The Rhetoric of Space & Place in Washington, DC
Early map of planned Washington, DC. | Image Source: Library of Congress
Map of Washington, DC c. 1865. The now underground Tiber Creek can be seen as it once was. | Image Credit: Library of Congress
In her recent book, Now You See It, Cathy N. Davidson reminds us that twenty-first century skills in a complex global network include learning how to “make connections, synthesize, collaborate, network, manage projects, solve problems, and respond to constantly changing technologies.” In other words, Davidson suggests that to thrive in our networked world, we all must learn to adapt to ever-evolving technologies, make connections between the seemingly unconnected, and collaborate with others who can help us achieve our goals. I’ve designed this course, therefore, to give you opportunities to develop the skills to navigate the complex network we inhabit by creating occasions for you to think rhetorically.
This course aims for three main goals: 1) To give you practice in the technical skills described below in the “Course Objectives,” 2) to further your rhetorical information literacy skills, and 3) to develop in you the importance of the relationship between Rhetoric and Citizenship, which we call “public discourse.” And since that public discourse occurs in what is call the “built environment,” I have designed this course for you to examine the rhetoric of DC’s built environment in order to enter its public discourse. Lastly, this course strives to develop in you a passion for inquiry itself.
To develop these skills, you will use our Writer-as-Witness text, Ruben Castaneda’s S Street Rising, to launch a rhetorical inquiry into DC’s “built environment.” In various multi-modal writing projects, you will begin this inquiry by rhetorically analyzing a single point in your built environment with the goal of ultimately situating that point into DC’s broader network. Through this process, you will explore the complex relationship between DC’s built environment and the life that inhabits it to help us better understand how they influence each other. We will begin by collaborating on creating an annotated map of DC, arising from our own respective inquiry. As you inquiry into your built environment develops and your project emerges, you will add that information to our collaborative map and write a series of essays you will publish to the web which will add to the public discourse.
The various writing assignments you will do in this course aim to inculcate this passion for inquiry, for the unplanned turn, the found object, the mistake, the emergent questions we discover along the way, the complex. This process of inquiry will help you develop the multi-modal research and writing skills that Davidson explains we need. By course’s end, you will not only have been introduced to and extensively practiced the reading, writing, research, and editing skills necessary for academic success, but you will also have worked extensively in multi-modal technologies to write yourself into the global network.
You should see your project as ontological. What you end up writing about will depend upon your inquiry as it emerges.
Ultimately, this class seeks to help you develop the critical thinking skills necessary for you to think through any rhetorical situation. Furthermore, you will leave the class with your own webspace and portfolio to show off to family, friends, and, yes, even future employers.
I can not wait to see what you discover and what I can learn from each of you. And while I expect you to develop your own autonomy and self-reliance during the term, I will be there with you every step along the way. I look forward to it.
N.B. I am heavily indebted to Prof. Robin Wharton and Prof. Matthew Pavesich, from whom I have borrowed heavily, both conceptually and materially, in terms of Web design (Wharton) and assignments (Wharton, Pavesich). I thank them both for being so generous with their time and with their materials.
Many people see writing as a static, stable process, just like when we drive from point A to point B. We generally think of a few known possible routes and we might flex arrival / departure times based on perceived traffic patterns. In short, many liken “writing” to the old AAA Trip Tiks. These old maps, though useful, provided static information based on known circumstances at the time you received it. While these maps certainly could advise you where known construction sites were and perhaps even alert you to a known speed trap, these maps produced a simple, reductive world of static information. Today, of course, such maps seem absurdly unhelpful when compared to navigation apps, such as Waze. These new navigation apps constantly adapt to emergent conditions. If an obstruction happens ahead of us, the app will divert us to a route we may not have ever been aware of. Such apps show us how we are influenced and in turn influence the traffic environment. In short, we see that we are part of the network, of the complex system.
AAA Triptik for Kimber family relocation trip from Providence, RI to White Salmon, WA. | Image credit: Eliot Kimber, photo used under CC BY-NC license.
