This article focuses on teacher educators’ approaches to supporting discipline-specific undergraduate writing at the University of Strathclyde, the largest provider of initial teacher education (ITE) in Scotland. Although the Scottish Enlightenment had a substantial influence on positioning language, and therefore rhetoric, as a field of study ( Shieber, 2023 ), contemporary Scottish higher education—including teacher education—has no teaching of rhetoric or composition and no formalised general writing education (e.g., first-year composition). Yet, ITE students are expected to write in a variety of genres throughout postsecondary education. We position writing instruction as part of socially just teacher education. Our qualitative study investigates how university teacher educators conceive of student writing and enact these conceptualisations in practice. This study offers insight into how teacher educators evaluate the role of writing in teacher education and how they connect it to professional practice, positioning writing instruction as part of socially just teacher education.

This article presents findings from an ethnographic, rhetorical study of children's experiences with free-time writing in so-called author schools for children in Denmark. The study is guided by two research questions: What characterizes writing enjoyment in the context of free-time author schools for children, based on children's own experiences? and How can insights from children's writing experiences in author schools inform broader pedagogical considerations about writing in formal school settings? The aim of the article is to contribute empirically grounded knowledge about writing enjoyment in an out-of-school teaching context and to explore how such knowledge might inspire broader considerations about a pedagogy for enjoyable writing experiences. Findings point to four core dimensions of writing enjoyment as expressed by the children: (a) writing together with others in a community of writing, (b) being free in writing and experiencing agency, (c) using imagination in writing to explore ideas and stories, and (d) being taught by an author, someone who is herself a writer. These insights are considered in relation to existing understandings of writing enjoyment and discussed as inspiration for a writing pedagogy that is experience centered rather than performance centered.

Transnational and multilingual writing data are characterized by mobile practices that rarely hold still for study. As individuals form and re-form communities in the process of migration, their language and literacy paths increasingly diversify forms of language sociality, goals, or expectations. In such cases, a priori community knowledge around genre use becomes tenuous or nonexistent. Yet, many default methodological orientations in Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) have tended to emphasize agreement, recognizability, and community cohesion, focusing analysis especially on textual typicality. This article attends to this methodological issue by resurfacing and extending a discussion of the centrifugal nature of genre. To demonstrate this shift, the article enacts a genre analysis of a multilingual community-based writing workshop, showing how centripetal and centrifugal forces run through workshop participants’ creation of a language portrait. Ultimately, the article shows that tracking genre’s stabilizing and destabilizing forces, particularly from a human perspective, provides an analytic guide to writing practices as they fragment and re-coalesce. It further demonstrates how centering the human handling of genre can orient writing researchers to the instability that is often the reality of transnational and multilingual writing.

This article’s author situates late 19th-century essays by Andrew Carnegie within the rhetorical history of business and professional communication (BPC). A close analysis of the essays reveals that Carnegie relied on rhetoric to shape his public image as a benevolent business leader during a period characterized by significant socioeconomic divisions in the United States. Three primary themes— wealth , labor , and democracy —emerge, which the author argues animated Carnegie’s reasoning and arguments throughout the essays. The author concludes by recommending greater attention to the rhetorical history of BPC in future research and teaching.

ABSTRACT In The New Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca challenged the Cartesian understanding of the reasonable within philosophy with an expanded understanding based on types of agreements linked to types of audiences. They brought this same perspective to an analysis of values and value judgments in an attempt to respond to the logical empiricists’ critique. While scholars have examined the first of these goals, they have not attended to their analysis of values. This article addresses that neglect. It proposes that the way to understand Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s reevaluation of value judgment is to place The New Rhetoric in the context of the nineteenth-century discourse on values within philosophy. While rejecting the a priori ontology that characterizes most axiology, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca nonetheless employ the concepts and technical vocabulary of the philosophers’ paradigm to transform the axiologists’ logic of values into their rhetoric of the preferable.

