The Rhetoric of a Rhetoric Website:
Inquiry, Pedagogy, and Scholarship

Interactive Materials: Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric

-01-   I started out innocently enough. Overwhelmed with all the technical terminology from historical rhetoric I encountered in reading rhetoric manuals from antiquity to the Renaissance, I turned to web pages and the hyperlinking of data simply as a way of making notes to myself. (Let's see, just how does metonymy differ from synecdoche, and is catachresis just a combination of metaphor and hyperbole?) But in three years' time, my research notes have evolved into a full-scale website on rhetoric now used by teachers and students from across the country and globe and relied upon as a scholarly reference by journalists, graduate programs, and university libraries.

-02-   The brief but happy life of Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric, illustrates how the conventionally separated activities of discovering, organizing, teaching, and publishing academic information can be pursued simultaneously on a website. The flexibility and novelty of the web medium can be seductive, frustrating and resource-consuming. However, as this scholar/teacher/webmaster's experience reveals, if one knows and respects the parameters of the web environment, and if one is wise enough to observe certain basic rhetorical concepts such as arrangement and delivery (in the organization and presentation of one's ideas), and especially audience, the nascent web medium can create a dynamic and productive relationship between academic inquiry, pedagogy, and scholarship.

1. Academic Website Creation as Rhetorical Inquiry

-03-   In setting out to make my rhetoric website, my intention was not the same as that of so many current entrepreneurs in cyberspace: finding an attractive means (web presentation) to sell a product. Before long I would discover that the public and pedagogical dimensions to my project required me to attend to clear and attractive presentation of my ideas, but I began to work in the web environment not to sell knowledge, but to find it, arrange it, create it. My historical research on rhetoric had overwhelmed me with data; I hoped the web environment would enable me (and then others) to make more sense of it.

-04-   My subject matter, rhetoric, gave me an advantage in coping with the duality of this medium (its capacity to enable both private inquiry and public presentation of ideas), for the earliest theorists on rhetoric had already recognized this duality in discourse generally. Rhetoric is known as the art of persuasion (selling ideas), yet from the beginning it has also been associated with inquiry (discovering ideas). Aristotle acknowledged this epistemological dimension to rhetoric in calling the art one of finding the best available means of persuasion.^[1] Similarly, in his Antidosis, Isocrates said the power of speech has as much to do with "seek-ing- light for ourselves on things which are unknown" as with persuading others, "for the same arguments which we use in persuading others when we speak in public, we employ also when we deliberate in our own thoughts."^[2]

-05-   Even so, traditionally we know well the difference between the rhetoric of our thoughts, or of our private exploratory writings, and the rhetoric of publication. The web environment draws these two domains closer to one another, which can prove both distressing (as the public examines unpolished thought) and invigorating (as the public contributes to revisions). Thus, my narrative about website creation as rhetorical inquiry is inevitably intertwined with my narratives about this website's uses in teaching and in scholarship. What we are used to keeping divided the web will not allow to be kept apart.

-06-   My research goal was not unlike that of the authors of the very rhetoric manuals I was studying from ancient Greece and Rome and from medieval and Renaissance Europe: I set out to canvass and comprehend the art of rhetoric for my day. Of course I found competing and conflicting rhetorical traditions (for example, the concept of style differs markedly between Hermogenes from late Greek antiquity and Cicero in the Roman tradition). However, as a conservative educational discipline that lasted for over two millennia, rhetoric managed to retain core principles, traditional argumentative strategies, and common figures of speech that I wished to define, arrange, understand, and teach to others.

-07-   This encyclopedic ambition is not new, of course. Most ancient rhetorics, like writing textbooks today, combine discussion of theory with lists of strategies or figures of speech (see Aristotle's Rhetoric or the Ad Herennium, for example). Modern reference works based on classical rhetoric repeat this encyclopedic effort. Richard Lanham's Handlist of Rhetorical Terms and Arthur Quinn's Figures of Speech, for example, remain excellent handbooks. However, I have found rhetoric can be the victim of its own success, for as rhetorical terms multiply (one Renaissance reference work listed 5000 different figures of speech), the relative importance of rhetorical terms diminishes, and the important correspondences among kinds or levels of rhetorical concepts can become utterly lost.