This course, then, seeks to provide you with the tools better navigate this ever adapting complex network. As a part of the undergraduate community, you will be faced with writing in myriad situations. Some of these situations will feel quite familiar to you; others might be present you with new ways of presenting information. You will certainly write static, traditional essays (See “Rhetorical Analyses”) where your professor will be your primary audience and your primary goal will be to show the professor you understand the particular concepts you have covered. Other assignments, however, will challenge you to discover your own topic on your own for your own purposes. This class will empower you to enter those situations with confidence.
These projects encourage you to work in a variety of complex rhetorical situations, which emerge from your own inquiry into your CLS. The projects start with more familiar rhetorical tasks and move into rhetorical complexity as you move through the semester. Note that the projects accrue. That is, your first major assignment builds towards your final project. All major projects may be revised for a retroactively-assigned new grade in the final portfolio.
I hope you’ll find our readings and assignments engaging, provocative, and helpful. I mean it when I say I am with you. I am new to much of this technology, and I very much look forward to learning from the expertise you bring to this class. These projects should allow us all to share our strengths with each other, so we can all benefit. Because our contemporary world forces us to grapple with myriad, simultaneous stimuli every second of our lives, learning to collaborate matters more than ever. After all, the more we can harness each other’s talents, the better we can all navigate this complexity. The following assignment give you practice in these 21st century skills.
You may submit these after any assigned reading and class discussion.
Each of you has been assigned a section of S Street Rising. You should drop pins on any spot the text references and annotate that pin with pertinent textual information. You should add page numbers for every textual mention and use quotation marks and other citations where necessary.
Some of these references will require research. For example, maybe Castaneda references a place, like the night club, Is This It?, without giving a full address. Such cases require research to find the exact address.
Like the “wax on; wax off” move accomplished for the Karate Kid, this exercise will help develop your summary analysis skills. This assignment does not aim for you to write a complete essay; rather, it asks you to compose in rigorous academic dialect a page—double-spaced, MLA 8—in which you accurately and usefully summarize various academic scholarship. This will help your reading skills, as well. In fact, you’ll soon see how reading and writing are really are two sides of the same coin.
In academic writing and in most other sincere, serious work, writers are constantly engaging a conversation other writers have begun or standard views that a culture holds. In their own writing, then, these writers must accurately reflect those texts and ideas. The trouble is, however, scholarship has shown that many college students are not developing these important skills. This assignment aims to help you do just that.
Every genre, indeed every rhetorical situation, has its own form. This assignment gives you practice writing in the academic genre. While these analytical principle cross genres, academic discourse demands a specific set of forms. Of course, an understanding of the form guides you to the content and shapes it for you. For example, think of how a structure, such as “In her Now You See It, Cathy N. Davidson explains ______________,” shapes how you approach the text. Rather than regurgitating the text linearly–first she says this, and then she says this, and so forth–you now must read Davidson’s text holistically, as part of a larger conversation, in order to make your own “reading” of what you consider to be her main argument. When writing your own original argument, you would then use your reading / analysis to suit your own purpose.
Since this assignment develops your analytical reading skills, you do not need to make an original argument or do something with the text you are explicating. Rather, you should focus on the academic forms this genre demands and using those forms to make defendable analysis of the text.
During the semester, you should compose no fewer than six reading analyses, each worth up to 100 points. In order to successfully complete this assignment, you should earn no fewer than 300 points.
I won’t score or annotate these in great detail. I’ll basically mark them as done well or not. We’ll have office hours to discuss your work in detail.
You can find the due dates on the Course Schedule, and the rubric here.
How to compose a summary analysis:
For the first two analyses, you should take one section of a text we’ve read this semester: Fleming’s City of Rhetoric, Schindler’s, “Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment,” or Rice’s “Inquiry as Social Action.” In other words, you might choose “Part I” in Schindler or “Part 2” in Fleming.
