 Introduction Classical Trivium Applied Trivium Explored |
Trivium /
RhetoricalhandbookRhetorical Handbook: Heuristics and HeureticsWe would like to start this handbook by suggesting that heuristics (guides to analysis) and heuretics (guides to invention) are going to be of vital importance to effectively working with new media and digitial communications, both as consumers/interpreters and producers/creators. The tradition of heuristics, schema, or topoi has been a central part of the rhetorical tradition, as teachers of rhetoric have always faced the difficult task of trying to teach a fluid, situational, unstable art—rhetoric—via memorable, coherent, useful strategies. McLuhan scholar Frank Zingrone (2001) suggests that heuristics like Marshall McLuhan's Laws of Media capture the positive spirit of "symplexity": "taking huge amounts of complexifying information and imploding it into simplistic transformations" (44). These heuristics and heuretics run the risk of over-simplifying analysis and production, and will always benefit from the critical eye of the dialectician, questioning both the value of the heuristic or heuretic, as well as the analyses or products produced.
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