Call it what you want, an apple is still an apple.

        Overall the history of rhetoric and rhetorical science was interesting. What stood out most to me was in the way that the periods were divided. Despite the overwhelming use of rhetoric for religious purposes through the medieval period, it was seen as stagnant. But it seems to me that rhetorical science was one of the few sciences that flourished. While it was mostly guided by the church, there was no end to the study, testing, and ultimately, the use of what had already been theorized about by the Greeks, but also in the development and testing of new methods by different religious organizations. What we lack is publication of the methods because their uses were so guarded by the organizations that used them.

 

        When I look at the climate of the world today, I see that the use of rhetoric is more important than ever. The number of different ways that we can communicate with each other makes it so much easier to get the message out. We’ve gone from spoken word, to written word, to digital words. Even now I am able to communicate my thoughts and ideas to millions of people with just a few keystrokes. That doesn’t necessarily make what I say the truth though. If I wanted to I could post online a picture of an apple, and call it an orange. I’m sure I could come up with all kinds of philosophical statements relating to the validity of my claim. Like a commercial I recently saw said “Everything on the internet is true”, people who believe that would be easily led to my way of thinking and start calling apples oranges. Despite my assertions though, the apple is still an apple.

 

Communication has existed since the first life form bumped into the second one. While rhetoric has become more sophisticated and elegant, in some ways it has also become more simple and dangerous. The right words in the wrong hands can be just as dangerous as giving loaded weapons to monkeys. Knowing the history of how rhetoric was used will hopefully help us to use communication skills and our knowledge of them more responsibly than some of our predecessors.