Finally! The first rhetorical analysis projects! And participation!

One last time:  sorry it’s taken me this long to get this stuff back to everyone.  I basically had two problems here.  First, I had some very stupid time management issues.  Some of it was bad planning on my part; some of it was other work “imposed” on me that I wasn’t expecting; some of it was life; etc.  The other problem I had was I decided to do audio comments on these projects, which graduate students tend to like and/or find useful, but which can be time consuming and “limiting” in the way I have to do this.

But that’s all done.  A couple of important details after the “continued” part.

Your grades and audio comments are on emuonline.  What you do is log back into emuonline and you can find my audio comments either in the “outbox” part of the dropbox or on the gradebook.  The audio file is an mp3, which should be easy to listen to on your computer.  I would encourage you to read your essay while listening to my comments of me reading the essay aloud and offering commentary.  Let me know if you have any problems finding the files or getting them to work.

To be honest, I was kind of disappointed with these projects.

Just to remind you: the goal of this assignment was to minimize the scope of what phenomenon/topic/idea being analyzed so that you could spend your time and effort on working with a particular aspect of rhetorical theory to that issue.  The idea here was to use a “lens” of rhetorical theory to view some phenomenon and to make some sort of claim about the way rhetoric “works,” given that specific rhetorical lens.  My intention in these shorter projects was two-fold:  first, I wanted to minimize (though not eliminate) the research burden for your topic/phenomenon, not to mention the search for theory from beyond our class readings.  Second, I wanted to lend a focus as to what sort of theory– what lenses to pick, if you will– were available to analyze texts, because at the end of the day, the purpose of these writing assignments is for you to demonstrate your understanding of the theory that we are reading and discussing.

In other words, we’ve spent a lot of time this term reading and discussing rhetoric, especially as it applies to issues of science and technology.  The purpose of this assignment was to give you an opportunity to demonstrate that you have done this and that you are able to use this experience to analyze a phenomenon and make some sort of point.  I was interested in whatever phenomenon you analyzed, but I was most interested in seeing a level of mastery with rhetoric as a tool for analysis.

Now, for the most part, the phenomenon that folks picked were small and manageable, though there were some problems there.  While I wanted to minimize the amount of research required for explaining your topic, I didn’t want to eliminate it.  In some cases, the lack of research or explanation about whatever it is you were discussing made it difficult for me to see your point; in other cases, the phenomenon being analyzed was probably too broad for the assignment.

But the place where I saw some serious problems was in the rhetorical analysis itself.  Most projects missed the mark of demonstrating “mastery with rhetoric” as a tool for analysis.  I found it a little odd the extent to which folks focused in on ethos and/or pathos– I’d say this was the approach taken by about 80% of you, I suppose because it is easy to apply to a lot of contemporary events and because we did read a fair amount about both.  Regardless of that, this is a good example of where I saw in many of your projects what I can only characterize as a surprising lack of understanding and explanation of the concepts.   Even though ethos was a concept discussed in many places in the Crowley and Hawhee book, even though it was directly and indirectly discussed in a number of other readings, many of you more or less limited your discussion of ethos to a definition– that is, you quoted Crowley and Hawhee’s definition of ethos (in many cases, only from the glossary!), and then proceeded to make your case without ever referring back to the text.  That’s really not a whole lot different than looking up a term in the dictionary and then using that “research” as your sole basis for an argument.  It’s certainly not what I was intending by an assignment asking you to analyze something.

Now, I think there are basically three causes for this– or, more accurately, it’s a combination of these things:

• Folks just haven’t done the reading. While the discussions we’ve had on the class web site have been pretty good, perhaps they have been deceiving/misleading in that many of the comments do not actually indicate the level of reading of the material that I had originally thought to be the case.  Or, another way of putting it:  some of you are perhaps “winging it” a bit more than I thought when it comes to commenting on the readings.
• Folks weren’t able to take “the next step” and do an analysis on their own. In other words, perhaps the problem is not (at least not exclusively) about not covering or not understanding the readings and discussions.  Perhaps the problem was that there was some kind of disconnect between reading an analysis of how kairos or ethos or whatever “works” in relation to DNA or the Challenger Disaster or what-have-you and actually writing one of these analysis yourself.
• Folks just ran out of time and/or budgeted time poorly. I say this because I sense a bit of “rushed” finish in many of these projects.

Now, of these three possibilities, the most difficult one to address is the first one.  If you haven’t been keeping up the reading and/or doing the reading as thoroughly as you should, it’s awfully hard to make up for that now.  Furthermore, it is not going to get any easier; after all, the reading for the second part of the term is more demanding and the final will be based on the assumption that you have read the material closely throughout the term.

The second and third causes are more easily addressed.  I am happy to meet with people about revising this project and hopefully, this experience has better prepared you for the second short rhetorical analysis.  And if you didn’t budget your time properly before, well, don’t do that again, and now you know better.

I will give you the opportunity to revise this project though.  There are four simple rules for such a revision:

• You need to meet with me to discuss a revision, either in person, or, if that won’t work, via Skype.
• You need to come to me to discuss a revision with some sort of a plan– if you come to me and say “I want to just fix what you told me to fix,” then my response will be “what might that be?” So the best thing you can do (if you want to revise, at least) is to listen to my comments while reading your essay, write up some notes, and then make an appointment with me.
• You have but one opportunity to revise this– that is, no showing me a copy and then saying “is it an A now?” and then showing me another version.
• Revisions of this first short rhetorical analysis are due by midnight on December 6.

And I should also mention that there won’t be a similar opportunity for a revision with the last short project because of time constraints.