ABSTRACT The article distinguishes between “anthropomorphism” and the “anthropomorphism accusation,” a term coined to describe the value-laden assumption that using so-called human terms to talk about nonhumans is always inaccurate and always to be avoided. Analyses of scientific papers and op-eds in botany, evolutionary biology, and microbial science reveal an almost pathological avoidance of anthropomorphism as well as the deeply political foundation of the avoidance—that is, while critiques of anthropomorphism are couched in concerns for accuracy, the critics themselves generally give up a measure of accuracy and instead make a morality case. Analyses of posthumanist rhetoric and science studies texts reveal a tendency to deflect the anthropomorphism accusation without consideration for the conceptual ground that is being ceded in the deflection. The article calls for posthumanist writers not to deflect, but rather to accept the accusation in order to begin making space to deploy the affinity-seeking moves that get called anthropomorphism.

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of globalization, the increasing diversity of languages and cultures has underscored the pressing need for cross-cultural comprehension and effective communication. This article stands at the junction of argumentation theory and translation studies, exploring their interrelationship. Using the “Hao Bridge Debate” as a case study, the article adopts a rhetorical perspective to explore the challenges of conveying ideas across linguistic and cultural barriers. By analyzing varied translations and interpretations of the debate, considering source language expressions within their historical and cultural contexts, this article discusses the multifaceted challenges faced by translators in bridging linguistic and cultural gaps and emphasizes the inherent deviations in translations. Moreover, this article examines the impact of cultural elements, such as metaphor interpretation and utilization in argumentation, influencing argument transmission and comprehension. This research also illustrates the importance of rhetoric to translation in the study of argumentation, which has further implications for understanding cross-cultural argumentation.

This article positions rhetorical attunement—defined by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard as an “ear for, or a tuning toward, difference or multiplicity”—as a valuable methodological practice for community-engaged research (CER). In CER, rhetorical attunement can help researchers remain responsive to difference and complexity, supporting a range of ethical and practical goals: enacting reciprocity, pivoting when priorities shift, listening well to unspoken concerns, and sustaining relationships over time. In this article, we focus on reciprocity as one key goal of CER in order to demonstrate how Leonard’s rhetorical attunement can operate in practice. While reciprocity is often defined through formal agreements or mutual benefit, we examine how it can also surface through indirect, situated expressions that require careful listening. Drawing from a multisite project on water resilience in Arizona, we reflect on how rhetorical attunement enabled us to enact reciprocity in moments of misalignment, redirection, or informal connection, and how we attuned and responded. We conclude by offering a typology to support researchers in practicing rhetorical attunement as a method for sustaining ethical, reciprocal relationships across difference.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies are increasingly marketed to knowledge workers as productivity tools for focused, immersive work. Yet little empirical research examines the lived experience of sustained VR use for complex academic writing tasks. This study presents a 10-week diary study of a doctoral candidate using VR to compose her dissertation during summer 2025. Through weekly reflective entries, screen recordings, and artifact analysis, we examine the user experience dimensions of immersive academic writing. Our thematic analysis reveals six major findings: (1) technical infrastructure constraints dominated the writing experience; (2) embodied discomfort consistently limited sessions to 30–50 min; (3) affective dimensions shaped productivity; (4) learning curves remained steep throughout the study; (5) task type significantly influenced success, with structured administrative writing outperforming open-ended academic drafting; and (6) technical disruptions fragmented flow and made momentum recovery difficult. We argue that VR writing tools require task-appropriate design, realistic session expectations, and user agency to discontinue when needs are not met. These findings contribute user-centered evidence to technical communication scholarship on emerging composing technologies and offer practical guidance for graduate writing programs.

