To Professor Jean Dietz Moss, who fed me with her knowledge. One day in a seminar class, she walked up to my desk, plunked down her 12th 1843 edition of A Practical System of Rhetoric, and said, âSee what you can do with this.â So, I did. Later, she gifted me the book itself. But she gave me ever so much more.
And, also, to Professor Donald C. Stewart, my first rhetoric professor, who might shake his head at my choice of subject. His views on nineteenth-century rhetoric were fairly straightforward, and his choice of Fred Newton Scott as a rescuer of rhetoric in composition was fairly set. Nonetheless, I hope I have made him proud.