• PowerPoint?

• Wikipedia
• del.icio.us social bookmarking

• Facebook, MySpace?...

These are new forms of writing and new spaces for writing, and so new places where rhetorical practices change and expand beyond print.

But a closer look suggests that books like Wired Style don't offer much beyond rough-cut advice and Do's and Dont's. Not so much a guide to the territory as a couple of snapshots. Not so much descriptive observations about practices as pet peeves posing as Rules. The same kind of stuff that the typewriter-based Strunk and White Elements of Style offers up. With new technologies and new media, people create new ways of writing, communicating, expressing themselves, and persuading others. Cell phone users - people practiced in no more than everyday literacy - devise SMS shorthand for efficiency of expression in 160 characters. Students taking online courses learn how to engage in online dialogues with colleagues, which means unlearning monologic practices that serve them well in the face to face classroom. Facebook and MySpace? provide new social spaces - online student unions and parks and malls - where people hang out, make contact, make apparently trivial conversation, exchange ideas, engage in public dialogue. Weblogs and YouTube? lower the barrier to local and global communication and allow new voices to be heard - and those voices don't all speak the Standard Dialect. Wikipedia challenges the ideas of authoritative texts created by experts and controlled by editors, and demands changes in writing (Use NPOV) and changes in reading.

A definition

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on current and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and digital communications. Like Weblogs and Wikis, this course explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. Rather than looking at the style books and The Rules, we'll investigate the rhetorical principles behind the prescriptive do's and dont's - and look at those principles as they operate in their social, situated conditions.

In this class, we're taking a rhetorical perspective on e-media. (Rhetoric: the art and science [practice and theory] of using language to create and understand messages). Rhetorical study is not an introspective, intuitive, quiet study. It's noisy and self-conscious, and grounded in practice. It involved observing, analyzing, and interpreting forces and phenomena and people and situations in the world as they play out in practice. Rhetoric focuses our attention on the social, the situated, the contingent, the probable, the particular - and how rhetors (that's you and me when we write, speak, IM, point a camera, create a tag) make choices to address and change particular situations.

A rhetorical focus means we take a different perspective on the matter of writing and ask different questions than you might be familiar with. A rhetorical focus is a focus on meaning: public, shared meaning, meaning that both writer and reader invest in, that both writer and reader employ resources to create: the writer in creating the message and the reader in interpreting that message. So our questions address the larger rhetorical situation rather than focusing on one aspect of it. Our method demands that we take a step back from the text, step outside the rhetorical situation, rather than work from an insider's impression or a gut reaction. And rhetorical study means we sideline intent, because messages often mean and operate in ways rhetors don't intend.

• Rather than simply noting, "The dominant color on the page is blue, which is calming and peaceful..." (physiology-speak) we ask the further questions, "What - and how - does the color blue mean on this particular web page? What blue is this, anyway? Sky blue? Blue water? IBM Big Blue?"

• that working in alternative media can be more interesting - more intellectually engaging - than working in the typical academic essay form - more interesting for you and for me.
• that working in alternative media allows us to question and test both the traditional media and the alternative: it allows us to see communication practices as un-natural, constructed, designed - that is, rhetorical.

Rather than confining our selves to one media or kind of messages for the course, we're sampling four, maybe five, in one course. Email, podcasting, Facebook, folksonomy, perhaps web design or weblogs, or wikis. This is like traveling at high-speed at low altitude. You will become highly adept at observing and analysis - those practices run throughout the course. But I can't promise you'll become master of any of these media.

But expertise is not the purpose of the course. The course will help you get your rhetorical bearings and to push beyond the obvious, the codified, the well-known, the already-habitual, the already-comfortable, the seemingly natural. You can gain an intimacy with the landscape, and an intimacy with method. Hopefully - and while this is your responsibility, I'll do my best to make it possible - you'll gain in insight into your self as a user and creator of media.

Most of the writing we all do for this course will end up on the wiki. Notes, notes on notes, lectures, more notes, group notes and projects. As the course progresses, you'll find that we can begin to link up these nodes, developing them into topics (a topic is a point where a note becomes a WikiWord?), and further developing topics over the semester and across semesters. The wiki becomes more valuable (to us, to the next group, to who ever's looking in) the more we develop topics over time.

During project presentations, grad students will spend time getting an overview of the projects and will submit (on the wiki) a 1000 - 1500 word or so analysis and interpretation of the collection of projects, and their project's place in that collection. This can be informally written - you're addressing the class - but should move from analysis towards interpretation. As a grad student, it's your role to help us all see what the larger picture might mean.

• ENGL 4170/5170 Web Design for Content Writers (prerequisite ENGL 3179 or 4169; waived for 2006)

Technological developments create new situations for using language, new ways of using language, and new varieties of language use: new possibilities of expression, new means of persuasion and communication. Under the pressure of technological and cultural change, writing changes - from the stuffiest of academic essays to the most languid and informal personal note. New forms are invented, and existing forms are adapted to the new contexts. New ways and means of communicating appear. New modes. New media. New customs of writing.

We see changes in new media and in new practices in usage and punctuation. Consider:

• chat rooms
• blogs and blogging

These are new forms of writing and new spaces for writing, and so new places where rhetorical practices change, expand, beyond print.

But a closer look suggests that books like Wired Style don't offer much beyond rough-cut advice and Do's and Dont's. Not so much a guide to the territory as a couple of snapshots. Not so much descriptive observations about practices as pet peeves posing as Rules. The same kind of stuff that the pre-wordprocessor, typewriter-based Strunk and White Elements of Style offers up. With new technologies and new media, people create new ways of writing, communicating, expressing themselves, and persuading others. Cell phone users - people practiced in no more than everyday literacy - devise SMS shorthand for efficiency of expression in 160 characters. Students taking online courses learn how to engage in online dialogues with colleagues, which means unlearning monologic practices that serve them well in the face to face classroom. Facebook and MySpace? provide new social spaces - online student unions and parks and malls - where people hang out, make contact, make apparently trivial conversation, exchange ideas, engage in public dialogue. Weblogs and YouTube? lower the barrier on local and global communication and allow new voices to be heard - and those voices don't all speak the Standard Dialect. Wikipedia challenges the ideas of authoritative texts created by experts and controlled by editors, and demands changes in writing (Use NPOV) and changes in reading.

Spam, promotional email, and .com web sites are using new methods to persuade drive-thru-readers that The Truth is out there, and that you can have it, today! Organizations, schools and universities, governments, and corporations are creating - and have stumbled on - digital ways of communicating with their constituencies and are finding that they need to change their rhetorical relationships with those constituencies. (It's not a One-Way, One-to-Many channel anymore. The audience isn't a just a consumer anymore but a producer as well - a role that challenges the textbook conception of audience as a target to shoot at: the new audience shoots back.) Podcasting is supplementing blogging and, like Wikipeda, challenging the realm of the expert. Professors and universities are under social (and financial) pressure to offer podcasts of lectures, which in turn demands that students spend more time reviewing more stuff, both written and oral. New social software: FaceBook? and MySpace?, Dandilife, flicker, YouTube?. New practices: tagging and folksonomies on del.icio.us, Bloglines, and Diigo. New professional practices: My office is a wiki now and and I have to keep a blog because I teach this stuff. New rhetorics, new literacies.

Let's get a definition out of the way

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on current and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and digial communications. Like Weblogs and Wikis, this is a course that explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. Rather than looking at the style books and The Rules, we'll investigate the rhetorical principles behind the prescriptive do's and dont's - and look at those principles as they operate in their social, situated conditions.

• Our approach will be descriptive rather than prescriptive.
• And so we'll engage in observation, analysis, and interpretation.

What do you stand to gain? I hope that you might come to a better understanding of how we adapt language to new situations and new media; and, even more, I hope you become more adept at adapting yourself.

In this class, we're taking a rhetorical perspective on e-media. (Rhetoric: the art and science [practice and theory] of using language to create and understand messages). Rhetorical study is not an introspective, intuitive, quiet study. It's noisy and self-conscious, and grounded in practice. It proceeds by observation and analysis of forces and phenomena and people and situations in the world as they play out in practice. Rhetoric focuses our attention on the social, the situated, the contingent, the probable, the particular - and how rhetors (that's you and me when we write, speak, IM, point a camera, create a tag) make choices to address and change particular situations.

A rhetorical focus means we take a different perspective on the matter of writing and ask different questions than you might be familiar with. A rhetorical focus is a focus on meaning: public, shared meaning, meaning that both writer and reader invest in, that both writer and reader employ resources to create: the writer in creating the message and the reader in interpreting that message. So our questions address the larger rhetorical situation rather than focusing on one aspect of it. Our method demands that we take a step back from the text, step outside the rhetorical situation, rather than working from an insider's impression or a gut reaction. And rhetorical study means we sideline intent, because messages often mean and operate in ways rhetors don't intend.

This course is an introduction to some of the methods rhetorical analysis and criticism. We'll practice a set of analytical methods to help us focus on what we don't see as much as on what what we do see. But analysis isn't all in the mind; it proceeds by material means, means such as

• discussion and comparing notes

Even though our day to day activity in this course is grounded in analytical procedures, the projects in this course will not be the typical product of analysis: the academic essay. In this course, you will be asked (syllabus-code for required) to break out of the rarely questioned double-spaced lines of academic writing printed on 8 1/2" X 11" paper. You will be asked to present what you have discovered about the rhetoric of the medium you're studying in the medium you're studying. For our work with podcasts, for instance, you might be asked to do a podcast, either scripted or spontaneous, to illustrate your take on ethos and authenticity in podcasting. For our study of Facebook, you might be asked to create - on paper, using pens or crayons and images - an off-line Facebook profile. For web site and page design study, you might be asked to redesign and rewrite a few BSU web pages in a way that tests and questions the published design. Or you might be asked to design a presentation as a 2-page magazine spread, working in tight constraints: 750 words on 2 well-designed pages, including callouts and images, for instance. Or you may be asked to work in hypertext (no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 nodes, for instance), using conceptual words for topic titles.

Changing media means changing rhetorical practices. And that means

1. that working in alternative media can be more interesting - more intellectually engaging - than working in the typical academic essay form - more interesting for you and for me.
2. that working in alternative media allows us to question and test both the traditional media and the alternative: it allows us to see communication practices as un-natural, constructed, designed - that is, rhetorical.

Rather than confining our selves to one media or kind of messages for the course, we're sampling four, maybe five, in one course. Email, podcasting, Facebook, folksonomy, perhaps web design or weblogs, or wikis. This is sampling, traveling at high-speed at low altitude. You will become highly adept at observing and analysis - those practices run throughout the course. But I can't promise you'll become master of any of these media.

