Grateful acknowledgement:  Many colleagues at the University of Puget Sound who took part in a summer writing-and-rhetoric seminar (2001) contributed quotations to this compendium.  

"Based on the types of studies that were pursued in the Classical world, the Seven Liberal Arts became codified in late antiquity by such writers as Varro and Martianus Capella. In medieval times, the Seven Liberal Arts offered a canonical way of depicting the realms of higher learning. The Liberal Arts were divided into the Trivium ("the three roads") and the Quadrivium ("the four roads"). The Trivium consisted of:

Grammar

Rhetoric

Logic

The Quadrivium consisted of:

Arithmetic -- Number in itself

Geometry -- Number in space

Music, Harmonics, or Tuning Theory -- Number in time

Astronomy or Cosmology -- Number in space and time[.]"

--David Fideler, http://www.cosmopolis.com/villa/liberal-arts.html

Argument:

[Definition] 3. a. A statement or fact advanced for the purpose of influencing the mind; a

reason urged in support of a proposition; spec. in Logic, the middle term in a

syllogism.

c1386 CHAUCER Frankl. T. 158 Clerkes wol seyn as hem leste By Argumentz that al is for the beste. 1475 CAXTON Jason 88 Why replye not ye to this argument. 1535 COVERDALE Job xxiii. 3 To pleate my cause before him, and to fyll my mouth with argumentes. 1664 H. MORE Myst. Iniq.338 But that the Beast that was, and is not, is not the Devil, we shall now evince by other arguments. 1724 WATTS Logic III. ii. §7 The middle term..is often called the Argument, because the force of the syllogisms depends upon it. c1790 REID Let. in Wks. I. 81/2 It is a good argument ad hominem, against the scheme of Necessity held by Hume. 1852 C. M. YONGE Cameos (1877)

II. i. 5 Well provided with golden arguments. 1865 MOZLEY Mirac. viii. 187 Anything is an argument which naturally and legitimately produces an effect upon our minds, and tends to make us think one way rather than another. --Oxford English Dictionary, 2^nd edition (1989).

"An argument is simply reasoning made public with the goal of influencing an audience."

--James A. Herrick, The History and Theory of Rhetoric, 2^nd edition (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2001), 32.

"There are also certain rules for a more copious kind of argument, which is called eloquence, and these rules are not the less true that they can be used for persuading men of what is false; but as they can be used to enforce the truth as well, it is not the faculty itself that is to be blamed, but the perversity of those who put it to bad use."

--Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine, Chapter 36, section 54: St. Augustine’s City of God and On Christian Doctrine, volume II of A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by J.F. Shaw, translated by Marcus Dods (Buffalo: Christian Literature Co., 1887).

"Few things are harder to put up with than a good example. "

--Mark Twain

"If the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle."

--Rita Mae Brown, Sudden Death (1983), quoted in The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women, compiled by Rosalie Maggio (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 191.

"But what about the instances--far more common in everyday life--in which two parties are directly trying to convince each other? In these `dyadic’ situations, standard persuasive strategies will usually do more harm than good, tending to harden rather

than soften positions. In such cases of dyadic argument, a technique is required that will create the grounds for reasonable discussion that classical rhetoric presupposes."

--Douglas Brent, "Rogerian Rhetoric: An Alternative to Traditional Rhetoric," in Argument Revisited, Argument Redefined: Negotiating Meaning in the Composition Classroom, edited by Barbara Emmel, Paula Resch, and Deborah Tenny (Lost Angeles: Sage Publications, 1996).

On Rhetoric

"Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art. Every other art can instruct or persuade about its own particular subject-matter; for instance, medicine about what is healthy and unhealthy, geometry about the properties of magnitudes, arithmetic about numbers, and the same is true of the other arts and sciences. But rhetoric we look upon as the power of observing the means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us; and that is why we say that, in its technical character, it is not concerned with any special or definite class of subjects."

--Aristotle, Rhetoric, translated by W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1954). See also "Aristotle’s Rhetoric: A Hypertext Resource," compiled by Lee Honeycutt: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~honeyl/Rhetoric/index.html

"Rhetoric, in the most general sense, is the energy inherent in emotion and thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to influence their decisions or actions."

--George A. Kennedy, from the introduction to his translation of Aristotle’s "Rhetoric," entitled Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 7.

"Rhetoric holds entire dominion over all verbal pursuits. Logic, dialectic, grammar, philosophy, history, poetry, all are rhetoric."

--Wayne Booth, The Vocation of a Teacher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xi-xv.

"For African American women, rhetorical expertise can be significantly defined by their abilities to use language imaginatively, creatively, and effectively in their efforts to assume a subject position. An enabling strategy with these rhetors has been to place themselves in a position, not always to act on their own, but more often than not to influence the power, authority, and actions of others. For them, rhetorical prowess has been intertwined historically with the artful ways in which they have participated as agents of change in community life."

--Jacqueline Jones Royster, "To Call a Thing By Its True Name: The Rhetoric of Ida B. Wells," in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Andrea A. Lunsford (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 167-84 [176].

"No matter what their ostensible topic, written texts are primarily about the writing and reading of them. What they refer to is not an explicit message but the implicit process by which inter-subjective understanding is getting accomplished. That is what you have to know in order to read and write."

--Deborah Brandt, Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), p. 4.

" [. . .]So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.

But it will be

a part of you, instructor.

You are white—

yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.

That’s American.

Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.

Nor do I often want to be a part of you.

But we are, that’s true!

As I learn from you,

I guess you learn from me—

although you’re older—and white—

and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B."

--from "Theme for English B," part of Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad, editor, David Roessel, associate editor (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994), p. 409.

"Just get it down on paper, and then we'll see what to do with it.

--Maxwell Perkins's advice to Marcia Davenport

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."

--Peter De Vries

Quotations from Perkins and De Vries from The Writer's Quotation Book, Edited by James Charlton (Yonkers, N.Y.: The Pushcart Press, 1980).

"The old lady, quoted by [E.M.] Forster--`How can I know what I think until I see what I say?’"

--W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962).

"I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

--Joan Didion, in Janet Sternburg, ed., The Writer on Her Work, volume I (1980), as quoted in The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women, compiled by Rosalie Maggio (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 359.

"What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them."

--George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946), included in Orwell’s Shooting and Elephant and Other Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1950) and widely anthologized since then.

"Like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettal, Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 55.

"[Defense of English] has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style."

--George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946).

"English has been robustly inventing itself for centuries—stretching and reshaping and enriching itself with every language and dialect it has encountered. Ironically, some of the very irregularities that students struggle with today are there because at some point along the way the English language yielded to another way of saying something."

--Mina P. Shaughnessy, Errors & Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 13.

"The reason formal grammar instruction has generally proved ineffective in improving writing probably lies in several complex and interrelated causes. Although these causes are often difficult to separate from one another, the most likely ones can be conveniently summarized as follows:

1. Formal grammar, being uninteresting, or too difficult, is not adequately learned by students.
2. Formal grammar, even if adequately learned, is not transferred to writing situations.
3. Formal grammar, even if adequately learned, is not transferable to writing situations."

--Rei R. Noguchi, Grammar and the Teaching of Writing: Limits and Possibilities (Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1991), p.4.

"She spoke academese, a language that springs like Athene from an intellectual brow, and she spoke it with a nonregional, `good’ accent."

The Small Room by May Sarton (1961), quoted in The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women, compiled by Rosalie Maggio (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 182.