The use of subordination enables language users to achieve syntactic efficiency by allowing them to connect ideas in temporal/logical relation. Although the importance of subordination has been recognized in previous research on second language (L2) writing, it has been typically assessed with global indices that measure overall ratio of subordination. In order to capture more nuanced patterns in the development of L2 writing, this study measures the sophistication of subordination, considering subordination type (adverbialization, complementization, relativization) and finiteness (finite, nonfinite). Our natural language processing analysis of 6,566 timed impromptu essays using the Subordination Sophistication Analyzer 1.0 showed that higher-proficiency L2 learners used more subordination, and, importantly, their patterns of use differed by subordination type and finiteness. Whereas the amount of adverbialization and relativization increased along with proficiency regardless of finiteness, the use of complementization increased only for nonfinite clauses. The broader impacts of this study for education and assessment are discussed.

This article examines the power of special topoi to characterize the discourse of literary criticism, and through emphasis on rhetorical action, it sheds light on the limitations of topos analysis for characterizing research articles in disciplinary discourse more generally. Using an analytical approach drawn both from studies of topoi in disciplinary discourse and rhetorical genre theory, I examine a representative corpus of 21st-century literary research articles. I find that while most of the special topoi recognized by Fahnestock and Secor and Wilder remain prevalent in recent criticism, contemporary literary critics tend to draw on only a select subset of those topoi when making claims about their rhetorical actions. The topoi they use most often— mistaken-critic and paradigm—help identify the ways knowledge-making work is undertaken in literary criticism, a discipline often considered epideictic rather than epistemic. But what the special topoi do not capture is precisely the distinctly motivated, actively epistemic character of this disciplinary rhetoric. Based on these findings, I suggest that special topoi must be seen as functioning in the context of the rhetorical action undertaken by literary research articles. These articles undertake not simply persuasion but the particularly humanistic act I refer to as contributing to scholarly understanding: a rhetorical action worth attending to for scholars of disciplinary discourse, because it is deliberately more concerned with practice than product.

This article centers on Faith, a Latinx bilingual student who, because of her failure to pass a standardized exam in English language arts, had to repeat 11th-grade English. Despite this stigma of being a “repeater,” during the year-long ethnographic study I conducted in her classroom, Faith proved to be an insightful and critical reader and self-described poet who shared her writing with her peers as well as with other poets in online forums. Drawing from that more expansive classroom study, this article features Faith’s metacommentary on language and her own writing process and explores how her insights (1) disrupt monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies by highlighting the disconnect between her sophisticated understandings of language and the writing process and her status as a “struggling” student; (2) draw attention her wayfinding, which chronicles her navigation of those ideologies that complicate her search for a writerly identity and obscure the translingual nature of all texts and all writers; and (3) can move teachers and researchers of writing to reimagine the writing classroom so that it (re)positions students like Faith as “writers in residence,” whose existing translingual writing practices and wayfinding can serve as mentors and guides for others.

As climate change contracts our environment, bringing human and nonhuman communities into increased contact and conflict over scarce resources, advocacy rhetoric is making a related shift, from raising human awareness of problems “out there” to renegotiating the very boundaries between human and nonhuman communities. This shift—along with the advent of online media, which similarly blurs traditional urban versus rural boundaries between communities—invites us to update classic studies of advocacy rhetoric from the 1990s and early 2000s. Accordingly, this study addresses advocates’ use of online media in the Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Project. I reconstruct wildlife advocates’ attitudes toward the Project, as expressed online in press releases and blog posts, by using a combination of topology—a method that looks at patterns of topoi (shared beliefs, values, and norms) that a community expresses in a given rhetorical situation—and Kenneth Burke’s theories of attitudes and identification. I then compare advocates’ attitudes with the attitudes of project administrators and landowners in the reintroduction area, reconstructed in earlier work. I conclude that advocates amplify their identification with allies (chiefly wolves and supportive sectors of “the public”) and their alienation from competitors (chiefly public-land ranchers and project administrators) via the creation of “straw attitudes” for these communities that conflict both with their own attitude and with the documented attitudes of these communities. This rhetorical strategy creates a zero-sum political scenario for communication in the Project and recapitulates old political divisions in the southwestern United States. I finish by recommending rhetorical strategies aimed to increase identification, rather than alienation, in the Project and by showing what online advocacy rhetoric can teach us about the structure of Burkean theories of identification.

