This week’s readings brought me back to high school debate, where I somehow did very well without understanding exactly what I was doing; some of my debate methods were intuitive, some were related to proofs, and some were a bunch of crap. But now, I have polysyllabic words of Greek and Latin origin to help me explain and frame arguments! In all seriousness though, I found this reading really helpful for different areas of my academic life. As others have discussed, explaining some of these concepts to students I tutor can be useful, provided I focus more on the broader concepts than the terms. Lots of students come in with assignments to write argumentative papers, and I think explaining the concepts behind kairos could be very useful for some of them. (Other students might just be confused by it – even the potential discussion of kairos depends on the right kairos.) The stases too can be helpful for students who are stuck or missing an important part in an argumentative paper. Crowley writes that “the stases often allow rhetors to articulate assumptions that they take for granted but that may be controversial to others,” which is a concept I’d like to articulate to students who are so sure of the rightness of their argument that they don’t try to explain it.

I think that I could teach some of these rhetorical approaches to freshmen, but it could prove to be difficult for me to explain and difficult for the students to grasp. Admittedly, kairos and stasis theory will probably be more useful for me as a graduate student than as an instructor or tutor.

I really, really hope I never have a student who writes a paper on abortion.