“The Selfie Project” is the final assignment in an upper-level undergraduate course on writing with digital and social media. The assignment intends to increase students' awareness of their everyday practices by asking them to critically analyze the act of taking pictures of themselves. Selfies have become an integral part of students' daily lives. For example, students post selfies on social media, they take selfies at parties and on vacation, and they use them to connect with their communities. Though they might seem inconsequential, selfies are rhetorically rich sites of character presentation in the world of social media: practicing their composition offers students a novel way to enhance understanding of character presentation in social media. With this assignment, students successfully brainstorm, compose, and revise rhetorical content in a genre they are already culturally familiar with.

Introduction: Faculty members have little time and usually lack expertise to provide writing feedback on lab reports. Sending students to a writing center, an existing resource on virtually all college campuses, could fill that gap. However, the majority of peer writing tutors are in nontechnical majors, and little research exists on training them to provide support for engineering students. Research question: Can peer writing tutors without technical backgrounds be trained to provide effective feedback to engineering students? About the case: Previously, sending students to the writing center was ineffective. The students did not see the value, and the tutors did not feel capable of providing feedback to them. To remedy this situation, an interdisciplinary training method was developed collaboratively by an engineering professor and the writing center director. Situating the case: Researchers have suggested that effective writing center help for engineering students is possible, and the authors have designed an interdisciplinary training method that has produced positive results. Supporting literature includes the use of generalist tutors, writing in the disciplines, genre theory, and knowledge transfer. Methods/approach: This was a three-year experiential project conducted in a junior-level engineering course. The assignment, a lab report, remained the same. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from students and tutors. Results/discussion: Tutor feedback and student satisfaction significantly improved. However, a few students who were satisfied overall still expressed interest in having their reports reviewed by a tutor with a technical background. Conclusions: Interdisciplinary tutor training can improve the feedback of peer writing tutors, providing support for faculty efforts to improve student writing. The method requires minimal faculty time and capitalizes on existing resources.

This manual is ideal for engineers at all stages of their careers: from the freshman engineering student to the college professor to the CEO of a large corporation. It can be a valuable tool for universities to train undergraduate and graduate students and for companies to train their employees. It clearly accomplishes its purpose—it teaches best practices in engineering communication using real-world issues and genres. It also serves as a guide for undergraduate and graduate students.

Reviews Christopher S. van den Berg, The World of Tacitus' Dialogus de Orato­ ribus: Aesthetics and Empire in Ancient Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107020900 If, as Ronald Syme remarked, "Tacitus gives little away," this is espe­ cially true for the Dialogus de Oratoribus.1 Elusive as Tacitus is in his historical works, he is more so in the Dialogus: Tacitus himself plays no real role in the dialogue (unlike Cicero, who sometimes appeared in his own dialogues), and readers have long puzzled over which speaker, if any, wins the day or repre­ sents Tacitus. The enigmatic character of the Dialogus has led to a variety of readings, most of which seek to pinpoint either a single argument or a single speaker as embodying the text's positive message. Each of these readings faces inter- and intratextual difficulties, as Christopher S. Van den Berg amply demonstrates in this volume. Rather than seek to resolve these tensions by identifying a particular speaker with Tacitus or describing an argument or speech as more persuasive, van den Berg argues that the "manifold contradic­ tions" (p. 124) within and across the speeches are, in fact, intentional and pro­ ductive features of the dialogue. In grappling with these tensions, along with the intertextual and intratextual dimensions of the work, van den Berg deve­ lops an interpretive approach that he terms "argumentative dynamics," an approach rooted in the very dialogue(s) that van den Berg studies. The result is an original and deeply learned approach to a perplexing and important text. The book consists of seven substantive chapters, along with an introduc­ tion, conclusion, and appendix featuring a detailed, outline of the Dialogus. Chapter 1 focuses on the first set of speeches (Aper and Messalla), weaving this analysis together with an overview of Tacitus' biography, the external and internal dating of the Dialogus, the role of rhetoric and declamation in imperial Rome, the work's Ciceronian engagements, and the dialogue genre. The "argumentative dynamic" interpretive approach is outlined in Chapter 2, where it is contrasted with "persuasion oriented" and "character oriented" (p. 56) approaches. The "persuasion oriented" seeks to describe a speech or set of speeches as being more persuasive than others, while the "character ori­ ented" seeks to identify a speaker with Tacitus. Both, though, seek to develop a coherent interpretation of the Dialogus according to which a particular 1 Ronald Syme, Tacitus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), Vol. II, p. 520. Khetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 3, pp. 320-329. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: / /w\nv. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.Org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.3.320. Reviews 321 argument or speaker effectively wins. Both approaches face abundant difficul­ ties: the dialogue is far from the Platonic model, featuring neither Socratic elendms nor deliberative exchange (p. 124), while Tacitus himself undermines his own voice and, in Academic fashion, allows each speaker to subtly under­ mine the persuasiveness of the others without engaging in direct question and answer. Argumentative dynamics seeks, instead, to explore "how dialogue functions to create and communicate meaning" turning to the text itself to recover "these functional strategies" (p. 94). Reading the Dialogus in light of the dialogue form - and as a literary work rather than a philosophical work, per se - focuses our attention on a number of features, the result of which is a rhetorical-literary reading in which the dialogue's "rhetorical aspects" are in fact the "core message" (p. 95) of the work. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 turn to an interpretation of the Dialogus itself. Interstitial passages are the focus of Chapter 3, in which van den Berg explores the way in which interstices contain "categories which describe the evolution of eloqueutia" (p. 99). Chapter 4 centers on what van den Berg describes as a sort of "rapprochement" (p. 164) between poetry (championed, ostensibly, by Maternus) and oratory (championed by Aper). That is, rather than view Maternus...

ABSTRACTIn this article I propose to interpret Austin's conception of perlocution in light of Peirce's philosophy of signs, through the lens of his notions of thirdness and speculative rhetoric in particular. I suggest that the traditional notion of speech genre, examined within the context of Peirce's semiotic framework, can make sense of the regularities and predictability that are characteristic of a large part of our discursive practices. More specifically, I argue that crystallized “habits of interpretation,” correlated to purposeful speech genres instantiated in given circumstances of enunciation, could be construed as predetermining the range of future interpretive conduct. In that perspective, this process of determination could be thus conceived as relatively predictable, at least for communication situations activating well-defined speech genres. In the end, I suggest that Peirce's conception of rhetoric draws attention to the necessarily constrained interpretive habits of our discursive life, yielding an original perspective on the notion of perlocution.

During the past 30 years, genre conceptualized as social action has been a generative framework for scholars, teachers, and rhetors alike. As a mid-level, mediating concept, genre balances stability and innovation, connecting theory and practice, agency and structure, form and substance. Genre is multimodal, providing an analytical and explanatory framework across semiotic modes and media and thus across communication technologies; multidisciplinary, of interest across traditions of rhetoric, as well as many other disciplines; multidimensional, incorporating many perspectives on situated, mediated, motivated communicative interaction; and multimethodological, yielding to multiple empirical and interpretive approaches. Because genre both shapes and is shaped by its communities, it provides insight into both ideological conformity and resistance, lends itself to multiple pedagogical agendas, and provokes questions about media, materiality, ethics, circulation, affect, and comparison.