Most of the writing we all do for this course will end up on the wiki. Notes, notes on notes, lectures, more notes, group notes and projects. As the course progresses, you'll find that we can begin to link up these nodes, developing them into topics (a topic is a point where a note becomes a WikiWord?), and further developing topics over the semester, and across semesters. The wiki becomes more valuable (to us, to the next group, to who ever's looking in) the more we develop topics over time.

Writing the wiki is an integral part of this course and your learning for this course. As your notes progress, you will begin, I hope, to cross link to the notes and observations of others. University students and professors are now in the business of making their course work in progress available to those interested; it's yet another new rhetorical practice of digital space.

Responses to and evaluation of projects will take place in class. If you don't have a project done the class day it is due, you miss that evaluation, which will cut into your grade - and the value of your evaluation - for the project. Again, it's best to turn in what you have rather than coming to the evaluation empty-handed.

I'll evaluate your work on your notes for a project when you submit the presentation.

As I suggested above, note-taking (rather than lecture and essay test) is the primary way you will be learning about e-rhetoric in this course. This means that note-taking is important to your success - more syllabus-code for grade - in this class.

• Especially near the beginning of the course, I'll reproduce anonymously some good examples of note-taking - examples that address the situation well, examples that I find demonstrate good approaches. I'll bring them to class and explain what I find strong about them.

Some note-taking assignments will ask you to structure your notes in particular ways. You might, for instance, be asked to use headings to organize your notes, observations under Observations and analysis under Analysis. This request isn't frivolous. It allows me to see not just that you understand but how you understand what you're doing. It's better than using a quiz or exam.

• Turn off your cell phone during class.
• No eating. It's distracting.

• If someone is talking - me, others - no one is typing.
• Please don't use IM or email during class. Check before or after, but not during.

We'll see how presentations and projects go. Sometimes they don't work as expected. If a revision is warranted (that is, if by revising a project, something can be learned, better articulated, better understood), you'll have the opportunity to revise.

Early in the semester, I will meet with the grad students to discuss grad requirements. Here are two I've been considering.

 Technological developments ... are constantly evolving, putting users under constant pressure to adapt their language to the demands of new contexts, and giving them fresh opportunities to interact in novel ways.  David Crystal, Language and the Internet.

 ->Technological developments ... are constantly evolving, putting users under constant pressure to adapt their language to the demands of new contexts, and giving them fresh opportunities to interact in novel ways.  David Crystal, Language and the Internet.

• Facebook, MySpace?...

• YouTube?

especially when by writing we mean more than the final delivery of message on paper or screen. Especially when by writing we mean the entire range of process, production, and distribution, from invention to arrangement to style to memory to delivery.

But a closer looks shows that prescriptions like Wired Style don't offer much beyond hackneyed advice and rule-based Do's and Dont's that the pre-wordprocessor, typewriter-based Strunk and White Elements of Style offers up. With new technologies and new media, people create new ways of writing, communicating, expressing themselves, and persuading others. People - ordinary people - devised SMS shorthand for efficiency of expression in 160 characters. Students taking online courses need to learn how to engage in online dialogues, which means unlearning monologic practices that serve them well in the face to face classroom. Facebook and MySpace? provide new social spaces - online student unions and parks and malls - where people hang out, make contact, make apparently trivial conversation, exchange ideas, engage in public dialogue. Weblogs and YouTube? lower the barrier on local and global communication and allow new voices to be heard - and those voices don't all speak the Standard Dialect. Wikipedia challenges the ideas of authoritative texts created by experts and controlled by editors, and demands changes in writing (Use NPOV) and changes in reading.

Spam, promotional email, and .com web sites use new methods to persuade drive-thru-readers that The Truth is out there, and that you can have it, today! Organizations, schools and universities, governments, and corporations have created - and stumbled on - digital ways of communicating with their constituencies and finding that they need to change their rhetorical relationships with those constituencies. (It's not a One-Way, One-to-Many channel anymore. The audience isn't a consumer anymore but a producer, which challenges the textbook conception of audience as a target to shoot at.) Podcasting is supplementing blogging and, like Wikipeda, challenging the realm of the expert. Social pressure is on university professors to offer podcasts of lectures, which demands that students spend more time reviewing more stuff, written and oral. Social software: FaceBook? and MySpace?, Dandilife, flicker, YouTube?. Tagging and knowledge: del.icio.us, Bloglines, Diigo. Blogs and wikis: My office is a wiki now, and I have to keep a blog because I teach this stuff. New rhetorics, new literacies.

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on current and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and electronic communications. Like Weblogs and Wikis, this is a course that explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. Rather than looking at the style books and The Rules, we'll investigate the rhetorical principles behind the prescriptive do's and dont's - and look at those principles as they operate in their natural conditions.

There are two ends in this course: 1) to come to a better understanding of how we adapt language in new situations with new media; and b) to become more adept at adapting yourself.

A rhetorical focus means we take a different perspective on the matter of writing and ask different questions than you might be familiar with. A rhetorical focus is a focus on meaning: public, shared meaning, meaning that both writer and reader invest in, that both writer and reader employ resources to create: the writer in creating the message and the reader in interpreting that message. So our questions address the larger rhetorical situation rather than focusing on one aspect of it. Our method demands that we take a step back from the text, step outside the rhetorical situation, rather than working from an insider's impression or a gut reaction. And rhetorical study means we sideline intent, because messages often mean and operate in ways rhetors don't intend.

• Or rather than simply noting that "The left-hand navigation column on the BSU website makes moving thorough the site easy and convenient," (That's marketing-speak posing as usability-speak), we ask, "We don't have two physical entrances for students on our campus, one for Prospective Students and one for Current Students. So what do the entry paths on the BSU home page tell us about how the institution wants us to see it, about its character, its ethos? What does it tell us about the multiple impressions the designers are attempting to help those visitors form?"

This course is an introduction to some of the methods rhetorical analysis and criticism. We'll practice a set of analytical methods to help us focus on what we don't see as much as on what what we do see. Analysis isn't all in the mind: analysis proceeds by material means, means such as

So, expect to take lots of notes on paper and online. Expect to make lists and diagrams. Expect face to face and computer mediated discussion based on those notes, lists, and diagrams. Expect to work in groups to develop ideas.

Even though our day to day activity in this course is grounded in analytical procedures, the projects in this course will not be the typical product of analysis: the academic essay. In this course, you will be asked (syllabus-code for required) to break out of the rarely questioned double-spaced lines of academic writing printed on 8 1/2" X 11" paper. You will be asked to present what you have discovered about the rhetoric of the medium you're studying in the medium you're studying. For our work with podcasts, for instance, you might be asked to do a podcast, either scripted or spontaneous, to illustrate your take on ethos and authenticity in podcasting. For our study of Facebook, you might be asked to create - on paper, using pens or crayons and images - an off-line Facebook profile. For web site and page design study, you might be asked to redesign and rewrite a few BSU web pages in a way that tests and questions the original design. Or you might be asked to design a presentation as a 2-page magazine spread, working in tight constraints: 750 words on 2 well-designed pages, including callouts and images, for instance. Or you may be asked to work in hypertext (no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 nodes, for instance), using conceptual words for topic titles.

Changing the media means changing the rhetorical practices. And that means that

1. working in alternative media can be more interesting - more intellectually egaging - than working in the typical academic essay form - more interesting for you and for me.
2. working in alternative media allows us to question and test both the traditional media and the alternative: it allows us to see communication practices as un-natural, constructed, designed - that is, rhetorical.

Rather than confining our selves to one media or kind of messages for the course, we're sampling four, maybe five, in one course. Email, podcasting, Facebook, folksonomy, perhaps web design or weblogs, or wiksi, all wrapped up in hypertext... This is sampling, a survey course: high-speed at low altitude. You will become highly adept at observing and analysis - those practices run throughout the course. But I can't promise you'll become master of any of these media.

But expertise is not the purpose of the course. The course will help you get your rhetorical bearings and to push beyond the obvious, the codified, the well-known, the already-habitual, the already-comfortable, the seemingly natural. You can gain an intimacy with the landscape, and an intimacy with method. Hopefully - and while this end is your responsibility, I'll do my best to make it possible - you'll gain in insight into your self as a user and creator of media.

Much of the writing you do for this course - notes, charts, notes, projects, notes - will be used in class. It's a workshop, after all. Work, online or on paper, is due on time. You will have plenty of lead time. I'll take note of late and missing work. If you're not done, submit it in anyway so others can work with it. It's always better to turn in something rather than nothing.

Notes can always be revised during a project, and I would suggest you do so as you learn method. Once a project is finished, however, don't bother revising your notes. Move on.

Overall, grad students are expected to go into more depth, more detail, and bring more insight to our work and class sessions. They should lead and guide and focus. There may be extra readings for grad students on some topics. You should draw these readings into your notes and projects.

Early in the semester, I will meet with the grad students to discuss grad presentations. Here are two I've been considering.

Grad students will spend time getting an overview of the projects and will submit (on the wiki) a 1000 - 1500 word or so analysis and interpretation of the collection of projects, and their project's place in that collection. This can be informally written - you're addressing the class - but should move from analysis towards interpretation. As a grad student, it's your role to help us all see what the larger picture might mean.

• YouTube?

Depending on the topic, there may be extra readings for grad students. You should draw these readings into your notes and projects.

Early in the semester, I will meet with the grad students to discuss details of other options. Here are two I've been considering.

Grad students will spend time getting an OV of the projects and will submit (on the wiki) a 1000 - 1500 word or so analysis and interpretation of the collection of projects, and their project's place in that collection. This can be informally written - you're addressing the class - but should move from analysis towards interpretation. As a grad student, it's your role to help us all see what the larger picture might mean.

Teach the class for a week. Starting with a rhetorical issue from Stoner and Perkins, put together two class sessions. In the first, present and have an exercise we engage. In the second, lead a consideration of what we did. Topics might include: presentation of identity, reading, ethos, invention; or you may address and work with a mode or media: follksonomy, YouTube?, rss news aggregators... Prepare a short report on what you did and how it went.

Course description

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on current and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and electronic communications. Like Weblogs and Wikis, this is a course that explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. Rather than looking at the style books and The Rules, we'll look at, investigate, the rhetorical principles behind the prescriptive do's and dont's - and look at those principles as the operate in their natural conditions.

Focus on the rhetorical

In this class, we're taking a rhetorical perspective on e-media. (Rhetoric: the art and science [practice and theory] of using language to create and understand messages). Rhetoric is not a nebulous study; it is grounded in practice. Rhetoric focuses our attention on the social, the situated, the contingent, the probable, the particular - and how rhetors (that's you and me when we write, speak, IM, point a camera, create a tag) make choices to address and change particular situations.

