Greensboro: University of North Carolina, 2006. — 8 p.The AP Language and Composition Exam places strong emphasis on students’ ability to
analyze texts rhetorically and to use rhetoric effectively as they compose essay responses.
It’s an important question for teachers, therefore, to consider what students need to know
about this often misunderstood term in order to write confidently and skillfully.The traditional definition of rhetoric, first proposed by Aristotle, and embellished over
the centuries by scholars and teachers, is that rhetoric is the art of observing in any given
case the available means of persuasion.The whole process of education for me was learning to put names to things I already
knew. That’s a line spoken by Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton’s private investigator in one
of her series of alphabet mystery novels, C is for Corpse. When I began a graduate
program that specialized in rhetoric, I wasn’t quite sure what that word meant. But once I
was introduced to it, I realized rhetoric was something I had always known about.
