http://biro.bemidjistate.edu/erhetoric/
ENGL 3179/5179
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
Alternative version of this description
Stoner, Mark, and Sally Perkins. Making Sense of Messages. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005.
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:
These are new forms of writing and new spaces for writing, and so new places where rhetorical practices change and expand beyond print.
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 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.
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.
There is a lot to look at, closely. There is a lot to talk about. There is a lot of work to be done.
Rhetoric
And so e-rhetoric (or digital rhetoric)
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.
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 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.
for instances
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Please be considerate of others in class.
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:
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.
Final grades will follow the usual scale.
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.
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.
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 requirements. Here are two I've been considering.
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.
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.
This statement is subject to change. You'll be informed if I do change it, and changes will be marked on the statement.
below the line
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
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 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