Senior Seminar

Progress Report 3

 

Since the conference on my working draft/outline, I have been working on developing my analysis section and on structuring my introduction section. Prior to my conference, I was struggling the most with these two sections. In my conference, the discussion about how to potentially use my idea for incorporating another source’s analysis of George W. Bush’s rhetoric in response to 9/11 as a parallel to Trump’s rhetoric and as a way to focus on the potential outcomes of Trump’s style of rhetoric has led to me not only rethinking my introduction, but also to rethinking how I plan on discussing the implications of Trump’s rhetoric. In terms of my introduction, realizing that I don’t have to justify the choice to focus on the rhetoric of politicians in general through a discussion of Bush has decreased some confusion about what I need to discuss in my introduction.

Bush’s rhetoric has also reminded me that no matter who wins the upcoming election, Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t just disappear and therefore positioning his rhetoric within the context of similar styles of rhetoric or aims of rhetoric will help to predict potential ways, in which his rhetoric could become vital or foundational to the rhetoric of his supporters. As I complete this project I will not be so distanced from the moment that this speech happened and Trump’s overall presidential campaign to analyze this rhetoric through “hindsight” and therefore having this sort of predicative capability will be important to discussing the implications of Trump’s rhetoric.

With the analysis section of the fantasy-theme criticism of Trump’s speech, I was struggling with how to organize potential components of the analysis and what I planned on focusing on within Trump’s speech. Currently, I have decided to focus on the three characters Trump emphasizes throughout his speech: Americans, Hillary Clinton, and immigrants from the “Middle East.” While the settings of Trump’s speech are important, constructing a rhetorical vision or an understanding of Trump’s rhetorical visions by focusing on setting themes seems as though it would be messy especially as two of these characters (Americans and Clinton) exist within this setting, along with Trump as a character. Emphasizing the setting could weaken the analysis by not allowing me the room to explain the importance of these characters for Trump’s rhetorical visions. Trump ascribes many different actions to the characters of Americans, Hillary Clinton, and immigrants from the “Middle East” and therefore analyzing Trump’s rhetorical vision through the lens of character themes seems like the best way to create an accurate and understandable picture of the importance of these actions within Trump’s rhetorical visions.

As of right now my current argument is along the lines of “Trump uses the Orlando Nightclub shooting to encourage policy against immigration from the “Middle East” and place himself as the person to “carry out” this policy (Trump as hero) by positioning Americans as ideal/good citizens who need to be concerned about what they can and should do to stop this “kind of immigration” into the country and how their prior support of immigration policies/lack of stance against immigration policies has played a role in several current tragedies (essentially, responsibility of these ideal/good citizens to the nation) and by positioning Hillary Clinton and immigrants from the “Middle East” as the main sources of the United States issues, which these ideal/good citizens should be aware of and should want to get rid of.”

The feedback from Thursday was also helpful in moving my project forward. The response to my artifact summary led me to thinking about how I envisioned my incorporation of Trump’s speech throughout my analysis. The summary was pretty lengthy, since it covered basically everything in Trump’s speech. I plan on keeping this summary for future reference, but ultimately aim to shorten the summary in my actual paper. When I re-read through the summary, I realized my biggest goal was to summarize the entire speech for myself so as the researcher I could feel confident about my knowledge of the speech. I definitely think I accomplished this task with my artifact summary, but I’ve also realized my audience doesn’t necessarily need this lengthy summary, especially as I aim on incorporating a lot of direct quotations from Trump’s speech into my analysis portion.

The feedback also helped with the question of how should I deal with any inconsistency or incoherence in Trump’s speech. During the working draft/outline conference, we discussed ways to determine if coherency was even important to Trump’s audience and this was definitely helpful in terms of moving me away from my concern that I was just overall misunderstanding Trump and for thinking of potential ways to incorporate this discussion, if needed, into my paper. In the group feedback to this previously mentioned question, I really appreciated the response that I should just “embrace” the lack of unity Trump may present and that I should not try to avoid discussing this component and its potential effect on Trump’s audience.

Questions/Topics of Discussion for Second Reader and Outside Reader

As I’ve been looking further at my chosen artifact of Donald Trump’s speech in response to the Orlando Nightclub Shooting and have developed a greater understanding of fantasy-theme criticism, several questions have arisen. These new questions, along with questions that have arisen since I’ve begun thinking about the discussions and questions presented in my prospectus conference, are all potential questions that I want to address with my second reader and outside reader.

One of these questions, which is likely obvious, but still important is: What are sources or ideas from your field/area of study that could complement my chosen topic and help make sense of Trump’s rhetoric?

While I’m using an artifact that is in response to a specific tragedy, the ideas, themes, and rhetoric presented in this speech don’t “exist in a vacuum” and Trump’s rhetoric and ideas in the past likely influence this particular speech and the response of his audience to this speech. My current understanding of using fantasy-theme criticism in an attempt to understand a “shared reality” or “shared worldview” of groups points to this analysis as taking the themes in this speech of Trump’s and creating an understanding of the larger rhetoric and ideas of Trump and Trump’s audience, but how much of Trump’s rhetoric prior to this speech should I incorporate to create a foundation for this analysis or to further support the analysis I develop from fantasy-theme criticism? How much do I need to look to the past outside of Trump’s rhetoric and ideas, in terms of past representations of the topics which this tragedy hits on for Trump (immigration, Muslims, LGBTQ+ community) to ground or contextualize the presentations of these topics in Trump’s speech?

