Hummingbird Hill Studio
Dynamic Design
with the five classical canons of rhetoric
Linda Digby McFarland, M.A.
Dynamic Design with the five classical canons of rhetoric Linda Digby McFarland, M.A.
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Dear Audience: Rhetoric can be academic; quiltmaking is not so considered; both are learned skills. Rhetoric produces sound (whether vocal or subvocal); quilts are visual and touchable; both are symbol-centered. The products of rhetoric emanate from the mouth’s utterances and from the fingertips’ guidance of a pen or tapping of a keyboard; quilts come forth from hands using scissors, fabric, needles and thread; both originate in the mind, and both can be crafted into art by skilled practitioners. Both—spoken and written words, as well as stitched quilts—convey rhetorical messages to their respective audiences. You may now reasonably be wondering, “What does the quiltmaking process have to do with comprehension of the five classical canons of rhetoric and their application to writing and speaking?” Rhetoric can be a difficult concept to grasp; an analogy of the design process of quiltmaking to the use of the classical canons of rhetoric can increase our understanding of the purpose of the canons in effective writing and speaking. I have been a quiltmaking instructor for the past quarter of a century. I have written profusely for most of my sixty-five years, and was educated, in my youth, to be a journalist. I have a Master of Arts in Professional and Technical Writing from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. I teach freshman composition at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and at Ouachita Technical College. I searched for a method of empowering the composition of each of my students’ academic pieces with purposeful prose, animated imagination, logical order, meaningful clarity, appropriate personal expression, audience engagement and acceptance, and a dynamic medium. I realized that the designing process of quiltmaking and the designing process of document-making are exceedingly similar, and the guiding principles of the classical canons of rhetoric apply to both of them. I have been applying the classical canons of rhetoric in the design of my quilts for twenty-five years; I just hadn’t known it! I didn’t refer to my quilt design process in rhetorical terminology. I called it “dynamic designing,” but I was effectively, very effectively, using and teaching Aristotle’s five rhetorical principles: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.* Please accept my Introduction to you of the five rhetorical canons! Linda December 2007 *The contents of my letter are quoted from my article "Teaching the Tools of the Five Classical Canons of Rhetoric to Composition Students through the Quiltmaking Design Process"--and copyrighted 2006.
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