“[Drama] is an imitation of an action.” --- Aristotle, Poetics Part VI                                     One of my first jobs in theatre was to run a summer camp.  My purpose was to teach theatre skills to children as I led them in creating a play for public performance.  Because I felt uncomfortable with the act of casting---which necessarily involves telling some children that they are talented whereas others are not---I chose to have the children develop their own plays, tailored to their individual skills and interests.  While I knew that I would have to use a lot of improv, I intended to make writers of my preteen pupils.  I bought them notebooks and pencils and, at the end of our practices, I would ask them to write down the scenes that they had developed through their performance exercises. I found out, though, that they wrote nothing.  Because writing seemed such a chore, I stopped asking for it and, in so doing, found that their work suffered in no way:  they still created dramatic scenes with strong characters and conflict.  Their speeches were never the same from run to run, but the plots stayed consistent.  From this experience, I learned what Aristotle meant when he called drama the imitation of an action.             Given Aristotle’s bias for plot, when he writes about action, we can take him to be describing the enacted events of a play---which, in his view, should work together to form a coherent whole.  However, in drawing our attention first to actions instead of words, Aristotle suggests how drama differs substantially from what we might today call poetry or prose fiction.  Consider the relationship of words to actions implicit in the following quote:  The plot ought to be so constructed that, even without the aid of the eye, he who hears the tale told will thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place.  (Aristotle, Poetics Part XIV) Aristotle suggests that a good plot will move its listeners even if not witnessed, even in summary.  In other words, actions are not the same thing as language: the same actions can occur with different words.  Aristotle, then, suggests that words themselves are very much secondary in playwriting.  Instead, language is merely one way to accomplish action.  While some speeches have more finesse than others, as long as the action is accomplished, we still have drama.             The lesson that I draw is that, if we fully consider what it means to write actions and not words, then we radically change what writing is.  As my grade-school playwrights taught me, the act of choosing words is far less important than choosing what those words are meant to accomplish.  To use Aristotelian terms, perhaps we sometimes muddy drama’s essential manner of imitation by focusing on words in playwriting classes. Actions should also be part of the writer’s toolbox.  Choosing and ordering actions are key to dramatic writing.  From this perspective, acting itself can also be a form of writing. ... View more

One of my family’s traditions at Thanksgiving was to work our way around the table, with each of us saying what we were most grateful for. I remember one year, during the doldrums of being thirteen, when I snarkily remarked that I didn’t have anything at all to be thankful for, and stared down, or tried to stare down, my aggrieved parents. How wrong I was, of course—and in my heart of hearts I knew it: even during the darkest days of my life filled with grief and loss, I have known I had much to be thankful for. So Thanksgiving is a favorite holiday for me. I like to send cards or notes to people I’m especially thankful for, I contribute to Thanksgiving dinners for those in need (and deliver whenever I can), and I try to find some quiet time that day to reflect. This year I’ve been looking back to some of my earliest years in the profession—the mid-1970s—and to three people I was grateful for then, and now. One was my teacher and mentor, Edward P. J. Corbett, who taught me about rhetoric (or the received notion of rhetorical history at the time) and about composition (by a huge stroke of luck, I was in grad school when Ed was serving as the editor of CCC, and I read every submission along with him and helped put the issues together). But I am grateful for much more I learned from Ed: his enormous curiosity, generosity of spirit, sheer decency, and wry wit made a lasting impression on me, as did his devotion to students. Two others I am thinking about this year, with thanks, are Mina Shaughnessy and Geneva Smitherman. I was incredibly fortunate to be introduced to their work and to meet both of them during those years. In fact, I read Talkin' and Testifyin' and Errors and Expectations​ practically back to back, and I was electrified by what they—especially read together—had to teach me. It was their work that led to my study of “basic” writing and writers and to my dissertation. I often think of what more Mina could have contributed to our knowledge had she not left us so early (she died in 1978). Geneva—Dr. G, as I’ve heard students call her for years—is still teaching me lessons every year. My gratitude to both these scholars runs very deep. But this Thanksgiving, as always, I give thanks for my family and friends—and especially the students I’ve had the privilege of knowing over the course of nearly 50 years of teaching. As I have often said, students in all their vivid differences, their rich histories, and their willingness to learn along with me—these have been the gifts of a lifetime. For them I will always be giving thanks. So Happy Thanksgiving to all—and here’s wishing your day is deeply satisfying. ... View more

In the tradition of structuralist semiology, the sign, as an arbitrary combination of a signifier and a signified, has no grounding in reality but instead mediates reality—a fundamental axiom that underlies the late Jean Baudrillard's poststructuralist proposition that the modern era, which he refers to as a society of the Sign, has lost touch with reality and is instead situated in a hyperreality constituted by an endless "precession" of simulacra: signs without content. Given the prestige of poststructuralist semiology, I find it useful, from time to time, to explain how the practice of cultural semiotics (the distinction between "semiology"—the term Ferdinand de Saussure used for the science of the sign—and "semiotics"—the term C.S. Peirce used for his reality-grounded studies of signs—is deliberate here) differs from the poststructuralist view, especially in its position on the relationship between the sign and reality. To put it succinctly, from the point of view of cultural semiotics, human behavior is not only a grounding reality for semiotic meaning; it is semiotic in itself.  Every action, every behavior, every phenomenon, is a sign whose meaning becomes apparent when situated within a system of associations and differences.  In this sense, cultural semiotics is profoundly empirical: it takes the concrete stuff of experience as its ground for interpretation.  Unlike structural and poststructural semiology, cultural semiotics does not regard the realities of lived experience as mediated simulacra; instead, it begins with concrete experience and phenomena and abductively interprets their significance. Thus, what people do can often be more reliable semiotically than what they say (though speech acts, too, are acts).  This becomes especially apparent when considering the common gaps between public opinion polls and actual voting records.  As pollsters know, to their cost, people often respond to surveys in the way that they think the surveyor wants them to respond, or in ways that they think make them look best.  But their actions, in the privacy of a voting booth, can be dramatically at odds with their words.  Thus, while there is nothing to exclude conducting surveys as part of a semiotic analysis, surveys are not a necessary part of the interpretation. Over the years I have collected a number of examples of this discrepancy between what people say about their behavior and the more likely meanings of their actions.  