Full Practice Exam
- Walter Ong coined the phrase “secondary orality” to refer to the ways in which media channels such as radio and television have revived the spoken (and listened-to) word, creating new oral/written hybrid rhetorics. Jay David Bolter suggested that electronic writing on computer networks might also change the ways we use language, blending features of orality with habits of written rhetoric. (1) Briefly compare oral and written rhetorical styles. (2) Suggest ways in which secondary orality and writing on computer networks might require a revision of teaching writing. Be sure to discuss the role of media and new genres of writing, as well as whether “secondary orality” and “electronic writing” favor a return to classical, speech-based rhetoric, or whether secondary orality calls for some new theory or synthesis of theories for the teaching of writing.
In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong introduces the term “secondary orality” to refer to how new oral media have created hybrids of written and oral rhetorics. Nearly half a century later, Jay David Bolter, in Writing Space, introduced another notion that suggests electronic writing has also created a new kind of rhetoric that blends oral and written habits. Both terms have implications for how we teach writing because both recognize a variety of new genres and skills that students will be expected to master in order to succeed in college and beyond. The implications of Ong’s and Bolter’s notions of these new kinds of media and genres imply a new theory of rhetoric that requires a synthesis of classical and modern theories for the teaching of writing in new media spaces.
Ong outlines the differences between orality and literacy. He argues that oral cultures are based in tradition and are focused in the present because they do not have a reliable way of transcribing their past nor of considering the future, simply because they cannot write things down. Ong also points out that the members of such oral cultures have mostly practical and aggregate conversations: they discuss only the problems or situations currently facing them and how to resolve or handle them. This all changes, however, with the introduction of literacy. Literate cultures are able to keep a written record of the past and are generally rooted in the future instead of the present. Writing contributes to such future-based focus because literate people can sustain thought for a longer period of time since they can write things down and come back to them later. Such writing also allows people to be more analytical because they can sustain their train of thought through writing longer than those who must rely only on their memories. Writing also makes language linear because writers can go back and revise their writing; before writing, thought and language were often nonlinear (or at least less linear). Ong argues that without writing, such advances as philosophy and the sciences would not be possible: there would be no central archive of human knowledge from which one could draw in order to advance it. Ong is careful about explaining that literate cultures are not necessarily better than oral ones; they are simply different and orality should not be denigrated. He also points out that literate cultures have lost the ability to return to orality. Once people learn to correspond letters to sounds, they cannot unlearn it; they will always visualize words as they say them. As such, our Western culture is irrevocably, mostly literate. Even in an age of secondary orality where aspects of oral culture are returning to our literate one, we are still a culture firmly grounded in writing and reading. Therefore, any new theory that encompasses secondary orality and electric writing must take into account that even if orality has made a return to new media, it will not push out literacy.
Bolter acknowledges a new kind of electronic literacy that requires attention to features of both oral and written rhetoric. For example, he brings up the notion of hypertext as a sort of return to oral nonlinearity. Hypertext is a rhizomatic structure made up of various “modules” that are loosely connected to each other around some theme. The reader/viewer could potentially enter and exit this hypertext at any spot(s), choosing which modules they read and when (and if they will read them all). Such ability reintroduces the nonlinearity of oral thought to a literate culture that previously considered reading to be a linear progression from beginning to middle to end. Another notion of Bolter’s that has implications for secondary orality and electronic writing is “remediation,” which he and Richard Grusin introduce in Remediation. Any new genre necessarily re-mediates, that is builds upon and draws from, the media that came before it. For example, video games remediate visual design, film, television, books, and painting, among other media and genres; each form of oral, visual, and written media constitutes a distinct entity, but video games blend aspects of them all together in one new medium. The new media are homages and rivalries: while they draw from old media, they also implicitly argue that they are better than the ones that came before. Bolter and Grusin imply that we live in a world defined by media that is constantly reinventing the media that comes before it while blending together existing media. Thus, we have such platforms as Facebook and Twitter that are amalgams of images, audio, video, and writing. Such technologies came after Bolter (and Bolter with Grusin) wrote his work, but they seem to be the most visible examples of nonlinear thinking (no two people see the same news feed on Facebook, and no one person sees the same news feed twice) and remediation (each platform draws on several genres and media in order to create the user’s experience) operating within a digital genre. Such nonlinearity and remediation of genres and media will need to be accounted for in a new theory of rhetoric because they are ubiquitous in the digital spaces in which everyday people participate.
