Will Duffy’s English 100 Blog

My ideal writing/composing process is to write a rough draft of the paper from start to finish to get all my ideas down. After that, I go back and structure my thoughts into a more organized draft. Then, I usually let my mom take a look at my paper to see if she has any suggested changes for me to make. I then take into account her suggestions and create a final draft. This process is ideal for me because it allows me to get all my ideas down initially without having to worry about the writing being perfect, because I know that I can always come back to correct my mistakes. The first reading was helpful because it showcased the importance of going back and thinking about how you can improve/better word your ideas. I feel that I apply this to my formal writing already, but probably not the extent mentioned in the reading. I felt that the second reading showcased the randomness of how writing ideas come to you, such as when the author was face down behind her bed trying to dictate her writing ideas into her phone. I felt that my writing style also relates to this because my initial process is just writing down my basic thoughts/ideas.

For my fourth blog I will be discussing ‘”Introduction”‘ to Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric In Contemporary America.” This piece was made by Carl G. Herndl, who works in the English department at the University of Southern Florida and Stuart C. Brown, who works in the school of biological sciences at the university of Adelaide. I believe that the primary audience of this text is the general public. I struggled to find an exact definition of rhetoric in this passage, but I believe that they were implying that rhetoric can only be used to describe something up to the point that we’ve made words to describe something. In other words we can only describe something if it has words that are capable of being used to describe that specific thing. The main argument of this text is that we can see nature in three different ways ethnocentric (ethos), anthropocentric (logos), and ecocentric (pathos). The texts primary rhetorical purpose is to inform and persuade.

For my third blog post I will be discussing Jenny Edbauer’s piece, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies” and her thoughts on the word rhetoric. The author, Jenny Edbauer, works in the English department at The Pennsylvania University. The primary audience for this text seems to be her writing peers as this article was in the thirty-fifth volume of the 2005 Rhetoric Society Quarterly. The text implies that rhetoric is something that we encounter. It is something that we experience. In a similar way to Gee’s discourses, Edbauer’s interpretation of rhetoric says that it can be different things depending on the situation you’re in; it relies on outside circumstances to exist. The main argument of this text is that rhetoric is much more than the overly simplified models of communication, sender, receiver, and text. Rhetoric is how we interact with the world around us and how it can change society as a whole. Edbauer’s main example is of the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” which is her experience of rhetoric having an effect in her life. “Keep Austin Weird” had a lasting effect on the city of Austin and inspired many similar slogans such as the Austin Public Library handing out stickers featuring the phrase “Keep Austin Reading.” Edbauer also recalls a memory of her and her friend finding a piece of paper with a phrase in block letters that read “Keep Austin fucking normal. Conform. It’s just easier.” Edbauer states that the sign itself is weird, thus making it quite ironic as it is portraying the opposite of the message it is trying to get across. The texts primary rhetorical purpose is to provide its own take on how rhetoric is viewed in society today by providing more recent, relatable examples of real life rhetoric.

For my second blog post I will be discussing two separate authors and their opinions on rhetoric. The first author is Patricia Roberts-Miller who is a professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas in Austin. It appears that her primary audience is her peers at the University of Texas. Roberts-Miller says that “Rhetoric is a contingent, pragmatic, and generally (but not always) verbal way of approaching problems we face as members of communities” (Roberts-Miller 10). The main argument of this text is to prove how other past views or descriptions of the word rhetoric are in the authors opinion, incorrect. The texts primary rhetorical purpose is to give a brief history of the various definitions of the word rhetoric followed by the author giving her views on those various definitions, followed by her own definition of the word rhetoric. The second author I will be discussing is Lloyd F. Bitzer, who was a associate professor of speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Professor Blitzor’s primary audience for this text was his peers during a public lecture at Cornell University in November 1966 and at the University of Washington in April 1967. Professor Blitzor says that “In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality through the mediation of thought and action” (Blitzor 4). The main message of this text is to give the author’s definition of the word rhetoric and to explain the relevancy of rhetorical situations and rhetorical utterances. The texts primary rhetoric is to give the author’s opinion on definition of the word rhetoric by displaying the various uses of rhetoric in situations in society such as the fishermen in in the Trobriand Islands. I know this was part of the assignment, but one line from Blitzor’s piece that intrigued me was “In its primitive uses, language functions as a link in concerted human activity, as a piece of human behavior. It is a mode of action and not an instrument of reflection” (Ogden and Richards).

For my first blog post I will be providing my full knowledge about the word “rhetoric.” I have not had that much exposure to the word rhetoric before and I do not know the definition. The first thing that comes to my head is the phrase “rhetorical question” which gives me the idea that rhetorical means something similar to biased or being one-sided(?), it is tough to give the word a singular definition because I feel that it could mean so many things. My understanding is that a rhetorical question is a question only has one answer or at least the person asking it only thinks that the question only has one answer, hence why I think that rhetoric could be similar to the word biased. Rhetoric could possibly be related to teaching, since I think I have heard the phrase “That course has a tough rhetoric.” So maybe it is also connected to teaching because I think that some teachers can be biased, and believe that there is only one right answer to a question. It could also mean that the ideas of the class are tough to grasp. Rhetoric could mean that you are trying to influence another person by presenting them with a singular answer to a question and at the same time dismissing all other possible answers at the same time. It is really tempting to look up the definition of rhetoric because I do not know if I am going off on some sort of weird tangent that is just going farther and farther away from the actual meaning of the word. I hope you found some meaning in this post because I felt like I was stumbling around in the dark, not knowing where I was going regarding “rhetoric”. I look forward to learning the actual definition of rhetoric next class.