Terms for GWRTC 103 Discourse Community

discourse: communication among a group of people who share a commonality (values, beliefs, goals, interests) and have a common language
rhetoric: study and craft of communicating to a specific audience, with a specific aim in mind
rhetorical situation:  the context that informs a text or discourse; includes audience, purpose and occasion (exigence)
exigence: the relevance and timeliness of a text, what makes the reader/audience care about it
audience: the people who have something to gain from reading a text; we tend to think about audience in terms of a primary or intended audience (these are the people you are thinking about when writing) and a secondary audience (people who may read your work but who you didn't really intend to).

rhetorical reading:  reading a text with an aim of understanding its audience, purpose, and exigence.
rhetorical strategy:  anything a writer does to reach out to an audience or to create a convincing argument
ethos: the credibility of a text or author; authors build ethos by establishing connections to the reader, by presenting him/herself as knowledgeable about the subject, and by being professional in all aspects of communication.
pathos: the capacity of a text to invoke emotions (anger, urgency, sadness, joy, etc).  Authors can create pathos through the use of personal stories, comparative examples, photographs, and diction (word choice), among many other rhetorical strategies.
logos: effective reasoning in a text; writers build logos through research, organization of ideas, establishing relations among ideas (such as cause effect or analogy).
claim:  the thesis of an argumentative text; a claim expresses the writer's opinion about a multi-sided issue and  justifies it by showing why the opinion is important; claims can never be indisputable facts.
so what: the importance of a claim and topic, the reason a reader should care about it; comes from this idea that readers should never read a text and think "So what?  Why should I care about this topic?"

Reading Rhetorically-Flower and Haas

As a high school student, and even an undergraduate majoring in English, I often felt frustrated with my teachers who, like many others, seemed to privilege a single interpretation of a text.  I was never one to find that singular meaning my teachers professed and I hated passionately those students who did.  Why were they graced and I was not? 

It wasn't until my junior year in college that I felt some kind of affirmation for my often subversive interpretations and analyses of texts, what I now understand to be rhetorical readings.  I was taking a class on the works of Thomas Hardy.  I had been eagerly looking forward to the class, but I soon realized that once you've read Tess of the D'Urbervilles, you've read Hardy's oeuvre.  Yes, the settings and characters change, but the stories are, essentially, all the same.  I had already written two papers on Hardy's novels and was wracking my brain trying to find something different to say for my third paper.  Finally, the evening before the paper was due (I was not typically a procrastinator, but I couldn't overcome my writer's block), I gave up.  I started writing the same paper I had for the other two, just changing character names and settings.  But midway through, I started getting angry at Mr. Hardy.  "Couldn't you find something else to say about the way society treats women, you bumbling idiot?"  And out of anger and frustration, I started writing not about how women were always victims of English patriarchal society, but about how they were femme fatales.  That they ultimately caused the downfall of the male characters.   

This was, of course, bs.  I didn't really believe what I was writing, but I figured there was at least a possibility there and I could support it.  I was playing, really.  It felt good to write something so opposed to what we had been discussing all semester long.  But at some point, I liked what I was writing.  It was cathartic.  So I took a risk, revised the beginning of the paper to match my new purpose in writing and crafted a conclusion in which I made a rather broad claim that, in having his female characters embrace the very traits men accused them of--selfishness and vanity, Hardy was being more subversive than any of us have fully understood.  Two weeks later, I received the paper back from my professor with red ink all over it.  "I disagree!"  "I just can't agree here."  "Do you really think this?"  I feared looking at the back page, allowing the negative comments to haunt my mind for days.  Finally, when I no longer cared whether I failed the paper, for I was assured at least a C in the class,  I looked.  There, written in a hand rather smaller than I had expected, was something else I had not expected: a B+.  Below it was written a brief note that even though my views ran counter to everything my teacher valued and loved about Hardy, she appreciated my unique, rather brazen, perspective.  She was glad I had engaged with the text and found something new to say about it.

Needless to say, my professor's comment made quite an impression on me.  I was finally rewarded for my reading of a text.  For a good while afterward, I read every text with a suspicious eye.  What is going on in society that might have influenced this author's views? What is he or she really communicating?  What is he or she not communicating?  How might my own interpretation differ from the common reader and why?  I still read this way, but my motivations aren't so much to prove a writer (or a teacher) wrong. More than anything, I am motivated by a curiosity and an interest in discovering how and why my interpretations so often differ from those of others.

On "Shitty First Drafts" . . . or my torturous writing process

As much as I like Lamott's idea of a "shitty first draft," and as much as I encourage students to try out her process at least one time during the semester, I'm just not a "shitty first draft" kind of writer. I think this is because I'm a thinker. I have to internalize anything before I begin writing. I might think about a writing task for days, even weeks, before I begin. In fact, I have a conference presentation coming up in April, and I've been "pondering" the paper I am going to present since September when I first found out my proposal was accepted. My colleagues who were also accepted used our very short winter break to start writing drafts of their papers for presentation. Not me. The most I've done is start jotting down a list of ideas and sources to include. This list is very characteristic of how I write. I internalize; I list. And after I have a fairly full list, I draw arrows to signify some kind of ordering of ideas. I hate outlines. I hate the indents and the silly A.s and I.s. Who thinks that way, anyhow?

Only after I have a fairly full list, complete with arrows all over the place, will I begin to write. Once I do start writing, I usually have plenty to say. If only I could get it all out without censoring myself.

This is where I envy Lamott. When I write, I constantly stop, interrupting my momentum to read what I've written. It is as if I cannot move forward without looking backward. This makes for a very long, sometimes torturous writing process. I can spend over an hour on a single paragraph. But it somehow works for me. I don't mind that I will spend twice as much time planning and drafting a paper than my peers. Where I save time is revision. I still revise my writing, but usually I can do so in one sitting, looking at a hard copy (though more and more I feel comfortable reading and revising on a computer screen). And even then, I am usually pleased with my language and content. I most often find myself reordering ideas and building stronger transitions. That's my weakness in writing, organization. It probably has something to do with all those arrows, but I'm okay with that. I wouldn't want to write a perfect draft the first time around.