Many years ago, to take one example, I noticed that my students were pretty much all wearing athletic shoes (Nikes for preference) with the shoelaces untied.  I asked them why, and they said, “because it is too much trouble to tie shoelaces.”  I knew, of course, what the real motivation was. This was in the era when urban street styles were being widely coopted by suburban youth, and my students were trying to look “cool” according to the fashion codes of the day.  But I joked with them, saying that if the reason they gave was the real reason, they’d be better off wearing loafers.  The fact that they were also wearing their baseball caps backwards at a time when this was also a highly visible component of the urban street code—a practice that actually had a very specific meaning that my students were completely unaware of—supported my interpretation that what was going on was really a part of a long history of white American youth adopting the cultural codes of black Americans in order to express their defiance of adult authority (“attitude” was the preferred descriptor at the time).  My very wealthy students (at that time) even went so far as to distribute specially made baseball caps in the school colors for the graduating senior class to wear at their commencement in order to express this defiance.  At the moment of the announcement that the class had graduated, they all turned their caps backwards in a parody of the mortar board tassel shifting ritual of traditional commencements.  Their class president had a particularly defiant look on his face at the time.   In short, it wasn’t what they said about their behavior that explained it; it was the meaning of their behavior as interpreted within a concrete system of associations and differences.  But the behavior was the grounding sign—a real world, not a hyperreal fantasia of mere simulacra. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Jeanne Bohannon (see end of post for bio). This post was guest edited by Samantha Crovatt, Jason Figueroa, Caitlin Hussey, Jordan Jackson, Ben Keefer, Eddie Kihara, and Xiao Li. Since my earlier post No Fear Gramm(r), I have become increasingly interested in unconventional grammar, especially reflecting on how writers use hashtag (#) grammar as a structure through which they achieve multiple rhetorical goals. My students and I decided this semester to explore four purposes of # grammar that writers can use towards rhetorical goals.  We chose Instagram as a platform for our project, which has turned into a digital cultural exchange with a school in Karachi! [As an aside, I must say how amazing my students are, as they earned their undergraduate research certifications through CITI training and our university's IRB office]. Context for Assignment My digital writing majors are currently nearing the end of a semester in which they have been challenged to re/think and re/vision their uses of grammar in digital spaces.  We crowd-sourced an idea that integrates the Instagram social media platform with learning how the hashtag (#) can be used to attain the following goals for effective hashtag usage.  For a unique spin on the assignment, we initiated an Instagram exchange with the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, Pakistan, which is a school our university has an existing exchange program with.  We framed our Instagram project through the following four rhetorical purposes of # grammar. Searchability: using # to find specific posts and curate posts Shared Meaning: using # to negotiate meanings for visuals & text Storytelling: using # to connect multiple visuals & text in a narrative Subversion: using # to make a satirical or social comment about visuals & text Measurable Learning Objectives for the Assignment Combine visual and textual elements with # grammar to tell a story Synthesize content-meaning through collaborative, dialogic writing Create shared meaning in social media spaces for a specific audience Background Reading for Students and Instructors Acts of reading and viewing visual texts are ongoing processes for attaining learning goals in dialogic, digital writing assignments. Below, I have listed a few foundational texts. You will no doubt have your own to enrich this list. The St. Martin's Handbook: Ch. 18, Communicating in Other Media; Ch. 27, Writing to the World The Everyday Writer: Ch. 24, Communicating in Other Media; Ch. 26, Writing to the World Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks: “At a Glance: Guidelines for Creating an Online Text” Writing in Action: Ch. 4, A Writer’s Choices; Ch. 17, Writing to the World EasyWriter: Sections 1c-1g in Ch.1, A Writer’s Choices Assignment Guidelines We crowd-sourced the following task list.  We would encourage other instructors and students to do the same to make your project unique to your class. Divide into groups of writers, video/audio recorders, and photographers.  Solicit volunteers for Instagram administrators. Create and maintain one Instagram "public account," to which all students will contribute.  The Instagram account is managed by class Instagram administrators. Post images and videos based on an overarching theme (ours is “Haunted Home”), using hashtags for searchability, shared meaning, and storytelling. We post several images each week while our colleagues at Indus Valley School do the same. Research trending hashtags on Instagram and other social media platforms. Use popular hashtags that relate to the overarching theme to generate followers and re-posts on Instagram. Sites such as Hashtagify.me and Top-hashtags.com are two examples of great resources for (#) hashtag research. Provide feedback and peer review on hashtag grammar and narrative structure to your colleagues (ours were at Indus Valley). Your colleagues/collaborators will then provide feedback and peer review on visual elements for our posts. From our group: "We invite instructors and students to modify our assignment instructions and let us know how your project goes. We would be glad to work with you." Formative Assignment Reflection We are still working through our Instagram cultural exchange. Over the next several weeks, we will continue to post our "Haunted Home" thematic visuals, complemented by text and #grammar.  We invite you to follow our project on Instagram: KSUculturecanvas Reflections on Democratic Learning from Our Group As a cultural exchange project, our group had the opportunity to collaborate internationally through a social media platform that allowed for a democratic and organic brainstorming process. This became a complex, multi-layered group assignment that encouraged creativity and engagement through its involvement that avoided becoming overbearing and intimidating. It made for a stunning Instagram narrative through images and text. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! Jeanne Law Bohannon is an Assistant Professor of English in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) department at Kennesaw State University. She believes in creating democratic learning spaces, where students become stakeholders in their own rhetorical growth through authentic engagement in class communities. Her research interests include evaluating digital literacies, critical pedagogies, and New Media theory; performing feminist rhetorical recoveries; and growing informed and empowered student scholars. Reach Jeanne at: jeanne_bohannon@kennesaw.edu and www.rhetoricmatters.or ... View more

