The Rhetorical Quest: A new blog.

Why a new blog?

After years of keeping my blog on Myspace, I am excited to be bringing my readers to this new, hopefully more accessible, location. Myspace just wasn't adequate for my needs anymore and continual changes in the format and limitations put in place increasingly made it meet my needs less and less. I posted the reasons I was considering that move on that blog if you want to read it.

For those of you who faithfully read my blogs on Myspace, I want to give you a hearty thank-you. I believe that there are one or two of you who actually kept your Myspace accounts primarily to make my blog more accessible to you. I have the deepest respect for Myspace and hope that you can find other reasons to continue to interact with them. Their constraints and my blog, however, have finally had to part ways. I will continue to have an account there primarily because it is still the best social network for music and entertainment.

Many of the reasons for choosing to move my blog here were technical and probably do interest some of my more technical savvy readers. Those reader will notice in my format below the appearance of a number of options that are at best difficult and increasingly impossible in
Myspace. Even less technophilic among you will be excited to see a number of new options:

Open comments: You do not have to be a member of anything to comment on my blog. The comment section below creates the possibility of commenting leaving as much information as you want. You can even comment anonymously. Easy syndication: This blog comes with an atom or rss feed that can easily be entered into your reader or aggregator. If you don't have a reader, it is high time you got one. Still, if you really don't want one, you can even subscribe to the blog by email. Open licensing of material: You can quote from my blog, email it to a friend, copy it, link to it, put it together in a bound book and put it on your shelf. Furthermore you can do it all legally. The specific license to use my content can be found by clicking here. There are restrictions, but not many.

Connections to more relevant content: From this page you will always be able to connect to my personal website, full of information designed to further you on your rhetorical quest. There are also going to be links to other sites. Few ads: Right now, there are very few. In fact, there are none. I will continue to have none for a long time. Maybe I will always have none. If I ever do have ads, tools will be in place to make sure that the advertisements are relevant to the page. Easy readability: I am not referring to language choice here. My history of rhetoric teacher once told me that if a person is not writing above his or her level, he or she is writing below it. There won't be a bunch of weird background pictures messing up the text. It should be clear and readable.

What can I expect from this blog?

For those of you who were familiar with my blog on Myspace, it should be more of the same, just in a better format. The subtitle of the blog; "a blog about coming to terms" might be the best way to express what is going on here. It is, to a large extent, a blog about living in the world and trying to make sense of it. My expertise in rhetorical theory and criticism, my faith, my experience as a professional educator and my philosophical mindset all will play a role in my writing, but the blog will not be about any of these things.

I hope that this blog will be a true weblog: a description of my journey that will help me map my progress. The blog will be about a journey, a quest, a search not only to find and know truth more, but to put it into words that we can share with others. It is a quest which has consumed me for a long time. It is a quest that I know many of you have been following as well. Whether you intend to join or guide me on this quest with your comments and emails, or if you merely interested in how the quest is going for me, I want to thank you in advance for
reading.

Now I will continue my journey . . .