This is Tyler Stafford’s Final Digital Project for his Digital Writing and Rhetoric course. He chose to do a website. The topic: thinking about the five classical canons of rhetoric in our contemporary, digital time period.

This project relies heavily on Collin Gifford Brooke’s Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media (2009), a work that reexamines and reframes the canons of classical rhetoric for our digital, new media age. Appropriately enough, Brooke’s central concern here is the interface. Rather than focus on compositions of today or orations of the past (that is, isolated textual objects or artifacts), he focuses on how we interact with and communicate with what are often synecdochically referred to as “screens.”  As part of his reexamination and reframing, Brooke gives each canon a new name (all of which start with the letter “P”): proairesis (invention), pattern (arrangement), perspective (style), persistence (memory), and performance (delivery). In this project, I discuss Brooke on the canons of rhetoric, explore what other thinkers have written on them, and add my own thoughts about these five subdivisions of classical rhetorical training.

Please note: To aid me in this project, I have drawn from my blog here and there. All work on my blog and on this website is my own.