| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | Contact: Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss | |
| PEER-REVIEWED WORK | Phone: 517-555-2400 | |
| January 15, 2009, 09:01 AM EST | E-mail: ridolfoj@msu.edu and devossda@msu.edu |
East Lansing, MI – In this webtext, we propose that new concepts are needed to discuss increasingly common rhetorical practices that are, we think, not closely aligned with the ways in which rhetorical delivery has historically been situated. We are specifically interested in situations where composers anticipate and strategize future third-party remixing of their compositions as part of a larger and complex rhetorical strategy that plays out across physical and digital spaces. We find this type of thinking—the asking of “how might the text be rewritten?” and “why, where, and for whom might this text be rewritten?”—an increasingly important set of questions in a digital age characterized, for instance, by swift, easy, and deep web searching and by copying and pasting practices.
We introduce a new conceptual consideration in this webtext, what Jim Ridolfo has called “rhetorical velocity,” and we explore the rhetorical possibilities of composing for strategic recomposition. We propose that the field needs an even greater lexicon to explain the sort of rhetorical moves made by increasingly complex strategies of delivery.
In professional writing, an archetypical example of this sort of strategizing is the press advisory and media release—a document specifically and deliberately strategized by a writer or writers with inventive considerations conscious of third-party recomposing. We chose a press release design for this article because it is distributed as analog and digital, with specific strategic use and importance associated with each of these physicalities; it also demonstrates an implicit consideration and structure for its recomposition. Certainly, a press release is not the flashiest or most compelling example of rhetorical velocity in digital spaces, but we think this genre is a useful place to begin thinking about the strategic appropriation of compositions. This genre, though constrained by rigid formatting conventions, offers a useful starting point for thinking about how such strategizing may predate and also change shape with the widespread adaptation of digital composing literacies. Additionally, this genre—with its disposition to alphabetic text—offers quick, easily locatable research examples for discussion and comparison (see the Defense Department example we've included elsewhere in this webtext). This genre scaffolds well into classroom conversations, and challenges students and researchers to find, argue for, and discuss other instances and mediums where ideas change shape, gather speed, and are elsewhere delivered.
The term rhetorical velocity, as we deploy it in this webtext, means a conscious rhetorical concern for distance, travel, speed, and time, pertaining specifically to theorizing instances of strategic appropriation by a third party. In thinking about the concept, we drew from several definitions:
Combining these definitions allowed us to create a term (i.e., rhetorical velocity) that allows us to wrestle with some of the issues particular to digital delivery, along with layering in a concern for telos.
“We are proposing the beginning of a field conversation about how composers strategically design texts for re-appropriation by third parties,” said Jim Ridolfo, a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric & Writing at Michigan State University.
“When a rhetorician has successfully produced and strategized the third-party use of boilerplate files, text, images, and videos by a third party, a strategic type of ‘plagiarism’ becomes the desirable ‘end’,” said Jim Porter and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, faculty in Professional Writing at Michigan State University.
For more information visit http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/ridolfo-devoss/index.html
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