Topic and Preliminary Bibliography for Final Project

Topic: How can rhetoric be incorporated into portfolio design?

 

Elbow, Peter and Pat Belanoff.  “Portfolios as a Substitute for Proficiency Examinations.”  College Composition and Communication 37.3 (1986): 336-339.  Print.

Elbow, Peter.  “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment.”  College English 55.2 (1993): 187-206.  Print.

Guthrie, John T. and Allan Wigfield.  “Engagement and Motivation in Reading.”  Handbook of Reading Research.  Eds. Kamil, Michael L., Peter Mosenthal, et al.  Mahwah: LEA, 2000.  403-422.  Print.

Lombard, Judy.  “To Portfolio or Not to Portfolio: Helpful or Hyped?”  College Teaching 56.1 (2008): 7-10.  Print.

Neff-Lippman, Julie.  “Assessing Writing.”  Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing.  Ed. Clark, Irene L.  New York: Routledge, 2012.  145-167.  Print.

Nitko, Anthony J. and Susan M. Brookhart.  Educational Assessment of Students.  New Jersey: Pearson, 2007.  Print.

 “Writing Assessment: A Position Statement.”  Conference on College Composition and Communication.  NCTE, 2006.  Web.  12 July 2014.

Yancey, Kathleen B.  “Looking Back as We Look Forward: Historicizing Writing Assessment as a Rhetorical Act.”  CCC 50.3 (1999): 483-503.  Print.

Yancey, Kathleen B. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.”  CCC 56.2 (2004): 297-328.  Print.

What should teachers teach, and how should they grade when it comes to organization?

In Victor Villanueva Jr.’s article “Maybe a Colony: And Still Another Critique of the Comp Community,” he develops an analogy between the United States’ colonization of Puerto Rico with the Eurocentric “colonization” of composition.  For example, latina and latino culture value repetition, poetic diction, and apparent digressions from the dominant line of reasoning (Villanueva 184).  However, due to the high status of Eurocentric principals in composition theory, these techniques are considered improper tools to include in a composition class.  This astute observation begs the question: if there should not be a single organizational form to composing essays, what should the teacher teach in terms of organization?  On the one hand, should the teacher include multiple forms and have students decide on which forms and/or combination of forms they wish to use?  Keep in mind, it will take extra time for students to learn new organizational methods as well as to practice and employ them.  On the other hand, teachers could make vague suggestions when it comes to teaching organization and allow students to express themselves as they see fit.  This conundrum doesn’t merely affect what teachers teach in terms of organization, but it also affects how teachers grade.  Should teachers factor the category of organization in determining a student’s grade?  Should organization be graded on a binary or sliding scale?  In other words, do students either have it or they don’t, or do students have more or less organization in their writing?  If so, is the teacher required to learn all of the possible forms of accepted organization in writing such as appropriate essay organization in Ethiopia, Crete, Norway, Greenland, and Russia?  Although I agree with Villanueva’s assertion that teachers should not teach only one form of organization, it opens a Pandora’s box as to what organizational techniques (if any) the teacher should teach as well as how the teacher should (if at all) grade students on the organization of their ideas.  These are important as well as practical questions that Villanueva fails to address in his article.   

Blog Rhetoric Reflection

Blogging is a diverse form of writing.  While genres such as academic writing, mystery novels, and biography all follow more or less specific genre conventions, the blog genre follows considerably less so.  For example, blog audiences are determined more by subject matter than any other factor.  This means that a blog can be casual, semi-formal, or formal (even academic) in its content.  In addition, it can be supported by copious amounts of evidence or no evidence at all.  In addition, bloggers can incorporate as much or as less multimedia as they desire.  And here's the kicker: all of the above are allowed in a blog.  It is no wonder why when students are required to write a blog for a class that there are always numerous questions about blog content, style, and expectations.  "Did I do this right?"  "Is this what you're looking for?"  It is a genre with such a wide range of possibilities that students need boundaries to help focus their writing.  With more freedom comes more frustration, and in that way, the blogging genre mirrors the human condition: the more choices we have, the less satisfied we are in our actions.