A rhetorical focus means we take a slightly different perspective on the matter of writing and ask different questions than you might be familiar with. A rhetorical focus is a focus on meaning: public, shared meaning, meaning that both writer and reader invest in, that both writer and reader employ resources to create: the writer in creating the message and the reader in interpreting that message. So our questions address the larger rhetorical situation rather than focusing on one aspect of it. Our method demands that we take a step back from the text, step outside the rhetorical situation, rather than working from an insider's impression or a gut reaction. And rhetorical study means we sideline intent, because messages often mean and operate in ways rhetors don't intend.

Analytical grounding...

Even though our day to day activity in this course is grounded in analytical procedures, the projects in this course don't aim to be the typical product of analysis: the academic essay. In this course, you will be asked (syllabus-code for required) to break out of the rarely questioned double-spaced lines of academic writing printed on 8 1/2" X 11" paper. You will be asked to present what you have discovered about the rhetoric of the mode you're studying in the mode you're studying. For our work with podcasts, for instance, you might be asked to do a podcast - either scripted or spontaneous, to illustrate your take on ethos and authenticity in podcasting. For our study of Facebook, you might be asked to create - in paper, using pens or crayons and images - an off-line Facebook profile. For web site and page design study, you might be asked to redesign and rewrite a few BSU web pages in such a way that tests and questions the original design. Or you might be asked to design a presentation as a 2-page magazine spread, working in tight constraints: 750 words on 2 well-designed pages, including callouts and images, for instance. Or you may be asked to work in hypertext (no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 nodes, for instance), using conceptual words for topic titles.

1. working in alternative rhetorical and material modes can be more interesting - more intellectually egaging - than working in the typical academic essay form - more interesting for you and for me.
2. working in alternative rhetorical and material modes allows us to question and test both the traditional form and the alternative: it allows us to see these modes as un-natural, constructed, designed - that is, rhetorical.

A survey course

Rather than confining our selves to one mode of messages for the course, we're sampling four, maybe five, in one course. Email, podcasting, Facebook, folksonomy, perhaps web design or weblogs, or wiksi, all wrapped up in hypertext... This is sampling, a survey course: high-speed at low altitude. You will become highly adept at observing and analysis - those practices run throughout the course - but won't become master of any of these modes.

But the end of the course is not to become expert. It's to get your rhetorical bearings and to push beyond the obvious, the codified, the well-known, the already-habitual, the already-comfortable, the seemingly natural. You gain an intimacy with the landscape, and an intimacy with method. Hopefully - and while this end is your responsibility, I'll do my best to make it possible - you'll gain in insight into your self as a user and creator of media.

The wiki

The policies

Attendance

Online writing and projects

Much of the writing you do for this course - notes, charts, notes, projects, notes - will be used in class. It's a workshop, after all. Work - online or on paper - is due on time. You will have plenty of lead time. I'll take note of late and missing work. If you're not done, submit it in anyway so others can work with it. It's always better to turn in something rather than nothing.

Response to and evaluation of projects will take place in class. If you don't have a project done the class day it is due, you miss that evaluation, which will cut into your grade - and the value of your evaluation - for the project. Again, it's best to turn in what you have rather than nothing.

Feedback on notes

As I suggested above, note-taking (rather than lecture and essay test) is the primary way you will be learning about e-rhetoric in this course. This makes that note-taking is important to your success in this class. And this significance will be reflected in your final grade for the course.

While I will be reading almost everything you post on line, I won't be commenting on everything. My job in commenting on your notes is to help you practice and master the analytical methods of this class, analytical methods that undergird many classes and most disciplines. So for notes, I'll do three things:

General considerations

Please be considerate of others in class.

Grading

Revisions of presentations

Graduate requirements

Depending on the topic, there may be extra readings for grads. These are not optional, and I expect to hear about them in your notes and project report.

• FaceBook?, MySpace?...
• chat rooms* blogs and blogging
• PowerPoint? Wikipedia

• Wikipedia

• tag clouds
• folksonomies

especially when by writing we mean more than the final delivery of message on paper or screen. Especially when by writing we mean the entire filed of process, production and distribution, from invention to arrangement to style to memory to delivery.

The expansion of linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical possibilities in digital media is applauded by some, reduced to marketing formulas by others (Be Pithy! Be Brief! Be Real! scream the editors of Wired Style), and condemned by many as The Downfall of Language and Civilization As We Know It. (Evidence? Set this article from the NY Times about corporate email against this 1999 article on the Strunkenwhite Virus).

But a closer looks shows that prescriptions like Wired Style don't offer much beyond hackneyed advice and rule-based Do's and Dont's. (The pre-wordprocessor, typewriter-based Strunk and White Elements of Style offers up the same stuff.) With new technologies and new media, people create new ways of writing, communicating, expressing themselves, and persuading others. People - ordinary people - devised SMS shorthand for efficiency of expression in 160 characters. Students taking online courses need to learn how to engage in online dialogues, which means unlearning monologic practices that serve them well in the face to face classroom. Facebook and MySpace? provide new social spaces - student unions and quads and malls - where people hang out, exchange ideas, engage in public dialogue. Weblogs lower the barrier on local and global communication and allow new voices to be heard - and those voices don't all speak the Standard Dialect. Wikipedia challenges the ideas of authoritative texts created by experts and controlled by editors, and demands change in writing (Use NPOV) and changes in reading.

Spam, promotional email, and .com web sites use new methods to persuade drive-thru-readers that The Truth is out there, and that you can have it, today! Organizations, schools and universities, governments, and corporations have created - and stumbled on - digital ways of communicating with their constituencies and in doing so have need to change their relationships with those constituencies. (It's not a One-Way, One-to-Many channel anymore, which challenges the textbook conception of audience as a target. The consumer is a producer.) Podcasting is supplementing blogging and, like Wikipeda, challenging the realm of the expert. Social pressure is on university professors to offer podcasts of lectures, which demands that students spend more time reviewing more stuff, written and oral. Social software: FaceBook? and MySpace?, Dandilife, flicker. Tagging and knowledge: del.icio.us, BlogLine?, Diigo. Blogs and wikis: My office is a wiki now, and I have to keep a blog because I teach this stuff. New rhetorics, new literacies.

the fundamental change is that the consumer becomes the producer.

Let's get the definitions out of the way

Rhetoric

And so e-rhetoric (or digital rhetoric)

Rhetorical study is not an introspective, intuitive, quiet study. It's noisy and self-conscious. It proceeds by observation and analysis of forces and phenomena and people and situations in the world as they play out in practice. More: WhatIsE-Rhetoric.

course description

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on the current and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and electronic communications. Like Weblogs and Wikis, this is a course that explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. In this course, we'll look at not the style books and The Rules but at the principles behind the prescriptive do's and dont's - and look at those principles as active in their natural conditions.

In this class we're taking a rhetorical perspective on e-media. (Rhetoric: the art and science [practice and theory] of using language to create and understand messages). Rhetoric is not a nebulous study; it is grounded in practice. Rhetoric focuses our attention on the social, the situated, the contingent, the probable, the particular - and how rhetors (that's you and me when we write, speak, IM, frame a photo, create a tag) make choices to address and change particular situations.

for instances

Buckminster Fuller used to ask architects and planners, "Have you ever really considered how much your buildings weigh?" and from that starting point he developed the geodesic dome. We're going to ask, "Have you ever really considered what the menus / the spam / the weblog entries mean?" to see what new ways of understanding we might develop.

Our work with these questions will be social, grounded, specific, particular. And we will not come to any final, absolute conclusions about them. But we can develop some insights, illuminate matters. And that's enough.

Even though our day to day activity in this course is grounded in analytical procedures, the projects in this course don't aim at the typical product of analysis: the academic essay. In this course, you will be required to break out of the rarely questioned double-spaced lines of academic writing printed on 8 1/2" X 11" paper. To work in the mode you're studying. For our work with podcasts, for instance, you might be asked to do a podcast - either scripted or spontaneous, to illustrate your take on ethos in podcasting. For our study of Facebook, you may be asked to create - in paper using pens or crayons and images - an off-line Facebook profile. For web site and page design study, you might be asked to redesign and rewrite a few BSU web pages in such a way that tests and questions the original design. Or you might be asked to design a presentation as a 2-page magazine spread, working in tight constraints: 750 words on 2 well-designed pages, including callouts and images, for instance. Or you may be asked to work in hypertext (no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 nodes, for instance), using conceptual words for topic titles.

Rather than confining our selves to one mode for the course, we're sampling four, maybe five, in one course. Email, podcasting, Facebook, folksonomy, perhaps web design or weblogs, or wiksi, all wrapped up in hypertext... Sampling, a survey course: high-speed at low altitude. You become master of none, sampler of some.

Q: What do we have here?

• blogs and blogging
• PowerPoinst?
• podcasts

• del.icio.us social bookmarking
• a tag cloud

A: New forms of writing

especially when by writing we mean more than the final delivery of message on paper or screen. Especially when by writing we mean the entire system of process and production, from invention to arrangement to style to memory to delivery.

But a closer looks shows that prescriptions like Wired Style don't offer much beyond hackneyed advice and rule-based Do's and Dont's. (The pre-wordprocessor, typewriter-based Strunk and White Elements of Style offers up the same stuff.) With new technologies and new media, people create new ways of writing, communicating, expressing themselves. People devised an SMS shorthand for efficiency and expression in 160 characters. Students taking online courses need to learn how to engage in online dialogues, which often means unlearning the monologic practices that serve them well in the face to face classroom. Weblogs lower the barrier on local and global communication and allow new voices to be heard - and those voices don't all speak the Standard Dialect.

Rhetoric:

And now e-rhetoric:

It is a study by observation of forces and phenomena in the world as they play out in practice. More: WhatIsE-Rhetoric.

M C Morgan mmorgan at bemidjistate dot edu | HS 314 | 755 2814
Office hours M W 10 - 11 T R 9 - 10 other times by appointment

ENGL 3179/5179\\

Stoner, Mark, and Sally Perkins. Making Sense of Messages. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005.

Teach the class for a week. Starting with an issue from Burnett and Marhsall or Stoner and Perkins, put together two class sessions. in the first, present and have an exercise we engage. In the second, lead a consideration of what we did. Topics might include: presentation of identity, news, reading, ethos, invention... As a final, prepare a 1000 - 1500 word report on what you did.

Starting with an issue from Burnett and Marhsall or Stoner and Perkins, put together two class sessions: present, have an exercise we engage. Then lead a consideration of what we did. Topics might include: presentation of identity, news, reading ...

Option 1: Class project reports

Option 2: Class exercise and presentation

Starting with an issue from Burnett and Marhsall or Stoner and Perkins, put together two class sessions: present, have an exercise we engage. Then lead a consideration of what we did. Topics moight include: identitiy, news, reading ...

