Data for upcoming paper on how your discipline makes knowledge

Interesting questions today in class!

Schedule: 

• Tuesday, 4/19: Research into your field before class. Developing good questions in class for the interview.
• Thursday 4/21: discussion of Men and Housework article (answers to my questions are found on the eLearning website; type your answers up and bring them to class.  Here is my attempt at the homework).
• Tuesday, 4/26: interview with professor written up and brought to class.
• Thursday, 4/28: compare/contrast paper brought to class using the two new articles from your discipline. 
• Tuesday, 5/3: workshop of three papers (volunteers sought!).  Didion papers back.
• Thursday, 5/5: workshop of all papers (you just volunteered!)  Rubric for the paper handed out.
• Tuesday, May 10: paper due in class (not after class, but at the start of class).  Poptarts.  General frivolity.

And.....then you're done.

-----

Data for final paper in your discipline:

Klooster article on the way different disciplines approach AIDS

spanking article

article in your field on a hot and controversial topic you folks argue about

talks by Dr. Gathagan (History (Medieval Studies (Queenship))) and Dr. Beshers (Health (Sexual Education))

list of journals in your field

list of experts on campus

lectures

other students’ papers

discussion

your own experience in this field

Interviewing each other on the field

list of key terms (can partly be drawn from the article you copied)

heroes and luminaries in your field

history of the field you did research on 

major figures in the field

key terms in the field ("feudalism," anyone?)

questions you developed with others in class about your field 

• compare/contrast paper you will write 

 two more related articles in your field (for Thursday, April 28) 

Rhetoric of your Discipline (major)

For Tuesday, April 12, I asked you to bring some general material to class.  Make sure you have it all when we begin:

• A list of the journals in your field (the library is the best place to go; besides, you have to find and xerox an article out of one, so you might as well go there and peruse)
• An article from one important journal
• A list of the experts on campus (that is almost surely professors and other teachers)
• A list of the historical figures in your field (Psychology, for instance, would list Freud, Jung, Adler, and others).  You can find this in a textbook or on the internet.

Seem to me that a discipline is like a very long story, spread out over a lot of generations, with big events that are still talked about, just like a family recalls (and revises!) big events in their own history.  People who are in the discourse community of your discipline are always proposing new ideas to talk about -- so many that it gets dizzying sometimes.  But there are themes.  Remember when in education the big focus was on Ebonics and Whole Language?  It was all anyone could talk about and write about. To take a somewhat silly example, we got some ducks last week and that is all that anyone can talk about: How should we build a pen? Do they need to be kept warm? Will the dog eat them if he gets a chance? Who left the pen open? Will we eat them?  Can you eat duck eggs? Do they taste like chicken eggs?

......you see the parallel.  Discourse communities get wrapped up in certain questions.  The article you find for class Tuesday, for instance, will most certainly be wrapped up in a certain obsessive question that the field is dealing with (if it were an unimportant question, it wouldn't even get published!)  Our job is to find out WHAT you folks write out in your discourse community and HOW your people react to the problems.

spanking, discipline

Rhetoricians,

"Discipline" means lot of things.  I guess for Thursday, we're studying academic disciplines and corporeal discipline.  They are very different things.  Or should be!

People today modeled in class strategies for using rhetoric.  By asking questions, Gizelle drew into question the subject of our discussion, Janelle used personal experience as evidence, and several of us started to construct an argument.  It was great!  I said that an argument is not insulting each other (we didn't do that at all), but it IS a way to construct knowledge.  After responding to each other's papers, we looked at a page from the spanking article (up on elearning and also here).

We spent some time looking at the first page of the spanking article, scanning it for its FORM -- its physical features.  Then we looked at some of these features (such as the use citing by using specific page numbers) and asked "why?"  Why go through all that trouble?  In class we came up with about ten good reasons.

The point is that a rhetorician is always asking "what use is it?"  Everything in that article -- every claim, apostrophe, footnote, abstract, everything -- is useful to the people in that discourse community.  It helps them make knowledge for their colleagues.

For Thursday, please bring two pages that examines the article carefully, using these criteria:

• ·       What is the motive the drives this scholar?
• ·       Content of the argument: what topic or idea or claim is so important to this discourse community?
• ·       Conventions of form: grammar, spelling, key words, format (abstract), sentence length, complexity of sentences, bibliography, level of formality?
• ·       Connections to the discourse community: bibliography, citation, choice of forum, reflection on other’s thinking, It has to reflect the conventions of spelling and grammar, of course. 
• ·       Evidence: what counts as evidence in this community?  Why do they respect this form of evidence? Storytelling? Statistics? Explication?
• ·       Relationship to audience: How is the plot of their argument laid out?  Do they write directly?  Do they refer to other writers?  Is the conflict direct or indirect?
• ·       How does the forum use ethos, logos, and pathos? 

