This article provides a framework for analyzing metaphor as epideictic rhetoric, accounting for the persistence of key disciplinary metaphors. It examines the metaphor of voice across distinct theoretical conversations as an example of epideictic metaphor. Voice’s epideictic function allows it to reconceptualize the shared value of power as it celebrates this value by stitching and unstitching it to various worldviews and values. An epideictic framework allows rhetoric scholars to uncover and trouble values celebrated by a discourse community’s shared metaphors while challenging values as unquestionable or mutually exclusive. Further, framing metaphors as epideictic celebrates linguistic and conceptual dissonance.

In 1902, the congressional sub-committee on territories visited New Mexico to assess its fitness for statehood. Their subsequent report recommended against statehood, in part because too much Spanish was spoken throughout the territory. This historical moment provided a rhetorical exigency for the students at the University of New Mexico to use their student newspaper as a site for negotiating citizenship in a border space. By incorporating Spanish into their English-language newspaper, these students challenged monolingual notions of literacy and advocated for a multilingual understanding of American citizenship.

Hugh Blair’s rhetorical theory reflects the tenets of New Science, answering the call for communication as the transfer of knowledge from the composer to the audience. Reading Blair on style through the Enlightenment cognitive model of physiological psychology suggests a mutual cognitive associative model. In this model, style is essential, not ornamental, as it limits dissonance in the audience’s cognitive process through perspicuity.

Style pedagogies, as many composition scholars have argued, have largely fallen out of favor in the last few decades. Those who have examined the decline have pointed to the deemphasis of the text prompted by the process movement as well as the subsequent social turn in composition studies. This article, in contrast, looks to the emergence of postmodernism and the ways in which it challenged and continues to complicate the theorizing and teaching of style. The author argues that embrace of a self-reflexive, “essayistic” voice would allow the instructor to exploit postmodernist impulses while revitalizing the teaching of style.

Common definitions of style have tended to treat it as an artifact controlled by the producer, overlooking two features afforded attention in sociocultural linguistics: dynamism and co-construction. Although some scholars have highlighted style’s interactivity, their accounts have not yielded a comprehensive theory. This essay advances and illustrates a more rigorous definition of style as a fluid activity in which meaning is often contested, continually negotiated, and necessarily informed by interlocutors’ beliefs. Ultimately, in integrating and expanding on theories of style’s interactivity and contingency, it provides guidance for style researchers and demonstrates the value of cross-disciplinary conversation around style.

Steven Pinker has written a potent prescription against the outdated and pedantic manual Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White (Boston: Pearson, 2014), the alarmist manifesto Eats, Sh...

Roughly over the last twenty years or more, critical race theorists and whiteness theorists have magnetized considerable attention in the academy. Many scholars, including numerous critical race th...

As I read and reread Young’s text for this review, I was struck by news of the activist and professor Cornel West stating, during an October 12 speech at the “Faith in Ferguson” rally, “I didn’t co...

This essay discusses the competing rhetorical styles of two volumes that appeared in the 1880s to remember Abraham Lincoln. One volume, edited by Alan Thorndike Rice, remembered Lincoln in a refined-official style. A second volume, by William Herndon and Jesse Weik, captured Lincoln in a middling-vernacular style. Using automatic coding and close reading, the authors show that Herndon-Weik’s middling-vernacular style put a focus on the “personal” Lincoln. Rice’s essayists, instead, featured an “official” Lincoln set apart from the everyday man. The authors argue that these contrasts were a contributing factor to the different critical reception they received.

Scholarship on language difference has strived for decades to transform teaching practices in mainstream, developmental, and second-language writing classrooms. Despite compelling arguments in support of linguistic diversity, a majority of secondary and postsecondary writing teachers in the US still privilege Standard English. I join a number of scholars in arguing for a revival of classical style and the progymnasmata, albeit with the unique agenda of strengthening pedagogies of language difference. Although adapting classical rhetorics to promote translingual practices such as code-meshing at first seems to contradict the spirit of language difference given the dominant perception of Greco-Roman culture as imperialistic and intolerant of diversity, I reread rhetoricians such as Quintilian in order to recover their latent multilingual potential.

