Educators and researchers from a range of fields have devoted their careers to studying how reading develops and how to support students who find reading challenging. Some children struggle specifically with learning to decode print, the central issue in what is referred to as dyslexia.However, research has failed to identify unique characteristics or patterns that set apart students identified as dyslexic from other readers with decoding challenges. Nevertheless, an authoritative discourse that speaks of a definitive definition, a unique set of characteristics, and a specific form of intervention saturates policy and practice around dyslexia, and teacher educators are under increasing pressure to include this state-sanctioned information in their classes. Literacy educators’ experiences teaching reading in schools and preparing literacy professionals can add valuable perspectives to the conversation about dyslexia; however, currently their voices are largely silent in conversations around dyslexia research, policy, and practice. The current research was designed to address this gap through an intensive interview study, in which we employed a Disability Critical Race Studies framework, along with Bakhtin’s notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse to explore the perspectives, understandings, and experiences of literacy teacher educators regarding dyslexia.

Starting in the 1970s, frame analysis became a popular technique of textual analysis in different disciplines (communication, mass media, sociology). There is no agreed-upon definition of frame analysis or of ways of measuring its key concepts. This paper explores the relationship between frame analysis and rhetoric. The paper reviews all main concepts developed in frame analysis. Concept after concept, it maps the correspondence between frame analysis and rhetorical concepts. It shows how frame analysis stopped short of developing what was really required to measure frames: tropes and figures. The analysis of a specific text confirms the power of rhetorical analysis for teasing out meaning systems and argumentative structures.

What does it mean to take a risk when I write? Can I? Should I? The idea of risk has preoccupied a number of scholars recently, including those interested in discourse, writing and education (e.g. McWilliam 2009 and Thesen and Cooper 2014). This paper attempts to trace a concept of risk in academic writing, by asking questions about what “belongs” in academic texts and making use of bodies of knowledge that seem to be beyond the pale of academic discourse – magic, the occult, exorcisms. By thinking of risk as a side-effect of genres and traditions, I use the language of magic and the occult as a device to apprehend what academic reading cannot usually perceive, when there may be more in a text than academic reading can deal with. I draw examples from three inventive academic writers (Mary Scott, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Nick Sousanis) to think about the benefits and consequences of risk in academic writing, and the limits of what Karen Bennett (2007) calls English Academic Discourse (EAD). I argue for a kind of writing that might, in the words of Jacques Derrida, anticipate the future ‘in the form of an absolute danger’ (1997: 5).

Within the Learning Development community there are few professional development opportunities or resources for new entrants to the profession, particularly with regard to conducting individual academic writing tutorials. The current study seeks to address this by analysing the talk of individual academic writing tutorials in order to better understand how tutorials are organised and conducted, how identities and relationships are established and how learning is developed. We analysed the audio recordings of one-to-one academic writing tutorials and used conversation analysis methodology to identify features of effective practice. The analysis revealed an overarching three-part sequential structure to the tutorials and identified several features of effective practice in the middle phase where advice-giving occurs. The key finding was that indirect and complex processes of highlighting problems and arriving at solutions are useful to develop learners’ skills and autonomy. The application of these insights has the potential to contribute to a more evidence-informed reflective community of Learning Development practitioners.

This essay conducts a rhetorical analysis of the efforts to commemorate Charles “Buddy” Bolden with a mock jazz funeral in 1996. Widely recognized as a jazz pioneer today, Bolden acquired most of his acclaim posthumously. Bolden spent the last twenty-five years of his life in the Louisiana State Insane Asylum where he died in obscurity in 1931. Bolden’s mock funeral provides a useful case for extending public memory scholarship by exploring the rhetorical dimensions of defleshed memories. Drawing from interviews, archives, and textual analysis, this essay theorizes defleshed memories as memories whose physical trace—or evidence of a physical trace—is attenuated to a state close to non-existence by coercive acts of institutional repression and neglect that sanitize and depoliticize memories. Further, this essay finds that defleshed memories are often rebodied to serve commercial interests but can also be reincorporated into more robust living traditions through rhetorical acts of commemoration.

This essay asks how social enterprises like TOMS generate so much consumer affective investment in an age whose cause-related messaging fatigues shoppers. I find one answer in the energizing buy-one-give-one mode in which TOMS participates and to which it gives collective access. The mode expresses an increasingly widespread sensibility that company growth cannot proceed indefinitely without constraint by company largesse: gathering and growth must be countered by expenditure and even a kind of waste. Modal analysis of metonymic tropes within TOMS’s discourse (by chief executive officer Blake Mycoskie) shows how the company gives a feel for connecting the apparently opposed concerns of self-interested acquisition and “wasteful” expenditure—doing good and doing well—without collapsing one into the other. Unfortunately, other social enterprise rhetorics have failed not only to acquire but also to “waste” consumer enthusiasm in similarly generative fashion, thereby deactivating at times the significance of social enterprise’s projects. This essay concludes by discussing why modal reading of affective investments matters for rhetorical scholarship in this historical moment.

The paper presents the results of the research conducted on the extensive corpus of press material. The purpose of the research was to show the frequency of references to the American scientific sources in the Polish press, specifically in popular science articles published in the weekly and daily papers. The analysis covered the period of 1975–2005 (and also the year 2015). The frequency of references to U.S. sources has been contrasted with the results on references to other countries (Poland, the former USSR, and Russia, in particular), as well as with the bibliographic data on the sum of citations of academic papers in individual countries. The research was carried out using quantitative methods (content analysis, bibliographic analysis of citations). The obtained results confirm the preference of the Polish popular science discourse for the sources originating from the Western culture, especially from the United States.

This study investigates YouTube’s beauty community, an online group of women who make videos about makeup products and techniques. The videos contain makeup application instructions and challenge ideas about what is “usable” procedural discourse. They sometimes defy conventions for high production quality. Moreover, storytelling and instruction are integral to the rhetorical work of these tutorials. For the diverse groups in this community, procedural discourse also serves as a means of establishing credibility not otherwise afforded to them, as well as opportunities for identity- and relationship building.

This article examines conversation analysis (CA) as a methodology for usability research for technologies used in multiparty contexts. Current laboratory-based usability practices often cannot account for how technologies are used in multi-participant interactions outside of the laboratory. In this article, I review new materialist approaches to usability and consider how CA might be integrated into this theoretical perspective. To do so, I present an example transcript of CA and review CA research on telemedicine in multiparty environments. I use this approach to argue that incorporating CA into a new materialist approach can help usability researchers to reconfigure the technical design of and the socio-material practices surrounding technologies.

This article applies identity construction concepts to a professional and technical communication student intern’s use of agency as she negotiates a unique identity for herself within a state legislature. Following a literature review, the author highlights several of the intern’s key efforts to become part of this new governmental and legal discourse community, including learning legislature-specific genres, combatting the “totem-pole” hierarchy, making choices about appropriate professional behavior, socializing by creating an “entire family dynamic,” and making an effort to learn the culture of the legislature. These efforts are documented through the intern’s reflective, self-narratives and documents produced during the internship. Through this discussion, the author suggests practical implications for aiding students and newcomers as they transition to unfamiliar workplace communication environments.