New paper schedule

Rhetoricians,

So we agreed to allow those who wanted to a chance to really rework their paper on love.  Well, of course!  Wow me.

So here is our schedule:

• Tuesday, March 29: in-class review of one-page piece on love
• Thursday, March 31: Discussion of Klooster piece (on eLearning)
• Tuesday, April 5: Didion piece due: 4 pages of analysis and one page on love (Didion imitation) [note that you'll also have other writing due this day as we begin the investigation of your discipline (major)]
• Thursday, April 7: Love revision due (optional): three pages. [note that we'll also have other work due this day for the section on your discipline]

and then only nine classes left....

Tuesday, April 12:
Thursday, April 14
April 19
April 21
April 26
April 28
May 3
May 5
May 10

FORM in Didion's essay

Agenda and schedule

PWR 399, Rhetoric

March 24, 2011

Dr. Franke

1) Role, housekeeping details, short response papers back.

2) Discussion of how the essay’s form supports its argument. 

Ø  Rhetoric as matching the response to the problem.

Ø  What is the personal situation? 

Ø  What is the rhetorical problem?  Why can’t she accept the normal definitions of things?

Ø  What are the essay’s formal aspects?

An analysis is simply this: explaining what something means by looking at what it does – the essay’s words (and sentences, paragraphs, and the like).  Everything the essay does is intentional.

Short assignment due Tuesday, March 29: Imitation of Didion’s essay morality, but using love as your topic (one page).  Use all the examples you can that Didion herself uses, and develop a thesis on love in a similar fashion.  You will attach this to your final paper, due Thursday.  You will also receive your second major papers back Tuesday.

Thursday: Rhetorical analysis due, March 31: “Didion has a huge rhetorical problem on her hands, and she feels it is very dangerous to make a mistake regarding this subject.  Explain her rhetorical problem and show how she solves it (or at least attempts to solve it).”  Four pages, minimum.  Short quoting is essential: you have to show what the essay is doing, not just summarize its ideas.  No bibliography is needed.   Tip: Don’t stretch the length with spacing and margins – it gives a paper a bad feeling.  Just write more than you need and revise down from there.  See me if you have trouble.

Joan Didion's "On Morality"

We began this dense and passionate piece today by talking about two short thank-you cards:

Thank you card #1:

Of course, I don’t mind that you went and got me a present, and I’m sure it’s very well made nor can I ignore that you got me exactly what I wanted and doing so must have taken a great deal of thought and research on your part to match the gift to my likes. 

Thank you card #2:

Jim, it’s fantastic.  It’s perfect.  You know I love the color blue, and the diamonds are more than I could have expected.  Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, or so they say, but it’s not true for me.  My best friend is you, and when I look at the ring, I’ll be reminded of that every time.  Wow.

Both of these are thank-you cards, but the difference is that they have very different effects due to the language used.  People thought the first one was sarcastic, cold, off-putting; the second was warm, sincere, and grateful.  But they both are responses to a nearly identical event!

We discussed the way the first one separates the two people, the effect of the long sentence, the distant tone of "nor can I ignore," and the like.

> My point was that a piece of prose may make you feel and know things, but that's just experience; analysis, on the other hand, is explaining how you come to have those feelings and that knowledge when you read.  What sentences, words, phrasing, things unsaid, implications, punctuation, etc. creates the meaning?  

Today, people handed in papers that explained how she writes the piece -- the form.

Tomorrow (March 24), people will bring papers that explain 1) her problem and 2) her solution

I think we can wrap this up pretty fast.

Game Plan for Thursday's paper

Rhetoricians,

Here are some suggestions for Thursday's paper:

One way to start: somebody paging through the forum in a bookstore, or you examining it in your dorm room late at night, or imagine a scene where somebody finds it on a desert island.  What is the big picture, the overall impression of the forum's audience, purpose, genre, and topics?

Another way: Start with a powerful idea from the readings we've been doing.  Examine and wonder about the claim the writer made.  Then connect it to an important part of your forum.

Another way: Write about the moment you "cracked" the forum, seeing it in a new light.  Start with your regular way of seeing it and move to your insight.

