Tag: rhetoric

Clouds, Graphs, Maps

/ Derek Mueller

A couple of days ago Mike posted notes on
my

CCCC talk from late last month, and I was reminded that I’m at least ten days
past due on the video
I said I would
produce following the conference.

I recorded the talk to an mp3 yesterday afternoon and went to
campus last night where I planned to use iMovie to sync the audio with jpegs of
the slides. Because the slideshow includes text, I needed to get the
resolution right, but, well, it started to get late. I started to get impatient.
I was able to output a reasonably readable mp4 file, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t get
Google Video or
Daily Motion to encode it.
Finally Jumpcut accepted the file, so it’s
available below the fold (even if much of it suffers from jaggies). The original mp4 is available for download
here.

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Did Bitzer Draw?

/ Derek Mueller / 6 Comments

Did Lloyd Bitzer ever draw his situational model? Or are all of the
visually rendered triangles drawn from his textual account?

If he didn’t draw it (I can’t find evidence that he did), are responses to
the model’s viability fueled instead by its proliferation as an abstraction
pulled (like a rabbit from a hat) out of Bitzer’s textual account? How did the
textual model evolve into a disciplinary fixture, a visual commonplace?
How was it translated from text to geometric figure? Should we enjoy free license
to convert anything with three points into a triangle?

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And Returns

/ Derek Mueller

Ph. and I whistled into the Syracuse train depot yesterday afternoon; we’re
home from the excursion to the conference. Everything is unpacked,
laundered, put away.

I have plans to put the paper to an mp3 and sync it with the slides. I
can do this, of course, because my talk was scripted. It’s endlessly
reproducible as a result. But recording will have to wait until I shake off the
cough-inducing tickle that has been getting the best of me all day today.
Sure, I could delete out any of the hacking and rattling that makes its way into
the mix, but why? I’ll just wait it out.

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Carnival: Trimbur and Writing Studies

/ Derek Mueller

Following Donna’s

renewed call for the late February Trimbur carnival, here are a couple of
floats in response to

"Changing the Question: Should Writing Be Studied?" from Composition
Studies 31.1 (2003).

For now I’ll try to keep it to just two or three ideas. I’ve heard
passing mention of "writing studies" as an alternative name for the knot (bow?)
where rhetoric and composition are tied together. When I used it myself
once, I think someone suggested that the "writing studies" designation is
typically claimed by discourse analysts–those whose encounters with texts are
measured for pattern and (ir)regular features. Perhaps that’s only of value
inasmuch as it sheds light on my own baggage with the phrase: a moment of
correction, definition, and re-association. And whether this is right or not is
less the point, I think, than the contemplation of writing studies’ orientation
to particular methods and research agendas. As I read Trimbur’s article, I also
thought about another passing conversation with a colleague who described
someone else’s work in film this way: "[S.h]e does film studies, not production.
Students who take film classes want production rather than all of the history,
theory, and methodology that go along with film studies. They’re impatient
and even bored with film studies." That was the gist of it, anyhow.
Out of this half-remembered conversation comes one question about a shift from
workshop to seminar room and toward writing studies: at the cost of what?
If the answer is that we study writing (n.) at the expense of writing (p.v.),
the proposition becomes considerably messier. Of course, nobody is saying
this explicitly, but to what degree is a quiet displacement of something else
implied by the asking?

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