"Mix Mash and Merge"

As a writer, it is important to be aware of your flaws so you repeat them less and less to where you have completely gotten rid of it. To a certain extent, we as writers attempt to untangle grammatically incorrect statements and attack others opinions to revitalize our own but Jones made it clear that we all have different and multiple standpoints. Editing the Wikipedia article “Rhetorical Velocity,” gave me a lot of insight and practice on editing the larger portion of this assignment. Small errors are my main forefront of writing errors. Actually performing the edits and seeing these edits from a different standpoint, allowed me to completely grasp what my problem is.

In Lazere’s article, chapter 10, “Avoiding Oversimplification and Recognizing Complexity,” she mentions that oversimplification is the essence of generalities such as advertising, talk radio, TV programs, propaganda, etc. When this statement from Lazere came to mind, I thought would this apply to rhetorical velocity? Ridolfo and DeVoss created a much simpler way of knowing how to create and identify rhetorical velocity which is to “mix, mash and merge.” Since rhetorical velocity can be considered to be a digital composition, I wanted to apply the concept when I edited the Wikipedia article I chose. The article, “Construction Sets” had little to no information, no references and no in-text citations nor were there any references inside the text itself. Instantly, I knew my first task was to search for reliable references that my audience and I can refer to when reading and understanding the process of “construction sets.” It is crucial to concentrate more on the body of the product and the claim and its importance rather than focusing on completing a product.

Because I am trained to react to worry about “completing” an assignment rather than focusing on certain aspects of the product, Hood really prepared me to lookout for bias information and original research. Hood 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.

However, Lazere taught me that oversimplification isn’t something as valuable as rhetoric. Where as rhetoric gives the best dialectical discourse and connection between audience and speaker and oversimplification gives the lowest result of that. I felt no connection once reading my Wikipedia article. I want to improve my writing skills by being able to expand a work that has many generalities but, the medium being Wikipedia, I was nervous and skeptical on how I should word my input. I want my audience, and Wikipedia’s audience,  to be able to workout through example and by meaning and discourse, what construction sets were and how they worked and their purpose. Congressman Newt Gingrich quoted, “You have to give them confrontation;” something to work through the audience’s thinking to get them to oversimplify.

Another quality of the article I noticed before I edited was its overgeneralizations and its wordy phrases and statements. In fact, the Lead was what confused me so much; I actually was going in circles trying to unpack exactly what this previous author was struggling to say. After skyping with our friend from Wikipedia, she gave me a ton of insight but one in particular stuck out to me which was to remember that majority of the writers are students and young adults, however, not everyone has a collegiate brain and some don’t understand what the word “discourse” entails and what it does. In other words, that is what I mostly struggled with, allowing myself to still be formal and professional in my writing but not to sound too “smart” and be “wordy.” The previous author seemed as if they did not fully prepare their facts and evidence with cases to back up their claim. If Corbett and Eberly were to have read this article they would have responded with, “You can spot discourses that beg the question by looking for such words as obviously… any defense lower would say ‘objection!’ if the prosecution were to say to the jury, ‘obviously, she is guilty.’”

                                                              Work Cited

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

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