WRD 104: Composition & Rhetoric II

“One purpose of a liberal arts education is to make your head a more interesting place to live inside of for the rest of your life.” —Mary Patterson McPherson, President, Bryn Mawr College

“I thought that the future was a place—like Paris or the Arctic Circle. The supposition proved to be mistaken. The future turns out to be something that you make instead of find. It isn’t waiting for your arrival, either with an arrest warrant or a band; it doesn’t care how you come dressed or demand to see a ticket of admission. It’s no further away than the next sentence, the next best guess, the next sketch for the painting of a life’s portrait that may or may not become a masterpiece. The future is an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper, and if you have the courage of your own thought and your own observation, you can make of it what you will.” —Lewis Lapham 

“It ain’t where ya from, it’s where ya at!” —KRS-ONE, Ruminations

One way we can educate ourselves in times of such political and cultural polarization is to try and assess the role of financial contributions and lobbying in legislative contexts:

• OpenSecrets.org: allows you to search by members of congress, seeing who — and how much — various interests donate to the legislator: 
  https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/
• MapLight.org: revealing money’s influence on politics
• Center for Public Integrity: investigative journalism
• FEC.gov: campaign finance data

“The project started under the Bush administration, and was used as a platform on which Tomaselli can creatively explore the global calamities and political nightmares of his lifetime. His painterly interventions underscore the tactility of newsprint, simultaneously dramatising events and often showcasing the ludicrous and depressing realities of the world.” 

Via Creative Boom

David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Speech (2005)

Intro

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Conclusion (22 minutes later)

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”
“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.

Transcript (PDF)
Audio (YouTube)

• Michelle Obama at Tuskegee — NYT coverage: “Michelle Obama Addresses Tuskegee University Graduates”
• Jon Lovett: 2013 Pitzer College Commencement Keynote — on “bullshit.”
• President Obama: Morehouse College Commencement Address.
• Ellen DeGeneres: Tulane’s 2009 Commencement Speech.
• David Brooks at Dartmouth, 2015
• Russell Wilson, Seattle Seahawks QB, former UW- Madison QB. For those of you familiar with the Madison football-game tradition of jumping around to the House of Pain, there’s this. 

NYT Book Review: A Guide to Writing Guides (5/19)

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“But, as we’ve already suggested [invitational rhetoric], arguing isn’t always about winning or even about changing others’ views. In addition to invitational argument, another school of argument-called Rogerian argument, after the psychotherapist Carl Rogers-is based on finding common ground and establishing trust among those who disagree about issues, and on approaching audiences in nonthreatening ways. Writers who follow Rogerian approaches seek to understand the perspectives of those with whom they disagree, looking for “both/and” or “win/win” solutions (rather than “either/or” or “win/lose” ones) whenever possible. Much successful argument today follows such principles, consciously or not.” 

— From Andrea Lunsford, Everyone’s an Author 

Lieber/NYT: As College Deadlines Near, Families Wonder What They Can Pay

Griswold et al, “Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century” Annual Review of Sociology. 2005. 31:127–41.

Griswold, W. (2001). “The Ideas of the Reading Class.” Contemporary Sociology, 30, 4-6.

Lunsford, SMH p. 81

Lunsford, “Top 20”

Fully developed and coherent paragraphs have these identifiable characteristics: 

[P] Point, like a topic sentence
[I] Illustration, which might be data, a quote, an example, a story; the range of possibilities is pretty wide 
[E] Explication, which is your commentary or explanation

