Research

You may want to review the Formal Essay Assignment before reading the following info.

One of themes we've encountered again and again in this course is that writing is a conversation that a writer is having with hir audience and with other informed writers.

In our last mid-term, for example, you wrote essays that conversed with me about how your ideas relate to Will Saletan's ideas about humility in politics.

There are two different kinds of research. 

• One type of research is forensic.  It's all about gathering background facts and information and context and concrete information to draw a particular picture of the world.  A cell biologist gathers data about how fast cancer cells grow in mice to draw a picture about metabolism and cancer.  A sociologist gathers data about funding and laws and other factors that shape an immigrant's secondary education in Sacramento.  A literary scholar gathers data about how American literature represents black masculinity.  

• Another type of research finds other informed writers to include in the conversation about their particular topic.  Informed writers will be other expert researchers who have well-developed, coherent opinions about the topic that interests you.  When we explain to our readers the particular picture of the world that these other writers have drawn, and when we explain how that picture differs from our own, we clarify and strengthen our arguments.

This kind of research is like taking the mid-term (do you agree or disagree or something in between and why?), but it allows you to respond to essays of your own choosing, which are interested in the same topic you have chosen.

Today, I want you to check out this information from Cornell University about how we choose these other informed writers for the second formal essay assignment. 

Here is the link to our Sacramento City College library.  PLEASE ask the librarians for help!
And keep in mind that we will be using MLA style citations in this class.

Wordy-ness

Nota bene: I had mentioned that we would try to cover parallelism this week, but I'd like to save it for next week. 

We've spent a lot of time in this class thinking about writing in terms of the big picture by asking some version of the following questions.  What does the whole essay look like?  What does the whole essay do?  How do we develop our ideas?  How do we put our ideas in a larger context?  and How do we organize our ideas? 

I also want to spend some time in the second half of this class thinking about how to edit our prose to make it communicate more clearly and effectively on the sentence level.  This form of editing assumes that you can recognize the subjects and verbs of sentences, certain parts of speech, and the sentences that have too many of them.

Nota bene 2: Please let me know if you need additional practice with any of the following common errors: run-on sentences, sentence fragments, mixed construction sentences, and /or dangling modifiers.

We want to communicate our ideas using as few words as possible.  This means that we have to recognize and delete common phrases that we use to clear our throats (like "It is necessary to believe that") before we get down to our main points.  We also want to get rid of common phrases that we use for emphasis (like "really," "totally," "so," "do," and "very").  And we want to try to eliminate as many prepositions as possible by preferring, whenever possible, to use action verbs in the active voice.

Logical Fallacies

Sometimes we find that we make claims that sound logical but still aren't necessarily true. 

For example, it may seem logical to say that President Obama's political agenda is worthless because he is dumb.

This example is called ad hominem (to the man); it means that someone is attacking someone on a personal level (we might call it a "low blow") instead of attacking the ideas or political agendas themselves.

Review
In class, we've discussed tautology, or circular reasoning.  This is the kind of reasoning that parents resort to with their demanding toddlers: "I said you can't have the cookie because you can't have the cookie!"

We've also discussed straw men, the practice of attacking an opinion in order to make your opinion look better, even though no one would fairly adhere to the opinion anyway.  It's always a good idea to represent opposing view points, but we need to represent them fairly.

Learn More
Follow this link to a handout compiled by the writing center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Go heels!), you'll find more information and examples. 

Powerpoint Presentations

Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, can be visual as well as textual.  Since the powerful rise of advertising and the advent of Web 2.0 technology, we cannot afford to ignore visual styles of rhetoric in our writing classes.

Understanding visual rhetoric will help you in work places where you may be asked to present information in the format of a slide show (as in a meeting) or poster presentation (as at a convention).  Since, as consumers and citizens, we confront visual rhetoric constantly--on billboards, signs, ads, magazine covers, commercials, TV programs, web sites, and more--understanding visual rhetoric should help us make informed, critical choices in the world.

We've already used semiotic analysis to understand the visual rhetoric of those awesome Old Spice ads.  (And btw, have you noticed that Dove appears to have adopted a similar marketing strategy?)

So let's turn to making our own visual rhetoric with Powerpoint (on PC) or Keynote (on Mac).

What are we doing here?

Blogging is its own art form or genre and follows its own rules.  That is to say that it differs from other kinds of writing we do in college.  It's more formal than taking notes or compiling a notebook.  It's less formal than writing an essay.  Within that range, the formality of blogs depends on the audience. 

So who is your audience?  You are writing for both me and your peers and anyone in the general public who is attracted to blogs about writing.  Be creative in trying to figure out the appropriate style. 

And look around at other blogs to get a sense of what works best.
These are
some links
to some
awesome blogs
that I
enjoy. (This is a small sample.  And not written by students.)  One of these bloggers, Prof. Michael Berube, once observed that some blogs come raw and some cooked.  IMO, the best blogs are medium rare.

Notice the things you like about these blogs and try to replicate some of them.  Images rock.  Links are very cool.  Take advantage of the blogging medium.  And, yes, if you are as cool as Jay Smooth, you can do video-blogging--it requires the same rhetorical skills but a lot more cooking.  And things like video cameras.

All of you have signed up to be responsible for kicking off our blog conversation each week by Sunday midnight.  (You don't have to wait until then to get her done, btw.)  On those weeks, you need to post a useful summary of our reading.  What is the purpose of a summary?  Try to decide that before you begin writing it.  And remember who you are writing it for.  Then think of an open-ended, conversation-starting question to kick off a conversation. 

The rest of you will need to reply to the question in useful, open-ended ways.  Replies have their own kind of rules, which are different from posts, so read around to see what people usually do.  The purpose of this blog-conversation is for you to help you get a handle on the reading and to get used to writing every day and maybe to generate ideas for and get help with your formal essays.  Plus you'll get familiar with a new form of writing that certainly looks as though it is here to stay.

Have fun!