Going all the way back to ancient Greece, a common practice for students of rhetoric has been adoxography (Links to an external site.), or the artful rhetorical praise of a thing generally considered to be worthless, foolish, or just downright ugly. The “thing” that is praised can be an object, an action, or even an idea. For a bit more information, you can read a brief description of the term here (Links to an external site.).
Compose a brief informal essay in which you sing the praises of whatever worthless, foolish, or ugly thing you’ve selected. Your goal here is to be creative and think of what characteristics or possible functions the thing might actually have that could be beneficial, and then to focus on those. Your style should be sophisticated and your tone should be sincere. Your audience is your peers. You are not expected to do any research for this assignment, so don’t. If you must, then make sure to cite all sources appropriately and in the proper (MLA) format. If you don’t know how to do that, don’t use sources. Also, don’t plagiarize (Why would you have to?). Have fun with this, but be serious.
This may seem like B.S. because that’s what it is, basically. Let’s get it out of our system right here at the beginning. That’s kind of the point. Most of us are able to engage in elegant sophistry (i.e. B.S., here used as a verb) when we need to, so show off your talent now and eject it from your system, because it’s not going to work later on.
If you are having trouble thinking up subjects for praise, consider one of the following:
cracked/shattered smartphone screens
tossing chewed gum onto the sidewalk
laziness
books with missing pages
running out of gas in the desert
cowardice
I’m attaching 2 examples that may help write the paper
