During this Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students reading I found the ways in which the use of style of the classical era was compared to the use of style today particularly interesting.
Cicero's agreement with the way we learn grammer today, in that he agree that through learning we internalize the rules, stuck out to me somewhat. I also found the importance put on correctness interesting considering that today we see grammer as rather secondary, at least when editing, teachers tend to tell us to focus on content first and foremost.
Meanwhile both classically and today there is a high emphasis on clarity. Although, today the emphasis on clarity is for the purpose of effectively communicating one's ideas to their audience while classically clarity was emphasized more on the basis of people being distrustful of rhetoric.
Even today one's writing should be appropriate to match a given situation as well, for example one would not be talking about the benefits of spaying one's pets at a technical conference surrounding the introduction of a new software.
Though figures of speech are less highly emphasized in our learning of rhetoric and writing today than they were in classical times, we still use them regularly in our writing. Through my educational experience I have noticed many people saying we do not use figures of speech as much, yet I think we just do not notice as readily when we do rather than not using them at all. Metaphors and especially similes seem to be used on a regular basis in writings in order to properly explain something. Today tropes, schemes, figures of speech, etc. may not be used as much or as readily as in the past but I still believe I could find examples of such in every one of my writings, and my peers, if I were to look; maybe not in every other word or perhaps not even in any sentence, but I am sure they are there, I just think today we do not pay attention to when we are using them nearly as much as was done in the past.
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