Rhetoric Basics
For any AP Language students who have experience with or know about this site and who are checking in over the summer, here are some resources worth investigating. The first is Dr. Andrew Cline’s Rhetoric Primer. It’s a nice, bare-bones description of the discipline of rhetoric. The Critical Applications section is particularly noteworthy, I think, because of Dr. Cline’s brief overview of Speech Act theory, a sub-discipline of pragmatics which is itself a sub-discipline of general linguistics. Each of the applications though, is worth taking a look at just to get a distilled introduction to the subject.
The second resource is Dr. Gideon Burton’s Silva Rhetoricae. It’d be worthwhile to investigate the Trees links on the left of the page which offer introductory material similar to Dr. Cline’s primer. The right sidebar of the page, the Flowers in the forest of rhetoric, is an exhaustive list of rhetorical schemes and tropes, many of which we’ll be learning about and using in our writing throughout the year.
Don’t be put off by these sites. Some of the language and ideas may seem advanced, but isn’t that what you’re all about?
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