Stance and Engagement

Out of all three articles assigned for reading this week, Hyland's "Stance and Engagement" article was the most enlightening and practical.  I found the notion that academic writers should not only position themselves within a topic but also within other writers on that topic to be a well-made point. In addition, the concepts of stance and engagement were easy to understand and easy to apply.  I noticed that Hyland's structure and voice organized his ideas and communicated them well respectively.  His use of multiple examples helped to clarify some of the more difficult ideas of the text.  

As a high school teacher, I instantly thought about Bloom's taxonomy while reading this article.  I felt that the two articles would compliment each other in order to help students improve their writing.  While Bloom would help students develop their ideas, I believe that Hyland would help them position themselves in an argument and interact with the audience.  A position paper or research paper would be an ideal assignment to have students learn about different points of view on a topic; students could then use the concepts of stance and engagement to position themselves and interact with the reader.  Peer review sessions could also incorporate reader response questions where the student evaluates another student's level of engagement through the text.  This would help develop audience awareness in students.  However, I would eliminate the category of "personal asides" for students because I find it to be a difficult concept to grasp that may confuse rather than help.  Otherwise, I plan on using this article in the classroom to help students participate in an academic conversation, develop their voice, and develop their audience awareness.

In John Swales and Hazem Najjar's article "The Writing of Research Article Introductions," they discuss the archetypal structure of research articles.  Having read many of Swales's articles previously including another article (aside: or maybe the same one) on research article introduction last semester, the article was more of a review than enlightening.  This is not to say that the article is not useful.  I find this article to be extremely useful, but to a select audience.  For example, I would only expose high school seniors to writing of this caliber.  This is not because of the level of language the authors employ, but rather, the content of the subject matter.  Although I would love to incorporate this article in a sophomore or junior English class, being a first year teacher, I don't believe I have the capabilities at the moment to incorporate it successfully into a research unit.  This is not to say I wouldn't use it in the near-future.

In Miller's article "Genre as Social Action," his diction and clunky voice repeatedly distracted me from absorbing the content.  For example, he uses words such as "ethnomethodological" and "ontological status of situations."  As a reader, there is a lot of stop and go which hinders from the absorption of the author's message since readers can only store around 120 wpm in their short-term memory to process in their long-term memory.  Hence, the reader must constantly re-read in order to understand the author's point.  This article made me appreciate Hyland's voice even more, and I may consider using this article as an example of voice and audience awareness for my students.

Rhetorical Analysis #1

Rhetorical Analysis 1: For this brief analysis, you will choose your own example of the kinds of texts we have examined together and apply the tools you have learned to identify the purposes and audiences of that text and explain the ways that the author attempts to accomplish those purposes.

Text: “Please Don’t Feed the Bears” by Paul Rogers in the San Jose Mercury News 9/14/2014

Audience: The audience for this article includes people that read the San Jose Mercury News regularly, people that visit Yosemite, people that are afraid of wild animal attacks, and since it was the front-page story, people that may walk by a newsstand (thus, it should be more eye-catching in terms in title and content). 

Purpose: The purpose of the article is to provide audience awareness of both the history of bears (emphasizing the damage they cause) and bear management in Yosemite as well as strategies and techniques that campers can use to avoid encounters with said bears. 

Method: The author uses an interesting strategy of personifying the bears in Yosemite by giving them human traits such as describing them as “breaking into cars” and calling them “marauders.”  He begins the article using these terms to not only to make the bears seem more human, but to make the bears seem like evil humans.  The author does this in order to establish a problem: evil bears in Yosemite.  According to M. Jimmie Killingsworth, this would be an appeal to the body in two ways: first, giving human qualities to a non-human entity, and second, by dehumanizing said entity.  In addition, calling bears “marauders” is an appeal to tropes since the author is making a comparison between two things without using “like” or “as.”  He uses this metaphor in order to add more description to his perceived attitude of the bears.  Then, he offers a solution to the bear problem.