ABSTRACT Incentives, economists remind us, are foundational to any economy: They include strategies to induce consumers to purchase products, motivate employees to work harder, or invite businesses to new localities. This textbook term, however, has not always been yoked to economic activity per se. This essay traces the history of the term “incentive” in two phases, first, from its origin in the Latin term “incentivum,” referring to “the thing that sets the tune,” and second, from its uptake and concretization by neoclassical economic thought through Jeremy Bentham, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson. In neoclassical economics, incentives “set the tune” of behavior by compelling rational economic action through the postulates of methodological individualism, equilibration, and utility-maximization. The terminological shift of “incentive” from its poetic origins into economic thought entails that “incentives” become an objective, univocal “thing” that embeds an argument about the dangers of actions that contravene market logics.

In keeping with the recent global turn in literacy and composition studies, this article explores rhetorical agency in an English-medium Indonesian PhD program. Drawing from the critical reflective lens teacher ethnography allows, the author highlights how graduate students at this Indonesian, yet international site negotiated both textually and extra-textually with the critical pedagogy she developed, while she also questions some of her initial assumptions concerning genre, audience, and rhetorical agency. Overall, the data presented here indicates that rather than focusing solely on textual form as a site of critical agency, teachers and scholars should also take into consideration the ways writers appropriate and circulate knowledge to the diverse audiences in their lives, across multiple genres and languages—and as time unfolds. Broadening the lens to account for such translingual agency might also benefit U.S.-based graduate writing pedagogies, the author ultimately suggests.

Collaborative writing is one of the twenty-first century writing competencies critical for college and career success. Technology-enhanced writing platforms, such as Google Docs, can serve as effective media for written collaboration. Although cloudbased tools such as Google Docs are increasingly used in secondary schools, little is known about how students collaboratively write in these environments, including how feedback sources and types of tasks affect collaborative writing patterns. This study examined the content of feedback and revision in 424 Google Docs written by 145 sixth grade students to understand the variations in feedback and revision patterns across key contextual factors: the source of feedback (i.e., teacher vs. peer) and assigned task type (i.e., argumentative, narrative, report). We conducted a qualitative content analysis of feedback and revision, followed by Chi-square and ANCOVA analyses. With regards to variations across feedback sources, we found that teacher feedback addressed more macro-level features (e.g., content, organization) whereas student feedback focused more on micro-level features (e.g., mechanics, conventions), and neither teacher nor peer feedback led to subsequent revisions. With regards to variations across task types, we found that among the three writing genres, the narrative genre had the greatest number of coauthors and feedback activities, and most of these activities consisted of affective feedback or direct edits. In contrast, in the report genre, the feedback activities tended to focus on content and organization, and the language functions of both feedback (e.g., advice, explanation) and revision (e.g., acknowledging, clarifying) were most evident in the report genre. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design and implementation of technology-based collaborative writing tasks in academic settings, as well as the limitations and directions for future studies.

As technology has made a range of modes of communication available and created new ways to integrate these modes, feedback has become increasingly electronic and multimodal. From written to audio, video, and screencast feedback, the multimodal options for electronic feedback (e-feedback) have expanded in such a way that we might speak of a ‘multimodal turn’ in feedback on foreign and second language writing. However, feedback studies on second language writing are just beginning to explore these complex areas. This essay offers a multimodal perspective on e-feedback by illustrating the scope of current research and highlights future research directions. The retrospective underscores the scarcity of research in the area with a specific focus on multimodality and identifies needs for speciality feedback systems that consider practical and contextualized perspectives. We argue that future research should strive for a context-rich description of e-feedback activities, gathering thick data about feedback provision, learner engagement with feedback and uptake through screencasting, eye-tracking, and keystroke logging technologies. These data should be triangulated with information about all factors impacting the feedback activity outcome, ranging from participant variables over modal affordances of the platforms used to environmental factors like institutional support.

Content marketing involves creating content in genres that readers find useful. These genres individually do not persuade their readers to buy a given product and may not even mention the product or service being marketed. But collectively, they are designed to lead their readers to a purchase decision, that is, they sell without selling. The authors examine how content marketers strategically deploy these ecologies of genres.

434 RHETORICA The conclusion of this work is quite substantive. Zali takes up the question of Herodotus' authority as an author as it has been positioned and debated by scholars. He brings in the question of the extent to which Bakhtin's theory of dialogism can inform our understanding of Herotodus and the openness or closedness of the work for the reader. Zali presents and supports the view that Herodotus constructed an open text for readers through the strategic inclusion of Greek and Persian voices in multiple forms. That is, the Histories persistently calls the reader into conversation with historical figures and events. In addition, Zali places his study of the Histories in the context of the recent scholarly trend of interpreting the text metahistorically. Zali sees his treatment of Herodotus as consistent with this interpretive trend and even pushing that trend further in terms of its eluci­ dation of Herodotus' "stance towards current oratorical practices, for his method of writing history, and for how readers are supposed to approach his work" (312). While this is already a lengthy study, the effort would have been stronger had the author better and more fully situated the main study within contemporary and historical studies of Herodotus. More specifi­ cally, given that the author's main claim concerns the significance of Herodotus' Histories in the development of rhetoric in the 5th Century, this work needed to situate the reader within the extensive scholarship of this development which has been generated over the last several decades in the fields of Rhetoric, English, Philosophy, and Communication Studies. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this meticulous and well-presented study of Hero­ dotus and the argument made concerning its role in the development of rhetoric, and I highly recommend it to others. David M. Timmerman Carthage College Bialostosky, Don. Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rheto­ rically. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, LLC, 2016. 191 pp. ISBN 9781602357259 In the centerpiece essay to the collection entitled Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, Mikhail Bakhtin takes upon himself the task of distinguishing between linguistics and metalinguistics. To illuminate this distinction, he argues that linguistics is best exemplified by the sentence, and that metalin­ guistics is best exemplified by the utterance. Bakhtin then proceeds to cata­ logue the differences between these two units of analysis, and it is clear that his interests lie with the latter. In charting out these differences, Bakhtin makes a claim that is particularly germane to the work reviewed here— namely, that while the sentence is endlessly repeatable (because as decontextualized linguistic matter," it neither answers nor addresses anyone), Reviews 435 the utterance, being thoroughly situated in dialogic contexts, can never be repeated. It is in this sense that Don Bialostosky's Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poet­ ics, Dialogics, Rhetoricalitp ought to be regarded—that is, as a gathering of utterances, published at various junctures over the course of a distinguished career by one of the pre-eminent Bakhtin scholars in literary and rhetorical studies. As utterances, these essays are addressed to varied and specific audiences, in diverse scholarly contexts, in response to what others have said and in anticipation of what still others may yet say. If Bakhtin is right, even though all of these utterances (save one) have been previously publis­ hed, each may be considered simultaneously old and new. It is not possible, then, to read or hear these essays in the same way they were received at the time of their original publication, but it is possible to hear them as newly uttered, as saying something different in the context in which they are now reread, or heard again. I want to complicate things a bit more. Instead of looking upon this collection as a gathering of juxtaposed utterances, what if it were to be regarded an utterance in its own right? In fact, the author anticipates this possibility, and indeed, desires that his collection be read this way. At the close of his introduction, Bialostosky says of his earlier essays that they "stand here as a whole utterance re-articulated by my arrangement and re-affirmation of them." It is up to readers, those co-constitutive "outsi­ ders," to bring to them what they will (15). As...

