That's DasAuto: Final Writ371 Project: Language and Communication in a Technical Era

First, I'd like to share my video for this project that shows where I'm coming from, its in a google doc and I would consider it to be the bulk of my project as I believe it says what I try to say in words faster and with more ease.

Abstract

I wanted to continue part of the conversation we started in class and do it in a blogging format. I use ideas and facts we talked about in class as well as outside sources which discuss networking and, what I’m most interested in, language and communication. Anil Dash highlights things I’m really interested in when he discusses tools and networking. Since the idea that new technology expedites our communicative processes is not a new idea, I’ll try to stick to how it affects our language and ability to communicate. I am coming into the middle of a conversation that we’ve all been having centered on the fear people have of language changing and the implications of our transforming language, whether it is good, bad, indifferent, etc. I try to point things out about our language implicitly by using the language of today and briefly mentioning it rather than bore you with lists of words and ways of communicating that are different and new.

Introduction

In my video, you can see a non-linear progression in Montanans’ ability to network and then, with the introduction of the internet and cellular phones, the world was included in Montanans’ network. It is as important to know where we come from as it is to know where we are going because ignorance is fear, not bliss, and the fear of communication through technology is overwhelmingly present on college campuses, especially the arts or humanities fields.

Let’s face it: As far as language and communication are concerned, we’re all doing pretty alright. Looking at that sentence, I know you all know what I mean and I also know that in an academic, proper “English” sense, it doesn’t say anything. We are doing “pretty” (as in beautiful?) “alright” (as in, “Alright, already, Mom, I’ll clean my room”?) and, “let’s face it”? “Face” is a noun, not a verb, but I definitely verbed that noun (Shakespeare, anyone?). So, what’s all the fuss about?

People are really, really, afraid of change; admittedly, I am in the same camp: show me something new and I will show you why I hate it. The interesting thing about this phenomena is, in my life, once I figure out how to use cool new technologies, they actually make my life much easier and better. But, it is scary to think that kids growing up in Indiana will cease to learn the ability to handwrite things (for those of us that grew up after the 1980’s, this means “write in cursive” and for those of us who grew up after the invention of the typewriter this means, “writing”, not “print” – which now means “Ctrl+p”), but is it really scary? The fear of this is, “it presages a further hollowing out of the real human personality, a further colonization of the human mind by the virtual at the expense of the real” (Darlymple 2). It is hard for me to read this and related thoughts and not laugh. But this is the question: How degraded are we willing to allow our language to become before we do something about it? My question is: Is our language actually degrading? And, how has humanity’s ability to network changed the position of language and communication in our lives? And, what is so bad about efficient communication?

1.)    Is our language actually degrading?

No. Our language is changing but if it wasn’t changing, that would be the first time in all of history and that would be cause for concern. Since the time when we have evidence of written language as communication, we can track the different influences in that language: romance languages, the Cyrillic alphabet, etc. There are classifications for everything and the lines are incredibly blurred. When I say, “that’s good” and someone in Germany says, “Das ist gut” (Das ist goot) it means the same thing, believe it or not, and sounds very similar – even the spelling is relatively close. My point is that I don’t speak German and don’t understand it but what I do know is that we English speakers speak a, partly, Germanic language and it is more than a little evident. If language had never evolved, though, we’d either be speaking German, Old English, or, with any luck, Mandarin. Since language is always evolving, and it is clear that the written word has also followed this path, it would follow that with the increase of technology, people would rather do the more convenient things: read the news on their smart phones, text short messages and tweet all day to, with people instead of calling and having one long conversation – texting can be a part of multi-tasking while talking on the phone cannot, reading emails and responding to them as the recipients’ convenience. Because of these things, we have, as a society, become much more efficient communicators. We have learned how to write sentences packed with meaning while sending the correct tone that would otherwise be lost without face-to-face conversation through word choice, sentence structure and emoticons in email and texting.

2.)    How has humanity’s ability to network changed the position of language and communication in our lives?

This is a picture of our niece through Skype. She lives in Wyoming and I live in Montana. My husband recently taught her older sister, our 4 year old niece, how to spell “poop” through Skype chat.