The final writing assignment, in my experience, needs to reflect the reality of the many competing concerns that occupy students’ time at the end of the term. Because these concerns hold potential to interfere with the writing process, I want to work with students to adapt their writing processes to facilitate successful completion of the course. Students’ concerns may be played out publicly in national or international news events or catastrophes, or perhaps more privately in the experiences of students’ everyday lives. Indeed, no matter how attentive we are as teachers, the issues our students face may remain invisible to us. What we perceive as boredom, hostility, inattention, or hyperactivity may in fact be expressions of anxiety, hunger, exhaustion, or frustration.   For these reasons, according to the assignment sequence posted here on Bedford Bits in July, I intended the final writing assignment to focus on “resilience for first-year students nearing the end of their first semester in college.” I had tried to design the final assignment with a more personal focus. Nonetheless, in my own classroom, students remained uncertain how, and especially why, to claim ownership of this assignment. The world has transformed many times over in the four months since I offered that assignment sequence in my syllabus and as a Bits post. Now, in November, the students felt restless. Even as we worked diligently on textual analysis, the students asked for a final writing project that would allow them to engage more directly with their own experiences and opinions. Although I suggested ideas for including personal experience and opinion as supplements for supporting evidence, the first two assignments relied mainly on close and careful comprehension of and engagement with particular texts for supporting examples and analysis. So in class, we discussed how and why students needed to include references in their final assignment: to reach out to the audience with academic supporting evidence. I assigned the readings linked to this assignment, two brief articles on resilience research and public policy by Bari Walsh, published in the Harvard Graduate School of Education Newsletter, for exactly this purpose. In summarizing the research, Walsh suggests that: “Resilience can be built; it’s not an innate trait or a resource that can be used up.” To open the conversation, I composed an example of how to connect the resilience research to recent current events. While I began with the illustration of the weeping Eiffel Tower, the students recommended that I add the video of a father and his young son discussing the aftermath of the attacks. Through the revision and our discussion of the multimedia texts, we found an opportunity to push beyond how to cite sources, and to began to approach why resilience matters. Here is the revised example: ​ At the end of this long semester, I look forward to reading the students’ final writing assignments, and to learning the many perspectives that students bring to fostering resilience. [Image source: Astrapi Attentats de Paris : les bons mots pour expliquer aux enfants - Astrapi ] ... View more

Collin College’s Third Annual Trends in Teaching Composition Conference brought teachers of writing from neighboring campuses together in late October, and I had the honor of spending a day with them. My visit actually began the day before, when I attended a graduate seminar in composition theory at Texas Christian and, following the class, a reading group discussion/potluck dinner. I’ve always enjoyed and benefitted from such occasions (and held many at my home over the years), but since I’ve “retired,” I especially savor these times, full of camaraderie, good will, fellowship, and talk about teaching and about students: Teachers enjoying and sharing and learning from one another. These sessions took me back to some of my earliest experiences in teaching graduate courses to new teachers, when I had an opportunity to build an intellectual and personal community that nurtured and shared ideas. Looking back over the years, I can see that these communities inspired a great deal of good research and scholarship as well as lasting friendships. I also see that such communities seem particularly characteristic of the field of rhetoric and writing studies. So now when I get to join one of these groups, even for a day, it feels very much like going home. At the reading group, I soaked up the atmosphere (as well as the great food!), and listened to the ebb and flow of conversation (we were talking about an essay I had co-written about students in the Stanford Study of Writing) swirling around me about research in pursuit of better teaching and learning. Indeed, it felt like home. Joining the conference at Collin College the next day continued a celebration of the best goals of our field. The conference’s theme was on argument, and I got to share my thoughts on the subject (and you know I have LOTS of them!) and then join in a large-group discussion of how best to teach argument today—and, indeed, why we need to teach it. For me, helping students engage successfully in the world of argument—that is to say, in the world we currently inhabit—offers them a way to become active and productive participants in that world, to learn to listen to and respect other viewpoints, to see that their voices are always in response to the voices of others, and to enter the global and endless conversation of humankind. I view argument not as a form or even a genre, but rather as a way of being in the world. We argue to learn what we think and believe, to understand our relationship to other people as well as to ideas, to make the best decisions we can about inevitably complex and difficult issues, and to build and sustain networks of exploration and understanding. We teach argument so that students can and will pursue these same goals. And what a feast of exchanges the conference provided. In a panel on Teaching Comics, scholars talked about how to argue for the inclusion of comics in our curricula and presented brilliant activities and assignments used in their own classes. In another panel, students and faculty from Texas State explored “Strategies for Teaching Argument and Persuasion in Relation to Latin@ Literary and Cultural Spheres,” reminding us that modes and ways of arguing differ from culture to culture and that we still have a lot to learn by paying very close attention to the writing and reading strategies of all our students, including those who attend Hispanic serving colleges and universities. So it’s true: I love writing teachers and being with such teachers. With teachers learning from and sharing their wisdom and successes, their missteps and failures, with each other. Yes, I know that higher education is under attack from all sides, that working conditions for teachers of writing are in many places disgraceful, and that the work we do can be bone-wearying. But I also know that we have been meeting these challenges for longer than I can remember, and doing so with grace and good will and persistence. ... View more

This post originally appeared on October 23, 2012. Some of you may have noticed that my author bio reveals that I’ve recently changed my institutional affiliation—I have left Chowan University in North Carolina and accepted a position teaching creative writing and literature at my alma mater, St. Lawrence University in upstate New York.  I’ve written before (though not for this blog) about my undergraduate years and the vital role that my professors played in turning me into the writer and thinker I am today, so you can probably understand that I’m quite excited to be back, teaching alongside the scholars and artists who inspired me when I was an 18-year-old, flannel-clad Gen-Xer who had a vague idea that he wanted to be a writer, but didn’t quite know how he was going to get there. I’ve been thinking a lot about 18-year-old Bradley these past few weeks.  Part of me almost expects to run into him, walking across the quad or coming out of the dining hall.  Part of me feels like I already have run into him—or run into his doppelganger from 2012, at any rate.  I’m teaching two creative writing classes and one literature class this semester, and these students are—for the most part—really enthusiastic about what they’re reading and writing.  I’ve taught thoughtful and ambitious students before, of course, but never so many at one time.  So it’s been an exhilarating experience. One thing I’ve noticed about the undergraduate writers I’m teaching this semester is that many of them seem savvier about things like publishing opportunities and grad school programs than I was when I studied here.  