Taking Ong’s secondary orality and Bolter’s notions of electronic writing into account, we as writing teachers need to adapt our curriculum to meet the needs of students. Kathleen Blake Yancey points out in “Composition in a New Key” that more people (and students) than ever are keeping blogs, posting to social media, and writing in electronic environments in general. They aren’t being told to write. They aren’t being graded on their writing. They are writing for the intrinsic value of writing in these digital environments. And they are using multiple media in order to convey their messages. She argues that we have a moment in which we need to recognize the power of students already using rhetoric in digital spaces and start helping them learn how to do so effectively, lest we risk becoming outdated as a discipline. Likewise, as Cynthia Selfe points out in Technology and the 21st Century, in today’s high-tech world, the high-tech jobs that keep it running are not only the most in-demand, but they are also the highest paying. Thus, we need to teach students the skills needed and the genres used in these electronic environments or we are denying them access to the opportunity to be successful beyond college. Selfe argues that it is imperative that we teach students how to write in digital media: they need to know how to compose a webpage that blends audio, video, visual, and written rhetoric because these are the skills that are in demand. The implications of Yancey’s and Selfe’s arguments are that students need to learn what Ullman refers to as “electracy,” and what others simply call digital or technological literacy. Genres created from multimedia texts like blogs can draw from oral texts (audio clips of music or someone speaking) and written texts (content generated by the user or someone else), as well as oral/written hybrids (video clips from YouTube or uploaded from a personal camera). Such a literacy blends the oral/written hybrids of Ong’s secondary orality and Bolter’s electronic writing, while adding a new element: the visual (images, photographs, or silent animations).
To this end, we need a new theory of rhetoric that synthesizes oral and written traditions while recognizing the new opportunities afforded by digital spaces. One aspect of oral rhetoric that has been making a comeback in the last two decades is the fifth canon: delivery. It fell out of fashion when writing came to the fore because it came to mean something along the lines of text being printed on 8 ½ x 11 white paper with one-inch margins and Times New Roman font (at least, that’s how we would describe it since the rise of the typewriter and printing from computers). But now that composition can potentially encompass more than just text on a page, delivery is interesting again. Cicero explained delivery in oratory as not only modulating the pitch, volume, and tone of voice, but also of matching gestures to words. Orators should control their voice by allowing it to rise and fall, increase and diminish, at the appropriate times. He explains that it would not be unwise for orators to study movement as actors do so that they may look natural while presenting their orations; in other words, they should not look rehearsed or stilted while speaking. The reasoning behind such advice is that the orator must maintain the goodwill of his audience: he must seem impassioned when it is appropriate to be impassioned, and he must seem subdued when it is appropriate to be subdued. The audience must believe the delivery of his performance in order to be effectively persuaded.
In today’s electronic culture, delivery has taken on a new meaning. As Jim Ridolfo and Danielle DeVoss argue in “Composing for Recomposition,” delivery must now take audience into consideration in ways it did not have to do so before. For Cicero’s oratory, the audience was immediate and in front of the orator. For today’s electronic writing, the audience is removed from the composer in both time and space, and s/he must take that into consideration by composing pieces that will be accessible to potential readers/viewers in other countries and perhaps months or years after the original composition. In other words, it must have what Ridolfo and DeVoss call “rhetorical velocity,” the ability to be used and understood by a wide range of audiences. This new conception of delivery accounts for all of the aspects of electracy: oral, written, hybrid, and even visual texts; every kind of rhetoric is able to be used in most digital spaces, and the composer must carefully consider how best to use each one for the maximum impact on the largest possible audience. Because this notion of delivery is so audience-centered, it is rooted in Cicero’s oral tradition because it still requires that the composer deliver a product that the audience will find convincing and worthwhile. Thus, the new theory of delivery calls for an understanding of both classical and modern rhetoric.
