Using Online Resources Helped Me Go Beyond Fallacies and into Classical Rhetoric.

For three years, Aristotle's work loomed large in my research life

Studying Aristotle in Digital Form

Though I found the textbooks helpful, I wanted to study the source of these ideas. According to the the textbooks I read, Aristotle come up with ethos, pathos, logos. I didn't study him in print. Instead, I downloaded his complete work into my laptop's Kindle app. Here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/Aristotle-Complete-Works-ebook/dp/B0776XBS5G

Though Aristotle's work is in the public domain, I decided to pay .99 cents for the download. All the commentary and history helped me understand his work better. I found out that the appeals came from his Rhetoric and the fallacies as we now label and define them came from On Sophistical Refutations. I started to bridge particular appeals to particular fallacies.

Studying Classical Rhetoric Online

Aristotle's work may be ancient, but I had my major exposure to these ideas online.

After going to the CCCC's 2014 Conference on open access, I started looking beyond my textbooks for both pedagogical and scholarly resources that explained Aristotle (as well as other) ancient rhetorical theorists. Thanks to Google, I found Dr. Gideon Burton's Forest of Rhetoric

Burton's online resource gave me both an exhaustive scholarly resource, as well as an online text my writing students could use. Because students didn't pay for The Forest of Rhetoric, I didn't have to feel bad if we only looked at the rhetorical appeals and a couple of the classical rhetoric exercises for writing prompts:http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Pedagogy/Pedagogy.htm

As I kept researching, I found my interests in creationist rhetoric return. I also became interested in visual and digital rhetoric.