I’ll be giving a talk later this semester to the students who work on the campus literary magazine, and one thing that the student who organized the talk told me they’d definitely be interested in hearing about was how I got editors to pay attention to my work, and what advice I have to give about getting creative work published. On the one hand, I admire these students for their work ethic and foresight.  It didn’t really occur to me until my senior year that I might try to publish some of the stories and essays I’d been writing, and even then, I didn’t actually bother buying envelopes or printing out the stuff I had on my hard drive.  Playing Mortal Kombat on my roommate’s Sega Genesis seemed like a much more productive use of my time.  These students know about literary magazines and are familiar with small presses, and I think that’s really cool.  They know stuff about their contemporary literature scene that I didn’t know about mine when I graduated 13 years ago.  I’m pleased to see that—it suggests a dedication to reading and knowing good creative work, and who knows?  Such knowledge among the younger generation might be enough to save our literary culture. At the same time, though, I worry a little bit about this focus on publishing.  I’m concerned that the students have sort of picked up on and internalized the “publish or perish” mentality that their professors are working under.  If you want to call yourself a writer, this mentality insists, you’ve got to get stuff published.  Submit to a magazine.  Send query letters to agents.  Most importantly, write the kind of stuff that other people want to read. Of course, it’s important for student writers to be mindful of audience, but I fear that this focus on publishing and “getting the work out there” could be bad for their development.  We don’t get too many opportunities in life to just do what we want to do, to “chase our muse”, if you want to be all writer-ly and precious about it.  When I think back at my own undergraduate writing, most of it was probably pretty terrible, but it was still stuff I was excited about, and it represented my very best attempts at articulating stuff that mattered to me.  I wrote a short story about a barfly whose lost love—dead for decades—returned to him one dark and stormy night.  I wrote a screenplay about love and jealousy and murder.  I wrote a play that absolutely wasn’t about my break-up with my college girlfriend the summer before our senior year (okay—it kinda was; don’t tell her, though).  I wrote an essay about feeling humbled when I saw the Aurora Borealis on the university’s golf course late one night.  I wrote a comic book script about an amnesiac superhero who wound up owning a comic book store in upstate New York.  I wrote several poorly-conceived performance art pieces.  The less said about them, the better. I doubt I’m ever going to revisit these pieces, or write anything like the again.  Although I have been dabbling in fiction lately, I remain pretty committed to creative nonfiction forms—particularly the essay.  But I’m glad I had the experience of spending those years trying out different things, experimenting with style while searching for my own voice.  I’m afraid if I had known that what I was working on—and pouring a ton of effort into—was ultimately “un-publishable,” I might not have bothered.  And that would have been terrible for my writing. I finished my undergraduate career at St. Lawrence during the summer of 1999, after taking some time off due to health problems.  I spent a lot of that summer hanging out and talking with Bob Cowser, who at the time was a young new creative nonfiction professor and who, over the years, has become a close friend and valued mentor.  By that point, I’d seen enough of the world beyond college that I knew I had to think more seriously about the future if I wanted to be a writer.  One afternoon, after he had given me some positive feedback on an essay I’d shown him, I asked, “Do you have any thoughts on where I should send it?” “Why?” he asked. I was surprised.  By that point, I knew I was going on to grad school.  And I knew that if I wanted to be a Real Writer, I would need to publish stuff. “You’re 23-years-old,” he told me.  “You have your entire life and career ahead of you.  Right now, you don’t need to worry about publishing—you need to worry about honing your craft and becoming a better writer.  Seriously, man—give it two years.  Start sending stuff out when you’re 25.  In the meantime, work on getting better.  You probably could start publishing now in smaller magazines—you’re good enough.  But if you wait and continue to get better, you can make sure that, years from now, you can be proud of every publication you list on your CV.” At the time, that advice kind of stung.  In hindsight, though, I think it’s the most valuable advice Bob could have possibly given.  The truth is, I’m glad some of those early attempts didn’t wind up published for all the world to see.  They were important for my development, but they weren’t fully-formed pieces that I could really take pride in.  As it happened, I didn’t really start publishing until I was 27, but the stuff I’ve published since then has been stuff that I’m pleased to call my own. I think, when I talk to those student writers in November, I’ll tell them about cover letters, and reading the magazines they want to send stuff to, and all that.  But I’m also going to give them the same advice Bob gave me.  “Slow down.  Try different things.  Write like you have another 50 or 60 years to worry about publishing.  The work that results may not be brilliant, and it may not be publishable, but you’ll have learned something about your own style, and the voice you find might be your own.” What advice do you have for student writers anxious to get started with their careers setting the world on fire with their prose or verse? ... View more

When I was first trained to teach first-year, introductory composition at the University of Michigan in the late 70s, one of the encouraged class activities asked the instructor to work at the board and lead the class in a discussion contrasting Spoken Language with Written Language. It was always a productive conversation with the class, since students could come up with important differences in sentence and discourse structure, vocabulary and usage. They could raise issues of register, formality, permanence, intimacy and immediacy, considering how language could fit a particular situation, a notion at the heart of rhetorical analysis. We would urge students to be conscious of the differences between speaking and writing, and to move toward the more formal control characteristic of academic writing and Standard English. In the years since, the emerging hybrid genres of electronic communication blur what once seemed fairly comfortable distinctions cast in the useful polarity of speaking vs. writing. Is email more like speaking or writing? What about messaging or Twitter? They have a certain permanence, but what about Snapchat? What about recorded conversations or online meetings or podcasts? What about video? Differences among hybrid media genres are of pressing concern. Hillary Clinton cannot shake the accusations of mismanaging her email communications, but she can be forced to surrender all the email that was not effectively deleted. Email is a written record and therefore discoverable. Would instant messaging, or Skyping, or Snapchatting have the same qualities? Face-to-conversations still provide some measure of confidentiality, but what about phone conversations? Could she have managed her communication, keeping private or confidential or top secret communications all contained within appropriate media? What are the differences among media, the affordabilities and the risks, and how do we choose what to use? From the current vantage point, it is ironic that Nixon got into trouble by choosing to tape oral conversations, while Clinton