2012 AP Lang & Comp Scholarship Essay

[My teacher was the sole audience.]

The Art of Writing

     Rhetoric paints a perspective. Good rhetoric creates an interesting perspective. Without an interested audience, the message is lost and forgotten—sorrow for what could have been.

     Without good rhetoric ideas become dull; everything is not interesting in that of itself, yet it all is interesting through specific modes of expression. Public education teaches students to find a topic and write an essay or something similar. This is one way to become ideal writers, but the supreme and never reached ideal writer scoffs and stays ever farther away from these “subject-student” writers. Maybe they use near perfect diction. Maybe they use sufficient enough syntax. Maybe not.
     If every idea—thought—is interesting, why not start instead from subject or issue just with thought and writing. By this way students will not only understand the importance of rhetoric but understand purpose. Those who take the time to think through what they mean—logic—eventually go towards truth. Once these thoughts are written they can be seen by others.

     Then, all one needs to do is discuss with others; all with the help of persuasion but not with the hopes of complete persuasion (as those who manipulate through good rhetoric do not use the “form of the good” rhetoric—the ominous of logical fallacies dressed up in guise). Only by true arguing, debate, whatever the name, can a level of true meaning be found.

     Again, content is drab and boring. Good rhetoric is much more than words that are written. It contains thoughtful sociology of the audience, and ideas are bits from psychology. When the romanticized name and stripped away, rhetoric is accurate argumentation synergized with precise logic. “It is not what you say; it is how you say it”—cliché but true.

      All through the effort from rhetoric lifelong learning starts the beginning of the end. Real ideas resonate. The brute content appears daunting at first. After writing and through rhetoric a “work” becomes a work of art. The content is slain; from it the bones and blood of the departed are taken, forming a new being. Now more than it once was—significance. 

My thought about rhetoric continues: abstractly. 

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