• Stoner, Mark, and Sally Perkins. Making Sense of Messages. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005.

• Burnett, Robert, and P. David Mashall. Web Theory. London: Routledge, 2003.

Required text

under consideration for grad students (maybe)

Alternative version of this description

Technological developments create new uses for and new varieties of language use: new possibilities of expression, new means of persuasion and communication. Under pressure of technological and cultural change, writing changes - from the stuffiest of academic essays to the most languid and informal personal note. New forms are invented, and existing forms are adapted to the new contexts. New ways and means of communicating appear. New modes, New media. New customs of writing (we see them first in new terms and new usage and punctuation).

What do we have here?

• SMS
• IM

• PowerPoint?
• podcast
• flickr photo sharing
• del.icio.us bookmark sharing
• tag cloud
• folksonomy
• FaceBook?, MySpace?...

A: New forms of writing - especially when by writing we mean more than the final delivery of message on paper or screen. Especially when by writing we mean

Spam, promotional email, and .com web sites are using new methods to persuade drive-thru-readers that The Truth is out there, and that you can have it, today! Organizations, schools and universities, governments, and corporations have opened new ways of communicating with their constituencies - and new ways of forming communities. FaceBook? and MySpace?, Dandilife, flicker - tagging and knowledge: del.icio.us, BlogLine?, Diigo. Blogs and wikis: My office is a wiki now. I have to keep a blog now because I teach this stuff.

There is a lot to look at, closely. There is a lot to talk about. There is a lot of work to be done.

Class project report

Grad students will spend time getting an OV of the projects and will submit (on the wiki) a 1000 - 1500 word or so analysis and interpretation on the collection of projects and their project's place in that collection. This can be informally written - you're addressing the class - but should move from analysis towards interpretation. As a grad student, it's your role to help us all see what the larger picture might mean. Write this report so that it is valuable to the class, so that it opens up our thinking by bringing insight to what we've done. Think of it this way: You've just looked closely at all the work. Now, what can you say about what this collection of work tells us more about the topic we've been studying?

A guiding question for you (which is one I use when I review the projects as a whole): What do these projects individually and collectively tell us about the rhetoric of the topic we've just dealt with? And where does yours seem to stand? You need not cover all the project, but you should pay special attention to yours.

This is not an artist's statement (it's not about you nor your intents) nor an evaluation of the other projects. You are not being asked to evaluate but to analyze and interpret. Step back (balcony view), step out of the particular rhetorical situation of the assignment and see what the collection of projects can tell us about the topic - not about us, but the topic. Look for patterns, variations, key images/approaches/metaphors that open up our knowledge and understanding of the topic. Draw on the text and other readings you've done for the course to help you. You'll have five days to finish your report.

Overall, grad students are expected to go into more depth, more detail, and bring more insight to our work and class sessions. They should lead and guide and focus.

For each topic, there will be extra readings for grads. These are not optional, and I expect to hear about them in your notes and project report.

Project Report

Grad students will spend time getting an OV of the projects and will submit (on the wiki) a 1000 - 1500 word or so analysis and interpretation on the collection of projects and their project's place in that collection. This can be informally written - you're addressing the class - but should move from analysis towards interpretation. Think of it this way: You've just looked closely at all the work. Now, what can you say about what this collection of work tells us about the topic we've been studying? As a grad student, that's your role: to help us all see what the larger picture might mean.

A guiding question for you (which is the one I use when I review the projects as a whole): What do these projects individually and collectively tell us about the rhetoric of the topic we've just dealt with? Where does yours seem to stand? You need not cover all the projects.

This is not an artist's statement (it's not about you nor your intents) nor an evaluation of the other projects: You are not being asked to evaluate but analyze and interpret. Step back (balcony view) and see what the collection of projects can tell us about the topic - not about us, but the topic. Look for patterns, variations, key images/approaches/metaphors that open up our knowledge and understanding of the topic. Draw on the text and other readings you've done for the course to help you. You'll have five days to finish your report.

We'll discuss this more when the time comes.

• Grad students will spend time getting an OV of the projects and will submit (on the wiki) a 1000 - 1500 word or so analysis and interpretation on the collection of projects and their project's place in that collection. This can be informally written - you're addressing the class - but should move from analysis towards interpretation. Think of it this way: You've just looked closely at all the work. Now, what can you say about what this collection of work tells us about the topic we've been studying? As a grad student, that's your role: to help us all see what the larger picture might mean.

• Overall, grad students are expected to go into more depth, more detail, and bring more insight to our work and class sessions. They should lead and guide and focus.

graduate requirements

• for each topic, there will be extra readings for grads. These are not optional, and I expect to hear about them in your notes and project report.
• Grad students will get an OV of the projects and submit (on the wiki) a 1000 word or so analysis and interpretation of on the collection of projects and their project's place in that collection Need not be formal; can be informally written, but should move from analysis towards interpretation. What do these projects individually and collectively tell us about the rhetoric of the topic we've just dealt with? Where does yours seem to stand? You need not cover all the projects. This is not an artist's statement (it's not about you) nor an evaluation: In fact, you are not being asked to evaluate but analyze and interpret. The object is to step back (balcony view) and see what the collection of projects can tell us about the topic - not about us, but the topic. Look for patterns, variations, key images/approaches/metaphors that open up our knowledge and understanding of the topic. We'll discuss this more when the time comes.
• overall, grad students are expected to go into more depth, more detail, and bring more insight to our work and class sessions. They should lead and guide and focus.

a survey course

http://biro.bemidjistate.edu/~morgan/e-rhetoric/wiki.php/Elements/ http://biro.bemidjistate.edu/erhetoric/

http://biro.bemidjistate.edu/~morgan/e-rhetoric/

ENGL 3930 / 5930
M C Morgan mmorgan@bemidjistate.edu | HS 314 | 755 2814
Office hours M T W R 9:00 - 10:00 other times by appointment

The Elements of E-Rhetoric

(:table:) (:cell:) (:cell:)

A course addressing

• email: from the business memo to the email message to spam
• hypertext: an introduction
• web design: rhetorical strategies in design
• weblogs: lowering the publishing boundaries
• wikis: changing process, changing interaction

(:tableend:)

Technological developments create new varieties of language and new ways of using language: new possibilities of expression, new means of persuasion and communication. Under pressure of technological and cultural change, writing changes - from the stuffiest of academic essays to the most languid and informal personal note. New forms are invented, and existing forms are adapted to the new contexts.

• web discussion boards

But a closer looks shows that prescriptions like Wired Style don't offer much beyond general prescriptions and rule-based Do's and Dont's. (The pre-wordprocessor, typewriter-based Strunk and White Elements of Style offers up the same stuff.) With new technologies and new media, people create new ways of writing, communicating, expressing themselves. People devised an SMS shorthand for efficiency and expression in 160 characters. Students taking online courses need to learn how to engage in online dialogues, which often means unlearning the monologic practices that serve them well in the face to face classroom. Weblogs lower the barrier on local and global communication and allow new voices to be heard - and those voices don't all speak the Standard Dialect.

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on the present and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and electronic communications. Like Weblogs and Wikis, this is a course that explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. In this course, we'll look at not the style books and The Rules but at the principles behind the prescriptive do's and dont's - and look at those principles as active in their natural conditions.

In this class we're taking a rhetorical perspective on e-media. (Rhetoric: the art and science [practice and theory] of using language to create and understand messages). Rhetoric is not a nebulous study; it is grounded in practice. Rhetoric focuses our attention on the situated, the contingent, the probable, the particular - and how writers (that's you and me) make choices to address and change particular situations.

A rhetorical focus means we take a slightly different perspective on the matter of writing and ask different questions than you might be familiar with. A rhetorical focus is a focus on meaning: public, shared meaning, meaning that both writer and reader invest in, that both writer and reader employ resources to create: the writer in creating the message and the reader in interpreting that message. So our questions address the larger rhetorical situation rather than focusing on one aspect of it. And our method asks that we take a step back from the text, step outside the rhetorical situation, rather than working from an insider's impression or a gut reaction.

• Or rather than simply noting that "The left-hand navigation column on the BSU website makes moving thorough the site easy and convenient," (That's marketing-speak posing as usability-speak), we ask, "We don't have two physical entrances for students on our campus, one for Prospective Students and one for Current Students. So what do the entry paths on the BSU home page tell us about how we might view the institution and the people in it? About the designers' way of understanding of web visitors? What does it tell us about the impressions the designers are attempting to help those visitors form?"

Buckminster Fuller often asked architects and planners, "Have you ever really considered how much your buildings weigh?" and from that starting point he developed the geodesic dome. We're going to ask, "Have you ever really considered what the menus / the spam / the weblog entries mean?" to see what new ways of understanding we might develop.

This course is an introduction to some of the methods rhetorical analysis and criticism. We'll work from and develop a set of analytical methods, adapted slightly to help us focus as much on what we don't see as what we do. But analysis isn't all in the mind: analysis proceeds by material means, means such as

So, expect to take lots of notes on paper and or online. Expect to make lists and diagrams. Expect face to face and computer mediated discussion based on those notes, lists, and diagrams. Expect to work in groups to develop ideas.

Even though our day to day activity in this course is grounded in analytical procedures, the projects in this course don't aim at the typical product of analysis: the academic essay. In this course, you will be required to break out of the rarely questioned double-spaced lines of academic writing printed on 8 1/2" X 11" paper. For our work with email, for instance, you might be asked to compose effective spam: words, pictures, layout. For our web site and page design study, you might be asked to redesign and rewrite a few BSU web pages in such a way that tests and questions the original design. You might be asked to design a presentation as a 2-page magazine spread, working in tight constraints: 750 words on 2 well-designed pages, including callouts and images, for instance. You may be asked to work in hypertext (no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 nodes, for instance), using conceptual words for topic titles.

1. working in alternative rhetorical and material forms can be more interesting - more intellectually egaging - than working in the typical academic essay form - more interesting for you and for me.

a survey course Rather than confining our selves to one medium for the course, we're sampling four, maybe five, in one course. Some email, some web design, some weblog, perhaps some wiki, all wrapped up in hypertext... Sampling, a survey course: high-speed at low altitude. You become master of none, sampler of some.

The end of the course is not to become expert. It's to get your rhetorical bearings and to push beyond the obvious, the codified, the well-known, the already-habitual, the already-comfortable, the seemingly natural. But you gain an intimacy with the landscape, and a familiarity with method. Hopefully - and while this end is your responsibility, I'll do my best to make it possible - you'll gain in insight into your self as a user and creator of media.

the wiki

Most if not all of the writing we do for this course will end up on the wiki. Notes, notes on notes, lectures, more notes, group notes and projects. Linked and developing into topics (a topic is a point where a note becomes a WikiWord?) and developing those topics over the semester, and across semesters.

