Author: imkenned

What is a public syllabus?

 

 

 

Or, first of all, what is a syllabus, period?

 

 

 

What, then, is a public syllabus (also referred to sometimes as a crowdsourced syllabus or a hashtag syllabus)?

  • A new, still emerging genre of online writing. This means that its genre conventions and rhetorical features are still very much unsettled and up in the air.

Earliest forms of it (consider this in terms of exigence):

This brings us to the two Trump syllabi.

Trump Syllabus 2.0 is interesting not only for its stated criticisms of the Trump 1.0 syllabus, but also for the more implicit ways in which it refines and improves this still emerging genre of writing as a whole.

  • Distinguishes between primary and secondary sources
  • Includes potential “assignments”

Project 2 Instructions

MLA Info + Extended Office Hours #1

MLA Info

Use the Purdue OWL:

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

MLA sample paper: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/media/pdf/20160920114529_747.pdf

1) Citing a book:

Last Name, First Name. Title of Book. Publisher, Publication Date.

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. Penguin, 1987.

In-text citations for books:

Gleick argues that “akdsfnadskngsdl” (12).

As one critic puts it, “akdsfnadskngsdl” (Gleick 12).

2) Citing a scholarly article:

Author(s). “Title of Article.” Title of Journal, Volume, Issue, Year, pages.

Duvall, John N. “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise.” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3, 1994, pp. 127-53.

In-text citation for scholarly articles:

Duvall argues that “sngsdkjgn” (145).

As one critic puts it, “asjdngsfjkgnsjkdng” (Duvall 145).

3) Citing web sources:

Last name, First name. “Page Title.” {if no clear title is given, use what’s written in the tab title} Website title. Sponsoring Institution/Publisher {usually by the copyright symbol at the bottom of the page}, Publication Date. Date Accessed.

Lundman, Susan. “How to Make Vegetarian Chili.” eHow, http://www.ehow.com/how_10727_make-vegetarian-chili.html. Accessed 6 July 2015.

In-text citations for web sources are difficult to wrap one’s head around at first. This is because there are no page numbers. So if not the page number where you’ve found the quote, what do you put in the parenthetical citation?

The answer is simple: you put the first thing that appears on the Works Cited page entry for that source. This would be the author’s last name, or if no author is given, then the title of the web page. Examples:

There is evidence of this commonly held misconception all over the web; as one commentator puts it, “blabh lakblkanfdklnafbn” (Kennedy).

*If you use the author’s name when you introduce the quote, no parenthetical citation is necessary:

Kennedy exemplifies this commonly held misconception when he asserts that “blabh lakblkanfdklnafbn.”

In-text citation for a web source when no author is given:

There is evidence of this commonly held misconception all over the web; as one anonymous commentator puts it, “blabh lakblkanfdklnafbn” (“10 Fatal Diseases Curable Simply by Drinking Lemon Water”).

Here are some more helpful tips regarding how to locate all the bibliographic data for a web source:
http://courses.semo.edu/library/infolit/mlastyle_web.htm

Project 1 Rough Draft Workshop

First: tertiary sources

  1. Pair up with a partner. If there’s an odd number of people, just form a group of three and pass your paper to the group member on your right.
  2. Open up the Project 1 instructions so that you can have the “Grading Criteria” on hand.
  3. Read through your partner’s draft. As you do so, leave annotations on the draft itself, covering anything from sentence-level issues (grammar, misspelling, poor word choice, wordiness, etc.) to higher-order issues (poor transitions between paragraphs, lack of exigence, unpersuasive claims, sloppy handling of a quote from an outside source, etc.). As you read your partner’s draft, keep in mind the Project 1 Grading Criteria as described in the instructions for Project 1.
  4. For each category in the Grading Criteria–(1) Ethos,* (2) Logos, (3) Exigence and Audience, and (4) Grammar and Proofreading–write roughly one paragraph, based on your reading of your partner’s draft, that explains what your partner still needs to do in order to get full points in that category (or what they’re doing well if they don’t need to revise that much). Write this in a Microsoft Word document using a laptop or one of our school computers. Email your comments both to your partner (so they can have your useful feedback) and to me (imkenned@umich.edu). Before you go, please also email me a copy of your rough draft.
  5. When finished, summarize your feedback to your partner. Then, call me over so that you can each summarize your feedback to me. In particular, I’ll be wondering what about your partner’s draft you liked the most, and what about it still needs the most work.

*For the Ethos category, you don’t need to assess your partner’s execution of MLA formatting. We’ll cover that next time.

