One page down, like 80 more to go...
Seriously, I'm finding that the hardest thing is limiting the things I'm interested in to one single question. Maybe I can arrange something more experimental then that, but most proposal guides I've seen really recommend the single-question thing.
I'm thinking about things like "blogging as practice of online reputation management." I'm also thinking that I'm out of my mind.
UNM "Visual Rhetoric Resources" lists resources for discussion of Visual Rhetoric.
I do a lot of explaining why VisRhet is so darned important and growing more important all the time, especially for professional writers.
Very few writing positions are just writing positions. At some point, most writers have to integrate their writing into a larger work which includes graphics or charts or must somehow fit into the overall look of something else. For magazine writers, they just have to turn in raw text, but how that text looks to an editor says something about the author. Is it saying the write things? Visual Rhetoric gives you the tools to figure that out.
Writing the Master's thesis proposal is important. Real important. Given how important it is, you'd think that there'd be plenty of information out there about how to go about it. There isn't.
I've begun the proposal-writing process in earnest, in anticipation of Thesis Boot Camp in January. UMass Dartmouth has a thorough treatment of the thesis proposal that is really helping me focus on what needs to be done.
"Writing at the Master's Level" talks a lot more about content, and about the audience for a thesis.
Dr. Kendra Gaines's Graduate Writing Resource includes not only discussion of the whole process, but also a list. Lists rock!
Two exciting things going on.
One: I've finished all the coursework for the Master's degree. Now, all I need is the all-important paper.
Two: I'm going to be hunkered down in THESIS BOOT CAMP in January. Basically you get locked in the English Department during three whole days with just a computer and a thesis advisor for company. Should be fun...NOT.
At least it will be productive.
Woe!
My thesis advisor is temporarily unavailable due to health concerns, and I'm panicking a bit. I'm having a hard time getting my thesis proposal in order, and I'd promised myself that I'd have it by December.
How does one write a thesis proposal? I can't even find a whole lot of data on it. If you have an idea...let me know.
Argument can be viewed in dialectic, where one develops a hypothesis and then examines its antithesis in order to validate or invalidate the original hypothesis. This shadows the process of hypothesis development. How does one develop the hypothesis in the first place? Just pull one out of the air? And what if it's wrong? Abandon it and start over?
This "either/or" approach coincides with the "persuasion" and "conflict resolution" views of argument. You're persuaded, or not. You win or lose.
That is, of course, only a part of argument. Sometimes there is no head-to-head. Sometimes hypothesis evolve over the course of an investigation. Sometimes there is no conflict. Sometimes the purpose of an argument is to generate truth, which will then resonate with an audience and be persuasive, but persuasion is the by-product and not the goal.
Crosswhite's chapter "Argument as Inquiry" examines argument as an epistemelogical device. He positions argument as the mechanism that discourse communities use to create and reinforce knowledge creation.
He points out that traditional view of argument breaks down the process of argument into discovery (which includes everything leading up to the formulation of a hypothesis) and justification (everything afterwards). Argument as inquiry breaks down that distinction between pre and post-hypothesis. Discovery and justification inform each other, each turning the other upside down in a continuing process until "truth" develops.
When is it truth? Scientists using this method would say it is truth when it produces repeatable results. Others may say it is truth with the members of the discourse community says it is, when the argument finds resonance within the community. That is an imperfect answer, but we are imperfect beings.
Crosswhite claims that a physics professor teaches students particular hypothesis not to be persuasive, but to point out what types of arguments are persuasive within their discourse community. It also demonstrates to the students what kinds of arguments should be persuasive to themselves if they are to be successful scientists.
In a distributed inquiry, the discourse community as a group sets themselves upon this discovery/justification wheel and informally rolls with it. Claims, evidence, refutation, hypothesis revision or reversal, all together, each community member putting their knowledge into the pool, and investigating everything else they see in the pool. This process happens all the time, but is seldom codified.
Stuart-Hall-o-rama is a quick-and-dirty guide to the world of media and cultural theory. And they use the word 'panopticon'. Apparently before he thought the media was the message, Marshall McLuhan thought the media was the devil.
Tasty!
There are a whole host of reasons, some are mine, some are from insightful teachers using blogs in the classroom right now.
'Why Weblogs?' on Kairosnews explains why one teacher sought to use blogs in the classroom.
I appreciate his appreciation for public writing and his understanding that blogs may be one way to get students excited about writing, perhaps to the point where they write more outside of the classroom.
Unlike other public writing forms, blogs are levelling in terms of relationship between teacher and student, providing another prompt to encourage writing.