Deb Streusand's blog

Practicing Rhetorical Analysis with Music Videos

Deb Streusand — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 23:24:52 +0000

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Deb Streusand

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Screenshot by Deb Streusand from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ORhEE9VVg, Taylor Swift's video for "Blank Space"

In my Rhetoric of Performance class, we begin each class day by watching and discussing a brief performance a student has brought in to share with the class. Since these performances are supposed to be 3-5 minutes, students frequently bring in music videos. With each performance, we do an informal rhetorical analysis.

First I ask the students what they noticed about the performance while they were watching. They frequently make note of things like symbolism and imagery – in other words, they tend to close read the videos. The goal of my line of questioning after that, however, is to bring them away from that tendency and into the world of rhetorical analysis.

I ask the students what they think the argument of the performance is. The argument of a performance is not like the argument of a written piece. With a good piece of persuasive writing, as a rule, everyone should come away from it with the same general idea of what the argument was. With a performance, it’s not a bad thing if we come away with some disagreement as to what the argument might be. The students often debate what the argument is, or bring in a multiplicity of answers, but they never have trouble finding some argument in the piece, even though music videos aren’t necessarily designed to make and defend a claim. One of the principles I put forth in teaching this class is that every performance has an argument. I believe this is true, but making the claim makes me a little nervous, because defending it is inevitably inductive – I will never conclusively prove that every single performance has an argument. However, each class day, my students add credence to my gradual inductive proof of this claim, because they have never failed to find an argument in any performance we’ve watched.

After we’ve wrangled over the argument for a while, we start talking rhetorical appeals. They don’t know that’s what we’re doing yet, though. We haven’t actually entered the rhetorical analysis unit. But we’ve been doing this all semester, from the second class day. By the time they get to rhetorical analysis, they’re already going to be pros at doing it – all that will be new to them is the terminology.

Every day, I ask them: what kind of persona does the performer present in making this argument? What is the intended audience, and how are they supposed to feel? How is the argument supported? What are the current social conversations to which this argument is contributing? Ethos, pathos, logos, kairos – all in a 4 minute video. My students practice rhetorical analysis 10-15 minutes per class day, all semester long. And because music videos are fun to watch and take apart, they have a great time while they’re doing it.

We don’t always watch music videos. Some students bring in short dance pieces, or political rants, or slam poetry. I mention music videos because they would be easy to incorporate into a non-performance rhetoric class as a warmup for rhetorical analysis. To make it simpler, the professor might choose them instead of having students bring them in, to make sure there’s lots to talk about – I always start the semester with Beyoncé’s video for “Flawless,” which has never failed to spark dialogue. The main point is to get the students used to doing rhetorical analysis while talking about something that’s fun.

YouTube Comments as Performed Pastiche

Deb Streusand — Wed, 05 Nov 2014 22:17:28 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

Image Credit:

Screenshot by Deb Streusand

For my course on the Rhetoric of Performance, my students are putting together a brief performance of their own. The idea is for them to learn how performance makes arguments by choosing an argument and putting together a performance to make that argument. Inspired by the Ice Bucket Challenge and John Berger’s work on the visual rhetoric of advertising, they’ve chosen to argue that people participate in viral trends because they want other people to envy them. The students decided that they wanted their performance to embody such viral trends as the Harlem Shake and the cups song; in performing these, they would take on the role of the people who wanted others to envy them. From a performance perspective, they chose to do something highly entertaining, but from a rhetorical perspective, there was something missing. How would we position those performances as undertaken for the purpose of provoking envy?

As teacher-cum-director, I suggested that we have part of the class performing while the rest of the class commented on the performance, and then rotate through different groups of performers and commentators. That way, we could get a viewer’s perspective on each performance. Commenting during the performance would also allow us to show the performers’ reaction to envy.

The students had been watching YouTube videos of the trends they were investigating, which meant that I had spent a lot of time looking at YouTube comments over my students’ shoulders as I supervised their work. I suggested that they start collecting some of these comments and proposed that we make a pastiche. Faced with this unknown word at 4:00 pm, several of them at once asked me, “is that a kind of pastry?” Though they were disappointed to discover that it was not, they dove right into the research to make one. They examined the YouTube comments on these videos in detail and selected the ones that they thought demonstrated envy. Googling “envy quotes” and “envy poems,” they added passages associated with envy to their array of comments. They also wrote their own YouTube-style comments to fill in the blanks when they felt that the pastiche material didn’t express what they needed.