gets into trouble by trying to hide written conversations. Over the years, I have urged students in business communication classes to choose carefully when to write and when to speak, what to put in an email and what to convey F2F. But we now see an explosion of video coverage and reportage of supposedly spoken messages. Police are caught by lapel cameras and recorders; domestic abusers and homophobes are captured on phone cameras. Everyone is viewed by security cameras, so you can’t even rob a bank anymore without your face being shown on the news. As I write, we have a wave of resignations at the University of Missouri for things people said that were captured and repeated:  a command to bring in some “muscle” to remove video reporters from a campus demonstration site and an email to class about standing up to hatred resulted in the resignations of two professors. The president and chancellor both resigned, more for what they did not say (and do) about campus climate than for what they did say. So even being silent or too quiet can bring down top administrators. We can’t put two columns on the board anymore, contrasting speech and writing. But we can raise awareness of what happens in a media-saturated environment, where it seems that very few communication events are not recorded in some form, and where intended audiences are often not identical with broad, unintended audiences and consequences. As we continue to move toward teaching diverse, hybrid, multimodal genres, we can engage students with thinking about when to communicate, using what technologies, always anticipating how messages will often escape our control. That is still what rhetoric is about. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

Highlighting alone = ineffective learning It's no longer a secret that highlighting alone (as opposed to highlighting as part of a note-taking strategy) is one of the least effective ways for students to learn. John Grohol, in an article that looks at research on effective student study strategies, pegs the findings on highlighting this way: However, writing as part of reading does lead to better reading comprehension and learning. In a 2010 Carnegie Corporation Report, “Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading,” Steve Graham and Michael Hebert, after a review  of the research, write, “The evidence shows that having students write about the material they read does enhance their reading abilities. In fact, fifty-seven out of sixty-one outcomes (93 percent) were positive, indicating a consistent and positive effect for writing about what is read” (page 13). So we can take two things from this research: one, writing while reading can help learning; two, it needs to be the right kind of writing done the right way (for example, summaries aren't right for all occasions). In print, there are two common ways to write while reading. One is to write in the margins of the text being read. the other is an option that gives readers more room to think: writing in a notebook (or reading journal, or research log, or index card, to name other variations.) Classic annotation occurs in whatever space the margin allows. Notebooks give writers more room than margins. Digital tools, like those found in LaunchPad, the Macmillan Learning platform the following images come from, combine margin annotations with the expanded thinking space notebooks offer. And then these tools sometimes go one step further. They offer the option to share annotations and notes, turning annotations into discussions. Consider the following: A harmonious blend of highlighting, annotation, and note-taking. As you can see in the image above, electronic tools allow annotations in the margins, but with no limit to how much one can write. In the example above, the highlight draws attention to the part of the text the note addresses, putting the highlight in service of annotation. The same tool can be used by the instructor to guide student responses, essentially turning the annotation tool into a shared notes, or, if preferred a discussion. By moving conversation to the margins of assigned text -- including text an instructor adds on their own -- it is easier to require students to base comments and analysis on evidence from the text.  For novice readers, or readers encountering new ideas for the first time, seeing what others think, gleaning a classmate's take, can create an experience similar to a study group or academic book club, as shown below. When an instructor offers a prompt, students can reply to it and their annotations and notes can be shared. By kicking off the kind of activity shown above, where students can reply to an instructor written note, instructors can do a number of things: Write prompts that guide students to particular annotation strategies. Foster rhetorical reading skills. Use groups to set up study group discussions in text. Allow students to see how classmates interpret or engage with assigned texts, fostering learning from classmates. ... View more

Some of the best moments I experience as a composition instructor come when my students discover that texts, as rhetorical events, can offer significant insights into the values, beliefs, and/or desires of their target audiences. When these moments of recognition occur, I’m reminded just how empowering a discovery this can be for many of my students who, although often quite adept at reading texts for information, have rarely been asked to approach texts rhetorically. Fostering a more sophisticated audience-based rhetorical awareness, then, is among my chief aims as a first-year writing instructor. This kind of awareness is precisely what I believe students are able to transfer from one rhetorical context to another. Like many instructors, though, I often find myself bound up in the day-to-day processes of supporting students’ production of a review of scholarship or an annotated bibliography or any number of other process-level tasks. During these periods, my focus as an instructor sometimes drifts from the higher-level concern for students’ developing rhetorical awareness to the lower-level, though obviously still important, activity of text production. My response has been to try to ensure that my students are engaged in rhetorical analysis and reflection activities at critical moments throughout my course: Beginnings: The Public Audience I usually begin my first-year writing course with a review of some of the basic principles of rhetoric. One of the initial activities I assign asks students to identify a specific target audience and to construct a product advertisement aimed at moving their selected audience to “buy” a product. An important stage in the process of completing this project is the analysis of audience. To be successful in the project, students must identify the values, beliefs, and/or desires of their target audience and make appropriate decisions about the elements of their advertisement in light of their analyses. My students have produced hand-drawn ads, posters, and even short filmic texts in response to this assignment, and I have them present their ads to the class as a whole. Students explore the content and design features of their advertisements in light of their understanding of their targeted audiences as part of these presentations. In the Middle: The Academic Audience The ad construction project sets the stage for the audience-based rhetorical analysis activities and projects that continue throughout the “heart” of my course, which is comprised of a series of units that explore the literate practices of various academic domains—the social sciences, the humanities, etc. In my natural sciences unit, for instance, I have students produce a formal rhetorical analysis​ of a professional academic journal article. My goals for this project are for students to (1) demonstrate their abilities to notice salient rhetorical/conventional features of natural science writing and (2) offer rationales for those features that are grounded in their understanding of the values, beliefs, and/or desires of the authors’ target audience. In another assignment, I ask students to translate a scholarly article​ for a popular audience. Students, again, must analyze an audience carefully and make appropriate decisions about how their text should be crafted to best serve the needs of that audience. Endings: Self-Reflection One of the final writing assignments my students complete is a rhetorical analysis of their own writing​. My students choose a text (representing a specific disciplinary genre) they’ve produced as part of my class during the semester, and they analyze that text in light of the values, beliefs, and/or desires of the text’s target audience. Strategically placing these kinds of activities and projects throughout my course helps to ensure that my students are able to move from analyzing audiences to creating texts that respond appropriately to the needs of those audiences in various contexts. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