We are now able to send every important piece of information via the Internet. Something I find particularly useful is that I can use Skype to talk or chat with my best friend, who is currently living and working in Korea, when it is 11 o’clock at night for her and 8 in the morning for me, face-to-face through my smart phone while I’m at school. I found out that her grandmother, who lives in my hometown (a three hour drive from where I live now), was very sick from “Skyping” her (another instance of evolving language, a verbed noun, a noun that has only recently been developed), half a day’s time zone away from me. Because of these advances in technology, everything but physical things are sent instantly across the world and to almost every part of the world. Commerce has increased, medicine has advanced, science and technology have increased rapidly and the results are astounding. We have access to all information we need at any point in the day or night; if we want to be involved in the conversation, all we have to do is “Google” it.

3.)    And, what is so bad about efficient communication?

When things are efficient and, like the internet, “free” (or very cheap and affordable), several things happen: Quality of life improves for everyone, even the small and obscure business owner. Everyone has access to more, rather than everyone having access to less.  This makes things like special books increase even more in value because instead of selling to everyone who may be interested in one small concentrated area (like one or two blocks in New York City), you can sell to everyone in the world who is most interested and willing to pay the most for that one book with hand-tipped illustrations. This illustrates the difference in the words "cost" and "worth".  Is the cost of constantly being connected worth the extreme benefits we get from it? What are the costs of our technology? Many would claim that it is costing us our language and ability to communicate effectively. Now, a person doesn't have to be a published author, in the sense of a publishing company and printed copies. All someone needs to do to be heard and spread throughout the web is to "songify" their life, or otherwise make themselves marketable and the cost is low for the enjoyment of a viral video or a good idea and that is the new authorship -- the new writership and the new audience. 

This is the same for everything, though, not just books. Medicine and medical practices become more available to doctors and patients around the world. Tutorials online can teach you how to make your own gourmet meals, fix your own sink, start fires in the snow, so you don’t have to waste your time taking a class or waste money paying someone else to do it for you – unless, of course, you want to. The point is that all of the information is available to you, if you need it. Could it be bad? Sure, we could become too dependent on the free services of the World Wide Web and we clearly take it for granted now that it is available to us all the time but I maintain our ability to communicate what we want, need and how that must be facilitated is increasing drastically.

What happens when we lose our ability to use our language? I have to admit, it kills me when people use the wrong “their, there, they’re” and use commas in the wrong place and don’t use apostrophes and flat out misspell and misuse words. This could be blamed on texting (txting) and tweeting and it is. 

 Technology has always been a scary thing for people to adapt to but the thing is that we create the technology we live with and it is because of the things we write and record now that make these advancements possible. I am not afraid of technology and certainly not afraid of algorithms taking over our world and making decisions for us and I don't think anyone else should be afraid of that either. People are the authors of algorithms, as we have been the authors of our history and this only gives us more power over it than less. Our language is a fantastic phenomena that has always been changing and the cause of great concern over the years:

            “The managements of thought and expression has more to do with them. These gargantuan          technologies are more and more the products not just of writing and print but of computerized technologizing of the word. Through the computer, the technologized word is reaching deeper and deeper into the heart of our ordinary lives. That is to say, today the alliance of thought and expression with technology that began with writing is becoming more and more intense. What does this say about human responsibility? Plato had Socrates protest that writing is destructive of human values – and then went ahead to put this ovservation into writing. Writing did not destroy human values, but it made it necessary to handle them on a different basis – in terms of more abstract principles. Print brought new problems of value management. And computers bring still more. Somehow, we must find a way to interiorize the resources of the computer, to humanize them as we have humanized writing and print” (Ong379).

These are letters from the 1800s. Above, they have been typed and set into a book; on the right, the letter was scanned into a computer. The letters of condolence on the left show a very interesting aspect of letters deliverable by hand: your condolences may not reach the intended party until weeks, or months, after the person had passed away because it would take as long for a person out of town to hear about the death as it would for them to respond to the family members.