[P] Every wolf in Yellowstone therefore is more than just a wolf. Imbued with profound symbolic meaning, each wolf embodies the divergent goals of competing social movements involved in the reintroduction debate. Framed by environmentalists and their wise use opponents as another line in the sand in their ongoing battle for the heart and soul of the West, wolf reintroduction is a high-stakes political conflict. [I] Wolf recovery is often portrayed by environmentalists as being symptomatic of a culture in transition–an inevitable change (Askins, 1995). It is an image that plays especially well with the media: “[T]he wolf issue pits the New West against the Old West” (Johnson, 1994, p. 12), a milestone in the “transformation of power” from the Old West (Brandon, 1995, p.8). [E] Wolf restoration clearly represents change, but sound bites that reduce the social struggle over wolves to an “inevitable” transition from the old to the new are inadequate. They do not explain the underlying social issues driving the transformation. They do not capture the essence of social negotiation, the give-and-take of political exchange between social movements struggling to define the western landscape. Nor do they acknowledge that these social issues will remain after the wolf controversy has exited the center stage of public policy discourse.

Wilson, Matthew. “The Wolf in Yellowstone: Science, Symbol, or Politics? Deconstructing the Conflict between Environmentalism and Wise Use.” Society & Natural Resources. 10(1997): 453-468. (more…)

Sent by Jumma:

• How would you assess the article’s credibility and authority?
• What questions would you ask?
• If you were writing about terrorists and terrorism, how could you use this article?

Thank you, Jumma!

Definition: “An inability to begin or continue writing for reasons other than a lack of skill or commitment”

Possible causes:

• Subconscious awareness and overly rigid “rules” — such as a rule against sentence fragments or how to compose paragraph transitions
• Too-early editing: a writer begins criticizing and altering a text before there is enough of a rough draft to evaluate
• Inflexible composing strategies
• Fear of evaluation
• Insecurity

Rose, Mike. “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block.” College Composition and Communication 31.4 (1980): 389-401. Print.

Followup from Wednesday, a definition of Latinx:

North American

A person of Latin American origin or descent (used as a gender-neutral or non-binary alternative to Latino or Latina)

• Via Oxford Dictionaries
• Latinx Identity In The Georgetown Classroom
• MEChA at DePaul

• Fit. How does this draft fit the assignment? In what areas might the writer struggle to meet the criteria? How does this draft fit the audience? What else does the writer need to remember about the audience’s expectations and needs?
• Potential. What ideas in this draft are worth developing more? What other ideas or details could inform the argument? Are there other viewpoints on this topic that the writer should explore?
• Order. Considering only the parts that are worth keeping, what sequence do you recommend? What new sections do you think need to be added?

• Topic sentences and transitions. Topic sentences introduce the idea of a paragraph, and transitions move the writing smoothly from one paragraph or section or idea to the next (5b, e, and f). How well does the draft prepare readers for the next set of ideas by explaining how they relate to the overall claim? Look for ideas or details that don’t seem to fit into the overall structure of the draft. Is the idea or detail out of place because it is not well integrated into this paragraph? If so, recommend a revision or a new transition. Is it out of place because it doesn’t support the overall claim? If so, recommend deletion.
• Supporting details. Well-developed paragraphs and arguments depend on supporting details (5c and d). Does the writer include an appropriate number and variety of details? Could the paragraph be improved by adding another example, a definition, a comparison or contrast, a cause-effect relationship, an analogy, a solution to a problem, or a personal narrative?

KATZ: What was it like trying to find common ground with the people that you went to school with? Like, I come from a poor family, and suddenly I’m going to be going to school with people that think it’s OK to major in dance.

LATTIMORE: You’re right (laughter).

KATZ: And maybe it is. But from my standpoint, I could never imagine going to school for something that couldn’t have a job at the end of it.

College Is A 4-Year-Long Balancing Act For First-Generation Students 

Good context for today’s Frank Bruni Op-Ed, “Lifting Kids to College.”

“The Times’s editorial page is a bit like the Supreme Court: Its opinions set the framework for the national debate, and its members tend to stay there for decades. So Stephens’s beliefs are about to have a big impact on the national discourse — even as his new employer sells newspapers by marketing itself as a leading vanguard of the anti-Trump resistance.”

