Thoughts on End-of-Semester Schema-Making

One of the challenges of creating a three-territory (that is, three circled boundaries, each representing a different method of rhetorical composition), color-coded Venn diagram like the one we made about locations of power in rhetorical theory is the fact that the process of designating which theorist goes in what (generalized) space is reductive, as Sarah has said in her post. Each theorist's ideas are nuanced, complicated, and riddled with subtleties and ideological nooks and crannies that you can't fully address when you're creating a schema like this. We had to keep reminding ourselves that we were focusing on the primary (not every) source of agency that each theorist seemed to identify. This, I feel, was our greatest hurdle.

That being said, I feel like the Venn diagram was an effective way to (re)arrange and visually organize the theorists we read the semester. The dual-layer aspect of the diagram allowed us to (loosely) examine rhetoric as product (the circles of the diagram) as well as rhetoric as process generated by creative forces and factors (the color-coding system) simultaneously.

The process of actually creating the diagram was helpful to me. After assembling the initial three fields (without mentioning the entertaining spatial brouhaha Sarah and I subjected ourselves to originally while trying to create a six-circle Venn diagram) and arranging them into proportional spaces in PowerPoint, we put each theorists' last name into a text box. Upon seeing all of the names on that page, here at the end of our journey as a class together, I realized just how much information we have taken in the semester. I was shocked. We went down the line, from Bitzer to Miller, sorting each theorist and then color-coding. We have looked at so many theories… so many ideas- I was sort of blown away when I saw them all compressed into one space.

Creating a schema at the end of a semester filled with complex theories (that usually build off one another) was a great idea. I definitely feel more prepared for the final now, and our diagram is only responsible for a little bit of that feeling of preparedness. What I mean is that I feel like all of our schemas put together would make an excellent review tool. There is a brilliant mix of innovative rendering and intelligent connection-making. I appreciate and take also away from each of the schemas. When we were charged with the task of organizing the same material, and organization of information entails certain levels of processing and interpretation, and the more we process and interpret this information (communally), the better we'll actually know the concepts (individually) (especially since we've now been forced to arrange the ideas in a spatial way... there's research out there that suggests visualized information is difficult to forget, so I imagine we'll have a hard time forgetting the content and organization of these schemas).