Project Purpose and Goals: This exercise gives you practice analyzing complex academic essays. Accomplishing this task requires several moves. First, we must comprehend the text we are analyzing in order to locate its main argument, which will become our claim. Then we must support this claim with textual evidence. And, finally, put the claim in context by explaining the broader conversion in which the text arises. A reading analysis differs from a “plot summary” because we do not chronologically repeat the author’s text in our words; rather, we distill what we think the text’s main argument is for our own purposes.
This analysis should mostly be in your own words, but you might want to quote a few key words and phrases that you think particularly articulate the author’s main argument.
You may want read the text or particular sections of the text multiple times before beginning your analysis. I encourage you to first compose your analysis in your own words without looking at the text before returning to it to add some key words and phrases to bolster your claims or help your audience better understand your claim.
In your conclusion, you should discuss the “so what?” Why does this argument matter? How might it be useful to someone doing the kind of research you are doing in this class? What’s at stake?
In short, a reading analysis creates what Graff and Birkenstein call a “They Say.”
This project is designed as an opportunity to practice gathering, summarizing, synthesizing, and explaining information from various sources.
Instructional Readings for writing summaries:
See Graff, Ch 1-3.
Guidelines
*Use the literary present tense, i. e. “Thomas Jefferson argues . . .”
*Cite paraphrased details and quotations (see EasyWriter for in-text citation)
*Limit quotations (1-3, brief, and only if the original language is very important)
*Include the bibliographic information (see EasyWriter MLA guide for end citation)
*Consider multi-modes when composing in the blog post: spatial, visual, linguistic
Click here to see a copy of the evaluation rubric.
On Form:
While your reading analyses’ content certainly matters, you should also pay particular attention their form. Since you are composing using academic conventions, you should use one of the three openings Graff describes in TS/IS. You should also focus on “connecting the parts” (107), on using “signal verbs that fit the action (38), on “framing every quotation” (44), by using signal phrases (46) and commenting on the quote (47) to reveal the connection between claim and evidence.
Category: “readings” and “wrtg100f16”
Tags: “Author” and “readings” and others of your choosing. Think about why we use tags and why they are helpful and tag accordingly.
I strive to “decenter” my classes as much as possible. That is, I want you to do most of the work in class, while I act as facilitator. In other words, each of you will be responsible at some point during the semester in leading class discussion on one of the readings I’ve assigned. You will also do a lot of peer review of each other’s writing during this term. In short, a big part of this class requires your participation. In return, you’ll earn credit for your work.
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Sharon Crowley, in Ancient Rhetoric for Contemporary Students, informs us that “[i]n pre-modern times, most rhetors kept written collections of copied passages; these were called florilegia (flowers of reading) in medieval times, and commonplace books during the Renaissance and into the eighteenth century” (250; emphasis in original; qtd in Micciche). Furthering the point, in her “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar,” Laura Micciche explains that “Commonplace books encourage students to read and analyze texts as skillfully crafted documents that convey and perform different kinds of meanings—among them, aesthetic, rhetorical, and political” (724).
Your commonplace book entry should be posted and tagged appropriately by class time every Thursday, unless otherwise noted.
In that spirit, then, once a week, you should post a sentence or sentences from anywhere you may encounter it–a novel you’re reading or from a song you love or from a paper you are working on in another class or even from a syllabus. It could even be an image or video (depending on the specific week’s instructions. Ultimately, you should use this space to explore meaning production through syntax, grammar, and forms. You should explain why your exhibit works or why it doesn’t. In short, this assignment asks you to think closely about the relationship between form and content and the rhetoric that dialectic produces. You should have fun with this and feel free to experiment and take chances and play around.
See the FAQ: “Creating Posts & Adding Categories”
“Commonplace”
“WRTG101S2017”
Required (3 x 5 records):
An Archive of Images & Sound & Video & Signage showing cultural, historical, and political influences that have shaped your Built Environment.
Optional
Built Environment Descriptions
Detailed built environment descriptions (50 points each/apprx 500 words):
Compose more descriptions for more points:
Your site descriptions will be created as blog posts on your WordPress site, in the category “Built Environment Descriptions,” and tagged appropriately (“Exterior” and “[Site Name]”).
