Transcript of Video Showing Me Typing Up My First Draft

Note: Material in quotation marks represents text I read aloud from the draft. Bracketed text represents important physical actions.

"This pedagogical emphasis occurs throughout composition's history. Setting that history's start date requires us to remember the second half of the title." Got a comma here I don't need. "second half of our title: rhetoric." Our? "of...the discipline's title: rhetoric. Rhetoric acts as the field's theoretical frame....as one theoretical frame for the field." Because I...there are others, writing process, other statements that have just as much weight. "one of the principles that holds our discipline together."

"Rhetoric, in the Western tradition, begins in the fourth century BC of Greece." And I need to make a note to myself to check that. Actually, I can probably check it here. Let's see, I've got The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition. [hold up book and start flipping through]. So what do I look up? Let's look up Corax, because I'm going to be talking about him in a minute....And looking through pages, looking through pages. Okay, here it is. Corax...490-440, so that's the fourth century, I think. I'll check. So I'll leave a note "check these dates, Corax's dates, 490-440 BC."

[read silently]. Okay, it doesn't give...what I was looking for was the number of people in the court. So I need to circle that--that's in my notes for History of Rhetoric; I just don't have...didn't print that part out.

"free males in the community. Lawyers didn't exist, so a citizen had to argue their own case. This approach worked great for those who are natural speakers. Not everyone is. At this point, an enterprising man named Corax began, for a fee, to teach people how to successfully argue before the courts. Corax's"...I've got "this new career," but I think...I want to keep Corax in there because it's...it's clearer...try "Corax's efforts mark the beginning of rhetoric as a systematically studied and taught discipline." Umm...that works for now.

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