Due to having a lot of other things to cover, we’ve only been rehearsing about 15-20 minutes a class period, so we have yet to stage the performances and use the comments we’ve written up. It’ll be interesting to see how the comments sound aloud, and whether there’s something of the effect described by this XKCD comic. As we rehearse, though, I think we’ll be able to filter and shape our pastiche to make the envy argument clear. (In fact, it’ll be probably be more transparent than the argument of most performances, since many performances do not start out with the idea of making an argument per se. One of my contentions in teaching this course has been that every performance has an argument, but they’re certainly easier to spot in some than in others.) It’s my hope that performing the comment pastiche will help my students understand how timing, intonation, and other performative elements contribute to shaping the meaning of the written word.

Student Comments on Technological Lesson Plans

Deb Streusand — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 19:28:44 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

Image Credit:

Screenshot by Deb Streusand

In the middle of this semester, I decided to do a survey of my students, to see what they had found helpful so far and what I could do to help them get what they wanted out of the rest of the semester. One of the things I discovered from this survey was that the lessons I found most interesting were not necessarily those that the students found most helpful. Two of my three favorite lessons to teach, and two of those that most depend on technology, attracted comments that questioned their utility. The “logos of logos” activity did not get comments, but the playlist pathos assignment I posted as a lesson plan and the Facebook ethos assignment I borrowed from another professor both featured in negative responses.

I was very excited about the Facebook assignment, because I felt it used technology in an interesting way, allowing the students to apply something they use on a daily basis to the learning of rhetoric. But the students questioned how the assignment, which required them to explore their Facebook to show what kind of ethos they projected on the site, corresponded to the kind of ethos they use in arguments for class. Facebook often only provided examples of situated ethos, because students could not find examples of themselves inventing ethos within the limited arguments they made on their Facebook walls. The students said that the assignment needed work, not that it should be removed, so I am now looking for a more effective way to make use of students’ Facebook pages in studying ethos.

Similarly, students wondered about the utility of my pathos playlist assignment. They enjoyed using the technology to make the playlists, but they weren’t sure that making playlists helped them learn how to use pathos in arguments, because they weren’t constructing pathos through the use of their own words. In the future, I will pair this technological assignment with a more traditional way of teaching pathos, so that the students can learn to use pathos in multiple ways – I believe that creating pathos through music is still rhetorically relevant for students who have multimedia work in their futures.

The surveys were humbling to read because they made me realize that the assignments that I was the most proud of creating or adapting, and the ones that took advantage of our meeting in a computer classroom, were not necessarily the ones that my students found most helpful. I consider myself, not the technology, responsible for this result. However, the surveys were a useful reminder that just because I work in a digital lab and find digital assignments exciting, it doesn’t mean that these assignments will always be the best, and it’s most important to pay attention to what the students are getting out of them.

technology

The Rhetorical Implications of a Lightning Bug: Making and Adapting Arguments in Visual Rhetoric

Deb Streusand — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 05:00:00 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

Image Credit:

Adapted by Deb Streusand from "Cookie" by Sonoftroll

As part of the rhetorical analysis unit in my Rhetoric and Writing class, I created a lesson that, because I like terrible puns, I called "The Logos of Logos." My goal was to introduce the students to the idea of visual rhetoric, with an emphasis on drawing out implied arguments from images. I've written this experience up as a blog rather than a lesson plan because I find what happened in the classroom far more interesting than my original lesson plan. I'll first lay out the progress of the original lesson plan, then describe how I adapted it on the fly due to having more time than I expected, and the intriguing conversation that followed.

I began by showing the students the Walmart smiley face logo:

walmart%20logo%20smiley%20face.jpg

Image credit: personal.psu.edu/tqs5262/blogs

I asked them to point out the premises and conclusion of the argument it makes, which they did ably: shopping at Walmart makes you happy, you want to be happy, therefore you should shop at Walmart.

Next, we looked at two video advertisements depicting the smiley logo in different guises.

The first advertisement added a construction helmet to the smiley, paired it with the slogan "working hard to save you money," and showed him using a saw to cut back the prices on Walmart signs:

WalMart - Smiley TV Commercial

Video of WalMart - Smiley TV Commercial

The students quickly identified the appeal to ethos the ad created by suggesting that Walmart works hard to save you money. They discussed how this appeal to ethos became one of the premises of a logical enthymeme when combined with an implied premise about the audience: Walmart saves you money, you want to save money, therefore you want to shop at Walmart. At this point, I was already wondering how I'd fill up the rest of the class period, because the students were picking up on the arguments much more quickly than I'd expected.

