Techne: January 2010

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Argument is Not Contradiction

In the interest of fostering a learning environment that both instructs and delights, I offer you Monty Python's classic "Argument Clinic." This is the skit I referenced in class (or at least in 303) last week. What is argument?

Enjoy!

Welcome to the Techne blog

The Techne blog is a public forum where writers enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Spring 2010 ILS200.303/304 practice their craft, contribute content, and invite discussion about rhetoric and writing. As you read the posts here--on this page as well as on our cohort blogs, linked below-- you are invited and encouraged to contribute to the discussion, respond to writers in the community, contribute your own work, and become an active part of our digital community; after all, there is nothing more important in thinking and writing than exchanging ideas with an audience, and "there is nothing more dangerous to an author as silence" (Samuel Johnson).

About the Class

"Tehne: A Multidisciplinary Workshop Exploring Writing as Rhetorical Craft,” as an extension of Dr. Shifra Sharlin's ILS 200 lecture, is taught by Christine Stephenson and is first and foremost a course about writing and rhetoric. Borrowed, for our purposes, from Aristotle's treatise On Rhetoric, the term “techne” refers to the art, skill, and practice of manipulating language—symbols—to access “ways of knowing”; it is for this reason that Aristotle defined rhetoric as “having the ability, in each case, to see the available means of persuasion”(1.2.1). This is a position we will explore in-depth in the first few weeks of our course.

Throughout the next sixteen weeks, our primary objective will be working together to explore our language; understand argument, reason, and expression; manipulate and interpret symbols and craft text. It is important to acknowledge, however, that the study and practice of writing involves a multitude of disciplines: art, anthropology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, neuroscience, and politics, just to begin. It is for this reason that professionals in the field often remark that “rhetoric is at once everywhere and nowhere.”

Techne

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Argument is Not Contradiction

Welcome to the Techne blog

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Cohort Blogs-Section 304

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National Grammar Day Countdown

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About the Class