The Wiki Debate

So, Thursday in class we watched a debate about Wikipedia. The three people in the debate where the founder of wikipedia - Jimmy Wales, a blogger/author against wikipedia - Andrew Keen (or at least the way it operates) and the mediator.

I thought the mediator did a very good job of allowing the two debaters to speak freely and not interrupting too much, just enough to keep the conversation flowing. I also thought the debaters did a nice job of being friendly and respectful of each other so it was just a big smeer campaign.

That being said, I am pretty confident if I was in that debate defending Wikipedia, I would slapped Andrew Keen about 5 minutes in and then walked away. It was extremely frustrating just to watch him sit there and say the same thing over and over, even after Jimmy Wales had addressed it and rendered it irrelevant. It was like Andrew had prepared two arguments for the debates - 1) contributors should be paid, and 2) APPARENTLY if information on some articles is longer than information on other articles, all hell breaks loose and the world as we know it comes to an end.

He completely failed to grasp the concept that it is not print media and the length is not limited by paper. Articles can be as long as they want, so why not just let it be - the more information the better right?

Finished with instructions

It is really nice to be done with our Instructions project and have it turned in. While I am not as tired of instructions as I was (and still am) with rhetoric, it's always nice to move on and study new things. The instructions project was pretty fun to do and definitely very valuable. I'm sure I will be writing a lot of instructions in my Computer Science career so I'm glad I was able to spend some time learning how to write them properly.

The peer evaluations were also really nice because it was a great way to get honest feedback about the instruction set before turning them in. When writing instructions for my career in the future, I will certainly have family/friend (or at least co-workers) read through them first and provide me with their own "peer evaluation" of my work.

Instructions and My Topic

Wow, never thought I'd be this happy to write a set of instructions, but after two weeks of talking about rhetoric - I'm thrilled to move on! I am pretty excited to learn about writing instructions though as I know this is a skill that will come in handy in every major, especially mine (computer science). I am sure I will have to write plenty of instructions for computer programs I write.

My topic for our assignment is "how to repair the disc read error on an xbox 360." Over the years, I have fixed a few of my friends xbox's that had this error and saved them the time/money required to send an xbox into to Microsoft and get it fixed. I figured this would be a good topic because it is beneficial for anyone with a xbox 360 as they are pretty prone to errors, and a common error is the disc read error. This occurs when someone inputs a disc into an xbox, and the screen still says "insert a playable disc."

My hope is that after completing this assignment, I will be able to handle any task where I am handed something and told "write instructions for how to use this," and able to write effective instructions for any program I write in the future.

Rhetorical Situations

During our last class, we spent the majority of time talking about Bitzer's The Rhetorical Situation. Our group focused mainly on the specific things that (according to Bitzer) make a situation rhetorical. To sum them up, there must be a situation (exigence), an audience, a fitting response, a situation that happens BEFORE the response is composed, and finally, the situation must actually be real and not fictive.

I agree with all of these except that the situation must happen first. I do not understand why that is necessary. Pretend we had a president that was involved in some sort of conspiracy, created a speech in response to a situation, then made that situation happen and presented the speech to the public, in an effort to persuade them that everything would be fine and they were taking care of the situation. Would that not be a rhetorical situation?

Realizations

Today in Technical Writing I had three realizations. The first two are pretty unimportant and the third was just something that does not make sense to me and I feel should be changed (although probably never will).

First - and let me start by saying I'm not trying to cause problems, just stating what's on my mind - we are expected to print a whopping 182 pages for our Technical Writing class (I downloaded the files and looked at their page lengths).  This semester every undergraduate has a print quota of 350 pages per semester. The entire policy can be found here.  I suppose it would be possible to print double sided, but this will still use just under 100 pages which is only counting the reading and not including any assignments one may want to print, or any resources one may need to print off for any other projects in this class.  That is almost 1/3 of our total free prints. While I don't print nearly as much as other students and I'm sure the new print quotas will effect others way more than myself, I find it a bit surprising that such a huge chunk of our free prints must be used for 1 class, when most students have 4 or 5 other classes as well.  Now, I have read the policy and see that faculty/staff are allowed unlimited free prints. However, I also took a moment to read the F.A.Q. about the policy and it states that faculty printing will be monitored for abuse. I don't know how much the "accepted" amount for faculty printing is but I'm sure almost 4000 pages (or 2000 double sided pages) - for a class of 20 students and 100 pages per student - would be pushing the "accepted" limit.  Therefore, perhaps a compromise could be reached where half of our readings are printed for us and we print the other half? Just a thought I had, as I stated printing isn't a huge deal to me. Moving on.

Second - My second realizations was that I was probably not going to enjoy blogging this semester, however it is always nice to express things we are feeling so I'm thinking I might enjoy keeping a blog. Not sure yet.

Third - Finally, I realized that rhetoric has a negative connotation and I don't understand why this is the case.  Well that's not true, I understand why it has that connotation I just don't agree with it. I suppose really it depends on which definition of "rhetoric" you choose to use.  If we go by the definition of rhetoric from our reading which says that rhetoric is "the systematic study and intentional practice of effective symbolic expression," (Herrick pg. 7) then it becomes apparent that rhetoric is not necessarily a bad thing. So really, the people who use it for "bad" things are just assholes.  Herrick goes on to define "effective" as "achieving the purposes of the symbol-user." With this definition, just about everything is rhetoric including art, literature, music - almost everything.  All artists do their best to use symbols (whether they be musical notes or paint colors) to create a feeling in their audience.  Regardless, I feel rhetoric's connotation will never change because a word's connotation, much like a person's reputation is very hard to change. People have falsely given rhetoric a negative reputation but right or wrong I don't see it changing so I suppose we just have to accept it.