Wastewater job really stinks

From the outside, this professional complex of modern buildings along Route 30 East near Ligonier had all the appeal of a sedate college campus. Two newer, red-brick buildings sat near the administration office and lab, both housed in a structure that easily could be called Old Main. There was even an aesthetically pleasing weather vane…

Cinematic truth lies in the close-up

In the current rejection of the close-up in mainstream cinema, filmmakers seem to have learnt nothing from the past. The 1950s epics now seem stolid, and most of DeMille is unwatchable. In a few years’ time, The Phantom Menace, George Lucas’s first Star Wars prequel – which was filmed almost entirely in medium and wide…

Visual Blogs

Does this mean that future weblogs should favour image over text? To do so would be to the detriment of the medium as it is the combination of words and images presented over time that make the visual blog what it is. Yet the contributions that images can make within weblogs should not be underestimated…

Fending Off a Plagiarist

A doctoral student at Northeast Urban University — I’ll call him Mr. X — presented my dissertation as his own. He received a Ph.D. and took an excellent research job at Prominent African University. Through my subsequent efforts, he lost his degree, his job, and his reputation. […] Mr. X must have thought that he…

Power Surge: Writing-Rhetoric Studies, Blogs, and Embedded Whiteness

Blogging and other electronic forms of rhetorical delivery and performance will not retain their power and ability to help white people in particular overcome our institutional and other kinds of racism, as I have strongly claimed here, if the Military-Media Complex, the five communication conglomerates in the U.S. as well as others in, for example,…

Into the Blogosphere

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others. —Into the Blogosphere

A Sudden Case of 'Routine Maintenance' in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe

A Sudden Case of ‘Routine Maintenance’ in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Our local amusement park has a ride based on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The trolley takes you past large-scale mock-ups of various sets from The Neighborhood of Make-Believe, and yes, Trolley goes through a tunnel. “Come along, come along, to the castle hug-and-song,”…

It’s a Didactic Day in the Neighborhood: Mister Rogers and Educational Ideology

I recently lamented that my kids are growing up without Mister Rogers -– a very sweet public television show that features an infinitely gentle father figure who wears cardigans and talks directly to the camera. (We don’t have good reception of our local PBS station.) Someone gave us a copy of a Mister Rogers show.…