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.

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 examines Hunton and Johnson’s Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, which recounts their WWI YMCA service in France supporting Black troops. TCW exemplifies a long tradition of Black civic pedagogy, drawing on prophetic and empirical strategies to teach audiences that Black experience and racial justice are foundational to American democracy. Deploying the Black jeremiad, it exposes racial inequities and envisions a racially just future; deploying testifying, it combines narrative, reportage, and documentary evidence to empirically support its findings of white racism, Black heroism, and French egalitarianism. These strategies suggest possibilities and limitations for future practice.

TABS: Aids for Ending Sexism in School was a journal founded by Lucy Picco Simpson and the Organization for Equal Education of the Sexes. Attention to this publication sheds light on feminist activism as it transformed in the wake of Title IX legislation in the late 1970s and 1980s. In examining the journal’s ability to facilitate networking, production, and accountability, we gain greater insight into how teachers and students were able to question normative messages about race, gender, class, and ability in educational materials and diversify the range of historical figures discussed in schools.

Bernard Malamud’s novel A New Life and its attention to midcentury writing instruction illuminates the emergence of rhetoric and composition. Malamud’s novel is what microhistorians describe as “exceptional typical” evidence, where exceptional status and typical topics combine to showcase power formations in historical context. The novel describes shifts in textbooks and writing curricula, identifies the emergence of process-oriented assessment practices, and witnesses the institutional and disciplinary marginalization of female instructors. As such, Malamud could be described as a proto-composition scholar. Reflecting upon his legacy at their institution, the authors consider the re-naming of a student lounge named after Malamud.

This article examines a lecture that Booker T. Washington delivered to the Tuskegee literary society in order to argue for Washington’s place within a Black Socratic tradition. Readings of this obscure speech invite new understandings of Washington’s habits of public address, including his pedagogical practice as a teacher of rhetoric, and illuminates how rhetors have mobilized the myth of Socrates to galvanize marginalized communities to civic action.

Though it has been insufficiently noticed, Kenneth Burke spoke at the first meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Chicago on March 25, 1950. Archival sources reveal that his remarks—“Rhetoric—Old and New”—drew from his recently completed A Rhetoric of Motives and from another volume, The War of Words, that he intended to publish separately. Burke sought to restore instruction in rhetoric to composition courses, explained his newly developed concept of “identification,” and later saw the published version of his remarks mysteriously missing from the first issue of College Composition and Communication.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum (OKCNMM) must balance respectful remembrance with broad education about the 1995 terrorist attack that killed one hundred and sixty-eight people. Epideictic and material rhetorics prevail throughout the OKCNMM, communicating uplifting messages about the effects of the bombing while also prompting visitors to create their own complex, productively uncomfortable pathways toward understanding. In this process, civic engagement through rhetorical processes is encouraged; the museum models and creates space to practice reflective dwelling, critical thinking, discussion, and composition, offering a rhetorical education that can circulate far beyond this single site.

I sit down to write this review at a fraught moment for talking about class, and especially the working class. On Facebook, many friends are discussing a recent Equality of Opportunity Project repo...

Performing Anti-Racist Pedagogy offers an insightful look into racialized identities within the university. Developed as a reaction to racist institutional effects and unaware instructors, the chap...

The myth of self-sacrifice is a belief in the value of caring and serving, regardless of personal cost, which characterizes attitudes toward women’s work in general and contingent faculty work in particular, especially writing instruction. “Women’s work” functions as a specific trope in the academy, particularly the high demand for such services, along with the unwillingness to pay for them. The comparison itself is not new; however, worth examining is how the very arguments proclaiming the value of women’s work in a capitalist system—and contingent work in the academy—are also used to undermine its value in that system.”

Satire is a popular form of comedic social critique frequently theorized in terms of Kenneth Burke’s comic frame. While its humor and unexpected combination of incongruous elements can reduce tension that surrounds controversial issues to make new perspectives more accessible, audience response to satire can vary tremendously—including the very negative as well as the very positive. Teaching satire should include exposure to rhetorical theory and audience reception analysis to better prepare students as consumers and creators of satires. With a complex, layered pedagogy, satire can be an important component of the twenty-first-century rhetor’s toolkit.

"Purpose, Practice, and Pedagogy in Rhetorical Criticism, Jim A. Kuypers, ed.." Rhetoric Review, 35(1), pp. 70–71

Charlotte Hoggaa Texas Christian UniversityCharlotte Hogg is Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at Texas Christian University. Her publications include From the Garden Club: Rural Women Writing Community (U of Nebraska P, 2006), Rural Literacies, coauthored with Kim Donehower and Eileen E. Schell (SIUP, 2007), and Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy, coedited with Donehower and Schell (SIUP, 2012), and scholarly and creative work in Women and Literacy: Inquiries for a New Century, Western American Literature, Great Plains Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Her current book project is on sorority rhetorics.

