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