Jarratt's Metacognition ISMLL 73-139

My first real exposure to rhetoric came from my English 306 class, Expository Writing. In that class we were presented with two books, Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. What we look at was how both books, contemporaries of each other, told of the same people, the same historical events, of the American people. The difference being in how each book relates the story. Since they were both “right” in the sense that accuracy was not in question, it became a quest to figure out why they chose to relate their stories in such a way. What I learned is that by emphasizing one aspect, and down playing another, the story of American people is told a certain way: Johnson’s story emphasizing the tradition party line while Zinn’s approach shows a more Marxist, Colonialist view. So in my beginnings with rhetoric it was imperative to discover the “what” and the “why’s” of the argument, but also the how; the “so what” factor.

Because my brain works so differently—mostly laboring laterally—after reading Susan C. Jarratt’s Rhetoric, the notion hit me to look at her article for the rhetoric she is employing to describe rhetoric. Right from the beginning she establishes that “a standard definition [of] rhetoric concerns itself with the ways human beings use speech to influence one another’s attitudes and behavior” (Jarratt 75). In an article that uses rhetoric to describe rhetoric must be, at best, metacognitive. Essentially, it is using itself to describe a concept it is employing. This convoluted argument takes what is seemingly a very dry subject matter, something that initially seems not to have a “so what” element, and places it within article itself; essentially allowing the argument to look upon itself for the very rhetorical elements it is describing. Very cool.