rhetoricus aesalon

About the extent of my self-talk right now...
 

Oh yeah! I guess I should mention that my areas of study are Film, TV, and Pop Culture, so if any of y'all are in those areas, fill free to hit me up with questions about that as well

Another current OSU grad here: Just adding that the stipend is slightly lower if you do not have an MA. The school offers a health care subsidy that covers 85% of the cost of your (and any dependents') premium, and there are many opportunities at OSU for fellowships outside the initial university offer (though winning a fellowship comes with an added bump to your stipend by a few thousand dollars per year after the end of the fellowship). Also, everyone is funded in the program.
EDIT: Like the others, I'm very happy to talk more about the program through PM, especially for those rhet/comp admits looking to connect with current students.

Duh! I honestly shouldnt be sweating, with a yes from my top choice, but I really want options (and bargaining power) and am tired of waiting.

What is this "Ohio State University" of which you speak? Perhaps you are confused with THE Ohio State University?
Seriously though, congrats to the successful admittee! 

This article in Inside Higher Education discusses a new book out soon from Harvard University Press on the subject of how (elite... but aren't they sorta all?) PhD admissions committees work. It's not clear whether any of the profiled departments are literature departments, but at least some are in the  humanities, and I remember this topic coming up fairly regularly when I was a more consistent checker-in here.  Unsurprising surprises: GRE scores seem to get more consideration than programs like to let on, internal department politics play a role, and participants support diversity in the abstract while prizing people with backgrounds and career goals like their own.

That summary sounds more cynical than I meant it to.  I have to say I find it refreshing to see people owning up to some of this stuff, and I look forward to reading the book.  Change starts with the recognition of an unsatisfactory situation. The surprising thing to me was glimpsing how much the process is driven by fear.  Real attention to genuine diversity - race, gender, age, cultural and educational background - has made many other fields more robust.  Corporate America, for all its many faults, recognized that a long time ago now.  Academics have everything to gain, and very little to lose, by broadening the scope of voices being heard.  For example, one way to recruit more undergraduate English majors is to have more English professors who share some life experience or cultural background with the (infinitely more diverse than when I was 18) undergraduate population. 

[steps off soapbox]

For an MA application, you're probably in the same boat either way. My feeling is that what makes apps stand out is a coherent narrative of who you see you are as a scholar or scholar-teacher. So, if you have no interest in applying work you've done in your writing sample to grad study, you will want to make sure you have that articulated especially well in your SOP and letters of recommendation. 
I've made this recommendation before, and I will surely make it again: if you can swing it, take an independent study with a faculty member you trust to push you and your work. Explain that your expectation for the course is to produce a writing sample for graduate school applications. You will not only have something you can then use for apps but also a faculty member who can speak very specifically about your work, your interests as a scholar in rhet/comp, and your work ethic.

For my MA I used three pieces (depending on the requirements). I used a 10 page paper from an American Lit survey course that could have broadly be considered a rhetoric piece (but really was just comparing works from different authors), a 4-5 creative nonfiction piece, and a feature article that I had written for a journalism course. R/C programs know that most MA admits aren't coming from R/C undergrad programs (or even from English programs, from my observations), so they are looking for your ability to make an argument, organize you ideas, and write coherently. If you have teaching materials (if you've done any workshops, or undergraduate TAships) I would use them.

My favorite time of year... the season of celebration gifs! Congrats, BarAndFrills! It's so nice to know this early in the game that you have an acceptance in the bag. 

I received a call/email yesterday from Michigan State, and have been accepted to their PhD program in Comp/Rhet for 2016. They accepted 10 people total, according to a friend of mine who is there. 

Have you done much looking into The Lion and the Unicorn, the academic journal interested in children's lit? You might take a look and see who is publishing in it and where they have affiliation. http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/lion_and_the_unicorn/

This topic came up about a week ago on the WPA-L (http://wpacouncil.org/wpa-l). 

I passed my comps today! I am officially ABD and a Candidate, which is SUCH A WEIRD thing to wrap my mind around. My only regret? I didn't work in a Hamilton reference. 
I wanted to start a thread where we can all celebrate each other's achievements this semester. Are you surviving your first semester? Will you be presenting at a Big Deal™ conference in 2016? Did you get a travel grant? Let's get a dance party started up in here. 

Just wanted to come back and say thank you for this. I am now in love with this font and don't know how I ever typed anything in TNR. 

Seriously, I wrote everything in Baskerville. Because of "science": http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670556/are-some-fonts-more-believable-than-others

What's wrong with shallow? In many ways, the SOP is a shallow document: you are describing definitively work that everyone knows you're going to change and that you need years of training before you can start. 
I don't think there is any good reason to discount mentioning specific faculty and excluding much of their work if you are doing it in such a way that it reads as "I know who works at your institution, and I specifically see these people helping get to where I want to be." I mean, the SOP is more about your work, not theirs. If your SOP reads as your work aligning with the people you've mentioned, the committee will know you've done your homework.

What's wrong with shallow? In many ways, the SOP is a shallow document: you are describing definitively work that everyone knows you're going to change and that you need years of training before you can start. 
I don't think there is any good reason to discount mentioning specific faculty and excluding much of their work if you are doing it in such a way that it reads as "I know who works at your institution, and I specifically see these people helping get to where I want to be." I mean, the SOP is more about your work, not theirs. If your SOP reads as your work aligning with the people you've mentioned, the committee will know you've done your homework.

I just want to add that your interests may completely change while in a program, so it's equally important to find faculty who engage with methodologies that appeal to you. For example, my advisor is a feminist rhetorical historiography scholar, and my dissertation is on disability activist rhetoric. But our partnership works because my work employs a feminist methodology, and I'm interested in feminist archival and recovery methods. 

I initially planned to apply to around 10 schools for the PhD, but the cost got in the way. I ended up applying to six schools.
From what I've observed though, there's no magic number or guarantee. I've seen people on here apply to 20 schools and strike out, and I've seen other people apply to three schools and get into all of them. When I applied for my MA, I did exactly one school and got in. With my PhD apps, I was accepted by two schools outright, waitlisted at another, rejected from two, and I never heard back from one.
I will add that the CIC fee waivers can be really useful depending on what schools you're applying to: https://www.cic.net/students/freeapp/introduction. They helped me out quite a bit.
 

::frantically superglues suede patches directly to my elbows:: I JUST WANT TO BE LOVED. 

Here's a thread from last year about online MA programs: http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/57570-online-ma-in-englishrhetoric-and-composition-programs/. Perhaps a good starting place?