Overview

• The underlife of an essay

• What is delivery? A (very) brief explanation

• Group activity: delivering writing

• Wrap-up

Once upon a time I wrote an essay…

• Context/Venue: MaleaPowell’s History and Theory of Rhetoric course at MSU, 2008

• Audience: Malea and my peers

• Purpose: Final project demonstrating my learning

I decided propose it to a conference…

• Context/Venue: Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference 2009 at MSU

• Audience: Colleagues, grad students, other rhetoricians

• Purpose: To present findings to the field

To do that, I had to do many things…

• Research the conference

• Write a proposal abstract

• Submit the abstract

• Wait

• Receive my acceptance

• Prepare the essay for presentation

I presented my essay…

• Context/Venue: Feminisms and RhetoricsConference 2009 at MSU

• Audience: Colleagues, grad students, other rhetoricians

• Purpose: To present findings to the field

And someone asked to publish it!

I decided to publish it!

• Context/Venue: Moon City Review, a journal of poetry, stories, art, and criticism

• Audience: Colleagues in many different fields of English studies including creative writers

• Purpose: Sharing ideas about race and performance; expression…and a publication!

I had some work to do…

• Research the journal• Do a formal submission

(write a cover letter, navigate the Submittablesite, etc.)

• Wait• Receive comments from the

editors• Revise and re-send the essay• Wait

And my essay was finally published…

• Platt, Julie. “When I Played Indian.” Moon City Review 2010 (Fall 2010).

• But is this the end of the story of this essay? Or is it only the beginning?

deliverythe public presentation of discourse.

• Like the canon of style, deliveryrefers to how you write/say/do something.

• In antiquity, it was mainly associated with oratory.

• Once considered the most important canon, it fell out of favor and has been “recovered” several times.

• Its evolution has tended to follow patterns of technological change.

• Today, delivery is more than gesture or intonation. It concerns both the medium and the circulation of discourse.

• Media: alphabetic text, video, audio, graffiti, etc. What form discourse takes.

• Circulation: letters, blogs, YouTube, billboards, etc. How discourse moves.

• Many steps were involved in delivering my writing outside of its original classroom context.

• In order to circulate it (make it move), I had to change its medium (change its form).

• I had to consider changes in things like context/venue, audience, and purpose.

• Many steps are required to bring a piece of writing out into the world, but this is often invisible.

• This “underlife” of writing is what we can make visible by paying attention to delivery.