On blogging and rhetoric

It wasn't at all surprising to me that, come the end of every week, I always dreaded the inevitable 'writing-of-an-obligatory-blog-for Kate'. Having to re-pore through the brick-like blocks of texts for that weekend... having to attempt to construct something articulate about such bricks... having to ready those thoughts to be viewed by others....

I'm certain I don't have to go into detail here; the recipe for dark bloggish loathing, I'm sure, you are all familiar with by now.

But what I was surprised at was how I never failed to be extremely glad to have written every one of those blog posts, no matter how originally reluctant. And not just for the satisfaction of getting it off my chest; indeed, it's almost as if Kate knew that all those unpleasant steps would ultimately lead to (egad!) a glimmer of understanding! 

Even if the text I'd read that week had unrolled through my brain without depositing a single sliver of rhetorical residue, reading over others' blog posts for that week and using their own gleanings and struggles as springboards to wade back into parts of the text, and then using the act of writing itself as a kind of externalized thought process... All this lead to the formation of a thought that much more concrete and stable than anything I had single-handedly hazarded the first go-through. That said, I want to say that I appreciate all of you, reading this; your blogs and comments this semester all helped me, in some way, to get to a place outside of class I could look back on with some certainty and satisfaction. As all of you, I'm sure, my blog posts fluctuated under my end-of-the-week state of mind between the almost-essay-worthy to the compost-esque, but between them all, and as a classroom collective, I daresay they are a matter for some pride. Huzzah, rhetoric-comrades—for sticking with it through the thick and the even-more-thick of dialectic and didacticism, elocution and oratory, mind-numbing prose styles and mind-bending philosophies, the depressing lack of feminine presence and Kelsey's deafening feminism—I toast you all from afar.