Over the past few decades, Plato’s Phaedrus has become an important text for scholars interested in tracing new materialist approaches to the history of rhetoric and writing. Drawing on rhetoric and plant studies scholarship, this essay contributes to this conversation by arguing that trees disclose an important layer of irony in the dialogue, producing a deep, if not ambivalent, unity that brings together rhetoric, writing, and discourse. Through a study of trees in the dialogue, this essay demonstrates how the Phaedrus offers rich connections between spatial, nonhuman, and ecological dimensions of writing, rhetoric, and discourse.

The Sloyd Training School, an early twentieth-century private school for teachers in Boston, attempted to legitimize the Sloyd method of handiwork. Specifically, its Alumni Association's publication Sloyd Record brought together educators across the country to make a case for Sloyd's relevancy and impact on the academic and professional development of students, particularly students who were working poor or receiving educations in non-traditional settings. Its contributors painted Sloyd as a form of knowledge and a resource, as a literacy, and their rhetorical effectiveness was predicated upon Sloyd's ability to be painted as such in its far-reaching effects and comprehensiveness.

The generative AI chatbot, as an artificial rhetorical agent participating in the invention and circulation of public discourse, shakes the foundations of rhetorical tenets such as agency, ethos, circulation, and justice; and in doing so, it further isolates rhetoric as amoral, ateleological technē concerned with mere calculated effects and consequences, and may ultimately contribute to a post-rhetoric condition. This article depicts a rhetorical profile of the generative AI chatbot characterized by stochastic rhetoric, which is distinguished from the conventional understanding of rhetoric as (human) conscious and purposeful use of language to induce change. Making a case for the possibility of a post-rhetoric condition, the article considers what it might mean for our conceptualization of ethos, circulation, and justice, and suggests ways of adapting to it.

This study draws on Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) to examine the role of personal statement prompts in promoting or hindering the effectiveness of holistic review in graduate applications. Our analysis reveals that the content articulated in the personal statement prompts help to reify four ideological values held by the discipline. Through the framing of these ideological values, users are positioned into two major social roles: disciplinary expert and expert-in-training. We argue that, for holistic review to be effective, graduate programs must reconcile the tension between personal statement prompts that demand the writer take on contradictory social roles.

Grace and Lace Letter was a newsletter by and for transfeminine evangelicals in the 1990s. This article explores the rhetorical approaches contributors used to bridge these seemingly contradictory identities. Through a recontextualization and historicization of Biblical passages and an employment of a "created this way" discourse, these contributors created possibilities for an evangelical transfeminine identity and advocated for trans acceptance within their evangelical communities. However, these strategies also reveal complicity with other marginalizing discourses. Thus, this article considers the rhetorical processes through which transgender religious identities are constructed and the limitations of such approaches.

Rhetoric Re-View was established under the founding editorship of Theresa J. Enos and has been a feature of Rhetoric Review for over twenty-five years. The objective of Rhetoric Re-View is to offer review essays about prominent works that have made an impact on rhetoric. Reviewers evaluate the merits of established works, discussing their past and present contributions. The intent is to provide a long-term evaluation of significant research while also introducing important, established scholarship to those entering the field. This Rhetoric Re-View essay examines Cicero's De Senectute, or On Old Age, as a work of "gentle" rhetoric.

This essay focuses on two historical maps as rhetorical artifacts: The Piri Reis Map of 1513 produced by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis in 1513, the Reis map, and the Map of the Island of Cuba and Surrounding Territories produced by the Cuban geographer, historian, and educator José María de la Torre y de la Torre in 1841, the de la Torre map. The Reis map demonstrates the colonial logic of Americas’ cartographic invention while the de la Torre Map is an alternative cartographic artifact disrupting the Reis map’s celebratory discourse and the settler-colonial legacy of the world heritage memory.

Featuring narrative argument in Jewish dissent for Palestinians rights, this article examines identity reconstitution and the attunement to being in relationship with the foreign other. The author promotes a critical rhetoric of first-person narrative for the attunement of identity as an ethical practice in relation to alterity. This rhetoric is exemplified in the work of Sara Roy, Jewish American dissenter, and scholar, who speaks out in support of Palestinian rights as a child of Holocaust survivors. In the process of speaking out, Roy reinvents Jewish self-understanding as an alternative to Zionist identity formations.

Dialogism and dialectical knowledge making have long subtended theories of written discourse and therefore the design of rhetoric and writing curricula. As universities move toward interdisciplinary and applied disciplinary epistemologies, theories of written discourse based in the dialogical and dialectical tradition require new scrutiny. This article synthesizes scholarship from the rhetoric of science, written communication theory, and transdisciplinary theory to develop a new poly-logical and poly-lectical approach to written communication for interdisciplinary discourse. The article concludes with examples of hermeneutic and heuristic invention strategies for rhetoric and composition pedagogy that can encourage poly-logical and poly-lectical inquiry on contemporary interdisciplinary issues.

Ethos is an inherent characteristic of persuasion in commonplace scenarios. The acceptance of everyday communicative practices compels belief and trust in language usage, often without question of simple statements. A more substantial understanding of the perceived ethical quality of language usage will afford a richer view of communicative acts, cultures, politics, and events. Three areas of language usage and appearance determine this ethical quality: communion, occasion, and occurrence. Combined, these areas suggest how the phenomena of language usage, particularly within epideictic rhetoric, is not inherently factual in-itself but projects the illusion that it is such.

We argue that intellectual risk-taking offers unacknowledged potential for the writing classroom. But in order to incorporate intellectual risk into the RCWS classroom, we need a theory of its role and pedagogical practices to operationalize it. Our article puts forth a theory of intellectual risk-taking as a rhetorical, deliberative activity and offers six pedagogical topoi (emerging from survey data) where instructors and students are likely to encounter risks in their writing process. The topoi serve as inventional prompts for students, instructors, and programs interested in helping students to cultivate rhetorical capabilities as writers.

This article details the experiences of Ignacio Bonillas, one of the first Mexican students to graduate from Arizona’s territorial schools and explicates how those experiences impacted his perceptions of U.S. and Mexican citizenship. Bonillas’s story illustrates how definitions of citizenship in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands were permeable and dynamic before the era of Americanization and encourages teachers and students to interrogate the ways restrictive notions of citizenship are reproduced in public schools. This article goes on to argue for inviting students to access local archives and create case studies of figures whose experiences challenge the Americanized histories of their region.

This article examines what activism looks like in an age of "deep writing." As alumni find their ways through multiple domains of life after graduation, what role does writing play in helping them orient themselves toward engagement with the world around them? This article reviews relevant literature, including some of the difficulties of defining activism, and then analyzes focus group data in which participants describe different kinds of activism and the roles that writing plays in them. Wayfinding provides a framework for understanding how alumni writers orient their understanding of their own writing practices.