I'm making a podcast! 21st Century Sophist is a rhetoric and writing podcast produced and featuring Jacob Richter, RCID PhD student at Clemson University. In our inaugural episode, we explore how teaching circles in university writing programs can empower collaborative leadership capabilities and improve writing instruction and student learning. Future episodes will feature interviews, discussions, … Continue reading *Podcast Alert*- Introducing 21st Century Sophist
Students always benefit from more rhetorical analysis. This is a simple statement that our disciplinary identities, the connotations that automatically form in our brains as rhetoricians and writing teachers, perhaps might function to cloud. What I mean to say here is not that (or not only that) students benefit from more rhetorical analysis assignments being … Continue reading Re-Framing RetroActive Composition
“One class down. Two more to go.” I can’t put a number on how many times I’ve whispered sentences like these under my breath over the past two years. Typically, I’ll find myself in a coffeeshop somewhere or perhaps at my living room table, hunched over a stack of papers that I’ve … Continue reading On UnGrading the Composition Classroom
Teacher Roles in Student Protests: When Passivity Becomes Rhetorical Action It’s spring break for my students and I in upstate New York, which means lots of snow, cancelled flights, undrivable roads and plenty of cancelled plans. It means there’s plenty of time for grading (and for procrastinating), and there’s plenty of time … Continue reading Teacher Roles In Student Protests: When Passivity Becomes Rhetorical Action
Part I of this post can be found here (I'd recommend starting there for a theoretical background on the issues discussed in this project). The UnEssays composed by CPN-100-03 can be found here. The assignment prompt I assigned is located here. For concrete examples of the conclusions that can be drawn from this … Continue reading STAND UP!- THEORIZING THE ACTIVIST UNESSAY, PT. II
With 2018 nigh upon us, it's time to look back at the best contributions from independent rhetoric and composition journals over the past year. I'm moving through the process of evaluating a number of essays for inclusion in a "Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals 2018" anthology, so my mind is already geared … Continue reading Best of Rhetoric and Composition 2018
Despite a frustrating lack of any palpable challenge to Socrates' naive, limited essentialism, Plato's Gorgias is of undeniable interest to any rhetorician even beyond the explicit discussion of oratory and sophistry contained in its opening discussion. The dialogue is well known in composition and rhetoric for its inaugural debate in which Socrates utilizes his famed method … Continue reading Probing Democracy: Gorgias, Public Rhetoric and the Electrate Polus
The scene is a familiar one. A student knocks reluctantly on my office door, enters the musty room with uncertainty and then proceeds to speak some deeply heartfelt words in a trembling, quivering voice. Something along the lines of “I do not feel comfortable with other people viewing the writing I produce for this class.” … Continue reading Discourse in Democracy: Composition, Digital Citizenship and the Crafting of Authentic Rhetorical Situations
Should first-year writing students choose their own essay topics? I’d like to take some time this morning to venture an interesting take on this question that has been turning around in my head for a few months now. Long a topic of boisterous debate within composition and rhetoric, the role of student … Continue reading Should Students Choose Their Own Writing Topics?: A Mindful Approach
I'd like to begin this post by posing a question to my readers, especially those involved in the ever-complicated undertaking that is the teaching of the craft of writing: how can we press our writing communities, whether they be inside of the college classroom or outside of it, to travel intellectually beyond current thinking into … Continue reading The Faces of Janus: Rothenberg, Divergent Thinking and the Productivity of Gray Areas
Jacob Richter 