As I Reflect...

I thought I should just throw in a reflection of the class. One thing that stood prominently in my mind as I showered 7am this morning (hey, the best thinking goes on in a bathroom) is that I still feel the way I do about reader-based vs. writer-based writing, as I should since my ideas are mine to own. But, what I have come to conclude is that writing in a reader-based style is simply another form of rhetoric. I'm going to coin a term here, so pay close attention:

Socio-rhetorism

I use the term as a concept in which people write according to what they think would persuade their readers about their writing according to the context of their societal means. Thanks all folks! I will not be persuaded and I encourage all the open their eyes and understand why I believe what I do. If not, it's a shame, but then again, you are simply doing what you are meant to: Be a product of your society...

Revising Research: The Art of Conformity

If you thought I went far with the reader-based, writer-based argument, please ignore this one.

This week's rant is on changing the research question in order to accomodate your research. It should not be done. Should a lawyer decide to take a case, then turn it down because they're not prepared, it only destroys the credibility of the lawyer. Similarly, should a student change their research question because they don't feel they have the research to support it, their credibility as a researcher and their reputation as one with critical thinking skills is lost. Thinking outside the box is what makes a research good, from making the research question to finding supporting evidence.

Readiness for Research: The Problem With Students Today

In the Wysocki and Lynch reading, the text goes on extensively about the need for a research question. For me, students entering the writing center almost always never prepare one, assuming the assignment sheet handed to them by their professor is enough. While it may give insight to guidance, the student must ultimately conclude one for themselves. Beyond research being a "social action," as described on page 145, it is also a solo action. It requires making a researchable claim and then revising that claim based upon luck with research (topic for next blog posting).

This or That? When to Use Each

This is a bit irrelevant, but I have a question which pertains to rhetoric. When writing, does one use "this" or "that," or does it not matter?

For example, I have written a statement in one sentence. I make reference to the statement in the next sentence. Which of the two should I use, this or that?

ex - "Math is good. This is true because..."
or "Math is good. That is true becuase..."

The Enemy Enthymeme

Whatever happened to the old fashioned method of argument? First you make a claim, and then you back it up with a warrant. I believe that using the concept of the enthymeme will ultimately lead to confusion for students. I understand the concept of the enthymeme, and I use it all the time when making an argument, but I would never try to explain to someone that it is the way to view their argument. Explaining to a student in a modified version works better. Tell them that their thesis should be their claim, their body paragraphs should be the evidence, and their conclusion should be their conclusion (sorry, there's no real synonym that I'd like better). For example:

Cheese is good for you
Cheese is high in calcium, which prevents bone loss
Cheese is high in protein, which helps build muscle
Cheese is low in carbohydrates, which can help you lose weight
Because cheese prevents bone loss, helps build muscle, and helps lose weight, it is good for you.


I know that it is essentially the enthymeme, but it is a much easier way of explaining to tutees, especially those who enter the WORD Studio with problems with their "there's." Without going too far off topic, let's get back to the enthymeme. Onto another example, the comic strip The Lockhorns best illustrate the organization of argument and the effect of the proper usage of enthymeme:

Enthymeme

Main Entry: en·thy·meme
Function: noun

1. A snooty way of saying the structure of an argument ( My name is Doctor Smartypants and your assignment is to create a paper using an enthymeme on quantum physics its use in cytogenetics).

2. A filler; a word with no relevance.

See also: Rhetoric

Tabula Rasa? When to Start With a Clean Slate

I specifically liked the point made on page 22 of Meeting Minds: A Brief Rhetoric for Wrtiers and Readers about how there are certain assumptions a writer makes to grasp his or her intended audience: "when your readers identify an assumption or values they share with you, they will be more sympathetic to you reasoning."

One problem though: To what point does one assume? Surely a writer will assume the language is something the audience members will understand. But what about concepts? Ideas? Words? At what point does one say, "everyone should know this?" And when to we start tabula rasa?