It's a workshop course. Be here. We'll make the most of our time together. Things come up, so if you must miss a class, let me know asap. Email or phone my office. To find out what you missed, talk to your classmates, not me.

Missing more than four classes will affect your final grade. If you miss six, I will ask you to drop.

Most of the writing you do for this course - notes, charts, notes, projects - will be used in class. It's a workshop, after all. Work - online or on paper - is due on time. You will have plenty of lead time. I'll take note of missing work. If you're not done, submit it in anyway so others can work with it. It's always better to turn in something rather than nothing.

Evaluation of projects will take place in class. If you don't have a project done the class day it is due, you miss that evaluation, which will cut into your grade - and the value of your evaluation - for the project. Again, it's best to turn in what you have rather than nothing.

I'll evaluate your work on notes for a project when you submit the presentation.

feedback on notes

As I suggested above, note-taking (rather than lecture and essay test) is the primary way you will be learning about e-rhetoric in this course. This makes note-taking is important to your success in this class. And this significance will be reflected in your final grade for the course.

While I will be reading almost everything you post on line, I won't be commenting on everything. My job in commenting on your notes is to help you practice and master the analytical methods of this class, analytical methods that undergird many classes. So for notes, I'll do three things:

• Especially near the beginning of the course, I'll reproduce anonymously some good examples of note-taking - examples that address the situation well, examples of writing that I find demonstrate good approaches. I'll bring them to class and explain what I find strong about them.
• I will periodically comment to you directly on your note-taking, to let you know how you're doing and to give you some directed advice.
• I will assign points to your note-taking as part of your grade for that project, with general advice on what you're doing well and how to improve your note-taking for the next project.

Some note-taking assignments may ask you to write in a stucture. You might, for instance, be asked to use headings to organize your notes under Observations and Analysis. This request isn't frivolous. It allows me to see how you understand what you're doing - better than using a quiz or in class exams.

You'll will also get feedback on your notes from your colleagues. And because notes are generally posted on line, you will be able to see how others approach the problem.

Here's what you're asked to do be considerate of others.

• No eating. Distracting
• Careful with drinks. If you spill, you might buy BSU new keyboard.

As the course progresses, I may adjust the balance between notes and presentations if this plan doesn't reflect what's happening in class. Right now, I'm considering five projects of 200 points each, for a total of 1000 points. The total number of points may increase.

revisions of presentations

Notes can always be revised during a project, and I would suggest you do so as you learn method. Once the project is finished, don't bother revising the notes. Move on.

Let's see how presentations go. If revision is warranted (that is, if by revising something can be learned, better articulated, better understood), you'll be able to revise a presentation that goes pear-shaped.

This statement is subject to change. You'll be informed if I do change it, and changes will be marked on the statement.

The course also opens into an extended study of e-rhetoric for both undergraduate and graduate students. Taken in conjunction with Weblogs and Wikis, Web Content Writing, Web Design for Content Writers, Technical or Professional Writing, and Teaching Writing with Technology, students can gain a broad and deep background in electronic literacy and writing in online situations.

--- Some advice

Stuff on how the course pushes into symbolic-analytic practice:

This returns us to the rhetorical focus again, and here it gets a little theoretical, so bear with me for a couple of paragraphs. Take weblogs. Typically, we think of them as diaries or journals, and diaries we think of as a way to pull the events and thoughts of a day together into a nugget of truth. But weblogs tend to link out in ways written diaries do not; they are centrifugal rather than centripetal. They are a nifty example of writing as a rhetorical practice of pulling already-created texts together into new combinations, new meanings. (J. Johnson-Eilola calls this symbolic-analytic practice.)

Or wikis. Wikis call into question what individual writers can create individually. They call into question the idea of the individual genius and the singular expert as the yardstick of creation and value. They make possible - perhaps demand - a way of writing (refactoring) that calls into question our typical understanding of the individual's contribution to a problem. refactoring means recoding selves into a new, more intense algorithm of writer.

Or the web page: the webpage calls into question singular reading paths and entry points into a text.

Part of the idea is to see the commonalities between the old and new, the e- and the non-e-media. Another part of the idea is to come to understand the differences.

Note-taking, as I mentioned above, is the primary way you will be learning about e-rhetoric in this course. This makes note-taking important your success in this class. And this significance will be reflected in your final grade for the course.

I won't be commenting on or evaluating everything you write. I will be reading almost everything you submit on line, but I won't be commenting on all of it.

• Especially near the start of the course, I'll reproduce anonymously some good examples of note-taking - examples that address the situation well, examples of writing that I find demonstrate good approaches. I'll bring them to class and explain what I find strong about them.

Some note-taking assignment may ask you to write in a stucture. You might, for instance, be asked to use headings. organizing your notes under Observations and "Analysis.'' This request isn't arbitrary. It allows me to see how you understand what you're doing - better than using a quiz or in class exams.

Final grading tries to balance mastering method (in note-taking and other assignments) with synthesis of knowledge (by means of new media presentations). Points come from your writing: there are no tests or quizzes. My rough cut is this:

• Notes and other assignments - 50%
• New media presentations - 50%
• engagement, helpfulness, respect for colleagues - 10%

As the course progresses, I may adjust the balance between these if this doesn't reflect what's happening in class. The total number of points might also increase. Right now, I'm considering five projects for a total of 1000 points.

Final grades will follow the usual scale.

• A = 90 - 100 %
• B = 89 - 80
• C = 79 - 70
• D = 69 - 60
• F = below 60 %

Revisions of Presentations

Let's see how presentations go. If revision is warranted (that is, if by revising something can be learned, better articulated, better understood), you'll be able to revise a presentation that goes pear-shaped.

Most of the time the work you do - notes, charts, notes, projects - you and your colleagues will be using in class. It's a workshop, after all. Work - online or in paper for class - is due on time. You will have plenty of lead time. I'll evaluate what you have the day it's due, so it's better to turn in something rather than nothing.

Part of the evaluation of projects will take place in class. If you don't have a project done the class day it is due, you miss that evaluation, which will cut into your grade for the project. Again, it's best to turn in what you have rather than nothing.

Feedback

I won't be evaluating everything you write. I will be reading almost everything you submit on line, but I won't be commenting on all of it.

My job in commenting on your notes is to help you practice and even master the analytical methods of this class, analytical methods that undergird many classes.

For notes, I'll do three things

• Especially near the start of the course, I'll reproduce anonymously some good examples of note-taking - examples that address the situation well, examples of writing that I find demonstrate good approaches, that I can take seriously. I'll bring them in and explain what I find strong about them.
• I will periodically comment on your note-taking in general, to let you know how you're doing and to give you some directed advice.
• I will assign points to your note-taking, which becomes part of your final grade.

Some note-taking assignment may ask you to follow a form. You will, for instance, be asked to use headings. This request isn't arbitrary. It allows me to see how you understand what you're doing - better than using a quiz or in class exams.

You'll get feedback on your project from your colleagues and from me.

Much of what you do in this class builds on what you write. A weak observation can produce a weak analysis, and so on. You'll need to be able to pursue a project in writing without a lot of immediate feedback from me. By this time in your academic career, you should be able to do this.

• Projects - 100 pts each
• Notes and practices that lead to projects - 100 pts for the lot

• Rather than simply noting about a color on a web site that "The color blue is calming, peaceful..." (physiology-speak) we ask the further questions, "What - and how - does the color blue mean on this particular web page? What blue is this, anyway? Sky blue? Blue water? IBM Big Blue?"

• Or rather than simply noting, "This email sounds just like my friend speaking," we step outside the immediate rhetorical situation of you and your friend to ask further. "What's going on in the writing to make it read like a) a person placing the reading audience as a friend, and b) speaking rather than writing?"

• Or rather than simply noting that "The left-hand navigation column on the BSU website makes moving thorough the site easy and convenient," (That's marketing-speak), we ask, "We don't have two physical entrances for students on our campus, one for Prospective Students and one for Current Students. So what do the entry paths on the BSU home page tell us about how we might view the institution and the people in it? About the designers' way of understanding of web visitors? What does it tell us about the impressions the designers are attempting to help those visitors form?"

Buckminster Fuller often asked architects and planners, "Have you ever really considered how much your buildings weigh? and from that starting point developed the geodesic dome. We're going to ask, "Have you ever really considered what the menus / the spam / the weblog entries mean''?" to see what new ways of understanding we might develop.

Our work with these questions will be grounded, specific, particular. And we will not come to any final, absolute conclusions about them. But we can develop some insights, illuminate matters. And that's enough.

This course is an introduction to some of the methods rhetorical analysis and criticism. We'll work from and develop a set of analytical methods, adapted slightly to help us focus as much on what we don't see as what we do. But analysis isn't all in the mind: analysis proceeds by material means. One material way analysis proceed is by

• ...

Expect taking lots of notes on paper and/or online. Expect making lists and diagrams. Expect face to face and computer mediated discussion based on those notes, lists, diagrams. Expect working in groups to develop ideas.

As much as our day to day activity in this course is grounded in analytical procedures, so the projects (the products, deliverables) push beyond the typical product of analysis: the academic essay. In this course, you will be required to break out of the rarely questioned double-spaced lines of academic writing printed on 8 1/2" X 11" paper. For our work with email, for instance, you might be asked to compose effective spam: words, pictures, layout. For our web site and page design study, you might be asked to redesign and rewrite a few BSU web pages in such a way that tests and questions the original design. You might be asked to design a presentation as a 2-page magazine spread, working in tight constraints: 750 words on 2 well-designed pages, including callouts and images, for instance. You may be asked to work in hypertext (no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 nodes, for instance), using conceptual words for topic titles.

Two reasons:

1. working in alternative rhetorical and material forms is more interesting - more egaging - than working in the typical academic essay form - more interesting for you and for me.
2. working in alternative rhetorical and material forms allows us to question and test both the traditional form and the alternative: it allows us to see all these forms as un-natural, constructed, designed - that is, rhetorical.

This returns us to the rhetorical focus again, and here it gets a little theoretical, so bear with me for a couple of paragraphs. Take weblogs. Typically, we think of them as diaries, and diaries we think of as a way to pull the events and thoughts of a day together into a vivid nugget of truth. But weblogs tend to link out in ways written diaries do not; they are centrifugal rather than centripetal. They are a nifty example of writing as a rhetorical practice of pulling already-created texts together into new combinations, new meanings. (J. Johnson-Eilola calls this a symbolic-analytic practice but you don't need to know that, although I feel obliged to mention it here.)

the policies

attendance

It's a workshop course. Be here. We'll make the best of our time together. Things come up, so if you must miss a class, let me know asap. To find out what you missed, talk to your classmates, not me.

