As I’ve mentioned in class, my own adventures are taking me away from RCC, away from the Inland Empire, and into the far reaches of the Pacific Northwest, and I plan to keep a record of my photographic and written reflections on the experience on the blog I recently began, On Nothing from Nowhere.

I also have an infrequently updated cooking and food history related blog called Veganachronism. And if you really want to stalk me, I also have accounts on the photography site Flickr and the Internet radio site LastFM, as well as a profile on FaceBook as a few of you have already discovered. Though, honestly, you may want to wait until you’ve seen your final grade to “friend” me. You may not feel so “friendly” after you get your results.

Anyway, it was a pleasure having you all in class this term, and I wish you all the best in your educational and personal endeavors. Take care, all…

Tomorrow, I’ll be giving you the chance to see in advance the essay questions for the final, and you’ll have an opportunity to create for each of the two questions an outline that you can bring with you to the actual final on Monday at 7:00PM. I’ll also be giving you each a chance to see your grade thus far in the course and resolve any possible issues or discrepancies before I calculate your final grade. If you’ve attended class regularly this term, kept up on the weekly blog posts, and put in your lab hours, you should have nothing to worry about. If not, well…

Anyway, this weekend is your last post for the term. Congratulations to all of you who have stuck with the blog assignments to the end, and I hope a few of you at least found the experience valuable and have thought about blogging in the future as a useful means of writing practice and self expression.

Your last post should be a reflection on one of the two texts from this week, Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” or June Jordan’s “Nobody Mean More to Me than You, and the Future Life of Willie Jordan.” Here are a few questions you might consider in your blog reflections: How do you think education professionals should respond to students who speak “borderland” languages as described in Anzaldúa or “non-standard” English dialects as described in Jordan? Do the exigencies of professional success trump the acknowledgment that no one language or dialect is objectively superior to another? Have you observed personally a situation in which language, accent, or dialect has provoked either respect or disdain? Do you think those perceptions justified?

On Monday, we looked at the importance in rhetoric of what Burke calls “identification”—that is, the means by which we identify our own needs, wants, desires, etc. as being in common with another individual or group. And we saw how that identification is often accomplished through “properties,” often material objects that serve as metaphors for some identification with another individual or group (I know Burke is difficult stuff, but hopefully by now, you’ve started to develop an inkling of what he’s on about).

To see how this works in practice, we watched the film Local909er, which illustrated a lot of the ways that commercial and residential developers in our local area have used this rhetoric of identification. The Victoria Gardens mall, for example, uses 50s pop music and faux mom-and-pop signage to attract shoppers who want to identify themselves with the values of traditional small-town communities. The model homes at The Preserve in Chino similarly use the trappings of an idealized nuclear family to attract home buyers who identify with that ideal.

For this week, you might want to provide your own analysis of a clip from the film (you can review them on the Local909er site by clicking on the relevant location and clicking “watch video clip” on the lower right) within the context of Burke’s ideas about rhetoric and identification. Alternatively, select another commercial or advertising campaign that uses similar kinds of “identification” in its rhetoric. What connections do the advertisers attempt to make between their product and some cultural or social value with which their target market might identify? To what extent is this association real or merely illusory?

On Wednesday, we looked at the Achebe text, and Achebe discussed how language is fundamental to all our notions of society; indeed, as expressed in many creation myths, language is identified with the very creation of humankind itself, illustrating the importance of language to the very definition of the “human.”

But after establishing the importance of language to human society, Achebe also notes how, in myth and folklore, distortions of language can lead to social decline (Tower of Babel, anyone?). You may want, for this week’s blog post, to find a commercial or political text (something as simple as an advertising or campaign slogan will do) that you feel distorts language. What might kind of social consequences might result from such a distortion?

Extra Credit Opportunity

Still with me? If you want to do a second blog post this week, you can earn another ten points extra credit. Wednesday, we talked about the use of parallelism in creating effective sentences. Find an example from the reader of a sentence or passage that you think makes particularly effective use of parallel structures and write a few sentences explaining the parallelism you observed and explaining why you find it effective. This is all or nothing. If your example doesn’t demonstrate grammatical parallelism you get no credit, so be careful in your selection!

