As Kenneth Burke once said, and as us rhetoricians are fond of iterating, every act of selection is an act of reflection and also an act of deflection. Every time that we make a statement or an argument, we focus on one thing but neglect something else. This is reflective of our position in life …

Why is it that in the word “nihil”, the “ni” is pronounced “nee”, but in the words “nihilism” and “nihilistic”, the “ni” is pronounced “ny”? And why is it that in the word “nihilist”, the “ni” can be pronounced either “nee” or “ny”? The English language is a beautiful, strange, and confusing thing.

We do a lot of peer editing of our work in my Creative Writing class, and it is appalling just how many of my classmates’ stories are written with poor grammar, sentence structure, or a complete lack of coherency, as far as being consistent goes. As a proofreader for the university’s newspaper, one of my …

“Assonance is when you get the rhyme wrong” – Educating Rita If you know anything about literature, or if you are interested in plays about social class differences, or if you are intrigued about the meaning of “culture”, be sure to check out this fantastic play at Winnipeg’s MTC.

We are currently reading The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) by Mark Bauerlein in my Revolutions in Communication class. It’s an excellent book, even though a) I spend hours each day blogging and thus using the very technologies that Bauerlein despises, …

We have been studying poetry in my Creative Writing class. Several students brought Sylvia Plath’s work into the class to analyze. These students were raving about Plath’s genius, so I read her poetry with great curiosity. I didn’t like it. I found it to be simultaneously dull and melodramatic; the diction is simple and the …

I write visual art reviews for The Uniter. Typically I check out the art, ponder it a while, jot down a few notes, and then go home to write up my review. E-mail it to my editor and a week later, it’s published. Last week, however, I had the opportunity to attend a visual art …

The Superbowl, the Olympics, the Academy Awards: the majority of North Americans flock to these events. The media is full of information on the best recipes to have as snacks while we watch these events, the intense exercise regimes and nutrition plans that athletes use during their training, and the secrets of how celebrities “tone …

I’ve talked about PETA’s extremist advertisements before. Now, after I’ve read Lesli Pace’s excellent article Image Events and PETA’s Anti Fur Campaign, I’d like to discuss not just the effectiveness of these advertisements, but also our response to them. Consider: Nikki Craft, a women’s rights activist, finds a few issues with the PETA “I’d Rather …

In my Revolutions in Communications course at the University of Winnipeg, we have been reading Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid. A fascinating book which discusses “The Story and Science of the Reading Brain”, Proust and the Squid delves into a discussion on brain development throughout human history as well as the development of individual …

When I tell people that I study “rhetoric”, I usually follow this up by explaining that it’s “the study of communication”. It’s the easiest way to quickly describe what exactly “rhetoric” entails. Of course, it is much more than *just* (ha!) communication, but in a pinch, it’s a fairly apt explanation. Sometimes, however, people interpret …

Earlier this week, we examined how it is human nature to make judgments based on first impressions. Now I would like to address an adjoining part to this same issue: namely, the problem of acting upon assumptions when we have no real basis behind them. As a writer for a local newspaper, one of my …

As a health writer with a particular interest in body image, one of the issues that crops up time and again for people who are trying to come to terms with themselves has to do with body composition. Body composition refers to how we look and how the body distributes our weight. Three people of …