| Blog Entry - Friday, April 20th, 2007 | Add / Read (0) |
Thursday was a good media day for English teachers and other language geeks. I know you're always looking for clips to play in class to enhance the multimedia experience for your students.
This morning on they way to work, I was lucky enough to be running a few minutes late. When I run late, I sometimes get to hear my favorite NPR show - Engines of our Ingenuity. Today's Engine's episode (transcript or audio of episode 1926) was a discussion by guest Andrew Boyd on the topic of rhetoric. Rhetoric's original meaning is persuasion, although it has come to mean any complex writing. English, humanities, history, and philosophy teachers probably have a good background in discussing rhetoric's origins - popularized by the sophists in ancient Greece, sophist rhetoric was attacked by Plato as not leading to truth. Take a listen to this episode and consider Aristotle's belief that "logic is required to find truth but rhetoric is necessary to communicate truth." This clip would be a good introduction to rhetorical writing or speaking, dissecting persuasive writing (ads or marketing), or convincing students that "persuasive communication isn't an unpleasant afterthought, it's a vital part of bringing ingenious ideas to life."
Then on The Colbert Report - the Colbert versus Sean Penn "Meta-free phor all; Shall I Nail Thee to a Summer's Day?"(video)... Who does metaphor-offs? I love Colbert! "Love is a full-length mirror?" lost out to "love is a battlefield" in the human emotions category. Of course, if you want to show this clip, you'll need to be comfortable showing/discussing George Bush's dirty and blood-soaked underwear and its metaphorical meanings, because that was Penn's metaphor-of-choice for the evening. Still, he beat Colbert 10,000 to 1 in the contest, moderated by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Giggle. Colbert closed with promises of a hyperbole-off with George Clooney in the future. I can hardly wait!
Some links of interest regarding rhetoric or metaphors:
Read Aristotle's Rhetoric as hypertext.
Then, take a look at some links for rhetoric and composition - from definitions to blogs and writings. You might also want to familiarize yourself with some rhetorical terms, from alliteration to zeugma, with examples.
If you're thinking about producing some rhetoric yourself, you might look at some examples, first, from this archive of speeches, sermons, lectures, debates, etc.
What's a metaphor? Here's one answer. And some suggestions for using metaphors in creative writing. Some metaphors we live by and with. And some metaphor poems: I taught Fog and Fire and Ice and The Eagle when taught metaphor and simile in poetry a few weeks ago. So much fun!
Author: Libby Ingrassia
Posted at: 11:08:10 PM
