ABSTRACT

Who would have thought, 40 or even 20 years ago, that the computer could have any effect on our notion of rhetoric? Yet with the advent of the word processor in the 1970s and the personal computer in the 1980s, a technology that once belonged exclusively to scientists and accountants is now widely used for writing. Students of rhetoric, literary theorists, and sociologists have begun to consider how the computer as a medium is changing rhetorical practice. One fruitful approach has been suggested by Fred Reynolds. He points out that the computer expands the ways in which materials can be delivered to the reader. As a new means of presenting or delivering text (and graphics), electronic writing compels us to reconsider the classical concept of delivery (Reynolds “Classical”; see also Sullivan, “Taking”; Welch, “Electrifying”).