“Cape Wind” is a proposed wind-energy project off the Massachusetts coast. Its environmental effects are detailed in an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Writers of an EIS must address rhetorical challenges posed by the complexity of how the “environment” is characterized by many statutes and regulations. These requirements include guidance on the document’s style, and because the text is hundreds of pages long, they also include rules on its arrangement (its genre), and its online delivery. Partly as a result, the writer’s stance is that of an impersonal, corporate author. The EIS is required to address multiple audiences that include decision makers and elected officials; public participation in the process is encouraged. Evidence about the actual audience shows that the public finds out about the project through media reports, web sites, and press releases, rather than studying the EIS. Finally, sustained opposition by a fossil-fuel lobbying group has led to the project’s apparent demise.

Research suggests that student development as writers requires a supportive environment in which they receive sustained opportunities to write. However, writing researchers in general know relatively little about the actual writing opportunities embedded in students’ language arts lessons and how students’ production of texts in class is framed. The present study analyzes 178 video-recorded language arts lessons across 46 secondary classrooms in Norway based on the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observation. Specifically, we assess how often and in what situations students get an opportunity to engage in writing or are explicitly encouraged to write. We found that some writing assignments are short and fragmented, especially when students are merely recopying information from teachers’ materials. However, our analysis also provides detailed insight into how some teachers facilitate sustained, genre-focused, and process-oriented writing opportunities. These are powerful examples of successful writing instruction, and they suggest that when Norwegian language arts teachers prioritize writing, the opportunities to write are both sustained and scaffolded, the purpose of writing is explicit, and genre-specific assessment criteria are often used.

Introduction: This case study examines the impacts of component content management (CCM) on the ways global technical communication (TC) stakeholders practice multilingual quality. About the case: The case study is based on the results of a 12-month qualitative case study of global technical communication stakeholders at DreamMedi, a Fortune 500 manufacturer of medical devices. Situating the case:Three areas of inquiry informed the study. Academic and trade literature from technical communication and technical translation revealed disagreements and contradictions that surround multilingual quality in CCM environments. Rhetorical genre theory allowed analyzing multilingual quality by distinguishing content components as a new genre, a unit of analysis, and a mediator of global technical communication. Activity theory provided the theoretical foundation for examining a global TC activity system at its nodes and then elucidating the contradictions within these nodes.Methods/approach:The case study was a multiple-method research project that included observations, in-depth interviews, questionnaires, document collection/content analysis, and software exploration. The Institutional Review Board-approved study focused on technical communicators, translators, and bilingual reviewers. Results/discussion: Relying on thick descriptions of the storylines of global TC stakeholders, this paper pinpoints contradictions in how stakeholders understand and approach multilingual quality. These contradictions are rooted in stakeholders' backgrounds and experience, and become more dramatic after the transition to CCM. Conclusions: Global TC stakeholders lacked strategies for negotiating their understandings of and approaches to multilingual quality in the new information development and management paradigm. Developing such strategies is the key prerequisite for effective cross-functional and cross-cultural collaboration in multilingual CCM environments. Technical communicators are well-positioned to take on leadership roles in developing such strategies.

Background: Undergraduate engineering students often receive insufficient support when crafting résumés. Most notably, there is often a lack of disciplinary-specific instruction and a lack of emphasis on the persuasive function of résumés. Ultimately seeking to strengthen instructional materials, this study investigates a way to quantify the quality of engineering résumés, focusing specifically on the use of disciplinary discourse. Research questions: How do engineering résumés exhibit disciplinary discourse? How can disciplinary discourse be quantified as a way of promoting strong engineering résumé writing and professional development skills? Literature review: This project builds on research exploring the qualities of effective résumés. It extends on work establishing disciplinary differences in desired résumé qualities, as well as work characterizing résumé writing as an opportunity for professional identity development. Grounded in activity theory, this project seeks to elucidate the “rules” of effective engineering résumés at the lexical level. Methodology: This project analyzed a corpus of 31 engineering résumés through both qualitative and quantitative means. Résumés were initially ranked via a rubric, then coded for disciplinary discourse according to the American Association of Engineering Societies' Engineering Competency Model. Disciplinary discourse scores were then analyzed through descriptive statistics. Results and conclusion: Significant differences in the use of disciplinary discourse were found among strong, moderate, and weak résumés. Though these results are not generalizable due to the small corpus size, they indicate that disciplinary discourse may be a fruitful area for future research on résumés and the development of pedagogical materials.

Reviews 209 Jamie Dow, Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric (Oxford University Press) Oxford & New York, 2015. 248 pp. ISBN9780198716266 Aristotle s Rhetoric has long posed problems of fit, which makes its uptake particularly revealing of the preoccupations that define a historical moment. Where should the Rhetoric be situated in the Corpus Aristotelicuml Is it primarily a practical work in the handbook tradition, or is it supposed to offer a full-blown theory of rhetoric? Should it be approached as a kind of philosophy, or something else entirely, especially since it devotes so much attention to style and passion? Is it even a coherent text to begin with? In his ambitious book, Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Jamie Dow begins with these basic questions in mind, and he defends a set of interlocking answers that point to the Rhetoric as a serious, philosophical work along the following lines. Aristotle's Rhetoric is primarily a work on argumentation as understood by medieval Arab commentators along with some of our contemporaries including Bumyeat and Allen; it offers a full­ blown theory of rhetoric opposed to the handbook tradition of Gorgias and Thrasymachus; it is coherent in general and in detail, and it legitimates on philosophical grounds the use of passion in rhetoric. Thus, Dow's project also speaks to our historical moment—broadly postwar—when passions in political life became suspect for good reasons. Few will agree with all of the key claims as laid out by Dow or with each of the demonstrations offered. But it is an outstanding virtue of the book that Dow defends each claim with such care that even objections can be sharpened productively. In what follows, I outline the main arguments and what appears to be at stake. The first page offers the basic argument and a sense of the imperatives that make Dow's book bracing. "The principal claim defended in this book is that, for Aristotle in the Rhetoric, arousing the passions of others can amount to giving them proper grounds for conviction, and hence a skill in doing so is properly part of an expertise in rhetoric. This claim rests on two principal foundations. First, it involves defending the attribution to Aristotle of a norma­ tive view of rhetoric, centered around its role in the state, in which rhetoric is a skill producing proper grounds for conviction. If the arousal of the passions is part of rhetoric, thus understood, Aristotle must hold, second, a particular view of the passions: he must think they are representational states, in which the subject takes things to be the way they are represented" (p. 1). First Foundation I: this normative view, according to Dow, contrasts sharply with the merely practical understanding of rhetoric held by his pre­ decessors in the handbook tradition, and it diverges from the Platonic expectation that the orator needs to know the truth about the subject matter. Instead, according to Dow, Aristotle's orator should skillfully grasp plausi­ ble starting points for the listener's deliberations in the form of reputable opinions" (endoxa) related to the subject at hand (pp- 34—5). So how exactly is the rhetor obligated, and why isn't this obligation arbitrary? Here Dow is careful not to invoke some higher ethical principle. The obligation of the 210 RHETORICA rhetor remains immanent to the skill itself, as it becomes manifest in the context of the state organized along participatory lines. That is to say, rhetoric is by virtue of the world in which it appears as such—originally in the lawcourts and in the political assembly (p. 9). Understood at the most basic level, a rhetor should exercise skill precisely where the subject at hand speaks to the commonplaces and reputable opinions anchored in the state thus consti­ tuted. This is an important point that Dow wishes to extend beyond Aristotle per se: rhetorical skill has wide value and it must be measured as such (p. 76). Hence Dow gives us an ethos-proof like this: "they believe the things Pericles has said, because they believe Pericles—he himself is what is pistos" (p. 98). And then more formally this example of a pathos-proof: "1.1 register evidence...

