prescriptive-rhetoric requirement in the department, but like the other teachers he scrupulously avoided any defense of prescriptive rhetoric other than as a "requirement of the college."†
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There was a minimum prescriptive-rhetoric requirement in the department, but like the other teachers he scrupulously avoided any defense of prescriptive rhetoric other than as a "requirement of the college."†
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Using his class notes as reference material I want to reconstruct the way in which Quality became a working concept for him in the teaching of rhetoric.†
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His second phase, the metaphysical one, was tenuous and speculative, but this first phase, in which he simply taught rhetoric, was by all accounts solid and pragmatic and probably deserves to be judged on its own merits, independently of the second phase.†
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As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin.†
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Now, at last, the standard rhetoric texts came into their own.†
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What had started out as a heresy from traditional rhetoric turned into a beautiful introduction to it.†
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But they saw only the word and its rhetoric context.†
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His attempt to come up with something substantial led to further crystallization beyond the traditional limits of rhetoric and into the domain of philosophy.†
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I was talking about the first wave of crystallization outside of rhetoric that resulted from Phaedrus' refusal to define Quality.†
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In addition to these three classical logical refutations there are some illogical, "rhetorical" ones.†
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Phaedrus, being a rhetorician, had these available too.†
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Socrates, that ancient enemy of rhetorical argument, would have sent Phaedrus flying for this one, saying, "Yes, I accept your premise that I'm incompetent on the matter of Quality.†
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A third rhetorical alternative to the dilemma, and the best one in my opinion, was to refuse to enter the arena.†
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He showed the absurdity of trying to derive zero from any form of mass-energy, and then asked, rhetorically, if that meant the number zero was "unscientific."†
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The argument that the world was all mind might be a sound logical position but it was certainly not a sound rhetorical one.†
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The relationship of Quality to the area of Art has been shown rather exhaustively through a pursuit of Phaedrus' understanding of Quality in the Art of rhetoric.†
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I've sometimes thought of him as a student but not as a rhetoric student.†
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In time, Phaedrus abandoned the labor of pounding his head against the Chairman's rhetoric and tried to discover more about the background of the committee, hoping that would explain what this was all about.†
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When Phaedrus and his family arrived in Chicago, he took up residence near the University and, since he had no scholarship, began full-time teaching of rhetoric at the University of Illinois, which was then downtown at Navy Pier, sticking out into the lake, funky and hot.†
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Phaedrus noted that the time set for the class conflicted with his schedule at Navy Pier and chose instead another one, Ideas and Methods 251, Rhetoric.†
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Since rhetoric was his own field, he felt a little more at home here.†
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Rhetoric is an art, Aristotle began, because it can be reduced to a rational system of order.†
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He read on: Rhetoric can be subdivided into particular proofs and topics on the one hand and common proofs on the other.†
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Did Aristotle really think his students would be better rhetoricians for having learned all these endless names and relationships?†
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And if not, did he really think he was teaching rhetoric?†
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At the end of the hour he finally asked, "May questions about Aristotle's rhetoric be asked?†
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The next week Phaedrus had read the material and was prepared to take apart the statement that rhetoric is an art because it can be reduced to a rational system of order.†
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He points his finger at the student and demands, "According to Aristotle: What are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?"†
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You, sir, what are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?†
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Aristotle fouled up what Phaedrus wanted to say by placing rhetoric in an outrageously minor category in his hierarchic order of things.†
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Thus Quality, in Aristotle's system, is totally divorced from rhetoric.†
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This contempt for rhetoric, combined with Aristotle's own atrocious quality of rhetoric, so completely alienated Phaedrus he couldn't read anything Aristotle said without seeking ways to despise it and attack it.†
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This contempt for rhetoric, combined with Aristotle's own atrocious quality of rhetoric, so completely alienated Phaedrus he couldn't read anything Aristotle said without seeking ways to despise it and attack it.†
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Rhetoric is a counterpart of dialectic, it had said, as if this were of the greatest importance, yet why this was so important was never explained.†
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The only thing that was clear was that Aristotle was very much concerned about the relation of rhetoric to dialectic.†
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Phaedrus guessed that Aristotle's diminution of dialectic, from Plato's sole method of arriving at truth to a "counterpart of rhetoric," might be as infuriating to modern Platonists as it would have been to Plato.†
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Phaedrus wasn't insulted that dialectic had been brought down to the level of rhetoric.†
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He was outraged that rhetoric had been brought down to the level of dialectic.†
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The course in the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was not concerned with Plato's notion of the Good, however; it was concerned with Plato's notion of rhetoric.†
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Definition:

(rhetoric)
the use of (or study of using) words to make a point -- typically implying skillful use

editor's notes: Rhetoric is used with many connotations. "Effective rhetoric" has a positive connotation, If someone says something is "just rhetoric," they're implying that the words may make a good surface impression, but they are lacking in substance.