Course Projects | Spring 2019
Rhetorical Trading Cards (Reading Response A)
Goal: In order to foster both depth and breadth of thinking/coverage in the course, students will be responsible for creating Rhetorician Trading Cards every other week; these will take the place of more traditional reading responses. This activity offers students the opportunity to practice research and close reading of key figures in the history of rhetorical studies and requires thoughtful synthesis and application of research and reading. Trading Cards should provide readers with the following information:
- Rhetorician’s/Rhetor’s Name & Dates
- Brief Biographical Sketch (25 – 50 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 action, object, or concept; consider the major questions we’re exploring this semester and how this rhetor/ician engages those big questions, or perhaps how this rhetor/ician contributes to modifying ancient rhetorical concepts, e.g., ethos, pathos, logos, kairos, stasis, etc.)
Resources: For primary biographical/analytical information on these rhetor/icians, 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 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. From Canva, you can download as an image (PNG) or a print-based document (PDF). For your bi-weekly reading response, you will post the PNG version to the course site along with a link to the original on Canva in case we have any trouble viewing the document.
Example: Gorgias
Lesson Plans (Reading Response B)
Goal: Students who are not completing RTCs for the week will instead work together as a group to create a Lesson Plan to guide our class discussions. This activity encourages students to synthesize readings and connect current readings/discussion to previous readings/discussions. Lesson Plans should attempt to
- Engage all the assigned readings for the week, making connections across writers and texts;
- Explore how the texts for the week engage the larger questions about rhetoric that the course is seeking to answer, e.g., according to these rhetor/icians, who communicates? about what? in what contexts? what are the limitations with language or discourse that thes rhetor/ician addresses?
- Connect the current week’s texts/writers to those of previous weeks and/or to readings you’re doing/have done in other courses;
- Demonstrate how the ideas or concepts from the current readings might impact classroom teaching practices (e.g., in first-year writing) or might impact how we communicate outside of school contexts.
Resources: You shouldn’t need any resources other than those assigned for class, but secondary research is always an options.
Formatting: Students should collaborate in teams to construct their Lesson Plans. These do not need to be minute-by-minute schedules of activities, though if appropriate, that might be fine. These plans may be just a set of focused questions that help guide our conversation and make sure we address all of the readings in some detail; or they might combine big questions with a short activity to help our thinking or to get us all making connections between the readings and our own classroom teaching practices. Lesson Plans should be submitted to Dr. Banks 24 hour before class meets so that he has time to seek any clarifications needed and to put the lesson plans up on the course site.
Response Teams | Spring 2019
| Team A | Team B |
|
Zach Emily Yvonne Lakela |
Cody Jayde Alicia Kelsey |
Genealogy Projects
The genealogy 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 same 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 bibliography and then smashed the entries together without the citations between the paragraph annotations. That is literature review 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 referenced in clusters (families that share the same belief/value) that link to other clusters only in as much as they both address the same concept or approach. They do so 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 like “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 in order to show (dis)connections among thinkers / ways of thinking and how those (dis)connections lead us in various directions.
Your goal with this project is to select a rhetorical term/concept that we got from ancient Western rhetorics (e.g., the Greek and Roman traditions) and explore modern rhetoricians have come to understand that concept differently, how they have built on it and modified what it means or how we now understand it. Your genealogy project explores different “families” of scholars, thinkers, and/or rhetoricians who have talked about or deployed that term/concept and organizes it around key areas of agreement. For example, if you were interested in the concept of logos, you might start by looking at how different scholars have understood the Greek concept since 1700. Your initial inquiry might reveal that rhetoric and philosophy understand that term differently and that different paths emerged for thinking about “logic.” You might follow those paths to see what emerges as “logic” is rethought in the 19th and 20th centuries by different rhetoricians, which might then lead to a very specific instantiation or understanding of logic in feminist or other cultural terms. Your genealogy project would be about tracing that movement of the term, showing how from one concept shifted and changed over time and ended up being understood in a particular way by contemporary rhetoricians.
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.
Rhetorical Concepts to Trace
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Genealogy Project: Annotated Bibliographies
In order for you to be working all semester toward these projects, you will build two annotated bibliographies related to the concept you’re exploring. One bibliography will reference writers/thinkers before 1950; the other, since 1950. The goal here is that the sources you include in your genealogy should represent historical movement of the concept across the modern period, roughly 1700 – today. Each bibliography should have 10 entries, half of which can be texts we read together as a class. The other half should be texts you find through your research. Annotations should be no more than 150 words and should highlight the elements of the text that connect to your genealogy project.
The goal of your annotations should be to condense articles and book chapters into key issues directly related to your topic. To that end, I would encourage you to follow a modified version of the rhetorical précis with these. The précis is brief enough that you can write it fairly quickly and is structured such that the text you write here would likely be “liftable” from the bib itself to your genealogy project. An effective précis does not ramble; it offers a condense statement regarding the primary argument or thesis of the article/chapter; then, it highlights key issues that make the article/chapter relevant to the writer of the bib and to their immediate project. (Examples)
Genealogy Project: Draft
An initial draft of your genealogy project is due soon after midterm (consult the schedule) and should be roughly 8 – 10 pages. Your peers and your professor will both read your drafts and provide feedback. At this stage, your project might not have a clear sense of a specific argument or goal you’re making about the concept you’re addressing; you may just be showing the reader who has said what about the concept and be starting to piece togehter the “why does this matter” part of the project. That’s a great place to be with this draft as you can use your peers and your professor to hone your thinking.
Genealogy Project: Presentations & Teaching Activities
On the last night of class, everyone will have 15 minutes to present their work and get feedback. Part of your presentation should be about the concept you have traced and what you learned, while the second part should be about how you might make use of this concept in a classroom setting (teaching activity). You can use PowerPoint or similar technology for the presentation of your rhetorical genealogy, but you should also have a handout for everyone of the teaching activity you have created. You will have 10 minutes to share your work and 5 minutes to receive feedback.
Your finished Genealogy Project, presentation, and teaching activities will all be due in finished form during the final exam time scheduled for this course. Consult the course schedule for specific dates and times.
To begin your research, you might want to search through the core journals of the field of 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 “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 |