Keywords, continued

 

Art Primary source:

Original artwork

 Secondary source:

Article critiquing the piece of art
History Slave diary Book about the Underground Railroad
Literature Poem Treatise on a particular genre of poetry
Political Science Treaty Essay on Native American land rights
Science or Social Sciences Report of an original experiment Review of several studies on the same topic
Theatre Videotape of a performance Biography of a playwright

Primary or secondary? Depends heavily on how the source is being used:

Whether something is a primary or secondary source often depends upon the topic and its use.

A biology textbook would be considered a secondary source if in the field of biology, since it describes and interprets the science but makes no original contribution to it.

On the other hand, if the topic is science education and the history of textbooks, textbooks could be used as primary sources to look at how they have changed over time.

From: http://umb.libguides.com/c.php?g=351019&p=2367357

Primary sources are records of events as they are first described, usually by witnesses or by people who were involved in the event. Many primary sources were created at the time of the event, but can also include memoirs, oral interviews, or accounts that were recorded later.  Visual materials, such as photos, original artwork, posters, and films are important primary sources, not only for the factual information they contain, but also for the insight they may provide into how people view their world.

…

It can be difficult to determine if a particular source is primary or secondary because the same source can be a primary source for one topic and a secondary source for another topic.  David McCullough’s biography, John Adams, could be a secondary source for a paper about John Adams, but a primary source for a paper about how various historians have interpreted the life of John Adams.

From: http://libguides.bgsu.edu/c.php?g=227153&p=1505675

So it depends on how the source is being used. But it can also depend on the age of the source:

In the humanities, age is an important factor in determining whether an article is a primary or secondary source. A recently-published journal or newspaper article on the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case would be read as a secondary source, because the author is interpreting an historical event. An article on the case that was published in 1955 could be read as a primary source that reveals how writers were interpreting the decision immediately after it was handed down.

From: https://library.ithaca.edu/sp/subjects/primary

Lisa Nakamura, “Media”

Nakamura spends a good deal of the early part of the essay using as primary sources what we would normally think of as secondary sources:

Walter Benjamin, probably in the 1930s, hard at work theorizing and philosophizing about the “new media” of his time

–Benjamin’s thesis: the decline of the “aura” (aura being a characteristic of art from the age before mass reproduction); new media (mass media: art/media in the age of technological reproduction), such as film, offering vehicle for collective innervation and political revolution >> Nakamura isn’t engaging with Benjamin concerning the rightness or wrongness of his thesis (as she would if she was using him as a secondary source); rather, she’s using Benjamin as a primary source exemplifying a particular opinion or theory of media that developed in European academia in the 1930s (he “ushers in the study of the media as an academic discipline,” as Nakamura puts it)

How to find primary sources? Depends on the kind you’re looking for.

For video sources (e.g. a particular that exemplifies or reflects some broader historical phenomenon that you’re writing about, e.g. “America” or “Globalization”), a good place to start would (obviously) be YouTube, but also take a look at primary sources used by any secondary sources that you find (this is an example of what’s called internal research-I’ll demo this later on today). For magazine and newspaper articles, I would use the UM-Dearborn library website, specifically the Proquest Research Library database. (How about a demo by way of revising/improving Nakamura’s ethos?)

What about secondary sources?

For this kind of source, you’re most likely going to be engaging with contemporary peer-reviewed scholarship about the phenomenon exemplified or reflected by your primary sources. (E.g., if you were writing an essay about globalization, and used the international hit movie Slumdog Millionaire  as a cultural artifact and primary source that reflects and provides an interesting piece of direct evidence of the phenomenon of globalization, as a secondary source you might cite a scholarly article or book about Slumdog Millionaire, or even about something more general like international films that have seen cross-cultural success in America). Best library database for this kind of source: Academic Onefile. (How about another demo? Plus internal research: for secondary sources, this involves just browsing that source’s references list; for primary sources, look additionally at the index, if you’re dealing with a book, but you also might need to read through in detail and catch the primary sources as you work through the reading. Google Scholar, by the way, is also pretty useful for internal research.)

Keywords, part 1

The first thing I’d like to tackle with these essays is the question of exigence and target audience. For whom are these essays written? To whom do their arguments matter? To whom are their arguments intended to feel exigent?

To get answers, a good place to start is to research these authors. To that end, I’d like us to get into groups of 3-5 people. We should have approximately six groups as a result. Your group will be tasked with researching (or, Google-stalking) one of these authors. Note that all of these authors are college professors. Look for their official faculty page (.edu) at whatever university or college they teach at.

