When first admitted to Oberlin College, women were expected to attend their rhetoric courses in silence. Not content with an education that did not prepare them for public speaking, some women students collaborated to educate themselves. Their history uncovers feminist and antiracist disruptions to composition and rhetoric that have much to teach present-day educators.

This article describes and reflects on a place-based pedagogical approach to public engagement that uses multimodal composition to insert new discourses into ongoing local debates over university expansion. The public-forming potential of multimodal texts encourages students to imagine new ways of being public and opportunities for adopting community-oriented subjectivities that engage with the issues, people, and spaces in neighborhoods adjacent to campus.

We surveyed 803 undergraduates at a large public university about their online writing practices. We find that despite wide platform access, students typically write in a narrow range of spaces for limited purposes and audiences, with a majority expressing rhetorical concerns about writing in digital spaces. These findings suggest rich opportunities for writing instructors to better help students negotiate the terrain of online public discourse.

This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls procedural feminism, or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will directly engage. The author argues that employing procedural feminism can move students to become more ethical participants in public discourse while circumventing student resistance to ideological classrooms.

Geocomposition engages students in writing on the move in order to explore how such writing composes the multiple layers of public places. This article describes a collaborative, location-based composition project designed for students to rhetorically engage a responsive public through locative media: media that work in and through specific sites. View a brief video abstract: Geocomposition in Public Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogy

Dear Colleagues and Friends~~This month's issue includes various genres- articles, symposium contributions, review essay, exchange, and poster page-that tap both time and space. In these collective texts, we have historical perspectives helping us understand our own past and allowing us to update our present; linkages to other fields of endeavor so as to enhance our own; connections across spaces to other sites of writing around the world; and closer looks at our own sites-hence the title of this introduction. As represented here, our field includes a capacious view, and as we expand sites of inquiry and activity, we have a more robust and complex view. In this introduction, then, I'll summarize each of these contributions before taking up two other tasks: (1) outlining the treat in store for us, in the combined September and December special issue of College Composition and Communication, we will learn from colleagues about various and diverse Locations of Writing; and (2) sharing with readers our new policy on rememberingIn our first article, Expanding the Aims of Public Rhetoric and Writing Peda- gogy, Writing Letters to Editors, Brian Gogan takes up how the conventional assignment of the letter to the editor can be located in what he calls an ap- proach to public rhetoric and writing pedagogy that is conducted according to the tripartite aims of publicity, authenticity, and efficacy. Drawing on his work with students, Gogan expands on these single-concept aims to situate them in relationships: publicity-as-condition and publicity-as-action, authenticity- as-location and authenticity-as-legitimation, and efficacy-as-persuasion and efficacy-as-participation. Gogan also argues that we should separate and emphasize the participation the letter-to-the-editor genre entails from the persuasion that may be its aspiration: when the efficacy of the letter-to-the- editor assignment is expanded so that it is understood in terms of participation that may lead to persuasion, public rhetoric and writing pedagogy embraces the fullness of the ecological model [of writing] by seeing the wide range of effects-persuasive or not-there within.Continuing recent work recovering our collective writing pasts, our next article details the experiences of several 19th century women, some of them from the U.S., making their educational way at Cambridge University. In 'A Revelation and a Delight': Nineteenth-Century Cambridge Women, Academic Collaboration, and the Cultural Work of Extracurricular Writing, L. Jill Lam- berton focuses on the writing these women engaged in, especially outside the classroom, in order both to succeed in the classroom and to affect wider spheres of influence. Defining this writing as a form of collaborative peer activity foster- ing agency, Lamberton identifies three benefits accruing to her 19th century subjects: (1) use of extracurricular writing that augmented and enriched cur- ricular learning; (2) use of writing to develop social networks and circulation; and (3) use of such writing to shift public opinion, looking outside the college or university for broader audiences to voice support and agitate for change.Mya Poe, Norbert Elliot, John Aloysius Cogan Jr., and Tito G. Nurudeen Jr. return us to the present as they consider how our writing programs can be enhanced: by adapting a legal heuristic used to determine what in the law is called impact. In The Legal and the Local: Using Disparate Impact Analysis to Understand the Consequences of Writing Assessment, these col- leagues first distinguish between inequities produced by intent from those produced unintentionally-the latter called disparate impact-before outlin- ing a three-part question-driven process that can identify such instances and work toward ways of changing them:Step 1: Do the assessment policies or practices result in adverse impact on students of a particular race as compared with students of other races? …

This article outlines a three-part pedagogy capable of responding to the risks, rewards, and headaches associated with public rhetoric and writing. To demonstrate the purchase of this pedagogy, I revisit one of the oldest and most misunderstood public rhetoric and writing assignments: the letter-to-the-editor assignment.

