The original association with the oral tradition has been extended to the medium of print, and with it has followed our intuition that writing has much to do with voice, and other auditory features such as rhythm and verbal music. We often know that we are included in a community of discourse as much by the sound of the language as by its sense. A s writers, then, we write within a rhetorical tradition which may have roots in Greek oratory, with distinctive metrical patterns and acceptable patterns of reasoning. Or we may have inherited our voices from our mothers, our First Nations ancestors, our European grandparents, African oral traditions, joual , any number of regional dialects, or the media. Rhetoric has everything to do with voice, patterns of speech translated into writing, and our ways of telling stories.
T here are many ways to tell the same story.
Rhetoric is the art and science of how to tell a story effectively to any given audience. We tell stories differently to children than to bureaucrats. We adjust our level of diction, our cadences, the complexity of our thought patterns if we want to be heard and understood. I've always felt that a writer is perfectly justified in feeling paranoid. It's funny how some things stick in your mind.