Thomas Wilson

Last week, I enjoyed the discussion about Thomas Wilson and his Art of Rhetorique. I thought his views on rhetoric were important because he advocated for uniform composition practices. These composition practices can still be seen today. For instance Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Like Wilson, they outlined step-by-step ways to make writing better and they gave examples of good writing. Another thing I liked about Wilson was he used humor in his writing to engage the audience in his topic. In my technical writing seminar, we are discussing the appropriateness of humor in technical documents. While humor is not fitted for all documents, it can be useful in others that have a close relationship to the audience. At first, Wilson’s humor was lost on me. When reading through it by myself I didn’t recognize it because it was so subtle. According to the text in my other class, that is a flaw with using humor. An author shouldn’t be so subtle that the message is lost on the reader or the reader takes it for real information. When using humor, I imagine it is very hard to not be too sarcastic or too subtle, and I suppose it is a true art to find a happy medium.