Once again, I begin with a billboard. As usual, I encountered this promotion for Vin Diesel's latest on my drive to work, and once again I found a treasure trove of cultural information.  It all lies in the title of the movie—The Last Witch Hunter— and the catchy come-on that movies always seem to use to get you into the theaters: "Live Forever.  Hunt Forever."  That's just about all we need. Let's begin with the title. My first impression was one of surprise that in the era of Wicked and Wicca a movie would still be targeting witches as the objects of a manhunt (I use the word "manhunt" quite deliberately here), for with her traditional feminine identification, the witch would have seemed to be a figure that Hollywood no longer slated for demonization and destruction (I leave out of this analysis the connotation of "witch hunts" in the wake of the McCarthy era).  So, to give the movie the benefit of the doubt, I decided that maybe it was using the word "witch" in a genderless manner, including warlocks (the traditional male witch) within its range of reference, and went online to research its plot. It turns out that my first impression was correct, however.  This is a movie about an age-old war against a very female witch (who, not so incidentally, is portrayed by actress Julie Engelbrecht, who, again not so incidentally, just happens to represent central casting's paradigmatic image of blonde feminine pulchritude), who has been plotting to destroy humanity for about eight hundred years.  Never mind the fact that she has a male demon (the not so very subtly named "Belial") in her employ: what matters is that what we have here is a beautiful blonde woman cast in the hero's gun sights.  And here is where cultural signifier number one lies. Can you spell "male panic"?  I can't help but associate a storyline of this type with Basic Instinct, whose beautiful blonde villain just happens to have a witch as her mentor.  Nor can I help associating it with the recent Yik Yak threat at Fresno State University to "take a headshot at a hot blonde" in revenge (apparently) for favors not received, not to mention Elliott Rodgers's killing spree outside a UC Santa Barbara sorority last year, motivated by a similar resentment.  In other words, it appears that Hollywood hasn't gotten the message yet: that demonizing attractive women isn't, let's say, doing anything to tamp down the flames of a violent misogyny that is not only a worldwide scourge but an especial problem on America's university campuses today. So, a big "F" for gender sensitivity for The Last Witch Hunter, and the fact that the movie is doing quite well at the box office is a sign that such insensitivity still pays.  Do we see a vicious circle here? Now to cultural signifier number two, which (witch?) appears in the catchy come-on: "live forever."  A plot check reveals that, indeed, the movie is all tied up with various kinds of dark immortality, and this, too, is meaningful when situated in a system of associations and differences. To begin with, making immortality central to a storyline is nothing new in the movies (consider It's A Wonderful Life, complete with guardian angel).  The 1990s was a particularly fertile era for benign immortals—from Michael, to What Dreams May Come, to TV's Touched By an Angel—but at the same time, another immortal, the vampire, was also rising to prominence then (remember Buffy?), and by the early 2000s vampires had pretty much driven the angels onto the lesser stage of Victoria's Secret, only to be (partially) displaced themselves by an even nastier variety of immortal: the walking dead (aka zombies). The difference between the angelic immortal and the demonic one is the kind of difference that points to cultural significance.  Angels tend to be in the ascendant when a society is feeling good about things; demons serve as metaphors for all kinds of social anxieties (it was no accident, for example, that the Cold War-tormented 1950s saw so many monster movies).  So the fact that the immortal demon is getting most of the popular cultural play right now is meaningful.  This turn to the dark side is especially evident in the way that George R.R. Martin has effectively turned J.R.R. Tolkien upside down, transforming the ultimately green and good Middle Earth into the grey and grim Westeros.  A generation that once wrote "Frodo Lives!" on subway station walls has been succeeded by one whose imagination is casting dark shadows upon a bloody ground—a not very surprising reaction to a world overshadowed by the aftermath of the Great Recession and the 9/11 terror attacks. But there is still more to the analysis, for there is also the full bore fascination with immortality as such to consider, the endless parade of movie characters who do not die, or, when they do, manage to come back to life—yeah, I know that Tolkien did this too with Gandalf, probably getting the idea from Conan Doyle, who once brought Sherlock Holmes, after a fall into an abyss, back to life, too—but it is getting excessive.  This is a different kind of immortality from that of, say, What Dreams May Come, where the afterlife takes place in an afterworld which is wholly different from the one you lived in before you died.  Somebody else is in charge in that afterworld, and the rules are different.  In the current image of immortality, by contrast, you come back to life within this world, the ordinary one, and that may be a dangerous fantasy.  Because I can't help but think again here of those campus killers who post up a grotesque kind of posthumous "survival" on the Internet before going out on what are often conceived as suicide missions.  One has to wonder whether these killers really believe that they are going to die, or whether, deep down, they believe that they will somehow survive (or return) to enjoy their sudden "fame." I don't know.  But I do rather wish that popular culture wouldn't keep encouraging such fantasies.  I don't see it doing any good. Tags: cultural semiotics, The Last Witch Hunter, fantasy, campus shootings, misogyny, popular culture, current events ... View more

