David N.

Crowley Summary

David Noble

Eng 319

Word Count: 304

Ancient Rhetorics Summary

Sharon Crowley begins her book by explaining that rhetorics is a good thing and that contemporary media has villianized the word. Crowley goes on to explain that hearing countries or other entities disagreeing about something, as opposed to fighting, should make us thankful of the use of rhetoric. Later, she explains the importance of where rhetoric came from in ancient Athens and how the term evolved even during ancient times. Next, Crowley writes about the differences between ancient and modern rhetorics, such as ancient Athenians not caring about facts. Later on, Crowley makes an important point about why Americans tend to be adverse to arguing, that is, ‘attacking’ someone’s opinion is seen as an attack on that person. Following brief examinations of various arguments and other rhetoric stuff, Crowley examines the ideas behind different words like dox and ideology. She does this to show why they were important to the ancients and why they are/should be important to us. After introducing a few examples of ancient and modern ethos, she offers a writing sample of Richard Seager, whose ethos is good, because it’s casual, but still uses big words that a smart person in his field would use. Some time after that, Crowley discusses various methods on how to argue using rhetoric in discourse. While talking about first, second, and third person discourse in rhetoric, she explains what they are, when we should use them, and also gives various examples of what each discourse would look like in an argument. Crowley then discusses various ‘grammar’ type rules for rhetoric discourse and closes with “Situated Ethos” and how to situate rhetoric in a social context. This is applied for situations like engaging an audience/hearer/reader to view your rhetoric and argue back with you.