Enos, Richard Leo. “Literacy in Athens During the Archaic Period: A Prolegomenon to Rhetorical Invention.” Atwill, Janet, and Janice M. Lauer. Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention. 1st ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. Print. 16

Enos begins by noting that Plato didn’t necessarily believe that the writing instruction of the sophists was not an epistemological activity; rather, it was merely a skill incapable of discovering new knowledge about a topic.  Likewise, Aristotle also indicted folks for using writing merely as a skill rather than as a craft or art for creating rational proofs.  Contrastingly, Isocrates offered a different interpretation of writing: a central process in the creation of social knowledge.  Enos makes the argument in this essay that the perception of writing for philosophers and educators alike shifted during the transition from the archaic ancient Greek period to the classical.  For Enos, writing began to be considered more than a skill in the classical period as rhetoricians took up writing as a heuristical activity meant to facilitate complex problem-solving in rhetoric.

Enos claims that invention in written rhetoric has two dimensions: 1) during the archaic period writing operated as a craft technique for recording discourse; 2) in the classical period writing operated as a heuristic that facilitated thinking and creativity, serving as an inventional tool (177).  If we accept Enos’ line of reasoning, rhetorical invention necessitated writing and served as it’s creating exigency.  To achieve this end, Enos hopes to conduct a revaluation of literacy in Athens during the Archaic and Classical periods paying close and special attention to the social history and fabric of the community at the time so that a new and more accurate understanding of literacy – and by extension rhetorical invention – can be produced.

Enos notes that writing was a “craft” activity (conducted by specific individuals in specific trades) and a functional activity (accounting for example) in archaic Athens.  What is interesting here is that literacy was originally the domain of the thete class – or lowest class of laborers – responsible for the tabulation and accounting of various materials.  The introduction of rhetorical education in the 5^th century BCE moved the aristocracy away from being merely readers of “craft” written functional texts toward writers (who had the leisure time to write heuristically); the start of rhetorical education also coincided with larger city-state-wide formal education reforms.  At this point, writing moved from record-keeping “craft” by the lower classes to inventional heuristic used in education for the ruling classes.

1. Based on Enos’ description of what constitutes a “craft literacy” (i.e., the need for specialized tools in alphabetic systems as opposed to syllabic or hieroglyphic systems), is computer-aided composition a “craft literacy”?