All eyes have been on Missouri this week. In fact, Missouri has been on my mind a lot, certainly since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August of last year. But for the last few weeks, tensions at the state’s flagship University of Missouri have intensified as African American students reported on and protested a series of racist incidents, leading to Jonathan Butler’s hunger strike and eventually a walk-out of some 30 Missouri football players, a move supported by their coach. One result: on November 9, the University’s President and Chancellor both resigned, as the students demanded. Like most of you, I’ve been following these events with growing concern, and I’ve thought a lot about the combination of speaking, writing, and acting/performing that characterized the student protest—a rhetorical situation played out on the national stage. Flash back for a moment to 1968, to the Black Power movement, to the Mexican Olympics, and to John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s raised fists on that Olympic medal platform, raised fists that represented the frustrations of African Americans as well as Black pride. Those readers who were alive at the time will remember the uproar that followed, the media coverage of this event. Those readers may also recall that in the aftermath of that event, Edward P. J. Corbett published “The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist” (CCC 20 [December 1969]). He opened this essay with a reference to Zeno, who used the metaphor of the hand in discussing various relationships between knowledge and power. Corbett notes that by the Renaissance, Zeno’s “closed fist” had become associated with the spare, tight, rational discourse of logic, while the “open hand” was linked to the “relaxed, expansive” discourse of rhetoric. In the turbulent 1960s, Corbett suggested, we should perhaps see the open hand as representing the reasoned, sustained discussion of issues and the closed fist as representing discursive activity that “seeks to carry its point by non-rational, non-sequential, often nonverbal, frequently provocative means” associated with the Black Power movement. Corbett went on to acknowledge that such “provocative” activity is sometimes called for, so he does not reject such rhetorical action out of hand. But it’s clear that he hopes for a return to what he calls the “open hand” of rationality. Well, that essay was published nearly fifty years ago, and today it seems in some important ways shortsighted, especially in terms of the material lives of African Americans and their ongoing demands for equality. But I think Corbett’s essay and the metaphor of its title are worth recalling today, not only because 46 years on we are still plagued by the effects of racial divide, but also because the open hand and closed fist no longer seem a supportable binary, with rationality on one side and non-rational emotionality on the other. We now know, for instance, that human beings do not make most decisions based on reason and rationality, that emotion plays a crucial role in human action (and that it is distributed throughout the body, brain included). We know that the hegemony of the written word is challenged by the rise of aurality/orality, of the embodied, performed word. And we know that ethical and effective persuasion today calls for recognition of this knowledge and for imaginative combinations of discursive acts. We have seen such combinations at work on the Mizzou campus: the letters of protest; the signs, T-shirts, and placards; the spoken, chanted, shouted words of student protesters; the embodied argument of Jonathan Butler’s hunger strike; the collective action of football players and coach. Were we to return to the metaphoric binary, we might see President Wolfe as the closed fist, shut down, holding tight, not responding, and the students as engaging more in the “expansive” rhetoric of the open hand. But I really don’t think the binary holds: what we saw on the Missouri campus was a situation that required a combination of moves and strategies as well as an understanding of kairos, a seizing of the opportune moment. Professor Corbett was right that the grounds of argument and argumentation have shifted. The shift is obvious in the lessons from Missouri as well as in arenas stretching from public debate to academic discourse. At the end of his essay, Corbett quotes from Robert Scott and Wayne Brockriede’s The Rhetoric of Black Power: “Black Power, no matter what shapes it assumes in the next few years, will remain vital as one starting point for the study of the American ethos which is now developing. . . .” The powerful Black Lives Matter movement—now worldwide—and the events at the University of Missouri remind us that teachers of writing and rhetoric have an obligation to study “the American ethos” and the way that ethos is manifesting itself today, on campuses across the country and on the world’s digital stage. We have an obligation to engage our students in the study of this ethos  and these ongoing shifts in argumentation as well as to help them consider how, when, and where they will engage in such ethical argumentation—speaking, writing, acting, performing—in their own lives. ... View more

This post originally appeared on 10/24/12. In addition to teaching literature and writing courses, every fall I teach a course that develops skills for student success.  Recently we worked on note-taking. The exercise I used reminded me that when we give lectures, we need to make sure that our students connect with the material we’re presenting. The exercise is this: Students watch a brief video lecture (I like Liz Coleman’s TED talk from a few years ago, “Call to Reinvent Liberal Arts Education”); they take notes and then compare and discuss their notes.  However, what I discovered recently is that when my students watched Coleman’s brief lecture (18 minutes!) they began to get tired and stopped paying attention, the longer the talk went on. This really defeated the purpose of watching Coleman’s lecture, especially because she presents her most essential points toward the end of her talk. My students missed the big point.  They got information, but they couldn’t do with it what they needed to. This experience lead me back to a workshop I went to this summer at the Foundation for Critical Thinking’s annual conference.  One of the points made by Linda Elder, a workshop facilitator, was that rather than asking students to engage with large portions of content over long periods of time, we should have them engage with it several times over a class period.  As a rule of thumb, she suggests that when lecturing, we should try to break every 5 to 10 minutes to give students a way to directly and individually connect with the material. The result should be an engaged lecture and discussion—not a situation where we simply throw out a question for the class to answer (which is something many of us do by default).  That method can work, but only when students pay attention and are already willing to participate in class. I think a good solution to getting students to connect with the content of a lecture is to have them write briefly about what they’ve heard (as in a 1-minute essay), or to make a list of the major points of the talk, or to simply summarize for a neighbor what they learned from the lecture.  To some degree these requirements may seem artificial, but I think they can be quite useful. On the one hand, we need to teach students how to be better note-takers – and we should give them clues as to what it is that’s important in our lectures.  On the other hand, our students may not have the attention spans we want them to have (also, we might not have the attention spans we want them to have). Most importantly, though, there are ways to get our students engaged with our lectures. By having them respond to short writing prompts, to compose a focused list of the main ideas of the talk, or to talk briefly with a neighbor, we can encourage every student in the class –not just the ones who are already interested– to engage with course content. ... View more

