A Modicum of Success

Had our first workshop for fully developed drafts today in my Rhetoric class, and I’m pleased to report that a good number of my students seem to have moved beyond the binary thinking I was so distraught about last week. That’s not to say that they’re all there; far from it. My sample is clearly skewed because I know that the students with whom I worked today are the students for whom the light came on when I last ranted about the reductive nature of formulating all arguments as pro/con, good/bad. or right/wrong debates. I still have much work to do.

I was so crazed last week that I banned the use of the phrase “sides of an/the argument,” and said that I would stop reading whenever I came across that phrase and return the paper ungraded. And, while I’m not proud of having done so, it seems to have worked to the extant that if they can’t characterize a position as being on a particular “side” of an issue, they tend to fall back on the language I’ve been using in class and instead write about “argument(s) in circulation,” “conjectures,” and “available positions.”