Welcome to the blog for our Honors Composition course. As you will notice, this blog is not empty. The conversation you will be entering has been going on for two semesters. I encourage you to check out how students have used this blog in the past and some of the ideas and projects they have made public for all the world to see.
The concept of "a conversation" will help frame how we investigate writing, language, and audience over the course of the semester. In particular, we will often return to a quote from the literary and rhetorical scholar, Kenneth Burke, who highlights the conversational nature of knowledge making through his metaphor of the "parlor":
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument, then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him [or her]; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself [or herself] against you, to either the embarrassment of gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress (110-111, brackets mine).
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