This essay focuses on writing assessment. Specifically, the author explores the embedded raced construction of writing assessment, rubrics, inter alia, commonly used in first year composition courses. The author posits that rubrics used to assess what Asao Inoue termed Habits of White Language cannot effectively assess and may be detrimental to assessing speakers from different linguistic backgrounds, specifically African Americans. The importance of Black Language (BL), rhetoric, and argumentation styles to rhetorical studies and American discourse must not only be recognized but also explored and taught as a style of argumentation. I implement an Afrocentric rubric using the principles of African American Rhetoric as a means for both expanding the rhetorical triangle and providing ethical assessment of BL in writing.

This essay engages the understudied Indian reformer, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), in order to explicate pragmatism’s influence in non-Western rhetorical situations. By charting the influence of John Dewey on Ambedkar as a student at Columbia University, this study explores Ambedkar’s translation of pragmatism into an Indian context filled with religiously underwritten injustice. His form of pragmatist rhetoric focuses on conversion as a solution to the problems of untouchables in India, and represents a version of pragmatist rhetoric that is revolutionary in form and effect. Expanding our knowledge of how persuasion relates to religious conversion, I argue that Ambedkar constructs and employs a pragmatist rhetoric of reorientation. Honed by Ambedkar in the pluralistic context of India, this process is composed of three distinct steps: evaluation of existing religious commitments, renunciation of harmful worldviews, and conversion to beneficial alternative religious orientations.

A prominent strain of argument and assessment in ancient texts places stones and words side-by-side for evaluation. I call this strain “the mock rock topos,” exploiting the ambiguity of mock (mimic/taunt) to capture a common ancient attitude toward verbal representations, written especially: that they share certain qualities with stone and stonework but outperform them, too. The mock rock topos consists of four main sub-topoi—masterpiece, mimêsis, movement, and memory—whereby graphic rhetors assert the superiority of their products. Detractors of writers and writing often use lithic language in their criticisms as well. The practice of pairing busts of representative authors with their book-rolls in ancient libraries complicated the representation competition between stone and scroll and enhanced the cultured and cultural experience of readers in those spaces.

Using Colin Powell's 2003 pre-war speech to the UN as a case study, this essay illustrates ways in which discourse analytic methods can serve investigations of constitutive rhetoric. Prior to the speech, Powell's reluctance to go to war and his skepticism of the need for military action in Iraq was well known. His conversion to the administration's position was key to the persuasiveness of the speech. Thus, within the speech he needed to reconstitute his ethos from doubter to advocate. The analysis focuses on how specific linguistic qualities such as modality, positioning, narrative, and evaluation assist Powell in doing so. These discourse analytic tools reveal ways in which discrete linguistic moves contribute to the constitutive work of ethos formation and re-formation.

Computerized systems for automated assessment of writing and speaking create a situation in which Burkean symbolic action confronts nonsymbolic motion. What is at stake in such confrontations is rhetorical agency. In this article, an informal survey that asked teachers of writing and speaking about automated assessment informs an analysis of agency that contrasts writing and speaking along the dimensions of performance, audience, and interaction. The analysis suggests that agency can be understood as the kinetic energy of performance that is generated through a process of mutual attribution between rhetor and audience. Agency is thus a property of the rhetorical event, not of agents, and can best be located between the two traditional ways of defining agency: as rhetorical capacity and as rhetorical effectivity. Unwillingness to attribute agency to automated assessment systems makes them rhetorically ineffective and morally problematic.

Abstract This essay offers a phenomenological assessment of the moral and rhetorical nature of acknowledgment. The dynamics of acknowledgment arise with the ontological structure of human existence, with our way of being spatial and temporal creatures whose existence, in an epideictic display, opens us to the future. From out of this openness comes a call of conscience, an evocation and a provocation that speaks to us of the importance of an essential vocation: teaching. Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie is offered as a case study of this entire process.

T his paper is an effort-which none of the characters in the dialogue maketo listen carefully to Socrates' most famous attack on rhetoric. This locus classicus is found in the Gorgias within the opening pages (461-466) of Socrates' conversation with Polus. In it he charges that rhetoric, Gorgias' skill, is a defective art and no more than base sucking up or flattery. He completes his condemnation by likening rhetoric, as Shakespeare's Faulconbridge does, a millennium and a half later, to sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth, (King John, I, I), a debased confection in place of healthy food. It is not only characters in the dialogue who fail to make a searching inquiry into Socrates' condemnation. Many rhetors since that time, smarting from the sting of what Plato has Socrates say about rhetoric, have taken the passage as unproblematically expressing a blanket condemnation of rhetoric. But I believe it is not necessary to read Socrates' condemnation of rhetoric in that fashion, and I attempt a reading in which the condemnation is less absolute. In the interest of disclosure I should say that I undertake this analysis in an Aristotelian spirit. My interest in the passage began with Aristotle's allusion to it in the opening sentence of his Art of Rhetoric (1354a) and continues to be guided by what I believe Aristotle has to teach about rhetoric. It is also guided by a realization that Plato, a dramatic poet, achieves his effect, in dramas that have little overt action, almost entirely by rhetoric, that is, by the creation of a coherent voice through which we approach each character. Whatever Plato's ultimate understanding of the relation of wisdom and art (Roochnik), any argument that Plato has contempt for rhetoric must, sooner or later, deal with his constant and loving use of it in his work. The passage in question forms the first part-about a fifth of the bulk-of Socrates' dialogic encounter with Polus. This paper is thus limited to reflection on a fragmentary part of that encounter, for Socrates' condemnation of rhetoric emerges in four Stephanus pages. Nevertheless, it is a fragment that, like all of the pieces of a Platonic dialogue, spirals into place in the larger encounter and beyond that in the dialogue as a whole. I argue that our assessment of Socrates' argument is decisively affected by our grasp of the dramatic context in which it appears in several decisive ways. One obvious event that demands dramatic explanation is Polus' intervention in what had been a discussion between Gorgias himself and Socrates and his subsequent ineptness. Indeed, Polus is so inept that the pages barely qualify as part of a conversation, or at least a conversation with Polus. What we have is

