Category Archives: Posts

Where Stuff Is and How to Find It

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Someone emailed me this morning requesting tips on navigating the course site, particularly when searching for old things or double checking your own work. Because I’m sure many of you have similar questions, I’m sharing my response here as well.

Some General Tips for Navigating the Site

1. You can use the “Search” feature in the right sidebar to find things if you know a keyword.

2. To find all of the posts written by you, find ANY post you’ve written, then click on your name at the bottom of the post where it says “Written By: ___” That will take you to a page that displays only posts written by you.

3. For comments (and another way to do it for posts), go to the Site Dashboard, then click on “Comments” on the left sidebar. By default, it will show all comments in chronological order. But, if you click on the “Author” column, it will sort everything by author. Then, just scroll through the pages until you find your name, and you can see all of the comments you’ve left. This is what I do when I’m marking completion.

4. Now is also a VITAL time to practice using the Tags and Categories feature, as well as familiarizing yourself with the different tabs in the menu. Clicking on any tag or category in the sidebar will show you only posts sorted under that tag/category. As you make your own posts, please be extra diligent in assigning appropriate categories and tags to your own posts.

5. This is also a good time to bookmark posts/pages you expect to be referring back to often, such as the Course Schedule or Final Paper Overview posts. That way, you don’t have to scroll back through and find them each time.

6. There is a tag called “wordpress help”! There isn’t a lot there right now, but PLEASE leave your WordPress questions in comments (on this post, or anywhere, really– I get emails for all of them) and I can answer them in future posts with that tag.

If you’re doing this on mobile, sidebars often appear at the bottom of the page, so if you’re not seeing these things, scroll all the way down.

Links for Things on Assignment Checklist

Yourself as Reader and Writer
Weapons of Math Destruction Blog Assignment (to do comments for this, check under the Student Posts tab on the site. Not everyone’s posts will be there, depending on whether they checked that category, but definitely some are there.)
Analysis of an Ad Assignment (to do comments for this, click on the Analysis of an Ad category link in the sidebar to see your classmates’ posts)
Paper 1 Reflections

Bandwagon and Namecalling
Fear and Humor
Testimonial
Romance, Gender, and Sex

Paper 1: This I No Longer Believe

Proposal Instructions

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Here are the instructions for the Proposal, with revised deadlines to account for CUNY’s new “Recalibration Period.” You are more than welcome to post early if you don’t want the new surprise “break” to complicate your routine even more.

**Post your first draft of your proposal (or just your inquiry questions) on the Course Site by the end of Monday, March 30, give feedback to your classmates, and then upload your final draft to Blackboard by the end of Thursday, April 2**

If you have a question about any aspect of the instructions or rubric, please leave it in the comments!

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Class Now Online

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Dear Students,

The English department has strongly encouraged faculty to shift all classes to an online format, potentially for the rest of the semester. Certainly until conditions start to improve rather than continuing to get worse. However, online-only learning is certainly different, and we will all need to be patient with ourselves and each other as we adjust and figure out what works best for our class.

Therefore, I want to take some time to explain why I believe social distancing, when possible, is important. I will endeavor to use Aristotle’s 3 appeals and each piece of the rhetorical triangle as I compose this post, so as an exercise to practice, keep an eye out for how I’m considering each one as you read (even if you don’t think I’m being effective in one or more ways).

Many people are saying that concern around COVID-19 (the current strain of coronavirus) is overhyped, and that it’s far less prevalent than the flu. So, why are the changes being implemented around the world important? For one thing, our healthcare system is managing coronavirus on top of the existing flu season (which is already worse than average).  This means that hospitals and other medical facilities have fewer resources with which to help all patients, regardless of their ailment.

Distribution chains are also struggling, since many U.S. products are manufactured in other affected regions like China, and many people are buying up materials like hand sanitizer, alcohol swabs, and masks. Because demand is so high, medical facilities are also facing greater difficulties in acquiring supplies– it’s not just regular people going to CVS. Furthermore, COVID-19 is spreading at an exponential rate, doubling around every 6 days. It is likely to get far more widespread before it goes away.