Research on writing and transfer has shown that writers who have sophisticated rhetorical knowledge are well equipped to adapt to new situations, yet less attention has been paid to how a writer’s adaptability is influenced by their writing processes. Drawing on Zimmerman’s sociocognitive theory of self-regulation, this study compared the writing processes taken up by graduate student writers composing a research proposal for their final project in a tutor-training practicum. Findings from process logs, interviews, and drafts differentiated self-regulation strategies associated with varying degrees of success. The more successful writers framed problems in terms of potential solutions, used problems to set goals, and reacted to problems by creating a narrative of progress; in contrast, less successful writers avoided problems or framed them as dead-ends. Compared to the less successful writers, the more successful writers concluded the project with robust knowledge about research proposal writing. These findings suggest that self-regulation strategies may be linked to an ability to develop rhetorical knowledge and practices in the face of challenging writing situations.

In this study, a corpus of essays stratified by level (9th grade, 11th grade, and college freshman) are analyzed computationally to discriminate differences between the linguistic features produced in essays by adolescents and young adults. The automated tool Coh-Metrix is used to examine to what degree essays written at various grade levels can be distinguished from one another using a number of linguistic features related to lexical sophistication (i.e., word frequency, word concreteness), syntactic complexity (i.e., the number of modifiers per noun phrase), and cohesion (i.e., word overlap, incidence of connectives). The analysis demonstrates that high school and college writers develop linguistic strategies as a function of grade level. Primarily, these writers produce more sophisticated words and more complex sentence structure as grade level increases. In contrast, these writers produce fewer cohesive features in text as a function of grade level. This analysis supports the notion that linguistic development occurs in the later stages of writing development and that this development is primarily related to producing texts that are less cohesive and more elaborate.

This study focused on 12th-grade Chilean students’ ability to produce locally coherent persuasive texts and on the cognitive basis that underlies this ability. All the participants wrote persuasive texts and answered a test of recognition of incoherent sequences. A subsample wrote another persuasive text while thinking aloud and had a semistructured interview about the text composed. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze local coherence (LC) in students’ writing and the relation between products and students’ ability to recognize, explain, and self-regulate LC. The majority of students composed texts that were mostly coherent although ideas were presented in long unstructured sequences that did not use the more sophisticated LC resources to construct their reasons and opinions in writing. Findings suggest an association between being able to recognize incoherent sequences, using more sophisticated LC resources in writing, and being able to explain and self regulate LC during writing.

In this study, a corpus of expert-graded essays, based on a standardized scoring rubric, is computationally evaluated so as to distinguish the differences between those essays that were rated as high and those rated as low. The automated tool, Coh-Metrix, is used to examine the degree to which high- and low-proficiency essays can be predicted by linguistic indices of cohesion (i.e., coreference and connectives), syntactic complexity (e.g., number of words before the main verb, sentence structure overlap), the diversity of words used by the writer, and characteristics of words (e.g., frequency, concreteness, imagability). The three most predictive indices of essay quality in this study were syntactic complexity (as measured by number of words before the main verb), lexical diversity (as measured by the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity), and word frequency (as measured by Celex, logarithm for all words). Using 26 validated indices of cohesion from Coh-Metrix, none showed differences between high- and low-proficiency essays and no indices of cohesion correlated with essay ratings. These results indicate that the textual features that characterize good student writing are not aligned with those features that facilitate reading comprehension. Rather, essays judged to be of higher quality were more likely to contain linguistic features associated with text difficulty and sophisticated language.

Advertising may be the most pervasive form of modern rhetoric, yet the discipline is virtually absent in rhetorical studies. This article advocates a mutually beneficial rapprochement between the disciplines—both in academe and the workplace. Rhetoric, for example, could help address an enduring lacuna in advertising theory. Persuasive communicators since Aristotle have maintained that rhetoric begins with invention, the generation of compelling ideas. Studies of advertising creativity hold that invention begins with the gathering of facts to fuel an association of disparate ideas at the heart of creativity. However, studies of the fact-gathering heuristic in advertising fail to identify a systematic approach for product analysis. In hopes of advancing a rapprochement between rhetoric and advertising, this article demonstrates that Aristotelian causal analysis, long associated with rhetorical invention, can provide a systematic heuristic for product analysis. Rhetoricians can help advertisers strengthen a crucial element—the invention phase—of advertising copywriting.

This article analyzes the power of ambiguous metaphors to present scientific novelty. Its focus is a series of papers by the prominent population biologist W. D. Hamilton in which he redefined the meaning of biological altruism. In particular, the article draws on Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad to examine why suggestions of motive are so pervasive in Hamilton’s representation of genetic evolution and what epistemological consequences result from this rhetorical choice. Specifically, the metaphorical language of motive allows Hamilton to represent genes ambiguously and simultaneously as both the agents of evolutionary action and as the agency or mechanism by which organism agents act. The textual ambiguity generated by the agent-agency metaphors both reflects and constructs a conceptual ambiguity in the way evolutionary processes are theorized. Analysis of Hamilton’s rhetoric thus suggests the productive function of ambiguous metaphors in highly technical scientific texts.