As far as I can tell, we, as a society and as humanity, have done really well at communicating with each other and the idea that our language, even in a concise and/or non-grammatically correct way, can communicate perfectly well within our new technological bounds, using our new tools and creating new, faster ways to spread ideas. 

video project

Hey all, Here is my video. My question is "How has language in networking changed for Montanans because of the changes in technology and changes in the actual networks?" And several related questions. When the project is finished, it will be a blog post containing an embedded video, the video will be more complete but I could seriously use some suggestions on it. I'm going to write a lot more about my actual research and sources in the blog post and do a sort of social commentary/opinion style approach to it, since it is a blog and let the video explain some of my main points as a sort of timeline. (I decided to keep it to Montana since it is a little smaller than "the WORLD" and I can track the progress easier -- as a sort of "learning device" or illustration, I s'pose).... Anyway, feedback would be great. I have a really solid idea of the end product :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHoB0hoPE2Y&feature=youtube_gdata

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHoB0hoPE2Y

I'll check back to see if this whole thing worked out.... if not, a later post will follow with the embedded vid.

Mini Project 3

Algorithms in our lives

I think this idea can be really frightening to people: What if the algorithms are out of control and start to ruin our lives!? (like some sort of horror film). I don't feel the same fear, mostly because people can always rewrite the algorithm (which , by the way, are really cool). While algorithms can potentially be a bad thing, as we read about in the instance of facebook, mistakes can easily be fixed once they are brought to light and that gives a venue for more invention and ingenuity. These things can potentially be something we rely on as much as weathermen, something that could be considered voodoo or "magic" that is actually just effective and good technology, just as good or infallible as the person who designs and tests it: as years go by and adjustments are made, things run smoother and work better.

And how cool is it that people have figured out how to gather effective news from the internet and actually have little avatars report it as if they were real reporters with facial expression? I think it is really innovative of programmers to figure something like that out. To me, it seems like it would be a terrible task that would be far too difficult to begin thinking about, though I was pretty terrible at even code writing in Java so I would be quite useless in actually inventing such a thing. I'm really impressed with the abilities people have with thinking these ideas up and implementing them effectively.

I'm curious to see how people feel about this issue, I imagine the class will be split on the issue, especially considering past opinions on tech. developments.

Oh The Places We'll Go

I was really impressed with Anderson's TED talk. Mostly because it is something we haven't really talked about yet: where video and technology can take scientific research. It makes sense that scientific writing is already multimodal in that it utilizes pictures, diagrams, etc but doesn't it make even more sense that it would begin to actually visually demonstrate experiments! I was really impressed with this because I haven't even thought of it being a possibility. This, theoretically, could make advancements in scientific technology increase and hopefully make a more error-proof system. Wouldn't it be great if everything was run like this? Efficient living would be increased in every way.

I thought the other video was just as interesting but just not as new for this class.

To everyone in class on Thursday (11/3)

So, class turned into a shitshow today. I feel bad that it got so out of hand because I know that we all deserve more from each other and ourselves but -- once pitted against each other, we ended up in a weird mob mentality. Hopefully we can all regain our senses and not do that again. I guess, on my end, I wanted to make sure that everyone knows that if I offended them in any way, I was out of line. That is not the type of argument to die on -- especially since I don't even care about it or spend really any of my time thinking about it, and it wasn't even a valid argument, as both sides were "arguing" on completely different planes. Anyway: I hope everyone recovers from that. I, for one, feel a little embarrassed about it and hope it seeps into the oblivion of the remainder of the semester (come on Christmas Break!) (and yes, Christmas... but I'll concede to it being Winter Break, as well). :)

Death to the Author! *Pitchforks Waving* *Torches Flailing*

While I still like the idea of citation, if only in form of a "work's cited" page, or something of the sort, especially because I'm not an expert, a lot of what I've said or claimed in academic papers tends to be predominantly things I've drawn from mostly other peoples' ideas (even when I am being particularly original). This comes from stepping into a discourse community, combining other discourses I've already been a part of and deciding what could be synthesized between them all... this generally means it isn't super "creative" (which has seriously killed my grade in certain classes when I was so far out of medieval and greek/roman literature and what was and is said about it that there was no way my "originality" could have said anything, even if it was original, it was certainly always wrong). In instances where I am more "creative", I'm generally much more credible and feel much more comfortable in the discourse that I am talking in and around, I know the history and some of the other texts.