Writing centers have long been rich sites of critical inquiry into individualized instructional styles and methods. One of the great writing center debates involves directive versus nondirective tutoring styles and methods. While many writing center scholars have discussed the intricacies of directive or interventionist versus nondirective or minimalist pedagogical methods, few have examined the rhetorical implications of this important debate in relation to more classroom-based peer collaborations. This article rhetorically analyzes the literature on directive/nondirective methods and various approaches to tutoring writing, drawing pedagogical and rhetorical connections and implications useful for all teachers of writing and rhetoric.

In Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition, authors Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth liken the practice of style to a ...

This essay expands style pedagogy to include teachers' comments on student writing. To do so, it analyzes three major studies on response and the conceptions of style they both reflect and perpetuate. Ultimately, this essay argues that to teach style effectively though written commentary, we must use language that moves beyond impression and considers the rhetoricality of students' stylistic choices.

Looking back at a few memorable moments during the 2008 presidential primary campaign, Barry Brummett describes a discussion over whether a sweater Senator John McCain wore was “gay” as well as a c...

Paul Butler's Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Studies in Composition and Rhetoric enters into several contentious conversations taking place in and around composition studies today. Ostensibly,...

In this essay I analyze the plain style as conceived of and used by the Lollards, a late fourteenth-century religious group. I argue that the same practices that set Lollard reading and writing apart from orthodox discourse were foundational to the Lollards' departures from orthodox belief, theorizing language and style in such a way that meaning was free from priestly mediation. This demonstrates the importance of the Lollard plain style as both a marker of heresy and a precursor to subsequent notions of plainness.

In his 2007 Rhetoric Review article "Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies," Paul Butler explains that while style seems to have vanished from the field of rhetoric and composition since the 1980s, it has actually been appropriated by areas within our discipline including genre theory, rhetorical analysis, personal writing, and even race, class, gender, and difference studies. Using Janice Lauer's metaphor of the "diaspora" of composition studies to guide his analysis, Butler examines the ways that style, like invention, has "migrated" in the field. he claims that style is both absent and ubiquitous in our scholarship. Because "style in its dispersed form is often not called style but instead is named something else within the field," it remains central to our field although its presence is masked (5). That is, while it seems as though style is simultaneously absent and present in our discipline, the concept of style has remained present and it is the name style that is now absent. Therefore, style's place within composition studies is not paradoxical at all. "Style" appears to have gradually separated from the concept with which it was associated and has taken on other names that better fit the trends and developments of our discipline.

While most students of style justifiably cite Abraham Lincoln's reading as the major influence on his speaking and writing, five other important influences have been largely ignored. Little attention has also been paid to a study of his composing habits that will help scholars understand just how Lincoln went about the process of putting prose on paper.

Margaret Cavendish has been getting more attention recently as a controversial, prolific, sometimes brilliant, sometimes unintelligible British writer in latter half of seventeenth century.' I approached Cavendish's writings soon after reading essays in Reclaiming Rhetorica, and I noticed in many of her works an intriguing view of composition style. She advocated consistently that fancy and adornment were appropriate stylistic ingredients in scientific and historical prose. This is especially surprising in that Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and Thomas Sprat targeted science and history as areas in which fanciful and elaborate writing styles had no place. The rise of moder expository prose, with its idea of mimetic disinterestedness, can, in part, be traced back to these well-known calls for stylistic plainness and purity in seventeenth century. Cavendish, however, was not sympathetic to early moder calls for stylistic plainness. She was well read in natural philosophy and had contact with figures such as Sprat, Hobbes, Walter Charleton, Rene Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi. Gassendi's critique of Descartes influenced significantly Cavendish's own antiCartesian, vitalistic view of nature as an intelligent, self-moving, and purposeful entity, not a set of de-animated corpuscles.2 In addition, Cavendish followed closely meetings of Royal Society, and she was well aware of Society's calls for a plain, nearly mathematical style of composition. She attended a meeting in May of 1667, first woman ever to do so, and her attendance drew strong reactions from several members who disapproved of her scientific speculations, her fanciful writing style, and her elaborate clothing as well, as Samuel Pepys notes in his dairy (8:243). Undoubtedly, Cavendish's decision to write scientific and historical prose in elaborate styles was an informed decision, and her style should therefore be seen as a form of dissent directed against her age's escalating positivism. Until recently, Cavendish's writings have been characterized in large part by their excesses, including their proliferating and extravagant stylistic qualities, a characterization that began in her own time. As Henry Perry suggests in his 1918 dissertation on Cavendish, the Duchess's lack of restraint in writing was

(1998). Rhetorical style and the formation of character: Ciceronian ethos in Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 93-106.