So, healthcare facilities are at a high risk of being overloaded, and many healthcare facilities already face long wait times and limited space. Another issue is we don’t actually know how widespread the virus is in the U.S., because access to testing kits is limited , and many people cannot afford the medical bills of getting tested (one man’s bill for getting tested was about $1,400 after his health insurance paid for some of the costs) or cannot afford to take the time off of work/care responsibilities to do so.

Some epidemiologists (disease experts) are estimating that eventually, 40-70% of the human population will contract COVID-19. The question becomes, when? That’s where social distancing comes in.

Social distancing essentially means limiting time spent in groups of people, including at work, at school, on the train, and at social events. The goal of social distancing is to flatten the curve — that is, slow the rate at which people are getting the virus. If fewer people are sick at the same time, our healthcare system is better able to handle the situation and take care of everyone, even if the total number of sick people remains the same.

It’s true that the overall fatality rate is fairly low compared to some diseases, but it’s high for some populations of people, such as the elderly and people who are immunocompromised (their immune systems aren’t very strong, so they’re much more vulnerable to illness). And it’s important for us to care about the wellbeing of these people too, even if we ourselves are not at high risk. This is the same principle behind vaccines: herd immunity.  If most people are safe from a virus (either through immunities or through protective measures), fewer people get the virus, and the virus is more easily treated and contained.

The virus also has the potential to seriously affect people economically. For jobs that rely on tips, or people who get paid hourly only when certain institutions are open (schools, for example), people may lose their source(s) of income even though they are still employed. So, it’s extra important to limit the severity of the pandemic as quickly as possible, although I do think that it’s very important for schools/workplaces to consider and provide for how students’/workers’ needs will change, including considering access to technology, access to food and housing, etc. For example, I think the advice from many places to just “not take public transit” is laughably unrealistic, and telling people to stay home without providing for how they will afford to pay their bills is…a major problem.

I will write again later today with a plan for how our particular class will proceed. As I said yesterday, please still do your homework for today, please fill out the technology survey, and I’ll be in touch. Likely we will do a blend of some webconferencing and some asynchronous work. Please also check your email notification settings for this site, since it’s now especially important that you stay up to date with information.

Please email me with anything you’d like to talk about, or ways I can support you further.

Survey About Home Technology

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CUNY has offered a list of “Things to Do Now” to prepare for the possibility of having to shift all classes to an online format, as some schools around the U.S. (and the world) are currently doing.

One of those things is to figure out what technology our classes have easy access to at home, so we can plan appropriate activities. (For example, some things like watching videos can take up a lot of bandwidth/cellular data, and that might not be feasible for you. If most people can watch videos at home with no problem, I might make videos but also provide text versions of the same information for those with limited data. If most people cannot easily watch online videos at home, it wouldn’t make sense for me to make them.)

This form is ANONYMOUS. Please fill it out as soon as you can, so I can make sure to plan lessons that are useful/accessible to our class community.

Technology Access/Needs Survey

A survey to gauge students' access to different technologies at home in order to plan activities for online learning that everyone can participate in.

More on Ethos

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Here’s some more thoughts/explanations/examples on ethos, which I wrote after my students last semester asked for more resources.

Ethos

Ethos is the credibility/reliability/trustworthiness (or PERCEIVED credibility/reliability/trustworthiness) of the speaker.

The story of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is a fable about ethos. Because the boy cries “Wolf!” even when there is no wolf so many times, the villagers don’t believe him when there actually is a wolf. He ruined his ethos by lying and pranking them.

In professional settings, I often don’t have a lot of ethos, because I’m young and don’t have my PhD (yet!!). So in order to convince people that I know what I’m talking about, I may choose to dress extra professionally, talk extra formally, or make a point of mentioning the experience and qualifications that I do have. Think about a resume– that’s a genre that basically only uses ethos. It’s just a list of all the things you’ve done that make you good for a job.

Trump and Ethos

Trump is an interesting person to analyze when we think about ethos. During the 2016 election, and again now, many people who supported Trump said they liked him because he was a successful businessman, so he knows how to run things. Trump’s reputation as a rich person (and owner of a business) made some people trust/believe that he would be a good president.

