the pleasures of bullshit

I've been wanting to give students this assignment since probably my second year at Syracuse, and I finally found both time and reason to do so in my junior/senior level rhetorical theory course. It's the bullshit assignment. How it works: on day one, I asked students to go home and write 2-3 pages of bullshit on "fear" (the course is focused on the rhetoric of fear). Some initial responses:

"You actually want us to write bullshit?"
"What if we aren't capable of bullshit?"
"What's bullshit got to do with rhetoric?"
"Are we allowed to swear in this class?"

On Friday, they read one another's bullshit (and I got to refer to my class as "bullshitters" without being sarcastic and without offending anyone) and we came up with a list of rhetorical moves that writers make when they're bullshitting. I won't reproduce the list here because if you're a writing teacher, you can imagine what those moves are.

The beauty of this is 1) they knew what bullshit was, and so did I, before we did this activity, but now everybody knows that everybody knows what bullshit is; 2) we can now refer to others' bullshit moves as we're analyzing their rhetoric; 3) I laughed out loud reading some of their responses. I would reproduce some of them here, but I haven't gotten their permission.

Bullshit, I might venture to argue, is class-based. I am the world's worst bullshitter because I don't know how to say the same things over and over again without appearing to be doing so. Small talk. Schmoozing. Bullshit.

Hmmmm.