Rhetoric

I think a really great way to get them to think about visual rhetoric is to get them to “adapt” an assignment into visuals.

Visual rhetoric “emphasizes images as sensory expressions of cultural meaning” Wikipedia

Contextual art analysis (dominant methodology) emphasizes aesthetics for its rhetorical functions & reception.

I’ve done exercise where students try to guess price of a book by looking at & feeling it — one blindfolded.

Visual rhetoric’s a great way to get Ss to think about argument and interpretation; multiple voices and subjectivity.

A lot of times, the visuals are a framing devise to text. How do the visuals set expectations?

Jib Fowles’ 15 Appeals

visual rhetoric of anything is worth studying, whether it claims to be art or not.

For the first time this semester, I taught the five week section of the graduate introduction to rhetoric.

This was the first time I taught as part of the team. I wanted to be as accurate to expectations as possible, so basically I took the book and the assignments that were given last year and repeated them. I like Herrick’s book and I am glad that was our text. I still have my colleague’s other text totally ticked out in page markers. I have not yet gotten my own desk copy. I may have to buy one myself. While I like it, I think Herrick did a better job of introducing rhetoric.

I did ask for permission to do a few things differently. These things included (with reasons for rejection):
assigning a reading before class began (late adds)
assigning primary reading (intro course)
assigning weekly blogging (intro course, another course at same time is overwhelming)

Because I have never taught the course before, I kept basically the same syllabus that anyone else teaching the course had. Almost every week I would assign each student a different question from the reading so that the students had to learn that one well enough to answer in front of the class. They could write notes and/or read their answers. I gave no length or format requirement for responses.

During Week 1 I used a PowerPoint to talk about rhetoric: how the students could relate rhetoric to what they knew, where it fit in history, how it appeared in the Genesis account of creation, then a short intro to Greek and Roman rhetoric, and multiple definitions of rhetoric. I also used a PowerPoint to introduce the major sophists.

During Week 2, I used the three chapters students read for homework to ask questions of the students and have discussion. I also introduced the lessons I use to present the Aristotelian appeals to my students.

During Week 3, I had them write down the answers to a few questions based on their reading and then to get in groups and discuss them. In addition, we discussed the rhetoric that the AP Language exam expects and I read them a poem utilizing the kind of odd examples that were used on question 3, which I read this summer. I also talked about using that question as an in-class diagnostic and then having the students do brainstorming, discussion groups, and free writing on the topic before I gave it again, unexpectedly, as an in-class writing. I talked about the percentage of students whose grades increased and how many stayed the same.

During Week 4 I used three historical PowerPoints that covered the time periods we had already read about. These were too disjointed and not closely allied to rhetoric and I felt they were unsuccessful. (The students agreed.)

During Week 5 I brought artifacts from my office (books, art, and knickknacks) and we discussed them in terms of visual rhetoric. The students were at four tables and I had them discuss in their groups the texts on their tables. Then I had them introduce one that they felt was well created or odd or caught their attention and mention why and whether they thought it was appropriate to its apparent audience. The students loved this and felt like it was Show and Tell.

At the end of the five-week section, I asked for feedback. I did this by creating boxes on the board, listing what we did within each box, writing the homework between the boxes, and then soliciting both specific and general feedback.

Different in 2013?

Next time I teach the class I will use the first PowerPoint I created to introduce rhetoric. However, instead of only having them discuss once (in response to the Ecclesiastes 4:12 reading) I will also add multiple discussions to the PowerPoint exercise.

After the Genesis 1-3 discussion of rhetoric, I will ask the students to think about where they see language, persuasion, verbal trickery, or argument having an effect in the Bible. These can be for good or evil. Hopefully this will help students apply the concepts of rhetoric to their biblical knowledge.

I may add a section on the rhetorical lesson I heard at Southwest Central Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2011 on the book of Amos and entrapment rhetoric. I want to make it clear that even with a PhD emphasis in rhetoric, I am still learning.

I plan to repeat the slide asking how they can hook into rhetoric at the end of the presentation and have them discuss things they already know and care about which might relate to rhetoric, based on the definitions we will have reviewed of rhetoric.

I may shorten the Sophistic introduction. I will absolutely talk about the unilateral and bilateral approaches and where we see those in daily life. I will review the meanings after the introduction and ask students to suggest places where the unilateral approach of Gorgias (active speaker, passive audience) seems most likely/appropriate and then for the circumstances which make Protagoras’ bilateral view of the relationship between the rhetor and audience most likely.

