The Power of the Written Word
…and its limitations.
I have always been a strong believer in the power of the written word. I’ve been a devout reader since age four, and a dedicated writer almost that long. We were back-to-the-land hippies with almost zero possessions, yet somehow the corners of my little sleeping cubby were stuffed with books — the Chronicles of Narnia, Winnie-the-Pooh, the Lord of the Rings trilogy (long before I was old enough to grasp the story). And of course an ever-rotating supply of library books.
When I got to college in the fall of 1984 and found myself shunted into Rhetoric 1A instead of the English 1A class I was trying for, I was deeply disappointed. English had always been my best subject in school. What in the world was rhetoric? It sounded faintly disreputable; I didn’t even know how to pronounce it. “I’m in rhe-TOR-ic,” I sighed, much to my parents’ amusement.
My disappointment didn’t even survive that first week of classes, where I learned what the study of rhetoric actually entails: argumentative and persuasive writing. Creating it, analyzing it — studying what makes a piece of writing work, in order to hone one’s own skills as both reader and writer.
It was amazing. I ended up majoring in rhetoric.