-08-   Long before the Information Age, a surplus of data about figures of speech in particular had contributed to sandbagging the discipline of rhetoric as a whole. Because of the glut of terms naming figures, schemes, and tropes, it has seemed to many that rhetoric is only concerned with superficial aspects of language: dressing up a thought with figurative language). In actuality, rhetoric has traditionally dealt with the most serious and primary aspects of communication: adjusting one's speech to one's audience, developing and arranging one's material, etc. In other words, too few come to appreciate the forest of rhetoric because of the proliferation of its many trees. If I wanted to do service to this discipline, I would have to help rescue it from its own obscurity.

-09-   It was for this reason I appreciated the simple schematic rendering of rhetorical concepts printed in the front and back covers of Edward Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student.^[3] There, several simple charts give an overview of rhetoric in a nutshell, with page references to where more detailed information can be found. Here was the print model I would take as a starting point. The key to understanding the complexities of rhetoric, I began to believe, was not so much a matter of comprehensiveness (which could simply confuse), but of clear arrangement and presentation.

-10-   A web environment, I discovered, could provide both the simplicity I admired in Corbett's visual scheme, and the comprehensiveness I appreciated in the long and detailed pages of rhetorical manuals. Through hyperlinks, a reader could travel readily back and forth between the overview (the forest), and the details (the trees). Indeed, I would eventually employ this forest-and-trees metaphor as the organizational scheme and theme of my website.

2. Academic Website Creation as Pedagogy

-11-   It is an old and true saying that to learn something, one must teach it. I found that if I constructed my rhetoric website pedagogically, with entry-level students in mind, it brought clarity to my subject matter and it forced me towards a simplicity of design and to structures of accessibility that have proven helpful for all audiences. I believe teaching is the optimal rhetorical orientation for disseminating scholarly information on the web--and not just for the sake of actual students who visit the site or for the surprisingly large and diverse general public who visit. Researchers or scholars who do not think of web-based knowledge with teaching in mind will not just pass by a great opportunity for broadcasting their specialities; they are bound to be misunderstood and misrepresented. In traditional publishing scholarship carries a context with it (such as the history and readership of a given scholarly journal) which strongly influences interpretation. On the web, the burden is on the researcher/scholar to provide context. Keeping a student audience in mind prepares one to make the necessary rhetorical adjustments in presenting information meaningfully.

-12-   My initial attempt to put the system of rhetoric into web format merely took the form of an outline I adapted from a handout I'd used for students. I called it "Rhetoric for Rookies." As you can see by examining it, the links simply take one from a table of contents-type listing to subsections of the same single web page, where more detailed lists and sometimes definitions of terms can be found. It was simply a list taking one to other lists, and was extremely limited. It was efficient, but not conceptually clear.

-13-   I had been using the forest-and-trees metaphor to teach students the relationships among rhetorical concepts and terms in the classroom, and it occurred to me that this very metaphor could provide the conceptual and organizational order my website needed. My next version inaugurated the forest metaphor and theme, which began to give the site some zest and promised a better arrangement to come. However, the website would not escape the simplistic linking of lists of my initial version until I had better mastered the tools of hypertext and learned to use superior web design and browser conventions.

-14-   As I gained familiarity with the web environment, I realized a more optimal arrangement would be to break up my huge single page having just internal hyperlinks, and to make instead a miniature web of information with links relating the pages and their content to each other. This component model has proven very effective and flexible, for I can change the overall arrangement of the website through the main page and its links (and through using "frames," discussed below), while preserving the integrity of individual pages devoted to single terms--pages which can themselves be amended or expanded as necessary.

