Class Notes from Wednesday, Jan. 7

Especially for those who have just signed up for this course, here is a summary of yesterday's class (Wednesday, Jan. 7).

Writing Technologies

The technologies available to us affect how we speak and write, and our attitudes toward speech and writing affect the technologies we embrace. I began class by asking students to think of the five people they speak to on the phone most often, and then asking them who could recite those people's phone numbers off the top of their head. A small percentage of students could do so, and this is understandable, since cell phones store the numbers for us.

This exercise was intended to draw our atttention to memory (and how we use writing and technology to avoid memorizing things nowadays), because memory shaped early Western attitudes about the importance of writing. For instance, Socrates, the 5th-century B.C. philosopher, disliked writing because he felt it would destroy one's memory, and thus make you a poor speaker. He felt if one wrote something down, you wouldn't have to remember it, and then when you were called upon to give a speech in public, you would have nothing in your memory from which to draw on to speak about. Socrates' bias against writing is understandable in the context of Greek culture, which placed heavy emphasis on the ability to speak eloquently and persuasively, but attributed much less importance to writing. Each era has its own definition of what it means to be a literate citizen. In 16th-century Europe, for instance, being literate often meant simply that you knew how to read, for readings texts like the Bible was considered necessary to being a good person. Nowadays, because computers and databases store so much information for us, we do not need to remember much, and being a literate person requires that one has the ability to navigate these databases, searching for and evaluating sources efficiently.

The reason we have writings by Socrates is that his words were written down by his student Plato, who was not fond of rhetoric. Plato associated rhetoric with the sophists, a group of traveling teachers whom he viewed as willing to teach people to win arguments by unethical means. Aristotle, Plato's student, saw a place for rhetoric in one's ethical life. Aristotle was very scientific in his apporach to the world, and his many treatises classify and categorize many things (everything from cloud types to parts of speech). His study of persuasion, called Rhetoric ( or sometimes On Rhetoric, or Art of Rhetoric), classifies the many ways that peoepl organize their arguments, and the types of appeals and evidence they use to persuade people. He identified several koinos topos, or "common places," which are common forms of argument and proof.

There are three definitions of "commonplace" that are important to our work in this class.

1. According to Aristotle, topoi are the "places" from which one begins an argument. The common topics (or "common places") are a list of typical ways one goes about writing an essay or speech. Two topoi which students are often asked to use are definition and division. So ,when a teacher asks you to write an essay in which you define a term like "freedom" or "love," or when you are asked to classify the many types of something (i.e. division), you are using some of the common places Aristotle identified.
2. The "commonplace tradition" is shorthand for the ways in which people across time have used texts as a supplemental memory. In other words, people have kept things like diaries and journals as a way to remember things, and to help them make use of ideas they have, or things they have seen. Even an artist's sketchbook is a type of commonplace text. One main goal of these texts, especialy in the time before computers, was to store information that could be used at a later time. In this class, we will be keeping blogs, which is a type of commoonplace text that allows you to collect and return to your own writing and links to other people's writing.
3. A "common place" can also be a piece of shared culture, or a shared perspective that is used in an argument as evidence that you believe your listeners will recognize or believe in. The example I gave in class is that it is a common place in arguments ovr interpreting the U.S. Constitution that you are trying is interpret the Constitution in "the way the founding fathers intended it to be read."

The class then set up blogs on blogger.com (instructions are available on WebCT under "Course Documents"). These blogs willserve as our own common place books--a place to manage all of the text we will encounter. Students will post their journal entries there, as well as drafts of projects for peer review.