I’m also particularly worried about fatigue or “burn out” of my potential audience around the subject of Trump. While the presidential race and the topic of “weaponized” grief are important, with the current saturation of discussion around Trump in mind, what are potential ways that I can frame this project/discussion that will engage my audience who may be “burned out” by discussing Trump?

There’s been a lot of discussion around media analysis or engagement with Trump and whether or not this engagement or analysis has been approached in the most ethical way and/or has failed to challenge issues with Trump. Are there any ethical issues I should be concerned about when analyzing Trump and presenting my findings from this analysis?

I’m currently envisioning the audience response or the response of surrogates to Trump’s speech as a key component to my analysis. What are potential approaches I can use to determine which supporters of Trump I will be looking at? When making this decision, what are potential criteria for the responses I choose to incorporate into my analysis?

In Trump’s version of his speech on his website and in the transcript/video of the actual speech Trump gave, there is the inconsistency of Trump describing Omar Mateen as born in Afghan in his live speech and as born to Afghan parents who immigrated to the United States in the version of his speech on his site. How should I deal with this inconsistency or any other inconsistencies that come up? Is this difference important at all?

My final question focuses on what to do with the fact that Trump’s speech was “given” or presented live. While fantasy-theme criticism focuses on analysis of texts or language, should elements of Trump’s visual presentation of his speech inform my work in any way? Would this be pertinent or just extra material that could draw me away from my topic and research goals?

Post-Conference Thoughts/Progress Report 1

Before my prospectus conference the scope of my topic and project was a major concern. During an appointment at the writing center, I had worked with a consultant to choose and develop three potential topics from the list of several topics and avenues that I left my Writerly Portfolio Presentation with. For my prospectus draft on Thursday, September 22nd, I decided to focus my project around the avenue I thought I could best work with and analyze within the space of the time left for Senior Seminar. Using this previously mentioned reason as a major factor in my project choice, I chose politicians and the way this group potentially “weaponizes grief.” By the draft of my final prospectus, I had narrowed down this topic to Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and their surrogates usage of “weaponized grief” after the 2016 Orlando Nightclub Shooting.

In my prospectus conference, my confidence about this chosen direction for my project increased, but I was also alerted to the ways I could further develop the specificity of my project. My focus on the form of media that would be integral to my project, in terms of “old” and “new” media, was discussed during the conference. In previous discussions of my project I had emphasized social media as a key component of my project, but ultimately I have decided to focus on both forms of media since whether I chose Trump or Clinton’s response to focus on, the speeches they gave to the media after the incident will be used as an artifact for analysis and the response of their surrogates on social media will also be used. The discussion over how much analysis I could fit into a potential paper if I included both Clinton, Trump, and their surrogates into one paper, also further encouraged me to focus on the specifics of my project and to decide on the usage of one of these presidential candidates response to the Orlando Nightclub Shooting.

Post-conference, I’ve begun more research into fantasy-theme criticism, which I will be using as the method of analysis for this project. I have read Ernest G. Bormann’s “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision” text, Sonja Foss’s chapter on fantasy-theme criticism, and Travis Maynard’s “And on the Eighth Day, God Created Rhetoricians: A Case Study of the Creation Museum.” I have also begun reading Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” and Joseph E. Uscinski’s “The People’s News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism,” which both focus specifically on “old” forms of media. These ideas and understandings of “old” forms of media relate to the medium used to present the speech I will be analyzing and potentially to the way the chosen chosen speech is interpreted by the rhetor’s audience. I have also confirmed Professor Gary Deaton as my second reader and I have confirmed Dr. Avery Tompkins as my outside reader.

During this week and the upcoming week, I plan on continuing to work towards developing the annotations for my annotated bibliography due next week. While I’ve done some reading on fantasy-theme criticism, I also plan on reading more examples of fantasy-theme criticism in action, rather than theoretical texts about this method of rhetorical criticism. I also want to schedule a meeting with my second reader for the upcoming week to help shape my project further. My final goal for this week and the upcoming week is to actually start working through the steps for the fantasy-theme criticism of my chosen speech, which right now is Donald Trump’s speech in response to the Orlando Nightclub Shooting, and to schedule a writing center appointment to discuss whatever current steps I am on with my fantasy-theme criticism and to get another perspective on what stands out in Trump’s speech in relation to what a fantasy-theme analysis aims to pull or draw from an artifact.

Response to Naming What We Know: Concept 1 and 2 and Young’s “Should Writer’s Use They Own English?”

For the two sections from Naming What We Know, I have chosen to briefly look at five ideas that I think can potentially influence my approach to my final project. Two ideas from “Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity” and “Writing Speaks to Situations through Recognizable Forms” overlapped for me and therefore I have included them in a discussion together.

“Understanding and identifying how writing is in itself an act of thinking can help people more intentionally recognize and engage with writing as a creative activity, inextricably linked to thought. We don’t simply think first and then write. We write to think” (19) and “That is to say that writing does not simply record thought or knowledge but rather that writing has the capacity to actually produce thought and knowledge” (44).

I think these two ideas are pretty applicable to my own writing process. Instead of just storing ideas in my head for later or to deal with last minute, actually sitting down and working through ideas and creating accessible knowledge for my project will be helpful. I also find that the expectation for myself to write down completely coherent ideas or to have well-developed answers to questions or problems in earlier stages of my writing process leads to frustration and I end up putting off this work because by doing the work last minute I can give myself what I find to be a legitimate excuse as to why it was difficult for me to create well-developed ideas—time constraints. Viewing the writing that I do “to think” as actually accomplishing something for my project and as a visual record of any accomplishments is an important idea for me to keep in mind and to use to encourage me to begin writing earlier.

