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10/5: Multimodal Rhetoric
We’ve started thinking about different modalities for writing for advocacy. A modality is the delivery platform by which a message is circulated; it’s part of what Doug Downs calls the ecology of rhetoric. In his essay that we read last week, Downs says that “human interaction and meaning-making is […] the experience of encountering a vast range of sensory signals and interpreting them by associating them with networks of our existing knowledge” (462-3). Using this ideas of networks, Downs offers us an ecological framework for understanding how humans communicate through texts, written and otherwise. I asked you to bring an example of any text in your life you feel represents…
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9/28: Going Public: Understanding the Rhetorical Ecology of Advocacy
We’ll pick up our work from Tuesday, 9/26 to connect Downs’ terms ecology and motivation to the advocacy work of the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York. In small groups, describe the ecology of Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York website. EACH MEMBER OF YOUR GROUP SHOULD TAKE NOTES TO POST THIS IN-CLASS WRITING TO YOUR BLOG. To get full credit for this post, you must quote Downs’ “Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning-Making” (available on Blackboard) in some part of your post. We’ll end class today by showing you how to create a new page for your website so you can post your final counterstories…
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9/26: Rhetoric as a Human Operation System
I’ve offered feedback, either as comments on your blog posts or via email, to your Counterstory drafts. As you move toward your final–due on Tuesday, October 3–keep the assignment rubric in mind. I’ll be looking for you to tell stories, to use narratives with composite characters that help me understand the stock story and counterstory that build the purpose of your final piece. I will expect to see your purpose stated early on in your final draft, and I will also expect you to quote Martinez and another outside source. Today, we will look together at Angelis’ and Jade’s drafts as strong examples of creating composite characters. We’ll revisit Downs’…
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9/21: Rhetoric as Meaning-Making, or How Our Bodies Become/Create/Make Argument
“Bodies matter to knowing, meaning-making and interaction. So rhetoric must be about bodies as much as minds, and about the material as much as the conceptual.” Doug Downs, from “Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning-Making,” p. 463 Downs’s quotation above connects bodies to meaning to our interactions with others. This might be a new way for us to understand how we communicate in the world. To help us think through this complex set of connections, we’re going to use Corder’s and Downs’s texts to think about how our counterstory drafts are making arguments and, more generally, how public arguments are made. You’ll get into groups to think about…