-15-   Giving each and every rhetorical term that I discovered in my research its own "home page" has made my research more manageable, and has made possible ready revisions. I began with each such page including just the term, its definition, and where possible, an example (see aporia-version one). As I saw the need for cross-references (discussed below), the template I used for each term's home page grew to include such references under three headings (where applicable): Related Figures of Speech, Related Topics of Invention, and Connections to Other Parts of Rhetoric. (see aporia-version two).

-16-   Later, this template grew even further to accommodate my own research, the needs of students, and the needs of scholars. As for the first, I found I needed to include alternate spellings and equivalent terms from Latin, Greek, or English for each term in order to keep them straight (at one point, for example, I erroneously set up separate pages for conplexio and complexio). As for the second, students need a way to make the very foreign terminology understandable and accessible, so I added pronunciation and etymologies as ways both to remember and to understand a given figure of speech. For the scholarly audience, I included the etymologies, the Greek terms in Greek characters, and the references to primary sources at the bottom of each page. The formatting commands available through hypertext markup language (HTML) made possible a simple and attractive layout for each of these "home pages" (see aporia-final version).

-17-   By establishing the header information (alternate spellings and equivalent terms in particular), I was able to prune significantly the overgrown flowers section of the Forest. Now, terms essentially the same all appear on the same page, headed by the most established or common term (usually the Greek term, though not always). See, for example, apocope, whose three Latin forms (abissio, abscissio, or absissio) and one English form ("cutting from the end") all appear as alternate names in the heading for apocope. Using the search engine I built into the header of the website (using an offsite, free search service from Thunderstone, Inc.), I searched for common terms, collapsed separate entries where appropriate, and made many "pointer" entries when a term (such as "abominatio") clearly had separate meanings.

-18-   I have been satisfied at the growing utility and improved layout of these individual entries, but my overall purpose has never been simply the making of electronic index cards; my resource is not simply a database of rhetorical terms. I sought to organize this burgeoning array of terminology into a meaningful and intelligible interface. What good would it do for students to have a searchable database of rhetorical terms if they didn't know what to look for? How could I introduce rhetorical terminology sufficiently to introduce the subject matter, but not to overwhelm the entry-level learner? I did not want, for example, to give the public a densely hierarchical reference work like Heinrich Lausberg's 900-page Handbook of Literary Rhetoric^[4] (admirable as it is in its own right).

-19-   Happily, the web environment also provided me the ability to organize information spatially and visually, as I had appreciated in Corbett's book, but with a far more dynamic and fluid interface due to the hyperlinks and to the ability to scroll along screens. With the advent of frames, a now familiar browser convention by which different panels or windows of information can be shown independently yet together on the same screen, I was finally able to establish the three-fold organization apparent on the website's finished main screen.

-20-   The result is, I believe, an interface that maximizes access but minimizes clutter. A central viewing frame (headed by the "Forest" logo) is flanked on the left and right by thinner frames called "Trees" and "Flowers" respectively. The "Trees" are the organizing and controlling principles and practices of rhetoric, more comprehensive than the "Flowers." In turn, the "Flowers" are the many hundreds of figures of speech I have compiled from ancient, medieval, and Renaissance rhetorical manuals. As one clicks on a "Tree" (a major category such as "Canons of Rhetoric") the center viewing panel is then filled with the individual page devoted to that general rhetorical category. Similarly, clicking on one of the "Flowers" (a figure of speech such as epistrophe (try it by scrolling down the "Flowers" frame), the center panel fills with that term's home page. The scrolling feature on the "Flowers" frame allows a rather large list to exist unobtrusively on the main page. Readers are also able to customize how they read the website by dragging any of the frames to a desired size.

