Purposeful Avoidance of Toulmin

I'm working on a book report right now, and I'm reading David Zarefsky's President Johnson's War on Poverty. It's an interesting case study for a few different reasons, especially in relation to the work we're doing in the Arguing Differently.

First off, the title itself plays into our Argument Culture discussions. The book unpacks the 'War on Poverty' language, and shows how the policies of this program forward this structural metaphor into the popular subconscious of the nation. Johnson's use of this metaphor is expansive, making popular speeches that include 'waging the war', 'full-frontal attack', and 'weapons and tactics'. Zarefsky even extends his analysis to examine the impact it had on the military at this time. I haven't gotten too far into it, but I hope to see how a Rhetorical scholar approaches these issues.
Not only that, but I've never given much thought to how Rhetoric plays into public policy debates, how Rhetoric can influence the policy decisions of America, and how Presidential language impacts all of those things as well. For example, even though this was a Congressional program to be deliberated by members of the legislature, the president enacted the legislation, led a program of popular appeals to get it passed, and then celebrated the success of his program. These rhetorical acts impacted public policy, and I hope to see how those arguments are connected.

It's a new form of argument for me, a form of arguing differently. I'll keep you updated on how it's going, heck, I may even do a presentation on it one of these days :)

In other news: Toulmin. More on that later.

The Argument Culture in Action

I've been monitoring the coverage of the protests (uprising, revolution, unrest, etc) in the Middle East with a bit more skeptical eye since reading Tannen.
Look at the slide show on the front page of the New York Times website from today, and see if you can identify some themes that Tannen talked about in her chapters on the media:

http://www.nytimes.com/

Even though the events of the past few days have become decidedly more violent, there's certainly a pattern in these photos: violence, conflict, machismo. Where are the peace-keepers/makers? Where are the medical personnel? Where are the peaceful protesters? And, in the event that this latest wave of violence has made those things impossible, where was the 20 slide photo slideshow when the protests were non-violent, peaceful, and celebratory?

All the News that's Fit to Print (but only if it's violent and we can get some sweet action shots of people hurting each other).

Tannen, in short, ...

... was enjoyable. Each chapter was clear and insightful, and the topics on which she focused her chapters were all things I find very interesting. I'll admit, I did skim some of the middle chapters, but her discussion of the press and politics convinced me of their centrality of creating the argument culture.
Some minor criticism:

• The research in this book was mostly good, but at times I felt her sources didn't exactly support her claims or were shaky to begin with. This book straddles the popular/academic divide, so I'm not 100% sure I can hold this against her.
  
• She used her synonyms for the argument culture interchangeably. Do argument culture, culture of argument, culture of aggression, and the others all mean the same thing?
• the printing of my book got screwed up, and on three separate even-numbered pages, the text on the far right of each line got cut off. Talk about annoying (Note: I know this has nothing to do with Tannen, but I have half a mind to write those jokers over at Ballantine and give them a piece of my mind :)

These things were minor, and of course, I look forward to discussing her examples (especially her own 'war' metaphor describing Grad School as bootcamp) in class on Thursday.

For you Comp-Rhet people out there (and everyone who has taught writing to beginning writers): What did you think of Tannen's slight digression into the memory of her teaching in the FYC classroom? On page 95 she gives an example of how journalists could change their professional methods to mitigate the 'Argument Culture.' Tannen realized she had more to offer her students than simple copy-editing when '[she] figured out there was a lot [she] could still offer the students, but [she] had to step back and regard their papers from a more holistic perspective, thinking about what they were trying to do in the paper and how well they succeeded in doing it.' Journalism would improve because journalists would be 'freed of the task of looking for errors, not only readers but writers and commentators could step back and take a more holisitc view, which would, in the end, be a more accurate one' (94).
I played the believing game on this one, and since I approach my role as an instructor the same way, I think she's onto something here. Holistic thinking, analysis, and critique may well be the key to unlocking a non-argument culture.