Gorgias
preacher on Sunday morning
teacher in a classroom
lawyer speaking to a jury

Protagoras
friends
group members working on a project
jury members trying to reach a verdict

I will work on adding applications of rhetoric to each class period.
We will look at ethos, pathos, and logos in commercials one week. This will be fine in the same week that I present my freshman lessons.
We will look at politicians’ metaphors one week. This will be particularly appropriate with the Roman rhetoric readings.
We will examine lyrics and contrast them with music videos one week. This will work well with the Renaissance rhetoric, since it talks about the rhetoric of poetics.
We will look at book covers and album covers one week. This will be specifically visual rhetoric and we can compare/contrast more masculine covers with feminine covers and see if there is anything to the oppressive persuasion versus the invitational idea.

Next time I teach the class, as homework I will assign the students to write a short blog post for each week. The students will respond to the week’s assigned readings in whatever way helps them think about and discuss rhetoric. Also, if they don’t have anything else they want to say, they will be able to answer one of the discussion questions on the blog. The longer blog post will remain the same.

The students liked this idea and most of them said they would prefer this to the single question from the reading I asked each to be responsible for.

I will still assign a single question each, just to make sure we can stay on track with the reading and that the students make the effort to understand the readings. In addition, I sometimes learn how other things in the book are related to the question because the students try to cover all the material that might possibly impinge on the question.

The students felt like this was unnecessary, as they are graduate students in English and can certainly handle reading. It has been my experience, however, that when people are not held accountable for their assignments, some tend to not do them. There are always a few students in a class who need that kind of accountability.

Finally, next time I teach the course, I will add a short primary reading (or possibly two) and/or an article applying the rhetoric to each reading in Herrick. These will be based on an accessible online text. For the first week’s homework, I like the article on Paul’s use of sophistic rhetoric. For the second homework, I would use Cicero’s canon section and Aristotle’s appeals. For the next reading, I would take a section of Augustine’s discussion of why Christians should use rhetoric, probably. I do like the idea of incorporating an early female rhetorician, though. I have purchased a book of their works to read, but have not yet read through it. If one wrote particularly well on the rhetoric of poetics or Christian persuasion, I would use her work. For the final week’s reading, I am not sure what I would do yet. I am leaning personally toward Bahktin, but the students seemed more interested in Foucault and/or Derrida.

This was something the students specifically requested. I was glad to hear about it. I also was kind of bummed, because I gave them links the first two weeks to short primary readings; however, because they weren’t assigned, no one read them.

This last month we were talking about digital rhetoric, or new media, or ____(fill in your term here) in a meeting. Then I saw this Digital Blog Carnival. It’s not brand new (June of 2012), but I like that it was up. If I had known about it earlier, I might have had my grad students read it.

Liz Losh, in attempting to define digital rhetoric over the last decade plus (and having written a book on the topic) said: “I’ve always thought that “digital rhetoric” means both rhetoric about the digital and rhetoric conveyed by digital platforms, interfaces, and code.”

Steve Krause, who finished his dissertation in 1996, said: “[T]he evolving speed and presence potential of new technologies have been in some sense gradual and historic (the way that postal systems and then the telegraph changed communication in the 19th century comes to mind now), and in other ways radically fast (the way we find out about emerging situations/events via social media on ever-connected smart phones). The tool is not the only thing that matters, but when it comes to contemplating “digital rhetoric” generally or immediacy in particular, it’s critical. Without contemporary and future-looking computer and media technologies, there’s no “digital” in “digital rhetoric.””

Mike Edwards of Vita said: “Rhetoric as error, lies, or bullshit is for the most part uninteresting to me. But rhetoric as something that stands in relation to truth even as it seems to swerve away from truth at the last moment, as it becomes something other than logic, reason, philosophy, or coercion — that’s interesting to me. So a metaphor: rhetoric is an act, a doing, a verb, a process of skating on the thin ice of persuasion that rests between the materiality of our everyday social lives and the dark and cold waters of contingency, even as that thin ice is constituted by the frozen, solidified, embodied aspects of that contingency.”

There’s more. Lots more. Go and read it. Let it settle into your head and into your brain. Then, go back and read it again.

That’s what I am going to do.

The reading I did as an undergraduate (and even earlier and later) is significantly different than the reading done by the undergraduates I presently teach.

I have been reading quite a bit about reading this summer.

Here’s The Digital World Demands a New Mode of Reading, from the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Other books on the topic, or related works, included:
Writing the Visual
You Can’t Read This
The Book on the Bookshelf
Theology after Reading
How to Read a Book
How to Read a Poem
The Digital Divide
A Theology of Reading
In the World: Reading and Writing as a Christian

You Are Your Words from the American Heritage Dictionary, lets you upload both a picture of yourself and words you have written. Then, using your words and picture, it combines the two to create a piece of rhetoric that is visual… It uses your words to re-create your photograph.

Very cool idea.

A New Media Approach to Teaching Classical Rhetoric

I need to read this when I am not inundated with grading.

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?