This bold and triumphant collection argues from page one until the end that so-called “expressivist” theories and practices have always been “critical,” that they do not stand in direct opposition ...

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.

Joseph Bizup's BEAM schema establishes a rhetorical approach to research writing pedagogy, articulating four distinct ways writers use sources: for background, exhibit, argument, and method. This article rechristens the framework I-BEAM, identifying a fifth category: instance source use, a constitutive function that establishes the need for the writer's argument. Instance source moves appear in numerous locations––introductions, textual asides, footnotes/endnotes, and epigraphs––and can situate the writing in both academic and popular contexts. Attention to this exigency move highlights the problem of authenticity in school-based writing and raises questions about sources formative to the writer but invisible to the reader.

An explanation of the history of standardized tests in the US reveals the ways they have shifted from tools of articulation to tools of accountability not only in K–12 classrooms but also in higher education. Understanding the competing interests at play and the potential effects of the Common Core State Standards at the college level is crucial to reasserting assessment as a teaching and learning practice instead of a system of accountability.

Recent scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies theorizes agency as irreducible to human cause-and-effect. While this theory infiltrates many disciplinary conversations, however, our reliance on the terms students and teachers within pedagogical discourses manages our rhetorical imagination of pedagogical agency by committing us to individual, human agents every time we invoke these terms. Rather than expel these terms and the important work they underwrite, we can draw on social systems terminology of elements and relations in order to account for the ways that students and teachers emerge as agents and to imagine alternative conceptualizations of pedagogical agency.

AbstractThis essay examines kairos and rhetorical situation theory in relation to scientific inquiry, particularly the quantitative and interpretive components of Samuel G. Morton’s Crania Americana. Morton’s text is a flashpoint of debate on the ability of the sciences to detach themselves from their social contexts. This essay seeks to elucidate the significant political and social influences on scientific practice by examining the impact of kairos on Morton’s data analysis, and thereby to demonstrate kairos as a model for analyzing the interplay of the subjective and objective elements in processes of scientific inquiry. Notes1 I thank RR reviewers Daniel Schowalter and James Zappen for their insightful and useful guidance. I am also grateful for the tremendous helpfulness of Theresa Enos and her staff.2 See http://plum.museum.upenn.edu/˜orsa/Welcome.html.3 See studies by Lyne and Howe and by Barahona and Cachon on the rhetorical dynamics of Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibria.Additional informationNotes on contributorsDaniel ColeDaniel Cole is an assistant Professor in the Department of Writing Studies and Composition at Hofstra University. His research explores Native American rhetoric and resistance writing, especially during the era of Indian Removal. He also researches theory and practice in writing instruction.

James Berlin’s pedagogy employs generalized heuristics grounded in human agency and social-epistemic critique to enable political awareness. By contrast, actor-network theory (ANT) does not explain the composition of reality through pre-fixed heuristics but instead seeks to describe the unique composition of political objects through symmetrical accounts of human and nonhuman agency. ANT-as-pedagogy can be productively applied in the classroom to realize students’ capacities as moralists who comprehend the rhetorical difference between explanation (Berlin) and description (ANT) with regard to their political agencies as writers.

In sixteenth-century male writers’ descriptions of the English grammar school program, mothers were imagined as impediments to boys’ learning. Yet these same writers paradoxically turned to a “mother” figure, prosopopoeia, as the rhetorical device through which they imagined and brought into being a humanist-inspired education. By embedding maternal narratives, bodies, and language in their explanations of grammar school and its “mat(t)er,” the writers of rhetorical manuals, grammar school textbooks, and pedagogical handbooks position the mother at the center of early modern thought, which has implications and consequences for actual mothers and their participation in early modern rhetorical education.

First-year composition emerged at Harvard largely because of administrative attempts to address institutional, as opposed to pedagogical, issues. In particular, Harvard administrators sought to improve articulation with public high schools in order to increase enrollments, attract new populations of students, and retain matriculants. First-year composition provided a mechanism for doing so. Because of first-year composition’s value for articulation, it was endorsed by accreditation associations and consequently spread across the country as accreditation did. Articulation and accreditation were not expressly concerned with writing instruction, but they ultimately had profound effects on the development of writing instruction in American higher education.