Writing about historical change involves advancing causal explanations that show how events impact people and how their emotions contribute to historical outcomes such as wars and revolutions. This study uses Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal framework to examine how the language of emotion (Affect), an overlooked feature of historical discourse, is used by L2 writers of an under-examined genre, the Factorial Explanation. The study was conducted in a content-based, politicalhistory course for 63 upper-intermediate learners of English at a Japanese university. Results show that while writers made extensive use of the Affect categories Positive Inclination and Negative Satisfaction, which were often realized as adjectives and verbs, nominal formulations for building cohesion were infrequent. Writers also tended to intensify Affect resources by construing feelings as static attributes rather than destabilizing forces of change. The paper makes recommendations for teaching genre-specific language features to aid learners in construing the emotion of history.

This qualitative study investigates peer feedback among adolescent English and Spanish learners writing together in an extracurricular bilingual literacy program. Data sources include audio recordings, writing revision history on Google documents and interviews. This study reveals the complexity of peer interaction, feedback processes, and the potential for mutual growth. Oriented by Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) and informed by the concept of languaging (Mercer, 2004; Swain, 2006), this study conceptualizes peer feedback as acts that students take to mediate the thinking, writing, and communication processes while working together on a language autobiography. Findings show that students strategically used dynamic feedback acts mediating the writing and revising process, such as 'Ask questions', 'Give information', 'Make corrections'. We also found the use of translanguaging in the feedback acts expanded opportunities for learning as linguistically diverse peers were engaged in metalinguistic discussions, text co-construction, and language experiments. This study contributes to a new understanding of peer feedback which leverages the cultural and linguistic resources students bring to school.

This case study uses an action research approach to the implementation of a systematic bilingual writing assessment that K-5 teachers administered over a two-year period in an inner-city public school with a two-way bilingual English-Spanish program. The study reflects the importance of developing an awareness of academic discourse over time, as teachers participated in a writing assessment project that included the administration of writing prompts and corresponding analysis of student writing through use of grade level rubrics, three times each year. The instrument was developed by the first author, a participant-observer who in the role of writing coordinator also led professional development workshops, and provided mentorship to teacher participants. The second researcher is an outside expert on bilingual writing who participated in the retrospective interview stage of the study. This paper will focus on insights from semi-structured interviews with teachers that reveal their current views on aspects of the writing assessment project. The questions prompted teachers to review the rubrics and associated assessment materials to garner insights about their participation in the assessment project. Thematic analysis of the interviews indicates that teachers enhanced their awareness of discourse structure and the writing process, as they incorporated the rubrics for several pedagogical purposes: more targeted whole group instruction, strategic and flexible grouping of students, and more deliberate selection of topics to support writers during individual conferences. Furthermore, teachers appreciated the ability to systematically track writing growth across the academic year, an option that had formerly been used solely for documentation of reading development in this setting. The influence of standards in providing goals for instructional outcomes is also discussed. Changes in the form of assessment are unlikely to enhance equity unless we change the ways in which assessments are used: from sorting mechanisms to diagnostic supports; from external monitors of performance to locally generated tools for inquiring deeply into teaching and learning, (Darling- Hammond, 1994: 7)

In his book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, Professor Darrel Wanzer-Serrano makes several important contributions to rhetorical, communication, and Latinx, race and ethnic studies, and social-movements scholarship. Among those contributions is his detailed historical study of the Young Lords as a social-movement group, which had been, until his study, barely (if at all) mentioned in communication literature. Additionally, his study of the Puerto Rican diaspora, specifically Nuyorican culture, identity, and politics within communication literature, is groundbreaking. And, his thorough, detailed, meticulous historical study of the Young Lords’ rhetoric provides a model of contemporary rhetorical scholarship that should be read and then modeled.The contribution I wish to focus on for this commentary is his theoretical contribution to rhetorical scholarship. Work within the field has studied colonialism through critiques of rhetorics of colonialism (Endres; Parameswaran; Stevens; Stuckey and Murphy) and empire (Abbott; Hartnett and Mercieca; Owen and Ehrenhaus; Perez; Pollini; Sandoval; Spurr), postcolonial critique (Dora; Hegde; Gajjala; Hasian; Jarratt; Kavoori; Kelly; Olson and Worsham; Parameswaran; Schwartz-DuPre; Shome; Wang), and neocolonial critique (Ayotte and Husain; Black; Buescher; Kuswa and Ayotte; McKinnon; Ono; Ranachan and Parmett; Rogers; Vats and Nishime) lenses. Moreover, critiques of colonialism have often been approached as what McKerrow calls “critiques of domination.”Wanzer-Serrano’s book offers a theory of rhetoric and decolonization, distinguished from postcolonial scholarship. Not only does Wanzer-Serrano offer a theory of decoloniality, but he also suggests that the Young Lords challenged decolonization in important ways. He argues, “In this book, I make the case that the New York Young Lords’ enactment of differential consciousness pushes the boundaries of decolonial theory. Through critical performances of border thinking, epistemic disobedience, and delinking, the Young Lords crafted a decolonial praxis that resisted ideological oversimplification and generated new possibilities and spaces for activism in their immediate contexts and beyond” (7).The main chapters of the book detail the history of the organization, its revolutionary nationalism, the role of women in the Young Lords, the organization’s neighborhood garbage campaign, and its campaign to reform the ideas and role of the church. A foundational book about Puerto Rican diasporic rhetoric, the book is attentive to historical nuance in its study of the New York Young Lords. It discusses their emergence and formation as a group, their political platform, their social work, and their decolonial orientation. Gaining expertise and knowledge about the Young Lords and Puerto Rican American rhetoric and culture in New York is a substantial undertaking, and the maturity and sophistication of Professor Wanzer-Serrano’s work is evident on the subject.Wanzer-Serrano comes to the study of the Young Lords as a “decolonial liberation movement” (149). He argues that “the Young Lords’ rhetoric of ‘the people’ embarks on an ‘ideologizing of ideology’ that reworked the people through a decolonial lens and for a decolonial function” (150). As part of their decolonial project, the Young Lords “delink from modernity/coloniality in theory and practice” (11). He captures the significance of delinking perhaps most poignantly in his discussion of the Young Lords’ church offensive, during which they occupied and took over the First Spanish Methodist Church and renamed it “The People’s Church.” There, he argues, “I try to enact and locate ‘an other thinking’ in their rhetoric—a delinking double critique functioning within both Anglo-American and Latin@ traditions and simultaneously ‘from neither of them,’ a critique ‘located at the border of coloniality’ that overcomes the ‘monotopic epistemology of modernity’ and ‘releases knowledges that have become subalternized’ by the coloniality in/of modern social imaginaries” (150). Building on the work of Bernadette Calafell and Michelle Holling, who develop the idea of Latin@ vernacular discourse, Wanzer Serrano adds his analysis that “a defining characteristic of decoloniality is a critical delinking that offers pluriversal alternatives to modern coloniality. Such alternatives can coalesce in challenges to ideographs like ‘the people’ but must also include broader epistemic shifts privileging geopolitical location and the body politics of knowledge in contradistinction to the dominant social imaginary” (164). Delinking from modernity also means delinking conceptually from liberal democracy, which he says “means turning toward a differential consciousness (a la Chela Sandoval) to map the connecting strands that can help us ‘change gears’ and envision a revised conception of democracy not dependent on a modern/colonial ethic of nonbeing’” (177). He advocates thinking of democracy as “fugitive—constantly in flight, marked by multiplicity, unbounded, and contingent.” In this way, he suggests, “Such openness, multiplicity, and constitutive antiracism provides a robust starting point from which to launch fugitive, democratic heterogeneities that can challenge homogenizing racial neoliberalism (177–178).Professor Wanzer-Serrano has made a significant contribution to scholarship through his book. His sophisticated discussions of theory and praxis, his bold move to challenge contemporary conceptions of coloniality, and his detailed case study, which (even without the theoretical framework) significantly adds to what we know about the important, yet understudied, social movement group called The Young Lords render this not only a book worth reading, but also one that becomes part of the canon of rhetorical studies, a hallmark of the best work rhetoric has to offer. This kind of contribution, once realized by others, will have longevity. In short, I would say that it is now not possible to talk about race, otherness, marginality, or power seriously in rhetorical studies without having to confront Wanzer-Serrano’s suggested optic of decoloniality.

