November 1

I found the part about the belles lettres fairly interesting in that I found it interesting and of much sense that persuasion should be paired with literature, though I think it need not be limited to poetry.  I also thought that there was a good point that critics "held that literature was purposeful, intended to please and instruct the reader" because even today much of what is written manages to do both.  For example an informative article or essay may be written specifically to instruct but they tend to be written in a way which will keep the audience interested, please them if you will, because otherwise no one would read the piece; not to mention any informative article or essay is usually sought out by someone already interested in the topic. On the other hand things like novels which are written with the primary interest of pleasing the audience also manage to inform in that anytime anyone reads anything they are to some extent subconsciously stretching their brain, improving their vocabulary, and can even be improving their writing.

The elocution movement also stuck out to me in its importance to how we live today.  Partially, at least, thanks to elocution movement we now have a common dialect in individual languages which allows people to understand each other considerably better, if everything were pronounced differently by different people it could be hard to keep track of what they were talking about.  For example if I pronounced knight as 'nahyt' as we commonly now do, but someone else pronounced it as 'kuh-nig-hut ' I may not have any idea what they were saying, context may help for example if they said kuh-nig-hut in shining armor I might get it, but if they pronounced other words differently I may have no idea what a 'kuh-nig-hut een suh-hin-ehng ay-moor' is; note, I came up with alternative pronunciation myself and it may not make any sense but the point is slight differences may make it hard to understand one another if the difference is big enough or there are enough in a row.

Overall I found it interesting how much rhetoric was altered throughout the enlightenment as well.  From two cannons to five, useful to untrustworthy, etc.

The major thing I remember about the John Locke portion of the reading which I found fairly intriguing was the idea that writing is nothing more than an arbitrary expression of ones ideas, it is the idea which is important and the writing is secondary and even, in this context, seems fairly insignificant.

I thought it was pretty interesting that Mary Astell seemed to believe that women should be educated but was not particularly a feminist thinker in that she did not necessarily think they should venture outside their roles at the time.  I thought this was interesting considering that to me it seems as though education would naturally lead to improved conditions for women rather than keeping them in their somewhat limited roles of the time.