Collective Feedback on Verbal/Visual Portrait First Drafts

Hello, everyone.

I have done a quick review of your first drafts and want to offer some collective feedback as you move toward revision:

• Reminder -- please submit a signed "consent form" in class on March 1! Please also submit your peer review sheets with revision plan in class on March 1!

• The visual component should reflect the same dominant impression you have of your informant, although it does not need to be explicitly discussed in your verbal portrait (unless it is a relevant detail of setting, character, or theme).
  

• Some of you are using photographs of your informants, others of you are using your image manipulations, and a few of you are considering artifacts that are immediately relevant to the issue. Please remember to cite the image source. Generally speaking, images from our image databases are okay to use. Generally speaking, images obtained from other web sources or proprietary sources are not okay to use, especially if they are copyrighted advertisements.

• Most of you have done a great job so far of ensuring that your portrait is composed of various building blocks. Some of you are even utilizing different points in time, and others of you have written particularly strong transitions between sections that remind us of your overall issue. Please consider how each building block can reinforce your thesis, as well as demonstrate it. This will make your portrait cohere, given that it is still an issue-driven essay (and not just a narrative description of the interview).

• So far, the strongest drafts are those that triangulate the interview with published sources, rather than those that simply integrate the sources after the fact. Some of you are extending key terms or concepts from a source to your fieldsite, some of you are framing your portrait with a key term or concept from a source, and some of you are forwarding one author's ideas in order to describe what makes your informant significant or unique, or to help your reader interpret something that occurs at your fieldsite. These are all useful ways of drawing on published sources, because they require you to demonstrate a real relationship between the published sources and your observations, rather than simply dropping in a quotation here and there.

• Several of you asked about the best use of "I" (or narrative first-person) in the Portrait. There is no hard and fast rule. However, some portraits do focus too much on the writer and the writer's experience, rather than on the informant. So as not to focus the reader's attention on you, try to narrate transparently, focusing more on details of setting, character, and theme, and less on yourself.

• Some of you mentioned feeling caught between portraying your informant positively and your fieldsite negatively. Obviously, our goal isn't simply to laud or to criticize or to be biased. Our readers will doubt our critical research ability if we only portray our informant as a hero, or if we only write an opinionated piece about what we think should be done on an issue. Try shifting your thinking, somewhat. You just need a sense of what matters to your informant. What is important to them?

• Most of you have used embedded description naturally and well. If you are still struggling with how and where to employ those "grammars of observation," my advice would be to use them selectively. The role of descriptive language in the Portrait is to construct and support a dominant impression. Not every sentence need be explicitly descriptive.

• Most of you are beyond this point, but in case you are still overwhelmed with information, this exercise can help:
  

1. try writing down the issue in a sentence (example from "Surgeon's War": according to Susan Love, we need alternative notions of how to treat breast cancer and get to it before it gets to us)
2. then try writing down your argument in a sentence (example from "Surgeon's War": Susan Love's approach to treating breast cancer is unconventionally conventional; she believes in researching the cause but nurturing the person)
3. then try writing down the dominant impression (example from "Surgeon's War": a kind but fierce warrior in this battle)

Finally, remember that I am available in office hours, especially if you need a sounding board for your issue as you revise. The Verbal/Visual Portrait is by far the most difficult assignment in the sequence, not only because of the demands on interviewing and observation, but also because you are synthesizing information from so many sources, and you are negotiating multiple concerns in the way you write it.

You are doing great so far -- keep at it!

-Professor Graban

Thick Description / Embedded Language

Dear ENG W240 Class:

I want to modify, slightly, the reading for next week. Please review Trimbur's "Profiles" article, as we will continue working with that. In addition, please read Nilsen's "Sexism in English" but only pages 232-236, 302-306, and 331-333 in Fieldworking. (I have shortened our Fieldworking reading.) We will continue to understand the VVP assignment, but in the meantime, gather your questions about it and Blog Assignment #3. Send questions anytime, or save them for class!

As a reminder, Tuesday's class will be held in SE 045.

See you next week,

-Professor Graban

Visual Portraits and Erasure

Hello, everyone.

We ran out of time during yesterday's class session in SE 045 to do our own hands-on analysis of visual portraiture in more vital public contexts. However, I have come across two images to introduce in class tomorrow as we finish our discussion of Ellen Barton's "Textual Practices of Erasure" and begin our discussion of the profile genre.