“In the end, Luciano triumphantly asserted, ‘We’re building our own community. Don’t fuck with us. It’s as simple as that.’”—Wanzer-Serrano 131The epigraph—a quotation buried deep within chapter 4—belies the complexity and richness of Wanzer-Serrano’s project about the Young Lords and their rhetoric of “community control.” Although the quotation asserts a simple act of building community, Wanzer-Serrano’s book reveals how difficult it is to reimagine what community is and can be in light of colonial histories and a neoliberal present. Indeed, the concept of “community” is not without its difficulties. It can deny difference by positing togetherness as the ideal and often devalues temporal and spatial differences (Young 7). Yet, even as community is conceived differently, “radical theorists and activists appeal to an ideal of community” (Young 1). From a definition based in the neighborhood to one spanning borders, “community” carries connotations of race, ethnicity, nationality, and, importantly, identity. Narrated by Wanzer-Serrano to convey the affective force and empowerment-via-liberatory politics, the quotation in the headnote reminds the reader of community’s centrality to the Young Lords and their rhetoric but also to their imagining as a people. In this response, I tease out how the trope of “community” functions within the book as part of the discourse of community control. In doing so, I posit that Wanzer-Serrano’s work reveals tensions about community as it is negotiated within the politics of academia, our scholarship, and our relations to the communities we identify with and/or study.The meaning of the term “community” as it is used in the book reflects the tensions about the term. Wanzer-Serrano revels in and unpacks these tensions. Chapters 1 and 2 historicize the Puerto Rican community’s presence in the United States as Puerto Ricans reconcile their distance from the island and histories that led to their present conditions. Although Wanzer-Serrano is the scholar researching from outside, he provides the Young Lords equal positioning as experts to provide a perspective and account born of direct experience. Thus, chapter 1 is “both a history of the Young Lords and a history from the Young Lords” and elucidates a Puerto Rican history informed by the Young Lords’ concern with coloniality (Wanzer-Serrano 34). Chapter 2 attends to the Young Lords’ revolutionary nationalism delinked from coloniality and instead connected with decoloniality. These two chapters contextualize the various ideologies underpinning the Puerto Rican relationship with the dominant United States. In this account, the Puerto Rican community exists and asserts itself in the face of assimilationist discourses while it simultaneously carves out a space for the development of the Young Lords’ revolutionary politics. Although the Puerto Rican people were operating and surviving within the residual structures of community imposed by coloniality, Wanzer-Serrano elucidates how the Young Lords reimagine the possibilities of what a Puerto Rican people (and their community) can be and look like when situated in the mainland of empire and modernity.Chapters 3–5 reveal how an organization is reshaped by a decolonial ethic. Chapter 3 centers women’s voices within the Young Lords’ organization. Chapter 4 focuses on the neighborhood and their needs through the “garbage offensive.” Chapter 5 foregrounds the idea of a shared people—both the neighborhood and marginalized voices within it—through the church offensive. While he does not explicitly state it, Wanzer-Serrano implies that a decolonial ethic of love functions as an ideal mode of building and sustaining community with liberation and justice in mind. An ethic of love, informed by an intersectional “decolonial Third World protofeminist critique,” provides an avenue to reshape and re-form itself as needed to serve the community (Wanzer-Serrano 93). Decolonial love also functions to listen and respond to the needs of a community to address the coloniality’s commonplace oppression, as evidenced in the Young Lords’ “garbage offensive.” Finally, a decolonial orientation allows for a reconceptualization of “people” outside of the “hegemonic constructions of a liberal/Western people” and toward one of a “pluriversal collective, demanding material and epistemological liberation” (Wanzer-Serrano 146). If the people can be reimagined in this way, their community and its social relations with place and others can also be reimagined in a way delinked from coloniality.Wanzer-Serrano’s book reveals the very tensions of community and the multiple communities one identifies with, participates in, and is burdened by when traversing the spaces of academia, fieldwork, archive, and the neighborhood. Wanzer-Serrano’s critical self-reflections and revelations of positionality are peppered throughout the book but most evident in the introduction and conclusion. In a decade-long project spanning graduate-school experiences, Wanzer-Serrano’s initial theory building was first related to radical democratic theory, using the Young Lords as a case study. However, he later reoriented his project to focus on the Young Lords’ decolonial practice. In doing so and reflecting on this process, Wanzer-Serrano reveals the stakes of engaging in a decolonial project that requires a reexamination of one’s own epistemology, the education that led to it, and the scholarship that reinforces and circulates it. For Wanzer-Serrano, to build theory from the canon and to impose it on his subjects would inflict epistemic harm to his non-scholarly community in the name of solidifying one’s place within an academic community. Yet, to conceptualize a decolonial perspective in an ethical way requires time, energy, and commitment.Wanzer-Serrano’s book subtly reveals the stakes for academics of color and other marginalized communities. These scholars (myself included) often engage in research in these very communities and demonstrate the productive possibilities of theorizing from the ground up, not wholly disconnecting from the community in the name of securing “scholarly distance.” These academics identify with, and participate and live in, multiple communities, even as their work can serve and sever “community” in an effort to succeed within a neoliberal university model that is increasingly consumer-driven, instrumentally focused, and starved of community input. Yet, as the Young Lords illustrate, the rhetoric of “community control” foregrounds community as it operates from a decolonial orientation. Much in line with such scholars as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and la paperson, Wanzer-Serrano illustrates decoloniality’s power and alludes to the possibilities of the university as a decolonial force. While all rhetorical scholars may not take a decolonial orientation, Wanzer-Serrano’s book beckons us to consider it and to weigh the stakes of not recognizing the world-making value and potential of it.

