What's my point?

I’m all over the place. Anyone who has read my posts here for more than a week will know I’m a bit manic. If I were a roller coaster, I’d be Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. I don’t build up to a plunge, I pivot.

Occasionally I take a step back to wonder what’s my one thing? If I accomplished nothing else with my life, what one point would I want up on the scoreboard?

I take one shot. I score one point. What is it?

Right now that answer is to understand rhetoric as a social system. Rhetoric is usually dismissed as the art of persuasion, or mere marketing, but I see it as the lifeblood of communication.

• Ideas die in isolation.
• The first death happens in the writer’s hands, when they fail to articulate and publish the idea.
• The second death is in the reader’s hands. If they read a text and do nothing with it, the idea still dies.
• A text becomes viable only if it inspires further communication. Only then does the idea live.

I don’t see rhetoric as the art of persuasion. I see it as the text’s survival strategy.

Rhetoric helps writers draft viable texts that will survive and spread in social systems.

In some circles rhetoric has a bad reputation. It’s seen as manipulation. For some people the quality of the idea alone should determine the shape of the text.

That’s an idea that needs to die. It does so much harm because rhetoric has a real effect on which ideas survive to shape our culture. An idea in isolation is raw ore. It has value. It has potential. But it gains more value when mined and forged into a tool.

That’s what rhetoric does. Whether we acknowledge it or not, rhetoric is always operating in society, selecting which ideas live and which ones die.