When I began teaching, I had a phenomenal mentor who passed on his endless wisdom through the two years we worked at the same institution. During these two years, I began to develop, as all fledgling teachers do, my own style. Then, I began on the path to pursuing my PhD in rhetoric and soon realized that the style I had created had a Greek influence. Now, having studied the Roman rhetors up through St. Augustine, I am also realizing that my style has evolved into something a little bit Roman as well. It all lies in the comments that I leave on students graded papers; comments that begin in Greek with the emphasis on the first two canons of rhetoric and then move into a Roman style as their understanding of the canons evolves into “A” paper material and I begin to address the third canon–style.

Each semester, I get students who run the gamut of writing ability. My job, therefore, is to make sure that I help them improve their writing as much as possible. To this end, I begin by adding comments on student papers that focus their revision and future writing on areas they need to improve upon. My comments largely focus on the methods and research they use for their invention as well as the arrangement of the material. This proves relatively easy and amazingly Greek on the majority of my students’ papers. However, from the semester’s beginnings, I have strong writers who have a better grasp on invention and arrangement and, therefore, do not need as much guidance as others. I spent the entire first semester of my teaching grappling with how to add additional comments to their papers that would aid their writing improvement. I felt at a loss for feedback; I had begun to master adding comments that helped students with invention and arrangement, but after that I was at a loss.

As the semester progressed, I began reading comments both my mentor and I had left on student papers during the semester we worked closely on grading together. Studying his comments, I found a trend that I began to utilize in my own work. His comments on better papers focused on specific aspects of the writing with minimal comments on invention and arrangement. Therefore, I began to follow suit.

By the beginning of my second semester of teaching, I had a strong grasp on my commenting style. With weaker writers, I continued to focus my comments on their invention and arrangement. However, I finally found a method of working on improving the writing of stronger writers; for their papers, I focused my comments more on their style and made minimal comments to their invention and arrangement. When I focused on their style, I worked to provide comments that would allow them to see other weaknesses in their writing. I would make notes on repetitive sentence structure so students could begin to pay attention to these in their writing. I would add comments to their verb choice so they could see areas of weakness in these and begin to use words that are more powerful. Specifically, I would ask them to look at revisions to their “to be” verbs; I would ask them to seek out stronger verbs or revise their sentence to eliminate these words. As the semester progressed, my strong writers became stronger and I was able to see an improvement in weaker writers as they progressed through the revisions that I had asked for.

What I did not realize during these semesters, and would not realize until I ventured into the study of rhetoric, was that the methods I had been taught were not only rhetorical teaching styles, but evolved much as ancient rhetoric had. While the Greeks had begun working with the canons and stressed the importance of invention and arrangement in their canons, the Romans found themselves under tyrannical emperors who limited the invention and arrangement. Therefore, the Second Sophistics began to focus more on the development of eloquent speech and taught their students the importance of sentence structure and word choice. As grammar became more prevalent in the world of Roman rhetoric, so it had become more prevalent in the areas I emphasized in my strong writers.

As I continue to study rhetoric, I contemplate what other rhetorical methods I use without realizing. For my classes, I have found that the emphasis on invention and arrangement in the comments placed on weaker writers and the emphasis on style with my stronger writers creates stronger writers regardless of their placement on the spectrum of writing. I realize that the Second Sophistics were working from a different angle, but their focus on eloquence in speech advanced our comprehension of the canon of style. With the emphasis in many rhetoric classes on classical rhetoric through St. Augustine, it seems that focus lies more on the early rhetors and the Second Sophistic remains underemphasized. However, if it were not for their focus on the grammar and eloquence of a speech, I would probably find myself at a loss in commenting on the writing of my stronger students.