Beginning this week you are to locate a video mashup that makes an argument, which you will then use to stage an argument with group members from class. You are to embed the video on a blog post, and articulate the network of controlling values you see at play in the mashup. In your discussion, you will identify which role you are going to play (advocate, antagonist, interrogator), and what roles you are assigning to each member of your group. Each member of the group, for each video, will engage in argumentation using the argumentative strategies listed on the You Tube Conversation assignment page and/or on the Types of Reasoning resource page.
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We've only begun to distinguish the role register plays in writing and in evaluating writing. The key register you have begun to work with is the transparent/figural register. At the transparent end of the register, the language you use is meant to be transparent to what you are talking about, but at the figural end, focus remains fixed upon the words and how writers arrange them: here the writer and reader attend to the shapes of sentences (the figures) and how words work to create meaning.
Writing in the figural register allows for you to say things in a kind of code that disguises what is actually happening. By “allows” I also must stress that the figural register permits statements that reveal what is actually happening, but the language (the kind of sentence you write it in) draws our attention more than what happened.
Such a notion flies completely in the face of the educational expectations we bring into the classroom, both as teachers and students. How could it be valuable to see the need to understand as a detriment, that is, a hindrance rather than an asset when learning to write?
For instance, when you go to write a blog as part of a class assignment: it's a strange experience. Believe me I know. I mean, what would compel us to invest time and real effort into something that may not impact anybody? A common problem with blogs. Maybe it's our unwillingness to go through all the moves we've got to make: we want to know what to do, and how to do it (right), before we go do something that very well may be ignored beyond the online community of the writing class.
Think about a time when your writing made something happen within a group of people. How far did you take it? How many people participated? Were all of you performing in ways that moved the conversation forward? Maybe something like Facebook, or Instagram, or comments on a political blog, or a blog devoted to sports or entertainment. How long is your longest conversation? How many words? (copy and paste into a word or google doc and let it count the words for you). What do you think are the reasons for it turning out the way it did? I believe that taking "leaps"--when we don't already know how, or what the consequences will be--opens us up to learn, to own what seemed strange and unapproachable, and to get freed up around what it means to adapt rhetorically to what we think audiences expect from us. Perhaps a different kind of understanding emerges, the kind of understanding that is practical and rhetorical (that is, skilled in guessing courageously), and gives access to reflecting on what happened, access to articulate why and how it happened. This secondary--after the fact--understanding is awesome, and that sort of understanding is desirable in this course; but from another point of view, what if this understanding is kind of a curse, especially because understanding "after the fact/act" does not necessarily bring us ease? We have to question whether understanding buys us anything as we approach future acts.
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