(1993). The war between reading and writing— and how to end it. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 5-24.

Jacqueline de Romilly. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Oxford University Press, 1992. 260 pages. $75.00. Ira Shor. Empowering Education. University of Chicago Press, 1992.286 + vii pages. Lester Faigley. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1992. 285 pages. Crowley, Sharon. The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current‐Traditional Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. xviii + 207 pages. Horner, Winifred Bryan. Nineteenth‐Century Scottish Rhetoric: The American Connection. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. x + 211 pages. Johnson, Nan. Nineteenth‐Century Rhetoric in North America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.313 pages. Rewriting the nineteenth century Chris M. Anson, Joan Graham, David A. Jolliffe, Nancy S. Shapiro, Carolyn H. Smith. Scenarios for Teaching Writing: Contexts for Discussion and Reflective Practice. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993. xiii + 160 pages. Mark Backman, Sophistication: Rhetoric and the Rise of Self‐Consciousness. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1991. Douglas Walton. The Place of Emotion in Argument. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. 294 pages. $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.

In 1976 Mina Shaughnessy invoked the phrase converting the natives (235) describe an undesirable attitude for a teacher of composition. In her article Diving In: An Introduction Basic Writing, she outlines four stages of development for composition teachers, of which converting the natives is the second. The tendency of teachers at this stage is see themselves as missionaries who initiate the unenlightened into the true path of correct writing. At this stage the teacher's goal is to carry the technology of advanced literacy the inhabitants of an underdeveloped country (235). Joseph Harris also mentions the term conversion in his 1989 critique of the use of discourse communities in the composition classroom (16). We have, Harris suggests, pictured various discourse communities as fundamentally different, in fact, so fundamentally different that we are at a loss explain how students make the break with former communities in order enter new communities. Harris describes the way we have tended think of students

These notes are my recollections of a trip to see Kenneth Burke on February 19, 1993, in Andover, New Jersey, where Burke has lived for more than 70 years. The visitors were Jack Selzer, who is studying Burke's early work; Charles Mann, a longtime friend of Burke and curator of the Rare Books Room at Penn State's Pattee Library, where a substantial collection of Burke papers is housed; and Rosa Eberly, a graduate student in rhetoric at Penn State. The visitees: Burke and his friend and housekeeper, Ginnie.

Ethos is generally associated with individual rhetors.1 Certainly that's association Aristotle had in mind when he recorded most influential usage of term (Rhetoric 1356a). But there is ample warrant for moving to a broader level-the level adopted in this paper, a case study of outrageous of a group of generative linguists on cusp of sixties and seventies. There is ample warrant for identifying not simply with specific individuals in specific orations but also with identifiable communities. In ordinary language, for instance, has always been far more communal than individual: Ethos.... [ 1.] The characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment, of a people or community; 'genius' of an institution or system (OED, 1933 reissue) . And it has a similar sense among our academic neighbors-in literary criticism, where books have titles like The Ethos of Restoration Comedy (Schneider); in sociology, where books have titles like The Ethos of Hong Kong Chinese (Siu-Kai), or, more famously, in Merton's discussion of general ethos of science (268). Coming closer to home, consider Augustine's notion of a Christian ethos, which presupposes that rhetor stands for group values (De Doctrina 4.27-29). Consider similarly presupposing admonition of George Campbell about influence of party-spirit (97). Consider Black's above-epigramitized talk of patterned commitments and stylistic proclivities, which, as Halloran tells us, is essentially projection of to communal level (Black 85; Halloran, Molecular Biology 71). Elsewhere, Halloran tells us more: the word has both an individual and a collective meaning. It makes sense to speak of of this or that person, but it makes equally good sense to speak of of a particular