This qualitative study investigates how writing instructors compose feedback in multimodal digital environments, focusing on the rhetorical and relational dimensions of their design choices. Drawing on social semiotics and multimodal composition theory, the study analyzes feedback artifacts, instructor interviews, and student surveys from six first-year writing courses. Findings reveal that instructors engage in complex feedback design work across communication modes, often without formal training or shared frameworks. Instructors tended to default to text-based habits shaped by genre memory but adapted their strategies in response to communicative breakdowns and student needs. The study identifies three core themes: reliance on print-era conventions, rhetorical problem-solving through modal layering, and ambiguity in feedback interpretation. Despite these challenges, instructors demonstrated creativity and care in their attempts to communicate clearly and relationally. The article calls for a rhetorical framework to support multimodal feedback design, emphasizing the need for pedagogical reflection, professional development, and student co-interpretation. As genAI and platform automation continue to evolve, the findings underscore the importance of feedback as a site of human judgment and presence. The article concludes with recommendations for instructors, writing programs, and institutions to better support feedback as intentional, relational work.

In contemporary digital publics, rhetoric and culture intertwine, shaping collective understanding and moral judgement. Taking the public accusations against Katherine Diez as its point of departure, this article explores the rhetorical dynamics of a public accusation through which communities articulate and enforce shared norms while simultaneously reconstituting their own identities. By tracing and mapping how the accusation emerged, circulated, and crystallized across platforms, the article examines how rhetorical participation and cultural meaning-making unfold collaboratively in a networked media ecology. Drawing on theories of narrative rhetoric, accusatory rhetoric and participatory communication, the article demonstrates how a single accusation becomes a site where participants negotiate authority, moral legitimacy, and identity. The article contributes to recent research on accusatory rhetoric and offers a method for delimiting an object of analysis within a networked media ecology.

Ancient Greek rhetoric gave rise to and contributed to the (initial) development of many terms that even today attract the interest of philosophers and rhetoricians round the globe. Among those terms is logos, perhaps most characteristically described by Aristotle in his Rhetoric. But Aristotle is not the sole ancient Greek representative of rhetoric who considered the term. In this essay, I explore how selected ancient Greek figures—i.e. the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and a few others—understood logos in the context of rhetoric. I assert that, despite some differences, they essentially viewed the term similarly, as connected to discourse involving argumentation intended to exert influence for socio-political or philosophical purposes.

This article investigates the motivation informing President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s rhetoric regarding America’s lack of a direct military response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Employing Kenneth Burke’s pentad as its analytical lens, this study identifies how the president attempted to shape public opinion through his linguistic choices and selective interpretation of events. Biden’s rhetoric justifying the US’ non-military reaction to the conflict is found to reflect realism, and supports the claim that the US approach regarding the situation in Ukraine is an action policy. Furthermore, the results provide insight into the understanding of the working of the no-use-of-force rhetoric within the context of the still evolving post-Cold War world order.

Abstract This chapter examines the rhetorical impact of instructors’ hyper-scrutinization of BIPOC students’ texts for AI involvement on their authorial agency and voice in US writing classrooms, problematizing how AI-surveilling pedagogical practices intersect with raciolinguistic ideologies, epistemic injustice, institutional distrust, instructor bias, and historical deficit-based views of BIPOC students’ multilingual composition.

The following article is a rendering of the opening keynote speech given by Dr. V. Jo Hsu at the 2025 Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) Symposium that took place in Minneapolis, MN on October 17–18, 2025.

This article revisits the mid-century medical debate over the “treatment” of transsexualism in the U.S., summarily represented in the most cited essays on transsexualism at the time. The article leverages the stasis point of those medical debates—is transsexuality a product of the psyche or the soma?—as a singularly rich site for rhetorical inquiry arguing that this case demonstrates that stasis has both substance and a rhetorical form that determines the limits of what is accepted as a legitimate argument within any debate. The ultimate aim of this essay is twofold: one, to add to the rhetorical history of transsexuality with regard to medicalization and, two, to demonstrate how the decision of medical professionals to not allow sex-change surgery as a legitimate treatment to transsexual patients had much to do with the rhetorical association of site of malady/site of treatment and little to do with scientific evidence.