This study investigates the practice of presenting multiple supporting examples in parallel form. The elements of parallelism and its use in argument were first illustrated by Aristotle. Although real texts may depart from the ideal form for presenting multiple examples, rhetorical theory offers a rationale for minimal, parallel presentation. The form for presenting data can also influence the way it is observed and selected, as the case of the Linnaean template for species grouping illustrates. Parallel presentation is not limited to verbal phrasing. Arranging data in tables, typical in scientific discourse, satisfies the same requirements for minimal, equivalent presentation of evidence. Arranging representational or iconic images in rows or arrays is yet another mode for the parallel presentation of evidence, although this mode has a recent history. A cognitive rationale can perhaps explain the use of parallelism to present multiple supporting examples.

In spite of the continuing influence of Aristotle's Rhetoric on the discipline of rhetoric, no widespread agreement exists about whether the text is a systematic treatise about the tekhne (art) of rhetoric or a disconnected set of lecture notes. A significant piece of the puzzle belongs to Aristotle's metaphorical definitions of rhetoric in Book I of that text. Although scholarly efforts to interpret these definitions have informed our understanding of the text, they have done so without fully addressing how these definitions function within the text. This article affers a new approach to investigating these statements, one that considers them from Aristotle's own perspective on such linguistic matters: the author uses Aristotle's theory of metaphor as a measure of his practice in these definitions. The outcome indicates that Aristotle's practice in this situation does not match his theory, a circumstance that has certain consequences for our reading of the Rhetoric.

Many authorities have come to recognize the critical importance of the Greek notion of kairos (right timing and due measure) in contemporary rhetoric. But Aristotelian scholars have generally ignored or demeaned Aristotle's use of kairos in his rhetoric, often contrasting it especially to Plato's full treatment in the Phaedrus. This lack of attention has been partially due to faulty indexes or concordances, which have recently been corrected by Wartelle and programs like PERSEUS and IBICUS. Secondly, no one has hitherto attempted to go beyond the root kair- and examine the concept as expressed in other terms. This article will attempt to meet both of these concerns. It will first examine care-fully the 16 references to kairos in the Rhetoric and show that the term is an integral element in Aristotle's own act of writing, in his concept of the pathetic argument, and in his handling of maxims and integration. There are also important passages using kairos in his treatment of style, often in conjunction with his use of the notion of propriety or fitness (to prepon). Possibly the two most important indirect uses of the concept of kairos can be seen in Aristotle's definition of rhetoric and in his treatment of equity in both the Rhetoric and the Nichomachean Ethics, probably the two most important treatments of the concept in antiquity.

Commentary: When this essay first appeared more than 10 years ago, it built on a small but substantial body of scholarship that declared scientific writing an appropriate field for rhetorical analysis. In the last 10 years, studies of scientific writing for both expert and lay audiences have increased exponentially, drawing on the long-established disciplines of the history and philosophy of science. These newer studies, however, differ widely in approach. Many take the perspective of cultural critique (e.g., the work of Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar), whereas others use the tools of discourse analysis (e.g., Greg Myers, M.A.K. Halliday, and J. R. Martin). But, application of rhetorical theory also thrives in the work of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, Charles Bazerman, Jean Dietz Moss, Lawrence J. Prelli, Carolyn Miller, and many others. Randy Allen Harris offers a useful introduction to this field in Landmark Essays on Rhetoric in Science (1997). “Accommodating Science” applies ideas from classical rhetoric and techniques of close reading typical of discourse analysis to the question of what happens when scientific reports travel from expert to lay publications. This change in forum causes a shift in genre from forensic to celebratory and a shift in stasis from fact and cause to evaluation and action. These changes in genre, audience, and purpose inevitably affect the material and manner of re-presentation in predictable ways. Two concerns informed this study 10 years ago: the impact of science reporting on public deliberation and the nature of technical and professional writing courses. These concerns have, if anything, increased (e.g., the campaign on global warming), warranting continued scholarly investigation of the gap between the public's right to know and the public's ability to understand.