Today’s guest blogger is Kim Haimes-Korn (see end of post for bio). Americans in particular should study their popular arts the better to understand themselves. The media inform their environment, make suggestions about ways to view themselves, provide role models from infancy through old age, give information and news as it happens, provide education, influence their opinions, and open up opportunities for creative expression. Culture emanates from society, voices its hopes and aspirations, quells it fears and insecurities, and draws on the mythic consciousness of an entire civilization or race. It is an integral part of life and a permanent record of what we believe and are. While future historians will find the accumulated popular culture invaluable, the mirror is there for us to look into immediately. --from Handbook of American Popular Culture, M. Thomas Inge, ed. (1989) For this project students create their own knowledge through a collaborative learning project in which they research an ideology that influences thought and behavior in our culture through rhetoric and multimodal artifacts. The project draws on classical notions of the "commonplaces" and upon a more modern term, "ideology," which Sharon Crowley defines:             Ideologies are bodies of beliefs, doctrines, familiar ways of thinking that are characteristic of a group or a culture. They can be economic, ethical, political, philosophical, or religious (76). Group members work together to choose an ideology that is somehow reflected in images, words, things, and behaviors – the rhetoric – of our culture. Students examine culture in light of the "language, myths, rituals, life-styles, establishments which are all symbolic forms for the expression of the attitudes and values of society" (Inge xxv). One of the interesting concepts related to ideologies is that they are often assumed true even if they are not actually true in people’s lives. The project asks students to go beyond general assumptions and explore multiple layers of their ideology through rhetoric – including visual rhetoric – and create their own truths and observations. In Class - Invention and Brainstorming: Understanding Ideologies Defining:First I present definitions and examples of ideologies in our culture. For example, we might discuss the ideology of convenience and have students connect to all the artifacts that somehow manifest that ideology – ATMs, online education, fast food, online shopping, phones, computers, credit cards, etc. This helps students understand the differences between ideologies and artifacts and teaches them how to engage their analytic lenses. Looking Back:Then, I present some advertisements and magazine samples from other eras as it is easier to find examples and to analyze past cultural moments without the close proximity of our current culture. For example, I often show this Camel ad (right) from Popular Screen Magazine (1954) in which an Olympic figure skater endorses smoking. The copy says, “she leaps, she glides, she spins, she smokes Camels.” Students immediately see the ways this ad conflicts with their own current ideologies that would never align athleticism and smoking. Upon close inspection of the copy, they also comment on the “30 day mildness taste test” that guarantees your money back if not satisfied. It is easy to recognize that consumers would be addicted by that time, a startling idea for students who grew up with the smoking kills ideology as part of their belief system. Students can also conduct online searches to find many more advertisements like this one that teach them how to recognize and analyze ideological artifacts. Listing Modern Ideologies: Next I have students turn their gaze towards modern magazines and online artifacts. I ask them to list the dominant ideologies they recognize through their exploration. They come to class with their lists to present to their classmates to choose one that interests them as a group for the project. Check out some examples​ of their lists of ideologies. The Assignment As a team, I require students to submit the following assignments that make up the parts of this project:                                                                         1: Data Collection: Students explore definitions and origins of their subject by Questionnaire: Create, administer and analyze a questionnaire in which students conduct primary research to gather ideas of how other people define and understand their ideology. Multimodal Artifacts (visual and language): 2: Creation of a Meme: After they have analyzed the existing cultural artifacts, they complete an analysis of current memes related to their ideology and then create an original meme that speaks to and promotes the ideology and findings. In order to be effective, it must draw on an obvious (but not necessarily true or stated) major premise that reflects their ideology.  It must be supported with visual and textual communication (Stay tuned for a future post on memes). 3: Team Presentation: As a group, students present their findings to the class. This 30 minute presentation should not be a mere listing of their findings. Instead, it should somehow represent their findings in a more creative manner as interesting, informative, and perhaps even entertaining for both a live and internet audience. The presentation should include an analysis of the questionnaire and a discussion and display of the particular multimodal – visual and textual – artifacts that speak to the ideologies. 4: Group Minutes and Online Discussions: I instruct students to keep professional, accurate minutes of their group meetings and decisions. Each team creates a space on Google Drive to organize and manage their team. This creates easy group access to the thinking processes, operations, and tasks of the group and allows them to use the space to participate in a collaborative revision of their presentation and documents. Student Work I share a great student presentation by a group that chose to investigate consumerism. They created their presentation in Prezi and designed it in the form of a front page of a newspaper. The presentation takes readers through an interesting journey that allows for interactivity through a variety of multimodal artifacts.  A student in the consumerism group, Kendra, offers her thoughts on the project below.      Initially: When I think about consumerism, I think about spending lots of money on products that you can live without, images of overpriced products, credit card debt, brand name items and environmental depletion come to mind. My initial belief towards consumerism is that most people are probably aware that it’s not the best thing in the world, but still participate in the overconsumption of material goods anyway.      After completing the project: Based on the results of the survey, a majority of participants felt that consumerism is wasteful and poses problems to the environment. However, most also felt that consumerism provided necessary benefits to the economy. I thought it was extremely interesting that in multiple questions, there were several responses that stated that large companies who cater to consumers do not actually have the consumer’s best interests in mind, nor the interests of the environment.      She concludes by recognizing the idea that although we share common ideas, we all have our individual      ways of interpreting them: The project taught me a lot, not only about working with other people but about consumerism and ideologies in general. Through the use of our survey, I learned that you can’t trust the media to paint you an accurate picture of how people feel about certain ideologies. No one can really be put into a box; everybody has their own thoughts and experiences that affect how they feel about certain ideologies. References Crowley, Sharon and Debra Hawhee. Ancient Rhetoric for Contemporary Students, 5 th edition.              Longman, 2011. Guest blogger Kim Haimes-Korn is a Professor in the Digital Writing and Media Arts (DWMA) Department at Kennesaw State University. Kim’s teaching philosophy encourages dynamic learning, critical digital literacies and focuses on students’ powers to create their own knowledge through language and various “acts of composition.” She likes to have fun every day, return to nature when things get too crazy and think deeply about way too many things. She loves teaching. It has helped her understand the value of amazing relationships and boundless creativity. You can reach Kim at khaimesk@kennesaw.edu or visit her website Acts of Composition. Want to collaborate with Andrea on a Multimodal Monday assignment or be a guest blogger? Send ideas to leah.rang@macmillan.com for possible inclusion in a future post. ... View more

Roy Stamper​'s assignment instructions for a student self-analysis. For more, see his posts The Endings of Things: A Couple of “Capstone” Assignments and Foregrounding Rhetorical Awareness. ... View more