T he critical commonplace that rhetoric simply declined in direct proportion to rise of Romanticism has thankfully come under increasing scrutiny. In 1989, for example, Susan Jarratt questioned Donald C. Stewart's observation that the most notable feature of history of rhetoric in nineteenth century was its absence (73) and established constitutive role of rhetoric in literary and critical writings of Victorian Walter Pater. More recently, Don Bialostosky and Lawrence Needham have argued that the hesitancy of of rhetoric to consider political, cultural, or material factors when discussing rhetoric and Romanticism has been due to their willingness to accept at face value what Romantic authors have said about writing. For example, they have accepted uncritically pronouncements about Romantic genius that place author outside lines of dependency and relationship-and beyond concerns of rhetoric. Consequently, they write, historians of rhetoric have been curiously ahistorical in their accounts of rhetoric and Romanticism . (8). And just last year, almost as if in response to Bialostosky and Needham's assessment, Rex Veeder demonstrated how political and rhetorical principles informed Romantic pulpit practice in nineteenth century. He finds that What Romantics suggest is that purpose of art, including art of writing, is rhetorical in that it encourages act of identification and by so doing allows auditors to transcend their world view through imaginative participation with another (316). Rather than dismissing Romantic discourses as arhetorical or contentedly relegating Romantic texts to conservative pedagogies of taste, these rightly inquire into complex political and social conditions that impelled production and reception of Romanticism. Further, they implicitly or explicitly view their work as having important institutional consequences for literary studies, rhetoric, and composition. That is, if Romanticism has often been elided from histories of rhetoric for its aesthetic affiliations, this brand of revisionist historicism takes as its primary political motive opportunity to revisit-and to qualify-such founding Romantic oppositions as imaginary and factual, reading and writing, literary and rhetorical. In words of Bialostosky and Needham, A new investigation of relationship between Romanticism and rhetoric may lead to a rapprochement between literary and rhetorical branches of English studies (as well as between English and Rhetoric departments) whose separation was founded upon and is sustained by commonplace story of end of rhetoric and rise of literature in Romantic period (5).

(1998). The civic function of taste: A re‐assessment of Hugh Blair's rhetorical theory. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 25-36.

delegitimate any work that has been done on scientific style and arrangement and any attention that has been paid to ethical and pathetical proofs in (252) by scholars in sociology and rhetoric of science. Pera responds to the point about scientific style by stating believe that style and arrangement, although interesting topics of philosophical analysis, are inessential to science (the law of falling bodies, say, did not acquire or change its status of scientific knowledge when Galileo translated it from Latin into Italian and put it in the context of a dialogue) (255). In effect, he agrees with Gross's assessment by implying that style has no role in science. In addition, Pera's example suggests that he limits the scope of style to mere surface features of discourse-words may change but the concept (or scientific law) does not. If we examine examples from the realm of contemporary science in action, it becomes difficult to continue to conceive of style as ornamental or reduced to surface features and separate from the thoughts being articulated. While some scholars and many scientists may share Pera's reductive definition of style as surface, recent research in rhetoric and composition, as well as postmodern theories of language, suggest that style is connected in central ways with thought and argument (Faigley, Gage, Rankin). To build on this recent scholarship on style, the study of scientific practices can provide important examples of style that encompass an integral part of the scientific concepts or laws being formulated. The role of the rhetorical trope of metaphor or the figure of analogy in the process of scientific inquiry constitutes a prime example. In fact, the role of analogies and metaphors (and a third, related category, models) in scientific investigation has been, for several decades, a topic of much discussion by scholars interested in the workings of science; however, there has been much less inclination for scholars to draw out the implications of these discussions. In this paper, I want to begin to explore some of these implications by reviewing first, how philosophers and rhetoricians of science have conceptualized analogy and its contribution to the work of science; and second, by reporting some observations drawn from an empirical study of a group of physicists as they

A couple of weeks ago, while I was in the throes of drafting a paper about the significant alterations in Wayne Booth's thinking implied by his developing the concept of coduction in The Company We Keep, I received a rather amazing letter. As soon as I read it, I realized that it contained a far more appropriate assessment of Booth's evolving thoughts about the relations among authors, texts, and readers than anything my lugubrious analysis would yield. This letter, as you'll see, is far from unqualified praise of Booth, but I believe it gets at aspects of his work that a more reverential approach would just plain miss.