Identity Crisis: Consultant vs. Tutor

Upon reading "Tutoring in Unfamiliar Subjects" by Alexis Greiner, I feel that I shall no longer be known as a WORD Studio tutor, but instead a consultant. Greiner makes a point in saying that it is a consultant that "help{s} by provoking thought through conversation, posing questions, and engaging writers in the work of writing" (115). The term tutor implies that the tutor has the ability to teach others to write well. I feel that it is not the case at Saint Lawrence because the application process simply asks for a written piece of work, not a resume showing one's ability to help others.
Epiphany: We as a writing center should stop even advertising ourselves as "the one's who can help with papers." Think about it: The ideal writing center should help students how to write better; we should not only help students when they have an assignment due soon. In order to do so, all of the "consultants" employeed should take a class *cough* English 229 Rhetoric and Communication Theory and Practice, with Professor Hillory Oakes on Tuesdays from 2:20 - 3:50pm *cough* that will enhance their ability to tutor others in writing. Only then should we be called tutors.

Professor Oakes, how do you feel about the WORD Studio changing not only its name but its mode of operation?

Alice in Rhetorland

Trupe, being a published writer, should know that "the pen is mighter than the sword." Knowning this, she should stop studying the organization of Ghandi's writings and start understanding that "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

What the heck is Richard talking about? I'll tell you. When referring to a generic, fictional writer, Trupe labels them as "she." I understand that as a sexist society, writers often say "he," but fighting fire with fire never reached any goal. There are many gender neutral terms Trupe could have used.

As for Trupe: she lost all hope for establishing ethos with me as her reader.

Reader-Based Texts vs. Writer-Based Texts: The Reason Rhetoric Loses Credit

Though Trupe does a great job explaining to writers that they need to establish connection with the readers, it brings up the entire age-old battle of the evils of rhetoric. Clearly explaining a term or two will not alter the writer's opinion of what they write about, but I feel that a writer should write without the reader in mind, then revise his or her piece. If we were to think about the reader from the beginning, we alter our perception: perhaps our imagined audience does not like this idea, or perhaps this is too personal to share with my professor (the usual audience member for writers in college).
I personally believe that one should write to express him or herself, not express what they want the readers to perceive of them. If a writer writes to alter the perception of the readers, then rhetoric is evil and manipulative. Most artists hardly received credit when they were alive because their pieces of work were not understandable to the audience of the time. Decades later, they are masterminds. Should they have made their work understandable to an audience at that time, they would have gone without credit today. Writing should follow the same pattern. Most writers of yesteryear were harshly criticized for pieces that weren't "reader-based." Lo and behold, they are the greatest writers of today.

If we ever want the art of rhetoric to resubmerge from its grave, we must allow for the art of writing to rise first. Bring art back into writing!

Thursday's Class

Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. One problem: Kirk left the TV on Dharma & Greg while he was talking. Major distraction. It doesn't really matter what was showing on the screen; it was the simple fact that the audience members are like flies who follow bright lights. That portion of his speech zipped across from one ear to the next.

Moral of the story: when speaking, permit no distractions!

Pathos in Papers: The Lost Art of Emotion and Punctuation

It seems that the use of pathos, or emotional appeal to the reader, via punctuation is a lost art. Wysocki and Lynch are fantastic writers on the subject. I personally view there being more to pathos in a paper than just what you read. I believe that pathos appears in what you see as well. The same way one can be emotionally attached by what one says, they can also be emotionally attached by what one sees. Needless to say, our society is based highly on what we see. Who cares if Jessica Simpson has less brain cells than cotton (no, not Hillory's child). She looks good, doesn't she?
I believe that the same should go into a paper's presentation. I don't mean that one should you have 1-inch margins on white paper that's has no creases. That's true, but what I mean is that many professors frown on using exclamation points, or bold face, and underlining in a paper. It's understood that books should be underlined, so by convention we underline those in a paper, but we shouldn't be limited to word art. This artistic form of writing can create pathos with the reader. It speaks about the writers character and introduces a whole new world of comprehension and complexity.

