I’ve been plagued with a dissertation question since my prospectus hearing last week. It’s a bit odd, in retrospect. I walked into the hearing thinking I knew all the answers to any questions my committee could ask. I know my topic. I have a relatively firm grasp on the methodology, I’ve mastered the art of summarizing my topic into a succinct three minute sound byte (which I refer to as the “elevator speech,” courtesy of Dr. Burns).  I walked the walk and talked the talk through the entire hearing. But there was one thing I did not expect.

I expected this hearing to be much like my oral exams; my committee would ask questions and I would answer correctly. If I answered enough questions correctly, my prospectus is approved. After the closed door session, I expected to return and learn which of my committee members wanted to see my dissertation chapter by chapter or all at once. But the last half of the meeting involved a few more questions–questions my committee wanted me to consider while I was writing. Most of the questions were rudimentary–keep your naysayers in mind, explain specifically why your sample group was chosen, etc. But there was one question that has haunted me.

Will you ground your study in composition or in rhetoric?

This is a valid question in my program. We are specifically a rhetoric program, not a rhetoric/composition program and there’s been some discussion about making sure we keep a solid foot in rhetoric in our dissertations. Since my dissertation is composition based, I hadn’t given much thought to the rhetorical grounding as a separate entity; I was using the appeals in my argument and I had a strong invention grounding. But alas, invention has much become a part of composition more than rhetoric. I am focusing on research, which is also very much grounded in composition. I’ve spent hours contemplating a rhetorical connection that I could make. Everywhere I looked, I turned up a blank. I couldn’t squeeze anything into my dissertation that was a solid foot in rhetoric. But then, I realized the reason nothing was fitting was not because there isn’t a rhetorical connection, it’s because the connection is already there, hidden in the base argument that I already have–I need no revision to the argument. I just need to emphasize the rhetoric already in the work.

Kairos!

Kairos is the opportune moment for persuasion. Kairos not only provides the speaker (or in my case, writer) with the perfect moment to speak, but also constrains the speech by requiring the speaker to think about the audience addressed and use appropriate decorum in their address. While many First-Year Composition instructors talk to their students specifically about the audience and decorum of a written piece, there is little, if any discussion of kairos.

So, I know now that I need to ground my rhetorical foot in kairos. When we teach students to write argumentative essays, we don’t always provide them a rhetorical foot to ground their writing and then we complain when they don’t give us revolutionary, up-to-date arguments. I don’t think we can blame the students if we require them to only use “scholarly” sources that are held behind the academic firewall. So, as I delve into the great realm of using social bookmarking as a component of composition invention and research, I can now start to really delve as well into the way I ground my dissertation into the historical aspect of rhetoric and demonstrate how social bookmarking can better help writers grasp how to write for a specific opportunity–much as they will have to do in their own professions.

Now, don’t get me started about the kairos of my own topic…