Submit links in the appropriate place in Gradecraft.
Here’s your rubric. For due dates, see Course Schedule.
How to compose a built environment description:
Project Purpose and Goals: This course explores how we can do close, analytical “reading”—which we can phrase alternately as the reading of visual rhetoric and the reading of the rhetoric of artifacts—of the environments and landscapes around us. In order to do this kind of close reading of the built environment, we need to train ourselves to see, and document or describe the details that provide the evidence for our analysis or interpretation of a given site.
This project is designed to help you develop your faculties of observation and multimodal description.
Instructional readings and models of built environment description:
Guidelines:
Choosing, observing, and documenting a site
You are required to spend at least one hour observing each of the three spaces you’re writing about for this project. If you choose a private site (i.e. a business) for the interior or exterior site description, you should get permission from the owner or manager to conduct your observation. You should explain the purpose of the project, and that it is a class project.
You will choose your site from the class google map of S Street.
In an ideal world, you would make many trips to your site. For this project, you are only required to make one trip to your site, spending one hour taking photos or video, and writing or recording notes.
During your visit, you are required to document the site in two ways:
Use these questions to guide your process of documenting the site:
Other Characteristics to Note
Characteristics to Note
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You will archive each of your digital records as posts on your WordPress site, in the appropriate category (“Images,” “Sounds,” “Artifacts & Signage”) tagging them appropriately (“Interior,” “Exterior,” or “Digital,” and “[Site Name]”).
You do not need to archive your notes, but if you do, you can earn points for good notes by creating a blog post of them in the category “Field Notes” and tagging it appropriately (“Interior,” “Exterior,” or “Digital,” and “[Site Name]”). You can also get extra credit for archiving extra digital records (10 per record) from your chosen locations. You submit extra credit posts using the form on your WordPress site. To receive credit, submissions must be properly tagged.
Composing your site description
Optional: After you have observed and documented each site, you will create a blog post on your WordPress site in which you compose a 250-500 word description of your site that answers the following questions:
Rather than answering these questions in order, your site description should be in the form of a narrative that provides this information to interested readers of the general public. The description should integrate your digital records associated with the site.
Annotated bibliographies can serve several purposes, such as explaining how your sources inform your work or making sure you fully understand your sources and how to properly cite them. Some professors may ask you to submit one with your final research project. Others may ask you to create one before you begin writing.
This assignment will blend both approaches. That is, you will submit bibliographic entries throughout the term, three (or four) at a time. In the end, you will have annotated ten sources and detailed how you have used each source in accordance with Bizup’s B. E. A. M. Each annotation should be brief, about 150-200 words.
You should also compile all your sources and reading notes in Zotero.
.
See the Course Schedule for due dates. Here’s the Rubric.
Purpose / Goals: The Annotated Bibliography gives you the opportunity to explain how your research informs your project, in this case, your final Built Environment Analysis. It also encourages you to demonstrate to us how you are using them. This assignment, furthermore, gives you further practice in the academic forms of summary analysis. Rather than thinking of sources as things to check off (must have 3 scholarly sources and 2 popular sources), this assignment asks you to do something with them in accordance with BEAM, which reminds us that no source is inherently good or bad.
Use MLA 8.
Background: “materials a writer relies on for general information or for factual evidence.”
Exhibit: “materials a writer analyzes or interprets.”
Argument: “materials whose claims a writer engages.”
Method: “materials from which a writer takes a governing concept or derives a manner of working.”
How: The annotations are approximately two paragraph summaries of each of the ten articles (i.e., per work). Use the Single Author Templates to do this. We will work on how to annotate in class, and I will provide more detailed examples.
I will assess these according to the rubric found here.
Example structure:
Curzan, Ann. “Teaching the Politics of Standard English.” Journal of English Linguistics 30.4 (2002): 339-52. Print.
Jones, Paul. “Why I read Books.” Journal of Reading and Writing 32.4 (2004): 339-52. Print.