“Thus, meanings do not reside fully in the words of the text nor in the unarticulated minds but only in the dynamic relation of writer, reader, and text” (22) and “The technical concept of rhetorical situation brings together recognition of the specifics of the situation, the exigency the situation creates, and our perception that by communication we can make the situation better for ourselves” (36).

For me, both of these ideas relate back to the rhetorical triangle and the importance of thinking about one’s audience, whether invoked or addressed. In terms of my own writing these two ideas should always come into play. For the topic I will be analyzing in my Senior Seminar project, the idea of the rhetorical triangle and rhetorical situation for the rhetors’ I plan on analyzing should also be a foundational frame that I use to think about the relationship between these rhetors’ and their audiences. As I plan on using artifacts from a variety of rhetors’ in response to one tragedy, it will be necessary to constantly keep these ideas in mind to know how the rhetorical situations and relationships between the three concepts in the rhetorical triangle interact for the various rhetors’.

“For writers, these questions may be rephrased: What kind of writer do I wish to be? What are my obligations to my readers? What effects will my words have upon others, upon my community?
(31).

This idea comes from the discussion on the ethics of a writer, in relation to their audience. The discussion of ethics of a writer was reminiscent to me of the discussion in Feminist Rhetoric on invitational rhetoric, especially when the terms persuasion, open-mindedness, goodwill, and humility were employed by John Duffy. As I plan on dealing with a contentious topic and political figures thinking about “what are my obligations to my readers” and these other two questions will be a helpful as a way for me to think about how to best frame the discussion within my topic.

For Vershawn Young’s “Should Writer’s Use They Own English?,” I have chosen four important points of the text to mention and one point that I can definitely connect to my Senior Seminar project.

“But dont nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them ‘vulnerable to prejudice.’ It’s ATTITUDES. It be the way folks with some power perceive other people’s language” (110).

“Standard language ideology is the belief that there is one set of dominant language rules that stem from a single dominant discourse (like standard English) that all writers and speakers of English must conform to in order to communicate effectively” (111).

“Teachin speakin and writin prescriptively, as Fish want, force people into patterns of language that aint natural or easy to understand” (112).

“Code meshing use the way people already speak and write and help them be more rhetorically effective. It do include teaching some punctuation rules, attention to meaning and word choice, and various kinds of sentence structures and some standard English” (116).

All four of these ideas are pretty important to Young’s argument and address Young’s issues with Stanley Fish’s argument and presents what Young potentially would describe as the failure of Standard English and those who support the usage of Standard English. Although these ideas are important I currently cannot apply these ideas to my own writing in a way that is not somewhat superficial. For example, through Young’s discussion I could aim to worry less about the conventions of Standard English. In relation to my project topic, I maybe could potentially use how language expectations for politicians influence the response of audiences to these politicians. For example, I could look at the act of politicians tweeting in response to tragedy and how Donald Trump’s style of tweeting differs from Hillary Clinton’s style of tweeting and how do both of their tweeting styles either align with or reject society’s expectations for the language of politicians.

“I dont believe the writin problems of graduate students is due to lack of standard English; they problems likely come from learnin new theories and new ways of thinkin and tryin to express that clearly, which take some time” (113).

This idea of the potential effect of discussing new ideas on one’s writing has application to my own writing process. I will keep this idea of Young’s in mind as I am dealing with new ideas and theories and potentially attempt to write out my understanding of any important ideas for my topic that I come across during that 30 minute to an hour period I plan on setting aside. By doing this I will be able to determine how much I am understanding about elements of my topic and hopefully will be able to gradually develop a level of comfortableness with these new ideas, sources, or theories that will in the long-term making the act of writing my working draft and final draft less difficult.

WP Initial Reflection

Since the introduction of the question “who am I as a writer?” on the first day of Senior Seminar, I have been grappling with the notion of what a writer is and the fact that prior to this course I did not consider using “writer” as a term to describe myself. With the in-class discussion of what an author is versus what a writer is resulting from Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes texts, I came to realize that term “writer” was about communicating ideas and not as dramatic of a title as I had envisioned. After reading and reflecting on the texts assigned post this discussion and how those relate to what a writer is, the way in which I saw my past writing and future writing goals for Senior Seminar changed. This has occurred through the understanding that being a “writer” does not just occur outside of academic spaces, but within these spaces also as academic texts can have value to more than just academia, but value to understanding oneself as a writer and a person. By realizing academic writing is a valuable component to being a “writer,” I was able to understand the development of my relationship with argumentative writing, the purpose of writing, the exploratory nature of writing, and writing as representative through my past works and determine my goals for Senior Seminar. In order to discuss these four aspects I have decided to use four of my projects that relate to these aspects. These texts are the final essay from First-Year Seminar, the research paper from First-Year Research Seminar, paper two from Classical Rhetoric, and paper two from Readings in Rhetorical Criticism.

As I began the process of creating my final essay for FYS, I was worried about creating my own original argument. To me, the burden of proof, validity of arguments, and legitimacy of the writer had to be incredibly high to have anyone take a writer’s argument seriously. I ended up writing a paper on fanaticism and had an overall positive experience with argumentative writing. I realized ethical and logical writing was important to argumentative writing and that I was not just relying on my own ideas, but incorporating sources as evidence to further my argument.