Missing more than four classes will affect your final grade. After you miss six, I will ask you to drop.

online writing and projects

Most of the time the work you do - notes, charts, notes, projects - you and your colleagues will be using in class. It's a workshop, after all. Work - online or in paper for class - is due on time. You will have plenty of lead time. Have the work done. Hand in what you have when it's due. When I evaluate your notes, I'll evaluate what you have when it's due.

Part of the evaluation of projects will take place in class. If you don't have a project done the class day it is due, you miss that evaluation, which will cut into your grade for the project.

general considerations

• No eating. Careful with drinks. If you spill, you might buy BSU new keyboard.

grading

I won't be evaluating everything you write: much of what you do in this class builds on what you write. A weak observation will produce a weak analysis, and so on.

Projects - 100 pts each Leads to projects - 100 pts for the lot

In this class we're taking a rhetorical perspective on e-media. (Rhetoric: the art and science [practice and theory] of using language to create and understand messages). Rhetoric is not a nebulous study; it is solidly grounded in practice. Rhetoric focuses our attention on the situated, the contingent, the probable, the particular - and how writers (that's you and me) make choices to address particular situations.

A rhetorical focus means we take a slightly different perspective on the matter and ask different questions than you might be familiar with. A rhetorical focus is a focus on meaning: public, shared meaning, meaning that both writer and reader invest in, that both writer and reader bring resources to create: the writer in writing and the reader in reading. So our questions address the larger rhetorical situation rather than focusing on one aspect of it. And our method asks that we take a step back from the text, step outside the rhetorical situation, rather than working from an insider's impression or a gut reaction.

People typically have some gut reaction to each of these media, usually on the level of pet peeve or enthusiasm. But gut reactions and pet peeves are merely a place to start. To really see what's happening with electronic media - to see what it does to us, to see what we do with it - we need to step in close to look closely, then step back to take a balcony view of the phenomena.

____

But it takes a close read to see that prescriptions like Wired Style don't offer much beyond general prescriptions and rule-based Do's and Dont's. (The pre-wordprocessor, typewriter-based Strunk and White Elements of Style offers up the same stuff.) With new technologies and new media, people create new ways of writing, communicating, expressing themselves. People devised an SMS shorthand for efficiency and expression in 160 characters. Students taking online courses need to learn how to engage in online dialogues, which often means unlearning the monologic practices that serve them well in the face to face classroom. Weblogs lower the barrier on local and global communication and allow new voices to be heard - and those voices don't all speak the Standard Dialect.

People typically have some gut reaction to each of these media, usually on the level of pet peeve or enthusiasm. But gut reactions and pet peeves are merely a place to start. To really see what's happening with electronic media - to see what it does to us, to see what we do with it - we need to step in close to look closely, then step back to take a balcony view of the phenomena.

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on the present and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and electronic communications. Like Weblogs and Wikis, this is a course that explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. It provides a grounding in theory that allows you to get the most out of other writing courses. In this course, we will look at the principles behind the prescriptive do's and dont's - and look at those principles as active in their natural conditions.

Alternative version of this description

• IM shorthand and neologisms

• podcasts

Most people have some gut reaction to each of these media, usually on the level of pet peeve or enthusiasm. But gut reactions and pet peeves are merely a place to start. To really see what's happening with electronic media - to see what it does to us, to see what we do with it - we need to step in close to look closely, then step back to take a balcony view of the phenomena.

But it takes a close read to see that prescriptions like Wired Style don't offer much beyond general prescriptions and rule-based Do's and Dont's. (The pre-wordprocessor, typewriter-based Strunk and White Elements of Style offers up the same stuff.) People devised an SMS shorthand for efficiency and expression in 160 characters. Students taking online courses need to learn how to engage in online dialogues, which often means unlearning the monologic practices that serve them well in the face to face classroom. Weblogs lower the barrier on local and global communication and allow new voices to be heard - and those voices don't all speak the Standard Dialect.

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on the present and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and electronic communications. Like Weblogs and Wikis, this is a course that explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. It provides a grounding in theory that allows you to get the most out of other writing courses. In this course, we will look at the principles behind the prescriptive do's and dont's.

and the wiki

Most if not all of the writing we do for this course will end up on the wiki. Notes, notes on notes, lectures, more notes, group notes and projects. Linked and interlinked, developing into topics - a point where a note becomes a WikiWord? - and developing those topics over the semester, and across semesters.

The wiki becomes more valuable over time as you develop topics over the semester, and as others develop those topics further.

So writing the wiki is an integral part of this course and your learning for this course. As your notes progress, you will begin, I hope, to cross link to the notes and observations of others, and to your own observations and notes.

general considerations

attendance

general considerations ===

If you're in class, you're on task and paying attention, and you're not bothering others. Here's what you're asked to do be considerate of others.

• Turn your cell phone off during class.
• No eating. Careful with drinks. If you spill, you might buy a new keyboard.
• If someone is talking - me, others - no one's typing.
• Please don't use IM or email or blog during class. Check before or after, but not during.

grading

Catalogue Description

An introduction to the principles of applied rhetoric integrated with continued writing experience. Students investigate email, web page and site design, online discussion, wikis, and weblogs. Introduces fundamentals of hypertext. Students create and analyze online texts and exchanges. Computer-intensive. Prerequisite(s): Completion of ENGL 1101 and ENGL 1102. Credits: 3

This course leads to Web Content Writing and Web Design for Content Writers. Other courses in the series are

• ENGL 3177/5177 Weblogs and Wikis (no prerequisite)
• ENGL 3179/5179 Elements of E-Rhetoric (no prerequisite)
• ENGL 4169/5169 Web Content Writing (prerequisite: ENGL 3177 or 3179)
• ENGL 4170/5170 Web Design for Content Writers (prerequisite ENGL 3179 or 4169)
• ENGL 3530/5530: Teaching Writing with Technology

A rhetorical focus means we take a slightly different perspective on the matter and ask different questions than you might be familiar with. A rhetorical focus is a focus on meaning: public, shared meaning, meaning that both writer and reader invest in, that both writer and reader bring resources to create. So our questions address the larger rhetorical situation rather than focusing on one aspect of it. And our method asks that we take a step back from the text, step outside the rhetorical situation, rather than working from an insider's impression or a gut reaction.

• Rather than simply noting about a color on a web site that "The color blue is calming, peaceful..." (physiology-speak) we ask the further questions, "What - and how - does the color blue mean on this particular web page? What blue is this, anyway? Sky blue? Blue water? IBM Big Blue?"

• Or rather than simply noting that "The left-hand navigation column on the BSU website makes moving thorough the site easy and convenient," (That's marketing-speak), we ask, "We don't have two physical entrances for students on our campus, one for Prospective Students and one for Current Students. So what do the entry paths on the BSU home page tell us about how the designers want us to view the institution and the people in it? About their understanding of web visitors? What does it tell us about the impressions the designers are attempting to help those visitors form?"

Alternative version of this description

Two reasons: a) working in alternative rhetorical and material forms is more interesting than working in the typical academic essay form - more interesting for you and for me. b) working in alternative rhetorical and material forms allows us to question and test both the traditional form and the alternative: to see all these forms as un-natural, constructed, designed - that is, rhetorical.

Two reasons: a) working in alternative rhetorical and material forms is more interesting than working in the typical academic essay form - more interesting for you and for me. b) working in alternative rhetorical and material forms allows us to question and test both the traditional form and the alternative: to see all these forms as un-natural, constructed, designed - that is,

rhetorical

• Rather than simply noting that "The left-hand navigation column on the BSU website makes moving thorough the site easy and convenient," (That's marketing-speak), we ask, "We don't have two physical entrances for students on our campus, one for Prospective Students and one for Current Students. So what do the entry paths on the BSU home page tell us about how the designers want us to view the institution and the people in it? About their understanding of web visitors? What does it tell us about the impressions the designers are attempting to help those visitors form?"

• Or rather than simply noting, "This email sounds just like my friend speaking," we step outside the rhetorical situation to ask further. "What's going on in the writing to make it read like a) a person placing the reading audience as a friend, and b) speaking rather than writing?"

For instances

• Rather than simply noting about a color on a web site that "The color blue is calming, peaceful..." (physiology-speak) we ask the further questions, "What does the color blue mean on this particular web page? What blue is this, anyway? Sky blue? Blue water? IBM Big Blue?"

• Or rather than simply noting, "This email sounds just like my friend speaking," we step outside the rhetorical situation to ask further. "What's going on in the writing that is making this sound like a) a person placing the reading audience as a friend, and b) speaking rather than writing?"

• Rather than simply noting that "The left-hand navigation column on the BSU website makes moving thorough the site easy and convenient," (That's marketing-speak), we ask, "What do the links on this site say about how the designers want us to view the institution and the people in it? We don't have two physical entrances for students on our campus, one for Prospective Students and one for Current Students. So what do the entry paths on the BSU home page tell us about the designers' understanding of web visitors? What does it tell us about the impressions the designers are attempting to help those visitors form?"

Buckminster Fuller often asked architects and planners, "Have you ever really considered how much your buildings weigh? and from that starting point developed the geodesic dome. We're going to ask, "Have you ever really considered what the menus / the spam / the weblog entries mean? to see what new ways of understanding we might develop.

In this course we're focusing on meaning: public, shared meaning, meaning that both writer and reader invest in, that both writer and reader bring resources to create. Our questions address the larger rhetorical situation rather than focusing on one aspect of it. And our method asks that we take a step back from the text, step outside the rhetorical situation, rather than working from an insider's impression or a gut reaction.

For instances: Rather than simply noting about a color on a web site that "The color blue is calming, peaceful..." (physiology-speak) we ask the further questions, "What does the color blue mean on this particular web page? What blue is this, anyway? Sky blue? Blue water? IBM Big Blue?" Or rather than simply noting, "This email sounds just like my friend speaking," we step outside the rhetorical situation to ask further. "What's going on in the writing that is making this sound like a) a person placing the reading audience as a friend, and b) speaking rather than writing?" Rather than simply noting that "The left-hand navigation column on the BSU website makes moving thorough the site easy and convenient," (That's marketing-speak), we ask, "What do the links on this site say about how the designers want us to view the institution and the people in it? We don't have two physical entrances for students on our campus, one for Prospective Students and one for Current Students. So what do the entry paths on the BSU home page tell us about the designers' understanding of web visitors? What does it tell us about the impressions the designers are attempting to help those visitors form?"

(Buckminster Fuller often asked architects and planners, "Have you ever really considered how much your buildings weigh? and from that starting point developed the geodesic dome. We're going to ask, "Have you ever really considered what the menus / the spam / the weblog entries mean? to see what new ways of understanding we might develop.)