-21-   Thus, even though the resource is highly organized, its arrangement and hyperlinks do not dictate a certain sequence for viewing the information. The website can be "read" merely as a reference work, consulted briefly and specifically; or, it can be "read" as a primer in rhetoric, a sort of interactive textbook. By allowing each visitor to create his or her own text as desired or needed, the Forest of Rhetoric is a "constructive hypertext," as Michael Joyce defines this term.^[5] "In constructive hypertexts, the reader can actively link between and among texts rather than merely following predetermined links, thus creating new hypertexts."^[6] It is a reader- or user-oriented rhetorical approach that depends upon the unique grammar of hyperlinked text.^[7] In layman's terms, the links make possible either quick reference to a given term, or else more in-depth exploration of the subject matter itself.

-22-   Although I approached the development of the website pedagogically, I continued my research in rhetoric, which also shaped the configuration of information on the site. For example, Sister Miriam Joseph's Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language^[8] demonstrated to me how stylistic figures could be correlated to those general argumentative strategies known as the topics of invention. Thus, metaphor and simile were not just ways of turning a word or phrase, but were miniature versions of a larger argumentative strategy--in this case, the topic of invention known as Comparison.

-23-   This was a watershed realization, for such correlations bridge the great divide in rhetoric (represented graphically on my website by the two outer frames) between larger strategies of discourse, such as standard arguments, and the local level manipulations of language associated with style and the figures. I embodied this realization in the website's organization through cross references establishing those correspondences. Thus, the topic of invention known as "Whole and Part" refers on its page to that figure of speech in which a whole is represented by naming one of its parts, synecdoche, and vice versa.

-24-   This organization aids ease of use, of course, but I set it up as a means of understanding the subject I was investigating. Even though I was using The Forest of Rhetoric in my teaching, for me it was still a sophisticated system of note taking, allowing me to integrate and synthesize new rhetorical terms as these occurred from source to source. The flexibility and accessibility of the hyperlinks and frames made possible novel conceptualizations of my research data. As I saw patterns across a number of figures of speech, for example, I collected instances of them from across the website and made a new page grouping and linking them. For example, many of the rhetorical "schemes" rely on repetition. Once again, I used the search functions of my own website and came up with a list of entries from my website dealing with repetition. I then set up a new page, "Figures of Repetition" which I organized according to subcategories (such as repetition of letters, of words, and of ideas).

-25-   The website is infinitely expandable along such lines. However, many such innovative groupings I have kept out of sight--available, but only through cross-references or a search. Accessibility requires simplicity, and if there is anything that I have learned about website design, it is to resist the temptation to crowd a web page, or to over-design. There are practical reasons for keeping any website, academic or not, as simple as possible. Coding for websites has not been completely standardized, and so the spiffy tricks possible with HTML code currently recognized by Microsoft's Internet Explorer may be ignored by Netscape, or vice-versa ("floating frames" or "blinking" are two such features). Cutting-edge web features including complex Java scripts (miniature cross-platform programs rather than the uncomplicated formatting commands of basic HTML) can catch attention, but can make one's web presentation completely founder if the Java fails and nothing is visible. I experimented with the tools available, and feedback from students who were accessing The Forest of Rhetoric from various machines and distances convinced me to keep my coding and my presentation as simple as possible. I even have a secondary, non-frames main page for those using (now outdated) web browsers that do not recognize this convention, such as LINX (which recognizes no graphics at all).

-26-   A website's credibility, its ethos, depends both on external accessibility (getting to the page) and internal accessibility (navigating within the website). Simplicity of coding and design contribute to both, including the use of few graphical images, which are slow to load on many systems or over slow modem connections. Although my website would aim for a comprehensiveness and even erudition far beyond the needs of undergraduate students, I used such students as a baseline to test the accessibility and presentation of the website. The feedback from these students taught me greater respect for the problems inherent in the electronic medium and in the developing medium of web-based information.

-27-   That I succeeded in reaching students is apparent not only in my own teaching, but in the fact that secondary and elementary schools have recommended Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric, as a resource. In September of 1997 the website received the "Wise Owl" web award "in recognition of exemplary design and educational excellence."