This article explores pedagogical frameworks closely associated with d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing persons from the perspective of a disabled instructor to increase student awareness of the needs of diverse audiences they will encounter in the workforce. The author argues that students and instructors can use captioning theory to strategize one of the harder business communication genres, the presentation, for d/Deaf audiences to make communication more accessible. By raising critical awareness of the limits of technology, current trends in pedagogy, and disability, this article seeks to further the conversation about providing accessibility for disabled users in the classroom.

This article reports on a multimodal podcasting unit conducted during a two-week modified summer bridge program for at-risk incoming first-year students. The examples from student work show how teaching a multimodal genre encourages writers to draw from their prior knowledge of standardized genres learned in high school to effectively transition to college composition.

In two experimental studies, we examined the effects of types of written production mode (hypertext writing versus linear writing, Study 1 and 2) and learning mode (performance versus observational learning, Study 2). Participants in Study 1 (Grade 10) were initiating the more formal academic argumentative text, while in Study 2 students (Grade 11) were familiar with the genre. Dependent variables were students’ content knowledge, self-efficacy for writing and text quality. For the independent variable written production mode both studies did show interaction effects between learning condition and pretest scores. For content knowledge, students with lower prior content knowledge performed best in the hypertext condition; students with higher prior content knowledge in the linear condition. For self-efficacy, linear writing was most effective for students with initial high self-efficacy (Study 2 only). For text quality, students with relatively very strong initial writing skills performed best in the hypertext condition, students with weak initial writing skills in the linear condition (Study 2 only). For the independent variable learning mode for the hypertext text learning activity (performing versus observing), almost no differences in effects could be observed: performing the hypertext learning activities or observing these performances did not make a difference, except to students with relatively low initial topic knowledge: students with low prior knowledge performed better in the performing condition. These complex patterns of interactions between learning conditions and pretest variables are discussed.

The rhetoric of health and medicine has only begun to intervene in health pedagogy. In contrast, the medical humanities has spearheaded curriculum to address dehumanizing trends in medicine. This article argues that rhetorical scholars can align with medical humanities’ initiatives and uniquely contribute to health curriculum. Drawing on the author’s research on clinical simulation, the article discusses rhetorical methodologies, genre theory, and critical lenses as areas for pedagogical collaboration between rhetoricians and health practitioners.

This essay examines the work of Louise Clappe (1819–1906), specifically The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852. Clappe’s Shirley Letters are significant because she uses the epistolary genre in the form of private letters to her sister to reach public audiences, a strategy practiced by few other American pioneer women who have been studied. Furthermore, although her location in the mining camps is extremely limiting in a material and social sense, Clappe creatively details her deprivations to highlight her distinctiveness and ingenuity in adapting to California’s challenging frontier.

Although peer review as a method of writing response has been examined extensively, only limited research exists on peer review at the graduate level. This study examines graduate students’ peer review interactions in a writing workshop in which first- and second-language students from different disciplines were enrolled. The researchers focused on how students engaged with language and disciplinary differences as they peer-reviewed. Data were collected from two separate writing workshop classes over two semesters and included video recordings, observation notes, writing samples, and end-of-semester surveys. The researchers found that some students could provide only limited assistance when working with peers from different fields. The peer review groups’ effectiveness was strained when there were large gaps in academic levels. However, peer review groups were generally productive when students from different language backgrounds worked together. The peer reviews were effective in raising students’ rhetorical awareness and strengthening their understanding of genre conventions. Students showed an openness to language differences, and in their discussions they helped each other navigate the challenges of graduate school. Implications for using peer review in writing interventions for graduate students are discussed.

Although scholars have advocated for new technologies for responding to student work, there has been little study of how commenting style varies across types of technologies. Using a combination of artifact analysis and interviews, this study shows how the comments of five writing instructors varied between hard-copy and iPad-collected papers. Comments were coded for focus and mode based on previous work by Straub and Lunsford (1995). The overall focus, mode, and length of comments remained consistent across types of technology. In addition, the genre of the end comment (Smith, 1997) remained consistent and appeared unaffected by technology use. However, participants made more imperative marginal comments using the iPad. Interviews showed a difference in comfort and tactile experiences with the iPad that may account for this difference. Ultimately, the use of different technologies may affect teachers’ emotions and embodied experiences, which may have a more significant effect on mode of comments than the technology itself. Future studies should further examine the connections between the material use of technology, the emotions of the users, and changes in commenting style.