In this article I intend to share my experiences of teaching writingintensive courses at a large state university with the use of computers.' I want to present my positive experiences to the reader in such a way that will make you want to join me in exploring the myriad of possibilities of teaching with technology: ways that will free us, not constrict us-ways that will enhance learning and dialogue, not provide new ways of shutting down the inquisitive minds of students, but rather of expanding and enhancing all their possibilities and ours. Let me explain at the outset that the technologies I am advocating for teaching writing in writing-intensive literature and folklore courses are largely electronic mail formats and web sites for the distribution of assignments, for syllabi, for student writing, written assignments and peer reviews, and for the position of hypertext archives for class listservs.2 E-mail discussion listserv formats provide an easy way for everyone in the class to communicate automatically with every other member of the class, as well as with the instructor(s).3 Teachers, teaching assistants, tutors, and students can all be subscribed to the discussion listserv; whenever anyone on the list posts a memo addressed to the listserv, all persons subscribed to the list receive a copy of the entry. The listserv owner (generally, the teacher) controls who can be subscribed to the discussion list and who can participate in this electronic forum and how the discussion will operate. For example, in my descriptions below, I will illustrate how every student journal entry or writing assignment goes automatically to the computers of all the other students and myself. However, when I wish to communicate privately with a student or send her or him a graded paper, I can send that message only to that particular student simply by addressing the note to the individual student rather than to the entire list; similarly, when students are doing peer reviews of other students' papers, for privacy, they can post their comments only to the author of a paper, rather than to the entire class. In this paper I am advocating the use of the e-mail discussion list format because I believe in its capacity to better enable students to write well

Dionysius of Halicarnassus's attention to harmonious composition from the small part of the clause to the whole of a work is at the heart of what Eduard Norden has called Kuntsprosa, the ancient theory of formal prose composition that came to fruition during the Augustan age of the early Empire. The effort of fifth- and fourth-century BC Greek writers to provide prose the dignity and affective power of oral poetry through literate embellishment and studied arrangement was fundamental to the transformation of literate consciousness and therefore cultural consciousness in which the power of the modern state was birthed. As the eye continued to supplant the ear as a means of using words effectively to move audiences and as literacy brought about an interiorized way of thinking and manner of expression, ancient Greek and Roman historians, orators, and philosophers learned to play with language. They found in this new consciousness exciting ways in which elegantly conceived discourse could formalize the affective power of poetry and the spellbinding magic of persuasive words (Romilly). And it is this compositional tension between words heard and words seen that came to fruition in the first century Critical Essays

the writer's audience. Writing involves moving material from the inside the outside. We need only consult a few recent composition texts see how this inner/outer metaphor shapes the language we use talk about teaching writing. We tell students that the writer's mind is a kind of a box-a storehouse or reservoir, a pool of thoughts, filled with tremendous reserves draw upon. We speak of student writers opening the lid of the mind in order free what is stored inside. As teachers of writing, we want help students tap these sources, sift through your memory, and dredge up ideas. We want help students overcome writer's block, to unlock your mind and release information.' To make this happen, we talk about brainstorming, in which we make a frontal assault open the stronghold of the mind. And when this happens, we call the effect linguistic fluency, the flowing outward of inner speech from the reservoir of the mind. The dualism of this inner/outer metaphor, moreover, permeates much of the discourse of composition studies. Writing, many teachers, researchers, and theorists assume, begins inside, in the inner speech of private verbal thought, and is only gradually transformed into the outer written speech of public text. We habitually think of the process of composing as a movement from monologue, where writers address primarily themselves, dialogue, where writers address others. In this view composing transforms what is inside the writer's head into an external text that can stand by itself. Composing, that is, converts the associative, idiosyncratic, self-referential language that writers use talk themselves into autonomous texts that supply the interpretive contexts, logical connections, and explicit meanings readers expect of public discourse. James Britton's expressive and transactional functions, Janet Emig's reflexive and extensive modes of writing, and Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose, however they may differ in conception and formulation, all assume the polarity of private and public language and an inner-to-outer directionality in composing, a movement, as Flower puts it, from thinking in code