Aristotle...

Aristotle:

I found the Aristotle reading to be incredibly intriguing, if for the
simple fact that his arguments seemed so common-sensical, from his
separation of artistic proofs and nonartistic proofs to his
differentiation between political, forensic and ceremonial speech.
Aristotle, it turns out, seems to be the father, primarily, of forensic
rhetoric, which he employs here to explain rhetoric (much like how Plato
uses rhetoric to decry rhetoric.)

In particular, I enjoyed the following quote from page 181: "Rhetoric is
not bound up with a single definite class of subjects, but is as
universal as the dialectics. ...its function is not simply to succeed in
persuading, but rather to discover the means of coming as near such
success as the circumstances of each particular case allow." Here
Aristotle lays the groundwork for contemporary defense-attorneying (for
better or for worse.) Artful rhetoric, then, is not simply winning
through logic, it's winning through logic in the logic's context.

Lunsford and Ede:

I appreciated this article more than last week's from the same text, if
only because this text offered a self-reflective approach to Composition
theory. Coming from a high school system that breeds self-centered
teachers who have little desire to grow and develop--it's refreshing to
read an article by two people as they critique a previous article they
wrote. The critique possesses the eye of writers ten years in the
future, who now see what flaws existed in their original text.

On page 819, the two discuss the "place of struggle" within rhetorical
theory and how divergent voices and theories have place within
composition studies despite ivory tower voices. I have a hard time
agreeing with theorists who always talk complete deconstruction and
"building new ways of speaking." The idea of building from within seems
much more realistic.