#rhetcomp

[anghraine]

This week only renewed my realization that teaching subjects that are actually pertinent to my own specialized knowledge is not at all the same thing as teaching composition, where I'm just another body with an English degree who can pass on the dictates of a field I'm not in and have no particular expertise or interest in. I spent years hating teaching, resenting not being permitted to integrate anything from any of the fields I truly knew about, and felt like a fraud no matter how many times I taught it.

Meanwhile, now that I get to teach early modern drama, I can impulsively just say things like, "So you can see that her speech is really all about gender. Well ... not entirely, if we're being strictly accurate. It's also about murder!"

[digitalrevolutions]

Multimedia and RhetComp Apologetics

One of the most striking aspects of my arrival at Florida State University was a kind of speech I heard Michael Neal, the Rhetoric and Composition director, give to varied groups of graduate “English majors”—creative writers, literary scholars, and rhetoricians—several times during my first month there. It always began along these lines: “Hi, I’m Michael Neal, the RhetComp director. I know those of you in other specialties might not think RhetComp is very important, or even have heard of us, but…” Although my brief encounters with composition pedagogy had alluded to some controversy, I had never imagined an academic introducing himself to other academics with such a disclaimer. As I’ve settled into graduate school and begun to explore Rhetoric and Composition in more depth, I’ve come to understand Michael’s introduction not as a form of self-disparagement but as a reaction to narratives of place and purpose that have been with our discipline since its inception.

In The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925, John Brererton reports that just a few years after their inception in the 1870s, composition courses were already being criticized for “not making a difference in studentwriting, for being expensive in terms of a teacher's time and energy, and for distracting faculty efforts from more important things.” I couldn’t help but laugh when I read those words. I heard in them the echo of Blake Smith’s January 2023 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which he indignantly asserts that students who visit college writing centers, traditionally run by composition scholars, “ought to demonstrate a guaranteed minimum level of writing ability, leaving instructors in other courses free to focus on teaching their discipline-specific content without having to explain, yet again, the purpose of topic sentences.” More than a century on, composition is surrounded by the same narratives. The teaching of writing, we are told, is busywork—a simple skill to be acquired, not one that serious scholars should concern themselves with. And yet somehow we have spent nearly 150 years failing to pass along this skill and prepare students for “real work”.

In many ways, we’ve internalized this criticism and come to direct it at our own efforts in teaching, composing, and rhetorical analysis. Kathleen Blake Yancey argues that the traditional “neo-Platonian” model of composition instruction through individual relationships with the student “is doomed”, and has been for 100 years. Similarly, Alexander Reid posits that the “traditional humanistic paradigms” at the foundation of rhetoric are no longer suitable for the post-industrial age. In both cases, they offer digital rhetorics as the solution. For Yancey, digital rhetorics manifest as a multimodal composition curriculum which supplants writing for the instructor with writing for the “real world” in a variety of digital genres. For Reid, the exploration of digital rhetorics allows for a speculative rhetoric that privileges our relationships with nonhumans over purely human perspectives. In so doing, he argues, it can address concerns of the digital age that humanism isn’t equipped to deal with and restore the relevance of the English department. Both speak to RhetComp’s urge to discard our humanistic roots in favor of computational, algorithmic methods that we hope will win us recognition as a “real” discipline. Otherwise, we worry about being seen as anti-science or, in Yancey’s words, “as irrelevant as faculty professing in Latin.”

On the other hand, there are figures like Douglas Eyman, who sees digital rhetorics as an analytical method firmly rooted in public, dynamic, interactive conceptions of classical humanist rhetorics. A digital rhetoric framed in terms of computation and scientific/mathematical analysis, he argues, would reduce rhetoricians to technicians applying technique to a representation of discourse that doesn’t come close to the complexity of the real world. As Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes argue, much thought is required to bring multimodal, digital composition into the world of rhetoric without forcing it into the mold of traditional textual analysis. In the process, I would add, we turn ourselves into mere tool-users, applying universal principles of writing to some object.

While I disagree with Eyman—I think there can be a place for computational analytics in rhetoric—I’m also reluctant to cosign Reid’s dismissal of our roots. It seems to me that these tensions are driven by a constant quest for visibility, to justify our presence alongside what is relevant, impactful, and highly visible elsewhere. I find myself wondering if it’s possible to make peace with our relative invisibility—to say “We’re RhetComp, and you probably haven’t heard of us because we’re so deeply embedded in everything you do that it’s hard to see us. Let us show you how to recognize the context, considerations, and possibilities driving the way you communicate, so that you can decide how a text ‘works’ and what it needs to do next.” In other words, we could claim our mundanity and humanistic origins proudly, positioning ourselves as a conduit by which people can both come to understand individual artifacts and composing processes and learn apply that knowledge to the wider world. I’m sure someone else has proposed it before me, but I’m curious how the individual perspectives embedded in multimodal compositions have been considered by theorists so far.

