This post was originally from my previous blog, progymnasmata, and was published there on Friday, August 28, 2020 at 10:49PM. I will sometimes be reposting older blog posts here as I work through my collection of years of posts, sharing the ones I think are the most interesting. Your comments are of course welcome on all these old pieces.

It’s Friday night and normally I’m pretty energetic and excited. Tonight I’m worn out, and I think it’s because I spent most of the week working on an essay that I should have done last month. With all the changes and the almost-taking-a-buyout business I can forgive myself the slip this time. After all it’s better than my typical writing excuses such as “video game” or “too much pizza.”

I’m frustrated because I am not sure why I’m so tired after working on that piece and getting it finalized. I really shouldn’t be. It wasn’t epic, didn’t require a ton of research, and was pretty easy to write and edit. I think it makes sense and will be helpful for the intended audience. So I shouldn’t be tired. Instead, I’m mad and tired.

My mind goes back to the start of the week and a Monday video call with a friend and colleague where we were discussing metaphors for kinds of writing. He was talking about the kind of writing one does on comprehensive exams: The kind meant to prove that you that you can move heavy ideas around properly and get them in position. I talked about how annoying that rhetoric is because it doesn’t soar, and it’s not particularly “cool.” He called it positioning and then I responded with, “It’s like being one of those guys with the orange lights who are moving the plane out of the gate and onto the tarmac.” Bingo.

Tarmac rhetoric isn’t heavy. Planes aren’t heavy really. They have a weight, but it has to consider fuel, luggage and passengers. Planes are pretty light. They are designed to stay aloft. But they are very bad at moving themselves around and into position to lift everyone on board into the sky and sail them toward a destination somewhere quick.

I’m pretty sure this piece I finished drafting today was tarmac rhetoric and a pretty good case of it too. It sets up the ability of others to take off and go in a lot of directions quickly, lightly, and impressively. But in order for them to do that, I have to wave the little orange lights, stand in the heat, and make sure it gets into position on the tarmac.

Do we teach tarmac rhetoric? Do we teach positioning the “Wings that give our weighted words flight,” to quote Kenneth Burke kind of? What does that teaching look like? Who are we in the relationship to lifting, transforming, transportive rhetoric when we are the ones who help move the awkward beast out of the space it doesn’t belong and into the place where it can sit for a bit before it launches up and away, shining?