Commentary: My intent in doing this project was to illustrate that an archaeological site as (apparently) obscure as the Amphiareion of Oropos holds a wealth of evidence about the nature and practice of rhetorical contests. Indirectly, I also hoped to illustrate that developing new methods of analysis through “field work” in classical rhetoric complements conventional arm-chair research - characteristic of literary analysis - as a source of primary evidence. The study opportunities and support that I received in 1974 and 1977 from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Greek Ministry of Science and Culture convinced me that the Amphiareion would be appropriate for study. The Amphiareion was small enough for an in-depth examination and large enough to be known by ancient geographers such as Pausanias. From 1977 to 1985 I analyzed the information I had gathered about the site: the inscriptions my wife, Jane Helppie, and I had photographed and drawn on our field trips, the commentary of ancient sources, and the results of archaeological excavations under Basil Petracos and the Greek Archaeological Service. This study reveals that rhetoric was practiced at locations other than prominent centers such as Athens and that these practices were sustained for centuries. In the future I plan to visit other larger and better known sites in order to continue the search for information that provides the basis for a richer understanding of the history of written communication in Greece.

To change the mind of a reader, authors compose written persuasion according to a set of rhetorical features. This article describes the features of persuasive texts and reviews research results to explore whether adults indeed change their minds after reading persuasion. Toulmin's (1958) model of argument and Aristotle's model of persuasive content characterize the structure and content of well-written persuasion. Research in social psychology and text comprehension shows that adults typically build a case for their own prereading belief rather than process a persuasive text mindfully, weigh evidence, and change their beliefs. An important contract between author and reader is typically broken. Research on designing text to disabuse students of scientific misconceptions points to text features that authors could use to encourage readers to read persuasion mindfully.

The evolution of technical communication conventions in America is more anthropologically complex than the traditional linkage to the scientific plain-style tradition suggests. Analysis of leading ideas in early 20th-century engineering writing textbooks and other primary sources demonstrates that disciplinary discourse conventions develop from an intricate nexus of human motivations, beliefs, and social activity. This article explores currents in American social and intellectual history that explain this complex, sophisticated view of language, which combines a rhetorically sensitive formalism with the ideas of professional literacy and cultural reading to facilitate communication with various audiences and to reinforce the status and dignity of the emerging profession.

Many authorities have come to recognize the critical importance of the Greek notion of kairos (right timing and due measure) in contemporary rhetoric. But Aristotelian scholars have generally ignored or demeaned Aristotle's use of kairos in his rhetoric, often contrasting it especially to Plato's full treatment in the Phaedrus. This lack of attention has been partially due to faulty indexes or concordances, which have recently been corrected both by Wartelle and programs like PERSEUS and IBICUS. Secondly, no one has hitherto attempted to go beyond the root kair- and examine the concept as expressed in other terms. This article will attempt to meet both of these concerns. It will first examine carefully the 16 references to kairos in the Rhetoric and show that the term is an integral element in Aristotle's own act of writing, in his concept of the pathetic argument, and in his handling of maxims and integration. There are also important passages using kairos in his treatment of style, often in conjunction with his use of the notion of propriety or fitness (to prepon). Possibly the two most important indirect uses of the concept of kairos can be seen in his definition of rhetoric and in his treatment of equity in both the Rhetoric and in the Nicomachean Ethics, probably the two most important treatments of the concept in antiquity.

Recent trends in gender and writing research avoid or ignore the issue of essentialism while attempting to formulate a theory of “composing as a woman” that might rely on essentialist assumptions. Codifying the characteristics of “writing like a woman” or “writing like a man” can result in a limited—and limiting—conception of gender and its effect on writing. To illustrate this argument, this article uses as an example of I'écriture féminine the writing of Kenneth Burke and as an example of writing like a man the prose of Julia Kristeva. It argues for conceptualizing and studying gender as a secondary factor affecting writing rather than the principal factor.

The fields of social cognition and writing have both evolved significantly from their infancy in the 1960s. Yet by 1960, each field had already suffered from years of neglect; a social-cognitive framework was initially published in the 1930s (Mead, 1934), while audience awareness in speaking and writing was first addressed by Aristotle (Cooper, 1932). During the 1970s, cognitive-developmentalists interested in audience awareness in writing found Piaget's (1926) description of the egocentrism displayed by children in various communicative tasks particularly appealing. The combined acceptance by these writing researchers of the concepts of egocentrism and decentration led to a growing concern for audience awareness and adaptation in written communication. However, many researchers noted the limitations of cognitively based audience heuristics and the conflicting evidence regarding egocentrism. Support for their views on writing was found in the new field of social cognition and writing. Of the four theoretical positions currently advanced in the field, Rubin's (1984) multidimensional proposal dominates the research. Although the actual studies generated have been few, numerous theoretical and methodological problems already plague this area of research. Nonetheless, the emerging social-cognitive model of writing presents implications for research and teaching not available under traditional perspectives.

