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Notes and Overview for Week 4

ENGL 5362, Fall 2023

Important: No assignments or course documents, including the syllabus, should be considered to be in their final form until the first week of class begins.

Agenda

  1. Compose ourselves
  2. Followup Qs and As Annotated bibliography project
  3. Crash Course in APA Surgery
  4. Talk about this week’s readings: rhetorical situations, ecologies, velocity

(crash course in) APA Style

Citing sources is not simple or a matter of following directions. It’s a matter of prior knowledge, understanding how arguments are made, what kinds of arguments are made, that there are directions that need to be followed and the nature of the choices that need to be made, and more…

Writers choose texts to quote in order to connect themselves to particular traditions of thinking or researching; to put their arguments in the context of other, more prominent authors, whose views are already accepted by readers; or to put forth arguments or examples a writer wants to contest, examine, or elaborate. So, selecting and discussing sources is a matter of savvy diplomacy, persuasion, and argumentation. Sure, it involves learning how to follow detailed directions about how and where to place punctuation in order to indicate where quotations start and end; more importantly, it involves learning how and why writers associate themselves with sources, whether they seek to agree with what they’ve read, argue with what they’ve read, or apply what they’ve read to a new context. It involves understanding that there are reasons for using evidence other than to support a claim; writers might use sources to identify trends in order to argue with them.

Harrington, in Bad Ieas about Writing

Where do citation systems come from? What is the purpose of a citation system? There’s auseful discussion if you want to nerd out in Connors, R. J. (1999). The rhetoric of citation systems, Part II: Competing epistemic values in citation. *Rhetoric Review 78.2

What do formatting differences in citation styles (as interfaces?) and stylistic differences in style manuals tell us about the cultures of the academic disciplines that use them? What do parentheical vs numerical citations show us about the values of the scholarly disciplines that use them?

Andrews’ Modified APA 7 Stylesheet

See also:

What’s the sitch? Situations, Ecologies, Velocity, and more variables and constituents than you thought you might ever want to account for

Assigned readings can always be found on Blackboard. Addional resources should be there, and if not are accessible through our Library)

Required:

Required-ish:

Optional if you really want to go deep:

Notes and Questions towards understanding rhetorical situations and rhetorical velocity

  1. Review your visualiations–tell us about what you found, what you thought, and what you made.
  1. Mine own visualizations and notes and comments and things
  1. Limitations of the concept of rhetorical situation?
  2. Across various models of the rhetorical situation (and these other related theories), what things are theorists trying to account for?

Your Questions, Which are Really Good This Week and I Want to Focus on Them

  1. So, ‘rhetorical velocity,’ as described by Ridolfo and DeVoss, isn’t just concerned with the projection of the rhetoric, it’s also concerned with third party uses. Correct?
  2. Not a question but a comment: I’m glad we read Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. It gave some cool context when reading the piece by Ehrenfeld. I know one is talking about the birth of nationalism and the other about digital spaces, but they overlapped nicely and gave frameowrk to the other in a cool way.
  3. I don’t tend to use visuals when teaching rhetoric to my kids. I use an acronym to break down the parts, and we rock and roll. Do you think it is incredibly useful?
  4. Is rhetorical ecology talking about considering factors outside of the rhetorical situation or is it more about how the rhetorical situation can move through situations and contexts? I really tried to grasp the idea of ecology, but I feel like I’m just not quite there in how it relates to or involves the rhetorical situation.
  5. Is “remix” and “velocity” related to the idea of intertextuality but in a specifically digital context? What does this do to ideas of how knowledge production happens?
  6. The Ehrenfield piece focuses on discussing the ecological turn in rhetoric, but part of it seems overly focused on the individual. Specifically, other authors stating that we should focus on what we individually can do and disregard collective action. This seems antithetical to an ecological analysis and feels almost more like a neoliberal idea. That’s probably why Ehrenfield problematizes it so much, but am I misinterpreting that?

For Next Time

Journal entry for week 5

You’ll be deep in the weeds on your annotated bibliographies this week, so I don’t want to distract too much from that. Please read as assigned and post your 3-5 reading/discussion questions for this week:

To Read for Sept 2128 (Templates and Afterlife)

Required:

We will also give time for in-class workshop on your Annotated Bibligraphies. Bring a working draft, either on your laptop or a printed copy.