Background: This study examined discourse during the problem resolution process in face-to-face technical-support interactions between technical-support providers and users at a helpdesk. Specifically, this study responds to the limited discourse-based research in technical-support interactions, despite the agreement that exploring communication within these interactions can help to improve them. Literature review: Research in technical communication has only begun to systematically explore the microlevel (smaller, moment-to-moment) communication in these interactions, though it has provided a well-established understanding of their macrolevel (genre) structure. Further, research has not completely explored how the two participants in the interaction work discursively to resolve technical problems and what strategies appear to promote user satisfaction. Research questions: 1. What microlevel discourse do technical-support providers employ to resolve technical problems? 2. What microlevel discourse do users employ when collaborating with technical-support providers to resolve technical problems? 3. What microlevel discourse from both technical-support providers and users appears in satisfactory interactions? 4. What exchange patterns between the two participants appear in satisfactory interactions? Methodology: Using speech-act discourse analysis, this study examined 17 helpdesk interactions that resolved problems. These interactions occurred at a large, Midwestern US university helpdesk at which 11 instructors sought help with instructional technologies. Using a post-session survey completed by the users, I compared interactions with above- and below-average levels of user satisfaction to determine which microlevel discourse promoted user satisfaction with the help experience. Results: Technical-support providers employed signals announcing their thoughts and actions, gave explanations of the technology, and communicated confirmations or denials to user questions. Users employed inquiries about the technology, gave background information, and communicated confirmations or denials to technical-support provider questions. Statistically significant results about both speakers’ discourse indicate that typical instructional strategies (such as explanations) do not necessarily characterize more satisfactory interactions. Instead, alternate forms of instruction (minimal responses or giving background information from personal experience) contribute toward satisfactory outcomes. Also, users’ facility in asking follow-up questions or in giving further background information even during the problem-resolution stage appears to promote satisfaction. Further, a closer examination of the exchanges reveals how both participants interact in these ways. Conclusions: This study provides further insight into the typical instructional strategies identified by other researchers. Specifically, although explanations or directions do characterize problem resolution, these discourse strategies do not necessarily characterize distinctly satisfactory problem resolution. As one of the only studies of the functional discourse within technical-support interactions, this study provides researchers and practitioners further insight into how these important interactions work when technical-support providers resolve problems.

Background: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports are one of the vehicles for developing corporate images, namely, the cognitive representation of a company perceived by the concerned stakeholders. It would be interesting to compare the CSR reports of companies of the world's two largest economies: the US and China. Literature review: Previous studies of CSR reports tend to highlight their lexicogrammatical, semantic, and functional features at the discursive level, but few studies have examined the cognitive images that companies intend to develop at the level of conceptual structure (knowledge representation). This study investigates metaphor use as a discursive and cognitive strategy for developing corporate images in Chinese and American CSR reports from the perspective of corpus-based conceptual metaphor analysis, particularly based on the concept of genre-specific metaphors, the metaphors used to conventionally construe notions for a certain communicative purpose achieved by a particular discourse community. Research questions: 1. What are the major concerns of Chinese and American CSR reports? 2. What are the genre-specific metaphors used to construe major concerns of Chinese and American CSR reports? 3. What do the genre-specific metaphors reveal about the corporate images of Chinese and US companies? Are there differences in developing corporate images between Chinese and American CSR reports? Methodology: We collected CSR reports of the top companies in China and the US, identified genre-specific linguistic and conceptual metaphors, and conducted comparative analysis of metaphor-based corporate images. Results and conclusions: The conceptual metaphors genre-specific to CSR reports are businesses are objects, business is war, business is a journey, and business competition is competitive games/sports. Furthermore, CSR reports of both countries share most genre-specific metaphor parings and thus nearly the same mappings, which contribute to building corporate images of being economically competitive, ethically cooperative, and environmentally responsible. Although both stress self-development and taking a leading position, American companies seem to pay more attention to external cooperation with others. On the other hand, Chinese companies seem to stress internal cooperation and a well-organized hierarchy. Admittedly, this study may be limited in terms of analyzing only genre-specific metaphors and not balancing sector types of the companies in the two corpora.

Abstract In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal hung on the whims of a deeply divided Supreme Court. His ninth fireside chat argued for legislation that would grant FDR enough new justices to shift the Court in favor of the New Deal. Facing entrenched opposition to his unpopular plan, Roosevelt presented the president as a constitutional authority who must act in response to the crisis of the Great Depression to drive the three-horse team of government toward recovery. Throughout the text, Roosevelt worked to create a sense of urgency and asked the nation to see this moment as the time for decisive action. This study examines the flow of kairos in the speech, tracing timeliness in Roosevelt’s argument for swift action targeting the Court to safeguard economic recovery. Although Roosevelt did not expand the Court, his language lives on as a model for subsequent executives and part of our public constitutional discourse.

Book Review| September 01 2018 Representing Ebola: Culture, Law, and Public Discourse about the 2013–2015 West African Ebola Outbreak Representing Ebola: Culture, Law, and Public Discourse about the 2013–2015 West African Ebola Outbreak. By Marouf A. Hasian Jr. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickson University Press, 2016; pp. v + 251. $85.00 cloth. Skye de Saint Felix Skye de Saint Felix University of Arkansas–Fayetteville Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (3): 551–554. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.3.0551 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Skye de Saint Felix; Representing Ebola: Culture, Law, and Public Discourse about the 2013–2015 West African Ebola Outbreak. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2018; 21 (3): 551–554. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.3.0551 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This essay situates Abraham Lincoln’s Second Annual Message within the context of previous discourse on African colonization to illuminate the significance of the text as public policy rhetoric. I argue that Lincoln’s proposal for compensated emancipation and colonization in the Second Annual Message was the apotheosis of colonization advocacy. Lincoln’s argumentation navigated the complicated context to make a final, but failed, case for a compromise between North and South before the Final Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