Over the past two decades, critical discourse analysis has emerged as a major new multidisciplinary approach to the study of texts and contexts in the public sphere.Developed in Europe, CDA has lately become increasingly popular in North America, where it is proving especially congenial to new directions in rhetoric and composition.This essay surveys much of this recent literature, noting how rhet/comp has incorporated CDA methodology in a variety of studies of inequality, ethics, higher education,critical pedagogy, news media, and institutional practices. CDA uses rigorous, empirical methods that are sensitive to both context and theory, making it ideal for the demandsof a range of projects being developed in our field.

Public rhetoric pedagogy can benefit from an ecological perspective that sees change as advocated not through a single document but through multiple mundane and monumental texts. This article summarizes various approaches to rhetorical ecology, offers an ecological read of the Montgomery bus boycotts, and concludes with pedagogical insights on a first-year composition project emphasizing rhetorical ecologies.

Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom Kristie S. Fleckenstein Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability Peter N. Goggin, ed. Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Mark Garrett Longaker The Responsibilities of Rhetoric Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick, eds. Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric for Social Movements Sharon McKenzie Stevens and Patricia M. Malesh, eds.

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.

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 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.

The spaces in which public deliberation most often takes place are institutionally, technologically, and scientifically complex. In this article, we argue that in order to participate, citizens must be able to invent valued knowledge. This invention requires using complex information technologies to access, assemble, and analyze information in order to produce the professional and technical performances expected in contemporary civic forums. We argue for a civic rhetoric that expands to research the complicated nature of interface technologies, the inventional practices of citizens as they use these technologies, and the pedagogical approaches to encourage the type of collaborative and coordinated work these invention strategies require.

Often, composition teachers present public debate as if it occurs on a rhetorically level playing field, with victory going to the person who argues most logically. Real-world contestants are seldom so equal in power. We can enrich our pedagogy by studying such encounters; example: the 1263 disputation at Barcelona between Rabbi Nachmanides and Friar Paul Christian.

Personal narrative embeds the expertise of subordinated groups in stories that seldom translate into public debate. The authors describe a community writing project in which welfare recipients used personal narratives to enter into the public record their tacit and frequently discounted knowledge. The research illustrates the difficulties and possibilities “rhetorical, emotional, and material” of constructing narratives that “cross publics.”

Using Burkean theory, I claim that Malcolm X brilliantly exposed the rhetoric and epistemology of whiteness as he rejected the African American jeremiad—a dominant form of African American oratory for more than 150 years. Whiteness theory served as the basis for Malcolm X’s alternative literacy, which raises important questions that literacy theorists have yet to consider.

I analyze the public and professional discourse of learning disability, arguing that medical models of literacy misdirect teaching by narrowing its focus to remediation. This insight about teaching is not new; resurgent demands for behaviorist pedagogies make understanding their continuing appeal important to composition studies.

Globalization, or “fast” capitalism, has changed the workplace and writing in it dramatically. Composition epistemologies and practices, elaborated during the twentieth century in tandem with Taylorized workplace literacy requirements, fail to embrace the complexities of writerly sensibilities necessary to students entering the new workforce. To update these epistemologies and practices, MA students in professional writing were positioned as autoethnographers of workplace cultures, reporting to classmates on organizational structures and practices as they affected discursive products and processes. Their studies produced a database of petits recits on workplace cultures, and their work is analyzed for the ways in which it forecasts subjective work identities of writers in the years ahead. Implications are drawn for composition administration, curriculum design, course design, and collaborative work among academics and writers in private and public spheres.

The condition of our public discussions about literary and cultural works has much to say about the condition of our democracy and the author argues for more public discourse--in classrooms, newspapers, magazines, etc. to reclaim a public voice on national artistic matters. In this revealing study of the links among literature, rhetoric, and democracy, Rosa A. Eberly explores the public debate generated by amateur and professional readers about four controversial literary works: two that were censored in the United States and two that created conflict because they were not censored. In Citizen Critics Eberly compares the outrage sparked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer with the relative quiescence that greeted the much more violent and sexually explicit content of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psychoand Andrea Dworkin's Mercy. Through a close reading of letters to the editor, reviews, media coverage, and court cases, Eberly shows how literary critics and legal experts defused censorship debates by shifting the focus from content to aesthetics and from social values to publicity. By asserting their authority to pass judgments--thus denying the authority of citizen critics--these professionals effectively removed the discussion from literary public spheres. A passionate advocate for treating reading as a public and rhetorical enterprise rather than solely as a private one, Eberly suggests the potential impact a work of literature may have on the social polity if it is brought into public forums for debate rather than removed to the exclusive rooms of literary criticism. Eberly urges educators to use their classrooms as protopublic spaces in which students can learn to make the transition from private reader to public citizen.

