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1.  Look around you and listen. Where do you find people practicing rhetoric? Watch television and read popular newspapers or magazines with this question in mind. Jot down one or two of the rhetorical arguments you hear or see people making. Presidents and members of Congress are good sources, but so are journalists and parents and attorneys and clergy and teachers. Do such people try to support these arguments with facts? Or do they use other means of convincing people to accept their arguments?

Rhetoric is everywhere. I see rhetoric on TV whether it be the news, a debate, or an immature teen trying to convince his best friend to be an accomplice in the silly prank he is scheming. There is rhetoric in my Women’s Writers class as we discuss how much we think Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre is an asshole and in PoliSci when we learn the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Rhetoric is found in all of my professors’ lectures, as well as in my own daily conversations.Watching all of these examples of rhetoric, I see that arguments do not have to be based solely on facts. They can be supported with facts, but there are also a wide variety of ways to convince another a point.

An example of an argument that did not necessarily need facts recently from my day to day life came from my Women’s Writer’s class. We have been reading and discussing Jane Eyre as our first novel of the semester, and there has been this consensus that Mr. Rochester is a horrid human being who gets on the nerves of the majority of the students in my class. (Side note: This of course knowing the fact that we had not finished the novel yet, we have only gotten maybe a third in) In the midst of this antipathy against a fictional man, one brave soul, raised their hand to argue that maybe Mr. Rochester was not as bad as the class was making him out to be.

This person did not exactly have this long thought out argument that they presented to the class, but their raising awareness of this other side to the argument started a discussion of trying to convince one another using a variety of argumentative strategies. Facts were not the only pieces of evidence used. Of course there were facts from the era, the division of classes, social norms etc. But there were also other techniques used to make a point. Examples from the texts of, knowing that Jane was an unreliable narrator and more. Through these strategies and a 50 minute discussion, at the conclusion of class, the consensus had changed from Mr. Rochester being a horrible character to being a very layered (like an ogre – Shrek reference), troubled being worth sympathy.

The New York Times defines civic engagement as “working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.”

In the first chapter of our Rhetoric and Civic Life textbook, Michael Schudson defines being civic through 4 different areas. Schudson describes these areas as are where civic engagement and the act of being civic can be exemplified and understood. These areas are everyday life, infrastructure, shared enterprise, and structure. A few examples of civic actions that fall into one or more of these categories are acts such as voting to keep the infrastructure of the governement, saying the Pledge of Allegiance which shows how things in our lives become a civic routine, and knowing what we have to attend to and what we have to ignore.

Now, to me, reading this chapter and all of his examples, honestly, confused me even more. I looked at all of the articles that we were assigned that defined civic engagement and living a civic life, and I just could not grasp this concept in a way that my brain could fully understand. But then my roommate, explained to me plainly that to be civic, is to just act as a civilian. A member of a community that contributes to the community. This definition made a lot more sense to me and actually helped me understand more of this civic mumbo jumbo than all the reading and discussion that we did in class.

After realizing this definition, I was able to understand how the examples fit into this cloud of civic engagement and leading a civic life. So I came up with what I thought was civic engagement and my civic responsibility. I placed a big part of my take on civic responsibility and civic engagement through what would be called the “Everyday Life” area of the 4 areas that Schudson described. Only because that is the area in which most of my civic engagement and responsibilities will probably come from.

A big part of civic engagement and civic responsibility is the acts that we do that affect society. I do not think this is wrong, but I believe that there is a bit more to living a civic life than it is to do community work. I think that to live a civic life, a person should act as a civilian as well as performing their civic acts to the community. Small things like holding the door for the person behind you, thanking the people who ring up your lunch, things that make the community a less hostile place to live in.

I think that my civic responsibility is to not only do work for my community (which is awesome, don’t get me wrong, work for the community is needed and should be exercised by everyone), but also to have a daily outlook of life where I bring up and build the civic life, the civilians, around me. I actually think that this might be an even bigger part of civic life over the act of doing work for society because without the civilians, there is no work. There is no voting, no saying the Pledge of Allegiance, no American people making jokes about our free country. Being a good civilian to each other helps build that civic engagement spirit, which brings more participation in other activities to better the community, which as a result builds a greater civic foundation for our society.