Rhetoric Not Credible, Says Expert - NewView Options Provides Creative Alternative to Obsolete Rhetoric

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(Free-Press-Release.com) February 8, 2010 -- Provo, UT, February 08, 2010 -- Bill Drew, the author of a successful new e-book, The Secret DNA of Writing Essays – And Everything Else, claims that traditional Rhetoric is not credible.

When it was pointed out to Mr. Drew that every major university offers courses in Rhetoric, he replied, "In a way, that reminds me of a line from Dan Brown's book and movie, The DaVinci Code: 'How dark the con of man.'

"You see, Rhetoric is somewhat like many religions: In the first place, it uses phrases and terms from a foreign language of thousands of years ago, which gives it a mystique that is hard to penetrate; secondly, hardly anyone really claims to understand it, except those few who have spent years and years studying it, so everybody blindly defers to their scholarly opinion about it; and, third, the real experts are continuously re-translating the original documents, each claiming a newer and better understanding that all other translators have somehow missed."

Drew indicated that a case in point is George A. Kennedy's recent book, On Rhetoric, Second Edition (2006) ( http://bit.ly/RhetoricTheoryBook ). According to Drew, in that book Kennedy says the key subject matter of Aristotle's Rhetoric was Greek politics, but Kennedy also says that Aristotle used no actual, real speeches of Greek politics in his analyses.

"Furthermore, Kennedy says that Aristotle probably had very little personal knowledge of Greek politics. Let me summarize what Kennedy said: Aristotle's Rhetoric consists of reasoning based purely on abstractions that are disconnected from anything real.

"Not only that," Drew continues, "but Kennedy also points out Aristotle's Rhetoric was lost for over 200 years right after his death and the Rhetoric of Isocrates took over. Kennedy said that Aristotle's Rhetoric therefore was, and I quote, 'obsolete as a school text.' George Kennedy is an expert, brilliant translator of ancient Greek, and he's saying, I believe, that Rhetoric is simply not credible, despite the fact that it was written by that great thinker, Aristotle. In fact, here's a quote from Kennedy's book that backs up what I'm saying: 'Aristotle's precepts can be reduced to a recommendation that a speaker give a reason (or apparent reason) for what is asserted.' "

So what does your new book offer as an alternative to rhetoric? "My book, The Secret DNA of Writing Essays - And Everything Else, presents NewView, a breakthrough concept based on all the kinds of newnesses - there are only five, believe it or not - that generate content. That's the opposite of Rhetoric, of course, which supplies only form. I developed NewView in my Master's thesis and have used it to win awards as a technical writer for the past twenty-five years. NewView actually works really well with Rhetoric by ensuring the new content for readers / audiences that Rhetoric neglects. NewView is also easy to understand, and is already being used by students, teachers, and businessmen.

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