Are they obvious… or subtle?
I don’t think everyone has a point to make… unless, of course, you also want to consider straight-out information distribution as a way to convince others that the Civil War and/or particular aspects of it ARE important. In that case, yes… there is rhetoric involved, to some degree.
But, how much time do Civil War bloggers think about their “pitch”? Is it geared toward content… audience… that desire to achieve numbers in visitors… fulfilling something, a need perhaps (a need for expression, enabled through a blog?), within self? What? A little bit of all of the above and more, perhaps?
When I started blogging I thought about all of these things because… I had to.
This blog was rooted in a course in hypertext theory (great stuff… loved it…), but obviously, it went a lot further than one semester. A lot of what I wrote back in the first two years was a mixture of content, but with the intent of seeing how different approaches worked. Sometimes I’d get lost in the heated interaction/exchanges that resulted. That wasn’t good… but it wasn’t altogether bad either. It was an opportunity to learn about human-to-human interaction on the Web, which, I guarantee you, is not always the same as human-to-human interaction in person. There’s something about being behind a keyboard and a screen that turns many folks into different creatures. Perhaps it’s because of the absence of a few human factors that we normally have when we are in face-to-face environments. I could go down a different path here, but I’m going to keep myself in check…
I think we each have a “pitch”… sometimes the same, sometimes different.
Mine has changed from my first years as a blogger. I’ve moved more to a subtle approach, and that might be at the expense of numbers on the clicker… but that’s ok, really.
My rhetoric is the history itself, though I certainly have fun with it as a story-weaver… just never at the expense of the history.
If you haven’t figured out my “pitch” or “angle”, look at the subheader.
As a Southerner and native of the Shenandoah Valley, I offer reflections on the Civil War-era South… and sometimes a little more. But… expect the unexpected
Maybe that’s too vague.
For many years I consumed the standard fare that is so typical and common of the story of the South in the Civil War. When I learned there were actually other elements of that story, it changed my approach to the war. It also helped to know that some of my people were part of that other story.
In essence, I write, I suppose… in a counter-culture fashion, and against the traditional. Some might view that as “radical” in a bad way, but I disagree. My pitch is to challenge readers to read outside the box; to look at the story of the South and its people in the war in a different light. It might reach some, but not others… but that’s ok, too.
So, is it a mind-game… this rhetorical approach to information distribution?
In a way, yes, but understand… if a reader is convinced or not… is it that which really matters?
We can’t always gauge the impact of our writing, but, can it be enough to know that, even if only for a little while, you made someone think in a broader sense?
Did your writing, if just for a little while, share your vision without some confrontational clash with the other person’s perspective? We don’t always know, but I think that is the more effective rhetorical approach.
When it comes to “pitch”… to each his/her own, but what yields the most sustainable results? What rhetorical approach survives long-term? Which approach works in the vacuum of time that exists in a blog? Is it better to seek to change one’s mind through a more direct, confrontational approach, or is it better to be more subtle by offering a non-confrontational opportunity to see things through the writer’s eyes… if only for a little while?
Is history really controversial or is it merely an individual’s approach to history, through rhetorical pitch, that can make it controversial?
What is the longevity of your approach to history, and is it more reflective of you than the history?
Cenantua's Blog 
mib8
July 31, 2012
Yes, everyone who posts material on the net — pictures, videos, maps, text and combinations thereof — does so with a pitch or set of pitches. Sometimes it is a desire to influence people’s thinking. Sometimes it’s to get out there information that doesn’t get enough coverage by other means. Sometimes it is just a personal log — a diary of one’s thinking and research for the month, week, or day. Sometimes, it is with the intention to encourage discussion and debate of “important” issues or ways of looking at them that seem to be otherwise neglected. (Some people, OTOH, avoid anything that remotely approaches debate. It’s too intense, too disturbing. Seeing conflicting views makes them unhappy.) Others, as you mention, are all about gaming, trying to increase signed up readers or clicks or eye-balls; they’ll post whatever they think in whatever style they believe will crank up whatever statistics they can and want to track. They’ve also long been used (since the 1970s at least) as forums for experimentation with AI and, uh, multi-personality/team efforts at constructing artificial personalities… as well as a sort of benign on-line identity theft.
Different people have different things that make them happy, different priorities, different goals. That’s just the way people are.
Robert Moore
August 1, 2012
True… but how many folks think about their pitch? Not so much thinking about their intent when writing, but how the argument is engineered. What might be even more challenging is to figure out how to engineer the argument in such a way as to think about it’s long-term effectiveness. Is the argument timeless, for example. The subtle argument, for example, might be more timeless. The in-your-face controversial argument has, in my opinion, limits… and 10-20 years down the road, it might be strikingly obvious.
Janet
July 31, 2012
You commented:
“For many years I consumed the standard fare that is so typical and common of the story of the South in the Civil War.”
Could you give some examples of this. About the only things that pop into my head are high school text books and “Gone with the Wind.” One person I know said that he got interested because of a historical marker at a stoplight. Is there really a list of the top 10 books?
Robert Moore
August 1, 2012
The “standard fare” to which I refer isn’t necessarily information consumed through various forms of media, but also “memory” of the war, whether real or imagined… though certainly, books and movies have contributed to “memory”.
In the most simple terms, the standard fare is that the South = the Confederacy.
There’s an image that goes along with that, in which all Southerners embraced the Confederacy, everyone rushed to enlist in the South’s defense, and everybody who didn’t enlist cheered the men marching off to war (and often ended up suffering in some form or another, at the hands of an invader). Earlier history treated the war as a flat-out sectional conflict. Of course, that isn’t the case when we consider Southern Unionists, leave-aloners, slaves, free blacks. It was actually a many faceted South.
Lisa Pasquinelli Rickey
August 2, 2012
It always aggravated me when I was about to write a history paper and the professor asked what my “argument” was. Now that I get to write history “for me” — and for whoever wants to learn a little about whatever I’ve researched — I don’t think I usually have an argument, a pitch, or anything more sophisticated than “here’s a cool/interesting/historical story that I stumbled upon and wanted to share with the world”. 🙂
Robert Moore
August 2, 2012
… and nothing wrong with that either! 🙂
S. Thomas Summers
August 5, 2012
I pen a Civil War blog. In it, I attempt to enter the War through an unusual conduit – poetry. My pitch? Perhaps it is to explore history where the historian cannot see, between the facts of history, within the cracks if history. Therein lies my treasure.
I have just recently discovered your blog and have enjoyed it. Thank you.
S. Thomas Summers
Author of Private Hercules McGraw: Poems of the American Civil War
Robert Moore
August 5, 2012
Thanks for the comment. Hope you continue to follow!