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
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
Hacking the Curriculum: FYC, Critical Information Literacies and Social Web Environments Among the benefits of teaching writing at my current university institution is the freedom and flexibility it allots to its composition instructors. Next semester I’ll be teaching Writing Studies II, the second leg of the institution’s FYC sequence. Writing Studies II is … Continue reading Hacking the Curriculum: FYC, Critical Information Literacies and Social Web Environments
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
Here's the body of what I'll present at the 2017 SUNY Council on Writing conference in Syracuse, NY. My talk is just that-- a talk-- so these notes are really only serving as memory aids. I won't be reading word-by-word directly from a conference paper, but rather will be verbally outlining a thesis on the … Continue reading Cognitive Seeds: The Role of Creative Thinking in First-Year Composition
A bevy of scholarship within both the sciences and the humanities have surveyed the implications presented by recent research into the human's brain's astounding and only recently-realized levels of neuroplasticicy. The brain, the body of research suggests, is not a static entity that exists in fixed and stationary configuration, but rather is malleable, changeable, pliant … Continue reading Developing Habits, Developing Minds: What Can Neuroplasticity Do For Composition?
Blame it on Oprah. Blame it on One City One Book. Blame it on the declining reading habits of ordinary Americans (as recent popular wisdom would have you believe). Just about every highschool, community center and early-college common curriculum in the past decade or so has tried out some version of a community-read initiative. SUNY Cortland, … Continue reading On the Value of “Soft Reading”
Compositionists have in recent years begun, in a mode similar to the ethical, social and Sophistic turns of recent decades, the collective project of mobilizing the discipline to hold in greater esteem the cataclysmic situations of public concern unfolding in front of our eyes. We need only examine the evening news … Continue reading When Worlds Speak: Apocalypse, Composition, Critique
In a few weeks, I'll be presenting at a writing classroom and pedagogy conference called Writing Matters. This year's theme is "The Work Of Writing," and will feature panels and presentations from a variety of K-16 teachers. This semester, I've been teaching my Freshman composition courses at SUNY Cortland through a blog, which we utilize … Continue reading Writing Matters
Jacob Richter 