booth: February 2005 Archives

A point that was driven home (for me at least) at the Northern Voice blog conference was that the weblog world is often thought of as “a million voices”, but it is actually a million *listeners*.

Check out Lee LeFever's How the Weblog World Listens. Needless to say, I thought instantly of Booth's book.

Thanks to all who have respondly positively to the idea of doing a distributed read&discuss of Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. I've been holding off on picking a date, partly because I know that several people have it on order, and partly because I've been too busy myself to start reading it.

I've concluded, however, that this is a recipe for procrastination of the "not until April" variety. So, I'm setting myself a deadline. I'm going to post my initial conversational foray next weekend sometime. I've actually carved out a little reading time for myself this week, and hope to be back down this week to a normal teaching and service load, so it's time to get crackin.

Neither Clancy nor myself really set up any ground rules for this, so I'm going to go with the rule of thumb "my house, my rules." Namely,

1. My first post will be a quick outline & summary of the book, and this post will be the hub, the best post to link to as an overview of the whole discussion.
2. No matter where you are, or whose post(s) you are responding to, please trackback the hub. It should make it easier to find each other's posts. If you don't have trackback, either leave a link in the comments, or drop me a note, and I'll add a link.
3. If you want to post an entry, and have no blog, drop me a note, and I can either add you temporarily as an author on this site, or simply post it here for you. Keeping a blog is not a prerequisite for participating.
4. My only other rule is to write with the assumption that everyone you write about will be reading you at some point or another. Given Booth's emphasis on Listening-Rhetoric, this one should be a no-brainer.

Anything I've forgotten?

I don't expect that everyone will be ready to go next weekend, but the point of distribution is that we don't all have to be on the same page at the same moment. See you in a week.