Stein, The NYT’s new columnist defends his views on Arabs, Black Lives Matter, campus rape

“This Western civ narrative came with certain values — about the importance of reasoned discourse, the importance of property rights, the need for a public square that was religiously informed but not theocratically dominated. It set a standard for what great statesmanship looked like. It gave diverse people a sense of shared mission and a common vocabulary, set a framework within which political argument could happen and most important provided a set of common goals.”

David Brooks: The Crisis of Western Civ

Here’s the book review that serendipitously addresses Stephanie’s Inquiry Question:

Romantic love is a myth. You don’t choose a partner because you love him. You love that partner because you chose him. Which explains the plague of our time. Too many choices, too many channels, too many potential hookups — it’s made it just about impossible to choose, and if it’s just about impossible to choose, it’s just about impossible to love, and if it’s just about impossible to love, then, according to “The First Love Story: Adam, Eve, and Us,” by Bruce Feiler, it’s just about impossible to be fully human. Why were Adam and Eve able to love each other so fiercely? Because those lucky bastards had no choice.

The closing lines of Paradise Lost we read in class:

Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon; 
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

• Stephanie A.: TBA
• Henry B.: “How is the Concept of Race Taught in Schools?”
• Georgia B.: TBA
• Andrea B.: “What is the Current Debate on Animal Rights?”
• Deja C.: “What is the Relationship between Athletes and Performance Enhancing Drugs?”
• Lexi F.: “Is there a Link between Fashion and Low Self Esteem in Young Women?”
• Jumma G.: “What is a Terrorist?”
• Ellen G. “What is Creativity?”
• Adam G. “What is Loneliness?”
• Jamie: TBA
• Liv.H.: “What is Optimism?”
• Isabelle J.: “Does our Relationship to Food Mimic our Relationship to Romantic Love?”
• Raina K.: “What are the Stigmas of Mental Illness?”
• Cameron K.: “Is there a Psychological Factor in Inequality?”
• Michael L.: “What Impact does the Meat Industry have on our Environment?”
• Jennifer L.: “What is an Immigrant?”
• Salvatore: “What Kind of Culture Produces a 19 year-old who Doesn’t Care about Anything?”
• Katlyn M.: “Where does Confidence Come From?”
• Stephanie N.: “How is Romantic Love Different than Companionate Love?” 
• Katie P.: “How are Students with ADHD Affected by Formalized Education?” 
• Markiyan P.: “What has the Partisan Divide Done to our Country?”
• Juan S.: “Are Athletes Born or Made?”
• Lucy W.: “Are Americans Over-Medicated?”

Your issue and inquiry question are debatable; we can find credible sources where people take different and plausible positions on them

Your issue and inquiry question affect you in some demonstrable way; your proximity to the issue is close

Your proposal articulates the relevance of the project, and to whom it might be relevant

Your proposal includes two Rhetorical Précis

Your proposal includes a visual representation of your inquiry question and groups who might have a stake in it

In the spirit of problem solving and self-regulated learning, here’s what we brainstormed in class yesterday:

• Library Reference Desk
• Michael Moore
• Writing Center
• St. Martin’s Handbook
• Each other
• Oxford English Dictionary

It’ll be smart of you to track your progress at every stage of our process so that you can both self-assess and know when & where to identify resources for help. Depending on your own process, this might look different for different people: 

• Brainstorming (SMH 44-5)
• Initial Research (SMH 190-260): what’s the landscape?
• Draft (Lamott)
• More research
• Revise: overall, “global,” big-picture issues: tone, level of detail, does it accomplish the assignment? 
• Get feedback (SMH 66-76)
• Revise more
• Research more
• Edit (SMH 87-88): for us, so far, this has meant paragraph development and transitions
• Get more feedback
• Revise more
• Proofread (SMH 1-11); Lunsford, “Top Twenty Errors”
• Formatting/Presentation — academic essay genre conventions

• Mighty City Trembles (6MB PDF)
• Will London Fall?
• Sergey Ponomarev, photographer

It’s also a good case study in the integration of sources and quotes:

