Rhetoric

HOW did I miss this book until now?! I'm disgusted with myself for being so behind the curve. Today I picked up Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World at the bookstore after, as I perused a display table, it jumped out at me amidst such fare as The Neocon Reader and Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant! I can already tell I'm probably not going to be that impressed with the book; the blurb on the inner flap of the dust jacket reads strikingly like just another technological conquest narrative:

Since HughHewitt.com was launched in early 2002, more than ten million people have visited his site (seven million just since the beginning of 2004). "Why does this visitor traffic matter?" asks Hewitt. "People's attention is up for grabs. If you depend on the steady trust of others, suddenly you have an audience waiting to hear from you." The race is underway, though, to gain mindspace and to be part of readers' habits. If your organization has not established itself in the blogosphere, now is the time to move ahead, but quickly!

From a business standpoint, your organization can benefit from developing a two-pronged approach to blogging by creating offensive and defensive plans. Not only do you need to blog internally to promote ideas and foster better communication among colleagues, but your company also should take advantage of the advertising and publicity benefits of blogging. Put yourself at the front of people's minds, and make sure you stay there. As for a defensive strategy, create a plan for addressing immediately even one negative blog, because in just a click of a mouse it will spread like wildfire, and you'll soon have one hundred negative blog references out there, and then a thousand or more. Blog shows you how to develop both.

With 4.5 million blogs in existence as of November 2004 -- and with that number expected to double in 2005 -- almost everyone will soon feel this phenomenon impacting their lives or organizations. With Hugh Hewitt's help, you can make sure that you advance in the blogosphere rather than retreat and lose ground in this information movement.

While I see the value of intranet blogging as organizational/business communication, I'll maintain in my dissertation that there are many bloggers who do it out of a genuine desire to engage in discussion with others rather than to "gain mindspace" as though it were a commodity (but hey, I suppose it is, actually. Plus, I'm sure Hewitt isn't trying to say that gaining mindspace is the only motivation.). Ugh, I shouldn't even say that having not yet read the book. At any rate, Hewitt seems willing to make strong claims about blogging's effect on general culture; the sub-subtitle is "Why you must know how the blogosphere is smashing the old media monopoly and giving individuals power in the marketplace of ideas." And Glenn Reynolds gives it high praise: "This is the best book on blogs yet, which isn't surprising since it's by a successful blogger who also knows a lot about communications and the world in general." Definitely a must-read for my dissertation research.

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!

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.

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.

Krista and Lauren point to a thoughtful post by Ayelet Waldman in response to Frances Kissling's essay Is There Life After Roe: How to Think About the Fetus. They both quote this passage:

To be relevant to the contemporary world, to be valid, the pro-choice movement must listen to pregnant women. We must listen to the woman and value her words. A woman who is unwillingly pregnant, whose pregnancy at, say, 10 weeks, is nothing more than a source of desperation, of misery, knows one truth and we must respect it and honor it. A pregnant woman whose 4 month-old fetus has Down’s Syndrome knows another truth, and we must respect that, too. A pregnant woman whose batterer kicks her in the stomach, trying to end her baby's life, knows another truth. Respecting the truths of these pregnant women allows us to deal in shades of grey, to liberate ourselves from the straitjacket of the black and white.

I agree, but these insights raise questions -- no answers here, just questions -- that I'd like to explore. Reading this post reminded me of the debates over Laci and Connor's law; pro-choice feminists struggled with whether or not to support it. Connor Peterson was a wanted child whose death was against his mother's will, and many pro-choice feminists wanted to support the law wholeheartedly, without apologies or qualms, because of that distinction, but were worried that doing so was an admission of the personhood of a fetus, a step back in the fight for reproductive rights. I think this dilemma is another illustration of a truth.

I wonder how shades-of-grey pro-choice rhetoric will look. I wonder if the "moral elite" will see "shades of grey" as some kind of admission of guilt. Waldman says of her second-trimester abortion: "I also believe that to end a pregnancy like mine is to kill a fetus. Kill. I use that word very consciously and specifically." Maybe I've been reading too much Lakoff, but when I saw this, I thought, "pro-life frame." But her feelings toward this fetus were, and still are, very nuanced, a complexity of multiple-truths moral thought of which most pregnant women are capable. She does think of aborting in this case as killing, but chose to have the abortion for several personal reasons. Her decision was "based on [her] own and [her] family’s needs and limitations." She writes, "I did not want to raise a genetically compromised child. I did not want my children to have to contend with the massive diversion of parental attention, and the consequences of being compelled to care for their brother after I died."

The following are a couple of half-jocular little progymnasmata I jotted down in my paper journal. I had thought about posting them here, but someone I trust told me people might be offended (hey, that's anti-intellectual!). Nevertheless, it is a joke, sort of. I have to post them now that I've read a recent post by Amanda in which she writes:

But well before the end of [MLA], I was thanking multiple deities that I will never again have to write in the machete mode of criticism. By this I mean the kind of literature scholarship that frames all its main points as a demolition of everyone else's main points, like mowing down those around you by swinging a machete around. In graduate school it didn't take me long to tire of academic writing in which the argument was preceded by hatchet-jobs on the prior work of Professors X, Y, and Z; I hated writing like that even more. Hearing it again from the lips of senior scholars, some of whom posed their entire talks as point-by-point refutations of someone else's article, reminded me of everything that put me off the idea of writing the sorts of things one gets tenure for. At one point, I had the odd feeling that I was watching a large group of people standing on a tiny patch of ground, elbowing and jostling each other for more space, all trying to outshout each other.