Existing research has explored the rhetoric surrounding women’s health, fertility, and motherhood, as well as the effect of medical discourse practices on patients’ understanding and decision-making in reproductive and other health contexts. I build on this work to examine the use and impact of common language surrounding pregnancy and miscarriage, especially for older mothers—particularly the terms advanced maternal age, blighted ovum, and expectant management. Drawing from rhetorical and autoethnographic methods, I argue that these terms function constitutively to shape sense-making about processes that otherwise exist only sub-clinically, and do so in ways that reify risk but also clearly demarcate the limitations of medical care. Broadly, this research contributes to our understanding of the ways that medical rhetoric shapes experience and understanding about reproductive health-related issues, and it also provides a foundation to more effectively communicate with pregnant women, and especially older mothers, about their care options.

In this article, the author uses the rhetorical concept of techne, here understood as a repeated engagement involving mind and body, to understand eating disorder recovery. The article relies on posts from the subreddit r/fuckeatingdisorders and personal story to explain how the behaviors and mindsets described by the posts are considered techne, and how recovery itself is an exercise in learning and relearning. This learning and relearning, also seen as the development of techne, is connected to deeper ontological claims about what it means to live in a body and recover in said body.

This article proposes the Canon to Code (C2C) Auditing Framework for evaluating generative (artificial intelligence) AI output through classical rhetoric, arguing that AI's characteristic failures—guessing instead of knowing, politeness instead of credibility, and confidence instead of judgment—revisit problems that rhetoric has addressed since antiquity. Developed using a rulemaking methodology and drawing on classical rhetorical theory, this framework presents 10 auditing rules that operationalize rhetorical principles into evaluation criteria for AI-generated content, focusing on accuracy, transparency, and accountability. It offers content auditors, technical communicators, and compliance professionals a theoretically grounded method for distinguishing AI output that meets audience needs from output that simulates credibility through pattern matching.

Abstract: Towards the end of his life (ca. 1790–1797), Edmund Burke resorted to a series of sublime appeals in his letters, pamphlets, and speeches, repeating several of the aesthetic forms he had theorized in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757/1759). These appeals invoked psychological terror and provoked violent response, leading Burke and his intended audience away from the prudential deliberation and liberal constitutionalism that he espoused in previous decades. Burke's sublime rhetoric constituted an illiberal response to efforts at promoting toleration of religious Dissenters and electoral reform. Additionally, Burke's authoritarian sublimity accounts for the reception of his Revolutionary arguments both in the late eighteenth century and in our own times. Finally, analysis of Burke's sublime appeals in the 1790s reveals that Burke was more than a psychological theorist of aesthetic affect. He was also a rhetorical practitioner with political effect.

Abstract: Writing amid the overthrow of the French Bourbon monarchy, Mary Wollstonecraft in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) undertakes her own radical rethinking of established hierarchies, specifically those between rational "conviction" and passionate "persuasion" as they pertained to larger debates about how to influence collective opinion and action. Responding to British and French Enlightenment rhetorics and to French political oratory, Wollstonecraft posits the deep integration of reason and passion in the language of influence as much by the performance as by the precepts of her text. She also considers how such language necessitates and engenders deliberation about its compatibility with the public good. If French Revolution resembles the Vindications by its animus against the rhetoric of (often veiled) self-interest, it simultaneously attests to, and consequentially retheorizes, the role of rhetorical persuasion in the service of democratic contestation and change.

Abstract: This study explores the place of Ciceronian rhetoric and the humanist tradition of argument in Anthony Trollope's historical and fictional writing. I argue that although Trollope, for reasons common to the Victorians, expresses significant doubt about the value of Ciceronian inventio in his Life of Cicero , he celebrates the tradition—particularly the role of disputatio in utramque partem (argument on both sides of an issue) and skepticism—in novels such as He Knew He Was Right . In this way, Trollope's fiction features what Thomas O. Sloane characterizes as a rhetorical cast of mind.

