ENC 3021 Spring 2025 - Ayers

When was the last time your mind was changed? Have you ever been moved to believe, think, or live differently by a piece of art, a speech, a post, or a conversation? Shirley Wilson Logan says that "rhetoric is what we do with our literacy." In other words, rhetoric is how we use language to share our knowledge, our beliefs, and our selves with each other.

In this class, we will ask big, curious questions about language and communication practices. We will disrupt the myth that the history of rhetoric has a “single story.” Instead, we will learn about various histories and theories, situating Western Greek rhetoric as one of many theories of rhetoric, including feminist rhetorics, Global Black and African American rhetorics, activist rhetorics, visual rhetorics, embodied rhetorics, queer rhetorics, and more.