Rhetoric Review

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July 2023

  1. Proleptic Logics in Media Coverage of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report
    Abstract

    AbstractThe rhetorical figure of speech called prolepsis, describing a presaging of time and events to come, commonly appears in environmental communication and importantly frames the possibilities for action. Prolepsis is a figure employed in communication about climate change that demands attention in its various deployments, configurations, and, importantly, rhetorical inducements. Such inducements may rely upon feelings of hope or fear, and this study investigates the rhetorical and ethical conditions prolepsis may generate. A considerable literature studying the concept of hope offers great insights into climate change perceptions and behavior concerning climate action. The present study examines prolepsis to discuss how the figure's inducement of suasive effect through appeals to hope and fear shape the ethical horizons for action. We examine media coverage of the IPCC's sixth report, Part I, warning of the enormous impacts of the ongoing climate emergency and necessary climate action to mitigate the worst of these effects. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAshley Rose MehlenbacherAshley Rose Mehlenbacher is Canada Research Chair in Science, Health, and Technology Communication at the University of Waterloo and the author of On Expertise (Penn State UP) and Science Communication Online (Ohio State UP). She is also the inaugural Co-Director, with Donna Strickland, for the Trust in Research Undertaken in Science and Technology (TRuST) network.Carolyn EckertCarolyn Eckert is a Ph.D. Candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her research investigates the ethotic construction of experts during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also teaches at Conestoga College and in the Humber College School of Business.Sara DoodySara Doody is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo where she investigates climate change communication and transdisciplinary collaboration between science and philosophy. Her research examines written communication in science and higher education and inter-/transdisciplinary communication and collaboration.Sarah ForstSarah Forst is a graduate psychology student at the University of Cologne and a research assistant in the Department of Research Methods and Experimental Psychology. She was a Mitacs Global Link intern in Summer 2021 at the University of Waterloo.Brad MehlenbacherBrad Mehlenbacher is Professor of Rhetoric and Communication in English Language & Literature at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Mehlenbacher is author of the NCTE award-winning book, Instruction and Technology: Designs for Everyday Learning (MIT Press), co-author of Online Help: Design and Evaluation (Ablex).

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2023.2219495

July 2018

  1. Attitudes of Collaborative Expectancy: Antithesis, Gradatio, andA Rhetoric of Motives, Page 58
    Abstract

    In the recently declared “Stylistic (Re)Turn” in rhetoric and composition, several scholars reference pages fifty-eight and fifty-nine of A Rhetoric of Motives as being important to style studies. These pages, given Kenneth Burke’s perplexity, require further discussion. The rhetorical figures antithesis and gradatio are used on these pages as representative anecdotes of the figures’ capacity as forms to induce identification. Antithesis and gradatio illustrate a concept of somatic rhetorical figuration based on a rhetorical aesthetic which is summarized on page fifty-eight. Figures, or formal patterns, overlap and point to the continued relevance of classical rhetoric as a way of discussing style across disciplines.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2018.1463496

October 2017

  1. “A Strong Leadership that Does Not Show”: Ladies Auxiliaries as Women’s First Entrance Points into the Fire Department
    Abstract

    Women first entered East Coast fire departments through forming ladies auxiliary groups, where women provided critical support services—offering assistance at the fire, holding fundraising events for the department, and building community relationships—while maintaining conventional gender roles. Exploring auxiliary work through the lens of collaboration reveals feminist strategies for creating ethos in a highly gendered workplace; this approach for studying the complexities of women’s movement between background and foreground roles opens new avenues for considering women’s navigation of rhetorical barriers in professional spaces.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1355195

July 2016

  1. Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism through Literacy Education, Paul Feigenbaum: Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 248 pages. $40.00 paperback.
    doi:10.1080/07350198.2016.1179078

October 2015

  1. Beyond the “Foreign” Language Requirement: From a Monolingual to a Translingual Ideology in Rhetoric and Composition Graduate Education
    Abstract

    This article links language requirements in rhetoric and composition graduate programs to a dominant monolingualist ideology in composition studies. It argues that future faculty can be best prepared to conduct disciplinary work in the context of linguistic heterogeneity through a variety of collaborative pedagogical practices that reflect and advance a “translingual” language ideology.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2015.1073560

