As far as I can remember, the earliest form of a pre-write that I was taught was a mind map. Somewhere on the page, a circle is drawn with a thesis or idea that could be used for a central theme is written down and then a thin line is used to connect supporting ideas to the main one in a flowing way to a meaningful implication(also composed in the beginning), like using a GPS to find points of interest on a trip from Bozeman to Phoenix. This method is great if the author already has a good idea of what implications they want a reader to gather from their writing. One teacher introduced me to a method called stream of consciousness, where a word or phrase that is particularly interesting is written down and then a free flowing stream of words or phrases associated with the original sentence and the other phrases are written down in quick succession.
One idea that I ascribe to is to read. Ask a teacher for an example, find a essay along similar lines, and read a bunch of them.
However, my favorite method of pre-write was introduced to me by my 10th grade English teacher. It's called, "Start the damn thing." Basically, what Zachary Kuhn's philosophy was to start the paper. Sit down at the computer, type a sentence, read it out loud. Change some words, add some, delete some, delete the whole thing if it's crap. Write an introductory paragraph using several different leads and styles, maybe even emulating the essay that you read along similar lines.
A question that I had about the Aristotle reading was this: If the power of persuasion is so powerful, can it overpower the will of the gods?
You are the 2nd person that has mentioned reading. I undeniably, wholeheartedly agree.
ReplyDeleteAs for your question: yes, Zeus was talked out of many, many things by his insatiable Hera!
I love the idea of "start the damn thing!" Sometimes I do feel like outlines are the easiest way to get started, but that idea of just going for it is awesome.
ReplyDeleteAs for your question, the gods were so oddly removed from Greek society that I'm not even sure it would have mattered to them. Their lives were pretty much their own to reason their way through until a god decided to step in and ruin it, so it was fairly arbitrary as faith systems go. If they had been a monotheistic culture like many modern day faith-systems, that question might have really made them squirm, but as-is I'm not sure they would have cared much. (Pule I think Georgias was at least benignly non-aligned if not outright atheistic).
Your question that you posed on here definitely caught my attention for sure. This is what I have to say about this... the God of the Israelites (basically the Christians and Protestants of the world nowadays) was persuaded by Elijah. He pleaded with his God to not destroy the city, and God didn't. Elijah made a claim, followed through with it, and in the end got what he wanted. That's persuasion to the core. However, the story later goes on to tell that his request was aligned with God's plan, so it was totally fine that he got what he wanted and didn't ultimately change anything at all. Is something really rhetorical persuasion if the person being persuaded one direction or another really doesn't care about the end result? I don't know what that would be, but it doesn't sound like rhetoric to me.
ReplyDeleteThe question is an interesting one for me not so much in the particulars about Gorgias (whom I think you meant instead of Aristotle - it is just reprinted in that text, but not by him) but because the idea of divinity and of divine truth plays into understandings of rhetoric. If there are divine truths decreed by God or gods, those are fixed and immutable, one might imagine. If the Bible is literally true, then we need not argue about it too much, for example. Molly's example above is a great one: God got talked out of destroying a city, but He'd already planned for that, so it was God's plan (because things get tricky fast if God really did change His mind). For Gorgias, my sense like Mary's is that the gods were a sort of formal device, useful as a tool but not really relevant in a day to day sense. In Plato's piece, though, we get a lengthy story at the end that Socrates explicitly says should not be read as a fable: it is real, and it has to do with divine judgments and the afterlife. If there are to be divine judgments and an afterlife, I suppose it makes sense to assume that you won't be able to argue about where you should go - that this is determined by the time you get to wherever you're going. That question about divine truth, then, and about what is fixed in a sort of sacred context, does become a centrally important rhetorical concept.
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