Laura Thain's blog

Problems in the Descriptive Mode

Laura Thain — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:26:13 +0000

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Laura Thain

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Although teaching a descriptive unit is an essential foundation for good writing, many instructors find summary tedious to teach, and especially difficult to present to students in interesting, innovative ways. In my class, we learn how to adopt the descriptive mode as historiography, giving students a chance to both practice good summary and question the processes by which summary is produced and presented in a common rhetorical context. Nonetheless, students are usually anxious to move on to analysis as we wrap up the first unit.

Aside from just tending toward dreariness, unfortunately, at least in my experience, descriptive units also tend to have the highest instance of plagiarism, despite the fact that the skill instructors expect students to demonstrate—clear, cogent summary—is arguably the easiest rhetorical mode to grasp in lower-level rhetoric and writing classes. Certainly, most students will understand summary quickly, and many also tend to rely heavily on summary when analyzing or evaluating the merits of an argument. Why is it, then, that incidents of plagiarism are highest when the performative bar is lowest? Is there a correlation between the assignment difficulty and academic dishonesty? In other words, how much credence can we give to arguments that plagiarism is an act of desperation or the result of an overworked, overtaxed cohort of undergraduates?

I think we might find better answers by addressing lack of interest and lack of engagment. Bad information tracking often leads to students passing off something they’ve read as common knowledge, which is less of an attribute of a digital generation of students than it is of a digital generation of enforcers. Common knowledge has always been a tricky concept to define: The University of Texas’ academic dishonesty policy clearly states that “common knowledge” (things, of course, that require no citation) is a flexible category, and that what constitutes common knowledge

often depend[s] on the context, such as the academic discipline of a particular course or the writer's field of study orprofession. For example, what is considered common knowledge for an academic journal may not hold true for an undergraduate composition course.

But instructors with digital searching tools can now easily identify the source of uncited information through a simple Google search. Siphoning out “common” from “uncommon” knowledge before the Boolean search was nearly impossible, and so more often, marginal comments would read “source?” rather than “plagiarized.”

And what is “common knowledge” to students writing outside of their home discipline? Introductory rhetoric courses contain students that have benefitted least from common core curricula or standards of academic performance because they have experienced neither broad university-level writing training nor share specific disciplinary training. Classroom diversity in terms of socioeconomic, educational, and language background is a given in most classrooms (at least, in universities that cultivate a diverse student body), but diversity of disciplinary training is an attribute mostly of lower-level or general-curriculum courses. The instructor is faced with a dilemma when making choices about teaching foundational skills to classrooms with extremely mixed needs. The instructor often finds him or herself ethically obligated to teach to the lowest level of student skill, with the unfortunate potential side effect of losing the interest of other student contingents.

While summarizing might be a basic skill, avoiding plagiarism is certainly more nuanced. As Rebecca Moore Howard argues, the line between paraphrase and plagiarism is subjective. (Howard’s own syllabi argues that “patchwriting,” or “copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes” does not constitute plagiarism, but merely “poor writing.”) Common knowledge is also a subjective, context-dependent category. In other common plagiarism situations, such as the presentation of direct quotations as paraphrase with the appropriate in-page citation, the intent of the student is often unclear.

Many pedagogical resources on the internet suggest ways to present this nuance--acknowledging the nuances of plagiarism and engaging in meta-teaching, emphasizing building scholarly ethos, spending more classroom time on concrete examples of plagiarism, discussing the changing face of intellectual property in the digital age to clear up confusion about authorship, etc. But not many professors or instructors address the issues I’ve just highlighted above: that loss of interest while teaching critical skills can prevent some students who can easily understand the nuances of plagiarism from paying any attention to them. The assumption of knowledge can foreclose the possibility of understanding in this case.

I’d like to then posit that the most effective strategy for avoiding plagiarism is not an instructor’s presentation of knowledge but his or her insistence on engagement with that knowledge. Testing students on subtler forms of plagiarism for a nominal grade encourages engagement with the material that even the most eloquent academic honesty policy does not. This will do nothing to deter malicious plagiarism—buying papers, colluding on papers, or copy-and-pasting papers—but these instances of plagiarism are far less common. A simple, tested response to common issues of plagiarism, even one given at the beginning of each new unit, might do wonders in decreasing plagiarism incidents without forcing the instructor to assume a policing stance.

Why Teach Popular Culture?

Laura Thain — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 03:13:09 +0000

Author:

Laura Thain

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Wikimedia Commons

This semester, I have taken great pleasure in teaching The Rhetoric of Celebrity to a group of enthusiastic and talented students. In my office hours a few weeks ago, a student who came in to discuss a recent assignment with me began our conversation by asking if “all rhetoric teachers had to be so young.”

“Well,” I answered, “most of us are graduate students, so we don’t have our PhDs yet. We’re generally in our twenties and thirties.”

