Course Description

Engaging the Public is a first-year writing course designed to ethically engage students with the local public through rhetorically aware communication. Students will analyze public discourse such as advocacy campaigns, student involvement, local politics, and social activism in order to develop rhetorical awareness and a critical vocabulary. Students will then deploy this knowledge when conducting their own in-depth, extended, and multimedia campaign designed to reach multiple audiences in order to positively affect Purdue University. This class believes that productive and reflective citizenship is important to democratic life and that ethical communication is a cornerstone of such engaged citizenship. This course asks students to use language in all its forms to critically examine and ethically engage in public discourse for the purpose of shaping community.

This class relies on specific definitions of important terminology. Part of the work of this course is defining these terms for students.

• Rhetoric: Most generally defined, rhetoric is the use of symbols to produce an effect. From this viewpoint, rhetoric assumes that the use of language is symbolic action that can produce results. Though rhetoric has become a negative word within political circles and contemporary media, it has a rich history as one of the oldest intellectual pursuits in the western world. With a focus on audience, context, and identification, rhetoric can be a positive force within a community.
• Advocacy: Though most people associate advocacy and a related term, activism, with the radical fringes of society, this course views any concerted attempt to shape the local public environment as advocacy at its core. Advocacy can include any movement that works for political, bureaucratic, legal, service-oriented, or attitudinal changes.
• Ethics: Ethics, within the context of rhetorical advocacy, demands integrity, the inclusion of relevant perspectives, audience identification, thorough research, and situational awareness. In order to be ethical, the rhetor must genuinely believe that the result of their advocacy will benefit the larger community.

Course Goals

This course takes seriously the work of engaging the public. To this end, the following course goals serve as a reminder of the importance of ethical and rhetorically aware citizenship:

Developing Rhetorical Awareness

This goal applies equally to the production and analysis of texts, in that students can identify the following concepts in public discourse and successfully implement them in their own:

• Audience/Context: The specific public group, place, and time that a text addresses. Because each text appeals to a specific group in a specific place at a specific time, that text will reveal aspects of the audience and context.
• Identification: This class assumes that successful texts will relate to their audiences, allowing that audience to see themselves reflected in the presentation of the argument. Identification considers the values, terminologies, self-image, goals, and concerns of the audience.
• Exigence/Purpose: Every text comes from somewhere and hopes to accomplish something. Therefore, texts cannot be understood without considering their inspiration, motivation, and rationale. Exigence is the implicit or explicit call to write; purpose is what that writing hopes to accomplish.
• Kairos/Timeliness: Kairos is the effectiveness with which a text responds to context and exigence. Kairos measures the quality and not the quantity of time. Kairos then is the right moment, action, and measure directed towards the right audience and context.
• Evidence: Good arguments must include good evidence. Audiences demand evidence that aligns with their identities; writers who do not include effective evidence fail to both persuade their audiences and empower that audience to persuade others. Effective writers use a variety of credible source types to build pathos, ethos, and logos.
• Criteria Development: Success is a contingent but important term when it comes to rhetoric. Assessing rhetorical effectiveness is only possible after explicit and applicable measures have been established. Rhetorical criteria should account for genre and purpose as well as all of the above attributes of rhetorical awareness.

Fostering a Sense of Public Engagement

• Good citizens are invested in their public by reading and contributing to the discourses generated by that public. The public for this course means not “the average American,” but the specific places students inhabit. In this regard, students are a member of several publics simultaneously: their dorm, Purdue University, their hometown, and even Facebook.
• This course considers advocacy to be any productive rhetorical action designed to affect the attitudes or behaviors of any public.

Improving Writing Ability

Good writing accomplishes its purpose within its genre and with integrity. Therefore, good writing is rhetorically aware and conscious of its audience and context.

• Good writing is concise, coherent, complicated, and organized in bringing out the complexity of the subject and problems of argument.
• Because this course considers all symbolic action to be texts, the scope of writing is broadened beyond printed and spoken texts to all rhetorical acts.

Increasing Competence in the Use of Multiple Media

• Writing happens in a variety of ways across a variety of media. Effective advocates need to be comfortable with multiple media in order to get their message across.
• Therefore, this course engages students with multiple technologies that allow for advocacy to take place in the form of formally written proposals, letters to the editor, visual arguments, websites, videos, and podcasts.

Upholding Ethical Standards

• Students in this class are expected to be ethical in that they conduct their rhetoric with integrity.
• This includes a consideration of the relevant perspectives while conceiving and conducting advocacy for a particular and meaningful issue.
• Students are required to consider the audience’s identity, position, and vocabulary on the issue as well as the benefits that audience will receive from the advocacy. This consideration will be expanded by thorough research into credible sources. Students must genuinely believe that the results of their advocacy will benefit the larger community.

Course Readings

Students will engage readings covering the basics of rhetorical principles and composition. Readings will also discuss the situation and effectiveness of specific public rhetorical acts. Public rhetorical acts local to Purdue will also be examined to provide students with examples and criteria for producing their own campaigns. Readings will be taken from the course text book Compose Design Advocate, a course pack of selected readings, and various in-class and online materials.