It is a really complicated (not necessarily complex, though) issue because there are few parts and a shitton of opinions, well-thought-out, on what should be considered original, "taxable", "citable", or what-have-you. And none of the opinions are "wrong" but it does seem really divided. What I write is generally what I consider relatively worthless, monetarily, because I don't trust "my" ideas to be worth citing, while I will trust the words of others' within a thesis or online intellectual journal. I have little credibility as a writer on most topics because I am not an expert.

Anyway, these ideas of textuality, articulation, authorship and intertextuality are extremely fascinating for me. I might delve more into this for my research... ...probably the articulation thing more than anything. Articulation vs. "creativity"? we'll see...

Diggin the readings

I feel that both authors for this week's readings were really well grounded. Although, I do have to admit that I thought Lanham was complaining for almost half of his article.

Lanham brings up some really good points about the idea that people are really clinging to an archaic idea of what aesthetic is and what we in Lit departments try to reinforce is an idea that was around before computers. Basically, its about time that someone redefines the aesthetic that we are all so obsessed with. He makes some really bold professions about how technology makes it possible for him to teach a music appreciation course while having an insufficient education to do so... I would really disagree. Yes, the technology is there but regardless, there is a major component that a knowledgeable professor can offer that the layman cannot... ... even through another person's course materials, expertise cannot be faked and the specialization of professors in colleges is not, in my opinion, in danger. I do agree with him when he says that the advances in technology open up large new realms of possibilities for collaboration, collaborative education and such. I do think that is an extremely helpful part of our new technology.
Kohl, Liebert and Metten discuss that specific influence in one of its most effective forms: Wikipedia. I'm a huge supporter of the Wikipedia basic source for information. I'm glad that it is recognized scholastically for what it is.

I'm excited for this week's class. I'm glad we are reading people who have accepted technology and its place in our society, professional lives and classrooms.

Images in Scientific Writing

The Mishra piece really interested me. I was reminded while reading it of learning, in high school chemistry and physics, about the different ways scientists have attempted to visually document the things they study, specifically very small things like new molecules, electrons, neutrons, protons, reactions and how they could prove what they found actually looked like the diagrams they have used over the years. We even discussed the models we would put together of different compounds and why they did/didn't fully represent what actually happened. These are extremely interesting things to think about because of how highly esteemed Western Scientific thought is.

I have always been fascinated by the idea that a simple drawing can change the way something, that should be black and white, is viewed and understood. Even within the field of chemistry, if something is drawn or modeled incorectly, it could actually alter the substance and what the drawing means to begin with. It seems that more caution has been used in recent years with theorizing about the appearance of the inner structures of molecules but the formulation of pictures, while, if incorrectly depicted, can be a setback in understanding, it also seems that it is a huge part of how we, as people, grow to understand more and experiment more and expand the field. It seems extremely important to play around with models and pictures in order to further understand things. I am interested in why this method of learning and developing ideas is not used across every field of study (*ehem*, humanities) but Mishra is right, for some reason, it is seen as a silly and childish or un-academic way to present information for people within the humanities.

It seems that the more I learn about the lack of multi-modal learning and writing in academia, the more I realize that we are being seriously shorted on the amount of information that we could potentially access and understand. It would be interesting to see what type of pictures and visuals could be used with the academic writing we have all grown to know and love... ... and hate?

Mini Project 2; Blog post for this week still to come :(

Beauty

First, I am posting late and I do know that I am. I would give some sort of excuse but I'll spare you all and say, "here it is" and I'm sure you've all been waiting with bated breathe for this moment.