3. Academic Website Creation as Scholarship

-28-   "Web-based scholarship" remains an oxymoron for many. The novelty of the medium and its association with popular culture have worked against academic recognition of scholarly websites. This was even more true four years ago when I began my rhetoric website, and so my intent in creating the website had never been to establish academic credentials nor to provide a significant means of sharing my scholarly research. Scholarship through the website has been a secondary purpose, but one that I have gradually realized is just as significant as designing a user-friendly interface. I began to take my own website more seriously as a scholarly endeavor precisely because others began to do so.

-29-   It is always difficult to know if one's scholarly articles are being used, understood, or read at all. But in cyberspace there are at least three clear measures of this. First, through a third-party counter it is possible to register the "hits" a website receives. My website (verified through Hitboxer) receives about 40-50 unique users daily. (I wish my scholarly articles were so popular). A second and better measure of the scholarly use made of one's academic website is email responses. I have received a constant flow of feedback through email ever since my website has been indexed by some of the major services (Lycos, Alta Vista, Yahoo, etc.). This feedback gives me a good sense of how the website is used. Third, citations to my website reveal the evaluations of experts in either explicit reviews of the website or in their implied endorsement by recognizing and recommending my site.

-30-   I first demonstrated my website to my scholarly peers at the 1997 meeting of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. As I demonstrated my website in a computer lab, I was greeted with great enthusiasm by those who recognized that the content was being well served in this new medium. As they began navigating the site themselves, they pressed me for scholarly details and sources that were not on the website. At that point I had provided information useful to beginning students, but not the information that would be necessary to satisfy those doing serious scholarship in the field.

-31-   As a direct response to their interest and questions, I have invested considerable time during the past two years in supplying scholarly apparatus to accompany the more general information. As explained above, each entry now has comparative Greek, Latin, and English terms; etymologies; and the Greek in its original alphabet. To this I added, to the bottom of every page, citations to the primary texts where a given term is defined or discussed. I have tried to make these citations clear but unobtrusive: they are in smaller type; they link back to a main page of Sources; and they indicate which variation of a term derives precisely from which source. (See for example, the Sources section at the bottom of the entry for aporia.)

-32-   Providing this scholarly information has legitimized my research both for myself and for scholars. I ended up clearing away many terms and definitions I had started with which were based on handy secondary sources but which proved not to be grounded in historical rhetoric. Experts have recognized the scholarly credibility of the website, which I measure in part by the scholarly invitations it has generated. For example, I was recently invited to contribute an article to the multivolume Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik (Historical Lexicon of Rhetoric) based on the authority of my web scholarship. And, after reviewing my website, a senior editor at Oxford University Press has recently urged me to send him a proposal for a print version of the website. I had not anticipated generating scholarly opportunities in conventional publishing through the website, but this has proven one of the happy outcomes of web publishing.

-33-   I have found that some of the ideals of scholarship are more quickly achieved in the web environment, such as the idea that scholarly response should drive and refine one's research. An instance of this occurred when I was asked by one of my scholarly peers meeting in Canada where I had come up with the "General Rhetorical Strategies" that I listed (at that time) among the "Trees" on my website. My response was an honest one, if unsatisfactory: I had come up with them myself. I had noticed in researching information about rhetorical pedagogy (specifically, methods of imitation), that many of the pedagogical exercises established by rhetoricians over the centuries involved certain basic strategies for the manipulation of discourse: addition, subtraction, transposition, and substitution. Later, when reading about metathesis, I found these same four methods used to describe how the sounds, syllables, or letters in words could be rhetorically altered. I listed these patterns as "General Rhetorical Strategies," devoted separate web pages to each of them, and made the appropriate cross-references. It was some time later that I discovered these four strategies had been codified and discussed in three ancient sources. As a result, I renamed the web page "Four Categories of Change" and provided the classical term for these from Quintilian, quadripartita ratio.

