Welcome to Penn State’s  RCL: Rhetoric and Civic Life!

I am Michael Torna, first year student at PSU, from Philadelphia, PA. I am intending to major in Material Science and Engineering, and I am looking forward to talking and learning about Rhetoric and Civic Life with you!

This class is a journey through digital, oral, and written communication, and how to use these refine these tools to best captivate an audience and put forward meaningful and thought-provoking work. There is a reason rhetoric has remained a consistent skill through the decades. Effective communication is how countries sign treaties, candidates become leaders, ignorance becomes solidarity, and dissociated information becomes known feeling. The goal of this course is to take into account civic engagement and rhetoric in the current world at multiple scales, and form arguments to defend or detest these states through different forms of media. This blog will consist of two genres of writing: RCL posts and PSA posts.

RCL posts will consist of prompted discussion about current events in the above categories of civic related concepts or current rhetoric.

Passion (PAS) posts will consist of reflective overview of eight different adhesives I have used in personal projects in the past, and talk about the chemical properties and uses each one has.

The man depicted on the home page of this blog is none other than Marcus Tullius Cicero. He was one of the renowned orators and writers of the Roman world, and even more pertinent, he is one of the famed writers on rhetoric. He had written his first book at the age of just 22. I use him as my inspiration, as I hope to be a young adult traversing the world of public engagement and audience understanding with as powerful emotions as he had conveyed.