So. Beauty. A really interesting topic, especially coming from a woman who is easily and instantly offended or struck by the naked portrayal of another woman's body in an ad. Here is my first beef. I think humanity and the human form are beautiful (and I've been called a feminist by many-a-person before, though I don't really consider myself anything of that exact sort). Yes, women can be demeaned and yes, their bodies are sexually exploited daily, as are young children and men. The root of the obsession is not because women are inferior but because they are generally considered to be more visually appealing than men are (and a host of other reasons, innumerable). Beside that, one thing can be agreed upon in many cultures worldwide and despite gender and sex: humanity is extremely attracted to beautiful things. Something that is difficult to do is to define something so vast. But, there is something to be said of the test of time: marble carvings of men and women from Greece and Rome, Mozart's Requiem, Bach's Cello Suite 1 Prelude, Michaelangelo's The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, Flowers, Mountains, Clouds, Stars, Women with shapely bodies, Men with toned muscles, books that contain true and artful descriptions of life, Poetry, computers that are white and glow blue and phones that can contain all our lives within a sweep of our fingers on the screen.

The point is that beauty takes many forms. And what people remember and what they write about, think about, live for, die for, fight for, dream of, stare at and sometimes stalk, it is beauty. The ability to write well, to speak well, to dress well, to present yourself appropriately in different situations, that is your ability to effectively use rhetoric and those who are most successful, they are the beautiful ones, the ones we remember most: Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr., Sarah Palin (just kidding ;) ). 

Beauty, in fact, has everything to do with everything. It is most relevant and as much as we would all like to deny ourselves the carnal instinct to acknowledge and drool over its powerful presence, we cannot, in our most honest moments, truly pretend that the beauty contained in favorite texts do not move us.

Good Evening

Okay, I mostly want to focus on the Bronwyn Williams piece, though I think this equally relevant for the Jones piece: We are clearly not the audience. It is not news to us that there is some sort of "interactivity" going on between online multi-modal writing and the "real" world. It is no surprise that people multitask while doing online or even regular homework and it is certainly not ground breaking research to study facebook and myspace pages.... Unless we are talking about perhaps those not technologically connected (at all). The thing is -- this is the world we live in. If you let your child think it is okay to talk to strangers and accept sweet treats from them in the park while you go to a nearby bar to grab a quick drink 40 years ago, you are the same parent who doesn't monitor their 12 year old girl who gets online and creates a fake profile or chats with strangers. (stranger danger)

Pop culture is commonly mistaken for "Jersey Shore" and terrible quality programming and (heaven forbid) rap music, though Pop stands for "popular"... ... so the New York Times contains pop culture, the Bible contains pop culture... ...? Not a problem. Everything that defines a certain society at a given time can be defined as pop culture. While it is interesting to study "pop" culture of the 1920's it is not necessarily (or, in my opinion) very valid to write extensively on the interfacing of today in a shocked expository.

Given, in 1999/2000 (when the Jones piece was written, if memory serves me correctly, if not -- please correct me) this could be quite relevant and perhaps shocking. Students using the computer to communicate rather than actually meeting up! But 2008, Williams is a little ahead or behind her time in writing a reflection on something that is currently happening? Not what I would call the best situated rhetorical device on her part.

All in all -- these articles/journals said what we all already know about our own world. We use it and we are familiar with it.

I Am A Lone Reed

So, I know that this is taking some serious liberty with what we are supposed to respond to and what I may actually be doing. But, since I'm already blogging later than I should be and I think it happens to apply, I'm going for it.

In class and our readings, I have been thinking a lot about the application of technology in our writing. "What are we so scared about?" is my main question. And I recently watched one of my favorite movies, "You've Got Mail" with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks (in attempt to not go totally crazy on too much work and too little sleep..) -- beyond the half-a-box of tissue it takes to get me through that movie and the glass of red wine, it occurred to me (our best thoughts sometimes come from the lack of inhibition?) that people have been literally afraid of the technology that develops around us further every day, and continues to define our lives, for a long time. While the 90's was really not that long ago, the fear of technology-driven Apocalypse has been a serious issue in the mind of society for a long time. In "You've Got Mail" the fear is the "corporation" and one character is actually obsessed with typewriters for the purpose of its archaic value in society, a treasured piece of history he believes is being lost in the sands of time and the fast-paced New York style life.

The thing we are forgetting is that typewriters themselves changed the way people interact: publication, instant and unchangeable publication. Oh no! I can't believe humanity survived such an awful development.

But seriously, people will certainly still interact with each other: we cannot survive (proven by many-a-Biological study-- prove me wrong if you want, I'm not all that fired up about it) without interaction; we are a social group of mammals (my ability to apply that to a compact word has completely diminished: species?).