              The next section of the article details a history of black bears in Yosemite, the amount of damage done over the years (both monetary and human casualty), and measures that the park rangers have implemented to stem the tide of bears causing damage.  This is an appeal to time as well as an appeal to evidence and authority.  The appeals come in the form of the statistics of bear damage to property and casualties due to bears from 1980 to today.  The appeal to time claims that the bear situation is getting better over time, and the appeal to evidence stems from the inclusion of numerical facts in the form of bar graphs.  The article appeals to authority by detailing the actions that park rangers, experts in their field, have implemented to help prevent bear encounters.  Subtly, the article also makes an appeal to place; the article does not claim that people or bears should leave Yosemite.  Instead, the author implies that this place, Yosemite, is a place that can be shared by both people and bears alike in a harmonious manner.  Thus, the author advocates for a shared space.

              In the final section, the article addresses what steps campers can take to avoid contact with a bear.  This is another appeal to the body because the author assumes that all of his readers have bodies as well as all of those people would like to keep their bodies free from bear injury.  Thus, sharing safety tips appeals to people’s love for their body.

M. Jimmie Killingsworth's Appeals in Modern Rhetoric Ch. 6-10

Appeals to the body: since everyone has a body and is affected by similar issues associated with the body such as hunger and sex drive, advertisers frequently target body-focused messages in order to reach the maximum amount of potential customers.  In a similar manner, rhetoricians can use the same technique to guide others into adopting a new point of view.  For example, an author or speaker can describe nature or politics in terms of a human body with head, hands, stomach, etc.  In addition, bodies can also be dehumanized when it comes to enemies or emphasized when it comes to physical disabilities.  And finally, with the rise of technology, the lines between body and technology blur even further with each technological advancement.

Appeals to gender: careful attention should be made when stereotyping gender as well as sexuality.  In addition, rhetoricians should be conscious of the power dynamic such as differences in political power between the sexes.  Also, the rhetorician should beware that the line between exploitation and empowerment can be blurred and that both phenomena can even occur simultaneously.  And finally, authors should never identify one gender in terms of the opposite gender.

Appeals to race: rhetoricians should beware of “othering” people of other races or backgrounds.  This phenomenon is related to dehumanizing or demonizing, and it favors one group of people over another.  Professors should also remember that becoming a successful academic does not necessarily mean that the student should shed their familial, communal, or cultural background.  It is important that all races have an equal opportunity to learn, and an important factor between the powerful and the powerless is education. 

Appeals through tropes: rhetoricians can make appeals through tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.  Basically, the four tropes can be broken down into the following categories: identity, association, representation, and reversal of expectations respectively.  An interesting book to check out would be George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By which details how the human experience is founded on our ability to create and understand metaphors.  

The appeal of narrative: narratives can take the form of illustrations, examples, and anecdotes; they are in contrast to data or statistical forms of evidence.  Whereas data-based evidence is usually the pre-dominant form of evidence in specialized fields, the narrative structure is the pre-dominant form to communicate concepts to those outside the field.  This is because people outside of the Discourse community may not be familiar with the history, logic, or technical jargon of the specialized field.  Thus, narratives require storytellers to have a sense of audience awareness to judge what each audience needs to hear.  Storytelling has three purposes: to build a community, reinforce values, and to teach life lessons.  Narratives are also more democratic than data because everyone can listen to a story and anyone can be a storyteller.  If someone has experienced a unique situation or been a part of a unique community, then that person has the authority to tell a story on that subject; that person can instruct others and allow others to change their perspectives through vicarious experience.  Thus, narratives should show rather than tell.