Background: Current research in composition and writing studies is concerned with issues of writing program evaluation and how writing tasks and their sequences scaffold students toward learning outcomes. These issues are beginning to be addressed by writing analytics research, which can be useful for identifying recurring types of language in writing assignments and how those can inform task design and student outcomes. To address these issues, this study provides a three-step method of sequencing, comparison, and diagnosis to understand how specific writing tasks fit into a classroom sequence as well as compare to larger genres of writing outside of the immediate writing classroom environment. By doing so, we provide writing program administrators with tools for describing what skills students demonstrate in a sequence of writing tasks and diagnosing how these skills match with writing students will do in later contexts. Literature Review: Student writing that responds to classroom assignments can be understood as genres, insofar as they are constructed responses that exist in similar rhetorical situations and perform similar social actions. Previous work in corpus analysis has looked at these genres, which helps us as writing instructors understand what kind of constructed responses are required of students and to make those expectations explicit. Aull (2017) examined a corpus of first-year undergraduate writing assignments in two courses to create “sociocognitive profiles” of these assignments. We analyze student writing that responds to similar writing tasks, but use a different corpus method that allows us to understand the tasks in both local and global contexts. By doing so, we gain confidence and depth in our understanding of these tasks, analyze how they sequence together, and are able to compare argumentative writing across institutions and contexts. Research Questions: Two questions guided our study: What is the trajectory of skills targeted by the sequence of tasks in the two first-year writing courses, as evidenced by the rhetorical strategies employed by the writers in successive assignments? Focusing on the final argument assignments, how similar are they to argumentative writing in other contexts, in terms of rhetorical profiles? Methodology: We first conducted a local analysis, in which we used a dictionary-based corpus method to analyze the rhetorical strategies used by writers in the first-year writing courses to understand how they built on each other to form a sequence. Having understood what skills students are demonstrating in a course, we then conducted a global analysis which calculated a “distance” between the first-year argument writing and a corpus of argument writing drawn from other contexts. Recognizing that there was a non-trivial distance, we then identified and evaluated the sources of the distance so that the writing tasks could be assessed or modified. Results: The local analysis revealed eight key rhetorical strategies that student writing exhibits between the two first-year writing courses. With this understanding, we then placed the argument writing in global contexts to find that the assignments in both courses differ somewhat from argument writing in other contexts. Upon analyzing this difference, we found that the first-year writing primarily differs in its usage of academic language, the personal register, assertive language, and reasoning. We suggest that these differences stem primarily from the rhetorical situation and learning objectives associated with first-year writing, as well as the sequencing of the courses. Discussion: The three-step method presented provides a means for writing program administrators to describe and analyze writing that students produce in their writing programs. We intend these steps to be understood as an iterative process, whereby writing programs can use these results to evaluate what rhetorical skills their students are exhibiting and to benchmark those against the program’s goals and/or other similar writing programs. Conclusions: By presenting these analyses together, we ultimately provide a cohesive method by which to analyze a writing program and benchmark students’ use of rhetorical strategies in relation to other argumentative contexts. We believe this method to be useful not only to individual writing programs, but to assessment literature broadly. In future research, we anticipate learning how this process will practically feed back into pedagogy, as well as understanding what placing writing tasks into a global context can tell us about genre theory.

Aim:  The use of validated measures of writing motivation is imperative to improving our understanding and development of interventions to improve student writing utilizing motivation as a mechanism.  One of the most important malleable factors involved in improving student writing is motivation, particularly for secondary school students.  This research note systematically examines the measures of writing motivation for students in grades 4–12 used by researchers over the last ten years and summarizes their psychometric and measurement properties to the extent provided in the underlying literature. This collection of measures and their properties and features is designed to make researchers more aware of the various options and to point out the need for additional measures. Problem Formation:  Writing is crucial to college and career readiness, but adolescents are inadequately prepared to be proficient writers.  Grades 4–12, once students have generally learned the basics of writing, are when students begin to develop more fluent and sophisticated writing abilities.  They turn from learning to write to writing to learn, and writing is increasingly done across content areas and in multiple genres.  Unfortunately, writing is a difficult skill to master, and students in middle and high school suffer from declining motivation.  The ability to measure changes in writing motivation at this developmental stage will allow researchers to more effectively design and assess writing interventions.  What are the current, validated measures of writing motivation available for researchers working with adolescents?  Motivation research has grown significantly in the last ten years, and a variety of motivation constructs (e.g., self-efficacy, expectancy-value) and related measures are used across the field. In addition to the variety of motivation constructs used in research today, researchers require domain- or context-specific measures of motivation (e.g., science motivation) to enable an accurate understanding of the role of motivation in achievement. Despite increased developments in both motivation and writing research over the past few decades, the intersection of these two fields remains relatively unexplored (Boscolo & Hidi, 2007; Troia, Harbaugh, Shankland, Wolbers, & Lawrence, 2013).Information Collection:  A thorough literature search was done to find measures of writing motivation used for this age group within the last 10 years.  Psychometric properties, to the extent available in the underlying articles, of each measure are described.Conclusions:  Ultimately, seven discrete measures of adolescent writing motivation were found, but only limited psychometric details were available for many of the measures.  No “gold standard” measure was found; indeed, the measures utilized varied motivational constructs and rarely reported more than the Cronbach’s alpha of the underlying instrument. Researchers need to carefully parse through the related motivation literature to understand the most likely constructs to be implicated in their intervention. They need to consider factors specifically related to their study, such as how stable the construct being targeted is developmentally, whether the term and type of intervention will be sufficient to make an impact on the students’ motivation as suggested by the underlying motivational literature, and what the target of the intervention is. Appropriate motivational constructs to be measured will vary depending on the intervention and its anticipated theory of change.Directions for Further Research: Several underlying motivation constructs have been used in the measures described in this review, particularly self-efficacy. However, a number of important motivation constructs, such as interest and self-determination theory, were not captured by the measures found.  This review of currently available measures will give researchers options when wanting to include validated measures of writing motivation in their studies and suggests that additional, validated measures are needed to adequately cover the relevant motivational constructs.

When community literacy partners work to gether with academic organizers, both groups recognize the uncertainties of risk, the importance of trust, and the necessity of clear communication in accomplishing their goals.Likewise, professors who use service learning must help their students negotiate experiences that are often unpredictable or uncomfortable.In both scenarios, conversations that spark reflection, untangle problems, and guide action are vital.These objectives, and their reliance on open, guided conversation, are central to a new offering by mother-daughter team Nel Noddings and Laurie Brooks: Teaching Controversial Issues: The Case for Critical Thinking and Moral Commitment in the Classroom.In this book, Noddings, an emerita Professor of Education at Stanford and prominent contributor to feminist care theory, and Brooks, a member of the board of Provident Financial Services and advisory boards for North Carolina State and Rutgers universities, point out that teachers today must help students cultivate critical awareness while navigating a minefield of highly controversial issues such as authority and obedience, religion, race, gender, and socioeconomic class.While Noddings and Brooks intend to target K-12 teachers, administrators, and parents, many community literacy scholars and practitioners will appreciate the ideas the authors suggest that enable their readers to more thoughtfully create room for co-inquiry, conversation, and examining resources across different disciplines and perspectives.Noddings and Brooks' core purpose with this text lies in their dedication to helping students "prepare for active life in a participatory democracy" (2).To achieve this, they insist that adults not shy away from joining forces with students to examine complex and challenging questions.The authors advocate for critical thinking bolstered and emboldened by moral commitment, which, in their words, is "to bring people together-to help them understand each other in the fullness of their humanity" (159).Noddings and Brooks approach this task from an interdisciplinary lens, one that enables them to reach across and through traditional divisions among disciplines, genres, and media.This text provides specific suggestions for educators

Multimajor professional writing courses are becoming extremely common in English departments, which presents specific challenges for curricular design because of the diversity of the majors and professional goals of students. This article describes the theoretical, programmatic, and curricular details of a multimajor professional writing course. We argue that the design of a course that places a central focus on writing theory and writing knowledge can encourage learning transfer. Such an approach helps to overcome the challenges of a multimajor course by allowing the study of a common subject among students hoping to enter a number of different professions after college. Our design leans heavily on concrete knowledge domains—genre knowledge, social knowledge, procedural knowledge—and their application to specific disciplinary or professional contexts. The article’s discussion of course assignments and contexts demonstrates how these domains are applied and provides detailed information on our experiences teaching the course.