We offer institutional critique as an activist methodology for changing institutions. Since institutions are rhetorical entities, rhetoric can be deployed to change them. In its effort to counter oppressive institutional structures, the field of rhetoric and com-position has focused its attention chiefly on the composition classroom, on the de-partment of English, and on disciplinary forms of critique. Our focus shifts the scene of action and argument to professional writing and to public discourse, using spatial methods adapted from postmodern geography and critical theory.

Assignments appear in every chapter. I. EXPLORING CONCEPTS. 1. Seeing Rhetoric Through Media. Overview - Key Terms: Rhetoric, Media, Text. Keeping a Journal. Issues. Genres - Observing and Classifying Texts. Texts as Myths - Reading Takes Place From Within Belief Systems. Jennifer Ditri, Cheerleaders are Athletes, Too! Reading News and Popular Texts - Practice of Critical Reading. 2. Reading Media. Overview - Reading Interactively. Issues. What's a Medium? - Definition and Background of the Term. Learning From the Media. Being a Raymond Williams, Keyword: Consumer. Doing Without Media. Journal Entries: Marci Nowak, Jennifer Ditri, Mark Maxson, Stacey McAfee, Michael Halstead, Meredith Roedel. Clutter and Context - Ways to Deal with Overload. Strategies for Reading S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda S. Lichter, Who Are the Elite? Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, Real Elite. Conventions - Noticing What is Taken for Granted. Conventions in Writing and Writing Classes. Bill McKibben, 7:00 a.m. II. MEDIA AND PURPOSES FOR WRITING. 3. Making Use of Observations - From Prewriting to Drafting. Overview - What Critical Reading of Can Add to the Writing Issues. Writing as Your Medium - Genres and Conventions in Speech and Writing. William Stafford, A Way of Writing. Writing Essays as a Conventional Act - Crossover Between Conventions in Texts and in Writing. Broadcast News, Tom Gives Aaron Some Tips on Reading the Journal Entries: Teri Hurst. How Writers Write - Myth of the Born Writer. George Plimpton, Interview with Ernest Hemingway Karen Kurt Tiel, Note About The Loop Writing Process. Prewriting - Devices for Exploring What You and Your Readers Know. Drafting - Pulling it All Together. Readers' Roles - Text Invites Us to Play Along. Cassandra Amesley, How to Watch Star Trek. Readers' Roles in Essays: Linda Weltner, Joys of Mediocrity Kirkpatrick Sale, Fighting the Darkness Danielle Smith, Publishers' Clearing House. 4. Gathering and Evaluating News and Information. Overview - Confirming Our Basis for Judgment. Issues. Stories in the News - Narratives Which Guide Our Interpretation. Midland County Review, Barcia Joins Conservatives in Fight Against Unfunded Mandates. Sabrina Cantu, It's O.K. to Make Fun of Jesus, If He's Black. How to Search for Information - Search Strategies for News and Information. Stacey Cole, Negativity in the Media. What Counts as News? - Problems with Definitions and Reception. News as Rhetorical. Forms of News. News as Commercial. James Amend, A Spicier, More Racey New Medium. News and Entertainment. Reading the News Comparatively - Earthquake in Japan, as Treated in Several News Media. Problems in News. Keeping Informed - Health Care Reform. Bill Moyers and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Great Health Care Debate. Propaganda. Objectivity and Fairness. Appendix: Transcripts of News Reports on Kobe Earthquake. CBS Evening News. CNN Report. All Things Considered. NPR Morning Edition. 5. Close Attention to Detail: Regarding the Commercial. Overview - Value in Analyzing Unvalued Texts. Issues. Why Ads? - Effective Rhetoric in the Face of Audience Resistance. Collecting Ads - Categories as Part of Making Meaning. How to Read a Commercial - Rhetorical Devices in Print Ads. Tara L. Prainito, Advertising's Enhancements. Analyzing a TV Commercial - Technical Events in Television Commercials. Transcript and Analysis of Midol Commercial. Aaron Kukla, Analysis of a Chevrolet Camaro Ad. Categorizing Commercials. Problems. Ads as Propaganda. Ads and Effects. Dirt - Ambiguities in Boundaries Between Texts. Leslie Savan, Don't Inhale: Tobacco Industry's Attitude-Delivery System. 