Commentary: personally, I have a fascination with the narrative form.  As a kid, I would always look forward to the telling of a good bed-time story.  In reference to the chapter on appeals to the body, there are channels that cater to specific groups.  For instance, SpikeTV for men, ESPN for sports fans, Oxygen for women, and Speed for racing fans are all channels that cater to a specific demographic.  I notice that the more specific the audience, the more data is used.  For example, a World Series of Poker broadcast would have multiple statistics on the screen simultaneously.  Football analysis on ESPN usually includes multiple sets of data such as completion percentage, passer rating, total yards, etc.  On the other hand, the same story meant for a wider audience such as a nightly newscast would leave out most of the statistics and focus on the narrative such as “team X rallied from behind in order to overcome team Y in the final quarter.”  Even on SpikeTV where their most famous shows are Cops and 1001 Ways to Die, both shows deliver a narrative followed by a set of data.  In Cops, after the narrative of the police arresting the perpetrator, the police officer explains the law broken and the punishment for the offender; in 1001 Ways to Die, after the narrative of how a person died, the show’s narrator explains the science behind each death.  On the other hand, the most frequent use of data-based evidence on a newscast comes from surveys and eye-witness accounts, lesser reliable forms of data.  Thus, the more specific the audience, the more data should be incorporated into the message.  This is an important lesson for rhetoricians and falls under the umbrella of audience awareness: general population should focus on narratives while specific groups should focus on data.  However, this contrasts with the techniques in Killingsworth’s final chapter where he claims that narrative works better for an audience of adolescents than data.  In addition, the specific audience of the ancient tribesmen would favor more of a narrative structure than a data-driven one.  So, even though the audience may be specific, the rhetorician should use his or her best judgment to determine whether to focus on narrative or data-based arguments.

M. Jimmie Killingsworth's Appeals in Modern Rhetoric Ch. 1-5

Preface: I found it interesting that the author considers the body as a means of rhetoric.  Previously, I never would have categorized a riot or political protest as a rhetorical tool; however, it now seems to make perfect sense, and I look forward to reading that chapter.

General Introduction: I found it interesting that Marshall McLuhan claims that sex appeal actually appeals to the widest available audience because “most people experience sexual desire and hunger, after all, since everyone lives in a body” (Killingsworth 5).  Previously, I have been conditioned into believing that sex appeal is alienating and degrading rather than appealing to the widest audience.

Appeal to Authority: I found it interesting that different audiences require different appeals to authority.  For instance, the more academic the audience, the more academic the evidence should be.  Conversely, the more folksy and down-to-earth the audience, the more folksy and down-to-earth the evidence should be.  This definitely caused me a little cognitive dissonance since I thought that good evidence was good evidence regardless of audience.

Rhetorical Situation: I found it interesting that the author/actor attempts to relate to the audience in order to bridge the gap between potential differences.  For instance, a politician might mention how her father was a school teacher when speaking to a group of educators.  However, it is mentioned in this chapter that when an author/actor chooses to relate to the audience, the author/actor also runs the risk of alienating those in the audience who cannot relate.  Thus, the author/actor should know the audience and wisely choose which bridge would reach the most people in the audience, or the author/actor can implement a multitude of bridges that cover more and more ground.  For instance, the previous politician might attempt to relate to educators through growing up with an educator for a parent in addition to later mentioning how she is a proud parent with a child in the educational system.  This would resonate with both educators as well as parents. 

Appeal to Time: I found it interesting that rhetoricians can use time as a tool to increase the persuasiveness of their message.  For instance, they can claim that people should return to the past, learn from the past, embrace change, or value the future.  This chapter also has my favorite quote thus far: “With the development of the atom bomb, people became particularly aware of the break with the past.  The power to destroy the world with a single decision – the kind of power that had before been the prerogative of the gods – now fell into human hands” (Killingsworth 43).

Appeal to Place: This was definitely the most interesting chapter because it introduces the notion that rhetoricians can make the argument that a place is sacred as well as the argument that a place should be taken over (an imperialistic philosophy).  In addition, it touches on the idea of cyberspace as a real place as well as its implications for nature and environmentalism.

Commentary: I appreciate how this reading presents different appeals as a means for rhetoric.  As I mentioned previously, I never would have thought about the appeals to time, place, or body.  I am especially fascinated with the role of technology and its future importance in the field of rhetoric.  With society’s continued reliance on technology, what effect will this have on rhetoric?  Will the field of rhetoric shift its focus to more online and telecommunication subjects of study?  How does online communication affect rhetoric and the means of effectively communicating messages?  These are all interesting questions that will grow with relevance as technology becomes more and more a part of our daily lives.