As such, it is important that as we move forward in studying and teaching digital rhetoric and writing, we must be aware that it is rooted in both orality and literacy, and we must develop it to account for each kind of rhetoric, as well as a hybrid of the two and/or the addition of visual rhetoric. We must also teach our students how to compose in these electronic spaces so that they may be successful in today’s high-tech world or risk becoming obsolete as a field. Such pedagogy will require us to familiarize ourselves and our students with new digital genres that can blend many kinds of media in a given space. It also requires us to develop new considerations of delivery that are based in the old, and it will require even more considerations than I have space to describe here. Such theories and pedagogies require a familiarization with Ong’s secondary orality—we must acknowledge that secondary orality influences how we study, teach, and compose texts in both print and digital spaces—and Bolter’s electronic writing—we must acknowledge that such rhetoric blends traditionally oral nonlinearity while also remediating new texts composed of various oral, visual, and aural media.
- You have been asked to teach an upper-level undergraduate class on modern rhetoric. What texts from the reading list would you choose, and why? What theoretical approaches would you emphasize, and why? You may also refer to texts not on the list, but be sure to mention at least three that are on the list.
If I were to teach an upper-level undergraduate class on modern rhetoric, I would focus on definitions and conception of genre, specifically of genre as a social construct. Such an approach is important and interesting because it will change the way those students think of genre; most students think genre is a cookie-cutter form-based approach to writing, that it is nothing more than putting the right headers on the top of the page and using the write size of margins. But such a view of genre is limiting, nay crippling, for students. They need to see that genre is socially constructed and that it provides constraints that stabilize the rhetorical situation in order to make rhetorical choices and decisions easier. They also need to realize that the more genres they master, the more likely they are to respond correctly to new rhetorical situations. As such, the five texts I would choose to teach would be Aristotle’s Rhetoric for his conceptions of three genres, Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” for her important redefinition of genre, Charles Bazerman’s Shaping Written Knowledge and Amy J. Devitt’s Writing Genres because they build upon Miller’s work, and Bolter’s Writing Space because it introduces the possibility for digital genres.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle explains that there are three kinds of oratory, or three genres: forensic (dealing with matters of the past), deliberative (dealing with matters of the future), and epideictic (speeches of praise and/blame, often considered to deal with the present). At first, these three genres would suggest a reliance on formal qualities. In other words, it would seem that if one is performing a forensic oration, one would follow a set pattern of introduction, thesis, proof, and conclusion. However, Aristotle’s notions of these three genres is more complex than that. His insistence on the importance of audience shows that the listeners decide which genre the orator will select. For example, if the audience is expecting the orator to attempt to persuade them to, say, agree to increase city defense, it would be inappropriate for the orator to give an epideictic performance; they would demand a deliberative speech. Thus, though Aristotle does not explicitly state so, the genres are socially constructed: the audience decides which one will be used and how. Now, these genres also appear to overlap a little. For instance, while giving a forensic speech to attempt to prove innocence or guilt, it would probably not be unheard-of to draw on elements of epideictic to glorify or denigrate the accused. Aristotle’s genres are thus liquid and overlapping, as well as social.
Carolyn Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” argues against the notion that genres can be reduced solely to their formal qualities. She posits that genres are both socially constructed by various elements of the rhetorical situation and have social effects when used; this is one step further than the implications of Arisotle’s notion that the audience decides (socially constructs the need for) the genre. For instance, if a person is angered by an offensive article in a newspaper and decides to voice her opinion in a letter to the editor, her exigence (motivation for writing: anger), the genre she chooses (letter to the editor), and the effect (the letter being published) will be socially constructed. The newspaper article was written by someone else, then published, and finally read by hundreds or thousands of other people beside our angry writer; thus, her motivation came from the social world. She chose the letter to the editor as her genre because it is has been used for decades as a way to voice reactions to newspaper articles; her situation is recurring, a key element of its sociality. Finally, her letter will ostensibly be published in the same newspaper as the offensive article, and will thus be read by many of the same readers as the original article; in other words, her letter has the potential to reach and influence other people in society. Miller also argues that any genre that is brought into existence also has the ability to decay through disuse; for example, now that many newspapers publish online as well as in print, the letter to the editor could potentially change into some new electronic format or die out completely.
