Arnold Tompkins

The Science of Discourse: a Rhetoric for High Schools and Colleges Arnold Tompkins

Man continually speaks or writes, reads or gives audience. Rhetoric deals with all these universal and lifelong processes; hence, its practical importance is obvious and emphatic. This study, however, got its name from the one exercise of speaking from the Greek rhetor speaker because, in the political life of the Greeks, so much depended on the art of public address. If this study should be named now, and after the most effective means of formal communication, the term would come from reading or writing; and it would not matter which, as each presupposes the other. But we care now nothing for the name except to insist, in obedience to the demands of both life and logic, on its extension over all phases of the discourse process. Until quite recently it has been customary to organize this subject under the literal meaning of the word, attaching it to the chair of oratory in college and confining its practical value to those engaged in public address. Thus, as with the Greeks and Romans, it became the hidden art of the few by which fickle masses were to be swayed. But now it is not so much the swa)ring of masses that is needed as masses who can critically estimate and appreciate the utterances of others. And these utterances are comparatively seldom made now in the form of public address, but in that of the book, the newspaper, and the magazine.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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