There are two aspects to a paper: that that can be read, and that that can be seen! Bring back the visual paper!

Eureka!

It seems that all of the philosophers of yesteryear had a difficult time understanding rhetoric and writing. Aristotle was one to defend the "art of rhetoric" by relateing it to the "discovery of knowledge." The only problem that seems to arise is that rhetoric can lead to falsifying the truth, and the only way to see what is rhetoric and what is truth is to be a wise and well-rounded reader: "Aristotle did not believe that teh way to protect students from the harmful effects of the skilled rhetoricians was the aviod teaching the skills" (pg. 10). This all ties with the general idea of the piece that writing is "the ongoing reflection of students' developing understanding of ideas.

Get Your Grammar War On

I've just begun reading a book titled The War Against Grammar, by David Mulroy, a professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In our class last week, we began discussing misperceptions of a writing or communication center as a place to get grammar "fixed"--whether that means seeing the center, in Michael Pemberton's words, as a hospital, a prison, or a madhouse.

I've always tried to make clear to students, tutors, and fellow teachers that I like grammar (look--I'm reading a book about it at home! for fun!) and I like teaching it; I get strange comfort from diagramming a sentence. I do think that the way we should teach grammar to, say, a fifth-grader should differ from how we teach it to a first-year college student, and I think the kinds of things we emphasize differ, too. I would love a world in which every student used perfect grammar (and punctuation and mechanics and syntax) all the time, and I would never argue that it doesn't matter. But I do often wonder how we can break a 19-year-old of a comma splice habit besides just circling it a dozen times on a paper. And I do think carefully about the way a center like ours identifies itself on campus. I noted that one anonymous tutee made this comment on a tutorial evaluation last year: "I don't appreciate having the Writing Center tell me they're too good to help me with grammar." So I think we (I, tutors, mentors, and others who support our work in their classrooms) need to clearly articulate what we mean and why we believe what we do; I'm sure I'll muse more about this and seek more comments later.

For now, I'll quote one paragraph from Mulroy, in which he argues why it's important for every one to be able to list and define the eight parts of speech [can you?]:

The meaning of a sentence is created in part by the rules of grammar. Of these, the most important apply not to individual words but to whole classes of them--i.e., the parts of speech. For example, a declarative sentence is a proposition about a subject, which is represented by a noun or a pronoun. The sense of the proposition is contained in the predicate, which begins with a finite verb--not a participle, and so on. Though we understand the sense of most utterances intuitively, the only reliable way to interpret obscure one is through grammatical analysis, and that presupposes knowing the parts of speech.

Agree?

Rhetoric: Black Hat or White Hat?

I know we've already been discussing the fact that while "rhetoric" in itself should be a neutral term, people (at least outside of academics who study and teach rhetoric for a living!) tend to use it in a negative sense. Out of curiosity, I searched a few news sites for recent articles in which the word "rhetoric" was used; here's just a sample (the first four are from the New York Times; the second is from the UCLA student newspaper):

"Iranian Rhetoric Aside, It May Be Time to Talk"

“The common complaint about the government is there is a lot of lofty rhetoric, but the achievement always falls short,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said.

"But some critics say Mr. Huckabee’s crusade has more rhetoric than substance."

"...Council meetings where rhetoric has traditionally predominated over substance."

"As a person who does not share her views, I want to sound back to her that the use of some of the more rhetorical hot buttons, like 'religious right,' is a huge turn-off."

...I glanced through a hundred or so hits from my "rhetoric" search, and about the only non-negative use I saw came in an obituary of a professor who had taught courses in rhetoric. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I thought that perhaps some reporters and commentators out there would have a sense of the positive uses of the word, too.

So...my challenge to you: Report back to this blog with any quotation from any media (from news on TV to a website to a book you're reading in another class) or from daily life in which someone uses "rhetoric" not as a pejorative but as a positive concept. Ready?

Replacement: A Possibility?

