Throughout this spring semester, I was introduced to
countless gruesome yet exciting projects in Advanced Editing an Writing of
which I have learned to withhold an argument and connection with my audience to
creating claims and working on editing tasks. However, our Wikipedia project
was by far the hardest struggle I had to endure throughout this course but
also, it was insightful and prepared me for the type of job I hope to get out
of college.
During this course I was taught to draw from each critical texts
we had to read that week and argue and connect (sometimes contrast) what their
concepts are with how you feel towards a certain topic that was discussed. Our
Wikipedia article that spoke on the subject of “Multimodality” had countless
theorists and authors referenced but the most important aspect of all was that
we had no original claims, and everything that was written was written from our
own writing with help to support our argument using other texts.
According to Ridolfo and DeVoss in order to create
rhetorical velocity, one would have to “mix, mash and merge.” With Wikipedia,
rhetorical velocity is a common factor to be used and executed, especially with
this type of online encyclopedia. It creates a much simpler way of knowing how
to create and identify a digital composition to your audience. Creating a
digital composition such as this Wikipedia entry, I struggled with the claims
of each subsection of our article to include in the Lead. The reoccurring
question was “What is important in this section that the reader must know in
the Lead?” However, with applying rhetorical velocity my group and I found it
much easier to make each and every claim flow and come together.
On another note, Lazere taught me that oversimplification
isn’t something as valuable as rhetoric. Within Wikipedia and following its
rules of “not too wordy” with “no original claims,” etc., rhetoric gives the
best dialectical discourse and connection between audience and speaker. Even
though Wikipedia isn’t an “essay based” website nor is it a collegiate level
website but, it is one that most young teens/adults use. Without my knowledge
of rhetoric, I would have found it extremely difficult to deliver my argument
and connect with my audience.
Hood really prepared me to lookout for bias information and
original research. She mentions in her article, "to focus, then, on the
accuracy or inaccuracy of facts, the biased presentation of information, or
even the appearance of an obscene fragment of text in a Wikipedia
entry..." Because writing is such a process, it becomes a recursive task
in which makes us constantly change our opinions in what we want to argue or
even simply to get our point across. This Wikipedia project really put a lot in
perspective for me along the lines of possible job careers and with my own
writing itself.
Work Cited:
Lazere, Donald. “Avoiding Oversimplification and Recognizing
Complexity.” In Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizen’s
Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005.
244-256.
Ridolfo, Jim, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. “Composing for
Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery.” Kairos 13.2 (2008).http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/ridolfo_devoss/intro.html
Hood, Cara Leah. “Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and
Writing Pedagogy.” 2008. Available online at
http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/wiki_hood/index.html
No comments:
Post a Comment