Hi all. Today is dedicated to peer reviewing final papers. I want to clarify that this is more about revising the quality of thought, clarifying evidence, and attending to logical development than it is to dealing with surface level editing. If we think of rhetoric’s five major canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery), then today is primarily concerned with the second canon. Is this material arranged coherently? Can a reader with minimal background knowledge follow the argument?
With that in mind, I want to think about paragraphs as units. This is basic stuff and you all know this, of course: Every paragraph should have a specific purpose, it should convey one idea; every paragraph should make one claim, and then present enough evidence to support this claim; evidence, for most of these projects, will be either quotes or paraphrases from the texts the writer is reading and interpreting. But experience proves that writing is messy. Writing is an attempt to tame a thought. Thought is wild. It resists.
So, today, we are going to do our best to help tame thought. Here’s how. First, I will ask you to read the paper. As you go through each paragraph underline the topic sentence. We want to make sure that every paragraph has one, and only one, main idea. Please read the whole paragraph before you go back and underline. If you don’t think a paragraph makes a claim, then write “no clear claim” in the margin.
Then we want to look at how well the writer handles her evidence. I have a four part system for presenting evidence:
- Signal
- Quote
- Summary
- Analysis
I use this system for both longer block quotes (quotes that are 4 or more lines) and short quotes.
As you read through papers today, I want you to focus attention on how well the writer transitions into evidence. And, I want you to make sure that they are making explicit the connection between evidence and the greater claim of their paper: are they making the connection? Or are they asking you to do that work for them? Are they doing their logical duty before and after their evidence?
Here’s a few examples of how I use this system in action. First an example from my 2014 article on Gregory Ulmer’s “mystory” project:
Berlin (1988) offered his most damning rejection of expressivist pedagogies in his canonical essay, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Classroom,” where he indicated expressivism with two particular charges. First, because it identified the social as a corrupting force that tarnished the authenticity of the individual, collective action became more difficult:
[ … ] expressionistic rhetoric is inherently and debilitatingly divisive of political protest, suggesting that effective resistance can only be offered by individuals, each acting alone. Given the isolation and incoherence of such protest, gestures genuinely threatening to the establishment are difficult to accomplish. (Berlin, 1988, p. 487)
Hence, expressivism offers no explicit political project, but rather a “subversiveness [ … ] more apparent than real” (487). As already noted, Ulmer maintained the ideal response to a mystory is the composition of another mystory; thus, it can be difficult to see how one would translate the insight of the mystory (or an electronic monument) into direct, impactful political action. However, this assumes that the immediate purpose of the mystory is such action. While the mystory is not the kind of direct political action sought by Berlin, it is an important step in cultivating an agent (or, as Ulmer identifies them, an egent) capable of acting politically and ethically in the 21st century. We will return to this point in the conclusion of this section.
Above, I claim that Berlin characterizes expressionism as devoid of political dimensions. I then transition into a quote from Berlin. Before you get to the quote you know both 1) when the quote was written and 2) in what article it appeared. Then, after the quote, I both summarize my reading of it (perhaps a bit weak) before connecting the quote and paragraph to the over-arching argument of the article: that Ulmer’s “mystory” complicates Berlin’s characterization.
Let’s look at a second example:
Byron Hawk offers a similar perspective of the agentive/inventive dimensions of space and materiality, with a focus on highlighting a pedagogic practice conducive to choric invention. In addition to the work of Ulmer, Hawk turns to the Heideggerian-inflected pedagogy of Paul Kameen, specifically his practice of the “read around” (229-234):
At the beginning of each class, everyone reads his or her paper. […] After each presentation, there is no response or commentary, only silence, until it is broken by the next speaker. Class discussion follows these readings and focuses on selected texts from the syllabus. […] Such localizing establishes a rhetorical situation for both the students’ and the teacher’s knowledge production: it provides a background from which the participants in a class can interpret the poetry and criticism and produce knowledges specific to them as well as to the class. (226)
Hawk argues that Kameen’s insistence on opening classes with students listening to each other transforms their perception of and relations within the classroom space. In terms of the first principle, that environs operate as active agents in the inventive process, this pedagogical practice is an attempt to attune us to the agentive dimensions of mood, atmosphere, and space; Kameen seeks to transform the classroom into a space more conducive to unpredictable emergence by encouraging listening. But this passage also anticipates the second principle of choric invention, and its interest in juxtaposing subjective experience against objective history.
