English 7620 Assignments
Spring 2017
R² Trading Cards
Goal: In order to foster both depth and breadth of thinking/coverage in the course, students will be responsible for creating Rhetorician Trading Cards. Students will create 3 different cards, which represent rhetors from different centuries. This activity will give students the opportunity to practice research and close reading of key figures in the history of rhetorical studies. Trading Cards should provide readers with the following information:
- Rhetorician’s/Rhetor’s Name
- Brief Biographical Sketch (50 – 75 words)
- Major Texts/Contributions (4 – 5 articles, books, pamphlets, etc)
- Rhetorical Superpowers (2 – 3 major contributions to rhetoric)
- Rhetorical Frenemies (4 – 5 scholarly texts that extend/critique this rhetorician/rhetor)
- Impact on Writing (brief explanation of how this person’s ideas impact writing as 1) action, 2) object, or 3) concept)
Resources: For primary biographical/analytical information on these figures, you should consult the following texts:
- Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg. Eds. The Rhetorical Tradition, 2nd Ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s: Boston, 2000. (On Reserve @ Joyner)
- Herrick, James. History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction. 5th Ed. Routledge: NY, 2012. (3rd Ed. On Reserve @ Joyner)
- Foss, Sonja K., Karen A Foss, and Robert Trapp. Contemporary Perspectives On Rhetoric.3rd ed. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 2002.
Secondary critical arguments can be found using standard databases available through Joyner Library.
Formatting: Students should use Piktochart, Easel.ly, or Canva to create their “trading cards.” If another digital tool seems more useful, please suggest it and I’ll consider it for inclusion as an option.
Composition Textbook Survey
In our reading this semester, we have looked at a number of writers/speakers who, since the rise of modern science in the academy, have reshaped the way that much of the Western world thought about writing and rhetoric, about how we invent, arrange, and deliver our speeches and different genres of writing. Connors recognized in much of his research into early composition teaching that the textbooks of the 19th and 20th centuries were a primary way in which larger ideas about rhetoric influenced young composers. For this project, I’m asking you to look through around 15 “rhetorics” for teaching first-year writing college/university and to provide an analysis of how these texts present rhetoric and writing to students.
To do so, you should choose one of the major textbook publishers for first-year writing, listed below, and analyze at least 4-5 books from 3 different categories or types of textbooks. Borrowing broadly from Connors’ groupings, your analysis should include texts in the following groups:
- “thesis” or single-issue texts (e.g., “Writing Argument,” “Writing from Research”)
- handbooks (traditionally, “grammar” texts but now often both grammar and rhetoric)
- rhetorics (most publishers now use this as a category to refer to non-handbook rhetorics)
For this assignment, you should choose one of the following publishers:
- Pearson
- Norton
- MacMillan Learning (includes Bedford/St. Martin’s)
Once you have identified your textbooks, you’ll want to look at what the publisher says about the goals/focus/value of the book (after all, they’re trying to “sell” teachers on using this text), as well as the table of contexts in order to see what topics the texts cover and in what order. Look for similarity and differences among the texts first by category and then across categories. What trends do you see? What seems similar in these texts to the TOCs we looked at from Alexander Bain and Adams Sherman Hill in the 19th century? What’s different? new?
While it will be difficult to make any large claims about “composition textbooks today,” I want you to get a sense of how these books are organized and marketed to teachers and what we’re currently saying about writing to students in first-year writing courses. Make a chart that shows “common topics” or “common ideas” regarding writing and note which texts those elements come from.
In addition to your chart, write a 300-500 word reflection on the main things you think you learned about composition texts — structures, values, concerns — through this reflective-analytical activity. Include a list of 3-4 textbooks that you’d like to look at further if you were going to a text to use in teaching a college writing course.
Teaching Rhetoric
Rhetorical study has been most useful to writing teachers in as much it foregrounds activities or practices for reading that can have a direct impact on teaching. All around us, we hear teachers lamenting that students have no “critical reading” or “critical thinking” skills, and yet if you ask those same teachers, “Like what?” you will often get a blank stare. Critical thinking is a popular buzzword in education, but no one seems really to know what it means. Learning to read rhetorically — asking specific questions about a text and its context(s), author(s), etc. — is a type of critical reading/thinking activity that students can transfer from one learning/reading context to another. As such, at midterm and again at the end of the semester, students will be asked to share teaching activities that are grounded in the rhetorical theories/concepts we explore in class. While we may not ask first-year students to read Blair, Campbell, Weaver, Richards, Foucault, Butler, or Ahmed, that doesn’t mean that our teaching cannot be influenced by their ideas of language, text, and culture.