[michaelartsgood]

Publishing Advice

My good friend Matt teaches high school English and History back in Oregon, and a student had some questions about publishing their writing/possible book. He asked me if I had time to respond, and this is what I wrote up. But might also be an informative for all ages/experience levels. It’s almost as if I should be getting paid money to teach these things… but like, what job could that possibly…

[comptheory2018]

Music Monday

Today’s, Music Monday is brought to you by a band made famous in the early 2000s. This comes from an album they released just last year -- the song, “Imperfection,”  connects well with our conversations about writing/composing, our processes, what we value about “good” writing/composing, and so on. Most often, we don’t value our own “imperfections” and we see them as hindering about ability to be successful in writing/composing. But do they? Or are they a part of what makes us the writer/composer that we are? ;-)

The more you try to fight it The more you try to hide it The more infected, rejected, you feel alone inside it You know you can't deny it The world's a little more f*ed up everyday

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Don't you dare surrender Don't leave me here without you Cause I would never Replace your perfect imperfection

Enjoy the song!

[filledwiththeintenttobelost]

Thinking about research #rhetcomp #rhetoric #fashion #clothing #gender #wearabletechnology #phdlife

[pepprs]

this post was made by bad time management at fuck o clock gang

[strangcmatters]

Yeah I'm gonna go ahead and say I'm not making it back to tumblr rp this year. I'm super behind in my coursework for this semester and once I finish I have a way-overdue paper to write. There are some personal things I need to sort in the month between the end of the semester and the beginning of my study abroad program, and then I'm off to Ireland for a month. After I leave for my program in June, I may not be reunited with my laptop until September, and then my focus will be on finishing my program and graduating in December.

With all of that, I just cannot guarantee even the slightest activity on my blogs. If you want to unfollow, totally chill I get you, and I'll drop you a line when I'm back. I am pretty much always on disco though, and if we're mutuals you are free to add me, even if we've never spoken before. Also, I'll be documenting my travel shenans this summer at @andiabroad which is currently a blank sideblog off my personal. See you all on the flip side, hopefully with a master's degree in rhetcomp.

[operationphd-blog1]

New day, new reading. #qualifyingexams #rhetcomp #queer #phenomenology #gradschool #phdlife #productivity

[anghraine]

Today’s staff meeting included a tangent about the importance of not using literary content in composition and ... I mean, I understand the rationale, but it makes it pretty funny when the compositionists turn around and don’t understand why so many literary and creative writing people seem standoffish towards them specifically.

[theestuaryandthesea]

Hello, #GradblrChallenge! I’m really excited to be joining this, even though I’m definitely one of the borderline gradblrs to have been accepted. 

Name or nickname: Vee

Location: Arkansas, USA (yikes)

Area of study: I’m in an English program, specializing in RhetComp and gender/sexuality studies. I’m primarily interested in discursive constructions of group identity in LGBT spaces, rhetorics of female masculinity, and ephemeral texts, so my thesis is on constructions of identity in zines by queer, mad women in contrast to their representations in legal and medical discourse.

Level of study: Second-year M.A.

A word on your thesis/dissertation: Nebulous

What has been your experience with graduate school/university thus far: Overall, relatively good. This is a small program, so its an easier entry to academia than most, I think.

What do you hope to accomplish with this challenge: I need to actually get work done. Summer teaching and a language course ate up all my time, so I need to finish prep for my fall courses and finish my thesis prospectus. If I have time, I’d like to begin work on PhD app materials. I’m also hoping to establish a work schedule that will let me prioritize my own research going into the fall semester. I love teaching, but sometimes it feels like my teaching responsibilities expand to fill all my available time, to the detriment of my own work. I’ll have three classes this fall, so time management and routine are going to be what carries me through.

Is this your first #gradblrchallenge: Yes! :)

Favorite film: Probably The Hours? I also really like Swiss Army Man and Arrival.

Favorite TV Series: Grey’s Anatomy hahaha

Places you wish to visit in a near future: Seattle/the PNW in general

Where do you see yourself in five years: Ideally, finishing my PhD and entering the job market.