Groups 1 and 2: Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “America” (pp. 28-32)

Groups 3 and 4: Lisa Lowe, “Globalization” (pp. 127-129)

Groups 5 and 6 (any any extra groups): Scott Herring, “Rural” (pp. 226-228)

For your group’s author, answer the following questions in a blank Word document (one per group), which I’d like you to email me by the end of class. Each question should take at least four sentences to answer sufficiently.

  1. Besides the keyword essay contained in our textbook, what other genres does this author write in? In other words, when you find a list of this author’s writings, what kind of writings are these? Find or two of these writings on the internet (e.g. on Google scholar) and browse through it and/or its reviews.
  2. Based on this author’s body of work, the genre in which they’re writing, and their stated research interests on their faculty page, what do you take “American cultural studies” to mean? Note that all of these authors are, in one way or another, working in this field of study known as American cultural studies.

Second task, also pertaining to how these essays establish exigence (i.e. a sense of “this is why this keyword matters–this is why you, the reader, should care about what I’m saying about it”): a close reading of these essays’ introductory sections.

As we work through the three introductions, try to detect patterns or similarities (but also nuanced differences) in how the articles establish exigence. In its own way, each article sets out from the start to answer the question, “So what? Why does this keyword matter to this target audience?” Let’s highlight specific sentences that seem to be doing the most work.

Third task: Primary Sources v. Secondary Sources

https://library.ithaca.edu/sp/subjects/primary

In the humanities, age is an important factor in determining whether an article is a primary or secondary source. A recently-published journal or newspaper article on the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case would be read as a secondary source, because the author is interpreting an historical event. An article on the case that was published in 1955 could be read as a primary source that reveals how writers were interpreting the decision immediately after it was handed down.

Going Beyond the Either/Or, Part 2

Get into groups of 5 or 6, huddle around a computer or laptop, and–drawing upon each group member’s Mini Rhetorical Analysis #2–answer the following questions in typed form (email me your group’s response when you’re finished). We’ll discuss the results as a class.

  1. What in the world is “Brexit” in the first place? Feel free to use the internet (beyond Greenwald’s article) to answer this question. A related question: To what degree does it seem like Greenwald assumes his audience already knows what Brexit is/was?
  2. What is Greenwald’s main argument? Answer this question by restating his argument in the form of a one- to two-sentence thesis statement.
  3.  Recall the following Learning Outcome from the syllabus: “Engage in critical inquiry, i.e., go beyond an either/or debate on an issue or topic to a more complex rendering of perspectives.” In what way is Greenwald’s essay an attempt to do precisely this?
  4. How does Greewnald  use ethos, pathos, and/or logos in making this argument? Cite examples (i.e. quotes) from the article itself.
  5. Like Rensin, Greenwald was making an argument about our contemporary rhetorical situation as we were headed into election season, but what what was his rhetorical situation? What is the primary exigence (the endpoint goal or purpose) that drove him to write this, and who is his target audience (or audiences, plural)? Keep in mind a crucial aspect of Bitzer’s definition of audience, here: that said audience is a potential “mediator of change” with respect to the exigence (e.g.“properly speaking, a rhetorical audience consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change“). If Greenwald is targeting a particular audience (or multiple audiences), what change does he hope that audience will feel compelled to make?

Be sure to hand in your Mini Rhetorical Analysis #2 on the way out.

For next time…

Going Beyond the “Either/Or,” Part 1

Review from last time: The Rhetorical Situation

Exigence? Audience? Constraints? How did these terms come into play in our case studies…

What is our current rhetorical situation, broadly conceived? I would submit that it’s one characterized not just by partisan polarization, but more precisely by endless failures of rhetoric:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/02/29/john_oliver_shredded_donald_trump_for_20_straight_minutes_on_last_week_tonight.html

and yet…

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/its-trumps-moment/500066/

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2014-48913-001/

http://bigthink.com/think-tank/the-backfire-effect-why-facts-dont-win-arguments

Get into groups of 5 or 6, huddle around a computer or laptop, and–drawing upon each group member’s Mini Rhetorical Analysis #1–answer the following questions in typed form (email me your group’s response when you’re finished). We’ll discuss the results as a class.

