What happened to rhetoric? Is the lack of people studying rhetoric responsible for the decline of modern prose? People used to admire grandeur and length of thought in prose. Tennyson said the 'stateliest' English prose was to be found in Hooker, Bacon, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, De Quincey and Ruskin. Meanwhile the average /lit/ poster doesn't even have the attention span to read 17th century prose let alone appreciate its stateliness.
>>25497890Reality tunnel fortification > logic and rhetoric
>>25497890Mass literacy. You don't see stateliness in writing anymore because people aren't writing to appeal to learned statesmen. They're writing for the For You pages of sub-literate mongoloids.The commodification of education probably has something to do with it also.
>>25497890I think it's more easily attributed to the fact that know one has to, and few do, write long-form letters anymore.
>>25497890>What happened to rhetoric? Is the lack of people studying rhetoric responsible for the decline of modern prose?No? Are you retarded?Quality in every media declined because publishers figured people just were gonna consume the latest slop no matter how sloppy it is.
>>25497949Prose was on a trajectory towards simplification long before the total slopification of media.
>>25497890ESL here. Why is it when I googled “rhetoric”, google gave me nonsensical Neuro-Linguistic Programming-like techniques? Usually recommending books like Mark Forsyth’s Element of Eloquence or Jay Heinrichs’ Word Hero. Like they believe techniques like tricolon actually make things more memorable to the brain or something. It’s so silly. It’s not even pseudoscience, just nonsense.
