Breath-Catching

Plato defines rhetoric as "the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion."

Richards defines it as "a study of misunderstanding and its remedies."

Rhetorical discourse occurs in response to a rhetorical situation, which is made up of 3 components according to Bitzer. Something has to cause you to create discourse about something. You have to "have a moment".

Exigence: a situation that can be modified by discourse. The objective of discourse is to improve a situation.

Audience: those able to be persuaded by discourse. People involved who are qualified to change the situation.

Constraints: the conditions of the situation that effect the situation's outcome. The uncontrollable climate of a situation.


Audience: "writers may not disregard their audience as much as be tyrannized by it." (Armstrong). I think it's of utmost importance for a composer to realize when they are sacrificing their identity as a composer too much for their audience. The audience-composer relationship is, well, a relationship.

Memory: "associated with a kinda of reminiscence that is both sensory and experiential." A composition should be something that causes thought afterward, so should be very memorable and appeal to all aspects of memory. In this, a composer should also have a memorable style (a way of composing that is identifiable as none other than your work.)







I believe knowledge is always there, whether we validate it's existence or not. The knowledge is able to be utilized when someone realizes it's existence. Thus, it cannot really be "new" because the knowledge itself does not change. The capabilities and utilization of the knowledge is what changes. Knowledge is created on a foundation of prior knowledge. For me, "Knowledge is power." The more you know, depending on how you are able to use the information, the more opportunities you will be able to come by. For this class, "Knowledge is power." I feel that the EWM degree is similar an advertising degree from a different angle. I feel that we concentrate on the knowledge aspect before we focus on the application of the knowledge. We take in the information, then we think, "Okay, so what can we do with this now?" I do not want to say that we use our heads more in this major than we would somewhere else, but I think we do. As I have been googling images to use for this page, I have come across several that apply to chemistry, biology, and other science courses as well. I feel that is metaphorical for building blocks of knowledge. Before the "composition" of elements were discovered, there was the knowledge of artistic composition.



I used to have this photography teacher that always told me "If you don't have something you would change about it, then you didn't do it right." To me this means that if you think you did it perfectly, that you did not take the time to think about the improvements you could have made. If you don't reflect on your work, then you will not improve yourself as a composer. Reflection permits us to learn from ourselves. It's importance lies in understanding ourselves as composers and hence in understanding our composing processes. It produces a "self-consciousness", but not the bad kind. The kind that makes us realize our strengths, weaknesses, and improvement points.