I have been wanting to create one of these for a looong time. A place to stash our splices and dices, our slashes and burns, in no particular order. Everyone needs a CuttingRoomFloor as we are pulled toward long term maximization of entropy, doing the evolutionary dance. So: Don't throw it out. Paste it on the CuttingRoomFloor!
"Rhetoric and Composition" is a discipline at the structural center of American University education today. As a mode of instruction in the "fundamentals" of writing and argumentation, courses in rhetoric and composition are rightly seen as the highly compressed essentials of "learning to learn" as well the thread connecting contemporary education to the classical model of the Trivium - Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric. With techniques of writing, analysis, and persuasion, students are well prepared to join and navigate the communites of discourse they encounter as they choose a major, a develop a career and a and grow their life. By learning the core techniques of persuasion and argumentation as understood in dynamic response to rapidly shifting audiences and participants, students access an educational method that is increasingly recognized as transnational as well as cross cultural. Each generation of humans, it would seem, seek to transmit the life skills associated with eloquence and argumentation along with those of hunting, fishing, agriculture and medicine. The cultural transmission of all forms of collective and individuated identity depends upon the transmission of the rhetorical skills necessary to the recording, retrieval and creative alteration of the core stories, recipes and other "ways" of a culture. Insert deacon quote, insert donald quote.
Rhetoric, as traditionally understood by the Greeks and their modern heirs, compositionists of all types, typically divide their instructions into different categories. By learning practices of Invention, students become adepts at generating novel solutions to problems likely to be faced in any workplace or home.