My photo is prettier than your paragraph!

Bizzell and Herzberg explain that Classical rhetoric does reemerge during the Enlightenment, evident primarily (and initially) in the "Ciceronian conception of rhetoric" (792). That is, the five canons were typically the foundation for the study of literature and criticism, writing and speaking, and a "respectable scientific theory of psychological persuasion" (792). I'll focus on the earlier years within this period, in spite of the significance of Smith, Campbell, Kames, Blair, and Sheridan in the eighteenth century--only because earlier work was more provocative, if less applicable to the modern study of rhetoric.

Rhetoric was attacked during this period by members of the British Royal Society, apparently through their spokesman, Thomas Sprat. However, B & H note that these new attacks did not lead to the removal of rhetoric from school instruction. Sprat and others went so far as to say that all tropes were ornamental, barriers to understanding and communication. Sprat says: “…all of the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner obtain’d, than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the world” (796).

Bishop Wilkins, a founder of the Royal Society, seemed poised to erase the study of rhetoric, using Francis Bacon’s theories of replacing words with symbols. B & H explain that “The symbols were arbitrary and nonalphabetic but had phonetic value so that they could be pronounced” (797). This, of course, was a rather shortsighted endeavor. If reformists like Wilkins and Bacon truly believed more symbolic representations of Things and Ideas would lead to a more concise language, my guess is that they were rather naïve to the actual complex structures of Eastern languages like Chinese, which served as their model. (But, to be fair, I’ve never studied Chinese—a professor I worked closely with taught Mandarin, though, and I know it involved a great deal of time and effort. It is not so simple.)

However, perhaps we can take something from Wilkins and Sprat. We’ve all pushed through language that was difficult to interpret, and most of us would advocate for clear, concise prose.

That said, question #1: To counter the British Royal Society, how does the study of rhetoric lead to clear communication? What criticisms of dialectic forms might be valid, or invalid?

Question #2: Can we think of any examples where words (ideas) obscure actual objects? (See Locke, p. 798) To recycle a cliché, is a picture truly worth a thousand words, in some cases?