The Enlightenment can be described as an attempt to make reason more worldly in order to make the world more reasonable, and the Enlightenment project is characterized by an unflagging confidence in reason's ability to ensure humanity's progress toward a more peaceful, civilized, and moral social and political order. However, the luminaries of the Enlightenment did not succumb to the naive belief that disembodied reason was capable of exercising an immediate influence on human history. To the contrary, these thinkers recognized that humanity always already mediates between reason and history and that reason only ever becomes efficacious in the world by being at work in and on human beings. Accordingly, they recognized that their attempt to promote human progress could succeed only in and through a program of universal education. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment not only thought deeply about the nature and purpose of education; they also saw their own intellectual efforts as contributions to the education of the human race. Indeed, the great Enlightenment thinkers were driven to serious reflection on their own practice of writing as the vehicle for their overarching attempt to engage, teach, and shape their readers. Though it is now common to describe the Enlightenment as a transition away from humanism's concern with speech, rhetoric, and community toward a one-sided emphasis on mathematics, method, and subjectivity, this characterization is a drastic oversimplification that fails to attend to the necessary and abiding connection between Enlightenment, education, and communication.Immanuel Kant is exemplary, in this context. For though he did not write an independent treatise on rhetoric, he emphasizes the vital role that rational discourse and effective communication play in promoting freedom and morality. Thus, Kant characterizes the Enlightenment itself as an attempt to educate the human race by cultivating in each individual the capacity and courage to employ their own understanding to make rational judgments without relying on the guidance of authoritative opinion or received custom, and he argues that this pedagogical project requires, as its necessary condition, the public use of reason, in which individuals communicate their own considered views to their community. Kant thereby indicates that the Enlightenment is inseparable from the modes of communication that make Enlightenment possible and a fortiori from an account of what modes of communication are conducive to the Enlightenment project.G. L. Ercolini's Kant's Philosophy of Communication takes Kant's account of the connection between Enlightenment and the public use of reason as its starting point. Noting that the public use of reason is nothing if not a way of speaking to and with others, Ercolini's principal thesis is that Kant not only offers “a complex philosophy of communication, but, as it turns out, rhetoric, debate, and exchange emerge as central to his enlightenment philosophy” (2). Ercolini begins by noting that historians of rhetoric have tended to overlook Kant completely or to emphasize his noteworthy criticisms of rhetoric (9). However, Ercolini avers that “a little digging” allows us “to get past Kant's curt dismissals” of rhetoric and reveals that there is, in fact, “much in his work that relies on an important role for speech, rhetoric, communication, and public discourse” (6). Accordingly, Ercolini undertakes the daunting but important task of drawing out the theory of communication underlying Kant's various “discussions of rhetoric, ethics, aesthetics, and style” (2).Ercolini begins her analysis of Kant's philosophy of communication by reviewing Kant's several explicit discussions of rhetoric (chapter 1). She rightly observes that Kant is often quite critical of the art of rhetoric, and she notes that “Kant's objection to rhetoric … is twofold: first, to its deceptive purpose and, second, to its violation of the audience's goodwill and autonomy” (33). That said, Ercolini emphasizes that Kant's criticisms of rhetoric do not prevent him from acknowledging the need to speak well, with practiced eloquence and measured style (40). Indeed, Kant appends an important footnote to his most famous and trenchant critique of rhetoric in which he praises the figure of the Ciceronian orator, who speaks “without art and full of vigor” (40). In the final analysis, then, Kant's explicit discussions of rhetoric are ambivalent. Kant is critical of rhetoric, to be sure, but he also points beyond rhetoric to a mode of speaking that is both praiseworthy and salutary. Thus, Ercolini concludes, “Kant's treatment of rhetoric, albeit confounding and requiring much patience, ends up opening possibilities for distinguishing good from bad rhetoric” (41). The remainder of Ercolini's book is devoted to exploring these possibilities in an attempt to develop “a Kantian account of what could be considered as a positive role for rhetoric” (34).Schematically, Ercolini's analysis of Kant's philosophy of communication seems to fall into three parts: one that deals with the practical significance of Kantian rhetoric (chapters 2–3), one that deals with the aesthetic characteristics of Kantian rhetoric (chapters 4–5), and one that begins to develop an account of what Ercolini calls “rhetorical judgment” (conclusion). In the realm of the practical, Ercolini first examines Kant's interest in and analysis of popularity (chapter 2) and then turns to a more direct examination of the moral significance of rhetoric (chapter 3). Ercolini's treatment of Kant's account of popularity is one of the strongest and most important sections of the book. Noting Kant's well-known criticism of popularity in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (77–79), Ercolini illuminates this criticism's place within Kant's broader critique of Popularphilosophie, on one hand (81–87), and his own attempt to clarify, popularize, and promote the Critique of Pure Reason by publishing the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, on the other (60–77). Ercolini's central claim is that Kant is critical of the pursuit of popularity for its own sake but that he also recognizes the need to popularize his own thought. Of course, Kant is well aware that it is difficult to navigate between the demand for rigor and well-groundedness and the demand for clarity and accessibility, but Ercolini concludes that he sees the attempt to meet both demands as one of the central tasks of philosophical communication.Chapter 3 turns from an examination of popularity to an investigation of the normative principles that ought to govern the quest for popularity. In taking up the relationship between Kant's moral philosophy and his philosophy of communication, however, Ercolini turns away from what she describes as the “strict and morally rigorous Kant,” who “is interested in determining the a priori principle of moral action divested of any particularities, experience, or other intervening factors”, to what she describes as “another ethics in Kant”—“an other-ethics,” “an ethics of the empirical,” “an improper ethics” (92, 106, 104). Ercolini's claim is that Kant's anthropological writings reveal an approach to ethics that is “anchored in the realm of the contingent, the situational, and the momentary” (93). On Ercolini's reading, this “improper ethics” corrects for “the radical interiority of the categorical imperative” by offering an account of the human as necessarily directed toward and obligated by the community in which he or she abides (110). And precisely because it orients one toward community, the “other side” of Kant's ethics both demands and describes forms of communication fitting for moral community, as Ercolini demonstrates through a fascinating analysis of Kant's concrete discussions of communal dining (115–20).After completing her examination of the “practical” side of Kant's philosophy of communication, Ercolini turns to the “aesthetic” side in order to consider the role of Kant's aesthetic theory (chapter 4) and his account of style and tone (chapter 5). Chapter 4's overarching goal is to explain why Kant ranks poetry above rhetoric in the hierarchy of the fine arts. Ercolini argues that a careful analysis of Kant's argument reveals that both poetry and rhetoric can provoke a lawless and disordered relation between the cognitive capacities but that both can also provoke a lawful and harmonious free play of the faculties (154–64). Accordingly, Ercolini once again concludes that Kant's aesthetic theory points toward a positive account of rhetoric, his explicit criticisms of rhetoric notwithstanding.Chapter 5 offers an important analysis of Kant's account of style and tone. Regarding style, Ercolini stresses Kant's recognition of the need to balance logical and aesthetic perfection in order to achieve a “perspicaciousness” that is conducive to true popularity (167–75), while avoiding a fashionable, enthusiastic, and affected style that undermines rational autonomy (175–81). Whereas style can and should engage the understanding, Ercolini argues that Kant thinks that tone necessarily engages the affects (186). Thus, Kant's account of tone is primarily negative in orientation—he emphasizes the need to avoid a “superior” tone that smacks of “elitism, where the philosopher is one of the few who uncovers the secret of philosophy and, as such, holds a superior position over the many who have no such direct access” (193). And yet this negative posture points beyond itself to Kant's commitment to a way of speaking that “facilitates understanding and encourages engagement and exchange” (197).In her conclusion, Ercolini seeks to draw the insights from the preceding chapters together in order to offer an account of Kant's Enlightenment legacy. She pays particular attention to Kant's popular essays. Drawing out their historical context, she characterizes these essays as “argumentative moments in dynamic and lively debates” that describe, theorize, and establish “the communicative space of a vision of politics focusing on public modes of engagement” (202, 200). Ercolini concludes that Kant's popular essays reveal an implicit theory of what she calls “rhetorical judgment,” that is, the “practices of submitting one's thought to the public realm, achieving balance between rigorous examination … and aesthetic perfection” in order to attain true popularity (215).Having offered an overview of Ercolini's argument, I conclude this review by developing three critical suggestions in hopes of inspiring further reflection on the nature, meaning, and significance of Kant's philosophy of communication. The first critical suggestion concerns Ercolini's treatment of Kant's ethical theory. As noted above, Ercolini's treatment of Kant's moral philosophy turns on her distinction between Kant's account of a pure and abstract ethical theory grounded in the categorical imperative and the “impure” and therefore “improper” ethics that Kant presents in his anthropological writings. Though Ercolini is right to claim that scholars have tended to emphasize the former at the expense of the latter, she goes too far in her own attempt to correct for the scholarship's one-sidedness. For Ercolini goes so far as to claim that it is possible to read Kant as grounding morality in anthropology (106). However, the mature Kant consistently maintains that the categorical imperative is and must be the foundational principle of human morality. This observation is not intended to discredit Ercolini's claim that Kant's anthropological writings shed important light on his understanding of communication—they surely do—but it does call Ercolini's way of drawing a sharp distinction between two different “sides” of Kant's ethics into question. It would be productive to further develop Ercolini's careful examination of Kant's anthropological writings by exploring the important and vital connection between Kant's philosophy of communication and his account of the nature and significance of the fundamental principle of morality, that is, the categorical imperative.A second critical suggestion has to do with Ercolini's way of abstracting from Kant's account of reason as spontaneous, free, teleological, and moral. For Kant, the categorical imperative is grounded in reason. The moral law is always reason's moral law, and reason always already demands that morality be efficacious in the world of lived experience. This demand is root and fruit of Kant's account of the highest good, and it ultimately takes the form of an obligation to establish what Kant describes, variously, as a moral world, a kingdom of ends, and an ethical community. Attending to Kant's account of reason suggests that the categorical imperative, as reason's moral law, is always already bound up with concerns with and interests in the well-being of the community. Indeed, Kant emphasizes the importance of speech, communication, and the public use of reason at least in part because these activities are conducive to the realization of the highest good in the world. Accordingly, we do not need to turn away from Kant's “proper” ethics in order to explore the connection between morality, community, and communication. Ercolini's account of the role of communication in humanity's social and political life might benefit from further reflection on the central role that the highest good plays in Kant's moral theory.A final critical suggestion concerns Ercolini's treatment of the Critique of Judgment. For, though Ercolini offers a general summary of Kant's project in this work and a careful analysis of Kant's account of the relationship between poetry and rhetoric, she overlooks several other important and explicit discussions of communication that Kant offers in the third Critique. In particular, an account of Kant's philosophy of communication would benefit from a discussion of Kant's claim that judgments of taste are characterized by their universal communicability, of Kant's account of genius as an artist who is characterized by a special talent for a unique mode of communication, and especially of Kant's suggestion in CPJ §60 that beautiful art is capable of contributing to social and cultural progress by facilitating communication and sympathy between different social classes. Ercolini's discussion of the third Critique is helpful so far as it goes, but this work contains more resources for developing a complete account of Kant's philosophy of communication than Ercolini suggests.In the final analysis, Ercolini's treatment of Kant's philosophy of communication is clear, original, and provocative, and it pursues a number of important questions that are typically overlooked in the Kant scholarship. Kant's Philosophy of Communication makes an original and timely contribution to the scholarship. It will be of interest to scholars working on Kant's social and political theory, and it will be required reading for anyone interested in Kant's understanding of speech, rhetoric, and communication.

