Rhetoric

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

This course is an examination of the theory, the practice, and the implications of rhetoric & rhetorical criticism. This semester, you will have the opportunity to deepen many of your skills: Analysis, persuasion, oral presentation, and critical thinking. In this course you will act as both a rhetor (a person who uses rhetoric to persuade) and as a rhetorical critic (one who analyzes the rhetoric of others). Both the rhetor and the rhetorical critic write to persuade; both ask and answer important questions. Always one of their goals is to create new knowledge for all of us, so no endeavor in this class is a "mere exercise."

For our assignments, think of yourself as teaching your readers something about rhetoric as well as something about the artifacts you analyze.

By the end of the course, you should be better equipped to:

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him [sic]; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself [sic] against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress." —Kenneth Burke

Other than to learn to be more persuasive, why should we learn about rhetoric?

"A person who persuades is not, or surely may not be, the only person to be blamed if others are wrongly persuaded. Gullibility, or having too open a mind, is a serious fault, and one to which many other vices contribute. And, of course, there is the opposite fault of having too closed a mind. Many speakers fare better than they should, and others deserve a fate better than their audiences allow." —B. J. Diggs, professor of philosophy (1964)

A detailed reading list is provided in the Readings Section. Several pieces were excerpted from these textbooks:

Andrews, James R., Michael C. Leff, and Robert Terrill. Reading Rhetorical Texts: An Introduction to Criticism. Houghton Mifflin College Division, 1998. ISBN: 9780395731567.

Strang, Steven, ed. Writing Exploratory Essays. McGraw-Hill Humanities, 1995. ISBN: 9781559342629.

I grade on a 13-point scale (and I do not round final grades upwards)

Value of each assignment:

I don't distinguish between excused and unexcused absences

I realize that occasionally situations arise that prevent your finishing an essay on time. You get one "Get out of Jail Free" card—email me and say you want to use the card and you get an automatic one-week extension for an essay (not for Framing) with no penalty.

It's always a good idea to discuss your paper topics and ideas with me, and I'm happy to meet with you about all of them if you wish. But I leave it up to you to decide if and when such conferences will help you.

In rhetoric, how you write is as important as what you write. An essay with numerous writing glitches suffers in terms of being a rhetorical act of communication (your ethos is damaged) and in terms of grade.

Each essay must have 2 versions and might have a 3rd if you wish.

One of your purposes in writing any essay in this class is to teach us all something about rhetoric and to demonstrate your understanding of the subtleties of the texts we have read and your ability to explicitly use rhetorical and ethical concepts to analyze them and to convince us (your readers) that your analysis, interpretation, and argument are valid. Your essays should show novelty in analysis and persuasion.

Your essays should go beyond hard work; they should show insight and should provide a clear, nuanced discussion. Always your goal should be to create new knowledge. Your essays will be evaluated for

Your essays should always be your new work created specifically for this course. Using work written for other courses will result in an unchangeable zero.

You show appropriate respect for other writers and thinkers by giving them credit for their ideas, their unusual structures, their phrasings, and their information. More importantly, you enhance your own ethos by showing how your insights and research build on the work of those who wrote before you.

In Western culture, not giving credit is an insult as well as an act of dishonesty. In all academic writing, you must give citations each time you use 1) someone else's ideas, or 2) someone else's words. Although material on the web is free, you did not create it; someone else thought it, researched it, wrote it—give credit to that someone else. Plagiarism—intentional or unintentional—results in a zero for the essay (and no possibility of revision). If you are unclear about what constitutes plagiarism, Talk With Me and / or consult the WCC about specific instances you are not sure about. Do not ask your friend—ask an expert. The WCC also has information about plagiarism, and MIT itself has good information. But you are encouraged to

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