remix

"this is water" (David Foster Wallace)

We want to be rhetorically strategic but not ethically hollow. We want to avoid "the default mode," but sometimes the default mode is so comfy we cannot fathom how to discover an alternative way of being or of responding to an event, trend, or phenomenon. 

Your Inventing Arguments assignment asks you to explore a rhetorical challenge you are currently facing. You need not choose some monumental thing. I like the way David Foster Wallace describes some of the mundane daily challenges we face "in the workaday world." His painfully truthful admissions, along with his creative and critical "adjustments" help demonstrate ways of thinking toward framing problems productively so that we may examine them honestly and critically and so that we may begin to see methods of *moving* beyond or altering our disposition for the better. 

Does the video help you see more clearly the challenge you'd like to explore? How? What are you thinking? How did the text help you to see differently? Explain in a thoughtful blog entry; title it something that harks back to "water."

ePortfolios

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ePortfolios provide space for reflecting upon and sharing the nature of your learning in this course. Keep it simple. Whereas ePortfolios may take many different forms, for this course, you are asked simply to create a new blog (just as you did at the beginning of this semester), and then to create the following elements: 

1. A Blogger blog entry (aka "landing page") for sharing your reflection. One entry. Use the "CARA rubric" to guide you to the types of learning you would like to talk about. Highlight how you achieved the learning outcomes through our course projects and activities.
2. A series of links* within the reflection (to one or more existing projects, sites, or other relevant materials that shaped your learning) ... OR ...
3. At least one link to your favorite work (or all links to the works you cite) at a sidebar gadget (use the "link list" option to link to a document you have uploaded at your google drive). You may choose a presentation, a blog entry, a contribution to a group project, or a major essay.

To Complete:  Post your ePortfolio during Finals week. Then, send an email to kyburzbl@lewisu.edu. Create a Subject Heading: "ePortfolio." Paste a link to your ePortfolio into the email. Voilá!

* Note: Assuming you'd like to keep your projects "private," be sure that when you upload them, you indicate a limited readership (myself and your class peers). Reminder instructions on how to do so are found in this short video (also posted, below).

visual design principles

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Some of you are analyzing elements of visual design (rhetoric) in your analysis. You may care to use C.R.A.P. (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity) principles to help you think about how and why your cultural artifact means as it does, how it appeals to 1 or more aspect of human nature (ethos, pathos, logos) through its color, composition, etc. 

From a fine design site, here is Presentation Zen on C.R.A.P. You assured me in class that you were very well aware of these principles, so this is a simple refresher. 

You may also care to draw upon the vocabulary of visual design. Here is a brief reminder -- there are many fine resources to help explicate these concepts. Simple searches will get you there, though you may also feel free to cite this handout from Oberlin College, or this from the NJIT Elements of Visual Design site (very explorable!). 

I hope this is helpful!

new samples

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New! Additional samples! (@ sidebar). These samples are relatively sound. They rely less on sources than I've asked you to; however, they are well-reasoned, clever, and deliver sound, elemental rhetorical analysis. More use of shared rhetorical vocabulary might be additionally helpful, but these are getting after it.

Many of the analyses use a particular rhetorical "lens" -- a key concept from a rhetorical theorist (many use Bakhtin's "heteroglossia") as a tool for focusing analyses of relations regarding the meanings, implications, use values, and cultural uptake of the artifact (in this case, an individual internet meme). 

Finally, my colleague at Penn State, Debra Hawhee pointed me to several brief analyses, which you can access with a Google search "RCL Rhetorical Analysis." Several populate the screen. These seem to me to be sound, however, they are also more like planning documents for the sort of essay you are writing. It may be helpful to see the structure these writers are discovering.

contradictory sublime

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a draft of our shared rhetorical analysis* ... remarkably coherent, although i merely jammed everything together. faith in invention? faith in the social nature of rhetorical action? 

also, notes on how these ideas about invention comprise my main contribution to teaching you some/any/everything about rhetoric, writing, and success.

*i wonder if a pecha kucha event might work well??

what is it?!

mike patton by puppenjung on deviantART

In an effort to offer encouragement as you begin to draft your CARA (Cultural Artifact Rhetorical Analysis), I want to make clear that you can do this. What is "this"? The activity of writing itself, writing that is uncertain, ambiguous, inquiring. It will not be terrifically polished at first. Don't care. Start writing. 

You know this, of course. So, Start writing. Begin,  as my instructions make clear, by summarizing sources. Use sources that will help you establish that the artifact is circulating widely enough to suggest that it meets Brummett's criteria (see earlier post). This summary work may present the clearest route to the confidence that will compel you forward.

So, you have 2 pages by now, yes? Of course you do!

Moving on, then, I am pasting here (and linked, at "samples") a version of a model I wrote a few years back for a different Rhetorical Theory class. I am sharing here to let you know, again, that you can do this. This draft I'm sharing is a thing I wrote in about 30 minutes. It needs work, to be sure, and it needs more sources, more documentation, and ... just more. At the same time, it stands as a pretty great start! I am perfectly certain that you can produce something of value by just starting to write with an analytical mind about your artifact.