Intros. (15 min)
Name
Major and/or interests
Does Pittsburgh have good pizza? If so, where? Also, if so, you are more than welcome to be snobby about really good Pittsburgh food that isn’t that great elsewhere.
What is writing publicly and what is writing privately? (10-15 min)
How do you write privately? Writing something about pizza only for you. Now write something to a close friend or relative about pizza. Now to the person next to you about pizza. Now to all of Pittsburgh (will go on a billboard and in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) about pizza. What is the difference? In this class, these are important considerations, but what is also important is the “public interest”.
Public Writing (30-45 min)
Questions to consider: Writing with the world to see it is an important constraint to consider when writing. But what does that even mean anyway? How does one write to the or a “public”? What “publics” are out there to write to? How do you write to them? Is there such a thing as a “general” audience? What does it mean to write to such an audience? Can there be more specialized audiences? What’s that look like? Why do these documents look different?
Activity: Read and skim through each of the below documents (7 in total, all linked below). Read these documents comparatively.
To begin, you’ll have to note characteristics of design (use of images? White space? Color?), of sentence style (longer sentences? Shorter ones? Vocabulary more or less technical?), digital vs print (is this something that can only be read online? Both? Where would it be better?), does the reader need any special knowledge of any kind (e.g., a degree of quantitative literacy, knowledge of more or less advanced science). Another thing to do: if you had to name each document as a “type” of a document, what might you call it? Why?
Next, compare your notes. What is similar across these documents? What is different? Why? Hard to answer such a question definitively, but quantity over quality here: what are some reasons that these choices were made in one document vs another? What do you think?
“General” Public and Public(s) (10-15 min)
Which document would you say was written for a “general” public? Which one was maybe some version of a more specific audience? What is a general public? How do you write for them? Which document is the best example of that? Why?
Break (15 min)
Where to start? (5-15 min)
What motivates you? What interests you? Writing is a way to make knowledge, to see your thinking in front of you and reflect on it. The first assignment (see syllabus) is a way to get at these questions.
Syllabus (20 min)
Let’s do that first day thang and go over the syllabus.
Logistics and Public Interest Narrative (10-15 min)
Register for web site
Sign up for blog posts
While doing the above, work on your first assignment.
Next week (5-15 min)
Let’s go over next week real quick:
Submit your Public Interest Narrative to BB by 4pm on 9/6.
Read Booth (1963). There is no blog post for this reading, but I want you to think about the following questions to get ready for a discussion of public writing and ideology next week:
-Consider what a “rhetorical balance” means (see page 145 where he uses this phrase over and over). From his perspective, how might he define rhetoric, especially when considering the three aspects of his rhetorical stance?
-Booth is primarily talking about writing in freshman composition and not public writing in the wider world (though he certainly is drawing connections between both). Think back to your own experiences in Seminar in Composition: how might public writing be similar to and/or different from the kind of writing Booth is drawing from? Look to the anecdotes and examples and compare them with some of the things we looked at on 8/30.
-Which of the three “perversions” of the rhetorical stance might be most worrisome when writing for the public? Why?
PS, Booth is writing from an English department in the 1960s, so sorry about sentences like this one: “What makes the rhetoric of [John] Milton and [Edmund] Burke and Churchill great is that each presents us with the spectacle of a man passionately involved in thinking an important question through, in the company of an audience” (p. 145). Men, dead, white, “man,” etc.