This time, the lucky professor is none other than the legendary, quirky, wonderful Daniel Coffeen, my Rhetoric 10 professor. There won’t be as many as there were last time, but these are a bit . . . more. Rather than laughing at the giddy confusion of a woman who spends a little bit too much time thinking about cod, this post often containes some deceptively bright witticisms by the man who best embodies the field of study into which I am plunging. Many are from his introduction to the course, which itself is entitled “Introduction to Logic, Reason, and Argument.” Enjoy.
“Everything’s a freaking argument. . . . Everything. Every freaking thing. A flower plant, your eyelids, this chalkboard . . .”
“The problem with the statement ‘everything is an argument’ is that ‘everything is an argument’ is a valid argument, and so is ‘not everything is an argument’.”
“Formal logic is based on proof. Proof is the end of argument. Rhetoric begins precisely when the question of proof has been rendered moot. Only when proof is moot can rhetoric exist, when proof is an argument itself.”
Rhetoric is this strange beast . . . that helps us negotiate a world where there is no certainty.
“I came out of this program with a Ph. D. and I don’t know anything.”
[On current events, and in response to the previous]“I know we bombed a country in the Middle East, and it seemed rude.”
“A tulip is an argument: this is the way to be. Stand up straight. Bend a little. Be purple.”
“We’ll talk a lot about the argument grass makes.”
[Justifying a grant to fund the continued existence of the Rhetoric department]“Uh, I study the way things . . . go? In the world?”
[Closing his first lecture] “I’m skinny, but I can hold a lot of booze. People are surprised by that.”
“I might have made a good portion of this up; it doesn’t really matter.”
“As the name differs, so likewise does the reality”
“Go home, teach your parents this word [Ecceity, literally ‘this-ness’]. They’ll have you pulled out.”
“That’s our one enemy. The adamant prick”
“Tulips are so, like, groovy. They don’t need to proliferate, they stand alone”
“I urge you to get through an hour without some phatic discourse [pauses and meaningless utterings like “um”].”
“Your hair is brown, true or false. Rhetoric is the hippest major, true or false. Coffeen is full of shit, true or false. These things are verifiable, right?”
“I did my laundry today . . . that’s a sentence that should never leave somebody’s mouth [speaking of its banality, not of the virtues of cleanliness].”
“What’s at stake is whether you’re afraid of life or you enjoy it. That’s rhetoric.”
“There is something about being in a frat that means you have to like bad music.”
[On professionalism, his lack of it, and the reasons for professors’ dislike of him at an art academy] “I mean I can be an asshole, but these guys are all assholes, so if it’s on that grounds, then we’re all kind of equal.”
“An MD has never told me one fucking thing that I didn’t already know. But I can’t write my own prescriptions, so I have to go see these idiots.”
“Do you know what I’m talking about? Wait until you’re older and start to die.”
“I have always wanted to start this thinktank called ‘the society of individuals.’ [laughter]. It isn’t funny. But I guess you’re laughing and that’s the point.”
“Multilogical? Polylogial, that sounds less grotesque.”
“Socrates is the Gene Kelley of philosophy.”
“The book [Plato’s Phaedrus] says by the end . . . that all writing is play, it is never serious. You’re reading the fucking thing! I don’t understand how the history of the world missed the irony, but it did. . . . This is not subtle, he’s hitting you over the head with it. ”
“Is the Socratic legacy that all young handsome men should love old poor men?”
And so concludes volume 2. Comment, if you dare.
And in particular, a note to graduate students in the history department at U.C. Berkeley.
Grading a paper because it is not written in a style that you enjoy reading in your spare time is not, repeat NOT, a legitimate grading method.
Constructive comments include things like “Your link here to the text is a bit weak” or “You might want to develop on this idea more.”
Ignorant, waste-of-ink comments include things like “this language is a little bureaucratic,” “wordy phrase,” and my particular favorite “this is a super-long sentence.”
It is actually unhelpful to grade a student’s paper by making wholly incorrect statements such as that you do not have to indent on the right as well as the left when making a block quote.
Finally, good argumentative writing builds upon the points made before it, and so words like “thus” help lead the reader (unless she doesn’t understand argumentative writing) and you should not suggest that the writer take them out; words and phrases like “in addition” detract significantly from a paper by making it seem as if the point that follows is tangential and in addition to the actual argument.
This is college. I’m not a history major, and you know for a fact that I passed high school with some degree of writing competency. You also know for a fact because we’ve discussed it several times that I am a Rhetoric major and understand how to make an argument. If I’m using bureaucratic language, it’s intentional. If I make a sentence long, it’s because I had a lot to say about an idea that was relevant, and I assumed that someone who had a college degree (in the humanities, no less) could follow an idea for more than eight words; apparently I was wrong. This is not a writing class, you are not a writing teacher, and I am majoring in, essentially, argument. I’m not saying that I know how to structure an argumentative paper better than you (although I’m certainly thinking it, thanks to your ignorance of how a BLOCK QUOTE is formatted), but please at least apply common sense to your grading practices. And if you’re not sure of something, look it up.
The only examples listed above that did not come back in red on a history paper I just received back today are the helpful ones about textual relevance; in fact, my paper had little to no comment on these subjects, those which are actually relevant to history. My point is that making pedantic, stylistic comments that betray your ignorance of the craft of writing do not help anyone, and applying them to a grade is downright wrong. Take College Writing R1A next semester, please, I strongly reccomend it. They’ll get you all sorted out on that formatting question.