6. Reading Pictures. Overview - Connections Between Visual and Verbal. Issues. Appeal of Seeing - Reliance on Sight. Pictures and Narratives. How to Read a Picture. Signs, Codes, and Conventions. Visual Images and Descriptive Writing. Problem: Gaze. 7. Entertainment as Information. Overview - What Entertainment Texts Tell Us. Issues. What's Entertainment? - Business or Cultural Context. Entertainment as Play - Reactions to Popular Culture. More Dirt - Transgressions in Entertainment Texts. Why Do They Want You To Play? - Entertainment and Hegemony. Arthur Asa Berger, Genre Migration. Audience's View - Dominant, Resisting, and Negotiating Positions. Problems. Taste. Popular Music. Roches, Mr. Sellack. Violence. Carl M. Cannon, Honey, I Warped the Kids. John Leonard, Why Blame TV? Todd Gitlin, Imagebusters: Hollow Crusade Against TV Violence. Children's Entertainment. David Foster, Sexist? Racist? Violent? Terrence Rafferty, No Pussycat. Science-Fiction. Race and Entertainment Media. Stereotypes. Todd Gitlin, From Inside Prime Time. III. RECONSIDERATIONS. 8. Discovering Contexts and Deeper Purposes. Overview - Critical Thinking About Writing. Issues. Representation and the Natural - Denaturing Natural. Labeling - Cues for Interpretation. Appellation and Ideology. Ideology: Definitions and Illustrations - Three Paradigms: False Consciousness, Any Set of Values and Assumptions, and Specifically Values and Assumptions. Reading Die Hard - Ideology as Reflected in a Popular Text Dominant Ideologies. Reading Texts for Ideology. Lisa Straney, Analysis: Nike Ad. Ideology and Metaphor. Problems. Example of PC - Who Gets to Complain About Political Correctness? Brian E. Albrecht, Team Names Still Stir Controversy. Candy Hamilton, Where a Tomahawk Chop Feels Like a Slur. John K. Wilson, Myth of Correctness. Nostalgia. Further Reading. Bob Garfield, Pizza Hut Has the Crust to Roll Out Incorrect Celebs. 9. Revision: Bringing Drafts to Completion. Overview. Issues. Why Revise? - Raising Your Game. Writing as Conversation. Strategies and Tactics for Revising. Computers and Revision. A Few Tactics for Revision - Leave It Alone Nutshelling Bombing: Impersonation. Shannon Peacock, From Dais-ed and Confused. Eric Nelson, From Words Mean Things and Integrity Matters. Sample Revision: Media in the Courts. Collections of Writing. Portfolios - Draft and Exhibition. Class Publications. 10. Developing Style and Audience Awareness. Overview - Style as Product of Interaction Between Persona, Subject, and Audience. Issues. Some Bad Advice About Style. Style as Ornament. Style as Clarity - E.B. White's Disappearing Author. Reducing Unnecessary Difficulty - Some Practical Advice. Style as Constitutive Or Would You Rather Be a Dog? - Audience as Appellated by the Text. Hegemony and Style. Daniel Zwerdling, Interview with Leslie Savan. Ira Teinowitz, From The Marketing 100: Rich Lalley, Red Dog. Style and Audience. Words, Words, Words. Beverly Gross, What a Bitch! Bad Rhetoric - Some Deceptive or Sloppy Devices. Rush Limbaugh and Rhetoric. Recognizing and Correcting Bad Rhetoric. William Lutz, Doublespeak. 11. Expanding Resources. Overview - Dynamic Media. Issues. Collections as a Basis for Your Own System - Adding Other Media. What to Expect - Electronic Media: Hopeful and Pessimistic Assessments. Electronic - Rhetorical Implications. Search Procedures. Hypertext - Implications of a New Form. Internet as Source of Information: A Test Case - Reactions to Oklahoma City Bombing on the Internet. Cyberporn - Circulation Through of Sloppy Research. Library Material - Searching for More. Some Reservations about the Internet. Herbert J. Gans, Electronic Shut Ins: Some Social Flaws of the Information Superhighway. M. Kadi, Q: How Tall is the Internet? A: Four Inches Tall.

Examines American discourse on education and what it reveals about our values as a society.