They were equally adept at analyzing the next video, which featured a leather-gloved, bow-tied smiley firing lasers at the pricing signs:

WalMart - Smiley TV Commercial

Video of WalMart - Smiley TV Commercial

I asked them: "what associations does our culture have with leather gloves and lasers?" "It's badass!" cried a student. Another pointed out that this was an appeal to pathos as well as to ethos: you want to be badass, so shop at Walmart.

This was 20 minutes into a 75-minute class, and I had only one more trick up my sleeve:

walmart-high-cost-of-low-price.jpg

Image credit: chicshadesofgreen.com

Not only did the students rapidly dissect the effects of pairing the slogan with the smiley face image, but they noted something I hadn't caught: the addition of slanted eyebrows to make the smiley face look more sinister. Already, they were better at analyzing visual rhetoric than I was. We were at the 30 minute mark. What to do?

Inspiration! Since they were so good at analyzing the arguments the logos made in their original and adapted versions, why not have them adapt a corporate logo themselves? I asked them to get on the computers, find a corporate logo of their own, and decide how they would adapt it to make a different argument. They had about 15 minutes to work and the remaining class time to go around and present their choices. Since I came up with this assignment on the spot, and I didn't know their level of Photoshop expertise, I didn't require them to make an actual image adapting the logo, but merely to decide and explain how they would adapt it. After each student described his or her adaptation of the logo, I would ask the class to deduce the argument that student was trying to make, and the student would confirm or correct the class's suggestions.

Lots of delightful images, both theoretical and actual, emerged from this assignment -- one of my favorites was an evil version of the Twitter bird, intended to imply that Twitter will ruin your reputation. The most interesting discussion, however, came out of a student's use of Photoshop to adapt the logo of a local cookie store by adding a bug. I've made my own version of this logo for a fictional cookie store:

Modified Cookie Logo.png

The student's original image added a fly, which the class easily identified as creating an argument that implied the store was dirty. One student asked, "what would happen if you put a butterfly by the logo instead?" This question launched an impassioned discussion about the rhetorical implications of different types of bugs. "A butterfly is beautiful! That would create a positive image for the store!" "But it's still weird to have a bug by cookie..." The general consensus was that the butterfly's connotation was positive, though with some lingering dissenters. Then a student, my usual gadfly, smiled mischieviously. "How about a lightning bug?" The students went wild with laughter and then with discussion. They never did agree on exactly what the lightning bug would mean, but they were as excited about rhetoric as they'd been all semester. I left the classroom happy, and I think they did too.

Rhetorical Figure of the Day: Introducing Classical Rhetorical Figures in the Modern Classroom

Deb Streusand — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 18:23:28 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

Image Credit:

StaffordGregoire. Original image is here.

As a PhD student new to UT, I came to my teaching at the Department of Rhetoric and Writing with a knowledge of rhetoric derived from my experience at Mary Baldwin College's Shakespeare and Performance program. Professor Ralph Alan Cohen taught MFA students about the classical rhetorical figures Shakespeare would have learned in grammar school. We studied their role in Shakespeare's text and explored how actors can make use of them in performance. I quickly discovered that this type of rhetoric was not on the curriculum for RHE 306, but I thought my students might benefit from some exposure to it all the same.

I decided to turn it into a sort of warm-up, the “rhetorical figure of the day,” before we launched into discussing the rhetoric of modern controversies. (This exercise would come right after my “morning question,” in which I asked the students something about themselves that was also related to RHE 306’s topic of consumer culture, like “what is your favorite possession?” or “what would you do with a million dollars?”)

I told my students upfront that the rhetorical figure of the day wasn’t something they were going to be tested on or that they needed to memorize. I would be teaching them these things because I thought it was important: I believed it would be valuable for them to recognize the use of these tools in a text or, even better, learn how to employ the figures themselves.

From my students’ perspective, this is what the rhetorical figure of the day looks like on the projector:

Anaphora Slide final.png

I uploaded each figure to the class website, so that the students could refer back to it whenever they wanted. At first, I would select one example from a famous speech and one from a literary text, so that the students could get an idea of the different contexts in which these figures appear. I wrote the definitions myself, but also consulted Richard Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms and Gideon O. Burton’s Silva Rhetoricae.