Historians of rhetoric have provided research over the last three decades that has significantly advanced our knowledge of women in the rhetorical tradition. These achievements, while often stunning, have also exposed the need for more primary research, particularly in classical rhetoric where a wealth of evidence awaits study. Such evidence is frequently found in nontraditional sources and, correspondingly, calls for nontraditional methods of analysis. The need and merits of this view are presented in two ways. First, an overview of nontraditional sources offers new insights to the literacy of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan women. Second, a more specific and detailed illustration of the research potential of this perspective is presented by deciphering an inscription from Teos, a small but important Greek city that is now a part of Turkey. The epigraphical evidence available from the archaeological site at Teos reveals that young women had systematic education in advanced stages of writing. Such findings challenge traditional characterizations of ancient women as nonliterate. The intent of this work is to reveal the need for more primary fieldwork in order to attain a more accurate understanding of women and the range of their manifestations of literacy in the ancient world.

In recent years multimodal and multimedia have become buzzwords with substantial cache in composition circles. As Clair Lauer outlines in “Contending with Terms: ‘Multimodal’ and ‘Multimedia’ in th...

Abstract This essay traces the origins of the five-paragraph essay to a form of theme-writing that has deep roots in English education and classical rhetoric, long before the current-traditional period that has been commonly assumed to be the origin. The five-paragraph essay's history and evolution can inform our understanding of its role in writing instruction and why it has persisted for so long. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Lynée Gaillet and Janice Lauer Rice for their helpful recommendations. I am also indebted to Mara Holt for her help and encouragement, as well as Carol Mattingly, Amanda Hayes, Andrea Venn, Bryan Lutz, Matt Vetter, and Emily Nunes. 2Part I was published in 1851. 3Walker's textbook was first published in the United States in 1808. 4Walker did not create the term theme or the rules for writing them. While themes were used for writing in Latin, students probably also composed themes in English (the vulgar tongue) long before Walker. 5Many compositionists, seeing some classical roots to the five-paragraph essay, might assume that Aristotle's Rhetoric may have been an influence on the formation of the five-paragraph essay, perhaps citing the five canons of rhetoric (which he does not explicitly outline) and his treatment of argumentation and arrangement. However, there is no evidence that indicates that Aristotle's Rhetoric had any direct influence on the five-paragraph essay's formation.

By exploring two perspectives on civility—the invitational and confrontational approaches—this article argues for revising the neoclassical model of rhetoric commonly found in introductory writing and speaking textbooks. This article further claims that a revised conception of civility—here termed “situated civility”—can help rhetors communicate ethically and practically about and across political, cultural, and personal differences.

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.

This article reconstructs the Birmingham civil rights mass meetings of 1963 as one setting for reengaging the theoretical tensions between canonized and marginalized rhetorics. I consider how Ralph Abernathy's May 3rd speech epitomizes one way blacks used religious oratory to destabilize the boundaries that proponents of standardized writing have traditionally attributed to African-American discursive strategies. After summarizing the history of the mass meetings from Montgomery to Birmingham, I advance the claim that during his speech Abernathy functions as a folk preacher and a “revisionist historian.”

As Peter Elbow embarks on his fifth decade as a central contributor to the national conversation on writing pedagogy, his new book—Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing—is at once ...

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.

I was raised beneath the Big Sky, and my students are, almost exclusively, the children of loggers and miners, laborers and low-level managers—students, many both attending school and working fullt...

This article compares economic and rhetorical writings by examining two nineteenth-century American rhetorician-economists, Samuel Newman and David Jayne Hill. Both men directed both their rhetorical and their economic writings toward a common purpose—making citizens comfortable with new and uncertain instruments of (monetary and linguistic) representation. Considering the economic and rhetorical writings on representation, we come to understand how rhetoric (both theory and pedagogy) fits into the emerging and quickly morphing capitalism of industrializing and financializing America.

Interests and Opportunities appears at a critical moment in university writing instruction, a moment when many colleges and universities are relegating the task of basic writing instruction to two-...

As rhetoric and composition teacher-researchers, we know how paradoxical and, at times, ambivalent the relationship between our work and social action can be. On one hand, many of us are brought to...

Rhetoric-composition's recurring captivation with emergent brain research is sustained not only by the persuasive visual rhetoric of neuroscientific research but also by the conceptual and terministic overlaps that exist between the fields of rhetoric-composition and neuroscience. While these overlaps suggest ways research in brain science can usefully contribute to work in our field, they also instigate seductively simple “solutions” to the “problem” of epistemological uncertainty. Our neurorhetorical methodology preempts the reductive uptake of neuroscientific research while simultaneously motivating a cross-disciplinary reciprocity conducive to the goals of rhetorical inquiry and responsible writing pedagogy.