Meaning behind your url: I like water and all the good handles were taken.

A random fact about you: I’m slowly migrating towards the southeast. WA --> MN --> OK --> AR --> ???

[digitalrevolutions]

Quasi-Objects And Background Noise

Key (or New) Terms

Quasi-object— an object of examination that has a temporary sense of stability, boundedness, but only because it’s interacting with things that speed up or slow down its natural dynamic movement into something we can perceive (Hawk “Introduction” 6).

Resounding— a process of circulation, transduction, and resonance that evokes the “re-sounding” of rhetoric, in which sound leaves the domain of the oral and enters the digital—a process that can only move forward (“Introduction” 15).

Byron Hawk breaks with tradition; rather than opening his book with a definition of rhetoric, he chooses to define the rhetorical as “an ongoing series of actions that continually modulates and modifies—a series of suasive vibrations that speed up, slow down, rearticulate, and invigorate ecologies of composition and their futurities… at stake in every circulation of energy, every material encounter, and every unfolding future (“Introduction” 15).” Frankly, I struggle to understand where this framing of rhetoric departs from convention—it seems to me that the entire point of the rhetorical ecologies model that’s become dominant in RhetComp is to imagine a continually evolving, moderating and moderated rhetoric.

Hawk offers quasi-objects as a solution to the field’s warring desires to expand our objects of study to encompass the myriad composing forms of the digital age and to maintain an object of study that is focused enough to allow us some kind of disciplinary integrity. If we were to turn our attention to the composing of quasi-objects, he argues, our object of study would then be “any process of being put together, from the smallest circumference to the broadest scale (“Chapter 1” 21).” I have no qualms with this idea, as such, but it again seems to me like a nifty label for a way we were already thinking.

Things start to get interesting when Hawk turns his new framework on the analysis of sound. When understood as a quasi-object, he argues, sound is fundamentally ontological—concerned with the nature of being (“Chapter 1” 35). I find myself wondering if thinking in terms of quasi-objects means that most objects of study are fundamentally ontological, since the processes that they are composing and being composed by are ongoing and to some extent subjective. For sound, at any rate, it solves the debate around whether sound is an energy that travels/circulates or an event that is experienced in a particular place. Hawk tells us

“As an entangled material process, the transduction of sound waves into electrical brain signals forms the basis of knowledge and folds back to contextualize and coproduce further transductions (“Chapter 1” 35).”

As best as I can understand, this means “Perceiving the circulating energy and translating it into meaning in the brain is itself an event, so the energy and the event of sound coproduce one another.” This makes sense to me; sound can be both deeply rooted in a given moment or memory and a kind of “wallpaper for the mind” that follows us through life, and arguably the former occurs when something happens to give background music/sounds a special meaning, which can then fade back into the background as a circulating energy.

In this sense, Hawk argues, ambient rhetoric models and networked rhetoric models can coexist, because networks are always being produced, transformed by, and transforming ambient rhetorics. Actor-networks, he argues, aren’t strong or permanent links between things, but traces of encounters between and among quasi-objects (and quasi-subjects, or are the two the same thing?) in the act of composing. The idea that networks were composed out of ambient rhetorics seemed intuitive to me, but the idea that networks contributed to the establishment and maintenance of ambient rhetorics felt more novel. I really struggled with Hawk’s work; perhaps because it calls attention to the “background noise” of assumptions I took for granted, much like I do the music I have almost constantly playing in my downtime.

[comptheory2018]

For your out-of-class day, you are going to do the following “composing” things that will be due by Friday, January 26, 2018 at 11:59pm (this will count as attendance for Thursday’s class ... yes, I’m giving you an extra day to complete this work, so please be intentional with your time :-).

Please post  ALL of the composings to your Twitter! You can post them however you want -- in a series, 1 at a time, in a combo, mixed together (meme/gif), etc. -- so long as fulfill the expectations below.

(1) Memes: create a series of memes (minimum of 3, maximum of 6) that portray some of the key words that define comp theory (as we’ve discussed in class and/or read about in the course readings).

(2) Gifs: create 2 gifs that represent the complexities that help us define composition studies.

(a) You can use any “program/mode” (intentionally broad) that you would like to create these composings.

(b) They all must be original images -- in other words, you cannot take them from the Internet or from someone else.

(c They must be appropriate in the context of composition studies.

(d) They must fulfill the genre expectations of a meme and a gif.

(3) As part of the Tweet(s), please include a “reflection” that somehow connects them all together expressing your current understanding of composition studies. 

