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?