When our department was first formed here back in 2008, the first order of business of the newly assembled faculty was to choose a department name. After the great I.A. Richards, I suggested “The Department of Miscommunication.” Richards had suggested in his work that nobody really studies communication. When it works, he argued, it’s uninteresting.…

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Initial Thoughts about A Social Justice Debate Course

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Thinking about teaching after the pandemic

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Daily Doxa vlogcast is live on YouTube

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Thinking about teaching after the Pandemic

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Debate as a competition, contest, a battle, a winner-take-all proposition where evil is vanquished, virtue is on the line, and truth hangs in the balance. We can’t be stalwart protectors of the truth; we are inadequate to defend it. People won’t listen to scientists/information/facts. What can we do? We can repeat ourselves and become more…

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Completionism Perversion and Profit

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Invention, out of the five canons of rhetoric, is to me the most difficult to teach. All of our materials are designed to, in Paul Elbow’s brilliant phrasing, help students play the “doubting game” – finding what’s wrong with the source, the source’s source, the strength of the argument, or the internal connection between the…

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Attention and the Visual in the Classroom

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When I was a graduate student in speech communication rhetoric, we never read any composition rhetoric scholars. I would find people like Steven Mailloux and Jan Swearingen and others back in those days, and I was told that the trouble with such work is that compositionists focus too much on teaching, not the larger picture.…

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