own right. Fitzgerald argues that we should pursue

In 2004, the University of Kansas (KU) launched an interdisciplinary Graduate Writing Program as part of a larger initiative to reduce time to degree rates and increase degree completion rates. Serving both domestic and international students, this program employs a rhetorical genre-based approach in a series of courses organized around the genres of graduate school and beyond. In these Graduate Studies courses, students become ethnographers of the research and writing practices of their disciplines while writing their own texts and developing their professional identities. In addition, the Graduate Writing Program fields a Summer Writing Institute and offers workshops for students. The program supports departments and faculty members through consultations and workshops on such topics as how to mentor graduate writing. This profile—part program description, part theoretical construct—outlines the history and structure of the program as well as the academic and cultural challenges that graduate students and their mentors face. It argues that rhetorical genre studies is ideally suited for teaching graduate writing and supporting students as they create their professional identities.

This program profile describes how a writing center embedded within a major school of business negotiates its unique positionality. Tracing both the successes and shortcomings of a writing initiative tasked with improving the school’s quality of writing, the profile offers a number of insights on both WAC and writing center work, including how to enact curricular change, encourage faculty to incorporate writing into their classes, maintain programmatic continuity with frequent turnover of graduate student administrators, and consult effectively with undergraduate students. Several sites of analysis are addressed, as the initiative seeks to remain committed to its mission while encountering various challenges.

Even as globalization has transformed communication into a multicultural experience, composition programs in American academia continue to promote a prescriptive approach to language(Katz, Scott, & Hadjioannou, 2009; Richardson, 2003), encouraging students to incorrectly assume that “there is only one right way to use written language” (Lovejoy, 2003, p. 92). Thisapproach can foster biased attitudes among our students while leaving them unprepared for interaction with linguistically diverse populations and users of World Englishes (WEs) in particular.Composition courses should prepare students for multicultural communication by increasing their awareness of WEs and developing the skills they need to interact with their WE peers atschool, in the workplace, and in their home communities. This study looks at the impact such an approach can have on American students’ perception of World Englishes, generally, and WEtexts, specifically. Interviews, surveys, and essays were used to explore the language attitudes of American college students before and after they participated in several activities meant to developtheir knowledge of linguistic diversity and to familiarize them with World Englishes. The research provided encouraging signs of a possible correlation between increased knowledge about linguisticdiversity and positive language attitudes.

Higher education researchers have called for systemic changes in graduate education, their concerns fueled in part by poor attrition and completion rates and dismal academic job markets.Many have recommended that universities provide writing support for doctoral students at the dissertation stage. Writing researchers have an opportunity to inform these discussions. However,more research is needed to understand how graduate students’ experiences with research writing differ across disciplines and how they experience responses to their research writing from advisors, graduate peers, and journal reviewers. This study utilizes systems theory to examine one nonnative English–speaking student writing for publication as part of an environmental sciencesdoctoral program. Data consist of field interviews, semi-structured and text-based interviews with students and program faculty, and side-by-side comparison of textual revisions. Theresults describe ways traditional notions of dissertations as individual research conflicted with collaborative writing processes in the sciences and affected how the student received responses tohis writing. Additionally, this study examines the “information flow” of feedback, identifying instances in which the student was isolated from possible feedback sources and difficulties thestudent encountered in adapting past feedback to complete novel tasks. This study points to key ways writing researchers can inform current efforts to restructure doctoral research through further systems-based explorations into students’ writing experiences and models of program design that better leverage potential sources of feedback.

Youth perspectives are routinely absent from research and policy initiatives. This article presents a project that infuses youth participation, training and mentorship into the research process and teaches youth how to become policy advocates. Empower Latino Youth (ELAYO) studies the individual and systemic factors impacting sexuality and childbearing among Latino youth and seeks to reduce negative stereotypes and elevate the social standing of Latino youth. As a team-in-training, ELAYO provides adolescents, undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to develop research skills while learning the importance of linking science to policy. This paper was developed in collaboration with Latino youth.

This article presents the authors’ innovative approach to the challenges of teaching students in a large lecture survey course to perform effective close readings, and sets forth a rigorous qualitative assessment of students’ learning. It describes a combination of teaching strategies integrated to encourage students’ skills acquisition as well as content mastery, and to make the course writing intensive without also being grading intensive. It demonstrates the effectiveness of these strategies by analyzing evidence of student learning. The authors advocate for an instructional model that gives students ample opportunity for active learning and for practicing close reading skills. The authors conclude with a brief coda calling for more scholarship and reflection on faculty-graduate student collaboration in both scholarship and teaching.

Reviewed are: Postcomposition Sidney I. Dobrin The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies Donna Strickland What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors

Unlike the others in this collection of articles, I was Don Ochs' classmate for three years. When taking classes in classical rhetorical theory or practice, he tended to share instructional tasks with the professor-ofrecord. His classical education was exemplary. He had drunk deeply of the Greco-Roman brew. He was a man whom you could ask, "So what are you doing at 2:34 p.m. tomorrow?" and get a precise reply-the most totally organized doctoral student I've ever met (so unlike the rest of us).

Last semester I gave a talk to a small group of graduate students and faculty in the Department of Animal and Food Sciences in the College of Agriculture on my campus. As one of several invited speakers for the department's graduate seminar series, the purpose, I was told, was straightforward: model an effective presentation for the students. I teach courses in technical and professional communication so I imagined it might also be useful to discuss presentation strategies. I concluded by giving an overview of my own research interests---broadly, visual communication---and briefly described a project I am working on related to scientific graphics and historic public health maps.

This article seeks to formulate translator profiles based on process data from keylogging and eye-tracking, while at the same time identifying features which are shared by all translators in a sample consisting of both students and professionals. Data have been collected from 12 professional translators and 12 graduate students translating three texts of varying complexity. We found that individual behavioural characteristics with respect to initial orientation in the source text (ST), online ST reading, and online and end revision remained relatively constant across texts of varying complexity, supporting our hypothesis that translator profiles can be observed which are independent of the difficulty of the translation task. The analysis of the data also indicated that translators could be grouped into broad categories of locally-oriented and globally-oriented translation styles, which are partly, though not entirely, comparable to styles known from writing research. We also identified shared features with respect to reading and revision behaviour during drafting. Common to all translators was that they looked beyond the source text word they were about to translate, and that they made revisions while drafting the translation.

Battle Linesoffers a compelling game experience that allows student-players to develop rhetorical, community-building, and digital literacies, crossing boundaries between academic and ludic practices. The game was test-run for the first time in a class of undergraduate students at UT Austin over the course of four weeks early in the spring semester of 2012.

of New Mexico hosted the inaugural Summit of the National Consortium of Writing Across Communities (NCWAC) in nearby Santa Fe. In attendance were twenty-four established and emerging scholars and graduate students working in (and across) fields such as community literacy, writing program administration, writing across the curriculum, and second-language writing.

This article reports the results of a qualitative study on the joint publication of research articles by a group of supervisors and graduate students in an Iranian university. The results indicate that the ministry-regulated incentive system for publication had increased the research output of the participants. It argues that material and credentialing incentives for supervisors can be regarded as symbolic violence in the exercise of disciplinary power, which required that the participants form local communities of practice and interconnect with international journal reviewers to get their articles published.

