Qualifying the "Qualifying Distinctions"

In Lundsford and Ede’s “On Distinctions between Classical and Modern Rhetoric,” the authors argue that classical and modern rhetoric are much more similar than we usually think. Lundsford and Ede boil their argument down to a list of three similarities between the two eras of rhetoric, and then include three qualifying distinctions to these similarities. Although I find their argument quite compelling, I think that we should make some revisions, additions, and/or redactions to their qualifying distinctions in order to have them fit with Zappen’s “Digital Rhetoric.”

The first similarity that Lundsford and Ede provide is “[b]oth classical and modern rhetoric view man as a language-using animal who unites reason and emotion in discourse with one another” (45). Similarly, Zappen synthesizes Fogg, Warnick, and himself, and says that the computer is also a medium in which “credibility (ethos)... and other kinds of persuasive appeals, including appeals to the emotions (pathos)” are used (320).  Lundsford and Ede’s qualifying distinction for this similarity is that “Aristotle addresses himself primarily to the oral use of language; ours is primarily an age of print” (45). While this certainly could still fit with Digital rhetoric, I think we should amend the distinction to say that “ours is primarily an age of print and digital—or new—media.” To leave out digital or new media from the distinction would exclude the new ares of composing that Zappen is deals with in his article.

The second similarity is “ [i]n both periods rhetoric provides a dynamic methodology whereby rhetor and audience may jointly have access to knowledge” (45). Their qualifying distinction is that Aristotle claims their is a clearly defined relationship between rhetor and audience and what, whereas the modern view is that there is “no clear distinction between the knower and the known” (45). I think that, for the most part, this qualifying distinction holds up with Zappen’s “Digital Rhetoric.” I think that the argument could be made that there are visible distinctions between the “knower and the known” in online spaces (e.g. the user who posts the question, and the user who answers on a forum), but the relationship is fluid and informal. The person who answers the question’s position can quickly change if another user has more knowledge about something than the original answerer does. 

The third and final similarity is that “[i]n both periods, rhetoric has the potential to clarify and inform activities in numerous related fields” (45). I believe that Zappen’s  “theory of digital rhetoric that recognizes how the traditional rhetoric of persuasion is being transformed in digital spaces” (324) is an example of “eschew[ing] the false distinctions that have been drawn persistently between classical and modern rhetoric” (49) that Lundsford and Ede call for at the end of their article. Although I like their argument at the end of the article, I don’t really like their qualifying distinction in which they say “Aristotle’s theory establishes rhetoric as an art and relates it clearly to all fields of knowledge,” but “modern rhetoricians... lack any systematic, generally accepted theory to inform current practice” (45). I think that this distinction should be removed, because I think it’s kind of a false equivalency. They’re comparing Aristotle, a single classical rhetorician, to many modern rhetoricians; and they’re comparing a corpus from which many texts were lost, to a corpus from which we have lost few texts. Because of this, I think we should get rid of the distinction.