Gregory Clark S. Michael Halloran bring together nine essays that explore change in both the theory the practice of rhetoric in the nineteenth-century United States. In their introductory essay, Clark Halloran argue that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, rhetoric encompassed a neoclassical oratorical culture in which speakers articulated common values to establish consensual moral authority that directed community thought action. As the century progressed, however, moral authority shifted from the civic realm to the professional, thus expanding participation in the community as it fragmented the community itself. Clark Halloran argue that this shift was a transformation in which rhetoric was reconceived to meet changing cultural needs. Part I examines the theories practices of rhetoric that dominated at the beginning of the century. essays in this section include Edward Everett Neoclassical Oratory in Genteel America by Ronald F. Reid, The Oratorical Poetic of Timothy Dwight by Gregory Clark, The Sermon as Public Discourse: Austin Phelps the Conservative Homiletic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century America by Russel Hirst, of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America by P. Joy Rouse. Part 2 examines rhetorical changes in the culture that developed during that century. essays include The Popularization of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: Elocution the Private Learner by Nan Johnson, Rhetorical Power in the Victorian Parlor: Godey s Lady s Book and the Gendering of Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric by Nicole Tonkovich, Jane Addams the Social of Democracy by Catherine Peaden, The Divergence of Purpose Practice on the Chatauqua: Keith Vawter s Self-Defense by Frederick J. Antczak Edith Siemers, The of Picturesque Scenery: A Nineteenth-Century Epideictic by S. Michael Halloran.

On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, Aristotle, translated, with introduction, notes, and appendixes by George A. Kennedy Janet M. Atwill Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies, C. Jan Swearingen Beth Daniell Composition and Resistance, C. Mark Hurlbert and Michael Blitz Alice Calderonello Written Language Disorders: Theory into Practice, Ann M. Bain, Laura Lyons Bailet, and Louisa Cook Moates Patricia J. McAlexander Faking It: A Look into the Mind of a Creative Learner, Christopher M. Lee and Rosemary F. Jackson Patricia J. McAlexander Reading and Writing the Self Autobiography in Education and the Curriculum, Robert J. Graham Lynn Z. Bloom Textbooks In Focus: Advanced Writing Rethinking Writing, Peshe C. Kuriloff Evelyn Ashton-Jones About Writing: A Rhetoric for Advanced Writers, Kristin R. Woolever Evelyn Ashton-Jones Process, Form, and Substance: A Rhetoric for Advanced Writers, Richard M. Coe Evelyn Ashton-Jones Beginning Writing Groups Daniel Sheridan

Based on careful study of the Greek text and informed by the best modern scholarship, the second edition of this highly acclaimed translation offers the most faithful English version ever published of On Rhetoric. Updated in light of recent scholarship, the new edition features a revised introduction-with two new sections-and revised appendices that provide new and additional supplementary texts (relevant ancient works).

This book is a critically informed challenge to the traditional histories of rhetoric to the current emphasis on Aristotle Plato as the most significant classical voices in rhetoric. In it, Susan C. Jarratt argues that the first sophistsa diverse group of traveling intellectuals in the fifth century B.C.should be given a more prominent place in the study of rhetoric composition. Rereading the ancient sophists, she creates a new lens through which to see contemporary social issues, including the orality/literacy debate, feminist writing, deconstruction, writing pedagogy.The sophists pleasure in the play of language, their focus on historical contin-gency, the centrality of their teaching for democratic practice were sufficiently threatening to their successors Plato Aristotle that both sought to bury the sophists under philosophical theories of language. The censure of Plato Aris-totle set a pattern for historical views of the sophists for centuries. Following Hegel Nietzsche, Jarratt breaks the pattern, finding in the sophists a more progressive charter for teachers scholars of reading writing, as well as for those in the adjacent disciplines of literary criticism theory, education, speech communication, ancient history.In tracing the historical interpretations of sophistic rhetoric, Jarratt suggests that the sophists themselves provide the outlines of an alternative to history-writing as the discovery recounting of a set of stable facts. She sees sophistic use of narrative in argument as a challenge to a simple division between orality literacy, current discussions of which virtually ignore the sophists. Outlining similarities between ecriture feminine and sophistic style, Jarratt shows that contemporary feminisms have more in common with sophists than just a style; they share a rhetorical basis for deployment of theory in political action. In her final chapter, Jarratt takes issue with accounts of sophistic pedagogy focusing on technique the development of the individual. She argues that, despite its employment by powerful demagogues, sophistic pedagogy offers a resource for today s teachers interested in encouraging minority voices of resistance through language study as the practice of democracy.