Time to Take a Breath...

When I think of the first day class, I remember feeling somewhat comfortable because I have already taken the class Rhetoric. This helped me through the first week and gave me a head start

on some of the things we would be talking about in class. As we have gotten further along in the class the thing that has stuck out to me is the actual use of what we have learned. In a lot of the English classes I have taken it’s all about learning and understanding theories. But not necessarily putting those lessons to use. By doing the main assignments and the mini assignments we have to take what we have learned and apply them

to real life situations. By doing these projects it has helped me develop a better understanding of the things we have been learning in class so far.

We have learned several key words through out this class so far but there are several that stick out to me that I would like to point in this blog post.

The Rhetorical Situation: From Bitzer we learned that from a speaker, an audience and exigence a rhetorical situation can be formed. I feel like the good example of this was the Pearl Harbor that I used in my last mini assignment. When from a tragedy a nation was expecting a Response that would help alleviate their fears and their speaker was Frank D. Roosevelt.

The Five Canons: With the five canons of rhetoric I think are very important especially for writing majors. With Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory and Delivery you have the basis to write and compose in everyday life. With everything we write or say we have to have a purpose. The five canons help us take all of our thoughts and place them in ideal situations so that we can get our point across. Cicero first brought us these points and was one of the first men to truly master these tools. Although we can think of the canons in terms or writing we can use them in speeches, conversations and everyday use. A lot of people actually use these canons without actually understanding what they are doing.

Remediation: The last key term I want to touch is remediation. This so far has probably been the toughest concept to understand. But once you get to use the concepts yourself it becomes easier to understand. Bolter and Grusin define remediation as “ new media refashion prior media forms.” The best example I can think of is Harry Potter. This Franchise began as a book, eventually was remediated into a movie, game, cloth

es, and action figures. Even though it retains most of the same traits from the original books, people have refashioned Harry Potter to be acceptable into different media forms.

I myself think knowledge is created to each individual. Each person has different interests and things they like and will obtain and learn things based on that. The best thing to do to acquire knowledge is to learn about the topic at hand and then try to use and experience that situation for you. For me personally you can tell me how something works, but until I try it and mess around with it myself I wont grasp a full understanding of it.

As we come to the final few weeks of this class, I hope I can take what I have learned so far and have it further my development as EWMer.