-34-   As in professional life in any domain, the networking of people and ideas is a vital function of scholarship. My academic website has complemented and supplemented the professional meetings I regularly attend. In some instances it has provided me direct contact with scholars in my field that in the past I have only gained through direct contact at international conferences. For example, an Italian scholar at the State University in Moscow wrote me this morning, as did a professor of Russian last month from the University of Tartu in Estonia. The latter employs my website in teaching Russian stylistics and has negotiated with me the translation of the website into Russian at a mirror site. While it is true that a website does not substitute for the professional contacts possible in scholarly conferences, in some ways it accomplishes similar purposes in ways more efficient and less costly than those activities.

-35-   The stream of responses I receive from around the globe from scholars has made me feel very much that my voice is a valued part of a long and healthy conversation in my field. Moreover, the web medium has made possible scholarly contacts and conversations with specialists in allied fields within which I do not normally circulate. For example, although I do engage specialists in my home fields of rhetoric and Renaissance studies, through my website I have also been contacted by classicists, translators, biblical scholars, and professors from across the humanities.

-36-   The scholarly world can readily blend with that of teaching on an academic website, as I have discovered through responses and queries coming to me from teachers, students, and the general public. Students (who seem more ready to use web-based searching than their more established counterparts) frequently communicate: graduate students working on dissertations, secondary students in debate classes--even elementary school students discovering the world of language by way of web resources that have listed my website as a starting point. Some people arrive at my website not because of the subject matter, rhetoric, but because of my examples. For example, one internet-searching student discovered a rhetorical approach to interpreting Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy because he stumbled across my listing of this novel as an illustration of the figure metalepsis. Such accidental yet productive discovery has suggested to me an opportunity for widening the exposure of my website by diversifying the examples I employ (many of which are now drawn from Shakespeare). I have also been contacted by a reporter analyzing a speech by President Clinton and wanting to verify that he had understood the rhetorical terms he had found on my website (he had).

-37-   Citations to Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric reveal a great deal about the diverse users accessing the website and the variety of uses to which this information is being put. This diversity is due in part to the general nature of my subject matter (rhetoric is inherently cross-disciplinary), and in part to the range of individuals who search the internet for information. I have listed the websites referring to or recommending my academic website on a separate page (See Citations to Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric). Citing URLs are from academic institutions, university libraries; general scholarly websites; reviewed indexing services (Such as Yahoo or the Mining Company); secondary schools sites; web resources for language, literature, rhetoric, classics, and wordplay; and from geographic areas as diverse as the University of Sweden and the Davis School District of Farmington, Utah. It certainly is gratifying for a scholar to see his work considered useful for both specialized and general purposes.

-38-   A website puts a public face on scholarship--or it can, if one attends to that principle of rhetoric that governs good communication in any context: effective presentation in light of one's audience(s). The diverse nature of the web audience can be ignored, of course, but the organization and introduction of information in light of non-specialists can guarantee a much broader exposure--and frankly, a more satisfying use --of one's research.

4. Conclusion

-39-   My experience in assembling a website has improved my research, my teaching, and my scholarship in ways that I had hoped and in many ways I had not expected. Yet, this has come at a certain price, and has yielded hard-won awareness of the limits of this medium.

-40-   First, the creation of a website takes a great deal of time, much of which is not spent in the areas for which a scholar is trained. Web creation software is becoming more user-friendly and less dependent on its users knowing hypertext markup language, the code for web publishing. However, I have found it quite necessary to know and be able to manipulate HTML. No, writing HTML is not like writing computer code. If it were, I would never have taken on something so daunting. It is more like advanced word processing. And yet, it is another language which requires time to learn and master, especially when the code itself and browsers have been evolving. (By the way, I recommend Allaire's HomeSite as a composing medium, though there are many others both more simple and more complex).