March 2011

  1. A Matter of Concern: Kenneth Burke, Phishing, and the Rhetoric of National Insecurity
    Abstract

    Abstract This essay draws on concepts developed by Kenneth Burke to examine how a rhetoric of national insecurity has saturated phishing research and antiphishing campaigns. In response to the widespread public dispersal of antiphishing campaigns, it calls for a new terminology that challenges the underlying racial violence that characterizes its current practices. Notes 1Jakobsson and Myers define phishing as "[a] form of social engineering in which an attacker, also known as a phisher, attempts to fraudulently retrieve legitimate users' confidential or sensitive credentials by mimicking electronic communications from a trustworthy or public organization in an automated fashion" (1). 2In July of 2009, Symantec observed a fifty-two percent increase in phishing attacks from the previous month. 3Robert C. Miller and Min Wu argue, "Phishing succeeds because of a gap between the user's mental model and the true implementation, so promising technical solutions should try to bridge this gap" (291). Note how the technology becomes the agent of intervention. 4See, for example, Gurak and Warnick. Later, I will discuss how phishers utilize peer networks to share components of phishing solicitations in order to make the process more efficient. This use of file-sharing technology complicates more sanguine perspectives on the role that collaboration and sharing play in digital networks (see Devoss and Porter; Moxley). I am not alone in pointing out the dangerous limitations of digital technologies such as emails and online forums (see Holdstein; Moses and Katz; Blair and Takayoshi). 5Jenkins writes, "New forms of community are emerging, however: these new communities are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments… . Only certain things are known by all—the things the community needs to sustain its existence and fulfill its goals. Everything else is known by individuals who are on call to share what they know when the occasion arises" (27–28). 6I am grateful to RR reviewers Stephen Bernhardt and Jim Zappen for their helpful feedback on this essay. Thank you RF, MM, and MH—you are indispensable.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2011.552378

June 2010

  1. Restructuring English and Society through an Integrated Curriculum: Ruth Mary Weeks'sA Correlated Curriculum
    Abstract

    Some scholars trace the start of writing across the curriculum to the 1970s. However, in 1929, when appointed president of the National Council of Teachers of English, Ruth Mary Weeks initiated A Correlated Curriculum (1936), a significant interdisciplinary project that specifically viewed English as the mechanism for achieving an integrated curriculum. Although her goal was not fully realized, Weeks's efforts are important in their attempts to open education to broader classes of students, to promote learning as a collaborative process, to prepare all students to meet the demands of transforming social and industrial circumstances, and, ultimately, to restructure industrial America.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2010.485964

June 2007

  1. Peer Response in the Composition Classroom: An Alternative Genealogy
    Abstract

    This article reexamines the historical emergence of peer response as a pedagogical technique in composition classrooms. It first reviews Anne Ruggles Gere's influential account of that history, focusing on how that account was shaped by process pedagogy, collaborative learning theory, and ideologies of classroom authority and student autonomy. Then the author explores an alternative genealogy in which peer response emerges out of classroom practices of recitation and correction. The purpose of this rereading of peer response's history is to reconfigure teacher and student agency and also to suggest how historical analysis can enable or constrain present-day practices.

    doi:10.1080/07350190701419863

July 2003

  1. Questionable Categories and the Case for Collaborative Writing
    Abstract

    Contrary to much recent scholarship, this essay argues that there is no such thing as a collaborative mode of literacy. Specifically, it takes issue with Andrea Lunsford and others who have called for a profound shift in the zeitgeist of composition studies, as though it were possible to transform students from competitive to collaborative writers. In a larger sense, though, the article is not about collaboration at all; rather, it uses the literature on collaborative writing to illustrate a certain kind of scholarly exaggeration, whereby composition reformers try too hard to distill practical lessons from interpretive categories.

    doi:10.1207/s15327981rr2203_05

September 1999

  1. Supporting deliberative democracy: Pedagogical arts of the contact zone of the electronic public sphere
    Abstract

    I participate in a teaching and learning collaborative called Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project (IEDP). The project's goal is to enable students' participation in democratic culture through rhetoric and public writing. Using Internet and Web technology, we inhabit an electronic public sphere where both teaching and learning are collaborative, connecting teachers and students from many institutions across country, and where pedagogy, public issues, and politics intersect. From perspective of rhetoric and composition, IEDP embraces three topics important to our field: computers and writing; public discourse, especially deliberative rhetoric; and multiculturalism, specifically contact-zone theory and pedagogy. This essay elaborates some implications of this nexus. While much of pedagogy I discuss reflects strategies successfully used in IEDP, its implications extend to similar projects that engage students in electronic public sphere. Ever since Mary Louise Pratt challenged teachers to develop pedagogical arts of contact zone (40), many teachers have become more sensitive to multicultural dynamics of their classrooms, and they have begun to chart what Richard E. Miller calls the uncharted realms of teaching and studying in contact zone (407). There have been theoretical projects such as using contact zones as a basis for rethinking and reorganizing English studies (Bizzell); efforts such as those that address challenges posed by asymmetrical power relations in classroom (Miller) and differences in cultural perspectives and values (van Slyck); and investigations of specific contact-zone phenomena such as students' strategies for coping with dominant discourses (Canagarajah) and the politics of style (Lu). These developments signify our ability to respond to multicultural classroom conditions by accommodating educational needs and desires of all students. Nowadays, however, classroom per se is no longer sole site for teaching, learning, writing, and speaking. With growing interest in public discourse and civic participation among students-and with rapidly increasing

    doi:10.1080/07350199909359260

September 1996

  1. Pedagogies of decentering and a discourse of failure
    Abstract

    Person 1-I'm trying something new in my intro to literature course this year. I decided not to lecture any more. So I've been trying to have more discussion, more group work, give the students more responsibility for the course. And you know what's happened? In their journals, they say they want me to lecture; they've actually asked me to lecture. Person 2-When you get right down to it, all the theory about collaboration and shared responsibility is great if you've got students who want that sort of thing. But my students say they've paid their fees to find out what I have to say. Frankly, when I've got group work scheduled for a period, a lot of them just don't come.

