Professor Graban
12/12/10
This is a dedicated blog space for Professor Graban's ENG W350 Advanced Expository Writing class at Indiana University Bloomington, Fall 2010.
Question One (conflict and policy)
Briefly recount a specific disagreement or misunderstanding you have had with someone and analyze it on one of Kaufer’s “5 levels” (pp. 58-59). You’ll want to explain the conflict and then determine whether the source of the conflict was level 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. Please don’t just make something up—the point of this assignment is to reach into your own experience and try to account for it on Kaufer’s terms as accurately as you can. For this to make sense to your classmates, you will need to be clear and detailed with your explanation of what happened during the disagreement or conversation. Unpack any terms that carry assumptions, no matter how small they seem or no matter how much you are sure we would share them.
Question Two (analogies and conflict levels)
Mario Savio begins his speech with an analogy that “Sproul Hall is to student rights as Mississippi is to civil rights” circa 1964. Explain the relationship between this analogy and one of the following allusions: Brave New World (par. 1), Kafka (par. 2), the university as being “in the world but not of the world” (par. 11), or the “chrome-plated consumers’ paradise” (par. 14). How do the analogy and the allusion work together to support Savio's overall claim? How do they support the conflict levels that you think are at work in his speech (be sure to list those conflict levels as part of your response)?
Question Three (perspectives and ethical style)
Killingsworth and Steffens speculate that Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) could encourage a "narrative paradigm," in spite of the "rationalist" paradigm that they seem to promote (177). Test this assumption by applying it to another piece of public discourse. Locate a very brief article in one of the online journals of opinion linked to our Course Resources page or from another source with which you are familiar. Read through it until you find a key statement that you think is pretty close to what Williams might call an "ethical violation of style" (e.g., obscurity, misdirection, subversive clarity, opacity) (Style lesson 10) or what Killingsworth and Steffens might say is closer to "reification" than to "humanization" or "naturalization" (171). Discuss what makes this statement "unethical" in Williams' scheme, or what makes it seem "reified" in Killingsworth and Steffens' scheme, and whether you agree or disagree with these theorists that it is so bad. As part of your discussion, be sure to help us know the context in which that statement was made and the argument it was being used to support.
Question Four (stasis and ethos construction)
The immediate audience for Robert Bullard's address seems to be the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity, and he uses history (cause) to garner the Commission's attention—a strategy we see already employed by Ida B. Wells-Barnett and by Mario Savio. How could arguing in the stasis of cause (rather than in fact/conjecture, value, or procedure) help Bullard evade possible accusations about his motives, and how could the same strategy help Wells-Barnett and Savio construct an appropriate ethos for their respective audiences?
Good luck and have fun with this!
-Professor Graban