-41-   Website creation can be a time sink in another way, as well. Problems of scope are amplified by electronic publishing because it is simply far too easy to take on far too large of a project. My colleague, Paul Thomas, is part of the very admirable Canterbury Tales Project, yet this is a years-long endeavor involving a small army of scholars at a variety of institutions to bring it off. My project has been underwritten only by some occasional student labor. Anything involving even a modest number of graphical images, database preparation, or multi-media requires a task force and grants to drive the project. Academic website production, like all electronic publishing, can become something more akin to the collaborative and costly production of a movie than to typical scholarly work if one indulges all the tempting possibilities of this new medium.

-42-   Second, website creation is a hard sell to one's academic peers as a legitimate scholarly activity. This will change, but not in the short run. This has been underscored at my institution by two strong and contrary currents that have caught me in the middle. On the one hand, I have been cautioned not to rely upon my web scholarship for purposes of promotion (my tenure review is imminent). On the other, the president of the university has made digital publication and distance learning a top priority, establishing a Vice President to oversee university efforts to make use of this institution's considerable investment in hardware and web access for a technology-hungry public. Ironically, facility in web publishing has become a criterion for assessing faculty candidates seeking employment at my university, but faculty already in place (at least in the humanities) are told not to rely on web publishing for rank and status advancement. One can be punished for being a few years ahead of the game.

-43-   With these caveats in mind, I urge scholars to bring their knowledge into the electronic environment. Many significant uses of the electronic environment have yet to be discovered, and along the way the very pitfalls one faces can provide a stimulus for rethinking one's research and reframing its use within the classroom. A careful eye must be kept on maintaining realistic scholarly and technical parameters to web projects (simpler is better), and upon that strange but invigorating diversity of publics who will visit the academic site (and return, if you keep your site an inviting one through its accessibility--not through flash or gimmick). But these are navigable challenges on a journey well worth the price of passage. For this researcher/teacher/scholar, each of these roles has improved the other as I have entered the slightly dangerous, highly invigorating world of academic website creation.

Footnotes

[1] Aristotle, On Rhetoric, . Tr. George Kennedy. (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), p. 35 -1355b-.

[2] Isocrates, Antidosis. In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from the Classical Times to the Present. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds. (Boston: St. Martins, 1990), p. 50.

[3] Edward P.J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

[4] Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study. Tr. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, David E. Orton. Ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson. (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Although this new English translation of Lausberg's seminal reference work makes it more accessible to non-German readers, the book exemplifies well the trait of over-organization. There exist so many levels and sub-levels in his comprehensive outline that not even three separate indexes (Latin, English, French) make it easy to navigate the references. Lausberg's work is still unparalleled for the specialist.

[5] Michael Joyce, qtd. in Douglas Andrew Eyman, "Hypertextual Collaboration in the Computer-assisted Composition Classroom: an Introduction to Computer-mediated Communication Pedagogy" Thesis. University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 1995. http://localsonly.wilmington.net/~eymand/thesis.html. Joyce has become one of the seminal voices in hypertext theory. See his Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. University of Michigan Press, 1995. Eyman quotes Joyce's "Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts." Academic Computing 3.4 (1988): 10-42.

[6] Eyman. http://localsonly.wilmington.net/~eymand/chap2.html

[7] David Norton has written one of the earliest accounts of the grammar of hypertext in a Master's thesis. I read his work early in 1995 as I was conceptualizing my website and wish to acknowledge his influence. David Norton, "Playgrounds, Mosaics, and Improvisation Structures: A Study of Collaborative Hypertext Composition in the Classroom and in Theory." Thesis. Brigham Young U, 1994. http://humanities.byu.edu/dnorton/homepage_497.html (16 May, 1995) (This link is not currently active). See also Beverly Zimmerman, David W. Norton, and N. Lindeman, "Using a 'hyperphoric grammar' for teaching and evaluating collaborative hypertexts. In S.L. DeWitt, and K. Strasma (Eds.), Contexts, Intertexts, and Hypertexts (in press).

[8] Sister Miriam Joseph. Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947).