    doi:10.1080/07350199609359213

March 1995

  1. Review essays
    Abstract

    Richard A. Lanham. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. xv + 285 pp. $22.50 (cloth). Also available as a Chicago Expanded Book. 2 high‐density Macintosh disks. $29.95. Edward Schiappa, ed. Landmark Essays on Classical Greek Rhetoric. Landmark Essays Volume Three. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1994. xiv + 256 pages. $15.95 paper. Michael G. Moran, ed. Eighteenth‐Century British and American Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994. 318 pages. Barry Brummett, ed. Landmark Essays on Kenneth Burke. Davis: Hermagoras Press, 1993. xix + 290 pages. $15.95. Geoffrey A. Cross. Collaboration and Conflict: A Contextual Exploration of Group Writing and Positive Emphasis. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1994. 182 pages. $18.50 paper. Alice Glarden Brand and Richard L. Graves, eds. Presence of Mind: Writing and the Domain Beyond the Cognitive. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1994.

    doi:10.1080/07350199509359200
  2. The feminization of rhetoric and composition studies?1
    Abstract

    Last year, I was invited to speak at a conference whose theme was the feminization of composition.2 This topic coincided with another discussion I had been following in our journals: the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition as a scholarly field. In preparing my talk, I began to raise several questions like: What is meant by feminization in these discussions? Can we assume that composition is feminized? Are the discourses on disciplinary formation and on feminization already woven together? If not, should they be? This essay explores these questions, making distinctions and telling stories that offer an alternative perspective. Let me begin with the feminization of composition. My rereading of many of these discussions3 leads me to conclude that their statements about feminization apply largely to composition instruction, not to Rhetoric and Composition as a scholarly field.4 The two reasons generally advanced are the numerical predominance of women and the nature of composition pedagogy. Accounts agree that women do most of the teaching of writing from the university level to elementary school as either full- or part-time instructors. Many descriptions of recent pedagogies maintain that instructional practices, particularly of expressive and critical pedagogies, are marks of feminization because they are collaborative, student centered, and nurturing. A few, however, dissent. Susan Jarratt and Evelyn Ashton-Jones, for example, problematize collaboration as a desirable feminine pedagogy. Lil Brannon contends that the expressivists and people like Giroux, Shor, Freire, and Rose are reinscribing patriarchy by invoking masculine heroic narratives of conquest as traditional male Romantic heroes who, like the rugged individual in the Dead Poet's Society, work against all odds to make a difference. Some historical accounts of nineteenth-century composition position it as feminized in contrast to rhetorical instruction and the emerging professionalization of English Studies. Robert Connors argues that the demise of agonistic rhetorical instruction in persuasive public discourse, which he contends had largely characterized male education up through 1850, was related to the entrance of significant numbers of women into higher education in the nineteenth century. These women were excluded from taking oral rhetoric and assigned to a more appropriate course called composition. He

    doi:10.1080/07350199509359187

March 1993

  1. Review Essays
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1080/07350199309389020

September 1992

  1. Review essays
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1080/07350199209388999

March 1992

  1. The case for collaborative scholarship in rhetoric and composition1
    Abstract

    Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes First, we owe much to Gesa Kirsch and Patricia Sullivan for motivating us to write this paper. They may never fully realize how much they did. Second, we are grateful for the assistance of all the people—both living and dead—whom we list in the references. Third, we owe much to Jim Corder, who helped us to see that academic papers and personal essays are more alike than we know. Fourth, we thank all of the colleagues who have collaborated with us on books and articles: Gene L. Piche, Mike Graves, Wayne Slater, Ann Duin, Donna Johnson, Maureen Roen (two children, their journals, and a literary map), Patricia Hazeltine, Nicholas Karolides, Deborah Grunloh, Stuart Brown, Bob Mittan, Margaret Fleming, R. J. Willey, Kate Mangelsdorf, Vicki Taylor, Zita Ingham, Mike Rogers, Gesa Kirsch, Diane Clymer, Jan Swearingen, Marvin Diogenes, Clyde Moneyhun, Vicki Small, and Jim Nesci. Finally, we thank Theresa Enos and two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

    doi:10.1080/07350199209388973

March 1990

  1. Rhetoric in a new key: Women and collaboration
    Abstract

    (1990). Rhetoric in a new key: Women and collaboration. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 234-241.

    doi:10.1080/07350199009388896

September 1989

  1. Conflict in collaboration: A burkean perspective
    Abstract

    (1989). Conflict in collaboration: A burkean perspective. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 113-126.

    doi:10.1080/07350198909388881

September 1988

  1. Collaborative learning and composition: Boon or Bane?
    doi:10.1080/07350198809388840