This archival study examines the rhetorical theory and writing pedagogy of Austin Phelps, an accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and professor of sacred rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary. In disclosing Phelps's contributions to nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy at the first graduate seminary in the United States, this article highlights the ways that Phelps's melding of American transcendentalist thought and Christian orthodoxy enabled him to adapt nineteenth-century rhetorical theory and pedagogy in important ways. By demonstrating the extent to which Phelps's discussions of practical rhetorical wisdom and experiential preaching complicate documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the nineteenth century, this research aims to bring out a layer of the curriculum that other histories of writing instruction during the nineteenth century have not thoroughly investigated.

Abstract Although scholars in the field have begun to investigate normal schools, they still represent an underexamined site. One significant aspect of normal schools that has been overlooked is the educational activities of their alumni associations. California State Normal School Alumni Association, the focus of this analysis, provided a woman-centered space where women could engage in lively, rhetorically sophisticated public discussion of issues integral to women teachers in the 1890s. This analysis demonstrates that these alumni members, like clubwomen across the nation, participated in the process of transforming conventional assumptions about women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Catherine Hobbs and Vicki Burton for their thoughtful and helpful revision suggestions. I also thank Elizabethada Wright and Martha Chang for their encouragement and willingness to read earlier versions of this essay. 2For relevant research on normal schools, please see the following: Gold, "'Where Brains Had a Chance': William Mayo and Rhetorical Instruction at East Texas Normal College, 1889–1917" (2005) and Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947 (2008), chapter 3, "Challenging Orthodoxies at a Rural Normal College"; Gray, "Life in the Margins: Student Writing and Curricular Change at Fitchburg Normal, 1895–1910" (2008); Harmon, "'The Voice, Pen, and Influence of Our Women Are Abroad in the Land': Women and the Illinois State Normal University, 1857–1899" (1995); Fitzgerald, "The Platteville Papers Revisited: Gender and Genre in a Normal School Writing Assignment" (2007) and "A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition Studies" (2001); Lindblom, Banks, and Quay, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction at Illinois State Normal University: Credentials, Correctness, and the Rise of a Teaching Class" (2007); Lindblom and Dunn, "Cooperative Writing 'Program' Administration at Illinois State Normal University: The Committee on English of 1904-05 and the Influence of Professor J. Rose Colby" (2004); Rothermel, "'Our Life's Work': Rhetorical Preparation and Teacher Training at a Massachusetts Normal School, 1839–1929" (2007) and "A Sphere of Noble Action: Gender, Rhetoric, and Influence at a Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts State Normal School" (2003). 3Here I draw on Gold's definition of rhetorical education. (See Rhetoric at the Margins, page x.) 4The five normal schools that Ogren investigated were Genesco, New York; Florence, Alabama; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and San Jose, California. 5For examples, see Gold and Rothermel. 6As Barbara E. L'Eplattenier has asserted, "We can and should begin incorporating more explicit discussion of our primary research methods into our historical research" (68). Archival materials discussed in this article are held by San Jose State University Special Collections and Archives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Materials were gathered during two week-long and one three-day visit completed between 2008 and 2010. During the time I was completing research, San Jose Special Collections' staff was processing the normal school materials. As the material becomes available, it is being listed on the Online Archive of California. 7The association was also known as the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose and the Alumni Association of the San Jose State Normal School. 8In the field of rhetoric and composition, normal school alumni associations and West Coast normal schools have received little attention. In her history of American public normal schools, Ogren includes California State Normal School among the normal schools she examined. Although clubwomen have received attention by scholars, I have been unable to locate research on normal school alumni associations by scholars of rhetoric and composition. 9This information is from an article pasted into the Minutes of the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose for June, 1895. The article, "A Successful Session" was published in The Teacher and Student 3.1 (1895).

The discipline of rhetoric and composition is often defined by binaries: rhetoric/composition, teaching/practice. Our doctoral programs, however, occupy space at both ends of the spectrum through the simultaneous emphasis on composition pedagogy and rhetorical theory. The changing curricula in doctoral programs offer a unique lens through which to interpret some of the forces that have shaped rhetoric and composition as it has developed in the past fifty years. Examining the curricula highlights how our disciplinary identity has been shaped, at least in part, by our various institutional locations.

Peripatetic critic Demetrius has received little attention in rhetorical scholarship, but at the University of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, the use of On Style sparked debate among the English faculty, whose neo-Aristotelianism significantly articulated departmental direction. This tension centered on the use of the “forcible” style, and the subsequent debate gave rise to a faction of Chicago faculty who were sympathetic to the “New Rhetoric” of Kenneth Burke, who lectured there in 1949. This article demonstrates the significance of institutional context in the creation of critical positions, that these positions are often rhetorical responses to administrative, pedagogical, and political problems.