In Shaping Written Knowledge, Charles Bazerman expands on Miller’s definition of genre: not only is it socially constructed and act on the social world, but genres also provide constraints to stabilize the rhetorical situation. In other words, many people see genres as limiting, but when someone enters into a rhetorical situation, they could be overwhelmed by the options they have for responding to it. Bazerman argues that a knowledge of genres stabilizes those options: instead of having a potentially infinite number of possible responses, they are limited to a few from which they may choose. Such constraint is not limiting, but freeing; part of the work of the response has been done for them, now they can focus on creating a text or speech act that will appropriately respond to the situation. Bazerman also points out that, because there are sets of established genres from which someone may choose (rather than inventing their own), genres create reality: the genre selection impacts how a person will respond and what kind of knowledge they will put forth into the world. Bazerman seems uncomfortable with seeming infiniteness of available genres and thus argues that genres should be regularized so as not to confuse people, especially novice writers like students. He appears to argue specifically for disciplines to work on making their key genres more similar to each other’s so a writer can move between and among disciplines with more ease. Perhaps he is calling for something closer to Aristotle’s tripartite oral genres: only having to choose among a few genres instead of potentially infinite can help stabilize rhetorical situations even more effectively and offer fewer choices from which the writer must choose.
One person that does not seem to agree with Bazerman’s notion of regularizing genres is Amy Devitt in Writing Genres. She expands Miller’s notion of how genres respond to rhetorical situations by adding two new constraints (Miller only mentions the contexts Bitzer describes in “The Rhetorical Situation”: persons, events, objects, relations, and the exigence, or motive): contexts of culture and other genres. Such a conception of genre’s possibilities and constraints now includes the context of the speaker/writer’s entire background (age, ethnicity, education, race, gender, sexuality) as well as all of the genres that have been used to respond to similar rhetorical situations; thus, she has expanded the amount of options available to writers/speakers, instead of limiting them as Bazerman suggests. She argues that situations do not recur (as Miller does and Bazerman implies), but that they only seem to because they are similar to other situations, but not identical to them; each person’s cultural contexts and knowledge of other genres is different, thus their experiences are different. As such, we need to teach students what Devitt calls “genre awareness,” which includes teaching students how genres work, or how they respond to rhetorical situations. Such an approach would include Bazerman’s notion that we must teach students the rhetorical choices each genre offers, but it would also include teaching why those choices are available in particular genres, which genres are appropriate in which situations and why, and how to use genres effectively. Devitt suggests helping students master as many of these genres as possible so that students will have a storehouse of what she calls “antecedent genres” from which they can draw in order to respond to new rhetorical situations. Both Bazerman and Devitt want students to understand how genres work, but Bazerman seems to want to limit the number of genres available, while Devitt wants students to be prepared to use as many genres as possible.
Lastly, Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space introduces the notion of digital writing and sets the stage for discussions of digital genres. He argues that writing on the screen is becoming just as important as (if not more so) than writing on the page, and we need to prepare our students for how to do so successfully. Bolter’s work has implications for genre because with the rise of a new space in which to write comes new rhetorical situations that require new kinds of genres in response. For example, Bolter talks about how email is now a central form of communication, whereas it previously had not been. Thus, people need to learn how to write in a new genre. He seems to focus on some of the formal qualities (subject line, greeting, closing), but he also discusses the social component of such a genre: tone, audience awareness, what kind of a closing to give and to whom, and so forth. His book is quite outdated (written in 2001, technology has made many advances since then), but it can provide a window in to a discussion on such modern digital composition spaces as Facebook and Twitter, both of which, it could be argued, are hybrids of various genres. It can also provide an interesting bridge between Miller’s, Bazerman’s, and Devitt’s notions of the social aspect of genre and how that changes (or doesn’t) in a technological space.