Two famous passages in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War illustrate the origins of scientific writing and shed further light on the relationship between scientific writing and epideictic rhetoric. Thucydides' account of the plague in Athens in 430 B.C. uses a structure based on the Hippocratic approach, as well as “scientific” medical terminology. The report of the plague is immediately followed by Pericles' Funeral Oration. Similar themes appear in both segments, but the rhetorical strategies are markedly different. This article analyzes the juxtaposed examples of scientific and epideictic discourse by applying theories from rhetoric and sociology advanced by Perelman, Fahnestock, Havelock, and Durkheim, as well as schema theory and reader-response theories.

This article surveys and analyzes the contemporary reception of Plato's rhetorical theory in contemporary rhetoric and composition studies by examining the response from three current perspectives: (1) presenting Plato as completely against rhetoric; (2) leaving Plato out of rhetoric altogether; and (3) interpreting Plato's work as raising issues central to classical and contemporary rhetoric. The discussion of the first two responses to Plato's relationship to rhetoric reveals a reductive, or formulaic, presentation of classical rhetoric. The discussion of the third perspective shows that it is the most accurate interpretation. Plato's rhetoric is related to the traditional five canons that were prominent in Greek rhetoric and explicitly systematized in Roman rhetoric, beginning with the Rhetorica Ad Herennium. If Plato's extensive contribution to the last two of the classical canons of rhetoric, memory and delivery, were more commonly included in the historicizing of rhetoric, then the five canons would work in the fullness of their interaction, rather than as the three-part system (invention, arrangement, and style) that dominates much current interpretation of classical rhetoric. Examples of reintegration of Plato into classical rhetoric (the third perspective) leads to a conclusion that Plato's rhetoric is central to contemporary interpretations of classical rhetoric.

This article studies the fate of scientific observations as they pass from original research reports intended for scientific peers into popular accounts aimed at a general audience. Pairing articles from two AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) publications reveals the changes that inevitably occur in “information” as it passes from one rhetorical situation to another. Scientific reports belong to the genre of forensic arguments, affirming the validity of past facts, the experimental data. But a change of audience brings a change of genre; science accommodations are primarily epideictic, celebrations of science, and shifts in wording between comparable statements in matched articles reveal changes made to conform to the two appeals of popularized science, the wonder and the application topoi. Science accommodations emphasize the uniqueness, rarity, originality of observations, removing hedges and qualifications and thus conferring greater certainty on the reported facts. Such changes could be formalized by adopting the scale developed by sociologists Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar for categorizing the status of claims. The alteration of information is traced not only in articles on bees and bears, and so on, but also on a subject where distortions in reporting research can have serious consequences—the reputed mathematical inferiority of girls to boys. The changes in genre and the status of information that occur between scientific articles and their popularizations can also be explained by classical stasis theory. Anything addressed to readers as members of the general public will inevitably move through the four stasis questions from fact and cause to value and action.

Traditional views of organizational communication have fallen short because they misapprehended and oversimplified the realities of rhetorical behavior in organizations and because they offered weak theoretical underpinnings for the study of business communication. Recent developments in rhetorical theory spearheaded by the work of Toulmin, Perelman, Polanyi, and others offer a coherent, theoretically sound, and productive way of analyzing discourse in organizations. Applying constructs of the “new rhetoric” to the study of sample documents from a representative organizational situation illustrates the importance of consensus building as a tacit communication purpose, reveals the decision-making process involving the text's audience, and demonstrates the central role of context or situation in shaping discourse. Rhetoric in organizations, just as in other “rational enterprises” (such as the disciplines of science and law), reveals underlying paradigms that are determined by the nature of communal behavior and by the nature of thinking man.

College students wrote compositions that elicited their technical knowledge of economics, cancer, or growing flowers. They later completed a questionnaire that assessed which information sources had contributed to their knowledge about these topics. We analyzed the extent to which the number and the quality of the ideas generated could be predicted by four major information sources: formal education, mass media, social interaction, and direct experience. Most of the ideas generated were true, culturally familiar, and unsophisticated. The implications of the results are discussed in the context of some cognitive theories of the writing process.

Most rhetorical history has concerned itself with the theory of argumentative discourse as it developed from classical to modern times. This essay traces a parallel but much less investigated strand of rhetorical history: the theory and practice of explanation. The slow growth of a body of knowledge about how information could best be communicated without necessary reference to overt persuasion is followed from Aristotle's Rhetoric through the beginnings of a theory of written discourse in the American nineteenth century. A later continuation of this essay will trace explanatory rhetoric into modern times.