Reflection 16

When one thinks of rhetoric, what is mostly associated with it? Automatically one may answer rhetorical question. At least that’s what popped up in my head. Rhetorical questions are the types of questions asked and not answered by whom it’s addressed. These questions are mostly associated with a parent scolding their child. They often ask rhetorical questions and the child usually knows which questions to answer and which ones are to be answered. Rhetoric was used as a way to persuade others to believe that whatever topic you were arguing was true. The Sophists were the people who often used this way to argue. They would argue the worst and make it seem like the best and argue the best as though it were the worst. Rhetoric was adopted by the Romans and made their own. They even centered their education on rhetoric in the form of declamation, which was a speech class were young men were assigned topics and instructed to give an appropriate speech on the topic that would advocate or lead to a specific course of action taken by the audience or the listeners of the speech. At the time when rhetoric was introduced to the Romans, they had a fascination with the Greeks and basically wanted to mimic them. Rhetoric derived from the Greeks and even at that time, Romans found it fashionable to even learn Greek. Ideas and traditions that arose from the Greeks were often thought suspicious but still highly regarded by the Romans. Declamation, which was taught in the schools, then began to advance into controversia, which was an invented legal case argued before an imaginary jury. This act was done publicly and was considered fashionable entertainment. Students were given the opportunity and have their parents’ as well as the community would come to witness such an event. Come to think about it, this reminds me of a person reading a monologue, expressing emotion and basically talking to the audience without any response. Rhetoric also played a role in the way literature and entertainment changed with the use of the controversia and the declamation. It even made a difference in storytelling. There was a point in time where rhetoric began to lose its weight in society and lost its intellectual edge. If you could speak properly and persuade people you were thought of as someone who was intelligent. Not to say that this isn’t true in modern society because people who have an extensive vocabulary are thought of as immaculate when at least 50 percent of the time the words they are using isn’t being used correctly.


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