The new face of ethos: Assembling students' ethical competencies
Abstract
This project addresses the discrepancy between ethos as it is addressed and enacted inside and outside the first-year composition classroom, respectively. It queries how contemporary social networking practices are influencing the ways in which composition students are understanding ethos and the attendant pedagogical possibilities for composition instructors. After rhetorically analyzing celebrity social networking texts, surveying first-year composition students, and collecting material artifacts from first-year composition instructors' classrooms, it proffers a remediated understanding of ethos, celebrethos, which emphasizes a tangible appeal to celebrity status: persuasive communication imbued with identity appeals to the "ordinary." It also advocates the need for a more dynamic model of online ethos, one that is kaleidoscopic in nature and incorporates the presently important notion of klout-as- ethos. It culminates with a suggested assignment sequence that meets students where they are in privileging the powerful rhetorical lessons inherent in contemporary social networking practices.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Blackmon, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Multimedia Communications|Language|Rhetoric
Off-Campus Purdue Users:
To access this dissertation, please log in to our
proxy server.