Rhetorical Canons in a Digital Age

It's no secret that I love technical rhetoric. I can lose hours debating the ins and outs of social networking. I enjoy the finer points of web design. I dabble in coding with html or css, spend way too many hours playing video games, write as part of online communities, and always seek ways to drag these influences into the classroom.

While getting my MA, it also wasn't a secret that a large contingency of my institution's English Department were wary--if not altogether hostile--towards the ever-creeping reach of technology. For them, technology was (and is) a thing to be feared. It is complicated and superficial, difficult to master and even more difficult to teach. It changes constantly, while preserving things well beyond when they should expire.

This animosity (understandable as it is), is why I appreciate articles like James E. Porter's "Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric." Because, for Porter, digital writing and rhetoric isn't just about exploring a new, exciting frontier. It's also about recovering classical elements of rhetoric that, once lost, cost women, people of color, and other marginalized identities greatly (211). As the focus of rhetoric instruction shifted from orality and narration to informational writing, certain forms of understanding and relating to the world around us (such as verbal communication, storytelling, cultural connections, and oral memory) were devalued. And (surprise, surprise), the forms of understanding that were still "respectable" were almost exclusively those accessible to white, heterosexual, wealthy men (Welch, 1994).

This, however, is not a discourse on the evils of marginalization. Rather, it's a celebration of Porter's simple but encouraging acknowledgement that--with the continuing growth of digital rhetorics--these types of "knowing" have ample opportunity to reclaim their place.

Online discourse is written discourse, true. But it also carries a lot of the hallmarks of oral language. It is responsive and fluid. It is often community driven. And it's physical presentation (whether its through bodily representations of the communicator or the style and accessibility of the text's platform) plays an incredibly important role, hearkening back to the long subjugated canon of delivery.

House of Leaves... not your typical text experience.

This isn't to say that delivery doesn't matter in print texts. It does. But the delivery styles are almost always standardized. They follow relatively similar formats. They demand a certain approach and expectations from readers. Very few challenge these norms (though texts like Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves do exist). 

But the Internet doesn't fall into such standard categories. Digital writing isn't so much a genre as it is a medium, encapsulating an enormous range of audiences, forums, styles, and purposes. And while technology creates certain barriers of access that still perpetrate existing class lines, it also offers new forms of accessibility to those who had been previously barred. Because of digital writing's aural quality, its' ties to delivery are more readily apparent. And, as Porter explains, "A robust canon of delivery should help us think more productively about how we are writing, and to whom, and lead us to make smarter choices as writers/designers, whether we are producing online information or non-digital information" (211).

Making a Withdrawal - Stepping Away from the Banking Method of Education.

I think I might be in love with Paulo Freire.

He wouldn't be my first academic love (an odd and eclectic category that includes C.S. Lewis, Cicero, and--perhaps most embarrassingly--James Paul Gee). While I would never claim that Freire's style in any way resembles theirs (or that theirs resemble each other's), one thing they do all have in common is their ability to craft beautiful, and elegantly simple prose. They take things I hold dear, and they illuminate them with language that is engaging--sometimes even stunning--and yet still easy to understand. With Lewis, it's Christianity. With Cicero, it's the nature of discourse itself. And with Gee and Freire....it's students.

Freire's exploration of the banking model of education (where students are simply vessels where instructors "deposit" knowledge until they are full) strikes to the core of a lesson I've been slowly learning the more that I teach. The traditional education system is a top-down affair. The teacher is the authority. The students are subjects. As I have told students time and again, the classroom is not a democracy.

But what Freire points out--and what I'm realizing I really believe--is that, however true that is, it's not okay. Or, at the very least, it's a system that needs to be made visible.

So often, instructors of college freshmen lament their "inability" to exercise critical thought. They rail against students caught in the nets of five paragraph essays, stringent page requirements, and the ever cliched transitions of "First....secondly....and in conclusion..." Yet what they don't acknowledge is that, given our current system of education, to expect anything else is ludicrous. As Freire points out:

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. (73)

In other words, our students spend years learning how to memorize and regurgitate "knowledge" on command. They learn to adapt to a system. And it's especially evident in our "good" students (which, of course, we find en mass in college settings)...because these are the ones who learned how to play the game without making waves. They don't challenge the system, because they've learned that this is something that's frowned upon. They don't question the teacher, because that way leads to danger and stress and bad grades. They have learned to be vessels.

