Okay, hold up.

Discourse is necessary for composition and rhetoric. It is the basis for everything we experience. Bizzell and Herzberg tell us "reality it self is a function of the way we use language." If this is true, the affect of an argument presented to us can determine our perception of the world. Rhetoric and composition should always be a search for the truth, which can only be accomplished through the application of dialectic.

Dialectic takes discourse and wields it in order to reveal truth. Immanuel Kant defines dialectic as "a critical device for exposing illusion in dogmatic philosophy". This is relevant to composition because knowledge is truth. Although truth may be relevant to one's perceptions, it doesn't mean that it is in any way professionally sound to seek to candy coat everything. If, as a composer, you rely solely on appealing to emotions and not on any sense of truths, than your arguments will fail to capture your audience. This is made evident by Plato's play "Gorgias". Plato says "So rhetoric, it seems, effects a persuasion which can produce belief about justice and injustice, but cannot give instruction about them". Not only will your arguments fail to capture your audience, if not grounded in the truth and reason presented through dialectic, but it will be easy for others to refute your claims.

The truth of an argument, in the end, is determined by the audience. Bitzer says "Every audience at any moment is capable of being persuaded by speech". This means that the discourse itself does not determine truth, but the audience's reception. Bitzer also talks about the audience as a body of people that may be "moved to action". This means that composition serves a direct purpose and that is to engage the people and rally them to a cause. Persuasion is not simply about changing the way people think, but changing the things people do. This takes us back to the quote from Gorgias. If in response to an exigence, an audience is presented with a rhetorical argument that is characterized by manifested beliefs, than they will not be able to properly respond to the situation because the "knowledge" they've received lacks truth.

I believe that there is an ultimate truth. I believe there are practices that we can incorporate into composition and rhetoric in order to bring us closer to understanding this ultimate truth. One practice is reflection. Reflection allows us the opportunity to observe our composing process from the outside. Yancey describes it as "a means of going beyond the text to include a sense of the ongoing conversations that texts enter into". Yancey's theory of reflection takes into account that what a text carries continues to expand a person's knowledge even after reading it. Not only does the context of a text reveal true knowledge, but also examining the methods by which that context was reached.



Taking all this into account, my theory of composition is that it serves as a tool by which our knowledge is communicated and a means by which we convince others that our knowledge is truth. Compositions is not simply persuasion, but a great discourse, an ongoing conversation between speaker and audience in which we use language in order to bring each other closer to a common ground: the ultimate truth. These goals are achieved not only through composing, but also through the remediation of past texts. By engaging in old media and discourse, we pull in previous knowledge and transform it, bringing the old media itself closer to the ultimate truth when we present it as new media. Because of this constant search for truth, technology is in a constant process of adaption.

How fast technology changes.

If our identity exists as a manifestation of the impact of media on us, than in the same way our own knowledge should be considered true to us, and our compositions and rhetorical arguments should be true as well.