Taken together, these texts create an interesting conversation about modern conceptions of genre. Aristotle is considered the Father of Rhetoric, so no discussion of rhetoric can take place without his notions to establish the field. It also would be useful to look at Miller’s article in light of Aristotle’s ideas about genre. She seems to be arguing against some notion(s) of genre as a form-based response to a rhetorical situation, but comparing Aristotle and Miller shows that this was not always so; Aristotle also thought of genres as social, though he did not say it explicitly. Bazerman and Devitt also build on Miller’s notion of genres as social entities. Because genre is formed by social forces and the use of a particular genre has social implications, students need to be made aware of the choices they have within each genre in order to master it and use it to respond to future rhetorical situations. Devitt also expands Miller’s conception of how a genre responds to a rhetorical situation by including new constraints (contexts of culture and other genres) in order to emphasize that situations do not recur but only seem to. Devitt and Bazerman also both agree that students need to be taught some form of “genre awareness,” but Devitt calls for a broader conceptualization of what they need to be aware of (not just the choices they have, but also why) while allowing for the possibility of an infinite number of genres (instead of regularizing them, as Bazerman suggests). Finally, Bolter’s work introduces the digital aspect of genre and how our conceptions or knowledge of genres has changed in the technological realm. His work, though outdated, can provide fruitful discussion of the kinds of rhetorical choices that are available on Facebook or Twitter, the recurrence of rhetorical situations on Tumblr, or the kinds of contexts each person brings to the blogs they post on WordPress. Each work, starting with Aristotle and moving through Miller, Bazerman, Devitt, and Bolter, builds on the last and can convey to upper-class undergraduate students a representation of where our conceptions of genre began, where they’ve been, and how they got to where they are now.
- How have the readings on the list impacted your own approach to rhetorical research and teaching philosophy?
My research interests lie in issues of identity in digital rhetoric, specifically of identity in social media. I am interested in how people construct their identities in these spaces, how they choose portray themselves to a wider audience. I’m also interested in how such research can impact our approach to teaching writing. As such, three texts from the reading lists that have impacted how I research and teach are Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold, Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech, and Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives.
In Rhetoric Retold, Glenn argues for a broader definition of writing that can include women in the rhetorical canon. She suggest that rhetoric should be defined as any utterance intended to have an impact on an audience. Such a reconception of rhetoric would allow for women’s voices and ideas to be included in studies of rhetoric. For example, she argues that we must see such female influences as Aspasia in the same we see Socrates: we have no definitive proof that Socrates or Aspasia ever existed, except through secondhand accounts, yet we have no trouble accepting Socrates’ influence on Plato and rhetoric while we tend to deny Aspasia’s. Glenn’s broader definition of rhetoric also includes such typically arhetorical maneuvers as silence. For example, when Anne Askew was arrested, she refused to answer her Inquisitor’s questions. She was able to read her audience and knew speaking would not change any minds or save her life, so instead she said nothing and thus denied the Inquisitor any power in the rhetorical situation. Glenn’s notions have impacted how I will perform research because she raises issues of gender identity in rhetoric. Her broader definition (and, in fact, other research that has been done before and since) implies that women and men employ rhetoric in different ways. Traditionally, masculine rhetoric has been the primary object of study, but that is changing. Where Glenn is reclaiming women’s voices from antiquity through the Renaissance, my research is interested in reclaiming women’s voices in the present day, specifically in digital spaces. For instance, more men than women edit Wikipedia because their rhetoric and epistemology are deemed more “factual” than a feminine rhetoric that may be based in experience (much like how Glenn explains that women like Julian of Norwich and Margaret Kempe initially met resistance when they used personal experiences in their religious teachings). Glenn’s methodology and expanded definition of rhetoric will be a useful way to examine how women write (or refrain from writing, perhaps using silence rhetorically) in modern rhetorical spaces.
