A key component of any successful rhetoric is the ability to acknowledge the opponent. This is something I learned back in 8th grade when I had to give a Pro/Con speech. If you want to seem knowledgeable, be convincing, and…
English 5001
Week 1: “This post will fill your mind with wonder! Read it, it will make you better” . . . Rhetoric: The art of persuasion, not of truth.
by kmontero • • 0 Comments
Now that I have grasped the reader’s attention through the employment of rhetoric, though I am no famous rhetorician like Gorgias , I will use the aforementioned attention to discuss Plato’s Gorgias. Having one-half of the class title (i.e. History of Rhetoric)…
Inviting and Embracing Cultural Conflict in Writing and in the Classroom
by mbond • • 2 Comments
Once I said “esa,” (the female form) of “ese” (meaning homeboy or homegirl) from around the way way back in the day, during class and a student responded with “what?! you’re a scrap.” I didn’t know it, but I guess to him I was. I was talking like “a scrap.” And come to think of it, I did useta kick it, for a quick minute, with some vatos locos back in the day. Instead of inviting language diversity (my own) into the classroom, I alienated him because “esa” and “ese” are forbidden adversarial terms in his cultural language community.
Vico’s and Melina’s Humanist Side
by mbond • • 0 Comments
I’ve grown since that uncomfortable first experience with multiple intelligences. I understand that learning and teaching is a balance between abstract truth and common sense. And at the same time life is balance between chance and choice. Vico, very early, scrutinizes that “those whose only concern is abstract truth experience great difficulty in achieving their means, and greater difficulty in attaining their ends.”
Neither on the Outside Looking in, nor on the Inside Looking Out
by mbond • • 0 Comments
The perspective, neither on the outside looking in, nor on the inside looking out, hooks’ place, a “trangression of borders,” allows us to learn about the ideological forces that both constrain and liberate us.
Still Hungry? Fear in the Teacherless Classroom
by mbond • • 0 Comments
Is there a point in the teacherless classroom when people stop being polite? I’m not sure I’m looking forward to that experience. That is perhaps why I always wait for the last minute when a “paper is so late [I] finally stop worrying about how it will be perceived.” However, I’m not sure that the fear comes just from the thought of my peers’ honest responses. Instead it comes from an imagined amalgam of all those past hella smart and articulate peers I have encountered, and their (not my) even more hella smart profs.
Political Campaigning and the Rhetoric of Marriage: Proposition 8, Schubert & Flint, and the Religious Majority
by Keri • • 0 Comments
Political Campaigning and the Rhetoric of Marriage: Proposition 8, Schubert & Flint, and the Religious Majority California has long been considered a liberal state on most issues. People from other states often refer to California as “the land of fruits…
Janet Emig, Final Commentary :)
by Rachel • • 0 Comments
In “Writing as a Mode of Learning,” Janet Emig takes a rather unique stand both in how she views writing and in how she defines it as a learning process. She describes writing as heuristic, and by that, it seems…
Why Harry Potter? The Rhetorical Elements that Singled Out the Harry Potter Franchise as a Source of Evil within Youth Fiction
by Kristen Phipps • • 0 Comments
Abstract: The annals of literature are riddled with accounts of the fantastic and magical. Literary genre’s have been set aside for it, divided into subcategories, merged, and recombined. One of these genres’ that has currently gone through resurgence is…
Where Sleeping Giants Lie: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and the Shaping of American Literature
by Rachel • • 0 Comments
Abstract: Do eighteenth-century American women writers have a place inside the classroom or the canon, and if not, does their work merit such a place?Where Sleeping Giants Lie This project seeks to find whether or not women were writing in…