Response to Connors’ reading

I guess that the fact that rhetoric was associated to be able to talk about any area of knowledge is understandable in the old times. The corpus of science was tiny. Nowadays, after of the industrial revolution and the hyper-specialization and compartmentalization of science: how do we do to talk about any subject?
My attention was caught in the part that Connors explains the steps that Quintilian recommended for practicing writing. I know nothing about classical rhetoric but while reading the text, I realized how many elements are still operating nowadays. Actually, I didn’t notice a big difference between Quintilian’s steps for practicing writing and the modes of discourse proposed by Alexander Bain. If I remember well, textbooks for literature and writing classes in Argentina, even nowadays follow this structure where narrative and personal writing are considered the departing point and argumentation is considered more complex and therefore, taught at the end. Regarding imitation: that’s the way I was taught how to write: we were supposed to imitate literary consecrated texts in our writing.
It also occurred to me that the analysis that Connors proposes runs along the lines of what Habermas states in his book “Historia y crítica de la opinion pública” (History and critic of public opinion???). Habermas states that in the XVIII century public and private spheres separate, there is an empowerment of the individuality in the subjectivity and this leads to different types of writing and conceptualization of the writing activity. Habermas relates this analysis with the appearance of genres such as the personal diary and the bourgeois novel.
In addition, a question that kept on coming into my mind regarding personal writing: why do we need to know about what we are writing? Why we can’t conceptualize writing as a knowledge-building activity. And here I absolutely advocate for Reither’s and Berthoff’s claims. Students can discover new interests if they face the writing activity not as a mere account of their experiences but as a way of exploring a topic.
Lastly, when I read the phrase “the form of a kind of resignation about how students asked to write on political or social or educational problems lose themselves in “the intense inane of the general, the intangible, and the vague.”” (p. 179) I thought that this changes among cultures. Vagueness and intangibility can be evaluated in a different way in a different culture. As Kaplan once stated, I do think that rhetorical patterns vary among cultures.
What is my implicit stand about what is important to teach? I guess that here I belong to the majority, as Connors states, because I choose a sort of middle position. As I said in a previous blog: I would teach half of my classes following the writing process movement and the other half following the cultural literacy’s postulates.