In-class Work for February 10
We continue to work on the artistic means for inviting and sustaining community.
Using different kinds
of glue to hold your readers to the page and keep them coming back. Here are four traditional functions of
rhetoric:
Blogs lend themselves to a mixture of these purposes—so the idea is to create a good mix that keeps people coming back—even if you have a personal preference. For example, Regan’s strongest agenda may be to solicit action in the form of donations for the homeless, but she’ll use other kinds of glue to keep her community of readers together.
Question: How as
each author in your group worked with these four types of glue? Does one
dominate? Should it? Why? Why not? Discuss how each kind of glue works on
readers’ psyche, readers’ emotions, and readers’ intellect.
Making verbal and
visual play together
We commonly distinguish between verbal (alphabetic text) and visual rhetoric. (In the case of the blog, we could add “audio” as a complementary form). These different media work together on your blog, so you’ll want to give some thought to the dynamic relationship among them. For example, Justin’s and Sam’s blogs are image/video heavy—little explanatory text. Sergio’s is text heavy.
Questions: First find out how verbal and visual (or audio) elements of your blog compete for your readers’ attention? Second, ask how satisfied your readers are with the relationship? How does an image-dominant post work in terms of the four glues listed above? A text-dominant page? Ask group members for suggestions to rebalance and enhance the “stickiness” of your site?
Soliciting Passive
and Active Participation
Consider which elements on your blog ask readers to be passive or active. Passive participation is not a negative, necessarily, and you might play on readers’ passive tendencies as well as call for their more active participation. For example, Jamie’s video and her boxed response options ask readers to do something: click & view, then click. These are actions, but they require less of a reader, probably, than posting a comment. They are strong devices in that they keep readers on her site—doing something. So passive-active is best figured as a continuum.
Question: What is each blog writer in your group doing to
solicit active and passive participation? How would you arrange the different
kinds of solicitations along a scale from active to passive?
Keeping Purpose
(Thesis) up front
What is your blog’s “thesis”? How do you make it enduringly clear what this thesis is as you begin move through your material week by week? In other words, when your “welcome-here’s my purpose” statement scrolls off the screen, other devices keep your topic and thesis alive. For example, Geoff’s beer logo and images visually “announce” the topic of Geoff’s blog; if he keeps a single image present—it acts as a logo or “signature.” But perhaps his educational thesis is kept alive by other means?
Question: What’s the fine line between keeping your topic
visible and keeping your thesis visible?
List the various ways (subtle and blatant, visual and verbal) that everyone
in your group keeps their topics and theses alive?
Attending to Verbal
Rhetoric
How do you use words (alphabetic signs--text) to get readers to comment?
Questions: Are your posts compact? Is compact more
inviting than wordy? Why? Why not? How have you arranged your information? Do
your instructions or suggestions or pleas for comments get lost among the other
words? Are your words giving people a strong reason to comment? Do your words appeal
to people’s kindness? Anger? Playfulness? Generosity? Taste? Aggression? Competitiveness?