Summary on "H1N1 Virus and Video Production"

Michael Pennell introduces a new project in his first-year writing class as a tweek to his syllabus before school starts. This project consisted of an optional college video contest project that would push students to inform colleagues about the H1N1 Virus and health professionals to support them for prizes as an incentive. Pennell found this college video project as a good and new way to rhetorical approaches. 


The first few weeks in Pennell's class consisted of working on this project and students took into consideration their similarities with other students, but soon faced certain difficulties with technology. Some students didn't have cameras, the proper softwares, information, and many students found themselves imposing alternatives for limited space. Unfortunately, many students found this project as an obstacle with limited resources.


Although Pennell agreed with Jason Ranker who stated “Students who work in similar multimedia writing environments may find new, motivating, self-guiding purposes for writing as afforded within the whole activity of producing a multimedia, digital video text.” on the great rhetorical approach of  videos, he found that it was most definitely a project that could not be fully expanded with students' imaginations because of their limited resources. 


As a conclusion, Pennell found that most students preferred the usual techniques that a regular first year writing class would include rather than the new approach he took. Although he realized the attention grabbing was more effective than a traditional paper, he found that most students preferred not to deal with the difficulties of a new, different project. This relates to what I'm learning in my English 1311 course because we are currently in the process of a discourse community project that gives of the option of a video, billboard, or a pamphlet. I agree completely with Pennell because video production is a good way to grab attention, but there are limited resource that must be dealt with; as a result, my group and I chose to take the non-technological route prior to this reading to avoid the potential problems that we would have.

Pennell, M. (2010). H1N1 virus and video production. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 10 (3), 568-573.

Summary on "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love"

In Jim Corder's "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love," Corder creates his own definitions about everyone's life in general in order to prove that people have different stories, but can still coexist together by being loving, accepting, and understanding. Corder creates his own assumptions about everyone being a narrative and having their own arguments. Although this may be difficult to understand, Corder claims that we are all fiction-makers/historians and that we're each walking narratives. What he means by this is that we're all storytellers of our own lives. The narratives are life experiences and arguments define us as the people we are; we're constantly just standing some where in our lives telling others about our narratives. Corder explains arguments as what we've become. Argument in Corder's perspective doesn't mean what we all assume an argument to be, but it means perceptions that make us who we are, the decisions we've made, and how we've conceived them.

As story-tellers, what we do with our lives is just basically telling others about our lives and presenting it with the decisions that we've made and the experiences that we have within our lives. Corder states that we come upon other narratives that dont exactly have the same point of view as our own, and this can cause conflict. Unfortunately, Corder states that we must live amongst other narratives. Corder believes that it may be a little tough to compromise with other opposing narratives, but states that we can compromise by seeing each other, knowing each other, presenting each other, and embracing each other. Rather than avoiding the opposition, we can learn to live with them.

Corder's research deals with being able to coexist with opposing narratives and the certain methods that can be used to be able to live with them. He goes into detail about Carl Rogers's method. "the therapist-client" method and Aristotle's method. Corder goes on to explain Roger's therapist-client approach anf the certain requirements that mucst be met. Corder agrees that the therapist, acting as the audience, should be understanding and sympathetic towards the client, the story-teller.

As a result, Corder believes that we can all live in a world where we each learn to compromise  with one another and how we can learn to speaks and hear a commodious language. A commodious language meaning there's enough space and convenience  for everyone. This relates to my English 1311 course because we're currently working on a community problem research project that needs an opposing view. This is helpful because we can learn to see the oppsing view's prespective and try to accept it for their reasons on beliving this.

Corder, J.W. (1985). Argument as emergence, rhetoric as love. Rhetoric Review, 4(1), 16-32.