Essay 1: Rhetorical Analysis of a Document (300-600 pts)
5 pages, not including Works Cited pages and multi-media.
Academic / Scholarly
This essay marks the first step in your semester-long project which culminates in your final essay. As our readings thus far have argued, all objects are rhetorical. In other words, everything makes an argument. For this assignment, you will be working with a text connected in some way to your Built Environment.
This essay asks you to find a document that circulates through your CLS in order to uncover its “network.” You may have to do some digging around to find a text to work with. That’s ok. The discovery process will serve you well as your project develops. While you’re not looking to “prove” anything, you will need to think about your audiences that might come across your research. What would be useful for them? What do you find most interesting or ripe for further explanation? (think along those lines). You should probably think about the classical examples of rhetorical situation, including “kairos” and Kantz‘s schema or CATPA (Context/Audience/Topic/Purpose/Audience. You could also discuss its form (paper? Blog? twitter?).
In other words, use a combination of rhetorical concepts, including but not limited to those listed above, to help your readers better understand your Built Environment.
To Consider:
When choosing a document for analysis, make sure you choose one that seems important to your CLS, that offers enough to analyze for five pages. Consider documents such as mission statements, open letters, websites, and advertising campaigns.
Strive for an argument more sophisticated than simply: “it’s rhetorical.” Instead, choose what aspects of the document to analyze that help you to make an overall claim. Your thesis-driven, central argument should say something about how the document functions. For example, you might argue that the rhetor really leans on X device because she wants to achieve Y from Z audience in particular. Or, the rhetorical situation limited the options of rhetor, and she fails for Y reasons. Or, X organization arranges their About Us page on their website to convey Y ethos because they hope to achieve Z.
Remember, this is about function — how, you should ask yourself, does this rhetor attempt to achieve something?
On Form:
You should present this information in the best way to serve your various audience’s needs. What’s the conversation you want to have? You should include images and video. If you’d like to incorporate sound, please do so, but no one is required to use sound in this project. What might matter to the public? Ask yourself: what do I need to address if I want to argue X? Work backwards as we practiced in class.
Using Jenny Rice’s “Keep Austin Weird” example, this project asks you to “map” with a multi-media tool one commonplace within your CLS. You will practice research as a visibly networked activity, analyze, and use digital tools to represent the movement of your commonplace across a minimum of four separate rhetors and adaptations, and in so doing examine its significance. The point is to observe rhetors’ agile uses of rhetorical resources and system-level dynamics in order to inform your own rhetorical production. Your map should be able to stand on its own as a text that includes a claim (what we’ll call a “spirit thesis”) and plenty of examples of adaptations of the one commonplace. Furthermore, you will write a three page analysis of rhetors’ choices and, as you see them, the effects of their efforts.
See Course Schedule.
To Consider:
This project asks of you a different kind of research than what you’re likely accustomed to. You can’t choose a commonplace first and then pursue its iterations. Instead, you must immerse yourself even further in your CLS than you already have — and pursue more open and associative kinds of research. Though very different from typical academic research methods, what we’re doing is closer to how you come to coordinate with new spaces of discourses–this is how you come to be a better writer in other, later environments (bio class, your workplace, etc.): immersion and pattern recognition. Doing so prepares you for the later steps of pattern imitation and pattern adaptation.
On Form:
How should you choose a form for your map? And what are your options? Though by no means the only approaches available to you, the most common approaches students take include a geo-spatial map, a narrative map, or a timeline. Each of these suggests a different digital format you can choose. For example, if you pursue a geo-spatial map, you might go with a custom Google Map or Prezi. If you decide your commonplace is best expressed in story form, you might choose to make a short documentary in iMovie; if a timeline, then perhaps Piktochart.
