Blogs

Good for them for taking a sensible stand.

In my daily online reading, I encounter weblogs from a variety of disciplines, and I see weblogs used in all kinds of ways. It's not that I think any one discipline exemplifies "best practices" of using weblogs, but sometimes I look at what others do with weblogs and then look at what we as rhetoricians do, and I think, could we do better? Could we be more seriously and intellectually engaged with each other, at least some of the time? (Not all the time. I love fun posts and would never want to see those go away!)

See, for example, Crooked Timber's China Miéville Seminar. Several Crooked Timber posters read Miéville's novel Iron Council and wrote thoughtful essays on it. Links to the essays were all brought together in one post, and readers can read and leave comments under the essays, to which the authors of the essays respond. They even got Miéville himself to contribute an essay in response to the others. Just look at it; there's a lot of rich intellectual exchange going on. It's a beautiful thing.

See also the History Carnival, a cooperative effort to round up historical scholarship on weblogs. First there was a call for posts (also on the History Carnival site), then a blogger volunteers to collect that issue's submissions and post them to her weblog; the first issue is at Early Modern Notes. Again, wow. I'm impressed as all getout that people are networking scholarly writing like this.

I think we should do something like this. People who study communication and, in particular, communication online, are not yet making the most of the affordances provided by weblogs. So let's do this thing! Would you rather do a seminar or a carnival, or do you have other ideas?

Cross-posted at Kairosnews.

I'm teaching Oral Presentations in Professional Settings this semester and, while I'm in favor of having students post to course weblogs in most courses, I make an exception for speech courses. Requiring students to blog in a course focused so strongly on oral communication feels superfluous, like it's more for me than the students.* I am, however, using Drupal as a content management system for course materials this semester. I'm envisioning the course site primarily as a space for me to make announcements, provide online resources, and post notes from class (although the students are more than welcome to post if they like). Notice my list of links in the left sidebar; if there are any you think I should add, please let me know.

* That's really because I haven't thought of a good way to make blogging an integral part of the course. If you have ideas on how to do it in a speech course, I'd love to hear them!

The new issue of thirdspace has just come out. The TOC:

editorial

(Third)Waving not Drowning - Jenéa Tallentire & Kim Snowden

articles

Techno-Maternity: Rethinking the Possibilities of Reproductive Technologies
- Nadia Mahjouri

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Textual Bodies and the Rhetoric of Gender in Nineteenth-Century Critical Discourse
- Elizabeth Johnston

Veils, Poems, Guns, and Martyrs: Four Themes of Muslim Women’s Experiences in Shirin Neshat’s Photographic Work
- Nina Cichocki

Gendered Home and Space for the Diaspora: Gish Jen’s Typical American
- Lan Dong

essay

Why I Don’t Do Wine and Cheese: The Price of Admission for the Bi-Racial Subject in the Academy - Heather Tirado Gilligan

Mom’s the Word: Musings on Being Childless - Amy Leask

resources

A 12-Step Guide to Research and Writing: One Essay at a Time - Candis Steenbergen & Robyn Diner

Cristina Hanganu-Bresch is brilliant, and I want the world to know it. This post will embarrass her, but I don't care. You should all read all the essays posted on her research page, which include:

• Advertising Depression: The Case of Paxil
• People's House: The Building and Rebuilding of Romanian National Consciousness
• From Living to Symbolic Practice: The Romanian Community of St. Mary's Orthodox Church, St. Paul, Minnesota

Oh, and I forgot her preliminary exams. Read those as well. That is all.

Daisy, of the weblog Doctor Daisy, is back with a new blog. I don't know if she intends to stay there, but the University of South Florida's blogging system, writingblog.org, has been down for a while now (which makes me wonder what's going on WRT technical difficulties, and if they're going to waive the program-wide blogging requirement for the semester). At any rate, she's got a new blog at least for the time being, so spread the word.

Spread it!!

From Joan Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes A Day:

Because I was able to write quick, nearly finished first drafts, I had never found out how good a writer I might be. Revising my writing would mean exploring my limits, perhaps deciding to push them; but I would probably also have to give up my fantasy that by working hard enough, I could write like Virginia Woolf. The other terror, of making myself clear, was even greater. I responded by writing in a private language. When readers said they couldn't understand what I was talking about, I was both distressed and secretly relieved. As I grew older I found I had some things I wanted to say and have heard. At that point it became necessary for me to speak in the common tongue, and to revise.

To make your writing really clear is also to make yourself very vulnerable. If someone can find out from your writing what you believe, or how you feel, or where you stand, then you may be liked or disliked, agreed or disagreed with, congratulated or criticized for what you've written. As long as you stay hidden in opaque or obscure writing, you're safe. Don Graves put this dilemma succinctly: "You have to be willing to be a professional nudist if you're going to write." If you are having some trouble making yourself clear in writing, consider whether you really want to.

For real, though. My writing has been criticized for a number of reasons, but opacity is not one of them. In fact, over the years I've been praised for the clarity of my writing. For example, in my dissertation practicum last semester, one night when we were workshopping a draft of mine a student in the seminar began her remarks by saying, "First of all, I just have to say: Your writing is excruciatingly clear." :-) I still, however, like this passage and agree with it, but I also wonder if some people are afraid that if they do write clearly, they'll be accused of coming across as having a simple mind, not because of the thoughts they're expressing, rather because they're afraid their method of expression will read as unsophisticated dross lacking the appropriate complexity. I know I've had that fear.

Yesterday I attended a talk by Richard Graff*, part of a series of monthly "Rhetoric Parlor" talks given by faculty and graduate students in our department. It's an opportunity for us to find out more about the work our colleagues are doing and, for the presenters, an opportunity to present work in progress for feedback in a supportive environment. Richard's talk was titled "Field Study as Propaedeutic to Scholarship in Rhetoric: A Guided Tour of Greece," and most of it consisted of a laid-back presentation of photographs from his leave last fall, part of which he spent in Greece. He showed us photographs of the agora, the Acropolis, and the Pnyx from several different angles, and he showed an .avi file of a friend of his reading an excerpt of On the Crown on the platform at the Pnyx.

As he spoke, he pointed out the remarkable constraints imposed on the speakers by the space. The Pnyx is, he said, just a rocky hill where thousands of Athenians assembled to deliberate on matters of state: taxes, wars, etc. While anyone with the privileges necessary for citizenship was allowed to speak there, the acoustics of the space were such that the speaker would have been required to have a booming voice and powerful lungs. He suggested, too, that the speaker would have had to be well prepared with confident carriage. Such physical aspects of speaking were sometimes points of critique; he cited an example of someone who was criticized by (I think) Isocrates, who pointed out that the speaker had been trained as an actor and suggested that the speaker's ethos was questionable as a result: Maybe he's playing a part right now! Maybe he's in somebody's pocket. I appreciated hearing him connect the texts to his experience in the physical space. Oh, I should say here too that he's not only studying speech, but other literate practices as well. He showed us some photographs of ostraca and of tablets with inscriptions.