It's a system that I hate, and yet I know I have also done my time as one of of the "well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are only serving to dehumanize" (75). I generally am an open book. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and I'm quick to share my opinions....and when I occupy a position of authority (as I do every day in the classroom), those seemingly harmless opinions become law. And this remains just as true when I walk in with naive ideas of instilling a social justice-esque curriculum, if my means of doing so follows the banking method. Well-intentioned or not, if I simply inform my students of "how the world is," I am part of the problem. "[true humanists] cannot use banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society" (78).

I share my opinions with my class. I feel that, risky as it is, it's more dishonest to pretend to be utterly objective. But I try to remember that "liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals [sic] of information" (79). My job is not to inform my students how they should view the world. My job is to get them to start thinking about it...to start questioning the systems that have been invisible to them and which they've taken for granted.

I might not like the conclusions they come to. But that's the point. Their agreement with me means nothing if I never give them a chance to not.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Theory, Practice, and the Written Word: Or Working Around My Grudge With Academese

It's no secret that I have a grudge against poorly written academic texts ("poorly written" here meaning writing that makes my eyes glaze over and my brain cringe from jargon). I've written about it before, ranted publicly many a time, and I undoubtedly will again.

But however much I rail against an overabundance (in my opinion) of academese, I appreciate those moments when I get called out on exactly what I'm railing against.

It's true that a great deal of academic writing is overwrought. I'm guilty of this, myself (my MA thesis was an embarrassing collection of passive sentences and convoluted paragraphs filled with agonizing prose). It's an easy pitfall in a world where passive structures imply objectivity. Drowning in deadlines, publication requirements, and way too much caffeine, we have limits to what we can manage. If a piece is grammatically correct, understandable (if only barely), and a publisher is actually willing to take it....does it really matter if it's a bit heavy handed?

I'd say yes. My goal for my writing and my scholarship is communication. Clarity. Scholarship that is drowning in academese places a barrier between theory and reader, lessening the audience who can actually be impacted. If I want my research to make waves, I need it to be the kind of thing that people come back to willingly. Not the kind that graduate students reluctantly trudge through, thoughts of bonfires dancing in the back of their thoughts, before shoving it into a pile of other quickly-forgotten texts. I long to emulate scholars like James Paul Gee, Nancy Sommers, or Wendy Bishop; I want my research to be practical, applicable, and ultimately readable.

But my desire for clarity and engagement comes at a cost...one that Gary Olson and Kory Lawson Ching have expressed so, so well. In his essay, "Struggling Over Theory, Struggling Over Identity," Olson comments on the role of theory in composition. "I did not argue that everyone should engage in [theoretical] scholarship, or that we should abandon other types of scholarship (such as explorations of effective pedagogy), or that theoretical scholarship should be thought of as superior to alternative modes of investigation--only that as a field we need to widen, not narrow, our intellectual focus" (584). Ching, too, points out the great weakness hidden under all my railing--"to be constantly shooting for [practical] payoff is to privilege, in the parlance of composition, the product over the process" (456).

I know that my own practical knowledge of teaching and praxis has improved drastically since my return to grad school. I was a good teacher before, yes, but studying theory over the past three years (even the theory that left me writhing in mental anguish) has challenged me to question long-held beliefs, to find new ways to interact with my cohort and my students, and to grow...as an instructor and a student. Ching and Olson, in beautifully clear terms, remind me that abstract thought can often only be expressed in abstractions... and it has to start there (and be allowed to stay there) before any move toward practice can feasibly occur. It has to be valued in its gestation.

And, speaking in terms of pragmatics, there's the very real truth that the Academy (with all the ominous, anonymous authority the capital A ascribes) values theory and intellectual complexity. Ching references Sidney Dobrin when he says that without theory "composition scholarship will stagnate, and composition as a field will be defined within the narrow confines of a service orientation (emphasis mine)" (458). Teaching may be what brought me to this field, but the pedagogical imperative (if all-encompassing) becomes a constraint that can hinder our effectiveness as a field or even--equally--as teachers. "We risk invisibility and illegitimacy, and those attributes would have dire consequences for the field as a whole" (458).

My bias will probably always be towards practicality. I like personalized, witty, or practical scholarship. I like things I can hold in my hands and turn into something real. But what I want (however valuable) can't be the be all and end all of the discipline.

Anyone who has taught figures out very quickly that sharing ideas is the best way to plan. We pass lesson plans back and forth. We talk about strategies and approaches and we develop them into new, personalized things. It's a lesson that I am trying to get better about applying to my scholarly life as well. It's not enough to stick to the knowledge that I'm most comfortable with. I need theorists in my life. I need other view points. They make me a better teacher, a better scholar, and a better person... and that is valuable enough.