Everything is rhetoric…
This is a place for ideas of the written variety, be they essays, missives, articles, posts, rants, or whatever you’d like to call them.
This is a place to communicate about how we’re communicating. If you ask someone today what “messaging” is, they’ll probably point to professionalized fields like marketing or PR, but that’s too limited. Messaging undergirds absolutely everything. It forms the fabric of our lives, influencing the beliefs we have and the actions we take. If you wish to understand a person or a society, start with the words they choose.
Rhetorical flairs are all around us. You just have to know how to look for them. And make no mistake, everyone is always trying to persuade.
Some core tenets, if you’re into that sort of thing:
- All ideas are fair game if reasoned and presented well. Rhetoric bears no rigid ideological tilt.
- It is of great value for writing to be fun. But this is not a requirement. Some of the most important pieces ever written are absolute slogs. Let it be painful if it must.
- Twitter is a failed public square. Brevity is the soul of wit but the death of reason. Rhetoric aims at becoming a forum for long-form discourse where disagreement is lauded, not weaponized.
- It is way too damn hard for obscure, green, or untraditional writers to get published and break into whatever it is we call the discourse. Rhetoric, to the extent possible, delights in providing those writers with a platform.
This is also a place for wordplay and wordsmithing. It is an outlet for linguistic experimentation, and a testing ground for new ways to express. Got something you want to try? Reach out.