The article demonstrates how the Constitution of Medina (622 ce) is a multidimensional rhetoric of justice that countered rampant violence in the nascent city-state known as Medina. To make this argument, the article first introduces this legal-political text and explicates the rhetorical exigence that mandated Medina's inhabitants to articulate a framework for rights and obligations. Second, the article demonstrates how the constitution unified this citizenry by (1) recognizing everyone's equal standing, equality, and rights—especially to religious freedom and justice—across their religious and tribal affiliations; and (2) establishing institutional measures that realize these rights. As rhetoric of possibility, the Constitution of Medina constituted a community and modeled rights discourse.

This essay examines intersectional discourses of race and disability as they emerge in a 2014 wrongful birth lawsuit. Jennifer Cramblett filed the lawsuit after she discovered she was given sperm from the wrong donor resulting in the birth of her biracial daughter. The filing provides an opportunity to understand how rhetorics of identity are intersectional; in this case, how a legal filing for disability structures public arguments about race. Taking a critical intersectional rhetorical perspective, this essay analyzes the case and resultant public discourse to demonstrate how Cramblett enacts a mourning of her whiteness structured by already circulating disability rhetorics.

Documenting and characterizing interactions between student interns and their mentors in the workplace offers perspective on student learning and enculturation that can help us introduce these ways of learning to students in the technical communication classroom, even before the internship. Three student intern conversations in the internship setting are the focus of this close discourse analysis, framed by 6-month-long case studies and Vygotsky’s learning theory. Results indicate that many similarities exist between classroom feedback and mentor feedback in the internship, but that differences in student agency may make negotiation important in the technical communication classroom.

In this study, I present a qualitative analysis of 11 writing portfolios drawn from a yearlong instructional program designed to apprentice students into the practices of argumentative writing typical of early-college coursework in the United States. The students’ formal and informal writings were parsed into utterances and coded along two developmental dimensions: reciprocity, or the extent to which each utterance answered to the immediate context in which it was generated; and indexicality, or the extent to which each utterance evidenced modes of reasoning that reflect the conventions of academic argumentation. My analysis found that although students’ writing evidenced a high degree of reciprocity, they frequently employed nonacademic modes of reasoning. Focusing on a subset of utterances, I show how their tacit orientations toward the concepts of fact and opinion limited the extent to which their reasoning satisfied the evidentiary expectations of formal academic discourse. This discovery suggests that students’ development as writers of academic arguments is closely linked to their formal instruction in argumentative writing as well as to their tacit understandings of concepts fundamental to argumentation. Moreover, these findings highlight important distinctions between formal and informal reasoning and how those distinctions may be implicated in both curriculum and instruction.

“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.

The intention of this assignment is to use stories of refugee experience to cultivate a global perspective in the classroom. The final project of an intermediate college writing course (sophomore and junior level), this assignment asked students to research a topic related to refugee resettlement, apply ideas from course readings to that topic, and reflect on their own perspectives as readers and writers. This writing took the form of a textual analysis essay that combined primary and secondary sources grounded in library research. An emphasis on close-reading and rhetorical analysis provided students with strategies for moving between different modes of literacy (i.e. storytelling, theory, and reflection). The assignment was scaffolded throughout the semester by diverse readings that included memoir, journalist accounts, and scholarship in refugee studies. Although cultivating a global perspective with students was a central learning outcome of this assignment, the term proved difficult to define. This essay discusses how working with student writing provided some clarity on what a global perspective can mean.

Background: Swales's Create a Research Space (CaRS) is a popular model for writing research article (RA) introductions. CaRS prescribes three broad moves-establishing a territory, establishing a niche, and presenting the present work. This study assesses the applicability of a problem-solution patterns (PSP) approach to facilitate Move 1 in CaRS by analyzing RAs in materials science and engineering. Research questions: 1. Is structuring an RA introduction using problem-solution patterns a common approach in published RAs in materials science and engineering? 2. How does PSP facilitate the setting of boundaries between territory and niche in these RAs? Literature review: Variants of CaRS have been widely applied to study RA introductions. Even though the 2004 version of CaRS has been deemed effective in describing the structure of RA introductions in a number of disciplines, its prescription of Move 1 may not be easily operationalized in teaching engineering research writing. For problem- or application-based RAs, the territory can be established with PSP while preserving other CaRS moves. Methodology: This exploratory study employs a text analysis approach to assess 30 RA introductions from three materials science and engineering journals. Results and discussion: PSP is found in most RA introductions. By integrating PSP into CaRS, the proposed model can capture problem-solution cyclicity as a build-up move for territory and niche establishment. Conclusion: Because problem-solving is central to engineering research, RA introductions can be structured using naturally-occurring problem-solution patterns. PSP-CaRS may serve as an effective writing model for RA introductions in engineering-related fields.