Although looking at the dangers of fanaticism is an important conversation to have, I was not invested in the topic and was writing mostly to fulfill a requirement. Through my FYRS paper, my view of arguing as not inherently negative was further developed by the idea that writing for a purpose that matters to you and others is a necessity. The idea of “so what” or why does this matter that was presented in FYRS has since created a framework for my writing wherein I ask: why should a reader invest in this topic? How do I communicate this importance? For FYRS the larger idea of the failure of progressive subcultures by turning into a microcosm of mainstream society was the “so what.” With this paper, I was discussing concerns I had and the purpose of criticism and argumentation was to better something I was invested in.

My FYRS paper was the first stage in developing my understanding of “writing as exploratory.” From my FYRS course and onwards I have been able to use writing to further explore paper topics, my interests, my abilities, and myself. While my FYRS paper focused on criticizing certain aspects of punk culture, other aspects such as sexism, homophobia, and racism within punk culture were not discussed. When trying to write my introduction for my FYRS presentation to explain the ideas supported by the current punk culture, I used examples of homophobia, sexism, and racism from punk musicians. Doing this I realized that if I did the paper again I would frame the paper more from the angle of issues with marginalized groups, rather than The Shape of Punk to Come angle. Through writing for the presentation I was able to explore what was actually bothering me and found my interest in ideas, materials, and people affecting marginalized groups.

While working through my second Classical Rhetoric project, I learned that writing for a project does not have to end once the paper is turned in, but rather that one can use smaller scale projects to explore ideas that can possibly be applied to the development of larger scale projects. With this project, along with my Readings in Rhetorical Criticism project, I was also able to explore my abilities and the usages of rhetorical analysis. I used visual analysis and extensive textual analysis for the first time in these papers and came to understand rhetoric as a space to employ these types of analyses. Through the process of developing these two papers, I also realized I enjoyed analyzing and discussing rhetoric.

Reflection on the writing process I have used throughout my three years and my current understanding of myself as a writer has contributed to my understanding of writing as representative. With my writing process post-FYRS, I have excessively procrastinated on the task of actually starting to write down drafts of my text. For me, this element of my writing process has been stifling to my writing skills, my ability to express ideas, and to feel confident about the final version of my projects. By seeing myself as a writer now, I have realized that texts should consistently be representative of my ability and knowledge and therefore changing the timing of my writing process should be a major goal for my Senior Seminar project.

For my Senior Seminar project, I want the project to ultimately reflect my growth over three years, challenge me to explore a topic and myself, and focus on rhetoric; partly because I enjoy analyzing rhetoric and partly because of my goal to potentially use this project to apply for Rhetoric and Composition programs. Along with this, I hope to have my project deal with how ideas, people, and materials are being used and the type of affect this usage is having. My Senior Seminar project is going to be a traditional research paper, which looks at the rhetoric of public mourning and grief and how this grief is used in public spaces by public figures to meet other socio-political ends. To me, this project incorporates the “so what” and exploratory elements, as I will be learning how public grief is used and also by the end of the project, hopefully understanding my feelings about the usage of public grief. I will be dealing with a complex subject that I can hopefully address and write about at a pace over the semester that will allow me to create a work representative of who I am as writer.

Response to Anzaldúa and hooks Texts

An emphasis on writing as a powerful act and experience for the writer is discussed throughout bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa’s texts. Anzaldúa heavily connects her writing to image-making and her writing process to the ability to embody her own writing process/experience. Anzaldúa describes her movement towards writing as connected to the stories she would tell her sister and how “it must have been then that working with images and writing became connected to night” (87). In a sense, it appears as though Anzaldúa is positioning herself and her writing process as one of a “storyteller.”

In “The Shamanic State” section, she describes the stories and images she sees as “film-like” and as she is writing down these images, Anzaldúa takes on several different roles and viewpoints. For Anzaldúa images are “more direct, more immediate than words…picture language precedes thinking in words” (91). Anzaldúa’s text showcases this idea as vivid language that produces images are used throughout her text to describe her feelings as she writes. As Anzaldúa describes “what makes poets write and artists create” and the “state of psychic unrest” these creators exist in, she relays the image of a “cactus needle embedded in the flesh” and in dealing with this “needle,” creators, Anzaldúa included, participate in “an endless cycle of making it worse, making it better, but always making meaning out of the experience, whatever it may be” (95). In this Anzaldúa is not only embodying her writing process, but also touching on the transformative ability of writing. For Anzaldúa, “The ability of story (prose and poetry) to transform the storyteller and the listener into something or someone else is shamanistic” (88) and her “‘stories’ are acts encapsulated in time, ‘enacted’ every time they are spoken aloud or read silently” (89). Anzaldúa’s texts have an “identity” of their own and through the way Anzaldúa makes meaning in these texts, she can experience the power of these texts and so can her audience.

What really stands out for me from Anzaldúa’s text is her understanding of what she must do to be a writer or to write: “I have to trust and believe in myself as a speaker, as a voice for the images. I have to believe that I can communicate with images and words and that I can do it well. A lack of belief in my creative self is a lack of belief in my total self and vice versa…” (95). This statement really captures the ideas of image making and embodying the writing experience. According to Anzaldúa, the images she sees and then writes are a major component of her writing, but instead of separating this component and ability from her everyday existence, the act of creating images and writing images is imbued by her confidence in her “creative self” and “total self,” which are intertwined. This goal and understanding of writing and art overall is different from the goal and understanding of writing Anzaldúa ascribes to Western European cultures. According to Anzaldúa “it [art] is dedicated to validation of itself. Its task is to move humans by means of achieving mastery in content, technique, feeling” (90). In Anzaldúa’s description of how to write or to be a writer, she never speaks of mastery of communicating images but rather in belief and in a sense, passion and belonging, as what spurs her ability to be “a voice for the images” (95).

hooks “Remembered Rapture: Dancing with Words” touches on similar ideas about writing as Anzaldúa’s, though at times in different ways. hooks also speaks of writing as transformative and she discovered this ability of writing through a way similar to Anzaldúa’s with performance, but of poems and plays, rather than creating her own stories and telling them. The idea of performance is discussed several times by hooks as she describes her process of reading her first drafts aloud and “performing the words to both hear and feel them” (1). hooks also further discusses how she “had been taught in the segregated institutions of [her] childhood church and school that writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix, and transform” (2). For me the idea of creating writing that “should illuminate, transfix, and transform” (2) connects to Anzaldúa’s idea of the writer “as voice for the images” (95).

