What I do for a living and why I do it

Today was the my college's first day for Tuesday/Thursday classes, and I went in excited after the summer, full of more ideas for our first day than you could shake a stick at. I am one of the few people I know who can honestly say he has "good work." I know what I want to do, I know what the challenges are, I know what not to waste my time on, and I know what a good risk feels like. But what puzzles me is something simple: how is it that my understanding of what I do and others' understand is so very different? Or to put it in another way, what sorts of assumptions do my students and peers have about what I do that don't match up to my own experience? Even more simply: why do people have such odd ideas about this job?

First of all, I should come clean and admit that I'm a writing teacher. I might be called a "comp" teacher when I teach comp, a "tech" teacher when I teach technical writing, or a "creative writing" teacher when I teach that. For each role there are some subtle differences in the picture. The creative writing teacher might be expected to elicit people expressing their inner selves, a sort of Dr. Phil with a degree in English. A tech writer might be expected to teach one rigorous and methodical quiver of invariant forms for gaining Success in the Workplace, the holy grail. And on. Each role has its own costume and clichés.

But as a writing teacher, the biggest umbrella, I think of myself as a rhetorician.

What's that? Since "rhetoric" usually means showy style, the opposite of substance, I should take a minute to defend the choice of the word "rhetoric." It doesn't mean bullshitting people, nor does it mean tricking them, being self-serving, or being insincere. Plato comes out and condemns rhetoric for these things (and implies them) in such dialogues as the Gorgias, the Phaedrus, and The Seventh Letter, and he was not exactly a fuzzy thinker, so there is a lot of momentum to this assumption. Today it is almost impossible to use the word "rhetoric" without it carrying a pejorative spin, as in "Johnny told the truth, but Billy just used rhetoric." Like the words "liberal" or "intellectual," it's difficult to say what you mean when you use these words.

But the tradition and the potential for useful meaning is such that I think "rhetoric" is a word worth using. For me, rhetoric, straight from Plato on down, implies a love/hate affair with our own power to use language. It's a frightening thing when you think about it to realize that we as humans live in a world that is more made up of the words that people use together, oral and written, than the physical world itself. We live in a world of signs, surrounded by human sounds and sights. If someone says something particularly nasty to you, probably that will be as real as (or more so) than the sting of a bee. It's in skillful language that the Hitlers and the Ghandis galvanize great change in huge populations. Skillful use of language is volatile. These folks are powerful. Rhetoric -- and here I'm thinking of it as "the ability to get others to take you seriously" -- is dangerous.

It's also natural. We can't avoid our attempts to get others to take us seriously. My kids were literally born with the skills and desire to get their mother and me to take them seriously. Still are! When they are young, rhetoric is all about making sure the self is fed, clothed, and loved. Without getting to far afield, it seems to me that rhetoric is also about giving love, too, as that seems to be a fundamental human need (not just a nice thing to do).

So if rhetoric begins as persuading people to take you seriously, that has two big implications. First, it seems pretty selfish. Getting humans to do what you want (using that unique system, human language) is an interesting, challenging, endlessly engaging activity, but it has little to do with their well being. It's all about maintaining and increasing your individual capital. In this, rhetoric is power, like muscle power or military power, to get what you want (though of course you can get what you want by cooperating with others, too, the motive is the same). What do we do about this rhetorical selfishness? Is there room to look at motives and ethics with rhetoric, or is it all manipulation? Is teaching kids "rhetorical" skills the most crass sort of education?

Secondly, if rhetoric is about getting people to take you seriously, what sorts of things do you want to get people to consider? That is, how do you know what you want (even when you want it for others) is a good thing? How do you choose your battles? How do you choose your words?

These are not new questions. Plato asked most of them, and there are entire continents of interesting stuff done in the 20th century that revived these questions [need bibliographical link to starting places here]. What this implies for me is that 1) rhetoric can be deliberately developed through education. 2) In fact, education IS rhetorical in several senses, and it is rhetoric that brings up these questions about ethics, motive, and judgment 2) writing is where the rubber meets the road in questions about expression, learning, developing a concept, etc.