Rhetoric is constantly evolving and will never reach a point where it cannot be improved. Ever since humans were able to communicate, the basic thing that needs to be improved upon in rhetoric is how the information or message is transferred and received, so the improvement of availability and clarity are the main things to focus on when trying to improve how rhetoric is passed along.
Availability means having the ability to readily write down thoughts and ideas as quickly and conveniently as possible and being able to also have easy access to other people’s thoughts and ideas that they have written down or shared. Before the development of the first written language (cuneiform) all information was passed around orally. Oral communication is fine, and is still used today, as long as the information is coming from a primary source and is not being communicated through long distances (time or length). As the information gets transmitted orally from one person to another and so on and so forth the information gets distorted and lost in the transfer from one person to another. A good example of this happening is the telephone game. One person comes up with a phrase (i.e. “Cadre are patrolling the stoops from 2300-2315.”), and they proceed to tell the phrase to a person who then relays it to the next person and so on and so forth until it reaches back to the initial person and the phrase is now “RDC and Cadre are patrolling the stoops making us push from SRC to taps.” The same is also true with time. As time progresses, people’s memories fail to fully recollect information and parts of the phrase will be forgotten, changed, or even the whole phrase could get lost or forgotten. This seems undoubtedly true with rat bible knowledge and then your complete lack of recollection will be graciously pointed out by cadre and/or RDC. In order to clearly pass on a verbal message sentence structure is vital. If a sentence is put together incorrectly when spoken then the meaning could be misunderstood or completely incoherent to the point where the message cannot possibly be derived.
With the development of written languages information can now relatively withstand the test of time, which means that as long as the object it is written on still exists then the information also still exists. The downside was that early forms of writing were carved into rock, which meant that it was a laborious, difficult, and an intensive process to write anything down. It also meant that the information could not be moved or easily accessed by everyone because of its immobility. Because of this only a very select few people could read and write. These select few consisted of prominent state and religious figures. This is a nice first step, but the idea is to make the information available to everybody, not a select few. However this was improved with the invention of papyrus and paper, which helped increase the effect of literacy. It made writing lighter and easier making it so that texts could travel through cities and even countries as long as the paper was cared for correctly. Literacy expanded to almost all religious figures (i.e. priests) and state figures (i.e. noblemen). It was also easier to write and put your thoughts down on paper as long as you had a quill and ink to write with. Coupled with paper, the biggest innovation in literacy is the invention of the printing press. Before the printing press it took dozens of monks days to copy a book by hand making books expensive and hard to come by, but with the invention of the printing press books could be made a lot faster, a lot cheaper, and more uniform. Because of these advantages of the printing press, books were much more readily available meaning that the lower classes could afford them and then they learned to read and write as well. This was the biggest spread of literacy in terms of availability to date. It is the reason why most people in the world are able to read and write, and is very uncommon to run across someone who is unable to. Now that language was in a written format it needed new rules to be made on top of sentence structure to ensure the clarity of the message. Those rules consisted of punctuation, spelling, and other early forms of grammar that we, today, learn at a very young age. These new rules ensure that everyone’s writing is uniform enough so that anyone who can read that language can read any writing of the same language.
Another thing that helped with the advancement of literacy is how texts were stored. Libraries gathered many different texts together in one place so that people can come together from other places and learn. Libraries have existed since around 2600 BC and the most famous of these ancient libraries is the Library of Alexandria (3rd century BC). Libraries are still the main icon when people think of knowledge and learning even today. It just proves how effective it is to accumulate knowledge in one place for the masses of people is in terms of education and literacy.
A great modern advancement that rivals that of the printing press (in terms of rhetoric anyways) is the internet. It is a readily available collection of most of mankind’s knowledge and literacy all compiled into one place and weighs as much as whichever device you use to access it. It’s a huge advantage to literacy because it’s always readily available and easy to access as long as you can afford it. And with the increase in technological advancements devices to access the internet are steadily becoming cheaper and more available to anyone. A large downside on the other hand is that just about anyone can publish anything on the internet, and nobody is there to check and make sure that the facts are correct. So when you are reading an article online it is very possible that you are being misled by the author, intentionally or unintentionally, and all the information that you have just retained is false. This is a lot less of a problem if you are able to authenticate the work. A good thing to look for is references and if those references, because that means that the author has researched and studied the subject before writing about it and it is usually a trustworthy source.
In rhetoric, clarity is a necessity when trying to use rhetoric to convey an idea or thought to someone else. If they can’t understand what you’re trying to convey then they won’t be able to learn or do what you are trying to convey to them. Without clarity in rhetoric, rhetoric itself becomes invaluable because nobody can actually obtain anything from it. To solve this problem society has created grammar which sets down a bunch of rules to guide how we communicate. Without it there would be incoherent sentences everywhere and nobody would end up having the same way of communication like we have now. Grammar lets you express stylistic writings, spelling, and punctuation to add emphasis in a paper or just separation. Grammar is constantly changing to suit society and is never set in stone. Just over the past couple of years passive verbs such as “were” and “was” have been replaced by got”. So instead of the sentence being “the rats were RDC’d”, the sentence would now be “the rats got RDC’d”. That is just one example of many on how our usage of language and grammar constantly changes with society.
Rhetoric has changed a lot since it was first developed and will continue to develop even further in the future. Grammar changes with society’s needs of communication and will always be in constant evolution. Accessibility of rhetoric will also continue to change as new technology continues to make it easier and cheaper to access and also more portable to the extent that you are not bounded by your Wi-Fi signal. It is exciting that we live in a time where we are at the beginning of a major revolution of rhetoric where the internet gives everyone their own private Library of Alexandria.