Both hooks and Anzaldúa go beyond the idea of just writing to write with idea of writing as spurned by the passion to create these impacting images through language for oneself and also for one’s audience. When hooks discusses how “all academic write but not all see themselves as writers” (2), this previously mentioned idea of creating vivid images or vivid language comes into play. hooks places “writing to fulfill professional career expectations” as different from “writing that emerges as the fulfillment of a yearning to work with words when there is no clear benefit or reward, when it is the experience of writing that matters” (2-3). This “experience of writing” that hooks relays occurs when she’s reading her drafts aloud, but also in her writing process, as she describes this process as “a seductive atmosphere of pleasure and danger…as a writer, intellectual, and critical thinker, I feel swept away by the process of thinking through certain ideas as well as by their potential to incite and arouse the reader” (3-4).

Quite like, Anzaldúa’s description of the potential goals and understanding of writing, hooks goals for writing and understanding of writing doesn’t appear to come from the place of the art being “dedicated to the validation of itself” (90). hooks works, even when solely written by hooks, appear to be aiming to engage in the communal aspect and speak of everyday life that Anzaldúa describes invoked art as doing. According to hooks, she writes “with the intent to share ideas in a manner that makes them accessible to the widest possible audience” (4). This goal influences hooks “thinking and writing process” as she pushes herself “to work with ideas in a way that strips them down, that cuts to the chase and does not seek to hide or use language to obscure meaning” (4). To those who would claim hook’s is reducing complexity by doing this previously mentioned act, she describes her work as “mak[ing] the complex clear,” so “that the outcome should be that difficult terrain of though traversed that has enabled one to arrive at certain standpoints or conclusions is not evident” (4).

While I have been thinking about the connection between passion and a potential Senior Seminar project, I haven’t been thinking along the lines of passion, in a sense, for writing, which Anzaldúa and hooks present. Through Anzaldúa and hooks texts, it becomes clear that not only having a passion for a topic, but also a passion for creating strong writing for oneself and for one’s audience can create powerful texts. With this knowledge, I want to make sure that when I’m writing my Senior Seminar project I’m able to see myself as a writer, in the ways mentioned by hooks and Anzaldúa, and through this envisioning of myself as a writer and not just writing to fulfill expectations, I’ll become “devoted, constant, and committed” (3) as hooks describes. One of the ideas I’ve mentioned in my earlier blogs was about my struggle with my writing process. Hopefully, this knowledge about writing as being able to be transformative, transgressive, and powerful will orient me to pay more attention to how I’m writing, why I’m writing, and how this writing relates to my goals for the text. One of hooks goals that influences her writing and writing process, is her “intent to share ideas in a manner that makes them accessible to the widest possible audience” (4). While I don’t currently know how “wide” of an audience I want to reach with my Senior Seminar project, I think putting myself in the position that hooks has will help me deal with the current struggle that I feel I have of “mak[ing] the complex clear” (4). Engaging with “mak[ing] the complex clear,” throughout my writing process will hopefully be more helpful than me trying to do this act near the end of my writing process and with major time constraints.

Response to Ede and Lunsord’s Texts

Although Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford were understandably critical of their past work in “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” within their work “Among the Audience: On Audience in an Age of New Literacies” in relation to the changes occurring with online texts and audience, I still found myself connecting more to or at least reflecting more on the ideas in the somewhat less contemporary text of “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked” than “Among the Audience.” Through comparing my understanding of the relationship between audience and writer that fits into the boundaries of discussion in “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked” to “Among the Audience,” I’ve been able to more thoroughly understand how I personally work with the notion of an audience and how to incorporate my new knowledge and understanding into my potential project.

In trying to figure out how to deal with the possible uselessness of the term “audience” and the rise of terms like “discourse community” and “public” because of changing relationship between writer and reader created by “Web 2.0,” Lunsford and Ede bring up the relationship between audience and writer and the understanding of audience present in the rhetorical tradition. Their decision to continue with using the term “audience,” alongside the other two terms, is driven by Lunsford and Ede “find[ing] rhetoric’s emphasis on the rhetorical situation to be theoretically and pedagogically enabling” (7). To contextualize their new understanding of audience within “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked” in contrast to audience addressed or audience invoked, Lunsford and Ede used the rhetorical triangle to encapsulate the rhetorical situation. In this rhetorical triangle of text, audience, and speaker the speaker speculates or thinks about the audience’s expectations and position in relation to knowledge of the subject. For their modern “Web 2.0” based understanding of the rhetorical situation Lunsford and Ede used a new rhetorical triangle, which presents the older/traditional elements, but also incorporates the new elements presented in online spaces.

