Paying it Forward Through Rhetorical Velocity

Rhetorical velocity (Ridolfo & DeVoss 2009) for the sake of generating plagiarizer-friendly texts that can be recomposed for additional purposes perhaps outside the intentions of the original rhetor or rhetors is a nifty pedagogical strategy for teaching students about the vulnerability of their texts, interconnectedness of their rhetorical subjectivities, and the impact of the dromosphere (Brown 2012) to which they subject their writing. I’ve actually known about rhetorical velocity before being introduced to this text but just didn’t have a word for what I noticed going on across the internet. TMZ or another leading editorial would release a bombshell report about some celebrity, and other B list editorials would pick it up as if their own. Curious, I’d read the lesser knowns for signs of plagiarism. There wouldn’t be any; instead these third parties had simply recomposed original stories for their own intents and purposes. Thinking about the composition classroom, then, and shared rhetorical subjectivities of students, might be worthwhile to, instead of having them write for a grade, have them write for the future insofar as their writing will get taken up by future writers in training? I mean might it be more pedagogically sound to prompt the students to locate themselves in the tradition of being writing students whose writing can be (and perhaps should be) taken up by future writing students for the purposes of not just learning how to write rhetorical/academically, but also can be recomposed for their own purposes. Such an approach might better charge students with paying more attention to genre conventions associated with, say, writing a research paper, while also alleviating the stress that comes with choosing a research topic. Students will, then, have the added benefit of learning about a topic that they otherwise wouldn’t pay any mind, while also working through metrics of an effective research paper with a nod to future use thereof based on their decisions for the document. It also has the potential to disrupt the kind of a plagiarism  frowned upon at the academy by encouraging students to see others’ work as a starting point toward their own original writing; instead pilfering others’ works and passing it off as their own, what if students were encouraged as per rhetorical velocity to “strategize theorizing for how a text might be recomposed by a third party (i.e. themselves), and how this recomposing may be useful or not to the short- or long-term objectives of the rhetorician” (Ridolfo & DeVoss 2009)? By synchronizing at present student writing with future recomposition strategies made by future writers in the composition classroom, I wonder if the writing enterprise itself would feel like isolated and individualized, and rather more interconnected and subject to the dromosphere (Brown 2012) where students can more actively engage in invention and delivery strategies as opposed to favoring content generation and ethical argumentation.

References

[BROWN, 2012]; [RIDOLFO & DEVOSS, 2009]

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