platt teaching demo
TRANSCRIPT
Overview
• The underlife of an essay
• What is delivery? A (very) brief explanation
• Group activity: delivering writing
• Wrap-up
Once upon a time I wrote an essay…
• Context/Venue: MaleaPowell’s History and Theory of Rhetoric course at MSU, 2008
• Audience: Malea and my peers
• Purpose: Final project demonstrating my learning
I decided propose it to a conference…
• Context/Venue: Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference 2009 at MSU
• Audience: Colleagues, grad students, other rhetoricians
• Purpose: To present findings to the field
To do that, I had to do many things…
• Research the conference
• Write a proposal abstract
• Submit the abstract
• Wait
• Receive my acceptance
• Prepare the essay for presentation
I presented my essay…
• Context/Venue: Feminisms and RhetoricsConference 2009 at MSU
• Audience: Colleagues, grad students, other rhetoricians
• Purpose: To present findings to the field
And someone asked to publish it!
I decided to publish it!
• Context/Venue: Moon City Review, a journal of poetry, stories, art, and criticism
• Audience: Colleagues in many different fields of English studies including creative writers
• Purpose: Sharing ideas about race and performance; expression…and a publication!
I had some work to do…
• Research the journal• Do a formal submission
(write a cover letter, navigate the Submittablesite, etc.)
• Wait• Receive comments from the
editors• Revise and re-send the essay• Wait
And my essay was finally published…
• Platt, Julie. “When I Played Indian.” Moon City Review 2010 (Fall 2010).
• But is this the end of the story of this essay? Or is it only the beginning?
deliverythe public presentation of discourse.
• Like the canon of style, deliveryrefers to how you write/say/do something.
• In antiquity, it was mainly associated with oratory.
• Once considered the most important canon, it fell out of favor and has been “recovered” several times.
• Its evolution has tended to follow patterns of technological change.
• Today, delivery is more than gesture or intonation. It concerns both the medium and the circulation of discourse.
• Media: alphabetic text, video, audio, graffiti, etc. What form discourse takes.
• Circulation: letters, blogs, YouTube, billboards, etc. How discourse moves.
• Many steps were involved in delivering my writing outside of its original classroom context.
• In order to circulate it (make it move), I had to change its medium (change its form).
• I had to consider changes in things like context/venue, audience, and purpose.
• Many steps are required to bring a piece of writing out into the world, but this is often invisible.
• This “underlife” of writing is what we can make visible by paying attention to delivery.