We've been arguing that rhetoric is not just a set of rules for you alone to break or follow (remember the "Dumb Rules" webpage)?  You can list all the rules in the world for talking on the phone, for instance, and still not be good at holding a conversation.  Rhetoric is that conversation: the dynamic give and take, the back and forth, in a community.  It is how we create and maintain our "discourse communities."  This community gives us a role, an identity, our values, our jobs, and our language.  When it's successful, it appears natural (though we know it's a construction, a creation).

Your forum is successful (if it weren't, it wouldn't make any money and would disappear).  How does it make this wonderful, complicated, rhetorical virtual world work?  How does it invite and sustain your participation in this community?  What values does it support? What sort of inquiries (questions, curiosity) does it encourage?  By close attention to the form (parts, features and sequence) of the forum, its purpose, its prose style, its promises and solutions, and the like (see Porter's list), how does the forum make all this random info, ads and stuff into a virtual world you can inhabit?

Paper #2 Assignment

Paper Assignment #2: The Secret Process of Inventing an Audience

We have seen how Plato, one of the most capable people ever to have lived, saw rhetoric – and it wasn’t flattering.  For him, using rhetoric in writing was almost criminal.  It could only mislead people.  Writing is “like a painting” which can’t match the needs of the viewer or reader: it just repeats itself, saying the same thing every time, every time, every time. 

For Plato, rhetoric might have some limited use as a dry set of rules for organizing a speech.  If you know an individual’s soul, you might legitimately use rhetoric to match your words to “hit home” with your listener one-on-one.  Rhetoric for Plato was all about F2F real-time evangelism.  Rhetoric (according to him) had almost nothing to do with groups of people.  It wasn’t about sharing leadership  (as in a democracy), achieving justice (as in a court case), or playing with possible, unproven ideas (as in natural science or poetry). 

So here we are, sitting down with a niche magazine, full of pictures and writing, that represents a particular “forum” as James Porter calls it.  This forum is very powerful.  It is a “discourse community,” a set of assumptions, phrases, questions, and the like.  A discourse community dismisses (or ignores) what’s “weird” and celebrates what’s “normal.”  A magazine, as a mini-discourse community, gives community members images of themselves.  It tells you how to feel, act, and understand things. 

Ede and Lunsford saw how this works they said to be a writer was to be part of a discourse community.  They said it’s dynamic, a very back-and-forth sort of thing.  Ede and Lunsford said that it’s way too simplistic to say that there is an audience “out there” – an audience that just sits around, waiting to read your words.  You as a writer make the audience up in you head: audience “is a construction of the writer, a created fiction.”  But your audience is not just a daydream.  You make this world out of sentences and paragraphs.  It’s hard!  Writers create a little world for the reader by intentionally choosing to use style and references, and invite the reader to jump on board.  As Ede and Lunsford put it, “The writer uses the semantic and syntactic resources of language to provide cues for the reader -- cues which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes the reader to adopt in responding to the text" Ede and Lunsford, "Audience Addressed / Audience Invoked" (160).  

Forums in part invent their audiences.  Members of a forum do this invention it in their head while they’re writing, making a mental image of the readers; they also do it on paper by using their style to open up a space for the reader to inhabit.  When you finally find yourself “inside” a discourse community, you’re there because you’ve learned how to respond to the cues that the community gives you.  Nothing seems strange anymore (except the stupid and “weird” stuff you and your community rejects).  All around you are your people and you’re one of them.  At that point, you’ve been trained by the community to inhabit the conversations.  You have learned to believe that the topics and style and habits of the community are valuable.  You are a “handy man” or a “Cosmo girl” or a “medical doctor” or “completely Mad.” 

Our paper is a rhetorical analysis of a forum (your magazine).  The problem we face is this: From the outside, this forum seems to be addressing a set of people who are already interested in a certain subject.  Looking closer, however, you start to notice how cleverly the forum creates a “virtual world” or “discourse community” for readers to enter and call their own.  Though the discourse community seems natural, it’s in fact a careful stage set, a construction.  Paper topic: How does the forum make itself appear to be natural and normal?  What does it do to get people to become “insiders” to this discourse community?

Lisa Ede/Andrea Lunsford: Audience Addessed/Audience Invoked

Audience, huh?  So does the writer create an audience as she writes, or merely address a pre-existing group of readers?  Does the writer use writing to create for herself an image of the reader, thus in turn changing her own understanding of the way the text will be understood?  Does the writer create a world that she very much hopes the reader will recognize and accept, thus becoming the reader she was hoping for?  Sure!

Interesting stuff today!  Your assignment is to read your magazine all the way through (if you have a super technical one, such the medical journals, you don't have to read every article.  In fact, you won't be able to).  Read it, annotate it, and then type out your responses to James Porter's forum analysis appendix.  Bring that response to class on Tuesday, of course.

