Home
Hi, I'm Mike.
These are my notes ✏️
This start page isn't an index; it just has some starting points for this site as a whole.
Here are some topics I'm interested in:
I didn't discover rhetoric until my Master's degree, when I attended a random writing workshop for OGS and SSHRC scholarship applications. It was revelatory, and seemed much, much more useful than the things I'd learned in high school. I now tend to teach a lot of rhetoric in my classes because it's what I wish someone had taught me.
Some writing- or rhetoric-related topics to start:
- Engfish is bad and I hate it
- I think a lot about 🏗 rhetorical structure. Some starting points:
- your audience encounters your text linearly
- the rhetorical stasis questions help with structure
- if you have a very bold claim, you should address the refutatio early on
- subtle signals and metalanguage are cool and good
- an ''I'' anecdote is a fun way to begin an exordium; sometimes it takes the form of an I was once like you... anecdote.
Some bits of research I'm interested in:
- I'm obsessed with metonymy
- Metonymy is surprisingly difficult to define;
- Related to the problems of defining it, it's really hard to distinguish metonymy from synecdoche. I think one way into this problem is thinking of metonymy as fundamentally indexical (in the Peircean sense);
- Metonymy relies on pre-existing knowledge;
- One or more metonymic shifts are often what make metaphors work in the first place;
- Some interesting examples of metonymy.
- The Book of Nature
- Even thoughts are signs
- I'm also interested in literature, style and meaning:
- Dickens's style blurs metaphor and metonymy
- Marx's style and dialectic emphasize the world of forms and appearances
- metaphor and decorum
- A very pretentious page about Percy Shelley and the dialectic (and the role of poetry).
- "symbolism'' in The Secret Agent
- bad readings treat texts like a symbolic formula to be worked out; good readings, by contrast, understand that texts tell you what they mean.
FAQ 💬
Why does this site exist?
This site is an example of a 🌱digital garden.
It's kind of like note-taking, except that writing in public forces me to be slightly more rigorous or organized with my presentation, and this has advantages for my thinking and writing habits. ("The best way to learn something is to teach it..." etc.)
For example, when I first wrote this Start page, I was teaching communication courses remotely, and writing out explanations of concepts like ethos, pathos and logos can be re-purposed for my teaching, almost as a pseudo-script or outline for a video or something like that. Theoretically, at some point in the future, it might be the kind of thing where I can just link students to specific pages here and there.