Rhetoric

I remember the semester I was taking a graduate course in communication. We were supposed to read the winning papers from some prize that was given. I decided that the way the winners were determined was by who had the most unreadable, un-understandable, obfuscated paper.

That was my first strong memory of academic writing.

You can see why I might be intrigued by the Wall Street Journal having Helen Sword’s article on stylish academic writing.

Sword discusses typical prose:

Awash in muddy syntax and obscure vocabulary, such sentences recall the bureaucratic blather that George Orwell once likened to the defensive response of a “cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

I think we all have written that kind of rhetoric, while striving for academic style. I know I have.

For example: A paper I wrote back in graduate school for Dr. Jim Berlin came back with the notation that my writing was too simplistic. (I liked 9-word sentences back then, but had adapted to 14-15 words in sentences for graduate school.) I was furious, annoyed, and unsure what to do. So I wrote 90-word sentences. This he gave back with the word “gobbledy-gook” written on it. He didn’t even grade my ideas, just my writing. (At least, that is what I thought he was grading. Others made As in a seemingly effortless manner, which left me incredibly frustrated.)

Sword argues that academics are not considering their audience.

I am not sure that I agree with that.

I think many of us are trying to write the prose that we are reading, without, perhaps, understanding exactly what it is that makes it worth reading. The number of words in sentences and/or the number of words we have to look up, we can figure out, so we begin to write like that.

Sword gives three practices of stylish academic writers:
1. Authoritative, yet conversational, voice (which reminds me of an Advanced Composition unit I taught years ago)
2. Concrete writing, “anchoring abstract ideas in the physical world”
3. Attention to the details of the craft of writing, using “verb-driven, carefully structured and clutter-free” writing

Sword gives examples of stodgy and stylish for each of her practices.

I think it is an interesting article, worth the read.

Funding Digital Scholarship

What’s Next for Literary Studies? by Stanley Fish. It’s a little late, but it’s an interesting idea.

Ted Underwood’s response to Stanley Fish’s column.

The Research Exchange Index: “designed to recognize local, national, and international writing researchers by periodically collecting and publishing information about the research studies they’ve conducted. REx is also designed to solve a longstanding problem in writing studies: timely access to the information writing researchers are gathering and learning from their research.”

College Misery posts about a paper on the Magna Carta, which is totally ridiculously wrong and was not only plagiarized but also published on the net by the student in question. I wonder how often Aaron Kerzner’s theft of a paper will be googled during his working career.

Every once in awhile, I google a few phrases from the paper to see how it’s gettting along in the wild. Over the years, the two seed essays I planted have spawned a dozen or so Google hits at various disreputable sites. Sometimes they even want you to pay to see the whole text. However, for years I had no idea if any student had actually handed the thing in.

It kind of makes me want to write something equally ridiculous on the topics which I ask my students to write about and see who brings it in. But apparently design trumps content for many professors, since Kerzner’s work was published on the net. I’m guessing the prof didn’t realize it was plagiarized. But surely he would recognize the ridiculousness of some of the statements in it?

If I ever get to teach a class on visual rhetoric, which I might, I need to remember to use Scott McCloud’s work as a primary text.

Does he really have a book called The Vocabulary of Comics? (Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook says the eleventh chapter of this book is the second of The Vocabulary of Comics.) Or did the editors get this wrong and it is from Understanding Comics? I need to go look at my copy and see.

Scientific American has some interesting information for visual rhetoric.

[R]esearchers found that an attractive image is not more likely to be recognized. Rather “mem­orability seems more related to strangeness, funniness or interestingness,” says Phillip Isola, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a lead researcher on the study.

Having people in the picture—even if they are strangers—also help make a photo more memorable, as does the impli­cation of movement, such as a person running or waves crashing. Human-scale objects—chairs and cars rather than valleys and planets—similarly plant themselves in our mind.
…
Still, scenes that lack these attributes are not doomed to be forgotten. Simple changes can increase their mem­orability, such as the presence of a tiny hiker in the back­ground of a mountainous panorama. So the next time you’re out to take a memorable shot, make it interesting—not just pretty.

Very useful information for my students, I think. I will have to look up the study, if the conference proceedings are available. It was “presented at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June.”

At SXSW (South by SouthWest) two or three years ago, all the videographers were dismayed to realize that videography had already reached a peak. But when one of them said this, those who were presenting said, NO. You guys are on the forward edge so it seems to you like it has all been done, but behind you is an entire ocean that has not yet been surfed.

This seems to be the same question/perception that is being discussed in Is Design Thinking Dead? Hell, no.

The author, Grant McCracken, says that the moving force behind design thinking, Bruce Nussbaum, has declared that design thinking “has given … all it has to offer.” BUT…

In this world, designers can continue to create extraordinary value. They are the people who have, or could have, the laterality needed to solve problems, the sensing skills needed to hear what the world wants, and the databases required to build for the long haul and the big trajectories. Designers can be definers, making the world more intelligible, more habitable. But this won’t happen if, confronted by the inevitable difficulty of the early days, they take their balls and go home.

