Baruch’s writing center offers a variety of services that all students, no matter how adept (or inept) at writing, can benefit from. The greatest advantage I see in utilizing the writing center is the one-on-one consulting with professionals and other faculty on one’s own writing. There is only so much we know about effective and meaningful writing and rhetoric as undergraduate students, and learning from the best can broaden our perspectives and sharpen our arguments in the essays we write.
Rhetoric can be best generalized as the constant ebb and flow of thoughts and ideas in writing, conversation, visual and auditory spectacles… Anything and everything can be interpreted, making rhetoric universal and accessible to anyone with half a brain — not to insult anyone with half a brain.
What I find so unique about rhetoric is its diversity of definitions. There are people that believe it is a way of embellishing thought, as we instinctively “dress down” when it comes to thoughts that don’t leave the mouth. Others, as implied by the introduction to the text, see rhetoric as a manipulative tool, a sort of marionette’s control bar to steer people during discussion. However mixed the opinion on rhetoric is, the general consensus seems to be that it is a technique — or tool — to enhance language. Yet, it is so much more than that. Rhetoric is all around us, and we connect to it through one or more of our five senses (or six, if intuition counts). How else, then, is a picture able to say a thousand words? How else, then, can a wordless symphony evoke emotions so profound that we are brought to tears and immense joy? Rhetoric, friends.