So, the larger point is that since we are notably visual and notably social at the very least, why should we fight it? I know this may be beating the dead cat, I really think it is important to realize that the things we are learning in this course teaches us to do exactly what we have been taught to do since Elementary school (especially in humanities-based classes): Paint A Picture With Your Words. But instead of worrying about not being able to actually explain what you're looking at, you can show a picture of what you're looking at and talk about something that really matters: Why you're pointing out what you are looking at.

If technology is going to be the end of humanity as we know it the news to you would be: it is too late: life as you know it has been altered previously by technology. And my best guess (as I am not the Omniscient Universe controlling being) is that there is something else (humanity itself?) that will be the end of life as we know it -- Heaven forbid.

Sorry about the rant: I really like what we have been learning about and I really think technology is a really important application of writing :) Pictures + Writing = pretty cool.

(also, sorry this is so long and maybe not so relevant)

This Week

I was really impressed with our reading. I honestly never thought that I'd have any particular liking for graphic comics, though I know people who do like them a lot so I didn't judge them. Now I understand more of the draw to them but on a deeper level, I was really impressed. Specifically, I really liked how it cut out the bullshit and just spoke at a basic level of "this-is-this". It made it easy to follow and--- well, a little like looking in a mirror held up to humanity.

I particularly liked the Iconicity and Words and Images chapters. I guess I do have really specific examples but I mostly just liked how it lead into each though and each though was big and powerful but small enough to understand, or relate to.

Our faces are masks. I love that that was pointed out. I feel like that a lot and it is interesting how poignantly that can be displayed through a cartoony man with cute glasses.

I'm really interested to see what everyone else thought of this: I'm sure some of you are taking Lit Crit this semester and it has been a long time since I've taken that class but this reading called to mind readings in that class: Any thoughts tying the two together? It seems like the evolution of language is particularly relevant -- not only in this class but as a pressing issue for English majors and society in general. I think people worry unnecessarily about it... Thoughts?

Reading and Writing

So, it seems like our readings for this week deal very specifically with "information overload" due to technological access to everything and the idea that because of our the vastness of information readily available to people everywhere, specifically online/screens, people have to categorize which type of reading they will read deeply and which they will skim. I am relatively certain that most students do this quite a bit of their time in school. In order to be a successful student, you have no real choice but to skim and do it efficiently while extracting exact quotes you need and, more importantly, important information that will help you with a specific course or in a career later.

In response specifically to the Sosnoski article, I don't think students need to be taught to be hyper-readers -- it happens naturally and quickly. Plus, teaching people how to read and what for is completely ridiculous. It has to be a process where the reader knows what they are looking for and the teacher cannot teach them how to find something like that. It must be an independent learning process or the student will not be able to deep read or hyper-read a text on screen or off.

As far as the "We Can't Teach Students to Love Reading" is concerned, it is too true. I hate reading... and I don't mean to give off the wrong impression, what I mean is: I hate wasting my time. I don't like to name-drop with literature and classical ideas and theorists and I am never going to be that person. I've spent a good two years trying to fit the mold with Lit students and ... well -- the people are great, I love the department and most of the students but I felt like it was wasting my time -- almost always (and, for those of you in Lit, I don't judge you and don't want to fight it out). But I love to spend time reading/skimming things that will actually really help me in school and life. I love Wikipedia. It is not that I would base a book report off of Wikipedia but I have definitely done in-depth reports, gotten to the 15th page, decided to look up a term on Wikipedia and realized that all of my sources (books from the library that other people have actually written and read) are cited on that specific page. -- Imagine my dismay upon realizing all of my hard research could easily be found with a blue highlighted link! With keyword searches!!

That is the beauty of online and screen text... or one of the many. Don't get me wrong... I love physical books -- Thumbing through them, smelling them when walking into a used-book store, mm! But, I love not breaking my back with a million books that I may never find anything useful in when I can key-word/phrase search topics and read ten really helpful articles all with through the convenience of my lightweight laptop! :) Woohoo! (I don't have a kindle/ipad but they look pretty much awesome... any reviews for preference between either of those and physical text reading?)