Being bodies that learn language / thereby becoming wordlings-thus begins Kenneth Burke's revised definition of human beings.' Here I will suggest teachers of writing and literacy can use Burke to revise our discussion of words and thereby better empower the wordlings we teach. Traditionally, what have we taught our students about words? Probably the first place to look for the answer to this question is the site where our assertions about diction have most power: in the margins of their papers. What my students report about their revision processes matches what composition researchers report. Their primary concern (re: diction) is changing words to avoid such comments as WW, Abst, Amb, especially WW. That is the most potent lesson they have learned from their previous teachers about diction. I. A. Richards was right when he asserted that the best and most effective way to teach writing is to help students understand how words work in (8). The New Rhetoric reframes what we know about words work. It directs attention to the crucial importance of word-ing in both the psychological process of invention and the social process of discourse community.2 It can help us teach writing humanely, critically, and effectively both in the humanities and across the curriculum/'in the disciplines. Most composition textbooks use Burke, if at all, only by mentioning his Pentad. But this presentation of the Pentad is a red herring, an obeisance that allows us to deflect the rest of Burke, to put him under erasure.3 More important than any particular like the Pentad is what Burke can help us understand about language in general, rhetorical processes in particular. We should take into our classrooms Burke's insights into words work, into abstractions move minds, into contexts (especially of that rhetorically most important context called, perhaps misleadingly, audience [cf. Park]), into contradiction and into process-in short, into writing as a psycholinguistic, sociocultural process. In writing classes our discussion of words is all too often based in reductively narrow, dichotomized conceptions of style and diction. We will do well to let Burke remind us words are more important than that, to remind us wording can constitute knowledge and power. We should demonstrate to our students-while

My other self-as he might be called in a brief, ambiguous novelwas in this instance a bush pilot several hundred feet above Third Matagamon Lake, face to face with a strong winter wind. The plane was a Super Cub, scarcely large enough for the two of us. We sat in tandem and talked through an intercom. There is a lot of identification, even transformation, in the work I do-moving along from place to place, person to person, as a reporter, a writer, repeatedly trying to sense another existence and in some ways to share it. Never had that been more true than now, in part because he was sitting there with my life in his hands while placing (in another way) his life in mine. (249)

(1993). Mirroring ourselves? The pedagogy of early grammar texts. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 418-435.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes We would like to acknowledge Richard L. Enos for his careful readings of initial drafts and for his thoughtful suggestions along the way. We would also like to thank James Murphy for his useful comments regarding our manuscript. Finally, we are especially grateful to Takis Poulakos not only for his scholarship that works to open up a space for Isocrates but even more so for his insightful readings and challenging comments that indicated a tincture of hope in earlier drafts of our paper.

(1993). I conclude not: Toward a pragmatic account of metadiscourse. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 265-289.

M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. xi + 312 pages. John Frederick Reynolds, David C. Mair, Pamela C. Fischer. Writing and Reading Mental Health Records: Issues and Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992. 109 pages. Nathaniel Teich, ed. Rogerian Perspectives: Collaborative Rhetoric for Oral and Written Communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1992. 303 pages. $24.50. Gerald McNiece. The Knowledge That Endures: Coleridge, German Philosophy and the Logic of Romantic Thought. London: Macmillan, 1992. 226 pages.

(1993). The epideictic character of rhetorical criticism. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 339-349.

The uses of postmodern theory in rhetoric and composition studies have been the object of considerable abuse of late. Figures of some repute in the field-the likes of Maxine Hairston and Peter Elbow-as well as anonymous voices from the Burkean Parlor section of Rhetoric Review-most recently, TS, graduate student, and KF, voice speaking for a general English teacher audience (192)-have joined the chorus of protest. The charges have included willful obscurity, selfindulgence, elitism, pomposity, intellectual impoverishment, and host of related offenses. Although my name usually appears among the accused, I am sympathetic with those undergoing the difficulties of the first encounter with this discussion. (I exclude Professor Hairston in her irresponsible charge that its recent contributors in College English are low-risk Marxists who write very badly [695] and who should be banned from NCTE publications.) I experienced the same frustration when I first encountered the different but closely related language of rhetoric and composition studies some fifteen years ago. I wondered, for example, if I would ever grasp the complexities of Aristotle or Quintilian or Kenneth Burke or I. A. Richards, not to mention the new language of the writing process. A bit later I was introduced to French poststructuralism, and once again I found myself wandering in strange seas, and this time alone. In reading rhetoric, after all, I had the benefit of numerous commentators to help me along-the work of Kinneavy and Lauer and Corbett and Emig, for example. In reading Foucault and Derrida in the late seventies, on the other hand, I was largely on my own since the commentaries were as difficult as the originals, and those few that were readable were often (as even I could see) wrong. Nonetheless, with the help of informal reading groups made up of colleagues and students, I persisted in my efforts to come to terms with this difficult body of thought. I was then, as now, convinced that both rhetorical studies and postmodern speculation offered strikingly convergent and remarkably compelling visions for conducting my life as teacher and citizen. It is clear to me that rhetoric and composition studies has arrived as serious field of study because it has taken into account the best that has been thought and said about its concerns from the past and the present, and I have found that postmodern work in historical and contemporary rhetorical theory has done much to further this effort.

