Monday, October 11, 2010
Blog 7
I thought the section on Ramus was really interesting. In the introduction to the Renaissance it talked about how people were taking a more humanistic approach to rhetoric and more or less dipping their toes in, but Ramus seems to go further by believing it was best to "set off on one's own pursuit of knowledge." I also thought it was really interesting that he believed in working on something with a tree diagram and that Ong has argued that this kind of thinking could only work in a society that had shifted from an auditory to a visual relationship with language. The reading suggested that Ramus greatly simplified rhetoric, and I wonder how much that had to do with the change in times. I don't know if traditions changed that brought on less of a need to stick to what seems to us like a complicated plan or if the ability to write things down and refer back to them caused a need for simplification. The Renaissance really was a huge time of change for the whole world between escaping the Dark Ages and the newfound ability for people to have new ways to get information causing them to develop opinions of their own and not just what someone had told them. What Ramus said really doesn't seem that revolutionary to us now because we're all taught to think for ourselves (or at least try to) especially in rhetoric today. I also find it interesting that, although revolutionary, many people agreed with him at the time because I feel like oftentimes new ideas are met with resistance.
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When I first looked at the Ramus tree diagram of simplifying rhetoric, I didn't think that it fit with his idea that everyone should try to think for themselves because it seemed like he was making a formula that would lead to one right way to compose a text. However, after I read through all of the diagram, I realized he was making more of a map of some important elements of good writing. The diagram was more of a way to organize ideas. In today's society, it seems like peoples writing is often really similar sounding because schools teach students that there is really only one right way to wright a paper. In high school a lot of the focus is on how to pass standardized writing tests, so there is a very constructed model for the way a paper should be written. In elementary school, I remember we were introduced to a format of writing a paper and each paragraph had to have exactly 5 sentences, and the paper had to be 5 paragraphs long. There was to be a topic sentence, Reason/detail/fact, explanation, more explanation and a concluding sentence for each body paragraph. Although this method helps students gain a general idea one way to write a paper, it leaves no room for individuality. If schools could focus more on the organization of ideas like Ramus did, it seems like people would be more creative and interesting in their writing.
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