While I am able to understand the changing notion of audience as receiver, collaborative writing, audience agency, writer agency, issues with public writing versus private writing created by “Web 2.0” that has shaped Lunsford and Ede’s new triangle, but even as someone who is able to see these particular aspects play out online, reading this text has alerted me to the fact of how difficult it is for me to envision or connect to this new relationship between writer and reader from the perspective of just a writer, whereas it’s easier for me to connect to or envision this new relationship from the perspective of being a member of an audience or discourse community. For me this inability to completely connect to this new relationship and triangle as a writer and understand how my writing fits into this triangle and relationship, comes from a few different places.

Part of the difficulty with this connection comes from being someone who doesn’t create a lot of online text or create a lot of responses to other online texts (in terms of posting, liking, or retweeting/re-blogging) and therefore while I’m able to understand the agency or collaborative nature of the examples Lunsford and Ede use to illustrate the changing dynamic between writer and audience, not having the personal experience potentially stifles my fuller understanding of how others are engaging in online spaces. In line with this, seeing strictly the academic texts I create as writing or my sole source of writing also makes this connection to the new audience and writer relationship difficult. This focus on traditional writing and the rhetorical triangle present in it within my texts, partly comes from being required to write or aim for writing most of my papers in an academic style, but also potentially from the notion of individualism, which Lunsford and Ede describe in “Among the Audience” as “inherent” to “the classical (and more broadly Western) rhetorical tradition” (6).

In the “Teaching Audience in the Twenty-First Century” section of Lunsford and Ede’s text they state that the “individualistic system that rewards individual students through a system of grades (23)” in schools leads to resistance to collaboration. To me this “system” interacts with my understanding of the relationship between writer and audience and is possibly why I found the discussion of audience invoked and audience addressed in Ede and Lunsford’s first text personally applicable and easier to understand because while discussing and relaying the importance of the connection between audience and writer in “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked,” to me, there was still room allowed for this previously mentioned individualistic streak. Although in the section “Teaching Audience in the Twenty First Century” Lunsford and Ede bring up the idea of the teacher being viewed as the sole audience for a student’s writing in the context of encouraging an understanding of the different audiences present in work written online versus work printed in the traditional format, the idea that the mention of “such explorations [of what audience means] might well begin with exploring the problematics of viewing the teacher as the sole audience for student writing” (22) to me also hits on why I identified strongly with audience discussion in “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked,” as this discussion allowed room for me to still envision any professor as the sole audience of my writing.

From my struggle of identifying with the second Lunsford and Ede text, I identified shortcomings with my notion of audience that could potentially come into play in my final project. One aspect of this application would be if I aimed to create something alongside the lines of incorporating digital or visual components with a traditional academic research paper as mentioned in last blog post, the challenge of using Lunsford and Ede’s new rhetorical triangle in the process of writing my text would be necessity, especially if I plan on putting the work in a public space as was done with the Beyoncé text. “Among the Audience” also showed me the potential limitation of solely conceiving of the professor assigning the work as the audience invoked and addressed. I can deal with this limitation my writing process by aiming to my incorporate WRC peers and the other two readers into this audience invoked and addressed. Ede and Lunsford’s discussion of “writer-as-reader” and “reader-as-writer” in “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked” helped me further realize that I might not actually be as attentive to the audience as I thought I was prior to these readings. Even while I’m re-reading my texts to check for coherency and flow, I don’t think of myself as a reader or put myself in the space of the audience invoked and addressed.

When I reflect on my process of writing and how I incorporate the audience, I realize that I typically think of the goals set forth in a writing prompt as the expectations for the professor’s reading and therefore how I should shape text to meet the goal of this audience and I also typically give long-winded explanation because I think that no matter the audience, I’m difficult to understand. While I know that audience is an important component as the importance of audience has been mentioned no matter what course I’m writing for, I guess I have taken the idea of an audience for granted or pushed the audience to the side as I worked toward creating coherent and logical arguments and texts. Thinking about this limitation of my engagement with audience for me, actually has reminded me of my FYRS paper and the long-winded introduction/background that was met the response of doing a better job to cue the reader or forecast for the reader, which I struggled with. I think incorporating the audience more, especially in the initial stages of my writing, which where I typically set up how I’m going to approach a topic will add to my project by potentially making anything I discuss more engaging, giving me another definitive way to shape my project, developing my rhetorical sensitivity, and also helping further develop my writing ability, which was a goal mentioned in my first blog post.

Sample Projects and a Continued Look At My Potential Project

For anyone looking at the sample Senior Seminar projects, the first characteristic that probably pops out is the varying forms of the projects that include traditional academic research papers, a collection of poems, websites, a children’s book, a zine, and a screenplay. Although I briefly looked at or read the descriptions for all of the sample projects, in order to nail down specific characteristics of these projects that resonated with me and potentially offered specific insight into my project, I focused on four research papers. I didn’t aim to just look at somewhat traditional academic research papers–I was actually aiming to do the opposite), but based off of my own interests and potential projects, I ended up focusing on Alicia Reinersman’s “#Instalike Me: Consumerism, Self-Enhancement, and Instant Gratification,” Leslie Bartley’s “Trans*cending Dominant Media: An Ideological Analysis of Transphobia present in Hegemonic Media,” Molly Crain’s “Where is the Money Moving? Gentrification in Downtown Lexington,” and Molly Dean’s “Branding the Banana: A Rhetorical Analysis of Chiquita via Ideological Criticism.”