Most importantly, what I always think about with anything is communication. I love that people are tapping into a completely new world of communicating with each other. I'm not a huge networker/online communicator but technology is certainly changing the way people communicate and more-so how they learn to communicate... I won't rant on about that but I do love the new doors opening for people and kids learning how to read, write and speak in many languages and societies worldwide: who'd have thought?

Youch... sorry that was so long... and dull! I'll do better next time

The Meaning of Rhetoric, The Meaning of Life?

Hello all,
So it seems that a commonly asked and never (?) answered question is: What is rhetoric? I hear it all the time and usually the answer starts with: Well, I can't really say. The way it is frequently approached is through history: the history of Western Civilization and the communication that we currently employ from everyday speech to our most important writing/speeches. There are loads of formulas out there on how to communicate well: how to speak rhetorically with proficiency and Covino and Jolliffe go over the basics: Invention, arrangment, memory, delivery: these all seem like horrific pieces of rhetoric, the bad, nightmarish image of public communication classes and high school speeches in English class come to mind with these words. But, the reality of Rhetoric is that without its history, without the history of life, there is no such thing as rhetoric. The story of rhetoric and its many applications is an interesting view into the history of humanity, how we interact, when we decided to change the way we interact and most importantly what we have decided is important to talk about throughout the years. Rhetoric is extremely important and for powerful people is the means to their success. There are many factors in what makes successful rhetoric that are included in who a person is, their personal style, their background, their knowledge on the subject but what it comes down to is the basic structure of public speaking and communication, which now includes blogging, vlogging, and really any internet activity with which persuasive power and trust is given to the author.

As far as the Grant-Davie article is concerned, I am really impressed with the idea of a rhetor addressing the need to change: it makes a lot of sense.The way people are inspired to change things around them are often due to the way it is presented: the words used to summarize a bill, a speech given by a powerful person, a car salesman giving you the rundown on the new, family-safe Subaru, a high school guidance counselor explaining the importance of higher education: the presentation and its effectiveness are all a part of the particular discourse: the speaker(author) and the audience. What makes it effective is the ability of the author to communicate and empathize with the given audience. Everything else can simply fall into place and the "why" that everyone struggles over is simple: there are points in human history when things combine to create a setting, a specific history, a "placement" in history, time, geography, etc which causes something to be particularly effective. To give a speech on the importance of women's suffrage today would be misplaced historically while the issue of human trafficking is something that has been a serious issue for years. The "Why" of rhetoric is almost as important as the "when", in my opinion.

Rhetoric is a vastly interesting topic, as it provides more questions than answers in the actual study of it but the practice of it often creates grand shifts in ideologies of the people of the world. What an interesting combination: a person could potentially study rhetoric their entire life and use it very poorly or a person could study and know nothing about the ins-and-outs of rhetoric and still be an extraordinarily persuasive rhetorician. I'm really interested to see how this course will address the technology of Rhetoric, as it is a huge and extremely important part of our current and future lives.

Here we go again on our own --

Hey There,
I'm Trudi Fisher and am a Writ 371 student. I switched my major to writing just in time to graduate with some sort of marketable skill and escape the confines that I found the Literature major to restrict me to. I am nervous about this particular course because technologically I am not the keenest of people. However, I am excited for the new challenges in it.I expect that I will learn a great deal about communication and humanity and the technology that makes all of our interactions possible in this course and I think it will be very insightful and I expect it to prove itself extremely useful in life.

A little about me: I live in Bozeman but grew up in small town Wyoming. I am officially a resident of Montana because of a recent nuptial contract with a fellow Montanan. I love writing in general, despite the fact that sometimes it does not love me and sometimes I would like to throw large, heavy objects at it, mostly we have a healthy relationship. Rhetoric and communication, however, are increasingly interesting to me and I very much intend to create a career for myself out of my new found interest.


I have really enjoyed my projects over the summer and found myself enjoying the outdoors a great deal more than I have done in the past and intend to keep it that way: for crying out loud -- it is practically a sin to not enjoy the outdoors when you live here, right?

Anyhow-- I think that is quite enough about myself. I look forward to this semester :)