(1992). Disassembling Plato's critique of rhetoric in the Gorgias (447a‐466a) Rhetoric Review: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 205-216.

That errors in writing are somehow is no news to the field of composition. Yet there is a recurring discrepancy in the approach compositionists take toward this dimension of written error. On the one hand, what counts as an (or as correct) in writing is generally recognized as social: most compositionists freely acknowledge the of the controversial imposition of standards of correct notation as a set of arbitrary conventions. On the other hand, the production of particular errors is regularly identified and treated as social but as individual, evidence of an individual writer's cognitive or perceptual difficulties, trouble knowing and/or seeing error. We might account cynically for the discrepancy between recognition of what might be called the sociality of errors and the focus of research and teaching on error as a sign of ethical irresponsibility. I would argue, however, that this discrepancy results from an impasse in how the sociality of error has been theorized. To acknowledge that errors are seems to mean primarily that one acknowledges the of the regularization of conventions for writing English, a regularization which, coincidentally, has favored the syntactic forms of dialects spoken by more powerful social groups. But all this seems to be viewed as afait accompli, history in the sense of something in the past about which there is little now to be done, a digression that takes attention away from the immediate problems of our students and their writing. The proper focus of attention for researchers and teachers of writing, it seems largely to be assumed, is on matters of student cognition and perception of error. In her 1985 review of Research on Error and Correction, Glynda Hull testifies to this state of affairs. Hull acknowledges that [m]ost of the controversy correctness in writing has finally to do with power, status, and class, but observes that much recent research on error can be viewed as walking a middle ground in the controversy, neither despairing that students must learn a privileged language nor grieving overlong that there is a cost (165, 166). This research takes as its purpose not a delineation of the social and political implications of error and correctness but an investigation of those mental processes involved in making errors and correcting them (167).1 Note that researchers pursuing such matters do deny the social controversy surrounding errors. But

George A. Kennedy, trans. Aristotle: On Rhetoric (subtitled A Theory of Civic Discourse). Oxford University Press, 1991. 335 + xiii pages. The Importance of George A. Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric as a Pedagogical Tool Kennedy's Rhetoric as a Contribution to Rhetorical Theory Kennedy's Aristotle: on Rhetoric as a Work of Translation∗ James J. Murphy, ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth‐Century America. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1990. 241 + v pages. Teaching the History of Writing Instruction Thomas Miller. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 318 + viii pages. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb, eds. Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in the Postmodern Age. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. iv + 242 pages. Sandra Stotsky, ed. Connecting Civic Education and Language Education: The Contemporary Challenge. New York: Teachers College Press of Columbia University, 1991. Janis Forman, ed. New Visions of Collaborative Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1992. 200 pages. $23.50.

complex of social formations. In the field of composition and rhetoric, such systems have been described as communities. The term is useful in the theory and analysis of writing because it embraces the rhetorical concern with social interchange (discourse) and with situation or context (community). But the term can lead the analyst astray by prompting an uncritical acceptance of as a natural element or transcendental category. Because community, like discourse itself, is socially constructed-by the analyst as well as by the people who claim membership-the act of identifying communities is never innocent, never free of ideological influences. As both Lester Faigley and Joseph Harris have noted, the word community is almost always used positively, and herein lies its danger to rhetorical analysis. If the community is always good, who but the perverse could question or rebel against practices that sustain the community? However, to accept this irresistible goodness as somehow prior to discourse (above question) would amount to abandoning a key premise of rhetorical criticism-the idea of the rhetorical situation (Bitzer), which demands that the analyst acknowledge the possibility of transformation among the elements and aims of discourse, including location. In addition to changing language and changing minds, the enterprise of rhetoric suggests that speakers and writers have the power to transform the site of discourse, the community itself. In this essay I argue that as a defense against an uncritical adoption of the community concept rhetorical theory needs to keep alive competing concepts of discourse communities, so that alternatives exist in the description and analysis of discourse practices. Recent definitions of discourse communities have established a rather too-narrow foundation upon a communitarian ethic. At the present time, when liberalism's stock is down, communitarianism appears to be a strong alternative for understanding the relation of people to government and culture (Lasch). In liberalism, social organization depends upon two strong formations-the individual, who may enjoy a wide range of rights and freedoms at the possible cost of