The online activist site TakingITGlobal offers teachers of rhetoric a pedagogical heuristic that enables us to rethink and revise rhetorical education. More specifically, the site raises questions concerning what the “civic” means inside a global rather than a national context. It revitalizes thinking about how students might “go public” in both online and offline spaces. And it challenges ideas about the traditional rhetorical practice in which an individual rhetor composes a single document for a specific audience.

Abstract In this essay we explicate notions of technology, self, and writing imbricated in new media responses to the Virginia Tech shootings. In our analysis we bring a consideration of affect and the normalization of emotional responses to bear on "aftermath texts" (online commentary on the shootings and on Cho's writing itself). We ultimately argue for a greater awareness of subjectivity and affect in our disciplinary and pedagogical explorations and narrations of technology. Notes 1We thank our RR peer reviewers Shawn Parry-Giles and Shane Borrowman for their insightful feedback as we worked on this essay. 2It is a sad reality that neither the Virginia Tech tragedy nor the human response to it is unique. Cell phones, texting, and amateur video have played a role in every major disaster since the technologies became readily available. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, for example, documented their plans for Columbine on videotapes, a number of which were found in Harris's bedroom after the massacre, and there are, literally, terabytes of digital archiving and commentary on 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami in southeast Asia, the 2005 London subway bombings, and roadside ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our profession and others have responded to trauma and its implications for our work: Witness Shane Borrowman's 2005 collection Trauma and the Teaching of Writing; the 2004 two-volume issue of JAC focused on "Trauma and Rhetoric"; online discussions on the WPA listserv about using writing and the composition class to respond to institution-wide tragedies; and, of course, the burgeoning field of trauma studies. Indeed, the sad, simultaneous proliferation of technology and tragedy has offered much evidence of the epistemelogical power of writing; to write is to make sense, even if what we write about is, finally, senseless. 3See CNN.com for more information about the Columbine shooting and the shooters' use of video and other technology: http://archives.cnn.com/1999/US/12/12/columbine.tapes/index.html 4Dissenting views on the blogsite appeared scattered throughout the postings: 5Certainly, like many of our colleagues in English and writing studies across the country, we sympathized with our colleagues at Virginia Tech and understood that writing and literature courses would be among the primary places—given their size and the humanist content and subjects frequently taught in them—in which students (and faculty) would want to process such a terrifying and tragic experience. We also understood that Cho's status as an English major, and the fact that both his print and video texts were held up as objects of scrutiny and even as "explanations" for his behavior, demanded an accounting of the connections between violence, writing, and subjectivity. We know we are not alone in our continuing horror in response to that April morning in Virginia. We wonder, again, how we as a culture might prevent such violence, and we are keenly aware of the fundamental inability of academic texts to respond to such a tragedy. We thus offer this essay as an exploration of yet another explosive instance of what Lynn Worsham famously called "pedagogic violence." Indeed, such tragedies as the Virginia Tech murders pose seemingly unanswerable questions: Why would someone do such a thing? What kind of person is capable of killing so many others? What must his sense of self, his interior life, have been like? And how have his actions changed the interior and communal lives of others? Such questions cut to the heart of subjectivity, and they were frequently debated through a wide variety of electronic media. At the same time, such questions evoked Worsham's exploration of pedagogic violence in "Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion." Many of us wanted, as Worsham writes, to "be comforted by the view that violence is the unfortunate result of individual pathology" rather than an outlaw response to regimes of affect that are the "primary and most valuable product" of late consumer capitalism" (219). To some great extent, Cho's behavior up to and including his multiple murders offers us that comfort. It also points to larger issues of systemic violence, to the relative ease of gun possession, to institutional inabilities to prevent violence, and so forth, in ways that removed that comfort for us almost immediately. 6Some of our previous work has touched on this idea; specifically, see Jonathan's Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web, which examines students' development of rhetorical savvy in the design of websites for a variety of purposes—personal, communal, and even political.

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.

The attentions given to textual production in composition scholarship have led to a neglect of the dynamics of textual reception. Renewed acquaintance with the discipline of hermeneutics will provide scholars and instructors with a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between interpretive processes and rhetorical strategies. Building on the work of Phelps, Mailloux, and Crusius, this article revisits Gadamer and Ricoeur, two of the more prominent scholars of modern hermeneutics, for the purpose of applying their principles to learning objectives and class assignments in college-level writing courses.