Author: Phyllis Mentzell Ryder File Type: epub Rhetorics for Community Action Public Writing and Writing Publics, by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, offers theory and pedagogy to introduce public writing as a complex political and creative action. To write public texts, we have to invent the public we wish to address. Such invention is a complex task, with many components to consider exigency that brings people together a sense of agency and capacity a sense of how the world is and what it can become. All these components constantly compete against texts that put forward other public ideals_opposing ideas about who really has power and who really can create change. Teachers of public writing must adopt a generous response to those who venture into this arena. Some scholars believe that to prepare students for public life, university classes should partner with grassroots community organizations, rather than nonprofits that serve food or tutor students. They worry that a service-related focus will create more passive citizens who do not rally and resist or grab the attention of government leaders or corporations. With carefully contextualized study of an after-school arts program, an area soup kitchen, and parks organizations, among others, Ryder shows that many so-called service organizations are not passive places at all, and she argues that the main challenge of public work is precisely that it has to take place among all of these compelling definitions of democracy. Ryder proposes teaching public writing by partnering with multiple community nonprofits. She develops a framework to help students analyze how their community partners inspire people to action, and offers a course design that support them as they convey those public ideals in community texts. But composing public texts is only part of the challenge. Traditional newspapers and magazines, through their business models and writing styles, reinforce a dominant role for citizens as thinking and reading, but not necessarily acting. This civic role is also professed in the university, where students are taught writing that extends inquiry. Phyllis Mentzell Ryders Rhetorics for Community Action Public Writing and Writing Publics turns to the rhetorical practices of nondominant American communities and counterpublics, whose resistance to good public speech and proper public behavior reveals alternate modes of composing and acting in democracy.

Author: Brian Clegg File Type: epub Space is big. Really big. You just wont believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think its a long way down the street to the chemist, but thats just peanuts to space. Douglas Adams, Hitch-hikers Guide to the GalaxyWe human beings have trouble with infinity - yet infinity is a surprisingly human subject. Philosophers and mathematicians have gone mad contemplating its nature and complexity - yet it is a concept routinely used by schoolchildren. Exploring the infinite is a journey into paradox. Here is a quantity that turns arithmetic on its head, making it feasible that 1 = 0. Here is a concept that enables us to cram as many extra guests as we like into an already full hotel. Most bizarrely of all, it is quite easy to show that there must be something bigger than infinity - when it surely should be the biggest thing that could possibly be. Brian Clegg takes us on a fascinating tour of that borderland between the extremely large and the ultimate that takes us from Archimedes, counting the grains of sand that would fill the universe, to the latest theories on the physical reality of the infinite. Full of unexpected delights, whether St Augustine contemplating the nature of creation, Newton and Leibniz battling over ownership of calculus, or Cantor struggling to publicise his vision of the transfinite, infinitys fascination is in the way it brings together the everyday and the extraordinary, prosaic daily life and the esoteric.Whether your interest in infinity is mathematical, philosophical, spiritual or just plain curious, this accessible book offers a stimulating and entertaining read.**ReviewHere [Clegg] has done an excellent job of making the most complex concepts accessible while allowing their mystery to continue to shimmer just out of focus. --Kirkus Reviews Clegg is immensely readable and manages to convey to a lay audience some of the key mathematical ideas concerning infinity... a success. --H. Geiges, Times Higher Education Supplement An accessible and, of course, open-ended overview of infinity as conceived of and wrestled with by theologians, mathematicians and philosophers, from Ancient Greece onwards... endlessly fascinating. --Laurence Phelan, The Independent About the Author Brian Clegg studied physics at Cambridge University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has written a number of popular science books including A Brief History of Infinity, Light Years, The God Effect and Before the Big Bang.