Reviews 223 original ceremony nt Sancta Maria ad Martyres from language that reflects the architecture of the building, the movements of the presiding Pope (Boni­ face IV), the clergy, and the dramatization of God s voice in the words of the chant. Mary Carruthers and the contributors to this volume have produced an extraordinary collection of essays, rich and complex with thematic intercon­ nections and many avenues for further exploration. The overall arrangement illustrates ductus in invention, arrangement, and figurative motifs in the art of rhetoric across disciplinary lines, including composition, oratory, art, archi­ tecture, music, and liturgical performance. Many of the essays also include excellent visual illustrations. The editing is careful, though one system for translations, provided in the text of some essays and in the endnotes of others, would aid consistency. Nevertheless, readers will find Carruthers7 collection a remarkable resource not only for historical and textual studies, but also for insights into medieval culture, worship, and performance through the art of rhetoric. Elza C. Tiner Lynchburg College Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Text and Context 2), Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. xlii + 367 pp. ISBN 9780814211090. Making a well-timed appearance close to the publications of both Copeland and Sluiter's Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Peter Mack's A History of Renaissance Rhetoric (Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2011), Marjorie Curry Woods' new book helps us to imagine what took place in medieval and renaissance classes on the trivium. As her title suggests, Woods concentrates on commentaries written from the thir­ teenth through the seventeenth centuries on Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova, a popular Latin poem extant in over two hundred manuscripts that taught students how to write poetry and prose. By "commentaries," Woods means an assortment of instructive materials from interlinear and marginal manuscript glosses to freestanding explanations, from anonymous interpre­ tations, such as the Early Commentary that Woods previously edited and translated (New York: Garland, 1985), to the works of well-known intellec­ tuals teaching in documentable circumstances. Woods inquires insightfully into what these commentaries meant for teaching grammar and rhetoric in western as well as central Europe, in elementary courses as well as in universities. The scope of this book is therefore daunting, but Woods deftly chooses particular commentaries and teachers that best exemplify the Poetria nova s 224 RHETORICA use. For instance, chapter 3 details Pace of Ferrara's humanist elaboration placing the Poetria nova amidst classical authorities and literatures, while chapter 4 emphasizes Dybinus of Prague's Aristotelian rhetorical interpreta­ tion. As Woods elucidates, such differing constructions show how variously the Poetria nova might function within European curricula: for Pace as an aid to intermediate students in construing literature, for Dybinus as a text for university students analyzing various models of rhetoric, and for others as a guide to dictamen or sermon composition. A reader can learn a substantial amount about intellectual history and educational scenarios from Woods. Such learning is possible because Woods writes in lucid, well-organized prose that appeals to both specialists and those interested more generally in the history of rhetoric and education. For the latter audience, her Preface clearly defines terms such as "accessus" and "lemmata" that will recur in describing the commentaries (xxxviii-xxxix). Further, she opens the book with fifteen plates illustrating the diversity of the commentaries and pro­ viding exempla for later chapters. Nine of these plates include the famous opening phrase of the Poetria nova ("Papa stupor mundi," or in English trans­ lation, "Holy Father, wonder of the world") that becomes the subject of so many speculations about Geoffrey's audience and purpose. Along with the manuscript illustrations, Woods provides copious translations of transcrip­ tions from commentaries. Sometimes the interjection of these visual aids can overwhelm Woods' discussion, for instance in the layout of versions of the Dybinus commentary (190- 208), but Woods' intention is to be generous with manuscript materials over which she has labored long, and indeed many readers would be challenged to assess the divergent points in the commentaries without these explicit side-by-side comparisons. Woods' presentation of manuscript transcriptions also offers doctoral students...

A s I write this response, the end of the term is nearing, and with it, the end of my weekly meetings with a diverse group of graduate students (literature program, writing program, school of education, composition program) enrolled in my "Literacy and Pedagogy" seminar.The issues raised by this symposium's contributors resonate and echo back with the seminar's term-long collective investigation, so it is from within this context and through the concerns these graduate students have articulated throughout the term that I want to join the conversation.But first a few words about the seminar itself, the historical, theoretical, and ideological scrutiny of literacy and pedagogy it calls for, the reflexive inquiry it incites, and the contributions this kind of inquiry can make to a discussion of "the implications of Literacy Studies research, theory, and practice for Composition Studies" (LiCS Mission Statement).I started teaching this seminar in the late 1980s.What I had initially proposed was a seminar in histories, theories and practices of pedagogy (which eventually, led to my articulation of "pedagogy as reflexive praxis" (Salvatori 4).The intellectual atmosphere of my department at the time was beginning to be hospitable to the idea that advanced graduate students from our different programs, with their different teaching experiences and theoretical backgrounds, could benefit from such a course of study.But, it was suggested, it might be strategic for me to combine "pedagogy" with "literacy, " since as the subject of a graduate seminar, literacy would carry greater intellectual weight than pedagogy, and attract more students (and, I sensed, raise fewer faculty eyebrows).Needless to say, I was taken aback by the suggestion, but because I was equally invested in the study of theories of literacy, I complied and decided to foreground in my course proposal what would have been in any case two of my planned lines of critical inquiry: what kinds of literacy different theories of reading and writing, and their pedagogical enactments, assume and can presume to foster (Cultural Literacy was earning large numbers of academic and non-academic acolytes); and what can a critical and reflexive study of pedagogy contribute to and draw from the study of literacy.The "and" in the title became and has since remained the central focus of the seminar's theoretical investigations, a nexus that through the years, because of different texts and different students, has consistently disclosed new and exciting "matters of concern" (Latour) for graduate students who are about to make crucial decisions about their professional future.Since the very first time, the diversity of students' backgrounds and interests led to more expansive and inclusive articulations of the seminar's original keywords and concepts (Glascott), and consequently of the seminar's affordances (Vieira).Even before we read Street, the use of the singular for literacy and pedagogy in the original title soon felt inaccurate, constrictive, but for bureaucratic reasons, it could not be changed.Thus "the singular" remained.But it consistently occasioned early

In this article, the author explains the habits that she brought to teaching English from the field of second-language acquisition. She began teaching in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where graduate teaching assistants were trained to use the communicative language teaching method, especially as it is developed by Lee and VanPatten in Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen (1995). When the author switched to teaching world literature survey courses in the Department of English at North Carolina State University, she found that many of the techniques she had used in beginner language courses applied beautifully to what she was trying to do in her new field. After briefly explaining the characteristics of communicative language teaching, this article highlights the three main strategies that she found most useful: minimizing “teacher talk” and maximizing the work the students do in the classroom, emphasizing the process of learning to encourage the students’ metacognitive thinking about their own education, and making negotiation a key activity to engage their critical thinking skills. As universities and colleges increasingly decide to make critical thinking and student engagement key factors in their brand, it can be very useful to reexamine the habits that we adopt and to consider some of the best practices of our colleagues in other departments.

