To whom it may concern...

This is a sort of "random bullet" post whose purpose is to vent to an audience who will never read it. That intended audience is anyone who has ever written or will ever write a letter of recommendation for an ABD job candidate in the humanities.

• Please, for the love of all you might hold sacred, do not open your letter to the search committee with that old chestnut, "This is not going to be the typical letter of recommendation in favor of a potential candidate." Although I know you are sincere in your praise of almost-Dr.-Suzy Twinkletoes, your writing that sentence (or some variation of it) makes me anticipate some actual, radical departure from the typical rec letter, like, say, a link to a YouTube video of you praising the candidate through the medium of interpretive dance. That would be totally cool. Instead, as inevitably happens, your letter does turn out to be the typical rec letter, and I become super disappointed in you and your candidate, because you have led me on.
• If possible, avoid damning with faint praise. Or at least avoid damning with faint praise for two single spaced pages--what I mean is, keep the damning brief. (And by "damning with faint praise" I mean tactics such as going on for two paragraphs about how the candidate has really mastered the art of showing up for office hours.) I mean, I'm a rhetorician, and I know the tricks. If you can't write a glowing letter, try to weasel your way out of writing one at all.
• I vomit instantly when I hear/read the phrase "best practices"--just an fyi.
• If you have not witnessed this person's teaching abilities, don't turn the lack of observation into a red herring--such as, "I have not had the opportunity to witness Mike B. Pretentious's teaching. However, I am sure that, based on...." Um, no--stop right there. Do not pass go--for all you know, the dude could be turning his classes into devil-worshipping workshops (albeit ones that use "best practices"). Assume nothing.
• When referring to the candidate's dissertation work, please do not speak of "exploding binaries," "counterhegemonic agendas," and "shifting paradigms." Because, um, although you think what your protege is doing is going to change life as we know it, I've just read 28 other letters that attested to those candidates' plan to shift, explode, and agenda the crud out of the next guy/girl. Maybe you guys should get together and talk and have some big counter-hegemonic tupperware party.

This has been a public service announcement from a concerned rhetorician.

I Am the Only Rhetorician in the Village...Right?

In his excellent book Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, Pedagogy, which offers a compelling history of my profession, Bob Connors offers the following delectable tidbit:

"Rhetoric, which had been dormant within composition since the 1890s, began to make a reappearance after 1944, when the first communications courses were taught at the University of Iowa. Communications courses quickly spread to other schools, bringing together scholars from English and speech departments for the first time since the tragic split between the disciplines that occured in 1914, teaching all four of the "communications skills"--reading, writing, speaking and listening. Rhetoric, which had been in the keeping of speech departments during the twentieth century, was a vital part of these courses, and many English teachers learned for the first time what might be some of the alternatives to mechanical correctness" (160).

What I am interested in here is the somewhat bizarre fallout in the aftermath of the apparently ongoing attempt to "heal" the split between speech/comm and rhetoric/writing (and I think the dichotomies are a big part of the problem-i.e. why should public speaking have been the domain of rhetorical instruction, while writing instruction was under the vague heading of "English" and left to languish in, quite literally, silence...).

What this means is the following: although rhetoricians-to-be may undergo quite similar training at our respective institutions (most of us have our PhD years split up into a mish-mash study of classical, applied, and contemporary rhetorical theory), we may wind up in vastly different departments--some of us in "Communications," some of us in "English," some us in "Cultural Studies," and on and on. The world of academe, quite simply, doesn't exactly know what to do with us.

I would like to "anecdotalize" the results of this 1914 split and their weirdo ramifications through a recent experience at my university.

I was asked to co-direct a student's McNair project this summer. Prior to asking two of her profs to co-direct it, my student came to me, agonizing over whether to ask me or this other instructor (she didn't say who it was). Both of us, she claimed, were great at giving feedback and understood her research interests. Ultimately, in the interests of a compromise, she asked both of us to split the duties. Both I and this other mystery prof agreed, separately. I emailed mystery prof, who, as it turns out, is a faculty member in the Communications department, to say something along the lines of, "hey, I hear ur gonna help direct Susan's project. awesome! lol. let's do lunch. ttyl." [No--not in those words, but you get the point.] So, we met at the campus dining hall one Friday for a friendly chat.

Come to find out, mystery prof is a rhetorician. She is a Burkean, like me. She has taught courses in political rhetoric and persuasion (!!!). She is "descended" from a dissertation director who studied under Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, whom I had just seen give an excellent keynote a month before on women's presidential rhetorics (rhetoricians tend to talk about our rhetoric/composition mentors in terms of "lineage" metaphors, and, though alluding to a kind of familial relationship with one's major profs may seem strange to those on the "outside," it makes sense to some of us). The similarities were hysterical, and I realized that, finally, I had a "colleague" in the sense of meeting another person who can discuss rhetorical "stuff" with the same arsenal of cool vocabulary words (like "anaphora") that I have. She just happens to be in a different department. Hmmm...

Here's the kicker--not surprisingly, this other faculty member mainly teaches public speaking for her first-year courses [she is, after all, in the "Communications" department across campus], while I teach primarily writing for mine [being, as I am, a denizen of the "English" department]. The speech/writing dichotomy lives on, folks, and I dare not go into any more tangents on this issue than this post should contain.

Even more "amusing" is that I truly believed when I took my position that I was the only rhetorician at LU and that I was, in fact, the first this college had seen in at least a decade and a half. I was special!

How interesting--I went two years at this institution without knowing there was another one of us rhetoric crazies lurking about. How did that happen? It happened because of the "tragic split" [which obviously still exists one some level] that resulted in rhetorically trained people being kind of funneled into positions that make use of their talents as needed--rhetoric does, after all, cover a tremendously vast number of areas. It branches out, for example, into the social sciences (and it would not surprise me to find that quite a few of us are happily and productively employed in soc. departments somewhere out there).

The result of finding a rhetoric colleague when you have deluded yourself into believing you are "big rhetorician on campus" is kind of like finding out you have a sibling...like that moment in "The Parent Trap" where Hayley Mills realizes she has unknowingly spent half her summer in a camp with, well, Hayley Mills (but without the resultant cat fights that made that film so much fun to watch--fun except for the part where they sing that god-awful duet).

But what really interests me about this case is that both of us work at the same institution, and even this one institution cannot quite decide exactly which department rhetoric people fit in. Insofar as we are all basically "communications" faculty in a sense, perhaps we should discuss these things. But more intriguingly, perhaps the strange dispersal of rhetoric faculty to different departments will continue, until every department has at least one resident rhetorician who is plotting with the other rhetoricians to take over the world. Naaahhh...I suppose a more likely, revolutionary step would be for us to even find out that the others exist on our own campuses. Baby steps...

Oh, if you don't get the post title, here's a clue (God love "Little Britain"):