Final Exam Practice. Note: This is an instructor’s draft—a work in progress. You may contribute your ideas.

 Metaphors provide ways of looking. Although ideally a given metaphor provides a new angle of vision and hence some explanatory power, no single metaphor illuminates everything. In fact metaphors also block given ways of seeing in order to privilege others.  For the final exam, I’ll be asking you to analyze your blog or a selected post in terms of the composite metaphor and the sliding scale metaphor. For each, I’ll list some elements but you can and should add your own.

1. The Composite metaphor suggests that you drag pieces of stuff from your writing repertoire and stick them together in a single space. Together these pieces make meaning. Pieces include all elements of the blog—not just the posts—everything from design elements to google alerts to verbal arts to grammar and correctness to visual or verbal “energy.”

2. The Sliding Scale metaphor also works with the idea of elements, suggesting that these might be aligned along a continuum. You—the writer—adjust the tuning. More is not better; equal is not better. It all depends on the effects you’re seeking and the readers who may be seeing and hearing—in other words, on your perceptions of the rhetorical situation.

Social Distance Diminished (I-you).. .  <…….. …………..Social Distance Increased (third person)

Immediacy (I just cut my finger and it’s bleeding on my keyboard)<………………..little immediacy

Randomness………………………………………>………………The Expected, The Well Ordered

Argument……………………………………………………………………………………no argument

Serious………<…………………………………………………………………………Funny, Comic

Active…………………………<………………………………………………….…not active

Clever……………………………………………………………………>…no cleverness allowed

Verbal……………………………………………<.…………………………………no verbal

Visual……………………..<……………………………………………………...no visual

3. Although the analytical terminology above allows you to talk to yourself and to your classmates about your writing—some of this language is not useful for other kinds of audiences. So . . . choose one or two posts suitable for a professional writing portfolio. Write a brief introduction to your blog describing not only the content but the proficiencies or arts or knowledge that go into the making of a good blog. Imagining a very specific potential employer will help you focus. I’ll try to provide a list of potential employers—maybe from our internship list.  

4. Rhetorical Situation is a term we privilege a good deal in professional writing: audience, purpose, medium. Yet it’s a hard concept to deal with when your work is accessible to millions of people. So I’ll be devising a question about rhetorical situation—not yet sure what it will be.

5. There will be a question about community building and community maintaining. Possibly this question will be part of the rhetorical situation question.