Abstract: In Calpurnius Flaccus's Declamation 2, a Roman wife is accused of infidelity on the grounds that she has given birth to an "Aethiopian" ( Aethiops ). The present article seeks to contextualize this relatively understudied declamation within the recent efflorescence of scholarship on ancient race, highlighting its connections to conventional discourses of race in Latin literature. In what follows, I identify a system of racial categorization as a component of Rome's imperializing vision of the world and demonstrate how discourses of race regulate domestic concerns at Rome, such as marriage, extramarital desire, and reproduction. The article also seeks to show how anxieties of racial contact, exemplified by blackness as index of symbolic exteriority, collide with anxieties regarding the presence of enslaved people within the Roman household.

We conducted a two-phase study with five National Weather Service (NWS) forecast offices in the Western United States region to improve the visualization of probabilistic forecast information (PFI) for their communities. We advance the concept of community risk thresholds (CRT), based on rhetorical commonplaces (communal beliefs, norms, and values) as a productive focus for forecasting. Our results suggest that CRTs are a promising heuristic for simplifying the visual presentation of PFI and increasing its community utility. We discuss the synergies and challenges of action research projects in weather risk communication and conclude by projecting future work focused on (a) visualizing community risk thresholds and (b) identifying productive pairings between weather hazard type and graphic genre.

After decades of proliferating digital texts, technical communication scholars and practitioners find themselves with no shortage of documents to examine. These exist in public and private repositories across a gamut of genres and used by varied audiences, communities, and organizations. As Stephen Carradini and Jason Swarts (2023) argue in Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication , the "immense amount of text created by the various arms of the field of technical communication" (p. 6) makes the field ripe for a method like corpus analysis. Carradini and Swarts's efficient and approachable book acts as a timely primer on corpus analysis—the systematic study of a collection of texts—that illustrates how the method can support, complement, and extend existing research agendas and professional practices in technical communication. Assuming no prior knowledge about corpus linguistics on the part of readers, Carradini and Swarts's highly useable book may well find uptake in adjacent scholarly areas invested in the study of writing, such as composition studies or the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine. But the chosen examples and suggested applications squarely situate Text at Scale as an indispensable volume for technical communication academics and practitioners alike.

Annually, disasters ranging from wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes to epidemics and even pandemics impact diverse communities globally. The calls for and research into improved disaster preparedness and better surveillance and resistance technologies are valid and necessary. However, it is pertinent that we also research and assess communicative practices of specific disasters, especially the discourse, rhetoric, and praxis that shape disaster response and management before, during, and after crises in vulnerable and marginalized communities. In Transnational Assemblages: Social Justice and Crisis Communication During Disaster , Sweta Baniya argues for the prioritization and inclusion of marginalized voices, centering their grounded knowledge, rhetorical agency, and coalitional networks. This will enhance effective and efficient disaster response as well as provide a more nuanced understanding of disaster rhetoric and praxis.

What happens when the devices we design to assist us begin to think with us, feel with us, and even become part of us? Augmentation Technologies and Artificial Intelligence in Technical Communication: Designing Ethical Futures addresses this question by urging readers to consider not only how technologies shape our capabilities, but also how we can shape them toward more just, ethical, and human-centered futures. Much like boarding a "fast-moving train," as authors Ann Hill Duin and Isabel Pedersen describe, the book is a forward-looking volume that interrogates the technical, rhetorical, and socio-ethical dimensions of emerging human augmentation and AI systems. Duin and Pedersen argue that artificial intelligence (AI), biometrics, and other augmentation systems are not merely technical tools but rhetorical and ethical phenomena that influence, and are influenced by, political, cultural, and economic conditions in ways that reconfigure the roles, literacies, and responsibilities of communication professionals.