“So, what do you want to do, you know, professionally? Do you want to work for TMZ someday?” she asked. I smiled a little and explained that I was a doctoral student studying 18^th century intellectual history and the English novel. She looked perplexed. “Why are you teaching us about music and movie stars and stuff then? Were there stars back then? What does what you teach have to do with being a professor?”

It’s a provocative question. Many of us shy away from studying our “pet” interests in the mass media to make ourselves more marketable—out of fear of entering an oversaturated market of scholars of popular culture. I’ve also heard many of my colleagues voice concerns over ruining what they love by studying it: “I just want to read/listen to/view __________ and enjoy it without thinking about how I can interrogate it!” is a common reprise in graduate offices. But I don’t think we really mean this. In fact, on our Facebook walls, in our informal discussions, and in our lesson plans we examine and analyze the media objects we encounter constantly. We express excitement when we find a particularly glowing example of a rhetorical principle in the most recent broadcast of SNL or The Daily Show. We talk about the ethics of ironic distance in The Colbert Report and Lena Dunham’s Girls. We laugh at memes that mix Derrida with Honey Boo Boo; we eagerly await the season openers of Breaking Bad and Homeland. I even have a fairly well-rehearsed defense of Britney Spears in terms of Barthes’ Mythologies.

At the heart of the importance of cultural studies in general, and popular culture in particular, is the interrogation of the evaluative mode of rhetorical discourse. The controversy model upon which all of our introductory composition courses here in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing are based emphasize three main modes of discourse: the descriptive mode, the analytical mode, and the evaluative mode. These modes represent a cumulative skill set—that is, that one cannot analyze before one can describe, and one cannot evaluate before one can analyze. Within this model, evaluation usually takes place in terms of a position paper on a social issue. For instance, last years’ first year forum book encouraged RHE 306 students to argue for a particular position on school reform; this year, the first year forum topic is oriented toward digital democracy and Web 2.0.

This unit structure transfer neatly into classes that deal directly with public policy—the Rhetoric of Protest, the Rhetoric of Gentrification, or the Rhetoric of Disasters—because the evaluative unit of these course topics easily fits into an argument for policy change. But how do we teach evaluative rhetorics in less civic-minded classes? How do we teach students how to evaluate a music video, a documentary film, or a comedy routine?

Teaching popular culture can be a crucial tool in teaching students how to make the evaluative turn when examining implicit, rather than explicit, styles of argumentation. Because students are often already familiar with the content, they are able to draw on a vast array of cultural associations when formulating their own series of ethical or aesthetic criteria, which is a crucial precondition for adept rhetorical evaluation. It is what keeps students and scholars alike from falling back on response-type criticism alone and seeing larger systems of meaning in media objects. It is what elevates the rhetoric classroom from book club to site of social critique. I believe the most important objective of teaching the evaluative turn in rhetorical theory—as it is in the descriptive and analytical units, as well—is to emphasize the utterly essential concern of audience. In order to do this, we must teach students to think beyond their own personal responses and consider how different rhetorics appeal to others. This process always begins with students learning to recognize these processes within themselves, but they must move beyond this in order to understand the effects of rhetoric in society at large.

The flaw of “book-club” style reader-response is that it is utterly centered on the individual and encourages us to read complex implementations of standard cultural mythic structures for plot, and the actions of the characters within these cultural media objects as somehow changeable. This elicits responses from students such as “If Britney hadn’t driven around LA during the summer of 2007 looking for attention…” or “If Mookie hadn’t vandalized the pizza shop in the end of Do the Right Thing…” in the same way that a reader might muse on the fate of Heathcliff had he not left Wuthering Heights to find his fame and fortune. This sort of response to popular culture undermines the ability of readers to discern that the choices the characters before them make, whether real or fictional, are nonetheless mediated by cultural forces as a precondition for audiences to even understand that a choice was made. In other words, the action and the depiction of the action are the argument; we cannot separate them from each other. Learning to make the evaluative turn rhetorically in popular culture means understanding that we judge the acts of groups or individuals as they are mediated through implicit media arguments; that is, we must teach students to examine with scrutiny the carrier of the message as much as the message itself, because one cannot exist outside of the other. In this exercise, the use of digitally-equipped classrooms is an invaluable tool, because the discussion of the dissemination of cultural myths in media objects is not only technologically possible but environmentally fostered.

Teaching popular culture means teaching students how to read and understand the content and power of implicit arguments as mediated by mass culture. It means deferring knee-jerk evaluative judgments—ones without distinct sets of ethical criteria. It means recognizing and resisting assumptions about the distinctions between high and low culture, and understanding mass media as, at least in some sense, a reflection of, rather than the cause of, cultural attitudes and mores. Close rhetorical analysis of objects in popular culture deconstruct the myths of societal devolution and help us to understand ourselves in our own moment without perspective and without hindsight—all things that make us better readers, better viewers, and, perhaps ultimately, better citizens.