Burke actually kinda... made sense? What?

For the purposes of this blog, I'd like to focus on the article that drew me, Ernest Stromberg's "Rhetoric and American Indians."

"You persuade a man [sic] only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his" (qtd. in Stromberg 5). After having dealt with his royal we, having Kenneth Burke applied to cross cultural rhetoric in such a painless way was quite refreshing.

As I stated in my last blog, academics traditionally come at the study of rhetoric from a Western perspective, "as if efficient writing was developed by Aristotle and everything before that was cave scratchings." In Ernest Stromberg's case it's not a matter of the chronological, it's a matter of outside v. inside the rhetorical circle. By that I mean, white writers view Native American rhetorics as simplistic, or even worse, non-existent.

In the outset of Stromberg's piece, he asks "Are there multiple rhetorics?" (Stromberg 1). This simple question frontloads his entire argument that even though academics profess a belief in multiple rhetorics, we continue to view rhetorics from non-white peoples through our own linear lenses. This contradiction is what prompts me to make the connection to FYC.

As instructors, we have been where our students sit now. We've gone through and been taught that there is one right model in high school. We've had our patterns shattered when we reached university... or did we? We still feedback on students' papers in such a way as to pull them back into the traditional writing fold.

Stromberg quotes Stephen Riggins and his process of "othering" (Stromberg 3). If one student dares put their toe across that line of alternate discourse, we lecture that it's okay, but in writing... I think not, good sir! Stromberg's application to Native American rhetorics is one in which he states that Native Americans must mask their own rhetorics to mesh with Western traditions just to be read, let alone understood. Academics have one way of doing things.

"Even as Burke defines rhetoric as a process of establishing 'identification' between self and other(s)... many American Indians [were] haunted by an official United States rhetoric of assimilation that proclaimed a unity just so long as it was 'our' unity...a shared sense of identity, was to be only one way: the white way" (Stromberg 3).

FYC students are haunted in the same way, by one unfamiliar writing territory that they must traverse in order to make the grade. Formatting, diction, vocabulary... all these things and more make up a writing environment that is hostile at best if one is not familiar with it.

We must, as writing teachers, talk the talk and walk the walk. If we lecture about alternative discourses, let the students use them. Let them use their voices, and use different lenses to view their writing. Don't let unfamiliar patterns result in a "frequently uninterested and even hostile audience" (Stromberg 6). Let them do things their way instead of yours (or academia's). Let us try to correct the intellectual imbalance.