Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, an art that has a long and noble tradition. Understanding the art of persuasion entails at least two things: one, understanding how the arguments made by others work; two, learning to make our own arguments better. To do these two things, we read (or watch, or listen to) the arguments made by others, and we write (or present, or perform) our own arguments.
This is not a course on mechanics, grammar or syntax. Yet to write persuasively, we need to write clearly. Clarity is a potent weapon in our armory: to be clear, we need to understand the rules that govern the English language. So, in this course, we take the time to make sure that our sentences really are sentences, that the words we choose are good ones, and that our ideas are expressed coherently and grammatically.
Department: Division of Arts and Humanities
University: Quest University Canada