First to start with, I had never really realized the grave consequences rhetoric in writing may have caused. I can still remember using rhetoric in my own writing multiple times because I had wanted to persuade my reader to my side, just like how Roberts-Miller had described. Although I hope to be able to say that I led my readers to the truth, I can’t. I can’t be absolute certain that my opinion is the truth because it’s just an opinion I made. Thus it would mean that I’ve been misleading people with rhetorical writing even if I hadn’t consciously realized it myself. Not only that, I’ve also realized that political speeches of probably all kinds contain lots of rhetoric. I was just recently reading Tom Watson’s essay on Interracial Southern Populism, for a class on Modern American History, and Tom Watson used rhetorics frequently in attempts of persuading his audience to follow his beliefs. Many of the rhetorics were negative because he held a strong racist belief towards black people in his respective time period. In the case of his essay, I believe he had used rhetorics to guide people towards the truth of his beliefs rather than misleading his readers. He wanted his readers to unite politically speaking to thus make a greater impact in the populist campaign. However, in the end Tom Watson had lost the fight. With the defeat the Populist party faced in the late 19th century, came Tom Watson’s defeat as well. In fact, after the populist campaign he had taken a completely opposite side and wished to disenfranchise black people. Tom Watson was just a recent example of the use of rhetorics that I had recently seen. There are countless other politicians that have used rhetorics in their writings as well, whether to mislead viewers or to guide them towards the truth.
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