BULL%*#@!!!

Hi! First week of school down.... hope everyone had a great weekend!

" As scholars of rhetoric and writing, the most we can hope for is to avoid making the problem of academic bullshit larger than it is." - Eubanks and Schaeffer

I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on this one... maybe it was my complete inability to understand this article, but I felt that, if anything, it only made my understanding of

" academic bullshit" even more cloudy. I felt like trying to explain and define something as broad, and as widely used as bullshit, just made it more confusing. Also, for an article that included a whole section on elevated diction and its role in bullshit, I felt like the vocabulary was a bit rough...egregious, apotheosis, opprobrium? Call me stupid, but I was confused. I felt like the bullshitty nature of the article itself detracted from the argument it was presenting. I feel like there are some things that are undefinable and too difficult to explain. Yes, there are a lot of bullshitters out there- who hasn't bullshitted on a paper or in class discussion? It is a necessary and expected element of daily life- why try to define something in such academic and confusing terms, when in reality it is a very simply and automatic part of our behavior. Who is really every 100 percent genuine all the time? You have to adopt to your audience... personally, I would love to write a whole paper in internet/text talk, but I would get a terrible grade, so I guess that everything i've ever turned in is complete bullshit.

I was very confused when I finished reading this article, and this made me think back to the previous weeks reading on rhetoric... I didn't think this article was the greatest example of rhetoric- I think it focused too much on the subject and not enough of the audience- I couldn't really follow the article at all. It brought it too many different topics in an unorganized manner. There was the defining of bullshit and its role in academic writing, which I thought was interesting, but then they also brought in the salesman idea, gender roles, and something about a fish? I just felt like this article was everywhere and nowhere at the same time... maybe i just failed miserably at reading it...maybe it made a lot of sense to you guys, but I felt it lacked straightforwardness and sincerity for an article whose purpose was to explain bullshit.

The Rhetorical Stance: Hard to Write, Easy to Say

Hey everyone! Hope you're all having a fantastic first week back!

So, while I was reading The Rhetorical Stance by good ol' Mr. Booth, I started thinking about his commentary on the difficult task of simultaneously keeping both your audience and subject matter in mind. Striking the delicate balance between what you're trying to say, and to whom you are saying it seems to be quite a difficult rhetorical task when it comes to writing. Booth goes on and on about it, giving various examples of his experiences of rhetorical failure... but, I also started to realize that though it might be a difficult thing to do when it comes to writing, we use the same rhetorical tools every day when it comes to speaking, and we do it almost effortlessly. For example, you wouldn't typically go up to the average adult cursing up a storm and going on about how hungover you are from the rager you had the night before. In monitoring your speech in front of your mother or your teacher, you are keeping in mind the relationship between speaker and audience. Similarly, you would not say, go up to your group of friends who are discussing weekend plans and start going on about the trials of childbirth and house keeping... that would be both weird, uncomfortable, and awkward. The author also talks about undervaluing the subject and over valuing pure effect. So, again, we seem to do this naturally without even thinking. Say for example, you were leading a conference dedicated to explaining the history of tortillas- you wouldn't start going on and on about the latest celebrity gossip just because you know it would get a rise out of the audience. Just because I love to hear about Brangelina doesn't mean that the Tortilla Symposium is the best place to indulge in my love for celebrity news...It just seems like common sense; this sort of filtering behavior has become second nature in our social day to day interactions, so why does it seem to be so hard to do in writing? Some food for thought! Speaking of food, I need some breakfast, so you all have a lovely day!!!