Another article I need to find: "The Rhetoric of Circumstance in Autobiography" by Andrew Kaplan in Rhetorica Feb 1992, Vol. 10, No. 1: 71–98. I have to buy it to view it online. D'oh. Or I can read it for free here in the library. Damnit. So what have I done over the past week?... Continue Reading →
What I need to read
to develop the LeFevre section a bit more: Plato's Phaedrus Elbert W. Harrington Rhetoric and the Scientific Method of Inquiry: A Study of Invention (Boulder: U Colorado P, 1948). . .thank you Ohio-link The 1971 Speech Communication Association's Report of the Committee on the Nature of Rhetorical Invention. . in Bitzer and Black's The Prospect... Continue Reading →
yoga and remembered rapture
Writer's block would be putting it mildly. . .I am avoiding the dissertation, completely and totally. Even though I am sitting here in the library with my fellow dissertators, who I know are being productive. Meanwhile, I'm perusing google reader, checking email and facebook, and thinking about insignificant wedding details. How did I make it... Continue Reading →
So. . .
it's been awhile. I am a bad graduate student. Or maybe I'm typical. Either way, NO PROGRESS. D'oh. What have I been doing? Teaching last semester: ENG 225 was great, ENG 111 I'm not sure of. Hopefully, my thoughts and feelings about 225 will be reflected in the surveys that were distributed and some of... Continue Reading →
Thought
for those of us interested in "new media" or "computers and writing," computers and composition," whatever you want to call it. . . From Frank D'Angelo's textbook Process and Thought in Composition (1977, 1980). The first line of the first section ("The Importance of Writing") of the first chapter ("Preliminary Considerations"): "Despite the claims of... Continue Reading →
Today
Maybe it's pretentious to quote, but this statement from Susan Mitchell's "Notes Toward a History of Scaffolding" (as read in D'Agata's The Next American Essay) struck me this morning: "Do I live in order to write? Or do I write in order to live my life as I do?" (249) The question of a grad... Continue Reading →
Once again. . .
I disappeared for a while. In the meantime, though, I did send my dissertation director 19 pages of a chapter, which she read and responded to in a conference with me yesterday. The chapter should end up being twice as long as it is now. . .I need to complicate the designations on which I... Continue Reading →
I should be working on my second chapter
by now. But I'm not. . .I'm still overwhelmed by the joy of knowing as much as humanly possible about invention studies. Ack. On the bright side, I've been thinking of other ways to complicate my place as topos in invention studies discussion, thanks to the (old) review-essay I just finished--"A Critical Survey of Resources... Continue Reading →
More reading notes for chapter 2
Vitanza, Victor. "A Tagmemic Heuristic for the Whole Composition." CCC 30.3 (Oct. 1979): 270-274. Vitanza takes a new view of tagmemic heuristics and its usefulness to writers by applying it to paragraph-level structures. Vitanza points out the importance of prewriting and invention strategies for writers, pointing out that "a serious writer spends a majority... Continue Reading →
Oh yeah
I should be posting, right? Hmm. . .classes have begun. I'm teaching 111 and my 225 course around the theme of essays and invention. . .we'll see how things go. So far, so good on both accounts. I'm really starting to think about how blogs might be considered a new form of nonfiction literature, and... Continue Reading →
essaying the plains 