Ramiform Reading #1: September 19, 2015
A biweekly list inspired by Dave Pell’s superlative Next Draft. Return here every other weekend for more articles and essays.
This morning, I learned the adjective actionable:
Louis Tsai’s essay is worth your time, not least of all because he starts with our old ally, Ken Robinson. You should curate a list of this sort of book — ones full of insights and actionable ideas.
In this course, we’ll pair these optional, weekly readings with actionable ideas. I’ll give you some context for the piece, and then I’ll suggest what you might do as a reader — whether that’s to hone one of our substructural skills or to work on your own writing. As always, your experience of the text is paramount, and you can galvanize your peers by sharing that experience through some of our interstitial hubs.
① Greg Howard on RGIII
I look forward to any article by Greg Howard. His ability to weave narrative and argument together helps him stand out in the sea of voices that cover current events — anything from this speech by President Obama to the above story on the Washington Redskins. His response to the WDBJ shooting is another recent example of his cogent and careful prose.
You need to find writers to follow, ones who tackle issues you care about. Then you can pay attention to the way they write — the rhetoric and style they use — in order to develop your own voice. That’s the truest way that writers develop: by synthesizing and emulating and borrowing from others.
This particular article, ostensibly about the benching of Robert Griffin III, delves into the author’s relationship to the NFL. Look for the paragraph that catalogs Howard’s reasons for disliking the sport of football, for instance, and then unpack each idea. What does “contrived militarization” mean? How does “herky-jerky tediousness” (a great phrase) describe the sport itself?
② Tracy Moore on LinkedIn
Greg Howard’s articles are often published on Deadspin; this one, by Tracy Moore, appears on Jezebel, Deadspin’s sister site and part of the Gawker network. These sites support our idea (well, Neil Postman’s idea) that writing is the most powerful way to get to the truth: Each of them carves out a niche and lets its writers explore it.
Another way to look at this constellation of sites is as living rhetoric — the thinking and writing of real people outside of the strange environment of academics. In this environment, grappling with gender is always tricky, but it’s also always important.
When you read Moore’s essay, be sure to read the comments, too. Then think about whether you can create a Kinja account and wade into this sort of discussion, whether on Deadspin or Jezebel or io9. If you do wade in, report back to us.
③ Sam Biddle on 9/11
The comment section of this next article is as interesting as the article itself. First, though, try an ETA (or emulation-through-analysis; here is an annotated example) exercise:
- Identify Biddle’s thesis;
- list his support for that central claim; and then
- evaluate his style, especially his tone.
The comments often confuse or ignore elements of his thesis, which leads to reductive arguments. When folks grapple with his tone, however, they sometimes separate what he says from how he says it. This is critical to rational discourse: the ability to avoid tone-policing, or at least to separate it from the main ideas of a piece.
④ Lindy West on Nicole Arbour
This article from The Guardian incorporates a little of everything built into the substructure of this course: empathy, communication, self-awareness, and so on.
Like you did with Biddle, you can get a lot out of this by trying to analyze West’s central argument. For more specific ETA work, focus on how she approaches the essay— the use of humor in the intro, the catalog of details, and then the contrast of a shorter sentence at the end.
Then look at the last two paragraphs, which bring the essay to its conclusion. This is an excellent example of reactive empathy that also incorporate a call for proactive empathy — what we are discussing in class this week. And what can you make of West’s idea that “male approval can be a comfortable harbour while it lasts”?
⑤ Dylan Matthews and Jordan Sargent on Cecil the Lion
This is an older article, but far too important (especially in the context of our course) to leave out of this first collection. It is a response to an opinion piece by Vox’s Dylan Matthews:
Before you read those two essays, read this article by Jef Rouner. It speaks to one of the more important purposes of this course: to unsettle, examine, and rebuild your internal mechanism for interacting with and interpreting the world around you. (That long phrase is actually copied over from our course syllabus.)
To do that, you must challenge your self-efficacy when it comes to your own beliefs. Most of what you can read online has some argumentative focus, so you could wade into almost any website to apply Rouner’s logic. For these two essays, don’t ignore the rhetoric and style, but focus more on what the arguments stir up inside of you.
That’s it for the first edition of this first edition of Ramiform Reading. Come back on October 3 for more essays and articles.