The first is an advocacy advertisement published by the Physicians Against Land Mines (PALM) campaign, a member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and dedicated to educating the public about land mines as an ongoing international concern. This particular advertisement was designed by Leo Burnett (advertising agency, Chicago). I will try to find out where it circulated. PALM ads have circulated, generally, in Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Bomb, and People magazines.

For your own interest, here is the text inside Emina's left leg:

“Emina Uzicanin was just 5 years old. Her family was living on the outskirts of Sarajevo. On a sunny afternoon in May, Emina was playing in a field behind her Uncle’s house. There, she spotted two little rabbits. As soon as she started towards them, the rabbits took off. So she began running. Five feet. Ten feet. That’s when it happened. An ear-shattering explosion ripped through Emina’s body—severing her left leg and leaving the rest of her badly scarred. Every 22 minutes another innocent civilian is killed or maimed by a land mine. Right now there are over 60 million unexploded land mines waiting jut beneath the earth in nearly 70 countries. We need your help to rid the planet of land mines and to help its victims like Emina.”

The second image is something you may have seen before. It is a spoof advertisement, otherwise known as an "anti-advocacy ad" by Adbusters.org, and of course, copyrighted to them. This particular ad was designed several years ago in response to the “Nike ID” campaign, which invited clients to custom-design their own cross-trainers.

The content in these two images is quite different, I realize, but it will be interesting to consider how visual representations like these can complicate our own notions of what portraits should and do achieve, especially when they are constructed on behalf of civic organizations, public issues, or community projects. I am especially interested in Barton's claim about the ease with which the United Way poster campaign erased the complexities of living as adults with disabilities -- rather than inspiring its viewers to authentically embrace the disability culture. Her claims raise larger questions about disability, public representation, and how to unpack verbal/visual portraiture for more complex social constructions.

See you in class tomorrow,

Professor Graban

What makes this rhetorical?

Hello, everyone.

Some of your comments and questions during today's class discussion left me thinking, hard, about how we might justify community-based research as "rhetorical." Of course, Sunstein and Chiseri-Strater advocate for most writing activity as rhetorical, and they understand fieldworking and ethnography as persuasive acts. But I'd like to synthesize some ideas from your blog posts and today's class discussion in order to answer that question robustly, perhaps to help us think differently about persuasion. Several of you pointed out a potential dissonance between persuasion and our attempts to be objective, transparent, and ethical:

• Community-based research (as it is enacted through fieldworking and ethnography) is rhetorical because it relies on a careful negotiation of both "emic" and "etic" perspectives, relating to the perspective of an insider while also representing the perspective of an outsider to a culture (FW 16, 17, 20, 76, 500).

• It involves a systematic training in "seeing", i.e., through Samuel Scudder's principle of "looking at your fish" (FW 86-90) and various other notetaking methodologies. This seems to resonate with the Aristotelian notion that rhetoric is "the ability, [in particular cases] to see the available means of persuasion" (Rhetoric, published 32 BCE, translated into Latin in 13th century, later translated into English).

• It involves the shaping of discourses for various purposes and audiences (FW 75), and hence even a process like notetaking can be done so as to show more explicitly how those discourses are shaped.

• It implies a structure and a form, which is to say that it contains a series of steps or processes that build on one another toward an argumentative end (are end-focused).

• It is transformative, especially inasmuch as it may allow a researcher to adapt or revise her beliefs or a writer to adapt or revise his perspectives.

• It is triadic, which means it is grounded simultaneously in credibility (ethos), in the emotions and psychology of the audience (pathos), and in patterns of reasoning (logos) (FW 75). This seems suspiciously like our triangulation principle, which we have only just begun to understand.

• It is, by and large, an ethical endeavor, which is not to say moral, but rather concerned with the relationship between reader, writer, and subject and with making those relationships visible. (Maybe this is why we should understand all of the positions that act on any moment, experience, or reading.)

• It involves the articulation of nascent ideas (FW 75).

• It is reflexive or promotes reflexivity (FW 88).

• It considers the possibility that dissonances can be made from language and delivered through language.

That is all I can come up with, but I'd love to hear more of your justifications, either in class or by commenting below. Thank you for the mental challenge.

-Professor Graban

Blog Assignment #2 Made Optional

Dear ENG W240 Class:

Several of you pointed out (correctly) that our schedule has been quite compressed. As such, I have decided to make Blog Assignment #2 optional, for extra credit. Most of the remaining Blogging Assignments have been posted, so feel free to look ahead.

Many thanks,

-Professor Graban