English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

There is a book that challenges, in some regards, Gladwell's concept of "Blink." Dr. Jerome Groopman argues that doctors that work from the gut generally make more mistakes. He qualifies this by arguing that it's when doctors become anchored to their gut reactions and diagnoses and refuse to reconsider that trouble insues.

What is very interesting for the rhetoric is Groopman's reason for writing the book. He states that he wants patients to know how doctors think so that they can help their doctor's think better. Such a conception of audience and audience interaction is a really interesting framework for understand and developing ethos. Older versions of ethos saw it as fairly stable and something developed for an audience. Some contemporary versions, however, see ethos as something a rhetor develops with the audience each time. Dr. Groopman seems to argue that such a progressive construction of the doctor's ethos can lead to better diagnosis and better care.

I'd like to see us extending the use of this blog by adding individual bibliographies. We could each maintain one, adding whatever books, article, videos, movies or whatever we see as helpful to forming our posts. It wouldn't be so much about proper attributing, but more about reccomendations for further inquiry. If we added to them through editing the same post instead of making a new one it wouldn't clutter the blog too much. For many of us, it would probably relate to other classes.

Here is the Onion story I mention Thursday, January 18, 2007.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33352

-Nathaniel