So, classrooms shouldn't be replaced by writing centers, right? But the fact is that many of our teachers today are semi-illiterate, all except for Hillory Oakes. Many ask for students to write papers, and grade them according to their taste, as opposed to actual structure and form. Students too are seldom taught in high school the basics of grammar and language. Writing in college after so many years of neglecting the rules of English, a writing center can effectively re-establish the rules of our language.

Geography Major

Mary will have to correct this post to be exactly right, but I'm pretty sure this is what I overheard while she was tutoring a student this past Friday: "Apparently Manhattan is actually in New York City, which I guess everyone knew but me."

(Close to how you remember it, Mary?)

Punctuation Marks + Comedy = Rhetoric (?)

Remember that rhetoric is, at its core, an examination of language (we'll leave the nonverbal out of it for now)--the words chosen, the meanings intended, the purposes achieved or not, etc. On the first day of the Rhetoric and Communication class we demonstrated this with the exercise in which we compared, say, what people mean when they say "euthanasia" as opposed to what other people mean when they say "doctor-assisted suicide."

But even smaller units of the sentence can have rhetorical weight...like my use of ellipses (the dot, dot, dot) just there or the question mark at the end of sentences, titles, even fragments. The Daily Show continues to offer some of the best rhetorical analysis around, as in this segment synopsized by one of the bloggers at Language Log thus:

Stewart observes that CNN uses question-marked story captions as a way to establish "existential" topics -- roughly Rumsfeld's method, though sometimes applied to flag outlandish subjects like "End Times" -- whereas Fox News uses rhetorical questions as a sneaky way to insinuate things that it doesn't dare assert.

Voice, Audience, Purpose?

Any teacher of writing or speech can recite "voice, audience, purpose" in his or her sleep--the rhetorical decisions a writer or speaker makes must be based on a determination of these three things. That's not to say that VAP (as I usually abbreviate them) dictate the content you will explore--I'm not suggesting, for example, tailoring what you want to say to the perceived whims of your audience so much that you don't even believe what you're saying/writing anymore--but you have to constantly remind yourself of VAP as you discover what it is you really want to get across.

So...Listening to President Bush's speech on the 5th anniversary of September 11, I was struck by how slightly askew his (or, more aptly, his speechwriter's) sense of voice, audience, and purpose was. [See the Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca quote from our Herrick text: "The important thing...is not knowing what the speaker regards as true or important, but knowing the views of those he is addressing" (9).] In a speech made on this particular anniversary, a speech that should probably be purely commemorative [epideictic is the term for ceremonial, "praise or blame" speeches], he did get political and somewhat off the day's most important topic. But what my ears really picked up on was this, fairly early in the speech:

For many of our citizens, the wounds of that morning are still fresh. I have met firefighters and police officers who choke up at the memory of fallen comrades. I have stood with families gathered on a grassy field in Pennsylvania, who take bittersweet pride in loved ones who refused to be victims - and gave America our first victory in the war on terror. And I have sat beside young mothers with children who are now five-years-old - and still long for the daddies who will never cradle them in their arms. Out of this suffering, we resolve to honor every man and woman lost. And we seek their lasting memorial in a safer and more hopeful world.

Do your eyes catch what my ears did? Look at all those I's: "I have met firefighters...I have stood with families...I have sat beside young mothers." Maybe I'm just being too rhetorically sensitive, but for a speech that was supposed to honor thousands of dead, thousands of survivors, and thousands who helped out firsthand in some way, why should we care about--to be more precise, why should or would we be persuaded by--what President Bush's "I" did? He's managed to shift the focus, subtly or not so subtly, from what the families and firefighters and mothers have experienced and done to himself. Not an accidental rhetorical move.

Rhetoric Lives at SLU

Welcome to St. Lawrence University's Munn Center--soon to be known as the WORD [Writing, Oral Communication, Research, and Design] Studio--blog. All current and former tutors are welcome to contribute here. (Students taking the Rhetoric and Communication Theory and Practice course this fall will be posting on a regular basis.) Bring here anything substantially--or tangentially--related to rhetoric, writing, speechifying, dialogue, research, design, or more. Enjoy!