The Importance of Narrative in Rhetoric

 It was not until I read three fourths of Watt's essay that I found something worthy of comment, but after I read the entire text I realized just how important the essay is as a whole. One thing that really stood out to me was the mention of Aristotle's opinion on narrative in rhetorical work. In the past I have always believed that a story is not necessary in a rhetorical piece. "Aristotle's elevation of reason over narration..."(208) made sense to me up until now. To be honest I really had not considered the contrast between a narrative piece of rhetoric or a non-narrative piece until reading this essay. Of course it makes sense that I would have a predisposed view that agrees with Aristotle, for I have always been taught in the Aristotelian ways of rhetoric and therefore my past agrees with him. Now that I have read through Watt's essay I better understand that while Aristotle's point on the narrative is valid, there are also various points which work to prove that a story line is almost mandatory in some methods of persuasion. Every rhetorical piece aims to persuade it's audience, yet each piece has a different way of doing so. In this essay, Watt's ability to exemplify the theory of story-list-sanction causes the reader (me) to establish different views on how a rhetorical piece can be constructed. While my thoughts were scattered throughout the reading and I had a hard time developing a position to take, I realized one crucial point. While this may seem obvious now, it was not so obvious before this semester began; the point being that we must put aside our ideas of rhetoric and explore outside of Aristotelian forms. The world outside of Aristotelian rhetoric is deep and complex and offers many different discourse regimes that we, as American students, may have never realized in the past. The goal of rhetoric as told by Watts is to, "influence it's audiences ideas and behaviors." While this goal is widely accepted the methods that exist to obtain this goal are varied and wide spread. It is our job, as students of rhetoric to understand that the deeper we dive into various methods, the more complex our history of rhetoric will become. Yet hopefully in complicating our understanding of traditional rhetoric we are able to construct a definition of rhetoric that is all our own. Whether it involves mass amounts of narrative in order to become popular or is purposefully academic, we are able to discover within ourselves the ability to construct and understand the types of rhetoric and discursive regimes that will eventually mold who we are as rhetoricians in the future.