The article demonstrates how the Constitution of Medina (622 ce) is a multidimensional rhetoric of justice that countered rampant violence in the nascent city-state known as Medina. To make this argument, the article first introduces this legal-political text and explicates the rhetorical exigence that mandated Medina’s inhabitants to articulate a framework for rights and obligations. Second, the article demonstrates how the constitution unified this citizenry by (1) recognizing everyone’s equal standing, equality, and rights—especially to religious freedom and justice—across their religious and tribal affiliations; and (2) establishing institutional measures that realize these rights. As rhetoric of possibility, the Constitution of Medina constituted a community and modeled rights discourse.

322 RHETORIC A like to have read something more about what this approach to the Dialogus tells us about Tacitus' works, more broadly, and whether the insights that van den Berg derives from the features of Roman dialogues might shed light on Greek dialogues as well. As someone who, prior to reading this book, tended to identify Tacitus most closely with a particular speaker (Matemus) and to find a particular argument most (politically) persuasive (again, Matemus), van den Berg has shown me new and fruitful ways of approaching a challenging and important work.2 Tacitus remains elusive, but this elusiveness is productive and intentional. Daniel J. Kapust University of Wisconsin, Madison Helen Lynch, Milton and the Politics of Public Speech, Farnham, Sur­ rey: Ashgate, 2015. 283 pp. ISBN: 14722415205 Historians of rhetoric interested in public-sphere discussions or in the political discourse of the Renaissance may find interesting this sometimes imperfect but nevertheless suggestive study. Lynch demonstrates how the political rhetoric of John Milton (1608-1674) can be better understood in terms of the pre-Socratic polls as described by Hannah Arendt than in terms of the Continental Enlightenment as described by Jurgen Habermas. Lynch argues convincingly that "Arendt's position is more in sympathy with that of seventeenth-century classical republicans and encapsulates a key differ­ ence between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century perspectives on the pub­ lic realm" (24-25). Although there have been studies of Milton and rhetoric in the past, longer studies have tended to focus on the major poetry, as for instance Daniel Shore's excellent Milton and the Art of Rhetoric. The present text focuses throughout on republican speech in the public arena even as it culminates with a consideration of the dramatic poem Samson Agonistes. In the first chapter—to my mind, the strongest—the author traces image clusters in Milton's political texts that replicate Arendt's distinction between the free Greek citizen speaking in the polis as against the repetitive labor performed in the oikia or household by disenfranchised women, chil­ dren, slaves, animals, and—by extension—merchants, who were typically not citizens and could make no contribution to the important, non-repetitive work of the polis. Milton explicitly takes on the role of speaker in such a polis in his famous Areopagitica (1644), subtitled "A Speech ... for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." Indeed, Lynch correctly reports that the authors in 2 Daniel Kapust, "Between Contumacy and Obsequiousness: Tacitus on Moral Freedom and the Historian's Task," European Journal of Political Theory 8 (2009)293 -311. Reviews 323 contemporary pamphlet wars figured themselves as speakers rather than as authors. Throughout the text, Lynch usefully points out the many reversible and polarizing binaries of that period's polemics and especially Milton's tendency to "define the good and evil versions of all observable phenom­ ena" (61). In chapter 2 of her study, Lynch examines linguistic theories in the period, including various efforts to establish a universal language and also the Royal Society s quest to achieve a one-to-one relation between signifier and signified. Throughout the chapter, Lynch suggests that Milton shared Arendt's concern that political language not be separated from meaning and therefore from action. Chapter 3 examines how rhetoric was gendered in the period, including a delightful discussion of how "embroidery" can refer either to the adornment of masculine speech or to the actual craft activ­ ity that was intended to keep women quiet. The issues of the first three chapters—public polis vs. private oikia, theories of language and action, and gendered rhetoric—help prepare for Lynch's last two chapters on Mil­ ton's drama Samson Agonistes, the most Greek of his poetic texts. In chapter 4, she locates the redemption of language operating in the drama through various polemical binaries and also aligns Samson's experience with the public-sphere civic-mindedness of Pericles' funeral oration as well as with Arendt's image of light for the public sphere. In chapter 5, Lynch usefully discusses Samson Agonistes as a rejection of the romance tradition, particu­ larly in terms of the crime of recreance, which can mean not only treachery but also refusal to act. She compares...

Abstract During the World War II era, a time of civilizational uncertainty, globalism emerged as a rhetorical alternative both to the isolationism predominant before the war and to the Cold War bipolarity that would replace it. A primary advocate for globalism was Wendell Willkie, the failed 1940 Republican presidential candidate who went on to cooperate with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving as his former rival’s proxy and personal representative in two famous overseas trips. While scholarship in rhetorical studies has accounted for the Roosevelt presidency and other forces shaping public discourse during the war and early Cold War, it has generally overlooked the importance of Willkie’s globalism in providing a bipartisan vocabulary with which Americans could describe a postwar peace sustained by interpersonal economics of free trade, global human rights, and burgeoning domestic civil rights. Using Willkie’s 1943 book One World as well as materials from his archives at Indiana University, this essay reads a popular figure and his influential ideas back into our historical narrative, demonstrating how he established what Kenneth Burke termed identification through the use of the related rhetorical strategies of proximity, presence, and ethos, inviting ordinary Americans to imagine a globally interdependent postwar peace.

In this persuasion brief I suggest how rhetorical-historical insights into the scientific and medical discourses of female hormones are relevant to current organizational and institutional diversity initiatives, especially those that aim to increase the number of women in leadership positions. Many of the examples I cite in the essay make specific reference to hormones, and as I argue, hormones often serve an enthymematic function in these expert arguments, both past and present. More specifically, I argue, discourses about hormones allow people who do not possess any scientific expertise to make authoritative-sounding claims that resonate with popular beliefs about women’s bodies and brains. Uncovering these historical tendencies in scientific and medical discourse offers new perspectives on the obstacles that women face in today’s workplaces. In this persuasion brief I aim to discuss these perspectives in ways that make the findings of rhetorical-historical research relevant to the many different stakeholders, leaders, and policymakers who are currently working to help women rise to leadership positions in many different fields.

Over the previous two decades, rhetoricians came to grips with the transition of genetics to genomics by employing rigorous analyses of public discourse, analysis characterized by respect for diverse audiences, attention to precisely what is said, and the historicity of texts. In so doing, they provided helpful models for addressing a new wave of genomics that may threaten to change “genomic medicine” from the curing of disease into the remaking of human beings and the earth’s biosphere. Their work can be read as supporting and illustrating an integrative model of biological and discursive codes as opposed to the hierarchization of mind over body, or the reverse. The inauguration of Rhetoric of Health & Medicine creates a valuable locus for building upon such work, ready to address the new wave of genomics and the on-going challenge of being social creatures who remake ourselves and others.

On the surface, “right-to-try” laws claim to benefit seriously ill patients by expanding their access to experimental medications. I suggest that a broader “Right To Try” discourse, unlike a historically significant earlier critique of FDA practice, ACT UP’s FDA Action Handbook, undercuts the possibility for what Nathan Stormer (2004) calls prosthetic thinking by eliding material experience from its consideration of medical rights. By emphasizing a language of constitutional rights, including an ill-defined belief in a right to health, Right To Try discourse participates in practices that Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) might associate with manufacturing consent, or creating the appearance of personal agency by leveraging public opinion through propaganda. In replacing medical information with language about constitutional rights, Right To Try discourse looks past the reality of physical bodies as well as conceptual bodies of medical knowledge, compromising the possibility for meaningful rhetorical articulation.

