Greek Life and rhetoric

Recently, a few greek organizations have been getting some complaints and there have been isolated cases of incidents involving hospitalizations directly related to certain organizations. In response to this Clemson has given a list of "self imposed" sanctions that all fraternities and sororities must adhere to. Because the sanctions were put on the entire greek community as a whole and not only the organizations that have been the cause of all the trouble, the greek community has come together as a whole to fight these unreasonable sanctions imposed on us. If there was ever a time for technical writing and rhetoric now is the time to shine. So far the leaders have done an outstanding job doing just that. All presidents have come together to come up with a plan of action and a proposal to the university for us to keep the traditions of these organizations and to work hand in hand with the university to change some of the issues within the greek community.

Blogging the ultimate form of technical writing?

Is there a better example of technical writing than blogging? You are constantly writing to a specific audience, usually its opinionated and highly rhetoric intensive, and bloggers are constantly trying to get their points across in the quickest simplest fashion they possibly can. I guess that might be why we all are having to keep these every week. We are constantly writing to each other and trying to interest our audience (basically ourselves) and all of us are also trying not to bore the other with wonderfully long-winded, uninteresting topics. As hard as it is to come up with something original every week that meets these criteria (im struggling right now as you can see) it definitely gives us the most practical practice, if you will, in studying and carrying out technical writing.

Religion Poem and Dark Side of Oz

In class we talked about a professor putting up a homework assignment with a few authors for his students to read. Immediately following the end of the class the professor decided to do an experiment on his religious poetry class saying that the authors names were, in fact,a poem and asked his students to analyze it. Of course the students came up with some greater meaning of the "poem" other than the 6 authors names written down on the board as a list. Two things caught my attention about this experiment. The first being that meaning in poetry and writing is completely relative and subjective to whom is reading the work. Secondly if a person is looking for meaning in something they will usually find it. I thought about another instance similar to this poem experiment and that is the coincidence of the famous Pink Floyd album "The Dark Side of the Moon" syncing up with the Classic motion picture "The Wizard of Oz." People have claimed for years that the two sync up "perfectly" and that the band did this syncing on purpose. If you watch it yourself without the bias of "knowing" that the two sync up you will see that they actually dont sync up very well at all BUT in certain places it seems as if the two go hand in hand. This is simply due to the fact that you are looking and wanting the two to sync up.



"Some guy with too much time on his hands had this idea of combining Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon."
-David Gilmour, Lead guitarist, Pink Floyd

Instructions

Of all the different types of documents and papers to write, writing instructions might seem to be the easiest, but in actuality they are (at least for me) more difficult to write than the most in depth essays.

All our lives we have been taught to write creatively and whimsically where as instructions are almost the exact opposite. Instructions are extremely "mechanical" in writing. The fewer thesaurus words and wonderfully long-winded sentences the better. The irony of this to me is instructions could arguably be the most practical form of writing. Rather than beat around the bush with different tones, themes, symbols, etc. you know exactly where you are trying to take people and you must do it in the most concise, easy to understand way possible.

What is Rhetoric?

One of the  first days of class we asked ourselves this situation. what is Rhetoric and why/how should we use it. Obviously that will be one of the main objectives of this class to answer but I thought this video was a quick assessment of just those questions.



Her Idea of rhetoric is similar to Aristotle's in that she says "words that can be understood, without adjusting the truth factor." Ethics seem to come up time and again when it comes to using Rhetoric.