Aristotle - The Rhetor
Aristotle on Style – “Authors should compose without being noticed, and should seem to speak not artificially but naturally” (118).
Perspective (Style)
“…it is impossible to account sufficiently for the relationship between the visual and the verbal in a single chapter, particularly when there are entire books on this subject” (114).
The above quote shows how perspective is a complex yet an important concept in terms of the way something is said/portrayed. Simply put style is the casual versus the formal manner that is adopted when something is verbally said, or visually represented.
Plato - Phaedrus
Plato on Memory – ” If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls, they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, by means of external marks” (145).
Persistence (Memory)
I wrote in my previous blog post about how memory is losing its importance, as more different types of texts, and technologies are being utilized to do the job of storing information. A great example of this is the search engine Google. It receives, regurgitates and provides large amounts of information. It’s just easier on individuals to go back to google, rather than to rack their own brains.
Performance (Delivery)
TIP OF THE DAY: If you want to do a google image search or YouTube search for the canon of delivery, type ” rhetorical canon of delivery” instead of just “delivery”.
Trimbur’s asserts in terms of delivery and medium that “..it may look at first glance to be a traditional genre exercise, but in fact, it involves much more”
This makes me think about the Conference proposals I’m drafting for two other courses this semester. I’m at my wit’s end trying to say all the right things strictly within the 250-500 word limit. Although it’s a teeny abstract, sometimes what is intended is not rightly delivered, especially in the genre of conference proposals.
Brooke, Collin Gifford. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2009. 113-201. Print
New Media Explorations 
Regarding Plato’s quote about Memory – ” If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls…” I wonder what he would say if he could see what’s happened as a result of the written word… and that if no one had written down what Plato had said, it’s likely that no one would have ever heard of him.
Memory hasn’t really lost its importance as I see it. Plato should have realized that memory wouldn’t go away, but rather it would change its shape. These days, memory is very much called upon to sift through the vast quantities of human expressions, publications, productions, and knowledge that one encounters in life, though one only returns to that content when needed. I’ve gone through many classes, read many articles, written many papers, and as I move toward my dissertation, I now have to go back through all the content of this program as I ask myself, “Now where did I see that article? Wasn’t it in my Major Debates class?…Ah yes, here it is! I’m glad I remembered!”
The big difference in how humans uses memory these days is that we are no longer attempting to memorize or file information into our brains permanently, but rather we’re developing the ability to organize information into a matrix of sorts so we can position, contextualize content and retrieve content later.
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