Today’s Plan:
- Booth Exercise #2
- Proposal Assignment
Booth Exercise
I haven’t had a chance to go over the Booth exercise from Wednesday yet, but I wanted to take another crack at using the Booth reading to generate potential research questions. Booth shares what in rhetoric we call a “heuristic,” essentially a fancy name for a brainstorming exercise–a systematic process for discovering an idea.
- Identify the Parts and How They Relate
- What are the Parts of Your Topic? How do They Relate?
- Is Your Topic a Part of a Larger System?
- Trace its Own History and Its Role in a Larger History
- How Has Your Topic Changed Over Time? When are the major events that shaped it?
- What audiences/groups care about your topic? How have their perspectives about the topic changed?
- Identify its Characteristics and the Categories that Include It
- What kind of thing is your topic? What is its range of variation? What terms or names does it go by?
- How do non-experts feel about your topic?
- Where in popular culture do we see your topic?
- Determine Its Value
- What values does your topic reflect? What values does it support? Contradict?
- How Good or Bad is Your Topic? Is it useful? Is it capable of abuse?
The next step: go through the responses above and ask yourself “so what?”
The Proposal Project
You should make a copy of this Google Document.
Homework
Your proposals will be due next Friday at midnight. I have office hours today if you have an idea about a potential project you’d like to discuss.
Reminder that we will not have class on Monday.