For the first two weeks, “rhetorical figure time” went like this:

-Student 1 reads Example 1

-Instructor reads the definition and explains it

-Student 2 reads Example 2

-Instructor attempts to explain what the rhetorical figure is used for and what it does.

Rhetoric is no exact science, however, and so I use “attempts” advisedly. I found it difficult to explain what I thought the rhetorical figures did and how they accomplished it, so I decided to ask the students what they thought instead. After the second student finished reading the above example from Richard III, I asked, “so, what effect do you think the anaphora has here?” I thought I might be faced with silence, but two students jumped in quickly. “It hammers it into your head when they repeat it like that,” said one. And then, oh joy of joys for my nerdy heart: “this is one of my favorites,” said another, “because you start to expect a kind of peak, when they get to the end of the repetition.”

Having the students discuss the effect of the rhetorical figure worked better, but I still felt I could do more to engage those who weren’t speaking up. Chatting with my fellow instructors, I noted the success they’d had getting students’ attention through the use of videos. I started looking around for videos and music that used rhetorical figures. On American Rhetoric, I found some examples from movies I knew my students would be familiar with:

Lion King Be Prepared 1080p HD

Video of Lion King Be Prepared 1080p HD

“My teeth and ambition are bared. Be prepared!”

--The Lion King's Scar shows off his zeugma (2:56)

Wizard of Oz

Video of Wizard of Oz

“You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe.”

--The Wizard of Oz is also a wizard at isocolon (3:42)

I showed my students clips from these movies in the place of Example 1, and then led a brief discussion as before. What I found was that when playing a bit from a movie, even a short clip, it’s almost impossible to study a single rhetorical figure in isolation. Scar uses three more rhetorical figures in the two lines surrounding the quote above, and the Wizard has a great bit of rhetoric coming up right after the moment I chose. I tried to pause the clip after the part I was interested in, but if I came in even a few seconds late with the pause button, there was already more rhetoric coming our way. I tried to use these accidents to convey to my students how much rhetoric surrounds us all the time.

Meanwhile, my “morning question” exercise was running out of steam, as I struggled to come up with new questions that both had to do with consumer culture and would allow my students to share something about themselves. So, I decided to change up the morning routine by having one student at a time bring in a favorite piece of rhetoric for each day. I started by giving them the St. Crispian’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, reading it to them and telling them what I liked about its rhetoric. I hit a snag with the next class because the student I thought had volunteered wasn’t prepared, but then it turned out that another student had gotten excited and had his all ready to go. He had printed out the “Wear Sunscreen” advice column by Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune for us, and he showed us a YouTube video of the song “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen),” a Baz Luhrmann remix of the column read aloud and the Rozalla song “Everybody’s Free (to Feel Good).” He didn’t use the exact language of the rhetorical figures, but he did talk about the juxtaposition between the serious and the comic in the text, and how the alternation between long, complex phrases and single verbs of advice heightened that contrast. The class discussed the effect of putting the music underneath the words of the text.

As I was arranging my next volunteer, a student who hadn’t spoken much suddenly cut in: “I think you said this in the first class, but…why this rhetoric stuff? I mean, I’m never going to use this, so why?” In a movie, I would have had a perfect, inspiring speech ready to go. In reality, I said something like this: “well, that’s a valid question, and I can see why you would think you wouldn’t use it. But these rhetorical figures really do help to persuade people when you’re making an argument, whether you’re trying to get funding for something that you care about, or asking your boss for a raise, any time you want to persuade someone. The reason the figures have such weird Greek names is because people have been using them to convince other people for more than two thousand years. So you may not see it right now, and as I said, it’s a very valid question, but you may end up using these, and if you do, you’ll have an advantage.” If I were writing the movie script for that moment, I might make my answer a bit less financially focused and a bit more idealistic, but at the same time, I think choosing those practical examples might have actually made an impact on my skeptical student. We’ll see when she brings in her favorite piece of rhetoric!

This coming week’s rhetorical figure media samples will come from hip-hop songs, thanks to my Mary Baldwin colleague Angelina LaBarre’s MLitt thesis, “Entering the Educational Cypher: Hip-Hop and Shakespeare in the Classroom.” Future weeks will feature standup comedy and advertising. I’m having great fun with the process of expanding my library of rhetorical figure examples, because I’m still finding new places where rhetoric is hiding. I can’t wait to see what my students bring in over the next few weeks.