I’ve been talking a lot about writing process with a friend, from the start of composition and generation of ideas to the way that a thesis gets mapped out, or at least how I do it.

So through these conversations about something totally unrelated to this post, I’ve been thinking that most ideas for an essay or for a video or whatever I’m trying to make are best thought of in terms of 3 movements that move through the idea through different perspectives.

Rhetoric, debate, argumentation are all perspectives that when looked through at an idea reveal something we were unable to see before (or even something we create through looking differently).

I’ve talked and written about the importance of the presence of uncertainty in life and how rhetorically it’s a powerful resource for invention. There are other things to explore here, like uncertainty in relation to the audience (Universal Audience theory could benefit from this), delivery, and discussions about proof/evidence.

As a starting point, through this three movement process I’m playing with I’ve come up with the following way to approach the subject of how to teach uncertainty:

1. Strategies to avoid seeing uncertainty as a problem to address via total elimination (perhaps the only way to deal with it that we are taught?).
2. How to use uncertainty as a site for rhetorical invention and generation of ideas without the requirement that uncertainty efface itself in order to achieve this.
3. How to create uncertainty out of rhetorical situations where the controversy or audiences feel there are very clear reasons and positions out there – making uncertainty out of the tools and materials that indicate certainty (not just for fun but for important rhetorical epistemic impact).

I think these are movements of the same argument – that uncertainty is important, teachable, not to be eliminated, and an important part of life. This allows a sort of managed way to write about it (which is also a way to think about it and think through it).