Scott Welsh is likely to elicit a sigh of relief from the many academics who struggle with what, if any, public intellectual persona they should adopt. Welsh (2012) argues against a broad swathe of mostly left-leaning rhetorical scholars that the academic's democratic duty is adequately discharged by providing suitably ambivalent rhetorical resources for others to use in their political struggles. For Welsh, following Slavoj Žižek (2008), the scholar's first obligation is to “enjoy your symptom”—that is, to demonstrate in one's discursive practice the problematic nature of trying to claim epistemic privilege in a society ostensibly of equals. The main conceptual difference between Welsh's and my own conception of academics as public intellectuals is that he understands the rhetor's imperative to deploy “all the available means of persuasion” collectively, whereas I understand it distributively.Thus, Welsh calls for a very tolerant attitude toward the exact rhetorical register in which academics engage with the public, calling on Kenneth Burke (1969) and Terry Eagleton (1990) as witnesses to the essential unpredictability and “polyvalence” of discursive uptake. In short, given sufficient time and space, anything said in any way in any context might just work, from which Welsh concludes that we should not be too judgmental of how our colleagues approach the public intellectual's role. Moreover, there may be something interesting to say—via Žižek—about the nature of the anxiety generated by the status of academics as public intellectuals. In contrast, I believe that each public intellectual is obliged to exploit the distinct communicative resources afforded by all the media. All public intellectuals should aspire to be “the compleat rhetor.” Of course, what can be conveyed in a heavily referenced tome cannot be conveyed in a three-part television series, let alone a live radio broadcast. However, the public intellectual is willing and able to play variations on her ideas across these different media. Even in our own time, despite the problems I discuss here, academics—three quite different but equally effective exemplars would be Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, and Niall Ferguson—have risen to the challenge.To be sure, the performance standards of public intellectual life may well exceed the abilities and dispositions of most academics, whose communicative comfort zone ends with their scholarly peers. I allude to what Thorstein Veblen called “trained incapacities,” which are often reinforced by the constitution of the academic field. More specifically, I have in mind not the early nineteenth- century ideal Humboldtian academic who aspired to do research worth teaching. That is very much in the mold of the public intellectual, and its spirit still imbues many liberal arts colleges (Fuller 2009, chap. 1). Rather, I mean, in the first instance, a phenomenon to which Veblen himself was responding in the early twentieth-century—namely, the rise of graduate education and the fetishization of the PhD, which effectively disabled academics' impulse to communicate with the larger society by structuring career advancement in terms of an increasingly specialized community of fellow researchers. Thus, the academic shifted from broad- to narrowcaster. However, the early twenty-first century has imposed an additional layer of difficulty, as the decline in tenurable posts has exposed academics more directly to market pressures, rendering them more biddable to fashion, which in turn erodes the sense of intellectual autonomy that the specialist researcher still retained.Given this trajectory, it is perhaps not surprising that Welsh restricts his discussion of the prospects for the academic as public intellectual in terms of the likely uptake of one's message, which in his view might as well be sent in a bottle. For a paper whose title draws attention to political agency, remarkably little is said about what if any obligation the academic might have in trying to control the public reception of his message. Here I would put the stress on “trying,” since there is no guarantee that the academic will be received in a way that he finds satisfying. However, a key moment in democratic education occurs precisely during the negotiation of this sort of potential misunderstanding, a negotiation that may be likened to what happens when theory and practice are drawn closer together. In this respect, I find Welsh's appeal to the early Habermas (1973) misguided because—like his evil twin Allan Bloom (1987)—Habermas presumes that academics would be unduly authoritarian were they to try to dictate policies based on their research. The possibility of the public character of academic rhetoric becoming overbearing was perhaps a legitimate concern for Max Weber in the early twentieth century, when universities were still very elite institutions, but the accelerated expansion of university construction since the 1960s has rendered such a concern moot. The increase in access to academic channels of discourse—from student enrollments to journal publications—has effectively diluted academic authority. Indeed, the argument has been made that external funding, given its reliable scarcity, may be eclipsing publications as the main market signal of academic merit (Lamont 2009). More to the point, there would have been no need for Richard Dawkins to hold a chair in the “public understanding of science” were there a serious chance that “the scientific establishment” might soon succeed in dominating public opinion about the nature of reality.If anything, this implied fragmentation of epistemic authority—which I have dubbed “Protscience” after the Protestant Reformation (Fuller 2010)—has only increased, as the internet empowers the modestly educated layperson to find a “second opinion” on virtually any topic of academic concern. In this respect, progress in the development of smart search engines could easily put the cautious, even-handed, “value-neutral” academic out of business. More difficult to automate is a consistent style of response across a broad range of issues that marks the autonomy of the public intellectual voice. We are much more familiar with the style of, say, Voltaire or Sartre than with the substance of what they said—and this is not because they did not say substantive, often rather unexpected, things. But their style marked them as thinking through things for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others. From that point of view, academic discourse can look like bad acting, where the presence of a script is all too evident in the performance. And here I mean not the literal presence of the written text—which is bad enough—but the academic's tendency to declare her reliance on others' work too loudly like a proud ventriloquist's dummy. The proper term for this stance is “normal science” (Kuhn 1970). It makes for a poor reading and listening experience.Thus, the rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums, relatively scarce access to which is matched by a large appreciative audience. This has meant that, for quite a while now, academics have had to compete with such “media elites” as professional writers, journalists, and other “celebrities” for prime-time television exposure (Debray 1981). Chomsky, Dawkins and Ferguson have risen to the challenge, each in his own way. Against this backdrop, Welsh's apparent satisfaction with academics simply providing Habermas-style “resources” for citizen deliberation appears profoundly unambitious. At the same time, though, given the erosion of the academic's intellectual autonomy in our time, treating one's own words as bottled messages may offer prudent career advice for people unsure of who will be writing their next paycheck. But Welsh does not seem to want to argue from such a position of abject weakness. In that case, he needs to come to grips more directly with the cognitive significance of entertainment as a modus operandi in public intellectual life—not just now but perhaps always.“Entertainment” is an early seventeenth-century English coinage designed to capture an abstract sense of tenancy, as in the case of the king who keeps a poet or playwright on retainer solely for purposes of amusement but whose proximity ends up exerting influence over his political judgment. It was just this sense of the term that had led Plato to regard the performing arts as potentially subversive of good governance. Moreover, as Adriano Shaplin (2009) has recently dramatized, Hobbes shared similar suspicions about the English court's fascination with the theatricality of experimental demonstrations, the details of which form the basis of the most influential monograph in the historical sociology of science in recent times (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). The fear evoked—or opportunity afforded—by entertainment is that after the final curtain is drawn, the audience might themselves continue acting in the spirit of the performance they had observed, effectively turning “real life” into an extension of the stage or, as Hobbes feared, the lab. It was precisely to decrease the likelihood of this happening that Aristotle stressed the cathartic function of the well-formed play: the most artful way to highlight drama's fictional character is to present its action as completely self-contained, which means that by the end all the plotlines have been resolved. Without such resolution, the line between fact and fiction may be easily blurred in an imaginatively inflamed audience. From that standpoint, the public intellectual clearly aims to violate Aristotle's strictures on good drama by wishing her brand of entertainment to outlast the experience of the actual performance so as to carry over as a motive force in the audience members once they have left the theater.My sense of entertainment's intellectually empowering character goes very much against the grain of Neil Postman's (1985) influential demonization of its alleged narcotic effects. To be sure, Postman was fixated on television, which he understood as Marshall McLuhan's absorbing yet noninteractive “cool” medium that, in Brave New World fashion, effectively sucked the life out of its viewers, a process that had been recently sensationalized by David Cronenberg in the film Videodrome (1983). But rather than the vampire, Postman might have considered the virus as the model of entertainment's modus operandi, whereby the host is not so much annihilated as simply contaminated by the guest organism. This then gets us back to the problem that originally concerned Plato, one which Antoine Artaud's (1958) “theatre of cruelty” converted into a virtue: it is not that the poets send the audience into a dream state but that the audience might enact those dreams in “real life.” The normative limits of “reality television” provide an interesting contemporary benchmark on this issue. Whereas television producers and audiences are enthusiastic about Dragons' Den styled programs (called Shark Tank in the United States) that cast entrepreneurship as a talent competition, similarly styled proposals to stage political elections have been met with the sort of disapproval that would have pleased Plato (see, e.g., Firth 2009).Against this backdrop, Welsh gets my critique of Dewey exactly wrong. Of course, Dewey was trying to be a public intellectual. In fact, the monumental level of his failure reflects the tremendous effort he put into the task. But in the end, his approach to the task was profoundly nonentertaining. He simply tried to apply his ideas without considering how the medium might affect the message. By nearly all accounts, Dewey's many public appearances and popular books over a very long career were watered down versions of the distractedly presented abstractions that marked his more technical performances. He was and is boring. Although Dewey saw the classroom as the gateway to a more democratic society, his real talent lay in taking advantage of the classroom's artificially well-bounded character to treat it as a laboratory for generating democratic sentiments. While hardly a trivial achievement, like many other laboratory-based experiments, it did not generalize. Perhaps Dewey's best chance in the public intellectual sweepstakes was taken by his followers behind the so-called forum movement, which in interwar America aimed to institutionalize deliberative democracy in the form of discussion groups in local churches, clubs, union halls, and community centers. William Keith (2007) has provided a sophisticated, critically sympathetic account of this phenomenon, which attracted the support of the reformist wing of the emerging speech communication scholarly community, who believed that in an era of mass democracy, the paramount concern of public discourse should focus on how to forge a purposeful consensus. In that context, they found classical debate practices inappropriately combative and elitist and therefore not suited to this purpose.However, the forum movement failed for reasons that would have been obvious to Dewey's nemesis, Walter Lippmann, journalism's answer to Plato. Dewey had imagined that the twentieth century would bring an end to the hereditary elites who had inhibited the populace from realizing their potential for self-governance. In many respects, the debate culture was an atavism of that predemocratic past in its casting of intellectual exchange as a confrontation of rhetorical virtuosos, observed admiringly by a mass audience. The big worry shared by Dewey and Lippmann as they debated in books and the pages of The New Republic in the 1920s was that the rise of broadcast media, especially radio, would facilitate the replacement of those old elites with a new, media-savvy breed of demagoguery that by the 1930s had come to be associated with fascist rhetoric (Schudson 2008). In this context, the forum movement was a collectively self-applied immunization strategy, as social peers—often neighbors—helped each other articulate their beliefs and desires, ideally in a way that enabled them to have a common voice in the face of the various claims increasingly pressed on them by competing ideologues and, for that matter, advertisers.Nevertheless, Keith (2007) concludes that the forum movement fell afoul of market-driven entertainment imperatives, as had such nineteenth-century precursors as the lyceum movement, which popularized New England transcendentalism, and the Chautauqua movement, which effectively spawned a self-improvement industry that has only grown with time. Big-name speakers were booked to draw large audiences, but then what passed for “discussion” was either respectful “Q&A” sessions or uncritical enthusiasm. In neither case was the original egalitarian and grassroots spirit of the movement truly maintained, a fatal structural deformation, considering the forum movement's aims. With hindsight we can say that the movement's boosters underestimated the extent to which people's beliefs and desires are constructed rather than discovered, especially once they enter relatively neutral zones of articulation. In other words, Dewey's followers were wrong to presume that some innate sense of collective reason came to light once external barriers were removed. Rather, it may be that the very possibility of “collective” thought and action is predicated on the open-ended character of individuals' ends. In short, people are by nature biddable.Lippmann took that prospect as a practical proposition, which is why he called for state licensing of commercial advertising even before Bernays (1928), the bible of modern public relations, had adumbrated advertising's likely long-term significance to “engineer consent.” Whatever else one might say about Lippmann, he took the normative character of the public intellectual's task seriously—albeit understood as guardian of the public interest, indeed often against the public's own instincts. While I do not share Lippmann's construal of the public intellectual's task, it is one that came to grips with the power of entertainment, an important of legacy of which was his own persona as the calming presence of the all-knowing insider. In contrast, the other successful twentieth-century U.S. public intellectual that I cite in “The Public Intellectual as Agent of Justice” (2006), Reinhold Niebuhr, played to the entertainment function more directly by extending the prophetic strain of Christian preaching into a call to arms to fight both poverty at home and communism abroad. His righteous politicized persona has been arguably—and perhaps even self-consciously—reinvented for a by chap. an of Welsh's to with the and is the of Slavoj Žižek as an intellectual for understanding the political position of the The not in the sort of light that Žižek which is simply a play of to scholars as members of society are in the of yet by they are to of which taken an to in many “all both and Welsh Žižek to the end, for and concludes that this is and in practice a of then for scholars to to with the that from a that with a position that is at once in but not of But this is no more than a of the of and, more the experience of that dubbed the of in modern from this is is is Welsh's of Žižek for these while a and clearly very well educated in and is not a in Welsh's Žižek does not hold a academic he and is a and the of academic life—not to with 2008). all of his while relatively academic in are through commercial with old New This means that his work is for its of on the basis of academic which of of and However, over time such has a as Žižek with his which in turn reflects a between and In short, Žižek the people Welsh claims to be is that were Žižek to apply his own of he would not himself in the position of the in the of but rather the public intellectual in the of Indeed, Žižek has been with I to by academics, with a in the public intellectual the problem of academics the of public intellectuals is even than that of academics trying to into the public intellectual