Among the four of these, the idea that potential motivations behind the different research/papers ranged from being inspired by personal experience, aiming to cover“new territory,” finding solutions, or creating a sort of a call to action struck me. Reinersman’s paper looks at the new social media technology of Instagram and Bartley aims for readers not only understand the way a transphobic ideology manifests and is reified in mass media, but also does something different by placing this knowledge alongside the use of new media as a resistance tactic (and to an extent offers solutions and a call to action). Crain’s research about gentrification in downtown Lexington not only works to bring forth resistance narratives and hidden narratives, but also has the bigger goal of the research being used to create positive communication between the members of the dominant, resistant, or hidden narrative group and ultimately shape a better culture for Lexington. The discussion of Chiquita’s website by Dean both falls into the category of “new territory” and inspired by personal experience. As discussed by Dean, a lot of research has been done about bananas, but none has been done on the rhetoric of Chiquita’s website as done by Dean. Dean also mentions earlier in her text how this project came from her experience studying abroad in Costa Rica and from reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Ever since I’ve set foot into Dr. Scott Whiddon’s classes, I’ve been tasked with the goal of making my writing have a “so what”–probably to the point where I’ve lost excitement for the potential larger reach of my projects and subsequently came to dislike or distance myself from these projects. From the previously mentioned characteristics of the chosen sample projects, I’ve been drawn toward thinking more about having a project that covers “new territory” in some way or makes a contribution or has a solution or call to action or does all four.

Throughout all four of the sample projects theories and frameworks, such as the elaboration likelihood model, socialization theories, cultivation theory, rhetorical criticism frameworks, Ranks Model, and Marxism are used as tools for analysis by the researchers. At first all of these differing theories struck me as not necessarily random, but as a lot to relate together to analyze certain artifacts. In the process of writing this blog I remembered that the idea of incorporating multiple theories or frameworks together such as ideological criticism and Marxism together had come up in the past, as it was discussed in the Readings in Rhetorical Criticism course. For me, this utilization of several theories and frameworks in all of the papers brings forth two characteristics present in the four papers: culmination of work, experience, and courses at Transy and complex and detailed arguments. While I’m sure the readers for these projects may have lead the writers of these projects toward certain theories that would work well with their topic and goals, a lot of the material is reminiscent of material that one could gain from courses while here, such as the intercultural communication theory in Crain’s paper or the persuasion theory in Dean’s and Crain’s papers. I’m also guessing writers used theories from outside of the WRC discipline, especially in Reinersman’s paper which discusses Maslow’s hierarchy, Bourdieu’s cultural capital, and Marxism.

The samples I chose and others that I briefly looked at stand out to me as a culmination of the knowledge and experience with academic disciplines the writer’s gained while at Transy or even if the knowledge used wasn’t a part of their academic experience prior to Senior Seminar, the culmination of skills to able discuss and use these ideas as a tool for analysis stands out. For my final project, I want it to be a culmination in some form. Prior to these sample projects, the idea of culmination in a Senior Seminar project meant building on the exact research or topics I’ve written on before, but now also stands as a way to culminate knowledge, experience, and abilities gained while at Transy. All of the different theories and frameworks are tied together in the papers in a way that is complex and detailed and brings a deeper knowledge, understanding, or perspective om the topics being discussed and the writers appear to handle this complexity well. For my final project, I potentially want to showcase a culmination of knowledge and skills in a similar way to the four papers, but also handle this mentioned complexity in a “sophisticated” way. This idea sort of goes back to what i mentioned in previous blog about concerns over developing my writing abilities, while addressing and discussing complex ideas and issues.

Other than these general characteristics I gleamed across the four samples I looked at in-depth, specific characteristics to certain projects stood out to me. The process to create Crain’s research paper is interesting as video interviews were conducted and used as sources for the paper but as far as I know, these interviews were not incorporated into Crain’s final project as a visual element. As I’m leaning more towards a traditional academic research paper for my final project, but still open to a different format, Crain’s work did show me the potential this format has to, in a sense, move away from the experience I’ve had of gathering sources for academic research papers and writing academic research papers over the past years. Crain’s work also reminded me of the Beyoncé article we discussed in Feminist Rhetorics, which was a traditional academic research paper, but also contained visual elements. Potentially, having both in a package as the article mentioned does, could be more refreshing from me if I continue on the route of doing an academic research paper.

As I looked through projects dealing with social media or collective consciousness, fantasy theme analysis and symbolic convergence theory came up several times. Currently, I think my Senior Seminar project will focus on social media and thanks to the projects incorporating fantasy theme analysis and symbolic convergence theory, this potential approach has been brought to my attention.

As of now, I really only have questions related to scope and length of projects. The research papers varied but were all upwards of twenty pages and as I mentioned contained a lot of theories, but left me wondering –as someone what wants to attempt to tackle a complex argument–at what point is too much as a writer and for a reader? One of the “boundaries” of scope that I’ve seen across sample projects is in the discussion of the work of this paper as a subset of what could potentially be a larger project. This idea has been explicitly stated in some projects or suggested through footnotes in other projects. Is thinking of the scope of the project as chunk of a potentially large project a good way to think about scope? How early in the process should scope come in as a determining factor what a project will tackle/discuss?

Writerly Portfolio: Step 1

At times I’m weirded out or perplexed by the fact that I’m a Writing, Rhetoric, and Communication major. In the past and even sometimes now, these three areas have been daunting or confusing to me. I avoided advanced placement English courses in high school because the words rhetoric and intense writing were being thrown around and came into Classical Rhetoric sophomore completely unaware yet afraid of what a rhetoric course would entail. At my high school we had a Communication Media Arts program and not only did I avoid taking classes from the discipline but I even avoided the hallway where the classes were out of fear of the word communication and what that would mean for me as someone who rarely spoke. Even now I get bemused looks from people I know who are questioning why I’m involved anything related to communication (common response: “But you don’t communicate, how does that work?”). My writing experience from high school English classes left me with a lot of concern. Post my first year of high school English, I experienced barely any writing assignments and barely any feedback. The only place I was actually writing on a consistent basis was in band classes. While I contribute you these band writing experiences to me surviving FYS, writing performance reviews, article reviews, and a summary of musical periods every year should have resulted in me hating writing.