Now, I said that it was NOT OK to have people talk over your head.  Of course people do it by accident sometimes just because they are specialists.  But we talked today about developing a method for analyzing a piece as if it were a story or a sporting event (handout below).

There are four things to keep in mind when wrestling with a reading that comes from a discourse community that is not your own: you don't have to do it alone (hence, class); you can look for the storyline by attending to the heroes and villains of the piece; you can look to the context, format, and forum for information about the audience and motive of a piece; you can write as a way to make sense of the reading.

See you Tuesday.

DF

Tuesday and Thursday

Thursday (2/24), I'm handing out magazines after we discuss the audience article.  


What do you think about the quote below?


[A] text's audience "is a construction of the writer, a created fiction . . . The writer uses the semantic and syntactic resources of language to provide cues for the reader -- cues which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes the reader to adopt in responding to the text" Ede and Lunsford, "Audience Addressed / Audience Invoked" (160).


So the writer creates his audience -- sort of a ghost audience in the writer's head, I guess, but it's also something more: the writer creates a "role ... [for] the reader to adopt."  


But wait!  Isn't why would the reader ever agree to take on that role?  What does the writer (or, in the case of magazine, writerS) do to get readers to ease themselves into the discourses of the magazine? What are we promised, what do we get, what do we agree to when we read a magazine?  


Thoughts?

Rules, Rhetoric, and Socrates

For Tuesday (February 21, a cold and sunny day), we'll be discussing Plato's dialogue, The Phaedrus, and discussing dumb rules (http://grammar.about.com/od/yourwriting/tp/phonyrules.htm) and useful rhetorical terms (http://grammar.about.com/od/rhetoricstyle/a/20figures.htm).  

We all love and hate rules, and Plato seems to have something to say about what they are good for.   

What are rules good for?  What is the opposite of technê?  Is rhetoric about following the rules?

Print, annotate, and bring your questions about the dialogue first, then the rest (both dumb and useful links).

DF

The assignment after reading Murphy

Here (http://www.nt.armstrong.edu/adanalysis2005.htm)  is the link to Dr. Armstrong's students' ad analyses.

Assignment: Read all the analyses, identify the best and the worst ones, and write a page where you give good reasons for why the worst is the worst and the best is the best.   You have to be specific!  You're not supposed to rank the ads themselves, of course, but only the students' short papers about the ads.  You're trying to determine what good analysis looks like.

FYI and BTW, I also think this ad analysis is pretty strong (but you can't rank it 'cause it's from the wrong collection): http://www.nt.armstrong.edu/Raa06SR.html

By the way, I revised by "how to write a rhetorical analysis" based on your constructive criticism.  Thanks.  It's on the elearing site, called "RhetAnalysis2 (new)."  Thoughts??

These are some things I thought were effective from today's class.  I saw people

• annotate heavily with questions and comments
• disagree (quite respectfully) with me and others
• confirm and emphasize the ideas of another students
• take educated guesses about what something might mean
• question whether there are contradictions built into a claim
• workshop my paper by identifying specific passages, pointing out strengths, and suggesting changes
• write on other people's papers
• ask practical questions
• ask about the writing challenge of developing a paper past the one-page point

Questions?  Office hours is the best way to get them answered.  I'm in by 9:00 on Wednesday (hours are 9-11:30, a slot I haven't yet changed on the syllabus).  Office phone: 753-5945.

Thursday

We introduced several new terms today: how an ad "invites" people to join in the discourse it presents, how it offers a "solution," and how it has contradictions within it, how it offers the reader a "subject position," and the like.

For Tuesday, we'll look at the first page of your analysis, typed and brought to class.  There are also two short readings found on the eLearning site: one by me, and one by James Murphy.  As always, annotate and wrestle with them.

Let me know your questions!

DF

February 1, 1st day of big snow

Rhetoricians,

Interesting conversation today.  So you see that Porter is suggesting that the power of the individual speaker or writer is significant only in the context of a community ("discourse community").  Great.  This is a huge revision of the usual ways we think about meaning, the writer, and texts.  Now let's put his techniques to work.

For Thursday, I want you to bring in a print ad from a magazine.  I put one example up on the elearning page for Rhetoric (http://webct8.cortland.edu/webct/logon/5361273700001) called "Monsanto."  It's just an example.