Although various types of documents are called white papers, in technical marketing communication the white paper is usually a document that describes a new or improved technology in order to generate interest in—and promote sales of—that technology. Most sources discussing the history of the white paper assume that marketing white papers evolved from government white papers. They conflate genre history with etymology. At some point in the mid-20th century, the term white paper—denoting a type of government policy document—began being applied to other types of documents, including eventually a particular form of technical marketing communication. This article proposes a revised history of the marketing white paper as a genre. By examining the formal features and characteristic substance of white papers through the lens of their pragmatic value as social action, we show that the marketing white paper of today has much in common with documents from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

The letter of recommendation (LOR) plays a significant role in the application process for many professional positions, offering descriptive rather than quantitative information from a third party about an individual’s potential fit within the hiring organization. Such letters, however, increasingly appear online, emphasizing existing problems within the genre and creating others involving trust, reliability, and confidentiality. Typically, the response has been that such digitization of the LOR minimizes its significance or standardizes it. This article analyzes the digital LOR genre as an exemplar of epideictic rhetoric situated within a Perelmanian framework and demonstrates how the digital LOR operates rhetorically, enhancing the adherence between candidate, writer, audience, and institutional values and providing a means of evaluating candidate fit. The article also offers a rhetorical heuristic that captures how audiences can more fruitfully read the epideictic, digital LOR, thereby demonstrating how to optimize the digital platform’s benefits and still use the LOR to its best rhetorical advantage.

This report details the second phase of an ongoing research project investigating the visual invention and composition processes of scientific researchers. In this phase, four academic researchers completed think-aloud protocols as they composed graphics for research presentations; they also answered follow-up questions about their visual education, pedagogy, genres of practice, and interactions with publics. Results are presented first as narratives and then as topologies—visualizations of the communal beliefs, values, and norms ( topoi) that connect the individual narratives to wider community practices. Results point toward an ecological model of visual invention and composition strategies in the crafting of research graphics. They also suggest that these strategies may be underrepresented in scientists’ education. More explicit attention to them may help improve STEM visual literacy for nonexperts.

This webtext explores the educational and social potential of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) by describing and analyzing the design, curriculum, and objectives of an ARG entitled S.E.E.D. This webtext uses some of the transmedia assets that made the game itself possible, as well as video documentation of the game, to provide an account of this genre and its affordances.

If the two of you are sitting there together, your reading silently squanders the interaction time on something that is very one-sided. If you respond to the text as a reader, as you proceed, the writer can get a better sense of what happens for a reader as the text unfolds. When you read aloud, the student can hear how the writing will sound to someone else (1-2). --William J. Macauley,“Paying Attention to Learning Styles in Writing Center Epistemology, Tutor Training, and Writing Tutorials.” [W]hile tutors had been trained to consider and discuss the intersections among audience, genre, and discipline with their students, their working understanding of the role of audience in this relationship seemed to operate on a global level with only fleeting or intuitive (and therefore inaccessible) considerations at the local level. Thus, while tutors had a conceptual understanding of readerly dynamics. . . they had less practice articulating the impact that discrete elements of a text have on a reader (14). --Amanda M. Greenwell, “Rhetorical Reading Guides, Readerly Experiences, and WID in the Writing Center.”

My article reports on an annual series of workshops I launched as director of my writing center. This ongoing initiative, titled Workshops on Real World Writing Genres, aims to introduce undergraduates to genres they will practice in their prospective careers. It is part of a larger effort at the University of Toronto to support students as they think ahead to life beyond their degrees. Drawing on material from workshops covering print journalism, law, public policy, medicine, and fiction, the article reflects on how well our theoretical presuppositions about genre help us prepare students to apply in their professional lives those critical thinking skills we seek to foster in our teaching. By regarding all knowledge as socially situated, contemporary genre theory has raised doubts about the capacity of our students to transfer even knowledge from one context to another. Insofar as genre theorists focus on the social creation of meaning, their account of genre, like their account of knowledge, must, I argue, remain incomplete. An exclusive focus on writing as social practice reflects a problematic division of labor in the academy between the sciences on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other. The notion of writing as radically situated has always posed a problem for writing centers, since we do not typically find ourselves situated in the same communities of practice as our students. The recent interest in transfer in writing center scholarship reflects a promising shift towards a vision of the disciplines as interconnected.

This essay presents two case studies of assignments that are redesigned into genre-based writing prompts. The authors describe institutional and programmatic changes including the elimination of all non-credit bearing basic writing courses in favor of an ALP model and explain how these changes, coupled with an increasing focus on adult learners at our university, create an exigence for the work detailed in the case studies. They ground their discussion in scholarship focused on Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) and multi-genre assignment design. While the authors ultimately believe that the redesigned assignments presented in case studies are applicable and appealing to many students, they draw from principles of the andragogical model to make an argument for why genre-based assignments are especially relevant to and useful for adult learners who are basic writers.

Genre has emerged as a central concept in writing studies, with numerous scholars advocating for its prominent role in writing instruction. Despite this interest in genre, however, research has not explored teachers’ understanding of the concept, which is critical to how they address genre in their classrooms. This study traces the evolving conceptions of genre among thirty-three new first-year writing teachers, examining their understandings--and, occasionally, tensions--at different points in time as they encounter the concept in their teacher preparation and with their own students. Through written reflections and focus group interviews, we identify key patterns in how the teachers define genre over time and some of the influences on those dynamic conceptions. Findings from this research have implications for teacher preparation and curriculum development in the context of U.S. college composition.

The following is a side-by-side review of two recent additions to the growing “Keywords” genre: Keywords for Disability Studies and Keywords in Writing Studies. Often considered a niche issue, or, in the classroom, solely the concern of specialists, what Keywords for Disability Studies does is reveal the tacit norms behind (dis)ability that inflect all bodies and minds with meaning. Keywords texts offer a number of entry points into their respective fields, and, because of their formal structure, challenge readers and teachers to devise their own pathways through the text. Reading Keywords for Disability Studies alongside Keywords in Writing Studies reveals opportunities for all composition scholars and teachers of writing to both apply an awareness of (dis)ability norms in the field and the classroom and map productive intersections between the two fields of study.

This article offers the term “accommodation transfer” as a way to understand the rhetorical skills disabled students transfer alongside writing knowledge as they access college writing assignments and writing classrooms. This study is based on five qualitative interviews with disabled college students and draws upon both writing transfer research and disability studies. The author explores how participants adapted writing process knowledge and learned how to negotiate their accommodation needs with instructors across their academic careers. Specifically, these negotiations include assessing instructors’ stances towards disability and testing effective genres and vocabulary to communicate about disability with instructors. The article concludes with two suggestions for cripping teaching for transfer: embracing and teaching crip time for writing, and highlighting the relationship between mentorship and interdependence.

