Jeff Rice

The 1963 Hip-Hop Machine: Hip-Hop Pedagogy as Composition.

I begin with an analogy: teaching research-based argumentation and critique in composition studies is like learning how to perform hip-hop music. My analogys focus on argumentation does not exclude traditional methods of argumentative pedagogy based on models like Stephen Toulmins complex hierarchies or the Aristotelian triad of deliberative (offering advice), forensic (taking a side in a debate, often a legal or controversial matter), and epideictic (a speech of praise or blame appealing to an already won-over audience) discourse. Instead, I pose the analogy as a first step towards developing alternative or additional ways to engage composition students with the argumentative essay. In choosing hip-hop as a model for the composition essay, I attempt to draw upon a dominant form of contemporary culture familiar to the majority of students I encounter in my classrooms. Does a relationship between hip-hop and com-

Networked Exchanges, Identity, Writing

This article argues for a rhetoric of networked exchanges that focuses on the response. Working from Spinuzzis call for a rhetoric of horizontal learning, it examines two kinds of online writing spaces in order to propose such a rhetoric. After surveying conflicting, academic attitudes regarding networked exchanges, the article proposes the response as a type of professional communication. A specific message board thread and a series of blog carnivals serve as examples of the rhetoric of response, a way that horizontal learning produces a specific type of networked writing identity. The article concludes with a call for response-based communication practices.

Urban Mappings: A Rhetoric of the Network

This article outlines a rhetoric of digital mapping through the specific example of Detroit, Michigan. In particular, the essay challenges representational mapping by offering a database driven rhetoric. This rhetoric, the essay argues, offers possibilities for new media invention and arrangement practices.

Writing about cool: Teaching hypertext as juxtaposition

This article takes as its departure point the near simultaneous work on notions of cool, technology, and composition in 1963, to begin discussion on how the juxtaposition of these moments can lead to an electronic rhetoric. Based on classroom work done at the University of Florida in two courses entitled “Writing About Cool,” the article presents juxtaposition as a method for writing electronically. Because this particular juxtaposition revolves around the word cool, the rhetoric proposed here is called a rhetoric of cool. The article frames a rhetoric of cool by describing how temporal events in the respective fields of writing, technology, and cultural studies seen in juxtaposition provide a model for electronic research. The article considers the influential 1963 Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs), writings by Albert Kitzhaber, Marshall McLuhan, Douglas Engelbart, and Amiri Baraka, and demonstrates how these works inform writing instruction in a contemporary networked writing classroom. Finally, the article examines how students working with hypertext, drawing from these works and juxtapositions, are able to not only write about cool, but are able to write cool as well.

Woodward Paths: Motorizing Space

This essay takes up the call for a rhetoric of distributed space by proposing a folksonomic rhetoric. Folksonomies, systems in which users may name any object, space, idea, or image any name they want, offer technical communicators new possibilities for how they work in network environments. As a way to explore the possibility of a folksonomic rhetoric, this essay examines 1 specific space, Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, as if it were a folksonomic space.

Professional Purity: Revolutionary Writing in the Craft Beer Industry

This study focuses on dominant terms whose usage generates a specific identity in the craft beer industry: revolution and crafty. Actors who engage these terms—brewers, writers, and consumers—create a narrative about the industry that gives craft beer a professional identity. The study explores how specific industries depend on the circulation of taxonomies in order to establish an identity with both a customer base and each other.

The Rhetoric of New Media

When we speak about new media, we must also speak about how we study and teach new media. I want to begin such a discussion with a quotation from Robert Atwan’s Convergences (2002, xxxviii), a popular composition textbook whose thematic focus is new media.