The Rogue Rhetorician is returning to the classroom. Yes, I gave up the academic job search… and was offered a position.
I’ve been away for a couple of weeks, traveling with my children from Western PA to the California Coast. While we were in California, I received and accepted a full-time teaching post at a state university near our home in Pennsylvania. Classes start later this month.
The fall semester includes four sections of “Critical Writing” which is another name for college composition. I’m not a fan of how most composition courses are structured (or taught) so this will be something of a challenge as I attempt to prove my approach to teaching academic writing works well.
I am not going to change what I believe is a better approach to academic writing instruction. Hopefully, that is why I was hired.
When I was a graduate student, we were given a syllabus with four essays, starting with a personal narrative. I’m not going to follow that approach.
My writing course will be grounded in rhetoric, the traditional rhetoric and recent rhetorical scholarship.
I am not going to focus on grammar or formatting because I can instead expose students to tools and resources that help with APA and MLA formatting, along with other style arbiters. Why have students memorize style guides that change when I can instead point them to websites and applications that are always up-to-date? Let’s be honest as teachers: we look up formatting and style rules because assuming we know them is risky. Very few scholars I know have memorized style guides and those that have done so study how the guides evolve. My students will be given templates and links to training resources.
College writing courses — all writing courses — should focus on the ideas and creative expression. Yes, we can tell students they are judged by the formatting of a document, and we can insist they use proper formatting via software tools, but we do not need to distract them from learning how to analyze arguments.
I’m going to teach visual rhetoric and the economic nature of rhetoric.
It is good to be back on track, though it was entirely unexpected after I had given up the academic job search.