Rhetorical teaching activities will be submitted on the course website as “Teaching Activities”; activities should, as much as possible, be ‘original’ ideas based on the rhetorical concepts we have read about in class. Activities should include a Title, at least two Outcomes/Aims/Goals, a brief Narrative that explains what the activity is meant to do, a list of any Materials needed (readings, handouts, etc), a set of Instructions that a teacher could follow, and any Handouts needed to complete the activity. Some activities may not have all of these items (e.g., a drawing or speaking activity may have no handouts). Students should discuss their ideas with the professor before these activities are due.
Genealogy Project
The genealology project is intended as a space to help you research and write about a key rhetorical concept or term that you can later use to build an extended argument in your area of specialization. On some level, this activity may resemble a “literature review” in that you’re assembling a number of scholarly articles and books that all address the sme concept or term. Where most “literature reviews” fail, however, is that they simply present a catalogue of texts and what the texts are about. When I read them, they really just look like the writer made an annotated bibliograpy and then smooshed them together without the citations between the paragraph annotations. That is literature reivew as #FAIL.
The reason I call this a genealogy project rather than a literature review is that the point of the project isn’t to simply “review” what’s been said, but to trace the “family tree” of a term/concept in rhetoric. The focus is on the rhetorical term/concept itself, and each “branch” (author/article/text) is reference in clusters (familes that share the same belief/value) that link to other clusters only in as much as they both talk about the same term. They do it differently, however, maybe only subtly, but differently enough that a careful observer spots the differences and can tease those out. Sometimes, they’re talking about the same concept but have shifted the term. For example, in digital rhetorics, one might talk about “new media ” in terms “remix”, “multimedia”, “multimodality”, “transmedia”, etc., and still be talking about the same basic concept. What matters is how we can organize/taxonomize those different ways of talking about the same thing.
Your job with this project is to select a rhetorical term/concept and explore how different “families” of scholars, thinkers, and/or rhetoricians have talked about or deployed that term/concept. For example, if you were interested in the concept of “genre”, you might start by looking at how different disciplines have taken up the term, e.g., literary studies, composition studies, and education. All three of these groups are invested in the concept but as fields of study, they approach the concept quite differently.
As we read examples of professional scholars doing this sort of genre, I will point it out and discuss it with you so that you have some examples of this genre-in-action.
Sample Concepts For Genealogy Projects (borrowed from Clark’s Concepts in Composition)
|
|
There are many many concepts from contemporary composition and rhetoric which would lend themselves to tracing their genealogies — how different writers/scholars/thinkers have taken up these concepts or modified them over the last 300 years. We’ll talk about these and other concepts in class as you work to decide what your genealogy projects might be about.
To begin your research, you might want to search through the core journals of the field rhetoric and writing studies. For most of these, you can search for the digital versions of these journals on Joyner Library’s “ejournal” portal, and then from the database you use, choose a “search within this journal.” That will limit your results significantly. You will also find in the Works Cited/References to the articles you find which books are typically cited. Following this “family tree” is one of your easiest ways to build your genealogy.
| Composition/Pedagogy | Rhetorical Studies | Tech/Prof Communication |
|---|---|---|
| College Composition & Communication (CCC)
Composition Studies Composition Forum JAC (Journal of Advanced Composition) Written Communication (WC) Research in the Teaching of English (RTE) Community Literacy Journal Literacy in Composition Studies Computers & Composition (C&C) Computers & Composition Online Kairos Journal of Basic Writing Journal of Second Language Writing Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC) Writing on the Edge (WOE) The Writing Instructor Writing Lab Newsletter Writing Center Journal Praxis: A Writing Center Journal WPA: Writing Program Administration The WAC Journal Academic.Writing Assessing Writing Journal of Writing Assessment BWe: Basic Writing e-Journal Issues in Writing |
Rhetoric Review (RR)
Rhetorical Society Quarterly (RSQ) Rhetorica Enculturation Harlot KB Journal Philosophy & Rhetoric Present Tense Pre-Text Pre-Text: Electra (Lite) Technoculture |
Programmatic Perspectives
Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ) Journal of Business and Technical Communication (JBTC) Journal of Business Communication
|