This article examines the rhetoric of resistance used by South African anti-apartheid journalists to expose the links between the apartheid government and death squads.By utilizing allusions, repetition, and a concept I refer to as “subversive enthymemes,” these journalists managed to reveal publicly information about death squad activity in a context of overwhelming constraints almost a full decade before these facts were confirmed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The pharmaceutical industry’s corporate responsibility reports illustrate how the liberal rhetoric of civic engagement can be reappropriated to serve the market-driven aims of risk management and public relations. Tracing the ideologic linkage of corporate responsibility and service-learning versions of civic engagement, and contextualizing postsecondary service-learning along a larger neoliberal trajectory, should prompt us to reconsider basic questions about the means and ends of our institutional and pedagogical work.

Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate in online back-and-forth exchanges that influence their rhetorical literacy. Because of the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical, and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public deliberation effective and how we can teach students to deliberate.

This article defines applied rhetorical work as integral to the intellectual work of writing program administration and asks our professional organizations to classify it as such within our position statements. With a specific case, it offers a generative framework for representing and assessing the work’s scholarly commons for professional review.

Visual rhetoric fuels composition as rhetors refinish filmed moments to show others what they “see” in them. My work examines projects that model strategic discourse in public spaces. It offers ideas for achieving full and guarded disclosure when clarity is but one of several communicative goals.

The following essays are adapted and extended from a CCCC roundtable session in New York in March 2007 entitled “At the Intersections: Rhetoric and Cultural Studies as Situated Practice,” with contributions by Lisa Ede (chair), Elizabeth A. Flynn, Anita Helle, Jay Jordan, and Elaine Richardson.

This article examines the historiographic trajectory of rhetoric and composition studies by analyzing archival research practices, using Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad as our analytical tool. We rely on a Burkean framework of “scenes, acts, agents, agencies, purposes, and attitudes” to invigorate our understanding of historiographic methods and to open up new possibilities for future histories of rhetoric and composition.

When examined rhetorically, Savannah River Site Community Preparedness Information calendars from 1994, 2004, and 2008 represent living rhetorical practices aimed at changing the public mind. My technical communication classroom at USC Aiken is uniquely situated for us to examine documents constantly generated by the site’s Public Affairs Department.

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.

In this article, I test claims made about rhetorical education for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining Florida State College for Women (FSCW), one of eight public women’s colleges in the South. I recover the voices of instructors and students by looking both at the interweaving strands of literature, journalism, and speech instruction in the English curriculum and how students publicly represented themselves through writing. I argue that the rhetorical environment at FSCW created a robust climate of expression for students that complicates our understanding of the development of women’s education in speaking and writing.

This article explores the need for alternative rhetorics that address systemic marginalization in American society and in the practice of rhetoric and composition. Specifically, three concepts from queer theory—intersectionality, copresence, and disidentification—are used as a basis for defining an alternative rhetoric. Then, in the bulk of the article, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera is examined to illustrate what engaging in alternative rhetoric from a marginalized cultural position may mean in practice.

Discussions of intellectual property are often the focus of rhetoric and composition research, and the question of textual origins grounds these discussions. Through an examination of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit, this essay addresses disciplinary concerns about textual origins and intellectual property through a discussion of situated and constructed ethos.

This article examines how the South African Committee for Higher Education used the resources of print culture to design forms of writing and delivery systems that provided students and post-literate adults in the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s with the means to recognize and represent themselves as rhetorical agents, for whom reading and writing were tools of deliberation and social action to participate in building a non-racial political future.

The indigenous rhetoric of the Plateau Indians continues to exert a discursive influence on student writing in reservation schools today. Plateau students score low on state-mandated tests and on college writing assignments, in large part because the pervasive personalization of Plateau rhetoric runs counter to the depersonalization of academic argument. Yet, we can teach writing in ways that honor all students’ “and not just Plateau students’ rhetorical sovereignty” even as we prepare them for academic writing.

Our article seeks to integrate alternative voices into traditional rhetorical study by turning to Bitch and BUST, two mainstream zines that serve as dynamic examples of young women’s rhetoric in action. We believe these zines are shaping the present and future of women’s rhetoric. Their most significant contribution to the understanding of women’s rhetoric is located in the way they accommodate ethotic constructions that are at once contradictory and complementary. While these texts can seem abrasive and perhaps even outrageous, the ways in which the writers shape their ethe can teach rhetoricians and teachers of rhetoric and writing about the modes of argumentation practiced by this subculture of the current feminist movement, one which is firmly grounded in the larger public sphere.

