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?