Author: Steve

  • Montana is a Great Place to Experience British-style Debating

    For the sixth time (maybe?) I travelled up to Montana to do a workshop and run a small BP tournament for those amazing people from the snowy west in Montana. I really like going out there, although this time I had some reservations about it. I always have reservations about it though. The first reservation…

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  • New Semester and a New Perspective

    The new semester is here and it’s time to They have renamed all the donuts in the on-campus Dunkin’ Donuts and I cannot deal with it. The names are just too much and I keep taking pictures of them. Now that we are jelly-brating, some news you may have heard already: I am no longer…

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  • Who Do We Praise? A Tale of Two Passings

    The eulogies will never end. Everyone is talking about the death of John McCain using the strangest language about “service” and “honor” and the like. It’s no surprise – as Aristotle tells us praising Athens before the Athenians is barely a challenge. Tropes of hard work, dedication, loyalty, honor, love of country, self-sacrifice, and others…

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  • Where Does Rhetoric Begin in Courses?

    where should we start in class? With organization? Research? Developing an audience profile?   Wherever you start teaching in a speech or argumentation or debate course, that is where you are positing the start of rhetoric.  The question of a start is the establishment of ends. What is the purpose of rhetoric? Why learn and…

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  • Refreshing

    Queens Boulevard yesterday afternoon I wanted to write this post on the subway and the bus however my mobile wireless was giving me problems. It wasn’t until I got to about where I needed to go that it cut back on. I don’t know if there was a tower issue with T-Mobile or if it’s…

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  • Lost Technology

    In reading through various meeting minutes and dictated letters from the 1930s in my recent research work, I found this great oddity:    Aliens confirmed. Well, aliens by metaphor only. Who is left who can read or write in shorthand?   The technology of shorthand I imagine is pretty much lost. This is clearly a…

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  • To Campus

    Woke up today and worked more on my long-term writing project about debating. I woke up with the question: If we are seeing a radical change in the way that people evaluate information, trust experts, consider what a fact is, and all that, why is our solution to just double-down on teaching the fallacies, tests…

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  • Broadcasting Rhetoric

    Still thinking about the time I spent in the media archive at the University of Maryland. They have a lot of documentation – transcripts and recordings and the like – but most exciting is their collection of the technology of broadcasting. They have a remarkably well-preserved inventory of early televisions and old console-style radios.  …

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  • Another Time, D.C.!

    Another trip done. And the summer is almost done too. I learned quite a bit on this trip but now what’s ahead is the race to September.  I agreed to help run and teach at a debate camp for the first time in a few years here in New York. Not sure what that’s going…

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  • The Archive

    I had the best time this week going to the University of Maryland special collections. I spent about three days there and that was a good amount of time. However I feel like I could just look at old stuff in the archives forever and not get bored. Seems like there’s a lot of it…

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