Polysyndetone and 753 and another introduction...

I know I already introduced myself on ning, but I'm not used to that space yet so I'm going to re-introduce myself here and talk a little about how I've envisioned my work in this class and on this blog.

I should confess: I'm a multi-blogger (this is the fifth blog I've started in two years--I erased the first one, and deeply regret it). Every time I need a blog space for a class I'm teaching or taking, I start a new one. I was also one of the last people on the planet without a Facebook account. I guess these things, for me, are connected because I often resist bringing things (or people in my life) together. I like to connect things in a controlled way in my mind, slowly understanding the relationships between ideas or people and, then, carefully bridging them or simply deciding not to. I named my blog "polysyndeton," then, because it means using a series of conjunctions to bring things together (things that might not otherwise be brought together in such a way with equal importance often created through the repetition of conjunctions) and, in a sense, that is what I would like to do in this class...I want to pull stuff together, stuff that has been with me for a while now, stuff that I've left separated out into tidy packages by courses I've taken or spaces I live in or the contexts in which I know things.

Firstly, I'd like to get better at moving between the multiple platforms that we'll rely upon in our class (which are currently freaking me out a bit). I'd like to make them work better with each other and to sharpen my sense of what each is good and not so good for. Also, I'd really like to use contemporary rhetorical theory to begin to pull some of my previous coursework together, to force it to come together.

So bringing things together, bringing things together that have, for me, sort of resisted coming together is a main interest of mine in this space as I approach next year, the third year of my doctoral work.