In my article, “Coming to Terms with the Antagonism Between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency,” I argue that academic desire is inherently frustrated by motives in tension with each other (2012). As rhetoric scholars, we are supposed to explore what we find politically interesting or important by isolating a chosen element of the political in order to perform a systematic study of that element and generate some insight about it. Yet graduate students quickly learn that moral fervor and political commitment are not the same thing as studying something that they care about. And this moment of revelation is no less true for a partisan in the throws of a political campaign than it is for an academic shut away in an archive. For example, political campaign operatives charged with polling a subset of the electorate are not, in the act of designing and performing the poll, acting as political operatives. Rather, in their role as pollsters, they must resist their own wishes or expectations or they will not actually be of any service to their campaign or party. Instead, to be of service, they must apply methods that are intended to return results that would be valuable to anyone who might have access to them. This is why campaigns hide their internal polls from both the public and competing campaigns. They do not want either the public or competing campaigns to know what they have learned precisely because such malleable knowledge could be applied by others in ways that might thwart their own campaign's strategy.Nevertheless, the difference between a political campaign's internal polling operation and an academic should be clear. Like internal pollsters, academics engage in systematic study in order to produce results that anyone could potentially use. However, unlike pollsters, academics do not keep the results of their research hidden away for partisan advantage but rather make those results public because their research is intended to serve the interests of anyone who might engage the products of their analysis. Like internal pollsters, however, academics also do not need to be understood as “value-neutral.” Of course they aren't. They will have chosen what they want to study because they suspect that an inadequate understanding of some element of reality may be the cause of problems that they hope improved understanding might somehow contribute to ameliorating. Now, if an academic fails to deliver a product that is of use to anyone because it takes a form that no one can figure out how to use, and use in a relatively sophisticated way, then the academic might be considered to have failed. She will have failed insofar as she had hoped that improved understanding might potentially aid those directly involved in addressing the problem.Might we say that academics work amid a broader competition to enact particular policies, just as internal campaign pollsters work amid those directly competing to win elections? Hence, are not both academics and internal campaign pollsters “in” the contest but not “of” the contest? Might we say that faithful service to either of the two demands it? In Slavoj Žižek's language (following Lacan), attempting to cut the corner, to directly engage in the contest, would be an example of what he calls “giving way” on one's “desire” (1989, 117–18). In the language of my prior article, it is an example of refusing the challenge that constitutes the antagonism, in this case, the antagonism between reflection and action that constitutes the academic subject position. Recall, however, that antagonism does not mean simple opposition. Rather, it points to a state of affairs in which an ideology or subject position unavoidably contains elements that are in tension. And “tension” is the right word because it can mean both pressing together and pulling apart. Antagonism, in Žižek's sense, means inseparability paired with incommensurability (to be a politically effective internal campaign pollster one must forswear politics). At his most esoteric, Žižek writes that antagonisms do not exist in what he calls “the real” (which can mean something like reality in the absence of symbols), because antagonisms are products of language (2005, 249–54). No word or set of words can say everything, and what is left unsaid in any moment will continue to torment what is said, creating the experience of antagonism—or an anxiety-producing need to say two different things at the same time (1991, 154; 1989, 21, 43, 49; 1994, 21, 26). Yet, while both things must be said, those two things, within language, always manifest as in tension with each other (in the world but not of the world, wholly God and wholly man, the mysteries of the sublime).Effacing an antagonism by reducing the saying of one thing to the saying of another—and acting as if it “resolves” the antagonism—entails giving way on one's desire. It is the construction of a cheap substitute when what is needed is not exactly the real thing itself, but the pursuit of the real thing. Hence, the pursuit of the real thing entails refusing to take a shortcut to one's desire (1989, 117–18; 1993, 60). The very idea of an “academic as public intellectual” is just such a shortcut. In it's material manifestation, it is an unstable, unsatisfying compromise that is wholly committed to neither reflection nor action. And, because it is neither one nor the other, it also cannot be both.For example, consider Fuller's account of the plight of the public intellectual. First, he explains that the “rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums.” In order to reclaim their allegedly rightful place in public discourse, Fuller argues that academics need to more carefully consider what it takes “to compete with such ‘media elites’ as professional writers, journalists, and other ‘celebrities’ for prime-time television exposure.” And what it takes, he says, is the careful cultivation of a persona that keeps some of the affectations of the academic yet is entertaining enough to attract a wide audience. Walter Lippmann, Fuller argues, is an especially good model for aspiring academics as public intellectuals because, even though he was not primarily an academic in the institutional sense of the word, he nevertheless played the part. He cultivated the public persona of “the calming presence of an all-knowing insider” as his authorizing—and entertaining—hook or gimmick, which permitted him to exercise a high degree of individual political agency. In contrast, John Dewey's problem, according to Fuller, was that he remained too singularly focused on maximizing effective citizen political participation, through various forum movements and improved public education, to the detriment of maximizing the reach of his own political voice. Thus, while Dewey may have thought of himself as something like what we call a public intellectual, he actually was not one in Fuller's sense of the word because either Dewey refused to perform a broadly entertaining persona or was simply, as a matter of temperament, not amusing or entertaining enough to effectively playact the role of the wise, trustworthy, plain-spoken professor for a mass audience.This is the same advice Stephen Hartnett gives academics who aspire to be public intellectuals. They must, as I noted in the prior article, learn to “speak clearly and look authoritative” while offering “mass-media-shaped tidbits” (2010, 81–83). The academic as public intellectual must look authoritative (play the part of an academic) while saying things that could just as well be said by a celebrity guest. The bait-and-switch quality of the academic playing the role of an academic on TV is apparent in a number of those whom Fuller identifies as public intellectual “exemplars,” particularly Noam Chomsky, Niall Ferguson, and Cornel West. Chomsky's “public intellectual” work, for example, bears only a passing resemblance to the academic research for which he is known. Hence, whatever a public audience might get from Chomsky's books about whatever the current outrage is, they should not be afforded special attention due to his renown as a professor of linguistics. Ferguson's August 2012 cover story in Newsweek arguing against the reelection of Barack Obama is a particularly egregious example of this bait-and-switch technique: he lures the audience in with the promise of rigorous academic intelligence but instead writes a deceptive account of the Affordable Care Act; no one expects the Harvard professor to be plainly dishonest (Ferguson 2012; Krugman 2012). Cornel West, the former Harvard professor who has cultivated what Fuller calls a “righteous politicized persona,” has definitely been adept at competing for the media spotlight, but it is not at all clear that his current persona promotes anything resembling what an academic is supposedly uniquely equipped to offer public discourse—namely, some sort of intellectual contribution. Together, all three become caricatures in line with the worst of what the public believes about academics—that they are unstable ideologues who pursue political agendas under the auspices of higher education.Each of them also fulfills