If college writing faculty wish to prepare students to engage in civic forums, then how might we prepare students to write and speak amid racial politics on our campuses? This article explores the college student discourse that shaped an interracial conflict at a public California university in 2002 and questions the “rhetoric of injury” informing racial accountability in the post-civil rights era.

As writing-program administrators and faculty are being called upon more frequently to help design and facilitate large-scale assessments, it becomes increasingly important for us to see assessment as integral to our work as academics. This article provides a framework, based on current historical, theoretical, and rhetorical knowledge, to help writing specialists understand how to embrace assessment as a powerful mechanism for improved teaching and learning at their institutions.

This article examines how the South African Committee for Higher Education used the resources of print culture to design forms of writing and delivery systems that provided students and post-literate adults in the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s with the means to recognize and represent themselves as rhetorical agents, for whom reading and writing were tools of deliberation and social action to participate in building a non-racial political future.

This article briefly analyzes the Spellings Commission Report on Higher Education, places it in the context of other American education reforms, and suggests ways for literacy educators to respond to this latest call for accountability in ways that are cognizant of political realities without compromising the integrity of our profession.

This article argues that the teaching of public writing should not neglect issues of circulation and local need. In a series of case studies involving small press papers and homeless advocacy, the authors seek to extend recent work begun by Susan Wells, John Trimbur, and Nancy Welch, which raises crucial questions about public rhetoric in the writing classroom.

This article uses the convergence of our positionings as feminists, pragmatists, and rhetoricians to theorize communicative gaps related to different beliefs about writing instruction as sites of generative dialogue. We offer a WPA/TA discourse model centered on productive resistance and on discursive power to posit feminist pragmatic rhetoric as a communicative art of writing program change.

This article argues that the ideas of “play” and “abduction” in Charles Peirce’s work represent an inventive theory of argument that opens up the kinds of activities that can be called “arguments” and avoids some of the struggles over imposed beliefs with which recent argument theory has grappled.

This article initiates scholarly discussions of undergraduate research, an educational movement and comprehensive curricular innovation, in composition and rhetoric. I argue that by viewing undergraduate research production and authorship along a continuum of scholarly authority, student scholars obtain authorship and authority through participation in undergraduate research. I then address several implications of this continuum for the discipline.

The assessment framework presented here draws on theories of reflective practice and mediated activity to update or “multimodalize” the reflective texts students are sometimes asked to compose after completing an essay. The article underscores the importance of having students assume greater responsibility for cataloging and assessing the potentials of the texts they compose both within and beyond the space of the classroom.

This article surveys and analyzes nearly fifteen years of scholarship, situating itself at the intersection of LGBT/queer studies and composition/rhetoric studies. The authors argue that paying attention to queerness provides unique opportunities to engage with students in challenging discussions about how the most seemingly personal parts of our lives are densely and intimately wrapped up in larger sociocultural and political narratives that organize desire and condition how we think of ourselves. Three moves in queer composition scholarship are identified “confronting homophobia, becoming inclusive, and queering the homo/hetero binary” and implications of these moves for composition are discussed.

Review of three books: Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement Linda Flower Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy beyond the College Curriculum Eli Goldblatt Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged UniversityAnn M. Feldman

Chinese migrant narratives suggest a parodic reworking of China’s official market ideology, “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” as well as new rhetorics that bring worker solidarity and opportunities for positive change.

Kirsch explores “the connection between spirituality and civic engagement,” suggesting that “spirituality—broadly defined to include mindfulness, introspection, and reflection—can play an important role in enabling rhetorical agency.”

Contemporary composition classrooms have understandably distanced themselves from the elitism associated with the terms taste and propriety. However, writers do need to learn how appropriate discourse is rhetorically negotiated. Understanding and reinventing propriety’s rhetorical function can enable students and teachers to develop notions of propriety that consider complex histories and perspectives.

Rhetoric and composition’s increasing attention to multimodal composing involves challenges that go beyond issues of access to digital technologies and electronic composing environments. As a specific case study, this article explores the history of aural composing modalities (speech, music, sound) and examines how they have been understood and used within English and composition classrooms and generally subsumed by the written word in such settings. I argue that the relationship between aurality (and visual modalities) and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and has thus, deprived students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning. Further, in light of scholarship on the importance of aurality to different communities and cultures, I argue that our contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. I encourage teachers and scholars of composition, and other disciplines, to adopt an increasingly thoughtful understanding of aurality and the role it—and other modalities—can play in contemporary communication tasks.

