Archive for April, 2007
what is the rhetorical situation?
Lloyd F. Bitzer defines it “as a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which strongly invites utterance; this invited utterance participates naturally in teh situation, is in many instances necessary to the completion of situational activity, and by means of its participation with situation obtains its meaning and its rhetorical character” [...]
Asking Students to Write Online: Negotiating the Private and Public
Here’s the PowerPoint for my presentation for Writing Intensive Curriculum on Friday. I’m not sure if it makes a lot of sense without me talking and the great discussion we had on Friday, but I thought I’d go ahead and share it. Oh, and I highly recommend Slideshare. My account can be found here.
is writing disorderly conduct?
Via Dennis Jerz, a story about high school student who was arrested for something he wrote in class: Told to express emotion for a creative-writing class, high-school senior Allen Lee penned an essay so disturbing to his teacher, school administrators and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct, officials said Wednesday. Lee, 18, a [...]
presentation tomorrow for WIC: negotiating private and public
I am presenting tomorrow for one of the Friday lunches for WIC. Here’s my program description: “Asking Students to Write Online: Negotiating the Private and Public“ Michael Faris (WIC) When we ask students to publish online, what issues of privacy arise? How does the Internet act as a public place where ideas can be shared, [...]
rss feeds made easy
Check this video out if you want an easy understanding of the way rss feeds work.
notes from what I read today (Bruffee)
“If thought is internalized public and social talk, then writing of all kinds is internalized social talk made public and social again. If thought is internalized conversation, then writing is internalized conversation re-externalized” (422). This seems to make sense to me, but I also have a fishy suspicion about this claim. I think perhaps it [...]
Trimbur: Composition and the Circulation of Writing
In “Composition and the Circulation of Writing,” John Trimbur critiques the prevalent practice in composition pedagogy of reducing the canon of delivery to mere submission of a paper, which separates writing education from modes of production and delivery and over-emphasizes the act of writing — “the creative moment of composing” — which becomes what writing [...]
Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty, Chapter 3
Josiah Royce, in Chapter 3 of The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908), argues that in order to be a moral person, one must chose to be loyal to causes that do not infringe upon other people’s loyalty to their causes — that is, one must be loyal to loyalty — and that all virtues are forms [...]
Miller’s “Genre as Social Action”
In “Genre as Social Action,” Carolyn R. Miller argues “that a rhetorical sound definition of genre must be centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish” (151). This action “must involve situation and motive” (151). Drawing from Kenneth Burke, Miller claims that we must [...]
Brick: “First Person Singular, First Person Plural, and Exposition”
In “First Person Singular, First Person Plural, and Exposition,” Allan Brick calls for valuing students’ own idea formation when many political forces are calling for skills education or utility-based writing. He writes that perhaps the problem with students not developing ideas well in their essays is that “the ‘main idea’ is not the student’s idea [...]
