2-25 class

Today we'll discuss some early rhetorical theory, a form of discourse analysis. See 2-25 class notes added to Webcampus.

Your dissonance paper/blog is due next week as well. I'll discuss my expectations in class, but basically the goal is for you to write about your own process of selecting a topic for your research paper. The term "dissonance" refers to the idea that you should be pursuing a topic for which you have some desire to understand better, based on your personal experience, professional goals, or both. Your dissonance paper should therefore identify topics related to this course that you want to understand better and reflect on why you want to pursue them. You can pose questions, discuss in or out-of-class readings, relate your experience. You also need to narrow and select a topic and explain your selection, based on personal interest, fruitfulness of preliminary searches in CompPile, etc. In the end, your paper should raise some possible topics, discuss your interest in them, and then identify the topic you want to pursue for your outside research paper. You won't necessarily be bound to the topic (I will read your dissonance papers with an eye toward helping you choose an appropriate topic), but you should have a good start and get the opportunity to get feedback from me and your classmates (so I suppose it should be a sharable blog?)

Next week's readings are mostly in the Cross-Talk book, but there is one article (Hillocks) in the library's e-reserves (not Webcampus). You should be able to access e-reserves from home, but you'll need a library access code. Can everyone access e-reserves?