Research and Credibility in Rhetoric
This is part of a series of posts about rhetoric and feminism. I’ll be writing these responses every week as part of my graduate class about Topics in Rhetoric this semester, and I welcome any and all responses!
To be totally honest, I did not find this week’s readings as fascinating as last week’s. I think this is largely because I’m not as interested in classical studies as I am more modern ones, so reading about classical theories of rhetoric wasn’t as exciting to me. That aside, I did find a number of passages that were, again, interesting to me as a feminist blogger and as part of the feminist blogging community and as a teacher.
I first found it interesting that “Quintilian compares on the teacher-student relationship to one between loving father and devoted son… Thus he would inspire love of learning, not fear of punishment” (Quintilian 294). We have definitely carried on this tradition in teaching up through modern times, and this is especially true when we discuss effective teaching techniques. Every article or post or discussion about effective teaching that I’ve been a part of has discussed fostering productive relationships with students, and this begins with inspiring students to learn, not intimidating them into doing so. Apparently Quintilian was on to something here, because I have also found in my personal experience that responding to students with the intention of helping them rather than punishing them is much more effective.
As a teacher and a writer, I also found it interesting that “Aristotle devoted a large portion of the Rhetoric to invention, or the finding of materials and modes of proof to use in presenting those materials to an audience” (Foss, Foss, and Trapp 7). In school, when I teach writing or speech, there is a great deal of emphasis on finding information. Whether this is to make an informed opinion yourself or to establish credibility, it is vitally important to begin the writing process with at least a little research. Not only do I stress this as I’m teaching, but I try to do the same in my own writing, especially when it comes to my feminist blogging community, and I do believe all of the community members try to do the same, as well. I have found in the past that, if I try to just write something down without doing at least a little research into the background of the situation, my audience will generally call me out on it, or at least post a few links to articles for me to read in order to broaden my perspective. Also, it is important to check the credibility of your sources, which can be very difficult to do on the internet. This is why I do not allow my students to do anything but cursory research on the internet and constrain their true research to online databases purchased by the school and books or printed magazine articles. As a blogger, however, that is not always possible because so much of what one is reading and responding to are others’ opinions posted on their blogs, but if the author has gone a long way to establish his or her own credibility by linking to academic studies or articles or other well-respected sites, it’s generally seen as OK to quote them. After all, as Plato said: “any man who does not know the truth, but has only gone about chasing after opinions, will produce an art of speech which will seem not only ridiculous, but no art at all” (Foss, Foss, and Trapp 7).
Finally, this idea shows up in Rhetorica ad Herennium, as well: “Finally, they say the highest art resides in this: in your selecting a great diversity of passages widely scattered and interspersed among so many poems and speeches, and doing this with such painstaking care that you can list examples, each according to its kind, under the respective topics of the art” (253). It seems here that these classical rhetoricians and theorists do privilege research a great deal, which, because of my writing and teaching practices, makes sense to me, and also happens to validate my teaching and writing processes.