Writing About Writing (Spring 2023)

WEEKLY EXERCISES

Weekly exercise #1

For your first weekly exercise, we’re going to put our newly learned or refreshed understanding of rhetoric to the test. Looking at our next reading, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, identify the key rhetorical strategies that author Paolo Freire uses to convince his audience of his central position.

To help you in your analysis, here are a few questions you might consider.

  • Who is Freire’s audience (and how can you tell)?
  • What kinds of choices does he make to communicate effectively with his audience? Are these choices particularly appropriate for this audience? Do they effectively support the content of the argument?
  • How significant is this aspect of his writing to the larger message he is arguing? How does it lend itself to the experience of receiving the message?

Remember, these aren’t questions to be explicitly answered as if you’re taking an exam. Rather, they’re guiding questions that invite you to think critically and meaningfully about the chosen text. Your responsibility here is to both rhetorically analyze and rhetorically produce, meaning you’re making an argument about an argument, making rhetorical choices to be persuade your audience while analyzing the rhetorical choices of another author.

The analysis you produce should be 500-750 words and it’s due by class time (12:15 pm) on Tuesday, February 14th. Please submit it via the link below or DM on Discord.

Weekly exercise #2

For your second weekly exercise, let’s keep exercising those rhetorical muscles to make some thoughtful and informed language decisions! Instead of focusing our efforts on the rhetorical choices of others, we’re going to emphasize our own choices by responding directly to a commenter from Jonathan Malesic’s “My College Students Are Not OK” op-ed.

Now, you don’t need to actually post a response, obviously, but your responses should be directed at the position that a commenter makes. To effectively do this, you’ll need to (a) identify a comment and (b) determine its argument.

Additionally, you might want to consider some of these questions to best support your own position.

  • What kind of rhetorical strategies does the commenter use?
  • Who is their audience and how might this be relevant to your response to them?
  • What tone are they engaging in their comment and how might it inform your own?
  • What strategies might you engage to best communicate with the commenter?

Like before, these aren’t questions to be explicitly answered in the content of your response––use them to make informed choices about how you present, phrase, and argue your own position.

What you produce should be 500-750 words and it’s due by class time (12:15 pm) on Thursday, February 23rd. Please submit it via the button at the bottom of this page or DM on Discord.

Weekly exercise #3

For your third weekly exercise, let’s ratchet up our critical and rhetorical analysis skills by using them to support our own experiences and observations. And while you all already do this, extrapolating or hypothesizing from individual experience can still be a bit tricky, and creating a through line from that to a more widely resonant experience is its own skill.

To practice this, I’m asking you to consider your immediate experience with the university and identify how it might connect and/or reflect Derrida’s characterizations of “oriented research” or applied research and “fundamental research” (12) in his text, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils.”

And if you’re struggling to articulate your experience, you might ask yourself some of the following questions.

  • What are some of your learning experiences like across both STEM and humanities classes? Do some classes feel more information-based while others are more abstract, or are they mostly the same?
  • Have you ever experienced more familial or community support for certain fields of study (e.g., majors, etc.) over others?
  • Do university communications (emails, brochures, web content, etc.) emphasize particular fields over others? Are certain facilities more advertised than others to promote Queens College (or other universities you’re familiar with)?
  • How often has the language of research come up in your course experience? How is research defined? How has its significance been framed or presented to you?

As always, these questions are basic starter questions––your own thinking doesn’t have to reflect them specifically. However, like everything else in this class, asking why or asking how is essential to more thoughtful engagement with a text as well as your own idea development!

What results from this engagement should be 500-750 words and is due by class time (12:15 pm) on Tuesday, March 7th. Please submit it via the button at the bottom of this page or DM on Discord.

Weekly exercise #4

For your fourth weekly exercise (and the last one before a solid break!), we’re going to follow from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s essay, “R-Words: Refusing Research” (2014), and consider refusal, rhetorically.

The authors readily engage with refusal as a opportunity for agency within the context of academic research and study, and I’d like us to do the same, but with special attention how refusal can be articulated and framed in our academic output. To focus this examination, please thoughtfully engage with the question asked by Tuck and Yang, what knowledges does the academy deserve?

Now, this is a big, beefy question, so don’t feel obligated to provide a clear, cut-and-dry answer that can be integrated into a curriculum. Instead, consider this a sort of thought exercise wherein you can call upon your experiences in your fields, in classes, with professors, advisors, departments, etc. You can also ask yourself some of the questions below to get the ball rolling.

  • What makes up “the academy” and how do you fit into it?
  • How does the language of “the academy” relate to the university? Are they one in the same?
  • What does the notion of desert (or deserving) mean to you?
  • Are there things that shouldn’t be studied (in universities)? What might those things be?

Again, the primary question is a significant one, so try to think of this exercise as just a top dip in the water of a larger discourse that we’ll continue to evolve in subsequent reading and writing.

Your response should be 500-750 words and it’s due by end-of-day (11:59 pm) on Thursday, March 30th. Please submit it via the button at the bottom of this page or DM on Discord.

Weekly exercise #5

For the fifth weekly exercise, I’d like us to pause and reflect on what we’ve read and discussed thus far. We’ve been evolving our discourse from mere critique of the university and its knowledges, systems, and structures to ways of navigating and negotiating them, both overt and covert.

There are different ways to engage in reflection on this, of course, and I want you to have options. So, you can do one of two things:

  • Choose a past weekly exercise that you’ve received feedback on and rework and revise it as a second, more polished draft, OR
  • Pick an idea from one of the Twitter thread posted in the #readings channel on Discord and evaluate it as a successful critique or as a viable (or inviable) intervention in the university’s existing ideology.

If you select the second option, I challenge you to think beyond agreement or disagreement and alternately consider whether the claims made in a chosen thread are effective in their argument. And feel free to look at the following to get your ideas flowing.

  • Is there any data or information provided to support the argument?
  • Are the experiences described collective, universal, or are they personal expressions of frustrations?
  • How is the university framed by the writer?
  • Do the recommendations or interventions offered (to improve the conditions of the university) make sense? Are they practical or sufficient?

These are just some starter questions, and, like always, you don’t have to answer them directly. But I strongly encourage you to engage meaningfully with either option to exercise those rhetorical and/or revision muscles!

Your reflection or revision should be 500-750 words and is due by class time (12:15 pm) on Tuesday, April 18th. Please submit it via the button at the bottom of this page or DM on Discord.

Weekly exercise #6

For the sixth (and final!) weekly exercise, we’re going to round out our rhetorically-focused investigations with a close and critical look at the language choices made by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in their chapter “The University and the Undercommons” from The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013), and how those choices contribute you the success of their position.

Now, as we’ve learned, language choices can mean a lot of things, but here are some ideas you might want to consider.

  • Significance of words like “fugitive,” “maroon,” “refugee,” etc. within the larger discourse of the modern university;
  • The framing of the American university as one and the same as “professionalization”;
  • The makeup and function of the “undercommons” in relation to critique and intellectualism.

Now, you shouldn’t need to address all of these at once, so pick a particular angle to focus on (or bring your own!) and build an analysis and argument around it.

I haven’t offered you any “starter questions,” because I want you to have maximum flexibility, but let me know if you need something to get you started.

What you put together should be 500-750 words and is due by 11:59 pm on Thursday, April 27th. Please submit it via the button at the bottom of this page or DM on Discord.