Every wolf in Yellowstone therefore is more than just a wolf. Imbued with profound symbolic meaning, each wolf embodies the divergent goals of competing social movements involved in the reintroduction debate. Framed by environmentalists and their wise use opponents as another line in the sand in their ongoing battle for the heart and soul of the West, wolf reintroduction is a high-stakes political conflict. Wolf recovery is often portrayed by environmentalists as being symptomatic of a culture in transition–an inevitable change (Askins, 1995). It is an image that plays especially well with the media: “[T]he wolf issue pits the New West against the Old West” (Johnson, 1994, p. 12), a milestone in the “transformation of power” from the Old West (Brandon, 1995, p.8). Wolf restoration clearly represents change, but sound bites that reduce the social struggle over wolves to an “inevitable” transition from the old to the new are inadequate. They do not explain the underlying social issues driving the transformation. They do not capture the essence of social negotiation, the give-and-take of political exchange between social movements struggling to define the western landscape. Nor do they acknowledge that these social issues will remain after the wolf controversy has exited the center stage of public policy discourse.

Wilson, Matthew. “The Wolf in Yellowstone: Science, Symbol, or Politics? Deconstructing the Conflict between Environmentalism and Wise Use.” Society & Natural Resources. 10(1997): 453-468.

For those of you who would like to follow-up on some points from last week: 

We talked about how sometimes the “debate” politicians are having often seems like a debate about something else. From “Do Tax Cuts Really Spur Growth? It Depends on the Details,” this serendipitous detail:

Indeed, you could argue that the liberals’ and conservatives’ differences on taxes is less a technocratic debate over optimal taxation but a proxy war for a bigger philosophical argument on the role of government.

“A lot of the debate about taxes is really a debate about spending,” said Leonard E. Burman, who studies tax policy at the Urban Institute. “What is the role of government, and what is the value of government spending? Those tend to be the real underlying question.”

“Chase Had Ads on 400,000 Sites. Then on Just 5,000. Same Results.”

“As of a few weeks ago, advertisements for JPMorgan Chase were appearing on about 400,000 websites a month. It is the sort of eye-popping number that has become the norm these days for big companies that use automated tools to reach consumers online.”

“Now, as more and more brands find their ads popping up next to toxic content like fake news sites or offensive YouTube videos, JPMorgan has limited its display ads to about 5,000 websites it has preapproved, said Kristin Lemkau, the bank’s chief marketing officer. Surprisingly, the company is seeing little change in the cost of impressions or the visibility of its ads on the internet, she said. An impression is generally counted each time an ad is shown.”

6 Reasons You May Not Graduate on Time

“Graduating from a four-year college in four years may sound like a fairly straightforward venture, but only 41 percent of students manage to do it.“

• “Fred Tomaselli’s beguiling artworks on New York Times covers”
• Via Google Images

“In my “Political Development of Western Europe” course this semester, which is essentially an extended reflection on the origins of fascism and democracy, students are writing their first papers. The last paragraph of my instructions reads as it has throughout my nearly three decades of teaching at both Harvard and Middlebury: “I am looking for a lucid and thoughtful argument that speaks directly to the issues raised in the question and is supported with historical evidence from the assigned readings or our class discussions. Careful comparative analysis cannot help but make your argument more persuasive.”

“While students must always first demonstrate that they understand an argument on its own terms, I make sure they know that they are free to disagree, both with a particular text and with me. I will grade them on the strength of their argument and the evidence they muster in support of it, not the conclusions they may reach. With these maxims, students not only write better papers, they also learn skills that arm them to fight injustice in all its manifestations.”

Stanger, “Middlebury, My Divided Campus”

“At one time or another, we have all observed self-regulated learners. They approach educational tasks with confidence, diligence, and resourcefulness. Perhaps most importantly, self-regulated learners are aware when they know a fact or possess a skill and when they do not. Unlike their passive classmates, self-regulated students proactively seek out information when needed and take the necessary steps to master it. When they encounter obstacles such as poor study conditions, confusing teachers, or abstruse textbooks, they find a way to succeed. Self-regulated learners view acquisition as a systematic and controllable process, and they accept greater responsibility for their achievement outcomes.” (Zimmerman, 1990.)