So here is your homework: read again the back pages of Porter and his "discourse community analysis" stuff.  Find and tear out a good ad from a magazine you have lying around.  Then, just as you did in class, writing down on paper (typing is good) for your small group what discourse communities sponsor that ad (by "sponsors," I mean the discourse community that the ad is building on, resisting, or arguing for).  I'm not interested in the one brilliant ad writer who composed the ad; I want to know the environment of discourse that made it possible and necessary to produce the ad.

Write down also the "traces" you see in the ad, the allusions and "fragments of meaning" (just as were buried in the Kent State report).  Bring that crucial piece of paper to class Thursday.

I'll be talking about the Monsanto ad, but the principles we cover will also apply to your ad.

See you soon.

David Franke

Second Day (The Office) post-script

I left class wondering about this: where does our knowledge about rhetoric actually come from?  What are the sources and origins?  It's not just out of thin air, right?  So what precipitates our knowledge about rhetoric?

I was particularly interested in our attempts to DISagree in class today over the definition of the term "rhetoric."  We had a hard time!  Seems to me that the reasons were good ones: we don't know a lot about it yet, we all draw from the same sources so far, and we are TRAINED to agree.

These are all good explanations, but they are also good reasons to PRACTICE disagreeing.  New knowledge is made through the tensions and differences, seems to me (ultimately we may agree, but any new idea causes a furor at first).  

Also, it seems to me that disagreeing means in a way that you're taking somebody seriously.  When I hear somebody say only "that's nice," I think I'm being dismissed or swept under the rug, not really being taken seriously.  I don't like it!  Not at all!

Next time, I'll lecture some more about the origins of rhetoric, we'll discuss the James Porter article and your questions about it, talk about your one-page paper on "How Do College Students Use Rhetoric," and maybe finish The Office, where Kevin defines the terms of the debate, we see Oscar's lame logos at work, Kelly's goofy pathos, etc.

Second day of Rhetoric (PWR 399)

It was a real pleasure to meet everyone yesterday.  I thought it was useful to think of the people in the room not just as individuals (though everyone is) but instead as an intersection, the intersection of their various communities.  I am always excited by the crazy chicken-and-egg paradox: do communities shape individuals, or do individuals shape communities?

I was impressed by the AWESOME list of words we have for "community" or "group."  I wish I had that paper now!  But we obviously are so very sensitive and attuned to the types and nature of our communities (brigades, clans, families, units, neighborhoods............).

My argument -- it's an experiment, not a fact -- is that it's the communities we live in that give us the license and reason to make knowledge.  I was driving my son (16) and his two friends in the car this morning and they were talking excitedly about new video games (World of Warcraft? Breach? MindCraft?) and I was so very much outside their conversation.  But they were putting new experiences together, valuing the whole process, coming to categories, claims, implications, theories, and the like -- and all the while were creating themselves AND their communities.  So that's what communities do, that's their function: to create discourse, to create knowledge.  It doesn't have to be schoolish or academic knowledge, but it is valuable knowledge nonetheless.  To whom is this knowledge valuable, where does it do work, where does it get traction? In the community.

Yesterday we talked about how a discipline and a major (same thing, seen from different perspectives) is always making knowledge, always abuzz with new claims, viewpoints, asssertions, and terms.  I said that the really interesting ideas come from the points of TENSION in a discipline.  Evolution/Creationism, for instance, is a point of tension in Biology (or was).  These points of tension can be discovered in key terms and concepts.  What are the key terms of your discipline?

How is knowledge made?  By an active and often contentious discussion.  The practice and study of how knowledge is made -- is that rhetoric?

First day

I'm excited to meet the new students.  The first day means I don't know my audience yet, so I have to think about the course in a new way, trying to anticipate the best way to introduce the subject.  It's a little bit of a challenge (it's sometimes easier to have a conversation when you have a lot of subject matter in common), but it's also a great way to deepen and think through things in a new way.

It occurs to me for the first time today (a "duh" moment) that this is one of the very cool values of the academy, of higher education: you have teachers re-formatting and revising their understanding of the material every semester.  In fact, we have a derogatory joke, a cliched image, of the teacher who lectures from his old, yellowed notes every semester.  Nothing new, nothing surprising happens.  No wonder colleges are the places we make knowledge: everyone there is a newcomer semester after semester, even the most seasoned professor (unless he actually lectures from old, yellowed notes).

Colleges are not just places where knowledge is trotted out, old die-hard facts and truisms.  They can be that sometimes, but also places where what we know is challenged.  I have a picture in my office that says "It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it" (Jacob Bronowski).  I think that is a very important way to look at rhetoric, too: it's a matter of questioning, opening inquiry, not codifying facts <yawn>.  I'm excited.