People who didn’t like Trump would say, “But he has no experience in politics” or “Running a business is different from running a government, so that doesn’t matter.” They did not feel like he had a lot of ethos.

Now, people who don’t like Trump will say, “He lies all the time about everything” — he has no ethos! If he lies, why would you trust him about any given piece of information? Trump supporters say that Trump has a lot of ethos, but the media is not reliable– they say the media has no ethos because they are out to get Trump even if it means lying.

Some Other Examples of Ethos

Ethos is often the source of tension in horror movies. For example, in The Invisible Man, a woman’s abusive ex is stalking and continuing to abuse her, but he’s invisible, so nobody believes her.

(Note: Discussion of assault and racism below)

Ethos is also SUPER important in sexual assault cases. Many times, people try to discredit the victim’s ethos– they were drunk, they’re exaggerating, they just want attention or money or to punish the perpetrator, etc. That’s about whether the accuser is trustworthy. But ethos isn’t just about trust– it’s about ethics, or goodness. We see that on the flip side. Often, when people talk about the perpetrator, they portray the perpetrator as wholesome (“just a kid, has his whole life ahead of him”) or normal (“Brock Turner, a star swimmer at Stanford University”), etc. This builds up the perpetrator’s ethos so people are more likely to believe them, or more likely to be lenient.

Racial profiling is also an example of an ethos problem. Because of racism, anyone who isn’t white is often viewed as less trustworthy– having less ethos– than a white person. They didn’t do anything to earn that lack of ethos– it’s just assigned to them by other people. A given action (walking down the street, holding a toy gun, wearing a turban, etc.) that is interpreted as non-threatening when a white person does it becomes rhetorically threatening when a not-white person does it– because the “speaker” (do-er of the action) lacks ethos. In this case, because of racism, not because of anything they did.

Ethos is not about whether or not someone is ACTUALLY saying true information/doing a particular thing. It’s about whether or not their audience PERCEIVES them to be telling the truth/doing a particular thing.

Ethos and Research/Your Writing

Let’s pretend I want to write a scholarly paper about Black Panther and its significance to African American readers. I’ve only seen the movie once, I haven’t read any of the comics, I’m not part of the fandom, I don’t really know much about comics in general or about African American literature in general, and I’m not African American myself. So I have basically no ethos! I can tell you my opinion about Black Panther, but you have no reason to trust my opinion more than anybody else’s.

In contrast, Professor Jonathan Gray (here at John Jay and at the Graduate Center)  could just say his opinion about Black Panther and it would mean a lot, because he has a lot of ethos. He is a professor with a PhD whose specialities are African American literature, pop culture, and comics. He has written books and articles about these topics. He has a lot of knowledge, not only about Black Panther specifically but about related topics in history and culture. He is also personally African American and a comics fan himself, so he can speak from his own personal experience and feelings about Black Panther too.

So one way I could boost my own ethos is by citing Professor Gray. My opinion might not mean much by itself, but if someone with a lot of ethos on this topic like him agrees with me, you might trust my analysis more!

For your research projects, you all will have at least a little knowledge about your topics, but probably not a lot. You are not experts. So you find information written by experts instead. You boost your own ethos by showing that you are filling in the gaps in your knowledge by seeking out reliable information. As a writer, you’re saying, “You can trust me, because I worked really hard to find true information from reliable sources.”

 