Fuller's academic-as-public-intellectual obligation “to exploit the distinctive communicative resources afforded by all the media.” What he means by this, here and elsewhere, is that academics who want to be public intellectuals have to not only be ready with but must also promote the nickel, fifty-cent, and ten-dollar version of their “ideas” in order to maximize each idea's public reach, appeal, and effectiveness. Yet how different is the nickel version of any intellectual idea from what many other similarly minded commentators, politicians, or protestors are already saying? Is the nickel version of Chomsky much different than what is printed on T-shirts outside of World Trade Organization meetings? And, in the case of Chomsky, does his actual academic expertise intellectually ground those slogans? And how is the talk radio or morning television version of any idea ever an “intellectual” contribution to public discourse? All that is left of the intellectual is the wise or iconoclastic professor persona cultivated by the professor doing the speaking; recall the number of conservative “thinkers” on television who enact their thoughtfulness by their choice in neckwear (always a bowtie).Is Fuller not recommending something like an ironic inversion of the classic advertising line “I'm not really a doctor, but I play one on TV,” except now the professor says, “I am really a professor but, until the next commercial break, I'm just going to play one on TV”? Just as celebrities trade on their stardom to play the game of political winning and losing, academics as public intellectuals ought to trade on their scholarly persona. In other words, one plays the part of the academic intellectual but must not supply what the persona promises to deliver. And this, Fuller says, is what it means for academics as public intellectuals to adopt a style in the tradition of Voltaire and Sartre, “marked” as “thinking things through for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others”? And it therefore follows, then, in a line Fuller likes to repeat, that it is the traditional academic who is little more than “a proud ventriloquist's dummy” (2005, 100)?Yet perhaps the deeper problem is bound up with idea that the spirit of broader academic arguments or intellectual syntheses continues to live inside their stripped-down nickel versions. However, as I argued in the earlier article, every academic conclusion drawn from however rigorous or voluminous the research will necessarily (should it ever come into contact with public discourse) be reduced to a simplified metaphor or simplifying shorthand term (Welsh 2012, 17). Still, in its simplified form, it is never simply a short or a nutshell version. Rather, it is a discursive resource in its own right that becomes immediately detachable (and is detached) from its origins and takes on new and unanticipated forms, which is to say that it immediately becomes available for diverse, often opposing forms of appropriation.Consider, for example, the term “social capital” that emerged among Dewey and his followers at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly as discussed by the political scientist James Farr (2004). “Social capital,” a term that continues to be used today among certain liberals as well as conservatives, tends to be understood as a call to look for cultural, educational, institutional, and economic “investments” that might support integrated and healthy communities. At its best, it frames social life in morally rich terms of connectedness and interdependence, taking the place of morally debilitating visions of “survival of the fittest” or “winner take all.” Farr argues that that the term's continued resonance has to do with the artistic twist it gives to common words and meanings. Yet it offers more than momentary delight. It invokes a revised world with modified priorities. It is morally suggestive and a richly heuristic play on words.Hence, people can do with it something very much like what Robert Putnam (1995) suggested in his widely read article “Bowling Alone” and invest in community groups and gatherings, treating social connections as a form of capital requiring steady investment. And certain kinds of conservatives can also use the term to rationalize cohesive communities—built on the exclusion of outsiders. At the same time, opponents of social capital in either of these senses could reframe the term in order to recommend forms of community ruled by the demands of capital accumulation. Efforts at building social capital in either of the two prior senses could be cast as impeding the production of the “real” social capital, which such opponents might argue is the economic output of the members of a society. Time spent at “social clubs” and “off the job” could be presented in terms of lost economic growth or diminished hard capital, the same capital needed to pay for the social “get-togethers.” Money doesn't grow on trees, you get what you pay for, there is no such thing as a free lunch.More economically progressive uses of the term “social capital,” others could say, is just code for “socialism” (a word that has a constant presence in American political discourse, complete with images of Stalin), a tactic designed to scare citizens away from progressive reforms. All of these arguments are already in place, ready to be marshaled into service should the term “social capital” begin to seriously challenge prevailing ways of speaking in any particular way. It could even be that those most sympathetic to the diverse uses to which the term can be put should argue for setting it aside because it is simply too fraught with difficulty. Is there any other two-word combination that draws attention to the dominant political and economic tension of the twentieth century more than “social capital”? Could there be?Fuller's argument, however, is that academics can, and must try to, actively “control the public reception” of their messages. Yet once an academic's “message” is reduced to a central metaphor, control is already lost. And, in addition to it no longer being in any respect a complicating “intellectual” message or discourse, in that same moment everyone is granted the freedom to pick it up and use it quite differently than intended—all the while continuing to tout the authority of its academic provenance. Thus, once one moves from academic discourse to public discourse, the scholarly product becomes a rhetoric, and once it becomes a rhetoric it becomes just one more rhetorical pivot point susceptible to leveraging competing policies. It becomes what C. Wright Mills called a part of the sociological imagination (2000, 4–5, 48, 71).However, is this not precisely the place where rhetorical scholarship becomes most relevant to public affairs? Any rhetorical analysis or critique worthy of the name must be rooted in the recognition that private terms are more likely to become public rhetorics when diverse groups of people can imagine using them in pursuit of a wide variety of goals. Hence, there is no teacher of rhetoric that has ever claimed to have found the political message that needed to get out. Rather, as Fuller himself argues in The Intellectual, the earliest teachers of what we tend to think of as rhetoric, the Sophists (whom Fuller also refers to as the first public intellectuals), did not advance particular ideas but, instead, offered training in using ideas as rhetorical instruments in light of a student's aims (2005, 7). Fuller argues that “the sophists never understood themselves as ‘idea merchants,’ as one might characterize think-tank dwellers today or, in more elevated tones[,] … Voltaire.” “No,” Fuller clarifies, “the sophists were purveyors of certain skills and perhaps even tools” (2005, 9). Moreover, Fuller explains how “the sophists mainly wanted to help clients win lawsuits and sway public opinion, to take greater control of their fate, as befits citizens in a democracy” (2005, 9). My argument is that rhetoric scholars should see themselves in just this way—as devoted to understanding public discourse, which entails weighing the shifting and unpredictable assets and liabilities of the wide range of rhetorical resources. By seeing themselves in such a light, they provide a service to all citizens, activists, and politicians engaged in unpredictable and constantly evolving rhetorical contests for power (Welsh 2013).Perhaps the key distinction here concerns whose agency academics should be interested in promoting. Fuller says that we are doing a bad job if we are not constantly thinking about how to win support for our own particular visions of what is good or just—the academic thus needs to be a political campaign's internal pollster, strategist, and messenger all in one. Hence, Fuller is arguing that Dewey's problem was that Dewey did not see his role as either or for inherently malleable and a quality of that Dewey clearly Rather, like the Dewey remained as a and to the political agency of even if that not maximizing his Yet, the that the Dewey had on and I think we can say he also did well for he refused to the antagonism that academic desire did not way on it.