The Wikipedia entry on self-regulated learning makes a connection to metacognition.

• Fact Checking Day
• FirstDraft: Essential resources for reporting and sharing information that emerges online
• WAPO: Don’t get fooled again by bogus links, bots and pure bunk. Here’s how.
• Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers handbook

Useful for articulating what the writer is doing in your Rhetorical Précis — some of these are rhetorically active verbs — most are not:

St. Martin’s Handbook, p. 235

“We are what we find, not what we search for.” – Piero Scaruffi

Spring Quarter, 2017

In WRD 104 we focus on the kinds of academic and public writing that use materials drawn from research to shape defensible arguments and plausible conclusions. As the second part of the two-course sequence in First Year Writing, WRD 104 continues to explore relationships between writers, readers, and texts in a variety of technological formats and across disciplines:

• How does specific text content gain acceptance and prominence?
• What counts as “true” within the discipline, and who makes that determination? Why?
• How do particular text genres gain acceptance and prominence?
• What are considered “legitimate” modes of inquiry within the discipline?
• How do the content, genres, and modes of inquiry within a discipline affect the social relations of participants in the disciplinary community?

You’ll be happy to note, I hope, that we build on your previous knowledge and experiences; that is, we don’t assume that you show up here a blank slate. We assume that you have encountered interesting people, have engaging ideas, and have something to say. A good writing course should prepare you to take those productive ideas into other courses and out into the world, where they belong, and where you can defend them and advocate for them.

If you have a project from another course that you would like to continue, or a community project that would benefit from rigorous research, or a professional aspiration that needs research-based support, this is the course for you.

Writing Center 

It’s no secret around here that students who take early and regular advantage of DePaul’s Center for Writing-based Learning not only do better in their classes, but also benefit from the interactions with the tutors and staff in the Center.

Unclear writing, now as always, stems from unclear thinking–both of which ultimately have political and economic implications. A well cultivated critical thinker:

• Raises vital questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely;
• Gathers and assesses relevant information, using abstract ideas to interpret it, effectively comes to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria and standards;
• Thinks open-mindedly within alternative systems of thought, recognizing and assessing, as need be, their assumptions, ideologies, implications, and practical consequences; and
• Communicates effectively with others in figuring out solutions to complex problems.

Critical thinking is, in short, self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking. It presupposes assent to rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command of their use. It entails effective communication and problem solving abilities and a commitment to overcome our native egocentrism and sociocentrism. – Adapted from Richard Paul and Linda Elder, The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools, 2008.

“A persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends.” Edward M. Glaser. An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking. 1941.

Chaffee’s Definition of Critical Thinking

Critical thinkers are people who have developed thoughtful and well-founded beliefs that guide their choices in every area of their lives. In order to develop the strongest and most accurate beliefs possible, you need to become aware of your own biases, explore situations from many different perspectives, and develop sound reasons to support your points of view. These abilities are the tools you need to become more enlightened and reflective “critical thinker” (p. 28). For Chaffee, critical thinking involves the following:

• Carefully analyzing and evaluating your beliefs in order to develop the most accurate beliefs possible.
• Viewing situations from different perspectives to develop an in-depth understanding.
• Supporting viewpoints with reasons and evidence to arrive at thoughtful, well-substantiate conclusions.
• Thinking critically about our personal “lenses,” which shape and influence the way we perceive the world.
• Synthesizing information into informed conclusions that we are willing to modify based on new insight. (p. 35)

[From The Thinker’s Way by John Chaffee, Boston: Little, Brown, 1998]

Habits of mind refers to ways of approaching learning that are both intellectual and practical and that will support your success in a variety of fields and disciplines. The framework identifies eight habits of mind essential for success in college writing

• Via Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing