Author Archive for jocias

Emig and Eldred

Emig begins her essay by stressing the importance of verbal language on writing. Acquiring language without a doubt assists in the writing process because it enables one to generate ideas. These ideas then must be decoded into written characters. While…

Matsuda

Of course ESL students have different cultural backgrounds, education, and language proficiency as Matsuda mentions in his essay. Ignoring these elements of students only increases the difficulty of teaching them English. I was surprised to read that in 1939 I.A.…

Proposal

Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist and author, definitely left a unique mark on Harlem Renaissance literature. In her most significant work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston sends a feminist message about autonomy and remembering one’s experiences; nevertheless, many of her…

fox and li

Nothing is “basic” about Tom Fox’s article on basic writing. While initiation theory attempts to bring students of all kinds into one homogenous group, it ignores the cultural differences of students and promotes a single-minded approach towards writing. This rings…

Burke

“In the beginning was the word” that sparked the creation of language and its complex system of signifiers, an infinite loop expanding as new ideas breathe into existence. Burke calls the rhetorical use of these symbols magic; its practitioners, spellbinders.…

xing lu

Lu’s work, “Rhetoric in Ancient China” dispels several myths about Chinese rhetoric from a Western view. The first and perhaps most startlingly misunderstanding is the notion that Chinese rhetoric does not discuss logical arguments. On this common misperception Lu writes,…

Rushd

Rushd’s “The Incoherence of The Incoherence” deals with one of the, if not the, most complex and paradoxical arguments of all time: By what means was the universe created? In defense of Aristotle, Rushd describes the concept of the unmoved…

ramus and vico

Ramus sets out to debunk Quintillian’s claims by dissecting his work into more precise categories. He maintains that Quintillian intermingles rhetoric with other disciplines thus confusing its definition. For Ramus, an artist is defined only by the rules of his…

quintillian and aristotle

Throughout Aristotle and Quintillian’s works, we are presented with various interpretations of rhetoric. For Aristotle, rhetoric is “defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion”. In his neatly packaged treatise on rhetoric, Aristotle…

Gorgias

In Gorgias, Socrates concludes that rhetoric is the power of persuasion. By questioning Gorgias, it’s as though he reveals the truth about rhetoric by revealing that in itself it offers neither truth nor knowledge. When Gorgias states, “he should not…