Discussing my paper in class - Blog 20

The focus is awkwardness in gospel conversations. Looking mostly at Christian proselytizing discourse, but also could apply to all religious proselytization.

The question is what creates the awkwardness, what cues and causes are involved.

The reference is an article by Benjamin Cline (sensitivity in Christian proselytizing Rhetoric). He references a standard for determining sensitivity in conversations, which translates well to pointing out causes of awkwardness. Includes awkward, unfamiliar jargon. Context (there’s a time and a place).

Another source will have to do with normal social rules for conversations, so we can see if Christian rhetoric breaks these, creating awkwardness.

One of these social rules is allowing give and take, Christian rhetoric sometimes does not allow normal flow of conversation, just one sided. Another is sudden jumps in topic, the speaker moving the topic to be about whatever they want.

Religion is a topic not everyone can talk about (a taboo topic).

Anote factor that has come up in the research

(Above are notes from in-class discussion, below is what I added later to answer the questions fully)

3. My topic is important to writing studies because it questions a couple of important, often ignored standards. One is that religious is a taboo topic that should not be used in academic work or in daily conversation. My topic challenges this by first starting with a religion-related topic. Next it challenges it by suggesting that religion could be a “normal” topic of conversation if proper guidelines are followed. My topic is also important because the concept of awkwardness is not one which is frequently singled out for study. It is a feeling people are very familiar with, yet no one really talks about it. I couldn’t find any study or source that talks singularly about awkwardness and ways to prevent it. Most often, guidelines for religious conversations deal with how to not be offensive. Guidelines for unawkwardness are part of social knowledge that we develop over time. I think it is important to put these guidelines down on paper, through research, to see if people really all use the same set of guidelines, and then to make these guidelines more obvious to people (especially Christians) so that they will use them.

5. The Cline article doesn’t exactly use the word “awkward” but has many examples of insensitive conversations. These examples also demonstrate awkward conversations. His discussion of the causes of insensitive conversation is also very useful for my research question of what causes awkwardness. Finally, the fact that his study works so well for my study shows that sensitivity and awkwardness are very closely related. If space permits, perhaps I will discuss the relationship between these two concepts. They are not exactly the same thing.

The guides for conversation work for my focus because they consider what makes conversations awkward in general. I think these guidelines work very well for creating an unawkward religious conversation. They help answer my question by helping develop the standards for normal conversation.  They also show that the goal of having normal, unawkward conversation, is one shared by most people, regardless of the topic. This is something important to everyone.