My friend hates the Gorgias

The next item on my reading list is Plato’s dialogue The Gorgias. The first time I read this was in college, working on my thesis. I read it again and again. I think this time might be my fifth or sixth time through it. I like it. I think it’s funny. But my friend hates it.

It makes him angry. He hates the way Socrates makes mistakes that Gorgias doesn’t pick up. And of course, he couldn’t; the dialogue was written by Plato, who makes it a point to make Socrates always look good (though there is some debate about whether or not he does). But this bothers my friend.

It bothers him when Socrates puts words in Gorgias’ mouth. Like when he says “since you call any craft whatever that’s concerned with speeches oratory” (450b). Gorgias never said that. And in fact, that’s a much easier claim to refute than the one Gorgias was actually making. We call this a Straw Man Fallacy. And it doesn’t stop there.

Gorgias is such a silly guy

Continuing on with the reading, I’m moving on to Gorgias and Encomium of Helen. From what I understand, this is a speech that he gave as a demonstration of his amazing rhetorical prowess. It was a show, meant to sell his services. The theory was that if he could convince people that Helen should be praised rather than looked down upon, then he could convince anyone of anything. For modern context, I suppose the closest we could think of would be convincing a congregation of Jews that Hitler really wasn’t a bad guy, and that while he did bad things, it wasn’t his fault.

So that’s what Gorgias does for Helen. He has four basic tacts for this: “For either by will of Fate and decision of the gods and vote of Necessity did she do what she did, or by force reduced or by words seduced or by love possessed” (6). Just from this, we can see the strength of his arguments.

The summer begins with Isocrates

Often times, lofty ideas for what will be done over the summer will surface and be forgotten. Last year, I told myself I was going to take a week off and then get back to work; I’d read fifty pages a day, trying to get a better grip on everything and have a leg up for starting this program. But one week became two, and then I was preparing to move, then getting used to a new area, and slowly but surely, the entire summer passed by without me getting much of anything done.

I can’t let that continue to happen. Next summer, I will have to get ready for my exams, which will occur the following fall. So I’ll have to work, and hard, over the course of the summer. And I suppose I have a choice. I could take this summer as one last summer off, and have to really kick myself in the ass next year. Or I could try to actually get a leg up.

I had an idea: take one week off, then start going through the reading lists for the exams. Do it with other people, so we can motivate each other. Well, one week did become two, but now I’ve started at least. And I started with Isocrates and Against the Sophists.

Retrospective: Everything I needed to know about Graduate School, I learned at a conference

I’m coming towards the end of my first year in a PhD program. That’s almost entirely accurate. I’ve been in another program that would have eventually resulted in a PhD in philosophy, but since I left with a Master’s degree, it doesn’t count. But now I’m 15 hours into a PhD in rhetoric and scientific and technical communication, with just two papers to write for the remainder of the semester, and then I have a summer to recover/get ahead on my exam readings.

So thinking about that, I figured it would be helpful to go back through the year and think about what I’ve learned. Maybe it’ll be helpful for those not yet in a PhD program, maybe it’ll just be helpful for me a few years down the line when I look back to how naive I was.

Planning Technical Writing

This summer, I will be teaching technical and professional writing. I teach this course differently than most, and I think my method works pretty well. Some people involve the students directly with real companies, which I appreciate. But my method involves on the one hand much less direct involvement but on the other much more flexibility.

What I do is give the students a simulation of a company, give them problems to solve, and teach them to communicate while solving these problems. Once they have a grip on that, they write something that I am confident all of them going into the business field will eventually have to write: a business plan.

This semester, I’m making some minor changes.

Narrowing the field, planning the courses

Thus far, when I have worked on developing classes, I have been doing so with four classes in mind: Rhetoric of Evil, Rhetoric of Science Fiction, Future Technology Pedagogy, and Systems and Rules. I’ve come up with basic reading lists (though I have to add Foucault and de Certeau to the Systems/rules class), goals, and so on. But I realized that I need to put some of these ideas on the back burner for a while.

Planning: Technical and Professional Writing

I realized recently that I need to plan out a class for the summer. I’m teaching Technical and Professional writing, which I taught last fall. But I can’t run the course exactly the same; now I have two and a half hour meetings twice a week.

And besides, I learned a lot about how to do it last semester, and I want to improve.

So I’ll start with the simple things that I have, the goals and basic structure. The goals of the class, as I see them, are to teach students how to communicate in a professional setting, and to prepare them for the business world as far as communication is concerned. What does that mean?

Getting ready for the C’s, planning classes

Tomorrow at a god awful hour of the morning, I board a plane that, through a series of other destinations, will eventually get me to San Francisco. At least, that’s the plan-there’s a chance the snow will decide otherwise. But most likely, I’m off to the C’s.

This is not my first conference, but it is one of the scariest. It’s without a doubt the biggest conference I’ve ever been to. So I’ve done more preparation for this than I have for any other conference. I may even have a power point presentation (though I am limiting myself to 7 slides, including a title screen).

In the meantime, though, I wanted to get back to my ‘class planning’ project.

Last time around, I came up with course goals. The next step is reading lists.

Technical communicator: author and extreme usability

Though not yet finished my reading for this week, I wanted to blog about two of the articles I am reading. The first is by Jennifer Daryl Slack, David James Miller, and Jeffrey Doak. It’s called “Technical Communicator as Author: Meaning, Power, Authority.” The second is “Extreme Usability and Technical Communication” by Bradley Dilger. Both are within Critical Power Tools edited by J. Black Scott, Bernadette Longo, and Katherine V. Wills.

So, first Slack Miller and Doak.

Critical Power Tools, part one

Today’s post is about the foreword, introduction, and three chapters of Critical Power Tools by J. Blake Scott, Bernadette Longo, and Katherine V. Wills. The reason this is part one is that I will be coming back to the rest of the book in a few weeks.

Part of my interest in this work is that I’m seeking an understanding of “Scientific and Technical Communication.” I’m a Rhetoric person, which grew out of my Philosophy background. I’m okay with sticking with Rhetoric, but I want to understand STC as well. Which is why I was very pleased to read that “technical communication is like Foucauldian power/knowledge system in that it relies on the invisibility of the relationships by which it includes and excludes, by which it orders, measures, and discipline” (x).