I'm Published!

Happy holidays!

Hope the holiday season is treating you well and you're not dealing with too much snow. In Wisconsin, we were fortunate enough to have a white Christmas. The cold temperatures and accumulating snow have made the weather perfect for ice skating and lots of shoveling.

But the point of this post is not to describe the weather in Mt. Horeb. Instead, my good news is that I was published on an online blog.

Woot!

The blog is called the Silver Tongue Times, Rhetorical criticism for the engaged citizen. Basically, it's a blog run by rhetoric scholars committed to explaining cultural messages in today's world through the lens of rhetoric. The blog aims to explain rhetoric in layman terms, so that anyone, no matter their knowledge of the "great rhetors" (think Plato, Aristotle, Gorgias, etc), they can understand what the author is doing in their message.

I found this blog through my Rhetorical Theory and Practice class. Taught by Jane Nesmith, a professor who I've had before, we examined what rhetoric is and how we use it today. It was an excellent class and I definitely learned a lot. One of the overarching messages from this class was that rhetoric allows you to be a spectator of a message. It allows you to step back and see how the moving parts are working together. So think of watching a sporting event, like baseball, football, soccer, etc. For most of those events, you are sitting above the field, looking down on the game. You can see each individual player and watching their singular movements and then the movements of the team as a whole.

Our final project of the semester was to write a post that fit the submission guidelines for the Silver Tongue Times. We had to take an article/speech or video and write about what the rhetor was doing and if they were doing it effectively. I chose an article I found at one of my favorite online websites, The Slate. It was an article that was pro-selfie (you know, the popular thing to do on social media now a days. It's also an official word, thanks to the Oxford English Dictionary). So I wrote the piece and thought, "Why not submit?"

I emailed the piece to the blog and heard back fairly quickly. Matt, the founding editor, said they would love to publish the piece. We emailed back and forth with some revisions and submitting a brief bio and they published it on Monday.

My article is "The Selfie Culture: Where A Picture Is Worth A Million Likes" (yeah, you should definitely click on this). I'm really proud with how it turned out and so far, my family and friends have really enjoyed it. Let me know what you think!

I really enjoyed writing this and analyzing current culture is something I like doing in my spare time (when I can find it). I hope to write some more articles for the Silver Tongue Times and Winter Break is the perfect time to do that!