In sum, it is wrong to say that design thinking has given us “all the benefits it has to offer,” and it’s wrong to call it a “failed experiment.” I think we should be arguing that design thinking is just getting started. And a good thing, too; we need this approach more than we ever did.

I think McCracken is right.

And I think it is the same problem videopodcasters at SXSW had a few years ago. They were too far ahead of the wave to see the entire ocean behind it.

11/11/11 is more than binary beauty. In the United States it is officially the day when we thank the men and women who have served and are serving this country in the military.

Thank you, veterans, for the time, energy, and family time you have given up (especially during times of war/crisis/police actions) so that all of us may live free.

Thank you, also, to the families of the veterans who also sacrificed for freedom.

My new university requires, for first year composition, a visual rhetoric essay.

I will confess that, prior to this assignment, I had no experience with visual rhetoric. I am an English and history undergrad major, who went with English all through graduate school. None of the courses I took, even the rhetoric classes for my PhD, included visual rhetoric as a topic, must less as a focus.

Due to time constraints, I was not able to converse with colleagues or get their ideas for the paper before I had to teach it.

What I did, though, worked very well, I think.

Examining Images Labeled “College Students”
As prewriting exercises, the class and I used Google Images to search for “college students” pictures. Then, I went through and pulled them up, one after the other, and asked my classes if these were actual college students or pictures of college students. I will say that they were better at articulating why the photos were NOT of college students than they were about what made the photo one of college students, but despite that limitation, they did an excellent job.

Some of their answers for why it was not a photo of college students included:
It’s too posed.
They are too old.
Those might be grad students.
That was taken in the 90s (or 80s or 60s). While not all the pictures were, and I’m not sure how that made college students or not, they were accurate about the time period portrayed within the photograph. I think that perhaps the students were answering based on whether these are modern college students, the kind my students would know and hang out with.
They don’t have faces. This one was a shock to me. I thought the students in the graphic were either late high school or early college based on their poses. But my students said they could not be college students because they did not have faces. Later on they added that the poses were wrong for college students: “No college kid would stick his butt out like that!” But there first response–across three classes–was that they don’t have faces.

Examining Book Covers
Then I took the class to Amazon. We looked at covers of books that I have read and know are fairly indicative of the actual text of the book. We deconstructed the covers based on:
target audience
compositional elements
genre, particularly as created by the elements in the picture
color and its meaning(s)
interaction of verbal and visual rhetoric
role of character(s) on cover, including their group’s role in government (not all, but most of the science fiction and fantasy works allowed for this deduction)
whether the book was a fast read or more dense with information
(Sometimes I would ask a leading question, but usually they already knew.)

Most of the time the students were able to identify the genre of the work, even though most of my students don’t read books for entertainment.

We also talked, sometimes, about the relationships of the characters portrayed on the cover.

For one book, I asked them to name not only the season of year that the book was about, but also the holiday being celebrated. (There was snow in the background and the main colors in the composition were red, green, and gold.)

My students did a great job of engaging with the reading of the visual rhetoric of covers of books they never had any experience or intention of reading.

Expertise
The students’ abilities to identify, classify, and correctly deduce various information from both the photographs and the covers allowed me to point out to them that they are already well versed in the practice of visual rhetoric.

Assignment parameters
Then I had my students choose a picture of some sort to write on, using the same kinds of points we had already covered.

I limited their piece to something that was not their own composition, either art or photography.

I also recommended, for those wanting to use photographs, that they examine more panoramic pictures–with multiple subjects or action– rather than close-ups.

Art Work
Our text included two art pieces that we had already discussed in terms of relationships, composition, colors, style of art, cultural implications, socioeconomic levels, and historical setting.

Many students chose works that were pieces of art. Only one chose an older art piece and that student is an artist herself. Modern art pieces were far more popular, even with the artists. One student actually brought to class a print he had purchased and used it as his text for the visual rhetoric essay.

Additional recommendations: Multiple audiences’ reading
For the guys who wanted to use football pictures, particularly (though I did recommend this for other people), I suggested that they discuss the visual rhetoric as it would be read by an expert such as themselves, by someone who knows what football is but not much else–like me, and by someone who is from a totally different culture without American football.

This allowed the students to demonstrate their expertise, but also to identify things that were more generic or evocative within the visual text. It also required them to think outside their own expectations and understandings, while examining a single work.

This suggestion also worked well for a student who brought a photograph of a member of the hacking group Anonymous, in a V For Vendetta mask, in front of a Chinese restaurant. There were significant differences in my own and their understanding of the visual rhetoric of the picture, based on what I knew first glancing at it. It also helped the student to realize that simply because he knew what it was a picture of didn’t mean that everyone in the world would recognize it.

