Rhetoric at UT Austin

I teach rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Most of my students arrive believing rhetoric means spin. By the end they have usually figured out that it means paying attention to how a text is doing what it does, which is a harder and more useful skill.

Rhetoric and Writing: Food

A first-year rhetoric course built around what we eat. We read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma closely, because food arguments turn out to be an unusually good training ground: everybody already has a position, the stakes are concrete, and the rhetoric runs from federal subsidy policy to the label on a carton of eggs.

Pollan’s seven words — eat food, not too much, mostly plants — look like simple advice. Unpacking why that sentence persuades, and what it quietly assumes, is most of a semester’s work.

Zen Rhetoric

Zen texts read as rhetorical artifacts rather than devotional ones. Koans, transmission stories, and Dogen’s essays are all built to do something to a reader, and they are strange precisely because they refuse the normal moves. A koan does not argue. It jams the machinery of arguing and waits.

We work through Huang Po, the Four Noble Truths as a rhetorical structure, and what happens to persuasion when a tradition holds that language cannot reach the thing it points at. My own scholarly work lives closest to this course; see the writing page.

Rhetoric of the Essay

The essay treated as a way of thinking rather than a format for reporting conclusions you already had. Montaigne’s question, que sais-je, is the design brief: an essay is an attempt, and it should show the attempting. We read closely and write a great deal, and I push students toward the version of a draft where they stop performing certainty.

Rhetoric of Animals

What happens to rhetoric when the other party cannot speak your language. The course runs through animal representation, the arguments we make on behalf of creatures who never authorized us, and the strange work done by observation versus judgment. Reading a dog is a rhetorical act. So is describing one.

How I teach

Two commitments, and they pull in the same direction.

Difficulty is the content. A student who gets a competent essay from a machine has produced a document and learned nothing, because the learning was located in the struggle they skipped. I would rather read a rough paragraph somebody fought for. This is also the argument of the book I am writing, so my classroom is where the thesis gets tested.

Urgency beats coverage. On good days students write their real question on the board and we work on that. A doctor you visit because something hurts is more useful than a doctor cornering you at a party with facts about the liver.

Speaking and workshops

I give talks on rhetoric, attention, Nietzsche and Zen, and on what writing instruction looks like now that machines can write. If that is useful to you, the contact form on the main page reaches me.