Be creative. Be critical. Be reflective.

I look forward to seeing what you can do! :-)

[sandwichmelody]

What is Sandwich Melody?

Sandwich Melody is a blog about rhetoric and composition (and maybe other stuff) by Brian, a PhD student in Rhetoric & Writing at Bowling Green State University. This blog is intentionally created for posting responses to readings for the course Computer-Mediated Writing, but I might continue posting about RhetComp one the series of reading responses is finished. Maybe, maybe not. Who knows?

[pepprs]

can you talk more abt the class that made you switch tracks? ❣

YES absolutely!!! so for bg @ my school within the english major there are 2 tracks u can pick... one is like looking @ history / analysis of literature and stuff like that and the other is looking @ rhetoric / composition! i came into college on the lit track w/o rly knowing much abt it lmao but then i took a class in my 2nd semester of college that was like... a gateway class all english majors had to take and it was more in the rhetoric / composition side of things.. the prof (who eventually became my advisor before i changed majors out of english LOL) was super scary but also SO like... idk how else to describe her but poggers???? JDHSKSHDJDJ like just her whole way of teaching the class was so cool and i literally decided to switch tracks to rhetcomp adter one (1) class w her lol. it was rly fun like we got to learn abt how text is more than just words on a page... text is also music and images and advertising etc and we did some rly fun hands on projects to learn abt it! like we had to make... not a doll but a BOX for a doll to communicate our experiences as students... and we also did a group project where we made like games and stuff but i forget what concept that was abt lol. it was such a hard class and there was a lot of reading / writing in it too lol and again the prof was super intimidating but it’s one of the best classes ive taken in college and even if i didn’t end up an english rhetcomp major in the end im rly glad i took it bc it helped me get clarity on what im interested in!!! 🤩

[slowtides]

On the questions of bias, propaganda, and agitation propaganda, and my classroom

In the rhetoric classes I teach, one of the first conversations my students and I have is about bias. We work through questions about what is biased and what is not biased, eventually arriving at the realization that everything is biased. My students begin by saying something is unbiased when it is "just the facts," but then we start to question who decides what the facts are, what facts are included, what facts are excluded, what facts are listed first, what facts are listed in the footnotes, what facts are alluded to but not stated outright, and what facts are taken out of context or put into a context they were not originally in. So then, we talk about how to identify bias, how to navigate it, and how to understand how it impacts the rhetorical purpose of the text. This is part of a rhetorical reading, followed by rhetor and audience analysis, along with specific identification of rhetorical appeals to reasoning, emotion, and credibility.

We also talk a little about propaganda, but not as much as I would want to. We talk about understanding all texts as rhetorical situations in which we may be the primary audience, or secondary audience, or tertiary audiences. And how all texts have a rhetorical purpose, and most of them have more than one--how a text might seem like it is addressing a specific individual publicly, but it is also addressing all the people witnessing this individual being addressed in the hopes that this secondary audience will exert pressure on the individual. And so on. How propaganda pushes a political line by referencing and appealing to the imagined and actualized values of the audience. We talk about veracity and speciousness--how there are things that seem like they could be true and so are treated as true, and how there are things that defy belief and so are treated as false, but that these are not truth claims in and of themselves; how there are truth claims that are at least partially true, but maybe they are in a different context, or maybe they are true on a small scale but not on the scale they are presented as. A grain of truth becomes a 50 lb bag of sand becomes a sandy beach that stretches for miles. And how propaganda is not inherently bad, but it is inherently rhetorical in how it emphasizes the call to action, the call to belief, for the audience.

We do not talk about agitation propaganda, which is what I think we should be talking about. The propaganda designed to galvanize and agitate the audience, the propaganda designed to push as much as the audience can be pushed, and then create new space to push more. The propaganda that emphasizes the extremes and the exceptions, disrupting the median or the norm or the average, in an effort to upset complacency. Again, this propaganda is not inherently bad or even false. (I think people hear the word propaganda and think "propaganda means lies" but that's not what it means). But this propaganda takes a perspective and carries it further. It is invigorating and exciting and arousing and radicalizing in the way it reveals how close you are to your convictions.

I guess I wonder how much I prepare my students for this. I think about how many of them come to me thinking bias is always bad, unbiased is always good, and propaganda is always lies. And I hope I disrupt that for them, at least a little bit. But I feel like I should probably do more.

[operationphd-blog1]

Reading and thinking about agency and who (or what) has it. #whatworklookslike #productivity #rhetcomp #phdlife #gradschool #qualifyingexams