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Category Archives: Education
enculturation: McLuhan at 100
If you haven’t already, I encourage to check out enculturation‘s latest issue: Marshall McLuhan @ 100: Picking Through the Rag and Bone Shop of a Career, launched on the final day of centenary celebrations, 21 years to the day of McLuhan’s death. Editors David Beard and Kevin Brooks have pulled together quite a stunning issue.
image by stefan.erschwendner, flickr
Winner: Rhetorical Analysis of the Month (Youth Division)
And our winner for Best Rhetorical Analysis in the month of December by someone 12 years of age or younger goes to Riley, who reminds us that analyzing the rhetoric of color choices, gender shaping, and consumer culture can never begin too early. Congratulations, Riley!
+1 and like
I don’t know much about tenure or impact factors and journals. I don’t really know much about how academic journals get rated for prestige, influence, and coolness. But I’ve been thinking about new sorts of ratings for academic publications—especially those DIY publications. I’ve been thinking about those self-published pieces that don’t go through a journal but are published online ready to be experienced. There are some outstanding pieces out there that may not have a home in a journal but are important and need some support and academic cred. I’ve also been thinking about all the work comp and rhet teachers do online. I mean often they are blogging about rhetoric, vlogging about rhetoric, youtubing about composition, facebooking composition and, in general, engaging in academic activities through social media platforms that they never get credit for. So I wonder about liking and +1ng. And I ask ya these questions:
1. Should there be some sort of calculation (impact factor type) for articles, books, and websites based on likes and +1s and tweets ?
2. Could academic prestige be equated to social media numbers?
3. Should social media presence help with tenure?
If the answer is yes to any of the above then ya gotta ask the next questions:
1. Would a like from Villanueva mean more than a like from Muhlhauser?
2. Would a +1 from Yancey be rated higher than a +1 from Brad Pitt?
What would a university look like if tenure were based on social media presence?
Please like, +1, and tweet this post. I’m preparing for the future.
later
Classical Rhetoric: A Manly Introduction
The Art of Manliness has a well written series of primers on classical rhetoric and the five canons.
Check ‘em all out:
Classical Rhetoric 101: An Introduction
Classical Rhetoric 101: A Brief History
- covers the sophists, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintillian, Medieval, Renaissance, and the “modern day”
- includes a brief section on Topoi
- covers narratio, partitio, confirmatio, refutatio, peroratio
- covers the five virtues of style: correctness, clarity, evidence, propriety, ornateness
- not just about memorizing, but making memorable
- master the pause, watch your body language, vary your tone, let gestures flow naturally, match your speed with your emotion, vary the force of your voice, enunciate, look your audience in your eye
With extra rhetoric, please . . .
Rhetoric in the news:
Herman Cain's Rhetoric Pie
It’s true (and perhaps to be expected) that rhetoric is implicitly defined here as bombastic sound-bites, caustic charges thick with generalization, delivered with unexamined confidence. Sadly, we’ve gotten used to having rhetoric framed this way (though we certainly should not accept it). What interests me, though, is the use of “extra” that’s further emphasized with the heaping mess of pizza glob and goop. It points us to a quantitative framing of rhetoric instead of a qualitative one. To stick with the metaphor: rhetoric may be perfectly acceptable as a garnish, a topping to be sprinkled judiciously on something substantive, but if the “toppings” are piled too high and wide we’ll get sick.
It’s a remarkably unproductive way to frame rhetoric that should signal to rhetoricians everywhere that our work is cut out for us . . .
The Perfect Campaign Speech
I would like to see more (a lot more) of this type of rhetorical analysis:
For similar videos check out “Trailer For Every Oscar-Winning Movie Ever,” Charlie Brooker’s “How to Report the News,” and The Onion’s “Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere.”
More please.
Present Tense: Issue #2
Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society has released its second issue. (Thanks goes to David Beard over at The Blogora for the tip.) Of special note is the piece, “Methodological Dwellings: A Search for Feminisms in Rhetoric & Composition,” which features a performance by OSU’s very own Nan Johnson:
"Methodological Dwellings: A Search for Feminisms in Rhetoric & Composition"
On a more personal note (or at least professionally-selfish), I’d like to offer thanks to Gae Lyn Henderson, Assistant Professor at Utah Valley University, for her review of the recently published Activism and Rhetoric, a simply stellar collection of essays curated by Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee. I’ve been fortunate enough to pursue this volume over the past few weeks and am energized by what Kahn, Lee, and the various contributors have accomplished.
For those also interested in affective/non-rational elements of rhetoric, check out Nathaniel Rivers’s, “In Defense of Gut Feelings: Rhetorics of Decision-Making,” which is an insightful and deftly managed piece on a notoriously difficult topic. (And if any of you Harlot readers out there will be joining me at this summer’s “Non-rational Rhetorics” workshop led by Diane Davis and Debra Hawhee, be sure to head over to the latest issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric, which has fresh essays by both.)
Thanks to all in the rhetoric community who keep exploring new realms of rhetoric with their research –
‘Dem ar Fightin’ Words…
NPR has officially won my “Rhetorician of the Week” award, for their new project: “Fighting Words.” Here’s how they describe it:
Check out this video for a sixty-second overview of the project:
NPR is doing great work here in helping cultivate civic rhetorical literacy, simply by providing the data needed for analysis. The one critique that I believe is worth mentioning, however, is the title of the project: Fighting Words. It seems they’ve fallen into that well-worn groove of envisioning argument and debate only in terms of WAR.
Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By reveals just how deeply this association has ingrained itself into our everyday expressions and thought patterns; here are just a few examples they list:
Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I’ve never won an argument with him.
He shot down all of my arguments.
The language we use to frame the practice and process of debate significantly impacts how think about and respond to it. NPR is taking the same route that the lame-stream media takes in trying to boost their ratings: amplify the sense of contentiousness to get viewers to tune in.
Every time I hear these metaphoric frames of aggression and war invoked without a thought given to their long-term consequences, I think of all the different ways we might envision argument. As Lakoff and Johnson so eloquently put it:
Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently.
Counter-Persuasion
So, I like ProfHacker. For realsies, it’s one of the few blogs where I read 75% of the posts (it used to be a lot more before they changed their rss feed to only preview the articles). Part of what I like about that blog is that they deal with what I’m going to call, right here, right now, without knowing if there is actually a term out there: counter-persuasion.
It’s like this: our things (supposedly, at least) are made to engage us, but when these things are too engaging we can suffer from the consequences of being distracted from the things we’re supposed to be accomplishing. When I avoid writing because I’m on facebook, it’s because, well, facebook is just so engaging. Or email. Or tv. Or whatever. So, ProfHacker posts such articles as “6 Ways to Avoid Letting Your Computer Distract You.” This article is specifically reporting on programs which aim to reduce or eliminate the technological things that lure you into using them: email, internet, social networking sites, etc. The distracting devices/services/sites cannot persuade you into interacting with them because of these programs which eliminate the distraction altogether. You know where I’m going with this. That’s right, say it with me now: counter-persuasion.
These programs are made specifically to counter act the persuasive temptations that exist with current technology. If you could see the image in my head when I think about this, it looks something like this:
Original photo via Bruce Turner, flickr
But, I digress.
More or less, I like the cyclical idea here that the software itself is persuasive because it’s reducing the temptations and persuasiveness of other softwares; that the use of counter-persuasion is persuasive itself. It’s a bit convoluted, I grant you, but cool nonetheless.