Personal Writing Assignments

Throughout most of the history of rhetoric, the answer to the question above was clear enough: the student of discourse was supposed to be able to speak and write on any objective subject given. Indeed, this concept of rhetoric having no specific province of its own, being able to cover any area of knowledge, is older than Plato and Aristotle. As Richard Leo Enos has shown, rhetorical theorists from the first sophists forward trained young students from their earliest lessons to master fully-formed objective speech tasks of many sorts. There were those in antiquity who felt quite sincerely that this meant the true rhetor must know everything-as Cicero puts it in De Oratore: In my opinion, no one can be an absolutely perfect orator unless he has acquired a knowledge of