I was searching the IUS website for a listing or information on hiring a ghostwriter and came across your bio page.

I have an idea for a book, but lack the structure and writing skills to deliver a serious book to a publisher.

I’ve created the table of contents and have organized information for certain areas that I would like to include in my book.

I’m looking to hire someone to assist in helping me write this book.

If you know anyone locally that would be a good resource for me to speak to or that could help me write this book I would appreciate you introducing me to them.

I appreciate any assistance you can provide.

Have a good evening!

Troy Stufflebean

Very nice post with honest reflections on the grad school experience. The FAQs you developed are insightful as well. I encourage you to check out http://www.gradshare.com, as we have some similar discussions taking place. You may want to participate, or pass the word on to any students that are interested in grad school. Keep up the great blog.

“the professor whose personality or teaching style gets under your skin.”
errr. this is something that affects your life and talking with others can be enlightening as long as it’s done in the right way. i.e. not exagerating or name-calling but talking realistically about the situation and how it affects you.

but yes we all need to talk about things more important than whether jon’s a good father, leave it to social services.

I’m an adjunct faculty member teaching Rhetoric and Composition at the Penn State Worthington Scranton Campus. While I taught a paragraph writing course last semester, this is my first time teaching rhet and comp.

From my contacts with other profs in the English department, I gather that the general approach is what I think of as strictly practical and contemporary. No one I spoke to provided any background whatever on the historic origins, development, and uses of rhetoric. Samples used were no earlier than 1990 or so. (Each class session I write a quote about writing on the board. Yesterday, no one had a clue who Mark Twain was or even what country he was from.) Objects for analysis were all contemporary and mostly focused not on the large cosmic questions of humanity or on worldviews, but on a one-sided presentation of mostly politically liberal opinion about gender and racial inequity.

To me, the course emphasis seems not to provide students with knowledge about their world (with reference to history before 1960), to encourage them to develop a coherent worldview, or to train them to analyze rhetoric but only to get them–when someone punches the “Narrative Essay” button, for example–to churn out a passable product. Granted, this is an 015-level course, whereas yours is an upper-level seminar class.

Nevertheless, I appreciated so much your statements regarding the nature of discourse, particularly this one: “Science is not really an objective discourse about the world. It is expressed in words, therefore rhetoric, therefore scientific progress is affected by assumptions about the nature of nature, about society, and politics, and other assumptions that are not objectively scientific.”

I’d like to respond to your posting in two ways: First, I wondered whether you have any suggestions for texts (poems, short stories, short books, essays) upon which I could get my students to practice rhetorical analysis. (We’ll be doing a separate ad analysis essay.) I’m familiar with the broad sweep of literature, but wondered if you’d identified a few somewhat elementary but substantial works that have worked well in analysis exercises.

Secondly, I have in my library a text, A COMPLETE COURSE IN FRESHMAN ENGLISH, by Harry Shaw (first published in 1940), that contains a section titled “A Collection of Readings for Writers”. It contains a wonderful exposition-argument essay that relates closely to your course aims.

Titled “The Pretensions of Science,” by Hugh Stevenson Tigner, it asserts the following in fifth paragraph: “There was nothing at all scientific about the attitude men took toward science. They surrounded it with the sort of romanticism which has surrounded dragon bones and the Holy Grail.” Later in the essay, Tigner says this: “Furthermore, science is limited to a secondly role in human destiny because it can deal only with quantities, with things which can be measured. The most significant facts in human life are a type of fact which science cannot recognize as facts–those elusive and nonmeasurable things that we call qualities, or values, or meanings.”

His conclusion regarding science is that while it is essential to exploring the physical world, it has wrongly been elevated to a sort of Holy Grail for the salvation of society.

Tigner’s closing paragraph summarizes: “The problem of social salvation, as I see it, is not a problem of science but one of emotion, value, and loyalty. It is not a problem of being open-minded, or objective, or dispassionate, or of mental discipline, or of learning to suspend judgment. It is a problem of loving and hating the proper things, a problem of calling only beautiful things beautiful, a problem of cherishing values of universal validity rather than those of limited worth. It is a problem of turning passion in a life-furthering direction, of replacing lower loyalties by higher ones. It is a matter of indoctrination and propaganda in behalf of high moral ends. In other words, it is a religious problem.”

(The complete essay was originally published in The Christian Century, Sept 14, 1938.)

The essay just came to mind as I was reading through your course objectives because it is a brief but timeless piece (except for a some references and quaint language) that clearly, passionately, and cogently places science and its advancements within the context of a worldview.

Thank you for posting your course description.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Brock