If the aim of argumentation is that of increasing acceptance of the orator’s thesis (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 49), then the ultimate goal of counsel, a widespread argumentative practice within the genres of discourse as well as literature, is indeed persuasion. The subject of this essay—that is, the rhetoric of counsel—allows us to observe the interpretative richness of this element of the “new rhetoric” through examples offered by Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, Lucrezia Borgia and Niccolò Machiavelli, straddling the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, bridging the fi elds of literature and history.

This article responds to the proliferation of fake news in today’s media by considering how a rhetorical theory and pedagogy more deeply grounded in a rethinking of vulnerability might help us as rhetoricians and writing scholars to address fake news as more than just dis-informative rhetoric. In the first part, I bring together scholarship from within and outside of rhetoric and writing studies in order to frame vulnerability as a fundamental component of all rhetorical encounters. In the second part, I propose the use of trolling rhetoric as an object of analysis that may help students better understand how deceptive and disruptive genres of discourse (including, but not limited to, fake news) may, in the process of trying to exploit our rhetorical vulnerability, actually call attention to this crucial aspect of rhetorical encounters.

Background: In policy and law contexts, plain-language practice and research tend to focus on the benefits of plain language for specific nonexpert or public audiences. However, as plain-language use has proliferated, documents targeted for revision increasingly include those with insider and expert primary audiences. This study investigates the effects of plain-language revision on insider audiences following the adoption of a revised city charter in a Midwestern US city. Research questions: 1. How does plain-language revision affect the way that insider city-government users make sense of the city charter? 2. How does plain-language revision affect the way that insider city-government users act on the city charter? Literature review: Plain language-a strategy that writers use to make texts more effective for users-is historically and ideologically associated with helping public or vulnerable audiences to access complex information. This core priority toward public or nonexpert audiences is important; however, it has also resulted in a limited understanding of the full scope of plain-language audiences, especially in contexts where insider and expert audiences are primary users. Methodology: This study, informed by genre theory, is a qualitative case study in which textual artifacts and interview data were collected and analyzed using a two-cycle qualitative coding process. Results: The analysis showed many effects, nearly all positive, for insiders and experts. Conclusions: This article focuses on two areas of impact: charter authority and user practices. I explore these areas, which include improved navigation, organization, and processes, through the concept of interplay between the unrevised and revised charters.

Reviews Cristina Pepe, The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity. International Studies in the History of Rhetoric 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. xviii + 618 pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-24984-4 When I review a book that is of high quality, I like to read it twice before submitting the review. That does not excuse the inordinate length of time it has taken me to review Cristina Pepe's Genres of Rhetorical Speeches, for which I apologise to the author, but it immediately indicates my admiration for the book. I shall outline its contents, before making a few observations, all of which are offered in a constructive spirit. The book consists (suitably, given its theme) of three parts, followed by an extensive list of Testimonia, an Appendix, Bibliography, Index of Greek and Latin Terms, Index Locorum, and a General Index. Part One covers the fifth and fourth centuries, opening with an overview of the contexts of speechmaking in Greece and, of course, in particular Athens. Separate chapters address the practice of the Sophists (with an inevitable focus on Gorgias and the Helen, supplemented by observations on the ori­ gins of the praise speech); Thucydides (deliberative oratory, with an anal­ ysis of the Mytilenean Debate in Book 3); Plato (analyses of the Gorgias, Phaedrus and Sophist, and of Plato's conception of advice and praise); Isocrates (in particular how he defines his logoi); Demosthenes (his distinc­ tion between deliberative and judicial); and, in greater detail, the Rhetoric to Alexander (with a discussion of genres and species, and of the connected and complex ascription of the treatise to Anaximenes, without committing herself either way). Part Two is of roughly the same length as Part One, but focuses on one author only: Aristotle. Rhetorical development, including in the Rhetorica ad Alexandrian, all led to the Rhetoric, which for Pepe was Greek rhetoric's 'crowning theoretical achievement' (p. 123; I note that this repeats the earlier judgment of Laurent Pernot in the English translation of his Rhetoric in Antiquity, 'the crowning achievement of rhetorical theory in Classical Greece', p. 41), though the dates of composition of the Rhetoric to Alexander and the Rhetoric were not necessarily linear. Most will not quib­ ble with Pepe's concentration on the Rhetoric, even if we need to bear in mind Pernot's assessment that 'this treatise full of novel views was rela­ tively little read in antiquity' (Rhetoric in Antiquity p. 44). Pepe examines Rhetorica, Vol. XXXV, Issue 1, pp. 110-120. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541.© 2017 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: / /www.ucpress. edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.L110. Reviews 111 the system of genres in the Rhetoric in minute and instructive detail, pay­ ing a great deal of attention to epideictic, which Rhetoric scholars agree Aristotle introduced 'as a genre in its own right' (p. 144), but also indicat­ ing the 'aspects of originality with respect to tradition' of his treatment of the deliberative genre (p. 159). Very helpful chapters on the different topics that are used in the three genres (Chapter Twelve), and on the style and arrangement of the genres (Chapter Thirteen), precede a final chapter in this Part on the relatively little-studied treatise, the Divisiones Aristoteleae. Part Three takes us through the Hellenistic period and into Rome (the title Rhetorical Genres in the Hellenistic and Imperial Ages' perhaps does not do full justice to the material on the Roman Republican period). This might be thought the least satisfying of the three parts, not because of any lack of knowledge, hut simply because it covers, inevitably in less detail, such a wide range of material, in Greek and Tatin, from Hellenistic theory to the proyyninasmata and declamation (Chapter Twenty). There is thus no individual chapter on Cicero or Quintilian, rather an approach that looks at topics from a combined Greek and Roman angle, such as the vocabulary used for each of the three genres...

