My hope is that students feel that Writing 101 was a foundation for the kind of research-intense work we’ve done in Writing 102. From my own observations, students were more engaged in working with the NYT last semester than my first year Writing 101 students were in the Norton textbook. It led easily to 102 in that students were already aware of the topics that built the most kairos in a sense. I felt that many of the topics covered in especially the opinion part of the NYT led well into the cultural myths explored in 102. It prepared students for the kind of engagement in social issues that came with the Writing 102 theme. Student writing improved in some ways, but I feel like the most growth happened in students who were already driven in Writing 101 and really pushed themselves to be better researchers and stronger academics in 102. I’m hoping the semester has given students a confidence in their writing that they may not have had without the first year writing sequence.
Tag Archives: rhetoric
How Ariyanna made my day
So Ariyanna in my noon class reached out to Charles M. Blow on Twitter and he responded! Which led to a rush of other messages to him. Talk about the power of rhetoric and social media! Here’s the screenshot. We’re famous!
The Dichotomy of Charles M. Blow
I decided to participate in the homework assignment for Wednesday, October 7th. I went first to the New York Times and read a few Charles M. Blow editorials (his recent one on guns and one on Jeb Bush’s comments on energizing his African American voters). I found both compelling and decided then to look into his twitter feed. I noticed that he has retweeted a lot of praise he’s received for his recent book. I noticed that he also tweeted about recent incidents involving US race relations (particularly an interesting video posted by a Texas mother who noticed a distasteful referencing of slaves as “immigrants” and “workers”). I also noticed that he often tweeted about going to the gym. One I found intriguing though was his sarcasm as he shared an abcnews article on Ben Carson who said he didn’t know what he would do as president if Hurricane Joaquin hit the US. Blow sarcastically wrote, “SHOCKER,” in all caps, so I investigated his recent column list to see if he’d written about Ben Carson. And he had. It seems in his personal space (twitter), Blow uses rhetoric that is much more inflammatory (all caps, sarcasm, anger), though the rhetoric used in his columns is more focused on how much the country needs to pay attention to these issues for the betterment of society. He writes about Carson,”But as a political figure, his stature is diminished as he reveals himself to be intolerant, bordering on soft bigotry, and also reckless and needlessly inflammatory. No one can discount what Carson accomplished professionally, but those accomplishments must now stand shoulder to shoulder with this new persona: whisper-soft purveyor of hyperbolic hucksterism,” but he blatantly uses sarcasm in his tweets that reference Carson which makes his bitterness toward him much more prevalent in his social networking space than we see in the tone of his Times columns.