For your RCL Blog, discuss how your conception of “rhetoric and civic life” changed over the semester.

Walking into this class, I knew the mechanical definitions of both important concepts. I knew that rhetoric meant a means of persuasion with words and other communication, and that civic life was how people interacted with the broader society around them.

I’ve since learned all of rhetoric’s intricacies; the art of rhetoric takes form in almost all communication, since all communication, generally speaking, has a goal of transferring  information. I now consider civic life to be the culmination of all the rhetorical strategies that humans use to communicate. I enjoyed incorporating technology with communication and those strategies having to compliment each other.

Having been exposed to a plethora of rhetorical civic artifacts and paradigm shifts between my peers, my consciousness of those changes have been ingrained in my head. I am now more influenced by the hidden strategies of politicians, which was originally a goal of mine entering this class. I can analyze what appeals and speaking techniques that my hobby must employ.