Required Readings

• Compose Design Advocate available at Borders in Wabash Landing
• Course Pack available at Copy Mat

Develop strategies for successfully and effectively participating in course reading discussions. Plan your reading in segments: read an article per day, for instance. Create a system of notations: passages for discussions, quotes to incorporate into posts, and sections that need clarification. Additionally, note dates and sources of readings, as well as any implicit connections or explicit references among the readings (that is, how these readings constitute a conversation).

Course Grade Breakdown

• Participation: 20%
• Rhetorical Analyses Portfolio: 35%
• Public Rhetoric Campaign: 45%

Course Rubric

• A – Completed on-time, meets requirements above satisfaction, and is ready for a professional setting (ready for use)
• B – Completed on-time, meets requirements above satisfaction
• C – Completed on-time, satisfies basic requirements
• D – Completed late and/or below basic requirements
• F – Incomplete or not completed, excessively late and well below basic requirements

Course Projects

Rhetorical Analyses Portfolio

Understanding public rhetoric requires thorough analysis of public rhetorical texts. Therefore, the first six weeks of the course will ask students to analyze several genres of public rhetoric to determine how are they are composed and whether they are successful given their audience, context, and goals. At the end of the unit, each student will turn in a portfolio with four polished, detailed rhetorical analysis essays and give a five minute presentation about a local instance of public rhetoric.

Rhetorical analysis is a genre that carefully examines several elements of a piece to determine how it is rhetorically composed. Elements considered in a rhetorical analysis are purpose, audience, context, exigence, composition, design, evidence, and ethos/pathos/logos. A rhetorical analysis is a well developed essay that weaves together evidence from the text to support a central theme, not simply a quick list covering each element separately.

Public Rhetoric Campaign

After focusing on the analysis of public rhetoric, students will plan, research, draft, and execute a ten week campaign advocating a specific change at Purdue University. The campaign will involve several genres that target specific audiences to affect change. Successful campaigns will consider audience, genre, design, research, and ethics. During the campaign students will compose and design a letter to the editor, a letter to a potential ally, a Facebook group about their issue, a formal proposal to a specific university official or department, a visual document, and a multimedia composition, such as a website, podcast, photo essay, video, or ebook.

Campaigns must be local to Purdue and advocate a change that benefits many current and future Purdue students, faculty, or staff. Students should choose a topic interesting and significant enough to be sustained for 10 weeks, but local and modest enough to be realistically implemented. Campaigns will be supported with a primary interview of an official expert on the issue and at least 5 secondary sources on the subject. Students will also focus group their texts in class to gain audience feedback on their work. The final grading criteria for successful campaigns will be partially determined by the class based on the insight gained during six weeks of rhetorical analysis.

Attendance and Participation

This is one of the most important components to the success of the course. All reading and outside assignments are to be completed prior to class, or by assigned deadlines in the case of project elements. This means reading carefully and critically, bringing materials to class, and coming prepared to engage with the ideas and the class. Class investigations are participatory assignments that include critical and active discussions as well as in-class collaborative work. While it is tempting to multi-task (i.e. surf the web and instant message friends) while on the computer, students should refrain from engaging in non-class related activities during class time. Students who are caught engaging in such activities will be marked absent for the day.

Attendance is welcomed, expected, and mandatory. Students are considered absent if they are 1) more than 10 minutes late, 2) doing computer activities unrelated to class assignments, 3) unprepared for class, and/or 4) not in class at all (this includes conferences, which count as two absences). There will be regular in-class work and/or a sign-in sheet to record attendance and preparation for class. Students may make-up three sessions without. The instructor will supply students wishing to make-up missed classes with an out of class assignment. Make-up work will be due two weeks from the day it is assigned. After three absences students must attend a conference with the instructor to discuss whether they should continue in this course. Seven absences constitute automatic failure of the course.

Classroom Behavior

Insults, slurs, or attacks of any kind will not be allowed in my class (this includes f2f meetings and on the course website). Any student who engages in this type of behavior in the classroom will be permanently removed from the class. In other words, forced to drop the course, in addition to other possible punishment given by Purdue University (See the Purdue University Student Code of Conduct Available at http://www.purdue.edu/odos/administration/codeconduct.htm). In order to have an effective teaching and learning environment we must practice both respect and tolerance, without question.

Plagiarism

Cheating: All written work submitted for a grade in this course must be the product of your own composition. Ideas generated due to reading and group discussion may provide the inspiration for your work, but should not be the sole ideas represented. With collaborative projects, of course, ideas should be representative of the group’s work.

Plagiarism is the act of presenting as your own work another individual’s ideas, words, data, or research material. The concept applies equally to written, spoken, or electronic texts, published or unpublished. All ideas and quotations that you borrow from any source must be acknowledged: you should always give the name of your author, the title of the text cited, and the page number(s) of the citation. Correctly citing using MLA format is also required: this includes quote marks around quoted material and block quotes for quotes running longer than four lines. See MLA Handbook for help with avoiding plagiarism. The only exceptions to this requirement would involve what is familiar and commonly held (e.g. the fact that the earth is round). You should know that penalties for plagiarism are severe and can entail suspension from the University. Students are responsible for reading and understanding the University policy on Cheating and Plagiarism set forth in Purdue University’s Academic Integrity: A Guide for Students available at http://www.purdue.edu/ODOS/osrr/integrity.htm