I cannot hope to achieve John's prolificity or eloquence, but I do want to think on screen about my own 1122 class. People may have seen my plea on Charles Lamb for help with exigence, a concept I have never struggled with presenting until this week.
The epiphany came to me post-class, of course, and it was this: no wonder the students aren't getting the gist of exigence. The assignment I gave them doesn't have one. I realized in the middle of today's class, as students good-naturedly struggled to turn topics into issues and then theses while avoiding binary thinking and developing exigence and considering "the third side" of the argument that we were mired in concepts with no road out, and nowhere to go. All we had was the map.
Others, I know, teach this course as an opportunity to develop a set of keywords. I find that at the end of week two, my students and I have a bunch of keywords but have not yet found anything to do with them.
The assignment I had started with was what I called "the third side." We read some debates about Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and considered a number of other arguments, with the idea that students would identify the two sides of an argument and come up with a third side. This was loosely adapted from Joe Harris' strategies for countering in Rewriting.
I could have predicted, did in fact predict, that when it came time for students to develop their own third side arguments, they would gravitate to hot-topic issues: all the things I have no interest in discussing, let alone reading about: abortion. animal testing. gun control. le sigh.
So I decided to blow up the assignment. We spent a ton of time developing theses that were rich, exigent, audience-aware, and so on, and at the end of class, I told them that they would only be writing the introduction. Instead of the paper they were to turn in next week, they would be doing the introduction only (but a really good one) and then some writing about the process of developing arguments. So no paper.
For archival purposes, I'll repost my charleslamb response here, too:
ReplyDeleteJuli:
I think students have a problem with exigence because, on the one hand, the definition of exigence in general ("something that motivates something else, in this case writing") is so simple as to seem to go without saying, while, on the other hand, specifically rhetorical exigence is rather more difficult to define, at least in a straightforwardly formulaic way. Unfortunately, a lot of the handbooks, etc., reinforce the confusion by simply equating rhetorical exigence with exigence in general. (That storm trooper bit seems to me to be an example.)
So I usually try to do an end run around the confusion: Rather than offering up the term as a precept to be applied, I start with examples and try to build up to at least a felt understanding. I choose examples of situations that are all strongly and clearly rhetorical by virtue of embodying the branches of oratory: i.e., I'll look through the paper for a story about a case before the Supreme Court, about a matter under discussion in Congress, and about a presidential speech. In all cases, the exigence will be clearly, even legally defined, so these examples are easy for me to work with.
But I also make sure that at least one example has, in addition to its manifest exigence, another, more difficult to locate, hence more interesting subterranean exigence. For example, the spending bill that came out of Congress this week contains four provisions blocking funding to ACORN (http://goo.gl/ZSX9yI), the now defunct association community-based organizations probably best known for having been defunded several years ago as the result of what turned out to be a non-scandal (http://goo.gl/dGCNts) (http://goo.gl/QdXA1K). The key word here is "defunct:" Why on earth would a bill released this week contain language (in four different sections!) prohibiting spending on an organization that dissolved in 2010? What's the real exigence here?
All of which is by way of saying that I've found that examining the term from the point of view of concrete, specifically rhetorical, and rhetorically interesting cases to be more productive than starting with an (almost unavoidably vague) abstract definition and then producing generic examples to fit it. At the very least, it helps students see why rhetorical exigence might worth analyzing.