The Birth of a Paper

My idea for my paper about teaching Shakespeare from a rhetorical approach started because of the individual play I chose to read, Julius Caesar.
I took 2 rhetoric classes last year and I was especially intrigued by the differences in the funeral speeches and thought, wouldn't it be cool and useful if I could teach students about rhetoric at an earlier age than high school? And it turns out it is! I think Professor Burton was my best source of background knowledge on this subject. I tried other avenues, but no one seemed to have knowledge or an opinion on the matter. The blog posts forced me to keep trying though, to see what I could find. That's when I became the most invested in my project, when I saw that it was relatively uncharted territory. In my first "final" draft, I was so excited about the different discoveries I had made that my paper was kind of like an octopus, legs going in 8 different directions. So I was a little disheartened, but I really like my Final, final draft. I decided to focus my audience to secondary level English teachers, who needed another angle on Shakespeare: rhetoric. And that my friends, is how "A Rhetorical Approach to Teaching Shakespeare in Secondary Schools" was born.