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While teaching Rhetoric 306 at UT Austin I'm realizing that students often have a tough time getting past newspapers. In our class students are expected to follow a controversy throughout the semester and, among other things, map out the various positions in the controversy. This is most easily done with argumentative texts, texts that take strong positions. The problem that many of my students are having is that they often grab the first newspaper article on their controversy that they see, not realizing that even a fairly biased news organization is not going to provide them with rich, explicitly argumentative language for analysis, unless it's an editorial article.

All,

I think that helping students distinguish textual analysis from contextual
analysis, and eventually combining the two, is a big part of teaching 306 at UT. Today I'm doing an online chat in class in which I'll be asking students to bat around some ideas about the text and context of a website, http://www.venganza.org/ . I think this site is great for class discussion. If you're not familiar with it, it's the website for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which originated with a satirical letter to the Kansas State School Board when they voted to eliminate evolution from their state's science curriculum. So, there's a lot of text and context to work with here. The letter itself is posted, as is fan mail and hate mail. I think one has to be careful when dealing with the site though. Attention to audience is critical. If I can boil it down, I think the site is extremely effective with those who are ant-Creationist and believe in evolution. But as a piece of persuasion, the site certainly fails to convince Creationists. So, the site provides rich potential for dicussion of how a rhetorical act can succeed or fail with different audiences. As I said, there's a lot of context to work with here.