I believe many of our modern society assess writing to be a dying art. Many of my peers complain of not wanting to read and not wanting to write. How can I blame them? In an age in which we can spend hours at a time looking into a glowing screen filled with seemingly overflowing wells of content, more images and ideas than we can even process at a time flash before our eyes at a moment’s notice, I understand why words are not as stimulating. The screen can even write for you now. Yet, as David Russell puts it in “American Origins of the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Movement” writing is “a complex and continuously developing response”, a powerful limb that, with exercise, is capable of evoking some of the most powerful things on Earth- human feelings (25).
No matter the venue, attracting the attention of and evoking emotions in others will always be the most powerful weapon on the planet. In our age, the fastest way to do that is through social media. “Exactly!” You may yell in my face, “I don’t need writing to do social media!” The point is that elevating your writing elevates every aspect of your communication. Writing is not a “set of generalizable, mechanical skills “independent” of disciplinary knowledge, learned once and for all at an early age”, its a muscle that when exercised properly improves every aspect of your communication and therefore your ability to connect with others (25).
When we use the word rhetoric in modern conversation, it’s perceived as vapid language, something we would assign to an artificial language model. In reality, it’s a defining mark of humanity. The desire to persuade, utilizing symbols to communicate and convince, is so uniquely human. This modern confusion about the roots and connotations of rhetoric are demonstrative of our shift in culture.
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