The most important question about the form of this project you can ask yourself, though, is which of these approaches can best allow me to convey the dynamics of commonplace adaptation and circulation in my CLS? One way to realize your account of these dynamics is to grid your findings, like this my example from Rice’s “Keep Austin Weird” findings:
| Topos:“Keep Austin Weird” | |||||
| Rhetor | Local business owners | Austin city officials | UT-Austin Lib Arts College fac and admin | Cingular Wireless | Local graffiti artists |
| Purpose | keep business in face of big-box incursion | Generate excitement around urban planning entertainment initiatives | Maintain and create support for college, build community within college | Sell product through identifying with local residents | Make fun of enthusiasm and popularity of topos |
| Audience | Local shoppers | Developers and voters | Students, current and prospective | Local shoppers | Street traffic and pedestrians |
| Genre | bumper stickers | Development proposal | T-shirts | Billboard | Painting and stickers |
| Adaptation | Keep Austin Weird | …in order to keep Austin unique and weird… | Keep Austin Liberal Arts | Keepin’ Austin Weird | Keep Austin Normal. Conform. |
It can help to look at a similarly simplified representative of your research for you to get a handle on how you want to characterize all this action. From there, it’s time to choose the digital format that allows you to best write these dynamics for others to see.
I know this project can sound a little mystifying at first, but I have a bunch of examples to show you of prior students’ work — and take a look ahead on the calendar to see all the lab time we have for this project. We’ll do this together.
You will, from start to finish (including all revisions), compose every assignment in a google doc, which you will share with me. To be considered complete, the assignment will use the following naming convention: [LastnameGivenNameInitial_AssignmentName]. For example, I would title my first Reading Analysis thusly: HoskinsH_RA1
You will also copy & paste the text to your WordPress Site, tagging and categorizing it according to the assignment directions.
You will also submit a link to your Web post in the appropriate place in Gradecraft.
In the interest of fairness to all students and to me (I can’t spend hours looking for your files), I will not assess any assignment not submitted according to the assignment’s specifications.
Required Texts:
David Fleming, City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America
Graff and Birkenstein, They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing
Various essays we can get from the library in .pdf form.
American University, EasyWriter
A Computer (you can borrow one from the library at anytime).
You American University GDrive.
Slack / Zotero / Hypothes.is / Gradecraft
Helpful Texts:
Ruben Castaneda, S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C.
College Writing courses offer a core set of skills and experiences, emphasizing both continual practice and increasing complexity of reading and writing assignments. All College Writing students should achieve the following objectives, which arise out of programmatic goals and evaluative criteria:
American University takes academic dishonesty very seriously; as such, all College Writing Program faculty members are required to report cases to the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Please read the AU’s Academic Integrity Code closely, and be sure to ask your professor if you have any questions. The code is available online here.
In writing papers, you must properly cite all sources (1) directly quoted, (2) paraphrased, or (3) consulted in any fashion. Sources include all printed material, any ideas or words you gather from interview or survey subjects, and any ideas or words you acquire from the Internet. Proper citation for this class means using MLA style.
Please note that it is considered plagiarism to submit informal assignments such as drafts and response papers without properly citing sources and acknowledging intellectual debts. And you may not submit one paper for assignments in two different classes without formal permission from both instructors.
The Dean’s standard policy for responding to academic dishonesty is failure of the course.
The information provided in this syllabus section is meant only to provide an overview; much more information about each major course assignment will be provided and also discussed in class.
The College Writing Program has a policy by which more than three unexcused absences may lead to failure of this course. Excused absences include but are not limited to major religious holidays, a medical reason, athletic participation on an AU team, off-campus activities that are required and related to another class, or a family emergency.
Often time we do not feel well. We then have to make decisions based on myriad factors. All decisions necessarily have consequences. We all must weigh those factors if we have a choice in missing class (or work), including thinking about those who may be relying on us (peers or family). We recommend saving those three absences for when you really need them. You needn’t explain non-excused absences. They’re yours to decide what to do with. However, remember more than three unexcused absences may lead to failure of this course.
For most absences, being a good colleague requires us to lesson the burden on others as much as possible. Therefore, you should check the class notes or have a someone take notes for you. Make a deal with someone in class (or work). Help each other out. Of course, you may always stop by office hours.
Your professors will appreciate it if you let them know in advance if at all possible when you will miss a class.