Discovery of Perspective

In learning the progression of rhetoric throughout history, the discussions that have erupted on its behalf, and how it has shaped our academic pursuits, we have been plugged into a history that is ever-changing. We now are attempting to assimilate these concepts into our own knowledge so that we may use them for foundation in our own assumptions. In essays such as "Freedom to Manners" and "Sheridan" we have seen how ethinicity and class, ultimately the identity of speaker or reader, have splintered the discussion into many new avenues. This idea of identity has enormous value for introspection when we regard what it means to share concepts, to communicate. It is not only a subject of what should be comunicatedand how it should be comminicated, or who is our speaker and audience, but how concepts are formed and interpreted in light of identity. A speaker has formed a concept but once she shares it with her audience, it becomes their propert, they own the concept and may do with it what they will (criticize it, build upon it, or dismiss it). In Roman and Wlecke's "Pre-Writing: Models for Concept Formation in Writing" they discuss 'concept-transformation'. They describe the puzzle a writer faces when trying to put an experience into words. They distinguish the difference between 'suffering the imapct of external events' versus really experiencing. Roman and Wlecke see this as the root problem of where writing, particularly student writing, fails. Unless the speaker can make an old concept their own, unless she can illuminate it first for herself and make it apart of her identity, she will fall short of making it anew or communicating it to others.