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The essays in this special symposium on Chinese rhetoric join the work of other cross-cultural rhetorical scholars in proposing new contrastive as well as comparative approaches and exploring structures that are dialectical and literary as well as rhetorical. In this work can be observed the formation of a new contact zone.

Teaching rhetorical production in a digital age calls for us to rethink our discipline’s current distaste for writing mechanics. Yet, the digital mechanics of writing are much broader than grammatical concerns. They include production tools that allow for the invention and circulation of audio, visual, and Multigenre writing.

describe and analyze the cases of three Native scholars in order to explore the claims, evidence, and rhetorical exigencies present when a scholar claims to be Native American.

The study of writers and writing in digital environments raises distinct and complex ethical issues for researchers. Rhetoric theory and casuistic ethics, working in tandem, provide a theoretical framework for addressing such issues. A casuistic heuristic grounded in rhetorical principles can help digital writing researchers critically interrogate their research designs, carefully examine their relationships with research participants, and make sound ethical judgments.

Dispelling historical narratives in composition and rhetoric that largely depict nineteenth-century student compositions as “vacuous” themes, this archival study examines women’s compositions at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as complex generic hybrids, in which the composition is fused with common social and dialogic forms.

In this essay, I propose that the field of composition/rhetoric can make important contributions to the understanding of ethics based on our critical perspective on language as interactional and rhetorical. The actual language of decision making with ethical dimensions has rarely been studied directly in the literature, a crucial gap our field can usefully fill.

This article is a rhetorical analysis of the anxious and outraged discourse employed in response to the “rising tide” of cheating and plagiarism. This discourse invites actions that are antithetical to the goals of education and the roles of educators, as exemplified by the proliferation of plagiarism-detection technologies.

Heather Lettner-Rust has written a commentary on David Coogan’s article “Service Learning and Social Change: The Case for Materialist Rhetoric,” which appeared in the June 2006 issue of CCC. David Coogan responds to Heather Lettner-Rust’s commentary. The full text of the original article is available at http://inventio.us/ccc.

This article places responses received from an open-ended survey of graduate students and faculty in dialogue with published commentary on the scope of composition studies as a discipline to explore three interrelated disciplinary dilemmas: the “pedagogical imperative,” the “theory-practice split,” and the increasingly complicated relationship between “rhetoric” and “composition” as our field’s titular terms.

The article explores writing-centered pedagogies that deepen student learning in literature survey courses. More broadly, the article also responds to Richard Fulkerson and Maureen Daly Goggin, who challenge professors of English studies to find disciplinary unity within the diverse epistemologies of rhetoric.

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Review Essays: The Literacies of Hip-Hop Nancy Effinger Wilson Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture H. Samy Alim “Gettin’ Our Groove On”: Rhetoric, Language, and Literacy for the Hip Hop Generation Kermit E. Campbell Hiphop Literacies Elaine Richardson Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans Geneva Smitherman.

The Japanese martial art of aikido affords a framework for understanding argument as harmonization rather than confrontation. Two movements, circling away (tenkan) and entering in (irimi), suggest tactics for arguing with adversaries. The ethical imperative of aikido involves protecting one’s adversary from harm, using the least force necessary, and, when possible, transforming aggression into cooperation.

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While Richard Weaver, R. S. Crane, Richard McKeon, and Robert Streeter have been most identified with rhetoric at the University of Chicago and its institutional return in the 1950s, the archival record demonstrates that Frederick Champion Ward, dean of the undergraduate “College” from 1947 to 1954, and Henry W. Sams, director of English in the College during Ward’s tenure, created the useful tensions for these positions to emerge.

This study challenges the prevailing interpretations of the Greek rhetorical principle of kairos “saying the right thing at the right time” and attempts to draw on a more nuanced understanding of the term in order to provide generative re-readings of three Braddock Award–winning essays.

In this article we propose, theorize, demonstrate, and report early results from a course that approaches first-year composition as introduction to Writing Studies. This pedagogy explicitly recognizes the impossibility of teaching a universal academic discourse and rejects that as a goal for first-year composition. It seeks instead to improve students’ understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and that encourages more realistic conceptions of writing.

This essay reports on a university-school oral history project at an elementary school in Brooklyn, New York. It theorizes the dialectic of place and history as expressed in the voices of the school community and goes on to suggest some tenets for a public sphere pedagogy rooted in material rhetoric and economic geography.