Reflections on my ‘This I No Longer Believe’ paper submission…

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  • What did I learn about myself? I realized in the process of writing this paper just how therapeutic writing is for me. I knew this was always a tool I had relied on in the past to manage my stress and anxiety, but I kind of fell off of the wagon so to speak. Formerly, I was quite diligent with keeping a journal. After writing this paper, I think I might make it a point to return to journaling. This might be what is lacking in managing the chaos in my day to day life at this point!
  • What did I learn about writing? I learned that writing can be messy- AND THAT IS OKAY! Re-reading and revising drafts, gaining feedback from peers, and taking time to reflect is SO important. Perfectionism is a myth. It does not exist. I think we could all do with putting a little less pressure on ourselves…
  • What was easy, what was hard? What was new/different? The easy part for me was deciding what I wanted to write about. As soon as this topic of our first assignment was given, I instinctively knew what I wanted to write about. The difficult part for me was trying to nail down getting my points across as to what information I specifically learned that shaped why my viewpoint changed. It is hard to not get emotional about traumatic things that have happened in our lives, and it is hard to prevent those emotions from taking over when presenting information. Also, as per the usual struggle for me- writers block happens! Sometimes you just need to take that break and stretch,  grab a coffee, go on a short walk, and then re-visit the work.
  • What did I gain from the assignment, or what did I hope to gain but didn’t? Not to sound cheesy, but writing this paper gave me so much strength and courage- and that is exactly what I had hoped to gain from this assignment. I chose my topic for this assignment knowing that it would be difficult for me to tell the story, but also feeling that this was a necessary story to tell. There wasn’t a particular aspect of my writing that I had hoped to improve on, because I do feel that creative non-fiction is a strong style for me. However, this writing journey was more emotionally eye-opening than anything else.  Additionally, I learned that I spend so much time worrying about grammar (which evidently I don’t really have an issue with?) while all along I do struggle with verb tenses! This paper highlighted that weakness for me, and it is definitely something I will be working on moving forward.
  • What additional support would have been helpful for me? I would have liked to review more exemplary samples of previous students work with our class prior to doing this assignment.
  • How do I think our peer review process went? What should we change for next time? Overall, I would say the peer review process went well. I think everyone was able to work in whatever capacity they were comfortable in, which is important. However, I do think that next time we should consider the following: Initially, reading multiple students papers and providing feedback proved to be a useful tool; but I feel it would be more beneficial if during the second round of peer review we worked specifically with ONE students work (again, in whatever capacity each person is comfortable with). I feel like there was not enough time to give sufficient feedback to multiple people, especially as the papers grew more in depth. I think it would be a more beneficial experience if, for the second round of peer review, everyone was assigned ONE specific paper to focus on. 

Analysis of an Ad Assignment

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Original Post Due: Wednesday 3/11 by class time
Comments To Your Classmates Due: Monday 3/16 by class time

For this assignment, you will take a picture of an ad or other poster that you see out in the world. We’re in NYC– there are ads everywhere. You may not use an ad we have already analyzed together in class, and you may not knowingly use the same ad as a classmate.

While it is possible to use WordPress on your phone, I strongly suggest you use a computer to write your post, especially if you have never used WordPress before.

Part 1 Instructions

After you find your chosen ad, do the following:

  1. Write a blog post on our course site following the Posting Directions. Embed the picture of your ad using the “Add Media” button.
  2. Under your picture of the ad, write a rhetorical analysis of your chosen ad. It should be the equivalent of about 2 pages of size 12/double spaced writing in a word processor.
  3. Before you post, find the “Categories” section in the right-hand sidebar of the post editor. Choose the “analysis of an ad” category.
  4. Hit the blue “Publish” button.

If you have questions about WordPress/how to post, you can email me or leave them in a comment.

Some guiding questions for your analysis:

  1. Who is the speaker in the ad? How is the speaker trying to present themselves? How does the speaker want you to view them? How do you know?
  2. What are the messages/arguments that the ad is trying to convey?
  3. What assumptions does the ad rely on?
  4. Who is the intended audience(s) of the ad? How do you know?
  5. What strategies does the ad use to try to persuade the audience?
  6. How does the ad appeal to ethos, logos, and pathos to persuade the audience?
  7. Do you think the ad is effective? Why or why not?

Part 2 Instructions

Choose (at least) two classmates’ posts to respond to with comments.

In your comments, you must add to their analysis of the ad. It is not enough to simply agree with their take and compliment them on it (although you can do that too!). Adding can mean disagreeing with their interpretation and explaining why, or it can mean offering additional interpretations even if you think their take is valid:  “Another interpretation could be that the argument is _________, because if you look at _________, maybe that means _________.” Or, you can analyze some aspect of the ad that your classmate didn’t talk about in their post!

Always support your analysis with evidence.

Each comment should be the equivalent of at least half a page of (size 12 double spaced) writing.