When I reflect on the beginning of my writing experience at Transy, the writing projects that I completed which stand out to me not only helped me get over these previously mentioned fears, but also went beyond just trying to get over what I felt was a lack of ability or understanding about writing, rhetoric, or communication. Out of fear, I dedicated a lot of time to my writing in FYS and FYRS by planning out way ahead of time formal and informal writing projects. Reading my past work in FYS, I notice how I was moving past the fears of writing and into the potential “seeds” of the topics and concerns I would focus in future work. While I’m not impressed or incredibly fond of anything I wrote in FYS, defending Earl Shorris’s “On the Uses of a Liberal Education as a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor” and arguing about the dangers of fanaticism connect to the content of the work I would do past FYRS and want to continue to write about in my post-undergraduate career. Right now, most of my writing is concerned with material, ideas, or people that I think are having a negative impact or perpetuating negative ideas and being critical and analytical of these material, people, or ideas. I know this is an incredibly broad category, but with my Senior Seminar project I hope to continue this thread.

Although in the two previously mentioned essays I was writing about articles and concepts I was interested in, FYS was still me writing to fulfil a requirement. My FYRS paper stands as a pivotal moment to me as I remember being truly engaged with the writing. I wasn’t just writing to fulfil a requirement, but to voice concerns I had. I was able to question and criticize punk rock music in the hopes of bettering something I participated in and enjoyed. I remember and find importance in this writing project not only because I came to understand that I could address issues in an academic setting that I felt mattered, but also because by the end of the writing project, I realized I was concerned with material, ideas, or people that affect marginalized groups. My criticism of punk culture focused more on the culture being apolitical, stale, and cultivating a mentality that was not conducive to the past ideals of what punk was supposed to be (may have never actually been) and posturing as though they were meeting the challenge of their punk predecessors. In the process of creating the PowerPoint for the project, I had one initial slide that focused on the existence of sexism, homophobia, and racism within the punk scene. It was an introductory slide that ultimately did not come into play much within my paper or presentation, but afterwards I realized the issues I mentioned about the punk scene in my paper bothered me, but the issues in the initial side that I hadn’t really focused on were also bubbling under the surface for me as a reason for why I was disgruntled with punk rock. In projects post-FYRS, I’ve dealt with materials, ideas, or people I thought were negatively affecting marginalized groups and I’ve mostly dealt with sexism. As I hope to continue writing about how materials, ideas, and people affect marginalized groups in my post-undergraduate career, I hope my Senior Seminar project will work with this aspect.

Moving past FYRS, when I think about a lot of my other papers I think of the process for analysis or the type of analysis I did for these papers. For Taste and Tastemaking, I wrote about Pitchfork and hip-hop and while I used many secondary sources focused on this issue, I also gathered my own data, in a sense, by analyzing the amount of hip-hop related reviews or activity on Pitchfork and gathered qualitative data by analyzing Pitchfork reviews. I’m not necessarily looking for a larger mathematics component in my Senior Seminar project, but the act I did for my Taste and Tastemakaing project of gathering quantitative data and analyzing from a primary source is something I would like to incorporate in my Senior Seminar project. Visual analysis done from my classical rhetoric second paper about American Apparel and from my Feminist Rhetorics paper about Barbara Kruger and textual analysis done from Readings in Rhetorical Criticism about Hunter Moore’s Rolling Stone article also are methods, processes, and types of analysis that stand out for me and that I hope to have a senior seminar project that would help me learn more about any of these forms of analysis.

When reflecting on any writing moments outside of FYS and FYRS, especially writing moments pertaining to my major, I realized I was in over my head with new ideas and not giving myself enough time for my writing process and this affected my writing or at least how I perceived the outcome (final paper) of my writing. While I find the topics I write about to be interesting and important, I end up being not as confident about the writing I’m doing because of the time I spend on the work. When I’m going back to read my writing now, I’m reminded of how in the creating the text I’m having to struggle with explaining difficult and complex topics because of how I laid out my work timewise and therefore I feel like stylistically I’m just going through the motions or creating just serviceable writing. For my Senior Seminar project, I want to deal with complex issues, but also create a work ethic/process that will develop me as a writer. I want to be able to see what my writing can be when I really push myself to develop and plan over time. When I finish my paper and look back on it, I want to feel as though I wasn’t creating just serviceable writing because I didn’t plan through well enough and was struggling to get complex ideas and make a logical argument as quickly as possible. By working on work ethic and process I hope to come to understand more about my writing and who I am as a writer.

A portion of this post is supposed to incorporate extracurricular writing, but through looking at my past work I realized I barely actually do any extracurricular writing. Outside of writing a few articles for The Rambler and writing pieces for applications, I have no extracurricular writing. While I feel as though what I write about for academic purposes is interesting to me and I’m passionate about these topics, I’m not sure if I should incorporate this lack of extracurricular writing into my Senior Seminar project.

As of now, my future goal consists of going to graduate school. I potentially want this Senior Seminar paper to be of use for my graduate school applications. Ultimately, I want my project to represent my development as a writer and thinker over my time at Transy and to potentially continue to deal with societal issues and to touch on mentioned different forms of analysis.