Most people have some gut reaction to each of these, usually on the level of pet peeve or enthusiasm. But gut reactions and pet peeves are only a place to start. To really see what's happening with electronic media - to see what it does to us, to see what we do with it - we need to step in close to look closely, then step back to take a balcony view of the phenomena.

At the same time, spam, promotional email, and .com web sites are using new methods to persuade drive-thru-readers that The Truth is out there, and that you can have it, today! Organizations, schools and universities, governments, and corporations have opened new ways of communicating with their constituencies - and new ways of forming communities. There is a lot to look at, closely. There is a lot to talk about. There is a lot of work to be done.

In this course, essayists become designers and designers essayists as a way of exploring what's involved and what's at stake in electronic media.

There are two ends in this course: to come to a better understanding of how we adapt language in new situations with new media; and to become more adept at adapting yourself.

focus on the rhetorical

In this class we're taking a rhetorical perspective on e-media. (Rhetoric: the art and science [practice and theory] of using language to create and understand messages). Rhetoric is not a nebulous study. It focuses our attention on the situated, the contingent, the probable. the particular - and how writers and designers (that's you and me) make choices to address particular situations.

You might have had courses in writing and reading that address the psychological (how the writing expresses a self), the aesthetic (what makes a literary text, what is attractively designed), the physiological (how color selection affects viewers). While these aspects enter into our concern, they are fringe, not central.

In this course we're focusing on meaning: public, shared meaning, meaning that both writer and reader invest in, that both writer and reader bring resources to create. Our questions address the larger rhetorical situation rather than focusing on one aspect of it. And our method asks that we take a step back from the text, step outside the rhetorical situation, rather than working from an insider's impression or a gut reaction. Rather than simply noting about a color on a web site that "The color blue is calming, peaceful..." (physiology-speak) we ask the further questions, "What does the color blue mean on this particular web page?" What blue is this? Sky blue? Blue water? IBM Big Blue? Or rather than simply noting, "This email sounds just like my friend speaking," we step outside the rhetorical situation to ask further. "What's going on in the writing that is making this sound like a) a person placing the reading audience as a friend, and b) speaking rather than writing?" Rather than simply noting that "The left-hand navigation column on the BSU website makes moving thorough the site easy and convenient," (That's marketing-speak), we ask, "What do the links on this site say about how the designers want us to view the institution and the people in it?" We don't, for instance, have two physical entrances for students on our campus, one for Prospective Students and one for Current Students. So what do the entry paths on the BSU home page tell us about the designers' understanding of web visitors, on impressions the designers are attempting to help those visitors form?

Our work with these questions is grounded, specific, particular. And we will not come to any final, absolute conclusions about them. But we can develop some insights, illuminate matters. And that's enough.

The text for this class, Stoner and Perkins, Making Sense of Messages, Houghton Mifflin, 2005, will help orient us to this rhetorical perspective and introduce an analytical method.

Expect taking lots of notes on paper and/or online. Expect making lists and diagrams. Expect discussion based on those notes, lists, diagrams. Expect working in groups to develop ideas.

As much as our day to day activity in this course is grounded in analytical procedures, so the projects (the products, deliverables) push beyond the typical product of analysis: the academic essay. In this course, you will be required to break out of the rarely questioned double-spaced lines of academic writing printed on 8 1/2" X 11" paper. For our work with email, for instance, will might be asked to compose effective spam: words, pictures, layout. For our web site and page design study, you might be asked to redesign and rewrite a few BSU web pages in such a way that tests and questions the original design. You might be asked to design a presentation as a 2-page magazine spread, working in tight constraints: 750 words on 2 well-designed pages, including callouts and images, for instance. You may be asked to work in hypertext (no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 nodes, for instance), using conceptual words for topic titles.

Example: We've spent some time classifying spam, drawing out and cataloging its features, developing some class notes on the rhetorical strategies used in spam. Now, compose a work of spam. In your favorite email software, using formatting or not (depending on the rhetorical strategies you want to tap into), images or not (again, depending on the rhetorical strategies you're working with) compose a work of spam for either an existing or fictional product or service. When you have done so do not send this spam. Print it out and bring it to class where we will review them as a group.

Rather than confining our selves to one medium for the course, we're sampling four, maybe five, in one course. Some email, some web design, some weblog, some wiki, all wrapped up in hypertext... Sampling.

So the end of the course is not to become expert. It's to get your rhetorical bearings and to push beyond the obvious, the codified, the well-known, the habitual, the comfortable.

This returns us to the rhetorical focus again, and here it get a little theoretical, so bear with me for a couple of paragraphs. Take weblogs. Typically, we think of them as diaries, and diaries we think of as a way to pull the events and thoughts of a day together into a vivid nugget of truth. But weblogs tend to link out in ways written diaries do not; they are centrifugal rather than centripetal. They are a nifty example of writing as a rhetorical practice of pulling already-created texts together into new combinations, new meanings. (J. Johnson-Eilola calls this a symbolic-analytic practice but you don't need to know that, although I feel obliged to mention it here.)

Or wikis. Wikis call into question what individual writers really can create individually, without others. They call into question the idea of the individual genius, the individual mind at work on a problem, as the yardstick of creation and value. The call into question the product of that mind as a commodity. Wikis make possible (demand?) another way of writing - refactoring - that calls into question the individual voice as something individual; refactoring means recoding selves into a new, more intense algorithm of writer.

Part of the idea is to see the commonalities between the old and new, the e- and the non-e-media. Another part of the idea is to come to understand the differences.

So think of this course is a survey course: high-speed at low altitude. You become master of none, sampler of some. But you gain an intimacy with the landscape, and a familiarity with method. Hopefully - and while this end is your responsibility, I'll do my best to make it possible - you'll gain in insight into your self as a user and creator of media.

Most people have some gut reaction to each of these, usually on the level of pet peeve. But gut reactions and pet peeves are only a place to start. To really see what's happening with electronic media - to see what it does to us, to see what we do with it - we need to step in close to look closely, then step back to take a balcony view of the phenomena.

You might read these as evidence of the Degradation of the Language, some as Evil Scourge, or Boredom made Manifest. You might see some as simply annoying, bothersome, others as embracing, empowering, putting wings on your soul...

Most people have some gut reaction to each of these, usually on the level of pet peeve. But gut reactions and pet peeves are only a place to start. To really see what's happening with electronic media - to see what it does to us, to see what we do with it - we need to step in close to look closely, the step back to take a balcony view of the phenomena.

Consider your attitude towards some of the following:

• neologisms in IM

• flaming
• spam

• PowerPoint? slide presentations

You might read these as evidence of the Degradation of the Language, some as Evil Scourge, or Boredom made Manifest. You might see some as simply annoying, bothersome, others as embracing, empowering, putting wings on your soul...

As much as our day to day activity in this course is grounded in analytical procedures, so the projects (the products, deliverables) push beyond the typical product of analysis: the academic essay. In this course, you will be required to break out of the rarely questioned double-spaced lines of academic writing printed on 8 1/2" X 11" paper. For our work with email, for instance, will might be asked to compose effective spam: words, pictures, layout. For our web site and page design study, you might be asked to redesign a couple of BSU web pages in such a way that tests and questions the original design. You might be asked to design a presentation as a 2-page magazine spread, working in tight constraints: 750 words on 2 well-designed pages, including callouts and images, for instance. You may be asked to work in hypertext (no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 nodes, for instance), using conceptual words for topic titles.

overview, sampler, testing the waters, survey course

So the end of the course is not to become expert. It's to get your bearings and to push beyond the obvious, the codified.

This gets a little theoretical, so bear with me for a couple of paragraphs. Take weblogs. We think of them as diaries, and diaries we think of as a way to pull the events and thoughts of a day together into a vivid nugget of truth. But weblogs (you'll see) link out, they are centrifugal rather than centripetal. They are a nifty example of a new understanding of writing as a symbolic-analytic practice (J. Johnson-Eilola): writers pulling already-created texts together into new combinations, new meanings.

Or wikis. Wikis call into question what individual writers really can create individually, without others. They call into question the idea of the individual genius, the individual mind, at work on a problem as the yardstick of creation and value. The call into question the product of that mind as a commodity. Wikis make possible (demand?) another way of writing - refactoring - that calls into question the individual voice as something individual; refactoring means recoding selves into a new, more intense algorithm of writer.

Think of this course is a survey course: high-speed at low altitude. You become master of none, sampler of some. But you gain an intimacy with the landscape. Hopefully - and while this end is your responsibility, I'll do my best to make it possible - you'll gain in insight into your self as a user and creator of media.

below the line

[in progress through August, 2005]

Example: Everyone will collect spam for a week, then bring in 20 - 30 printed out pieces each. That's a lot of spam, a big sample. In small groups, we'll attempt to categorize the spam: see if it falls into categories that we can then describe and consider, draw out the features of the category... That's analysis.

Example: We've spent some time classifying spam, drawing out and cataloging its features, developing some class notes on the rhetorical strategies used in spam. Now, compose a work of spam. In your favorite email software, using formatting or not (depending on the rhetorical strategies you want to tap into), images or not (again, depending on the rhetorical strategies you're working with) compose a work of spam for either an existing or fictional product or service. When you have done so do not send this spam. Print it out and bring it to class where we will review them as a group.

Expect lists, diagrams, discussion. Expect working in groups to develop ideas. Expect lots of notes on paper and/or online.

Example: Everyone will collect spam for a week, then bring in 20 - 30 printed out pieces each. That's a lot of spam, a big sample. In small groups, we'll attempt to categorize the spam: see if it falls into categories that we can then describe and consider, draw out the features of the category... That's analysis.

• Analysis, presentations, reflection.

In this course, essayists become designers and designers essayists as a way of exploring what's involved and at stake in electronic media.

[some pages from Berthoff]

... and new media presentation

As much as our day to day activity in this course is grounded in analytical procedures, so the projects (the products, deliverables) push beyond the typical product of analysis: the academic essay. In this course, you will be asked (required) break out of the rarely questioned double-spaced lines of academic writing printed on 8 1/2" X 11" paper. For our work with email, for instance, will might be asked to compose effective spam: words, pictures, layout. For our web site and page design study, you might be asked to redesign a couple of BSU web pages in such a way that tests and questions the original design. You might be asked to design a presentation as a 2-page magazine spread, working in tight constraints: 750 words on 2 well-designed pages, including callouts and images, for instance. You may be asked to work in hypertext (no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 nodes, for instance), using conceptual words for topic titles.

think overview, sampler, testing the waters, survey course

Rather than confining our selves to one medium for the course, we're sampling five or so in one course. Some email, some weblog, some wiki, some hypertext, some whatever. Sampling.

