Dear Young Writers, I'm writing from Strum Hall at the University of Denver, after a day of attending lots of cool--or at least cool to me--presentations on how to create community writing projects that are reciprocal, meaningful, and promote a better, more just world. View of University of Denver campus from Strum Hall (my photo) In between sessions, I started reading your summaries of the articles, stories, and TedTalks you'll be writing about in your first blog posts. And I quickly realized that despite your uncanny ability to quickly and fairly summarize events in your life, movies, and TikToks, when you are asked to write a summary of an article, or a TedTalk in the context of a school assignment, your writing muscles inevitably tense up, and your writing becomes as stiff as my forty-four year old right knee. It's not your fault. You've been conditioned to do what you are told in school, and so your problem-solving skills are a bit rusty. The summary is but one p...
This semester, I've asked you to choose a discourse community (DC)/community of practice to "investigate" for the entire semester, and I think most of you have had no problem finding a group of people united by some common goal or interest that you wish to learn more about. As you start your research, I hope you don't get too caught up on figuring out whether the community you chose fits (or not) John Swales' definition of a DC, which seems to me helpful as an observation tool but also rather rigid. Instead, I hope you use those DCs or communities of practice as the starting point of your research. The community you choose will be the "place" you'll observe, the people you'll talk with (not at) as you gather data through interviews, observations, surveys, etc. I've asked you start with a community because I feel research projects very often sprout from within communities of practice or discourse communities. But I digress, today, I want...
I just finished reading Joe's " The Marriage Blog: I put a ring on it" where he reflects on the memories of his recent wedding and how social media is changing the way he remembers--the ways ALL OF US remember. I found this blog especially relevant to the (sometimes tense) discussions we've been having about identifying and exploring rhetorical problems through research, reflection and writing. Honestly, any problem that prompts us to think about the ways we communicate, is a rhetorical problem. Any problem or question that can withstand the embrace of Rhetoric , is a rhetorical problem. In this case, I'm talking about Rhetoric as a field of study , just like Math, or Chemistry, or Archaeology Think about it this way, if your Math professor asked you to identify a mathematical problem that interests you and try to solve it, what would you do? In this case, I'm asking you to identify a rhetorical problem, explore it through research, write a...
Comments
Post a Comment