Two blog posts from this week’s reflections stood out this week: Sandmonster wrote an interesting short analysis of FDR’s speeches through the lens of Cicero’s On Rhetorical Invention and Jared provided an entertaining connection between Quintillian and the educational works of Troy McClure. Reminded me of a cousin-in-law of mine who’s doing his PhD on meat science…

• Choose a speech and critique the speech’s introduction in terms of Cicero’s thoughts on the exordium. Which of Cicero’s five causes is applicable here? Does the introduction suit the speech’s purpose and audience? Does the choice of introduction follow Cicero’s suggestions or depart from them? Is it effective as an introduction?AmericanRhetoric.com has an extensive list of links to speeches, and several of the texts in your reader originally presented as speeches, such as Gandhi’s “Economic and Moral Progress” or Roy’s “Come September, would also be suitable

• Find an example of an ad, text, image, film clip, etc. for some cause that you consider immoral. Does this example confirm or refute Quintilian’s assertion that bad people make poor rhetoricians? Is the piece effective or is the effectiveness compromised by its immoral or unjust aims?If you have an hour and fifty minutes to blow, the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will is available on Internet Archive with English subtitles. If you have only ten minutes, the 50s anti-homosexual propaganda film Boys Beware is also available, but feel free to find anything that interests you.

As always, if none of these suggestions interests you, feel free to generate your own topic as long as it relates to the texts assigned this week from the reader.

There were a few blog posts from our viewing of the film Slam that stood out: Wcarrasco gave a good explication of the film’s central theme, Jared drew a connection between Ray’s use of rhetoric over violence and Aristotle’s observation that his contemporaries (and ours too to a large extent) emphasized physical prowess over eloquence, Jlapolla saw connections between the character Lauren Bell’s efforts among prison inmates and other volunteer outreach programs.

Again, there’s no blog requirement this week, so this weekend, just focus on the reading, and I’ll have your research paper assignment ready to give you on Monday. See you all then.

One scene from Slam that particularly caught my attention, in this regard, is the conversation between Raymond and Hopha after Raymond diffuses the violent tension in the prison courtyard with his poetry. Hopha alludes to the book Sun Tzu’s Art of War (excerpted, by the way, in chapter three of your reader), in which Sun Tzu argues that the most skillful general is not the one who triumphs in violent conflict but the one who, through skillful action, makes violent conflict unnecessary. Hopha’s reading in Sun Tzu gave him a context in which to make sense of what he had observed from a more enlightened perspective and to envision radical new possibilities of being.

Now, in our reading from John Henry Newman, we saw that Newman was reticent to connect the value of liberal education to any sort of moral purpose. But I doubt even Newman would deny that an understanding of the humanities and the arts can open to students (including informal students, like Hopha in the film) radical new understandings of their social, cultural, and moral contexts and radical possibilities within those contexts. In what sense have the intellectual and artistic works you’ve been exposed to in your education opened for you news ways of thinking about the world around you? Have these, in any sense, helped you transcend the “group think” of your peers or culture?

Other possible connections between the film and our reading can be drawn from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the excerpt we read in class, Freire alludes to the power of non-hierarchical collaborative modes of education and their power to help the politically and socially disenfranchised challenge the systems of power that oppress them. Elsewhere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire makes the distinction between “systematic education, which can only be changed by political power, and educational projects, which should be carried out with the oppressed in the process of organizing them.” In what sense could the sort of self-organized artistic community like that embodied in the poet community of which the character Lauren Bell was a part exemplify the kind of non-hierarchical collaborative “educational project” that Freire alludes to?

And if you’re interested in learning more about this sort of thing, you might want to watch this short video about the National Poetry Slam festival. Or better yet, find out a bit more about what’s going on locally in the Inland Empire arts scene. I realize the cultural underground in the IE can seem very underground at times, but it does exist, and there are some people doing some really interesting things artistically and politically. It just takes a little digging…

(Also, if you weren’t in class on Wednesday for the film, feel free to revisit any of the texts from that chapter on education or the more recent excerpts on rhetoric and come up with your own response for this week.)

Last week I suggested the option of looking at recent political ads in the light of Plato and Aristotle’s thoughts on rhetoric. Stepher16 looked at California’s Prop 2 ads in the light of Aristotle’s three divisions of rhetorical method, as did Jlapolla with an Obama ad, and Lynzi with McCain. Erica had a look at rhetoric within a slightly more practical context, and Jared took us back to the 1964 Johnson v. Goldwater election.

In a few minutes, I’ll write up the blog ideas for the weekend, in case any of you are feverishly checking my blog at the wee hours of the morning…

Alternatively, you can analyze the ad in terms of Aristotle’s three areas of rhetorical technique as described in the excerpt from his Rhetoric. To what degree does the ad argue for its claims based on reason or evidence (logos)? To what degree does it depend upon appeals to emotion (pathos)? And to what degree does the ad attempt to establish the character of the candidate as more trustworthy than his opponent (ethos)? Which of these do you find most persuasive?

I also noted with interest yesterday this article on ReadWriteWeb, describing a study that indicates online readers are less likely to consider bloggers credible if their writing includes spelling or grammatical errors. How does this relate to Aristotle’s belief that rhetorical skill was essential if the advocates of truth and goodness were to get their message heard? And how might this relate more practically to the knowledge and skills you’re (I hope) acquiring through this course?