This gets a little theoretical, so bear with me for a paragraph. Take weblogs. We think of them as diaries, and diaries we think of as a way to pull the events and thoughts of a day together into a vivid nugget of truth. But weblogs (you'll see) link out, they are centrifugal rather than centripetal. They are a nifty example of a new understanding of writing as a symbolic-analytic practice (J. Johnson-Eilola): writers pulling already-created texts together into new combinations, new meanings.

Or wikis. Wikis call into question how much individual writers really can create individually, without others. They call into question as romantic, as commodity, the idea of the individual genius, the individual mind, at work on a problem as the yardstick of creation and value. Wikis make possible (demand?) another way of writing - refactoring - that calls the question on the individual voice as something individual; refactoring means recoding selves into a new, more intense algorithm of writer.

This course is a survey course: high-speed at low altitude. You become master of none, sampler of some. But you gain an intimacy with the landscape.

analytical grounding...

This course is an introduction to some of the methods rhetorical analysis and criticism. We'll work from and develop a set of analytical methods, adapted slightly to help us focus as much on what we don't see as what we do. But analysis isn't all in the mind: analysis proceeds by material means. The material way analysis proceed is by

• notetaking
• discussion in comparing notes
• making maps and diagrams
• more notetaking and discussion
• classifying / defining / reclassifying

Expect lists, diagrams, discussion - face to face and online. Expect working in groups to develop ideas. Expect lots of notes on paper and/or online.

[some pages from Berthoff] [

... and presentational flowering

As much as our day to day activity in this course is grounded in analytical procedures, so the projects ( the products, deliverables) push beyond the typical product of analysis: the academic essay. In this course, you will be asked (required?) break out of the (never questioned) linear lines of academic writing printed on 8 1/2" X 11" paper. For our work with email, for instance, will might be asked to compose effective spam: words, pictures, layout. For our web site and page design study, you might be asked to redesign a couple of BSU web pages in such a way that tests and questions the original design. You might be asked to design your presentation as a 2-page magazine spread, working in tight constraints: 750 words on 2 well-designed pages, including callouts and images, for instance. You may be asked to work in hypertext (no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 nodes, for instance), using conceptual words for topic titles.

Two reasons: a) working in alternative rhetorical and material forms is more interesting than working in the typical academic essay form - more interesting for you and for me. b) working in alternative rhetorical and material forms allows us to question and test both the traditional form and the alternative: to see all these forms as un-natural, constructed, devised.

[handwritten hypertext]

think overview, sampler, testing the waters. think mix down, survey course

procedure

• Practice, observation, experimentation.
• Analysis and reflection

Two ends in this course: to come to a better understanding of how we adapt language in new situations with new media; and to become more adept at adapting yourself.

Rather than confining our selves to one medium for the course, we're sampling five or so in one course. Some email, some weblog, some wiki, some im, some whatever. So: sampling.

And the end is not to become expert. It's to get your bearings and to push beyond the obvious, the codified.

This gets a little theoretical, so bear with me for a paragraph. Take weblogs. We think of them as diaries, and diaries, we think of as a way to pull the events and thoughts of a day together into a vivid nugget of truth. But weblogs (you'll see) link out, they are centrifugal rather than centripetal. They are a nifty example of a new understanding of writing as a symbolic-analytic practice (J. Johnson-Eilola): writers pulling already-created texts together into new combinations, new meanings.

Or wikis. Wikis call into question how much individual writers really can make without others. They call into question as romantic, as commodity, the idea of the individual genius, the individual mind, at work on a problem as the yardstick of creation and value. Wikis (another example of symbolic-analytic practices that workers and writers now enage) demand (make possible) another way of writing - refactoring - that calls the question on the individual voice as something individual; refactoring means recoding selves into a new, more intense algorithm of writer.

We'll sample wikis. Samples combined, layered, mixed, to create a larger take.

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on the present and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and electronic communications. Like http://199.17.178.148/%7Emorgan/cgi-bin/blogsAndWiki.pl?Entry_Point Weblogs and Wikis, this is a course that explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. It provides a grounding in theory that allows you to get the most out of other writing courses.

=== think overview, sampler, testing the waters. think mix down, survey course === Rather than confining our selves to one medium / course, we're sampling five or so in one course. Some email, some weblog, some wiki, some im, some whatever. So: sampling.

This gets a little theoretical, so bear with me for a paragraph. Take weblogs. We think of them as diaries, and diaries, we think of as a way to pull the events and thoughts of a day, a moment, together into a vivid nugget of truth. But weblogs (you'll see) link out, they are centrifugal rather than centripetal. They are a nifty example of a new understanding of writing as a symbolic-analytic practice (J. Johnson-Eilola): writers pulling already-created texts together into new combinations, new meanings.

Samples combined, layered, mixed, to create a larger take.

It's like a survey course: big give, high-speed at low altitued. You become master of none, sampler of some. But you gain an intimacy with the landscape.

Part of the idea is to see the commonalities between the media. Another part of the idea is to come to understand the differences.

=== procedure === We start with observation. Develop a way of talking about what we observe. We then practice, continually observing. Then stop, analyze the thing, reflect on our analysis. (Because ultimately, what we're doing isn't about you or me. It's about ideas.) Then on to the text media, carrying our understanding along further.

The course also opens into an extended study of e-rhetoric for both undergraduate and graduate students. Taken in conjunction with http://199.17.178.148/%7Emorgan/cgi-bin/blogsAndWiki.pl?Entry_Point Weblogs and Wikis, Writing.HomePage Web Content Writing?, Web Design for Content Writers, Technical or Professional Writing, and http://biro.bemidjistate.edu/cgi/twwtwiki.pl Teaching Writing with Technology, students can gain a broad and deep background in electronic literacy and writing in online situations.

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on the present and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and electronic communications. Like http://199.17.178.148/%7Emorgan/cgi-bin/blogsAndWiki.pl?Entry_Point Weblogs and Wikis, this is a course that explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. It provides a grounding in theory that allow students to get the most out of other writing courses.

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on the present and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and electronic communications. Like [http://199.17.178.148/%7Emorgan/cgi-bin/blogsAndWiki.pl?Entry_Point Weblogs and Wikis], this is a course that explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. It provides a grounding in theory that allow students to get the most out of other writing courses.

The course also opens into an extended study of e-rhetoric for both undergraduate and graduate students. Taken in conjunction with http://199.17.178.148/%7Emorgan/cgi-bin/blogsAndWiki.pl?Entry_Point Weblogs and Wikis, Writing.EntryPoint Web Content Writing?, Web Design for Content Writers, Technical or Professional Writing, and http://biro.bemidjistate.edu/cgi/twwtwiki.pl Teaching Writing with Technology, students can gain a broad and deep background in electronic literacy and writing in online situations.

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on the present and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and electronic communications. Like Weblogs and Wikis, this is a course that explores online writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice. It provides a grounding in theory that allow students to get the most out of other writing courses.

Elements of E-Rhetoric replaces ENGL 3160: Web Design and Content Writing I. It is broader in scope than 3160, and focuses on fundamental principles rather than the practices of a single medium. The course brings academic and professional depth to electronic literacy practice, which better serves English BFA and BA/BS students, MA candidates, Mass Comm students, and students in other disciplines.

The course also opens into an extended study of e-rhetoric for both undergraduate and graduate students. Taken in conjunction with http://199.17.178.148/%7Emorgan/cgi-bin/blogsAndWiki.pl?Entry_Point Weblogs and Wikis, Writing.EntryPoint Web Content Writing?, Web Design for Content Writers, Technical or Professional Writing, and http://biro.bemidjistate.edu/cgi/twwtwiki.pl Teaching Writing with Technology, students can gain a broad and deep background in electronic literacy and writing in online situations.

[in progress]

Course Blurb (in progress)

Technological developments create new varieties of language and new ways of using language: new possibilities of expression, new means of persuasion and communication. Under pressure of technological change, writing changes - from the stuffiest of academic essays to the most languid and informal personal note. New forms are invented, and existing forms are adapted to the new contexts.

• SMS shorthand
• neologisms in chat rooms
• email
• diy web pages
• online dialogue
• flaming, spam
• blogging

The expansion of linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical possibilities in electronic media is applauded by some, reduced to marketing formulas by others (Be Pithy! Be Brief! Be Real! scream the editors of http://hotwired.wired.com/hardwired/wiredstyle/ Wired Style), and condemned by many as The Downfall of Language and Civilization As We Know It. (Evidence? Set http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/business/07write.html?ex=1103518576&ei=1&en=98dd05becb0ea44e this article from the NY Times about corporate email against http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/OldFiles/humor/pluperfect.virus this 1999 article on the Strunkenwhite Virus).

But it takes a close read to see that prescriptions like http://papyr.com/hypertextbooks/wired.htm Wired Style doesn't offer us much. People devised an SMS shorthand for efficiency and expression in 160 characters. Students taking online courses need to learn how to engage in online dialogues, which often means unlearning the monologic practices that serve them well in the face to face classroom. Weblogs lower the barrier on local and global communication and allow new voices to be heard - and those voices don't all speak the Standard Dialect.

At the same time, spam, promotional email, and .com web sites are using new methods to persuade drive-by-readers that The Truth is out there, and that you can have it, today! Organizations, schools and universities, governments, and corporations have opened new ways of communicating with their constituencies - and new ways of forming communities. There is a lot to look at, closely. There is a lot to talk about. There is a lot of work to be done.

Elements of E-Rhetoric focuses on the present and evolving stylistic, linguistic, and rhetorical strategies in online and electronic communications. Like Weblogs and Wikis, this is a course that explores onnline writing and pushes the edges of theory and practice.

• Descriptive rather than prescriptive.
• Practice, observation, experimentation.

Two ends: to come to a better understanding of how we adapt language use to new situations; and to become more adept at adapting yourself.

description for the curriculum committee

Elements of E-Rhetoric replaces ENGL 3160: Web Design and Content Writing I. Elements of E-Rhetoric is broader in scope than 3160. It focuses on fundamental principles rather than the practices of a single medium, and so brings academic and professional depth to electronic literacy practice, which better serves English BFA and BA/BS students, MA candidates, Mass Comm students, and students in other disciplines. The course also opens into an extended study of e-rhetoric for both undergraduate and graduate students. Taken in conjunction with http://199.17.178.148/%7Emorgan/cgi-bin/blogsAndWiki.pl?Entry_Point Weblogs and Wikis, Writing.EntryPoint Web Content Writing?, Web Design for Content Writers, Technical or Professional Writing, and http://biro.bemidjistate.edu/cgi/twwtwiki.pl Teaching Writing with Technology, students can gain a broad and deep background in electronic literacy and writing in online situations.