A Little Rhetoric for the Soul

Thanks to James Herrick, this past week I have caught myself looking into so many different places of our lives and wondering if rhetoric was relevant in that situation. The biggest reason this came about is because Herrick raised the idea that rhetoric isn’t simply a speaking art form used in politics, but it is very pervasive in our own everyday social and private lives. He gives the example of rhetoric being used to pick up a date. According to Herrick, this would be rhetoric because somebody is trying to persuade another person that they are attractive, and the other person should go out with them. Now, I guess I can agree with that unless the person is like me, and isn’t so great in those kinds of situations, in which case, rhetoric and persuasion are out the window. Overall, I liked reading Herrick because he laid everything out very nicely as to how rhetoric actually works. I didn’t see this all right away, but after plenty of class discussion, it is starting to make sense.


This other guy, Marshall McLuhan on the other hand. I did not enjoy reading this at all. He tries to write about how “The Medium is the Message” (Pg. 23). Even after a lot of discussion this still did not really make much sense to me. The ideas are very abstract, and the way he writes about it doesn’t make it any easier. The only thing I really got out of what McLuhan was trying to say in this article was that when you look at medium vs. content in terms of a message, the medium is really what matters. For example, if you read a story in a book, and then watch the movie, the content of the two are pretty much the same, but they might seem very different because the media are different. This is the only way I can really see where the medium is the message. I apologize if this is not what he really meant, as I said before, this really did not make much sense to me. The second article we read by McLuhan got even better. In this article McLuhan started talking about hot vs. cold media. This article made me laugh. A hot medium is one that is low in participation (TV), and a cool medium is high in participation (telephone). However, he gave a lot of labels to arbitrary things, and this bothered me because in almost every case you could argue against the label he had designated. Then to top it off, instead of going into detail as to why he labeled the way he did, he decided to give all kinds of garbage like Shakespeare quotes. Not that Shakespeare is garbage, I love Shakespeare, but rather McLuhan’s use of Shakespeare and others is garbage.