Questions

I thought the article generally seemed like a collection of vague, paraphrastic summaries of classical authors’ ideas about approaches to rhetoric, loosely connected to the setting of a composition classroom. The concept of Kairos, while certainly relevant to writing in a very general sense, seems both incredibly obvious and nearly impossible to explain to a group of undergraduates. It seems like most students would understand intuitively that a variety of factors influence the relevance of a particular topic at a particular time. Explaining that explicitly might generate only confusion rather than anything productive or helpful to the writing process. 

However, I thought that the adaptation of the list of four questions devised by ancient rhetoricians would be a useful exercise for facilitating a critical conversation about the students’ writing.  The stasis questions would be an effective starting point for writers attempting to develop an essay.  While the answers to these questions (conjecture, definition, quality, and policy) seem like they would naturally occur throughout the writing process, bringing them up with students at the outset would likely provide an easier means of organization and articulation of ideas. Thinking about the questions at the outset would likely force a writer – especially an immature writer – to confront and develop solutions for problems that might otherwise not be evident until a much later stage of composition.  The definition (stasis horos) question in particular seemed a useful way to get students to examine the ‘problem’ or ‘topic’ of their essay from multiple angles.