  1. What does it actually mean to write a rhetorical analysis? What is the purpose of a rhetorical analysis? How is a rhetorical analysis paper different from a “position paper” or an argumentative research paper?
  2. What is Rensin’s main argument? Answer this question by restating Rensin’s argument in the form of a one- to two-sentence thesis statement. (i.e., pretend that you’re Rensin and your editor has asked you to write a better, more concise thesis statement before this article can go online).
  3.  Recall the following Learning Outcome from the syllabus: “Engage in critical inquiry, i.e., go beyond an either/or debate on an issue or topic to a more complex rendering of perspectives.” In what way is Rensin’s essay an attempt to do precisely this?
  4. How does Rensin use use ethos, pathos, and/or logos in making this argument?
  5. Rensin is making an argument about our contemporary rhetorical situation as we were headed into election season, but what is his rhetorical situation? What is the primary exigence (the endpoint goal or purpose) that drove him to write this, who is his target audience (or audiences, plural), and what constraints do you think might have shaped his rhetoric?

Be sure to hand in your Mini Rhetorical Analysis #1 on the way out.

The Rhetorical Situation

Review from last time:

Ethos

Credibility and authoritativeness:

dermatologistbanner_1

But also, shared worldview / shared way of life:

trump_kfc

Newsweek-Cover-Arugula-Beer.jpg

obama poupon.jpg

Pathos

 

Logos

Fully developed syllogism (the kind you’d see in philosophy):

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

A real-world (outside the philosophy classroom) version of this syllogism, in which some parts are left unstated (enthymeme):

“All humans are mortal, so Socrates is mortal.”
Claim: Socrates is mortal
Stated reason: all humans are mortal
Unstated assumption: because Socrates is a human

Another one:

trump-hat

Claim (itself not even explicitly stated):

Stated reason:

Unstated assumptions:

From Text to Context; or, the Rhetorical Situation

bitzer

“In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action. The rhetor alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change” (4)

Offers a formal definition of “rhetorical situation” on page 6, in section II:

bitzer-lloyd_the-rhetorical-situation

Case studies

Big Pharma’s rhetorical situation

Selling Science Smartly: Pfizer’s “More Than Medication” Campaign

http://scriptphd.com/advertising/2010/09/02/selling-science-smartly-pfizers-more-than-medication-campaign/embed/

Same (or at least very similar) rhetorical situation, but a different–very different–rhetorical response (or, in Bitzer’s words, a very different attempt at “creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action”):

Barbara Jordan v. Nixon

What is our current rhetorical situation, broadly conceived? I would submit that it’s one characterized not just by partisan polarization, but more precisely by endless failures of rhetoric:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/02/29/john_oliver_shredded_donald_trump_for_20_straight_minutes_on_last_week_tonight.html

and yet…

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/its-trumps-moment/500066/

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2014-48913-001/

http://bigthink.com/think-tank/the-backfire-effect-why-facts-dont-win-arguments

The Rhetorical Appeals

Quick review: how did we define “rhetoric” last week? As best as you can remember, what were some common themes in each group’s attempt to define that term?

765px-Aristotle_Altemps_Inv8575.jpg

Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Book I, Chapter 2

  1. Get into groups of 5-6 people. (We need to end up with four groups total–no more, no less.)
  2. Make sure there is at least one internet-connected computer available in your group.
  3. Open up the copy of Aristotle’s text linked to here: 106-aristotle-rhetoric-book-i-ch-2
  4. As a group, work together to understand and then summarize the portion of Aristotle’s text to which your group has been assigned. Feel free to use any internet resources to aid you in this task, for instance in order to look up any strange terms (e.g. what in the world is a syllogism?). By “summarize,” I mean translate Aristotle’s argument in your assigned paragraphs into a form that’s easier to understand. This was a difficult reading–your group’s goal is to help us understand your assigned passage more clearly.
  5. Write a brief (one to two paragraph) summary of your assigned portion in a Microsoft Word document. Make sure each group member’s name is listed at the top of this document, and email a copy to me (imkenned@umich.edu) when you’re done.
  6. You’ll have 25 minutes to do this. When those 25 minutes are up, we’ll reconvene as a class and each group will run through its summary in order to improve our understanding of Aristotle’s text.

Group 1: Paragraphs 1-3 (highlighted in yellow)

Group 2: Paragraphs 4-6 (highlighted in green)

Group 3: Paragraphs 7-9 (highlighted in blue)

Group 4: Paragraphs 10-12 (highlighted in gray)

Mini Rhetorical Analysis instructions:

mini-rhetorical-anaylsis-instructions

For next time:

Reading:

  • Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation” (Canvas)