I have also been influenced by Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech, notably her discussion about the difference between intention and desire. She explains that while someone who makes a racist threat (shows desire for a certain, potentially violent, outcome) is assumed not to intend to act upon such a threat, someone in the military who expresses homosexual desire is assumed to intend to act upon such desire. The fact that one person (probably white and of a more privileged class) can make a threat (against someone of a less privileged class) with no assumed intention, but that another person (considered to be of a lower class, by virtue of being homosexual) can make apparent his/her homosexual desires and is assumed to intend to act upon it, is troubling. This disparity between when and for whom desire is conflated with intent is based in identity and shows that power is given unequally to the two kinds of speakers. Such power imbalance through identity is indicative of a large systemic problem that hierarchicalizes people based on such contexts as gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, among others. In my research, identifying and analyzing such sites of identity-influenced power imbalance will be necessary. For example, Butler’s work points to one reason why many homosexuals (in the army or otherwise) may choose not to express their desire: because others will automatically assume that their desire means that they intend to act upon it. It would be interesting to see if there are other instances in digital spaces where such conflation between desire and intention happens and how it is grounded in issues of identity.
A third text that has influenced my research is Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives, specifically his concept of identification. He defines identification as that moment in which a speaker/writer calls forth some aspect that s/he has in common with his/her audience in order to maximize persuasion. The example Burke gives is of the politician who speaks before the people of a small farm town and declares that he grew up on a farm. The people of the town will realize they have something in common with the politician and will thus be more likely to trust him because they are “consubstantial” (substantially one, or the same) at the intersection of their overlapping identities. Burke also adds a noteworthy aspect to his notion of identification by explaining that the act of identification does not need to be genuine or sincere; the speaker/writer can fabricate it in order to maximize persuasion. This concept is useful to me because it gives me a framework and terminology from which to speak about a trend in social media that I have noticed but did not know how to discuss prior to reading Burke. Just as the rhetorician chooses which aspect of his/her identity to expose in order to enact identification, so too does a user on Facebook choose which photo to upload as a profile picture, or what status to post to describe his/her mood. Similarly, that same user can fabricate a connection between him/herself and his/her audience in order to produce a desired effect (in Burke’s case, persuasion; in the Facebook user’s case, it could be for people to perceive him/her a certain way). In other words, because such social media sites as Facebook are almost entirely under the control of the user (notable exceptions are posts to their wall [which can be deleted and/or turned off] and pictures in which they are tagged [which they can untag or delete]), s/he decides what artifacts will define his/her presence, and thus identity, in any given digital space; s/he uses identification to control how s/he is perceived.
Not only will these texts impact my rhetorical research, they have also impacted how I will teach writing in the classroom. For example, Glenn’s expanded definition of rhetoric allows for me to teach the rhetoric nontraditional genres, like blogs and webpages, that meet her criteria of being intended to impact an audience. Glenn and Butler have also provided a way for me to conceptualize teaching about power and identity in writing. It seems imperative that students must be aware not only that some writing has a greater impact than other kinds of writing, but also that they must be aware of this inequality and seek to balance it in their own writing and research. For example, we must recognize that a blog post based in experience (a typically feminine type of writing) can be just as valid a form of knowledge as an objective journal article (a typically masculine type of writing) on the same topic; thus, students should not only be encouraged to compose blogs, but also to draw on them for research in their academic writing. Burke’s notion of identification provides a way to teach students how identities are formed in various digital spaces, not only social media). It is a way to teach students not only to be aware of how they construct their identities in any rhetorical space, but also how to analyze texts (blogs, webpages, and even college viewbooks) to see how they portray various aspects in an attempt to identify with certain people. All three scholars, Glenn, Butler, and Burke, have given me concepts and frameworks from which to build my own research on rhetorical identity as well as how to teach such notions to students in a meaningful way. I’m sure I have much more to learn as I go, but they have provided me with a starting point that I did not have three months ago.
Exam. Play. 