112 RHETORICA 55-70); and it is misleading to state (p. 244) that the Roman Senate was made up of 'the heads of the leading patrician families and ex-magistrates' (patrician exclusivity only applies to the regal and early Republican period, while serving magistrates were also members). I attribute the erroneous dat­ ing of PHib 26 'to the 3rd century AD' to a simple typographical error, as the following '(ca 285-250 BC)' shows. The English translator, along with the readers noted in the Acknowledgements, is to be congratulated on produc­ ing a flowing text, though occasional extraneous use of the definite article remains (e.g. the title of 11.5 does not need 'The' at the start, nor does 'stasis theory' on p. 347 require a preceding article) and there are some other infe­ licities ('Trials were indicted by a magistrate', p. 246; 'How do the Greeks call this?', p. 486; use of 'we' instead of 'I', as 'We prefer', p. 396). Finally, some might wonder about the absence of a discussion of the situation pre­ fifth century. This is a remarkable first book. I would expect a scholar whose PhD was supervised by Luigi Spina to be of the first rank, and Cristina Pepe cer­ tainly is that. The book is the fifth in the ISHR series of International Studies in the History of Rhetoric edited by Laurent Pernot and Craig Kallendorf. Since this review is by the current (as I write) President of ISHR for ISHR's journal Rhetorica, there might seem to be a risk of nepotism. I would counter that no reviewer could do full justice to a book of this size and cov­ erage, with its meticulous philological and rhetorical scholarship. In my opinion it is eminently worthy both of the series and of the Society, and it will, I am sure, remain a key textbook in the study of classical rhetorical genres for many years to come. Mike Edwards, University of Roehampton, London Jacques-Emmanuel Bernard, La sociabilité épistolaire chez Cicéron, Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013. 641 pp. ISBN 978-2-7453-2591-4 Bien qu'immense, la bibliographie cicéronienne a donné lieu à peu de monographies portant spécifiquement sur les lettres de Cicéron (p. 14). Certains se sont intéressés à la correspondance comme source d'informa­ tion sur l'histoire et la civilisation romaines (Deniaux, 1993; Ioannatou, 2006) ou sur la personnalité de Cicéron et son environnement sociocultu­ rel (Boissier, 1865; Carcopino, 1947), d'autres comme support pour l'étude de la langue, de la grammaire et du style cicéroniens (Bomecque, 1898; Monsuez, 1949) (p. 14-7), ou pour s'interroger sur le statut littéraire de la lettre, ses spécificités structurelles et ses aspects textuels et rhétoriques (Wistrand, 1979; Hutchinson, 1998) (p. 18). D'autres enfin ont pris en considération les règles sociales qui déterminent les relations entre Cicéron et d'autres hom­ mes politiques romains, relations sur lesquelles se fonde sa correspondance (Hall, 2009; White, 2010) (p. 19—20). C'est dans ce cadre bibliographique que Reviews 113 Jacques-Emmanuel Bernard situe son objectif: prendre la pratique épistolaire comme objet d'étude en soi en étudiant de manière plus systématique la correspondance cicéronienne comme un tout, pour montrer comment elle s organise à la fois comme pratique sociale et pratique discursive. D'où le titre même du livre: Lu sociabilité épistolaire chez Cicéron (p. 20). Pour ce faire, il se sert des concepts et de la terminologie de la rhétorique antique (p. 23), en s'intéressant particulièrement à la doctrine du décorum (« convenable »), afin d'analyser selon quels principes élémentaires Cicéron dans ses lettres adapte son langage aux données sociales qui déterminent sa relation avec chaque cor­ respondant (p. 25; voir p. 25-7). La rhétorique est donc au cœur de l'étude de J.-E. Bernard, qui s'oppose ainsi à une partie très importante des études cicéroniennes - pour lesquelles les lettres sont le lieu de l'intimité et de la spontanéité -, et met en lumière les contraintes sociales et les...

The implementation of genre theory in the business communication classroom could lead to the cultivation of critical thinking skills in students. The lack of a common definition of critical thinking skills across academia and the workplace creates a difficult end goal to pursue; therefore, teachers should consider explicitly teaching to the outcome, or telos , of critical thinking through genre. This article examines a small corner of genre theory, identifies a genre theory framework for business communication, and discusses the implications of such a framework.

This article addresses the challenge of writing instruction in a standards-based environment where students are accountable for mastering different genres and text types. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), now adopted by the majority of states in the USA, provide exemplars of successful papers in the different disciplines, but offer no guidelines for teaching, particularly to inexperienced writers or English language learners. Since a text in any genre can be developed in a limitless variety of ways, students need a methodology for analyzing effective texts, and for developing their own. This article proposes that focusing on grammatical choice offers an entry point into understanding the craft of Explanations and Arguments. To illustrate, four samples of high school writing are analyzed from the published CCSS exemplars: two Explanations and two Arguments, all with very different purposes and development. The analysis demonstrates the central role that grammar plays in constructing these differences. Specifically, the analysis focuses on information management across noun groups for the Explanations, and on verb choice and modality for the Arguments. Drawing on functional grammar insights, this article proposes a pathway for students from the analysis of model texts to the effective construction of their own.

Humanities departments across European universities have established an increasing number of interdisciplinary, international master’s programmes that culminate in thesis projects. Yet, the challenges of such interdisciplinary research-based writing have been largely neglected in EAP research. This article investigates how postgraduate students in interdisciplinary fields express and develop genre knowledge during an EAP course for Humanities students preparing for their thesis writing. In two case studies, the article qualitatively explores students’ perspectives on their writing along the related dimensions of disciplinary positioning and genre knowledge. Students’ explicit expressions of such knowledge in course tasks and interviews are analysed. In addition, students’ research-based writing is compared to trace manifestations of this knowledge. The results highlight the students’ use of individual reference points to evaluate writing within their heterogeneous research fields. In terms of their research-based writing, the cases illustrate two related trajectories, namely, the development from writer to topic focus and the combination of themes into a coherent argument. Tracing the textual developments reveals the significance of mapping interdisciplinary studies on the interrelated epistemological, thematic and discoursal levels in postgraduate writing. Developing an awareness of these levels requires an understanding of the situatedness of postgraduates’ writing in interdisciplinary, departmental and biographical contexts.

ABSTRACT This article addresses the contentious philosophical claim that rhetoric is merely a “philosophy without tears.” Mindful of the institutional and disciplinary stakes of this claim today, it offers a genealogy of “philosophy without tears” across the past century, from the popular “no more tears” genre to midcentury debates between ordinary language philosophers and logical atomists. What emerges is an ethical argument concerning the materiality and transitivity of language, fleshed out through a rhetoric of tears and as an ontology of pain and suffering. Drawing on a rhetorical reading of Wittgenstein's “form-of-life,” I argue that both pain and its expression should be understood as transitive rather than as epistemological or private phenomena. Transitivity helps us to better understand the perlocutionary power of pain and suffering in the politics of war and terrorism, in the “man-philosopher,” who disavows such transitivity, and, finally, in the necessary risk of responsibility toward the “other” of philosophy (and of rhetoric).

Professional knowledge production through involvement in research/writing activities is a valued dimension of the work of university-based teacher educators. However, little attention has been given to how teacher-education doctoral students (predominantly former schoolteachers) become education-research writers as part of their professional development as university-based teacher educators. In this article, I examine 11 former elementary and secondary teachers’ professional identity work as writers, scholars, and researchers during their teacher-education doctoral studies. All 11 specialized in language, literacy, and/or literature education. I focus my analysis on their (dis)identifications with the terms writer, scholar, and researcher in stream-of-consciousness quick-writes that they produced at regular intervals throughout their semesters of participation in five extracurricular peer writing groups that I facilitated. To contextualize these writings, I also draw on observations that I made during five years of ethnographic fieldwork for my longitudinal study. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the 10 women respondents tended to recount a similar genre of (dis)identification narrative, one in which they disavowed their own authority as writers, scholars, and/or researchers, excluding available evidence to the contrary. I argue that the women’s teacher-education doctoral program, which maintained researcher/teacher, faculty/teacher, and faculty/student hierarchies, may have resonated in particular with these former schoolteachers’ previous experiences of sociocultural marginalization as women, and may thus have contributed to the emergence of their (dis)identification-narrative genre. To enhance the professional development of teacher-education doctoral students and faculty alike, I offer suggestions for how faculty might facilitate doctoral students’ writing groups while positioning/figuring themselves as group members’ colleagues.