rhetoric and composition

Rhetoric and composition are like second cousins secretly in love--completely legal, but they squick people out at first. Or well, so it seems. I really have no idea since I don't think I ever had a chance of not learning them hand in hand. One of my high school english teachers was a failed rhetoric phd candidate (something I found out after I went to grad school and after he died, which is a shame because the moments I had during my Masters work when I suddenly realized what he'd been quoting at us all that time were pricless--especially stuff about differance and Lacan and Heidegger. I mean christ, us freshmen just thought he was crazy--it didn't help that he often did this from the top of a table or in the middle of perfectly good arguments about what the A stands for in the Scarlet Letter.)

And then I inadvertently went to a college that was very much rhet/comp, and learned more about writing there. I enrolled in their grad school and was immediately dropped into teaching an intro to rhetoric course.

This "Rhetoric" course was actually our composition course. The composition couse had been 3 courses under quarters, but was now just one semester. That meant we had to cover a lot of ground in not a lot of time, and it was determined that "outing" rhetoric was the easiest way to do it.

So "Revisions" was a class about oral, written, and visual rhetoric. It was also a paper where you wrote a paper, did a major project, and gave a lot of presentations. This was a cousre that directly influenced the two books I'm reviewing here in a couple weeks, and I should have read them back then--but as I said before, I had found the textbook I liked already.

Rhet/comp aren't kissing cousins in my book. If we want students to actually, you know, say something, you have to give them tools through which to say those things. Words aren't enough on their own if you have no idea how to construct them. Teaching oral/written rhetoric together is one way to get to a student who can speak their ideas, but can't write them down very well. Allowing for visual rhetoric not only allows students to introduce "new" meanings to their work (like that radial reading/material text stuff we were discussing in 7010) but it also gives them that one more way to narrow down their argument that some students might need.

And thus, several years later, I've decided that that class wasn't so bad after all. It was too much material in two few weeks, but I think it was on the right track as far as "types of classes" go. Unfortunately, it was also a horribly scary type of thing for a brand new teacher to teach.