Previous research in argumentation has closely examined distortions of the opposition—particularly the straw man—and has recently provided some experimental evidence on their effects on persuasive outcomes. However, comparatively little empirical attention has been given to the inverse practice of faithfully reformulating an opponent’s contribution. The effects of accurate and inaccurate representations on speaker ethos and perceived reasonableness also remain underexplored. This paper addresses these gaps through three pre-registered experimental studies comparing accurate reformulation, misrepresentation, and no reformulation of the opposition. Experiment 1 assesses the impact of these practices on perceived trustworthiness using a six-item, 7-point semantic differential scale. Experiment 2 examines judgments of reasonableness using a scale repeatedly employed in pragma-dialectical effectiveness research. Experiment 3 measures persuasiveness at both the attitudinal and behavioral intention levels. Participants read a series of pre-tested argumentative exchanges between two speakers in a charitable-giving context. Results show that, in the cases examined, misrepresenting the opposition negatively impacted both trustworthiness and reasonableness judgments, addressing concerns that adhering to dialectical standards may diminish rhetorical success.

Abstract Personal attacks, which might convey damaging accusations, can take either an explicit or an implicit form. When they are communicated implicitly, they are referred to as insinuations . Their implicit nature is said to allow speakers to evade responsibility, preserve their public image, or even conceal argumentative weaknesses. In previous studies, we found that insinuated ad hominem arguments supporting disagreement made speakers appear more persuasive and trustworthy than explicit ones. However, further exploratory analyses of our data revealed that the advantage of insinuated over explicit ad hominem arguments was either only present or more pronounced when the personal attack was fallacious. This distinction between explicitness and fallaciousness —and their possible interaction—had not been accounted for in earlier work. To investigate this interaction more systematically, we conducted four preregistered experiments examining the combined effects of explicitness and fallaciousness in ad hominem arguments. Results indicate that there is no significant interaction between fallaciousness and implicitness, regardless of whether the personal attack targets the proponent’s expertise or character. While the often-assumed persuasive benefits of insinuation do not consistently emerge—and may even undermine argumentative support in the context of disagreemen—insinuation confers social advantages, as the speaker is perceived as more trustworthy overall. Moreover, valid arguments are consistently preferred over fallacious ones—not only when it comes to supporting disagreement, but also in shaping how the speaker is perceived. This suggests that while pragmatic subtleties, such as insinuation, can enhance perceived trustworthiness, argumentative soundness remains a central criterion in both rhetorical and interpersonal judgments.

In this article I explain how the ecological perspective, posthumanism, and rhetorical genre studies all coalesce into a theoretical framework from which to approach business communication theory and practice. I use the United States National Security Strategy as a research object to demonstrate this theoretical approach.

User experience (UX) as both a vocation and a skillset is currently in the center of a wicked knot: emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) are (for the moment) widely accessible in unprecedented ways and are already heavily integrated into modern workplace practices and educational spaces. Further, workplace demands have led to a change in perception of the function and value of UX, and the field is facing new obstacles to hiring and research funding. Our article argues that a resituation of UX is needed: we-as instructors and administrators-need to focus on UX as an act of slow, embodied, and multimodal UX composition. To do this work, we offer the strategy of détournement as central to UX curriculum and preparing students for design work in a variety of rhetorical situations, expressed through our example assignments for instructors to implement within the college classroom.

Content personalization or tailoring content as per the needs of users has been a focus of technical communicators’ work since a very long time. Recently, algorithms have helped trace users’ characteristics such as devices they use, platforms they work on, local language spoken, etc. to personalize content through strategies like responsive content, automatic translation and so on. AI tools have extended algorithmic capabilities for personalization, but at the same time increased the randomness of personalized content. That is, algorithms produce different results for the same user at different times or different results for different users at the same time with the same prompt thus shifting the agency of both rhetors (or content creators) and the audience (or content users). While conventional technical communication pedagogy has focused on writing for users, and more recently on writing for algorithms which serve the users, today it is crucial to understand how technologies like AI impact knowledge consumption processes from a user experience perspective? And how can we teach content personalization and adaptive techniques in the increasingly digital spaces of audience interactions? These questions motivated our research. To follow the roles of algorithms and technical communicators closely, we analyzed three different case studies where algorithms are responsible for a high level of personalization beyond the decisions made by technical communicators. Our findings suggest that we must teach students to investigate concepts such as user personas in UX for understanding audiences, several methods of decision-making for content assets, and rhetorical ecology for a holistic view of content production to dissemination.