Dear classmates and instructor,

I have been involved in political activism heavily since the beginning of last semester during which I was arrested twice for civil disobedience.  Yes, I was one of the five at the November Kelley School actions.

I am writing to you now not only because I am obligated to do so.  Due to my increased civic engagement, I have been pressured to both improve my ability to articulate some fairly complex ideas.  In doing so I have been practicing and learning about rhetoric outside of the classroom.  So this class is very timely for me.

I am writing about writing and making an effort to grapple with the idea of "audience" or, per Ong's suggestion, "readership" (11).  You can see that I am writing in the second person.  Bear with me, because it is a difficult thing to do in an academic setting.  It is rare to write in the second person in academia (as far as I can tell) and it may be due to academia's focus on research, ideas, and ultimately the subject of study.

In studying the English language and its uses, our own writing falls under our scrutiny, which is a challenge and quite productive.  We have the ability to scrutinize not only literature and its components, but also the language of political spheres, social spheres, and even academic spheres, which we have accepted to be a part of "academia."

Right about here I should be making my point about how Ong used letter writing as a prime example of the writer-reader relationship on display (19-20).  Letters conventionally begin with the name of the recipient and end with the name of the author.  Hopefully I am displaying this dynamic myself in this post.

Instead of directly furthering this point, however, here I would like to bring focus back to the way I began this post.  I want to discuss political rhetoric and how in its utilization and abuse in the mainstream has undermined democracy through the projection of the political spectrum which we are all at least vaguely familiar with onto each of our perceptions of politics.  To do so may not be entirely appropriate for this forum, so I'll leave that be--though it would certainly be more fun.

This post was a bit of a headache to write, so I hope it was a headache for you to read.  Ultimately, I don't even remember what my point was anymore.  Maybe it was meant only to be like a picture of someone taking a picture of the photographer who took the picture of the individual who took the picture being viewed...

Ouch,
Peter