Additional recommendations: Book cover having read the book
I also suggested that, if the student chose a book cover for a book they had read, they could see what the book cover would say to someone who had not read the work and then compare it to possible differences of nuance for someone who had read the book or who had more knowledge of the text, author, or genre.

We had done this already as a class when examining the book covers, since I only showed the covers of books that I had read. Sometimes things in the cover appear to be one thing to a new reader and are obviously something else to those who have read the work.

One book cover that elicited a more circumscribed description than I could have given for it was Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who. The student missed the blatantly environmentalist stance in the cover and the book and did not know Dr. Seuss’ history as a propagandist in World War II.

Another permutation
One of my students chose to do the book covers of one of his favorite books. That particular book had four different covers, by country of publication or by date of publication. Even the fonts chosen for the title and author’s name differed.

I think that could easily have been a much longer paper for an advanced composition course and, if I were teaching an advanced composition course, I might use a visual rhetoric assignment like this.

In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.

Chris Holland
from Hardin-Simmons University

“Inciting Ethics: Entrapment Rhetoric in Amos’ Oracles Against the Nations”

II Samuel 1-15
Nathan confronts David over his affair with Bathsheba.
Nathan tells story.
David is filled with righteous outrage.
Then Nathan reveals the truth.
David is the rich man.

“Entrapment Rhetoric”
Invites audience to indite a group in a story.
Then shows the parallel between audience’s actions and that group.

Amos I and 2 “Oracle Against the Nations”
Modern rhetorical criticism, needs to be viewed within the text, rhetorical situation, and rhetorical problem (G. Kennedy)

BCE—Why use this? Why not BC?

Amos’ oracle presentation, post exilic date would give you a more complex rhetorical situation.

Intro to book of Amos, first 2 verses, all 3 Aristotelian proofs (ethos, logos, pathos)
Ethos:
Fall of Israel and earthquake show ethos
Many things Amos spoke have already come to pass.
Amos is a prophet.

Enthymeme = logos

These two verses set tone of danger to the entire book.
Amos then declares God’s judgements on 8 nations.
1:3, 6, 9, 11, 13, 2:1, 2:4, 2:6

Outlined formula in the bold. (on the handout)
Each pattern begins with “thus says the Lord.”
Reinforcement of the ethos.
Says 3 wrong, and 4. (Hebrew poetry pattern)
Uses this point with only one crime for each nation.
Similar to “how much more so.”
Specific crime listed at each sequel is probably the pinnacle.
A rhetorical move to keep audience engaged in speculation.

Grammatical construction altered for clarity.
“I will not revoke the punishment”
but “punishment” is additional
“I will not revoke it” (real language) but what is it?

Audience must supply the punishment themselves. A grammatical enthymeme.

Listing of specific crimes would immediately have caused the audience to be angry. Would have affirmed the Lord’s judgment with increasing joy.
(Burning the bones of the king is a transgression against God. Why?)

Arrangement
Each nation reads from geographic and ethnical distance.
Far away, close, and then sister.

Judah is actually given with 3. Judah actually gets more of the points.

But the oracle to Judah is a false indication of conclusion.
Judah only has 3 points.

Israel’s crimes and debts are listed.
Judgment is described at greater length.
Own people and God
Specific infractions of God’s law broken by Israel.

There is some parallelism between other nations’ and Israel’s transgressions:
1:6, 9 and 2: 7
1:13 and 2:7

From celebration to shame…

Poetic form of the personal pronoun.
Usually the I is subsumed into the verb.
But in this instance it is also in the sentence as a pronoun, too.
“I delivered them. But they betrayed me.” (God actually adds the I/me into the sentence.)

God says he will judge. They will be unable to save themselves.

Israelites must have been given opportunity to respond well or poorly to prophet’s word.

Judah has seen the Israelites punished as Amos said.
Actual effect of Amos’ rhetoric is difficult to determine.
7:12 Amos is forced out of Israel.
Written record of Amos may or may not have conformed to Josiah’s reformation.

Amos creates entrapment rhetoric, encouraging the audience to judge the nations and then showing how they are going to be judged as well.

Amos relies on pathos particularly, especially in Israel.

Entrapment is built on the incitement of his audience.
Amos incites and satisfies his audience and keeps them in suspense with the 3 and 4, but only giving one.
Amos guides them to ethical reflection BEFORE their own judgment is given.

The more they agree/see/understand God’s judgment elsewhere, the more they are struck by their own sin.
Before this experience, the ethical implications of their actions are in the backs of their minds.

Question: What translation?
Used NRSV sometimes. There is a flair to the KJV language.
Have you used Alter’s translations? No. Used only his book on Hebrew rhetoric.

*SWCCL = Southwest Conference of Christianity and Literature