As a teacher, writer, administrator, researcher, theorist and philosopher, Louise Wetherbee Phelps has contributed to the construction and design of the discipline of composition and rhetoric at all stages, from its foundation in the 1970s to the eclectic dwelling in which we reside today. Louise is shaping the future of the discipline as well, mentoring and educating the next generation of scholar-teachers. She is invested in teaching and committed to cultivating stimulating intellectual engagement in composition and rhetoric. Louise’s former students often refer to her as a matriarch of the field, recognizing that her work has been foundational and highly influential. She has worked to bring recognition to rhetoric, composition, and writing studies on a local, national, and international level in such efforts as creating a stand-alone undergraduate and doctoral program at Syracuse University and securing our status as a legitimate discipline. Recently retired after a career spanning more than 30 years at Syracuse University, Louise has yet to slow down. In fact, she might be busier now than ever before. This interview takes you on a tour of the multiple, converging pathways Louise has traveled throughout her career as well as the new pathways she is forging in retirement. She discusses her work as a consultant, professor, and writer as well as the state of writing studies in the U.S. and in international contexts. She also provides insight into what constitutes a scholarly identity and how we might understand more holistically our own academic work and the work of others.

Although student veterans comprise just four percent of the population of undergraduate students, this number is expected to grow as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to come to a close (“Out”). In recent years, higher education has become increasingly concerned with accommodating this emerging, diverse, and vulnerable population of students. This review essay discusses two Web-based initiatives that advocate for and about student veterans transitioning to higher education : In Their Own Words, Montgomery College Student Veterans and From Combat to Kentucky . Specifically, this review essay discusses how these two digital projects provide educators, administrators, and students (both civilian and veteran) the invaluable opportunity to hear the unique experiences and needs of student veterans in higher education. Hearing such stories can contribute to teachers and students’ learning practices by fostering identification with student veterans, despite our differences, while affording teachers and students a way of increasing our understanding of military culture and its large role in our nation’s present, past, and future cultural contexts.

Research problem: This study provides insights into the role that a leader plays in improving relational capital, thereby motivating team members' citizenship behaviors in distributed teams. We address the following research questions: (1) What is the role of inspirational leadership in cultivating relational capital (i.e., reciprocity and commitment) in distributed teams? (2) Are team members' citizenship behaviors (i.e., knowledge sharing and interpersonal helping) influenced by relational capital in distributed teams? (3) How does technology support for cognitive and affective contextualization facilitate leaders to improve organizational communication? Literature review: The purpose of the review was to provide a theoretical background for the variables in this study. Based on the relevant theories on relational capital, leadership, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and contextualization, this study reviewed how previous studies link these theories to one other, and proposed the positive relationship between leadership, relational capital and OCBs, as well as the moderating relationships of technology support for contextualization. Methodology: The researchers conducted a quantitative survey with 141 respondents in a major university in Asia. The subjects were part-time graduate students pursuing their master's degree. Researchers administrated a paper-based questionnaire along with a cover letter explaining the study's objectives. Responses indicating teams that were situated in only one location and their role as team leaders were removed from the analyses. Participation was completely voluntary. The researchers chose partial least squares to test the hypotheses since it has fewer restrictive assumptions and its ability for analyzing measurement and structural models. Results and discussion: This study highlights the importance of inspirational leaders in cultivating two kinds of relational capital, namely commitment and reciprocity. This study also explores the differential values of contextual information from the cognitive and affective dimensions. A key result is that the effect of inspirational leadership on reciprocity is strengthened when there is technology support for cognitive contextualization. At the same time, technology support for affective contextualization has a direct impact on commitment. These findings provide empirical support for affective and cognitive contextualization in distributed organizational communication, and suggest a way for distinguishing between reciprocity and commitment. This study concludes by illustrating the positive effects of commitment on citizenship behaviors, such as knowledge sharing and interpersonal helping. The implication of this study is that when teams are physically dispersed, there should be more emphasis on leadership with inspirational attributes to get their team members to perform beyond standard requirements. In addition, this study provides leaders and organizations with an opportunity to reflect on the appropriate technology that can be adopted to compensate for insufficient communication. The limitation of this study is that each respondent represents his/her working team. As a result, it may introduce bias to the findings. In addition, self-reported measures may also cause common method bias. Future research could consider the addition of objective measures and longitudinal work to reduce the possibility of common method bias, and investigate how work behaviors change over time.

Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

Books reviewed: The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers by Linda Adler-Kassner The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies by Donna Strickland GenAdmin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the Twenty-First Century by Colin Charlton, JonikkaCharlton, Tarez Samra Graban, Kathleen J. Ryan, and Amy Ferdinandt Stolley

This article describes a graduate seminar titled “Interfaces and Infrastructures” that took place at Wayne State University. The course engaged with new media scholarship while also taking a piece of software, Google Wave, as its central artifact. The seminar demonstrates a pedagogical approach in which new media objects act as both tools and objects of study in the English studies classroom.

Steel Wagstaff , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/essays-into-silence-noise-and-john-cage ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) I present here the results of "The {Silence} Project," a multi-part creative research project that engages with ideas of chance, silence, and noise through the work of John Cage, the American avant-garde composer. The project began with an experimental prose essay that borrowed the formal structure of Cage's famous 'silent' composition 4’33” to examine the importance of silence and noise in Cage’s thought and speculate about the poetic implications of Cage’s use of constraints and chance operations in his composition practice. As part of a graduate seminar taught by Jon McKenzie, over the next four months I submitted this essay to two substantial remediations which drastically altered the form, content, and argumentative thrust of the original essay. I converted the prose piece first into “{Sile / nce},” a graphic essay produced with Adobe InDesign that attempted to imitate the look and feel of a large, visually rich, and typographically varied glossy magazine. Next, I remediated the piece a further time, creating “The Silence Film: Essays into Noise, Silence, and John Cage,” a short film loosely structured around the conventions of Pecha Kucha, a fixed-duration presentation format that features twenty images shown for 20 seconds each. In each case, the project underwent significant revisions, changing shape and adopting radically different content in order to explore the properties of the media in which it was composed and the software tools I was just beginning to use (primarily Adobe InDesign, Audacity, and iMovie). In each specific case of remediation, the structural properties and representative capabilities of the selected forms and formats offered both interesting opportunities and significant challenges, especially when it came to depicting the implications of Cage’s subversion of common…

Research questions: How can our current knowledge of experiential learning be applied to cross-cultural web-based training? How do postproject interviews with the participants advance our knowledge about experiential learning? What practical recommendations for teachers and trainers can be offered based on this and similar case studies? Situating the case: Literature on virtual teams stipulates the importance of teaching leadership development within teams, including methods of conflict resolution, and flexibility in methods and tools of communication. Literature on experiential learning places a high value on learner experience, and on indirect and combined methods of assessing experiential learning projects. Methodology: The case was studied through the analysis of data obtained from unstructured class interviews with three of the US-based participants of the teaching project. Interview participants were chosen to ensure a variety of responses about their experiences while taking part in the project. About the case: The project was a part of an introductory graduate-level seminar in technical and scientific communication. Graduate students in technical communication from the US and graduate students in marketing from Ukraine participated in the project. The participants worked in virtual teams to create collaborative analyses of localized versions of websites of transnational corporations. The findings of this research are as follows. (1) Virtual teams work more effectively when given time to build trust and connections among participants. (2) Virtual teams work more effectively when time is devoted to the development of leaders and the articulation of leadership responsibilities within teams. (3) Experiential learning team participants use a variety of communication tools depending on the nature of the communicative task at hand. (4) As part of the learning process, virtual team members recognized and attempted to adjust to cultural and professional discourse differences between countries and professional fields.

Writing in higher educational settings is regarded as problematic for all but the most dedicated people (Silva, 2007). Many of the problems come from psychological states (internal-censors, fears, perfectionism, procrastination) deeply rooted in writing experiences (Boice, 1990). However, the literature addressing this is generally missing. A survey of writing-books, manuals, and research studies indicate that most approach writing from linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical perspectives (Silva, 2007). This study attempted to fill this gap by examining a group of graduate students attending a writing workshop which specifically addressed psychological barriers to productive writing (Boice, 1990). The eight-week workshop consisted of classroom sessions in the first week and then moved to an online course management platform. The primary aim of the study was to note the changes in the students using data from their weekly writing reflections and discussion board comments in several forums and 8-month follow-up interviews. Findings indicate that the workshop had immediate effects on the writers but as the time passed the effects faded. The study looked to Threshold Concepts Theory (Meyer & Land, 2005) as a possible theoretical explanation for the loss of the temporary positive workshop results.

High-achieving students are not often the focus of studies in academic transition. In the UK, the driver has frequently been the widening participation and retention agendas, resulting in an emphasis on supporting the ‘non-traditional’ student. This exploratory case study based in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the <University> took academic writing as one aspect of transition and compared two transition points for undergraduate students of Modern Foreign Languages (MFL): from school or college into the first year and then into the year abroad as students adapt to expectations for dissertation writing. In a context where weekly tutorials arguably offer the ultimate space for development of student writing, the study unpacks students’ interpretations of institutional, disciplinary, tutor and genre-based expectations. The study drew on theories of academic literacies (Lea & Street 1998, Lillis & Scott 2007 and Russell et al 2009) by viewing writing as socially constructed and ‘literacy’ as dependent on disciplinary context. Findings revealed the significance of the multi-disciplinary nature of the MFL course to students’ ability to adapt to writing at university. It is suggested that a focus on the end product rather than the writing process might hinder the students’ ability to adapt to new expectations and make the most of their tutorial time.

In this article we analyse Portuguese postgraduate students’ problems and difficulties when performing written tasks in the context of postgraduate programmes. The data presented are the result of a study based on two different data collection procedures: a) the analysis of students’ written work, organised in a portfolio; b) a questionnaire focussing on the difficulties encountered when performing different tasks involving writing: note-taking; planning a text; writing and editing a text (a literature review); and referencing and quoting according to a reference style (APA). The analysis of students' work revealed problems and difficulties in different areas, namely with selecting information, planning the text, and writing the literature review using academic writing conventions. When asked about the reasons for those problems, students often referred to the difference between the literacy tasks they were used to performing in their undergraduate studies and those that they are requested to develop at the postgraduate level. These differences seem particularly relevant when those tasks are related to assessment practices. At undergraduate level, assessment is often based on examinations while at postgraduate level, it is more dependent on the production of other genres such as literature reviews or essays.

Young adults represent the most avid users of social network sites, and they are also the most concerned with their online identity management, according the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010; Madden, 2012). These practices represent important literate activity today, as individuals who are writing online learn to negotiate interfaces, user agreements, and personal data, as well as rhetorical situations. Examining the social, technological, and structural factors that influence digital literacy practices in online environments is crucial to understanding the impact of these sites on writing practices. Applying Brooke’s (2009) concept of an “ecology of practice” to writing in digital environments, this article examines the digital literacy practices of one undergraduate student through his self-presentation strategies. In considering the roles that social network sites play in individuals’ literacy and identity practices, writing researchers and educators can better understand the literacy practices that students engage in outside of the classroom and the experiences they bring to their academic writing.

Based on the theory of dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981) and intertextuality (Kristeva, 1986), this study explores students’ and professors’ thoughts about formal citation practices based on their comments on whether certain words from source materials need to be acknowledged as others’ words in student writing. A total of 75 students and faculty members at a North American university were interviewed to comment on five examples of language re-use in some undergraduate writing. Participants’ comments focused on how they valued and distinguished (a) between words and ideas, (b) between words representing specialized concepts and words forming a grammatical structure, and (c) between specialized or newly coined words and words that have become widespread since their creation in a specific subject area. The study suggests the complexity of original expression and makes visible what individual students and professors are considering in their citation practices. The study further suggests that writing pedagogy needs to move from rule following to judgment and defense of judgment.

