The comfort I found in reading other's blog posts didn't come without aversion to blogging, however. I found that the strict deadlines for blogging made me wary of blogging at all. For me, Mondays are always packed with due assignments and readings, as well as meetings and appointments. Getting blogs done by 11 am sharp wasn't always an option for me. While I would do my best to plan ahead and get my readings done during the weekend, 11 am Monday morning always sneaked up on me. I also feel like blogging has become a norm (and annoyance) for many of my discussion-based classes. Having 3 different blogs to keep up with quickly became a huge amount of reading and blogging each week. It almost seems as if blogging creates an overwhelming amount of information and opinions to parce and add my own little blurb each week.
There has to be a way to get the discussion out of blogging without overwhelming students with over-blogging.
I can certainly relate to your confusion concerning how rhetoric was approached in other classes before students had a basis in the history of rhetorical theory. I struggled to get into this class for an unremembered number of semesters, but it was always full by 8am on my registration day. I tried to supplement the modern conceptualizations of rhetoric that appeared in writing classes; I used some of my free time in the summer months to read things like The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle. But I still was never as comfortable with my knowledge of rhetoric as I am now. Rhetoric may still mean many different things to me just as it always has, but I love shades of gray (though perhaps not fifty of them) and detest (and frankly rarely believe in) simple answers to complex questions. I didn't think I'd be getting a simple definition of rhetoric in this class, and I didn't want one. But I know more about the shifting and varied nature of rhetoric now, and this helps me consider the world around me from many different perspectives.
ReplyDeleteOne question remains for me: why not require at least a beginning rhetorical theory course near the beginning of the writing major? One that provides a more sturdy foundation for future study? Patricia Bizzell writes in "Editing the Rhetorical Tradition" that it is important to "understand the traditional tradition because it forms the intellectual horizon of all our work" (117). And there are many other traditions or horizons that we have looked at as well. I would have loved to see more of those horizons early in my undergraduate career instead of in the final semester of it. But, alas, it was not meant to be.