This essay focuses on the implementation of a multimedia writing course and, in particular, a techno-literacy memoir project, which asked students (advanced undergraduates and graduate students) to use their creativity in choosing digital environments, such as podcasts, blogs, and wikis, for sharing their memories of gaining literacy through technology. What the students learned from this project was an ability to fluidly transition between print and digital literacy, along the way strengthening their ability to engage their audiences, and a recognition of their own cyborgian writing skills; indeed, they saw how various communication technologies were extensions of themselves. Through this project, they understood that they had been “cyborgs” since childhood (growing up with, for example, seemingly primitive Speak’N’Spells and Commodore 64s), and this realization helped them transition into a new repertoire of composing skills essential for 21st century student writers.

Our experiences in English 696e: Spatial and Visual Rhetorics culminated in a semester project that included large-scale installation projects and mini-workshops. This semester project was anevent—titled svr2—that we hosted for our local community, particularly targeting an audience of first-year composition instructors who would be teaching visual and spatial analysis to undergraduate students as part of the University of Arizona's first-year composition curriculum.

While reading a series of undergraduate essay drafts, ten newly appointed graduate teaching assistants consistently projected their own anxieties about academic writing onto the authors of the papers, with two exceptions: the students were imagined neither to have the teachers’ compositional agency nor to feel their ambivalence about the academic writing conventions in question. Suggestions for repurposing the intellectual work of the TA-training practicum follow.

This essay argues for an interdisciplinary, team-taught approach to the Introduction to Graduate Studies course in which faculty from literary and rhetoric/writing studies model the intersections of both fields through course texts, assignments, and theoretical frameworks. The authors also discuss the role of terminal master's programs in English and the need for graduate writing instruction.

College students often use the campus as a venue for their course-based research activities. More often than not, however, the university is simply a locus of research, not a subject of student inquiry. In this article, I consider what can be gained when students “study up” the university as an institution. I draw on data from my undergraduate students' research process in an ethnographic methods course at Illinois State University. I argue that an institutional focus provides an especially effective approach for teaching ethnographic methods — one that differs from standard introductory textbook instruction in ethnography and that helps students avoid routine pitfalls of beginning ethnographic research. In particular, I argue that the university focus enables novice students to analyze fine-grained ethnographic data within a middle-range institutional context without macrosocial theories and frameworks that are likely beyond the scope of their semester-long projects. I also argue that an institutional focus can help students become more engaged, critical stakeholders in the university community.

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

This review examines Susan Miller's Norton Book of Composition Studies in the context of the undergraduate writing major. Miller's anthology provides a thorough snapshot of the field of composition, representing the impressive scope of composition studies with 101 unabridged works of composition history, research, theory, and practice. Although this anthology was compiled to support instruction in both undergraduate and graduate classes, the reviewers suggest that undergraduates and some graduate students may require more contextual information about the collected works to better understand the major themes, issues, struggles, and successes of the field.

The study investigated Japanese and Taiwanese postgraduate students’ perceptions of summary writing. Eight Japanese and eight Taiwanese students who speak English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at a university in England participated in the summary writing task in English, questionnaires, and follow-up interviews. The questionnaire and interview data were analysed in terms of (a) students’ background knowledge on summarising and (b) educational background regarding experiences of summarisation and summary writing instruction taught in classes. The results revealed that the Japanese and Taiwanese students shared similar opinions on definitions of summary writing. The students in both groups tended to be self-taught in L1 summarisation due to little L1 summary writing instruction. ESL/EFL writing teachers should note that students from different countries may have culture-specific summary writing conventions and that students from the same country may have different summarisation experiences and perceptions of textual features.

Based on data gathered via survey questionnaire and follow up in-class discussion, the paper explores the ways undergraduate students think of themselves as writers and readers. Data drawn from a pilot survey in 2007 and a second in 2009 provides the impetus for discussion of issues of literacy and identity in a digital world. Of interest is 1) what first-year students anticipate they need to do and know, and 2) how final-year students reflect on what they have learnt in terms of academic literacies and related skills. A key issue is the way students bring a particular identity as readers and writers to university, and how this is transformed and re-inscribed through their studies. The importance of teaching for the development of rhetorical dexterity in a digital environment is highlighted because students’ digital literacy is a core element in their literacy identity. The paper also asks ‘how far should educators go in working into the space of digital literacies?’

This action research study reports on Kosovan, English as a Foreign Language, undergraduate students’ perceptions of the usefulness and effectiveness of class activities that promote the panning for gold approach (Browne and Keeley 2004) in the process of argumentative writing. The data obtained from a questionnaire, essay evaluation and a focus group, reveal that students show interest in the approach though they do not feel at ease when required to take a decision that calls for systematic evaluation of their thinking in a quest for new answers. It is apparent from the study that, in order for students to think critically and write argumentatively, the panning for gold approach and the principle of inquiry should be integrated across the curriculum or, in a better case scenario, should be an integrated part of daily life. The results have implications for syllabus and classroom practices.

Critical reviews allow access to the critical thinking abilities of their writers, especially with regard to analyzing and synthesizing ideas. In most institutions of higher learning, critical reviews are assigned as coursework, and the general assumption is that students would know how to produce a ‘good’ review, one that meets its readers’ expectations. Is this a fair assumption? If not, which particular skills and strategies do we, as academics, teach them? This study was undertaken to find the answers to these questions and focused on the critical review writing of postgraduates. A mixed methods approach was adopted incorporating questionnaires, interviews and critical reviews of articles written in English by ESL postgraduate students at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya. The critical reviews were analyzed from two perspectives (contents and presentation) using a checklist devised by the researchers. The findings revealed that most of the students lacked the skills and strategies for writing effective reviews.

As one of the productive skills, writing is among the most challenging for language learners. Increased opportunities for study in European universities through Erasmus programs and in Anglophone tertiary institutions has made it necessary to place more emphasis on writing skills in Turkish universities. This has made it inevitable that Turkish universities include academic writing as part of their curricula. Considering that even non-native speaking (NNS) scholars have been reported to face challenges with academic writing not usually experienced by native-speaking (NS) writers (Gosden 1992), it is not surprising to see that this activity causes a great deal of anxiety for undergraduate and graduate students. This paper explores the effects of using a multiple-draft process approach on reducing the students’ anxiety levels, as they relate to the academic writing process. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and written reflections by students.

The nuclear power industry is undergoing a renaissance, led by initiatives from the Obama administration and several states. In light of this development and the growing information economy, it is crucial that the public be well-informed, effective, and responsible regarding important technological issues. For this reason, undergraduate education, whether for technical or non-technical majors, must include an awareness of the complexity, ambiguity, and interestedness of the use of technical language and information. This is particularly important in communication involving public discourse and perceptions. I discuss here how I foster such awareness in my junior-level technical writing course for non-majors. We focus on the concept “safe” in relation to radiation and nuclear power. This is done in the overall context of making a recommendation for nuclear power as an energy source for the state of Florida for the next two decades, a realistic and urgent technical communication situation. Students see that standards and even the definitions of crucial terms shift depending on context and social circumstances, and that real-world choices involve trade-offs and balances between advantages and disadvantages.

This article presents follow-up information to a previous publication regarding ways to increase emphasis on research skills in undergraduate Technical Communication curricula. We detail the ways our undergraduate program highlights research by requiring majors to complete senior thesis projects that culminate in submission to an online peer-reviewed journal housed at our institution. This article also describes the roles our undergraduate students play in helping to manage the publication of that academic journal, an activity that further increases students' awareness of the research process and the value of writing for an academic audience beyond the classroom.