This article extends Keränen’s (2010) application of the concept of autopoiesis, or self-generation, to rhetoric by examining how arguments about wellness and natural health self-generate in public discourse. The article analyzes 20 qualitative interviews on what it means in contemporary culture to be “well”—how wellness differs from illness, how it is distinct from health, and how it can be maintained and enhanced. The analysis shows that wellness discourse is predicated on the entanglement of seemingly opposed logics of restoration and enhancement: those who seek wellness through dietary supplements and natural health products seek simultaneously to restore their bodies, perceived as malfunctioning, to prior states of ideal health and well-being, and to enhance their bodies by optimizing bodily processes to be “better than well” (Elliott, 2003). The fusing of these two logics creates an essentially closed rhetorical system in which wellness is always a moving target.

ABSTRACT This essay expands James Aune’s theory of the econo-rhetorical presidency to analyze how presidents define the U.S. fiscal situation. By “fiscal situation,” I refer to any rhetorical representation of the federal government’s ability to create and spend money, levy and collect taxes, and issue debt. Through historical analysis of the “balanced budget” topos in presidential discourse, I find that Presidents Carter through Obama tended to define the U.S. fiscal situation in austere terms, with balanced budgets figured as deontological goods unto themselves. I conclude by advocating for increased critical engagement with economic theory, generally, and theories of the U.S. fiscal situation, specifically.

The publication of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy has led scholars and teachers of writing and information literacy to identify ways of connecting threshold concepts of both disciplines to help students more easily and effectively acquire the transformed perspectives on research and writing. We argue that the practice of addressing writer exigence connects the concepts of IL and WS under a single literate practice. As the motivating matter of discourse, the perception of a particular exigence leads writers to identify a useful audience to address that exigence. Noting that audiences have their own exigencies for reading as well, we explain that writers must construct their texts in ways that signal a text’s exigency for readers, an effort that includes selecting the performances of evidence and writer legitimacy through information literacy. By teaching writing and researching as the literate practice of resolving the writer’s exigence by constructing exigency for particular readers, instructors can effectively link the six Frames of the ACRL Framework and Writing Studies threshold concepts and explain why concepts of both are essential and inextricable.

Given the multimodal nature of new modes of electronic feedback, such as screencasting, there is a need for the application of robust, theoretically grounded frameworks to capture linguistic and functional differences in feedback across modes. The present study argues that the appraisal framework, an outgrowth of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) that focuses on evaluative language and interpersonal meaning, can provide understanding of and discernment between technology-mediated modes of feedback. The study demonstrates this potential through an appraisal analysis of a small corpus of 16 screencast video and 16 text (MS Word comment) feedback files given to eight students over four assignments in an intermediate ESL writing class. The results suggest possible variation between the video and text feedback in reviewer positioning and feedback purpose. Specifically, video seems to position the reviewer as one of many possible perspectives with feedback focused on possibility and suggestion, while the text feedback seems to position the reviewer as authority with feedback focused on correctness. The findings suggest that appraisal can aid in the understanding of multimodal feedback and identifying differences between feedback modes.

Kenneth Burke confessed that Permanence and Change was a secularization of the writing of Mary Baker Eddy that he learned in his Christian Science childhood. Eddy’s Platonic treatment of substance as “truth” engages with the tension between the symbolic and the nonsymbolic, foreshadowing Burke’s treatment of substance in relation to symbol, nonsymbol, and identification. The ways in which substance and identification interact in the works of Plato, Eddy, and Burke follow a line of discursive development that can illuminate critical review of how different forms of public discourse argue for “truth.”

Through a case study of a community organization, The Women’s Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, I present a new framework for circulation strategies. The organization composed and distributed research reports on the gendered inequalities in their local economy, which they aimed to circulate locally. However, they encountered local publics that often resisted discourse on gender and gender-related issues. So, the organization developed a strategy focused not on circulating their work, but on challenging the discursive norms of their local publics that structured circulation and engendered the resistance. My case study reveals new ways to research and strategize circulation—aiming not to circulate texts or disrupt ongoing circulation but to challenge and/or make anew the norms that structure circulation.

This essay proposes that a “governmentality” framework applied to literacy sponsorship in refugee communities can help identify and critique competing agendas of control. By drawing on interview transcripts collected from an after-school program for refugee youth, the essay offers a glimpse of the different perspectives that shape tutor and aid worker discourse. Some of these discourses deceptively appear to be more “acceptable” than others, while sponsors can seem to be limited in their range of rhetorical strategies for talking about their work with refugee students. Michel Foucault’s (1991a) theory of governmentality shows how such discourses do not necessarily emanate from sponsors themselves, as if they are a central location of authority, but from power relations that are diffuse and contradictory. By examining these relations, a governmentality framework can help teacher-scholars in the community identify alternative discourses to those that shape the sponsor-sponsored paradigm.

Starting in the 1970s, frame analysis became a popular technique of textual analysis in different disciplines (communication, mass media, sociology). There is no agreed-upon definition of frame analysis or of ways of measuring its key concepts. This paper explores the relationship between frame analysis and rhetoric. The paper reviews all main concepts developed in frame analysis. Concept after concept, it maps the correspondence between frame analysis and rhetorical concepts. It shows how frame analysis stopped short of developing what was really required to measure frames: tropes and figures. The analysis of a specific text confirms the power of rhetorical analysis for teasing out meaning systems and argumentative structures.

432 RHETORIC A The final topic, that of chapter eight, is lexis, "style." Enos says very lit­ tle about traditional features of style (e.g., pleonasm, prose rhythm), but dis­ cusses instead Demosthenes's "stylistic strategy," which consists primarily of what he calls "chiastic contrasting" (191). More than to chiasmus, this seems connected to antithesis, that is, the "polar" or "diametrical" opposi­ tion between Aeschines and himself. Enos concludes that like Lincoln, Churchill, and King, Demosthenes raised political oratory to a literary art and created a speech perfectly fitted for the political and rhetorical moment. The book could have used some good copy-editing and proof-reading; in particular, the bibliography is not easy to use. It consists of four sections; texts and translation of Demosthenes, translations and studies of Aeschines, studies of Demosthenes, and general studies. The first section is especially difficult: almost all works are under Demosthenes as author, followed by the title, so that if one is looking for X's translation, one needs to remember its exact title (some of the Texas series have the title Demosthe­ nes: Speeches . . ., whereas others are just Speeches . . .). Dilts's OCT is listed as a translation, as are several commentaries (e.g., Wankel's). One author is "Harris Edward Monroe." Etc. In sum, this book has much of value, especially Walker's chapter. But starting from scratch rather than revising a fifty year old publication might have improved its value. Michael Gagarin The University of Texas Vasiliki Zali. The Shape ofHerodotean Rhetoric: A Study of the Speeches in Herodotus' Histories with Special Attention to Books 5-9. Interna­ tional Studies in the History of Rhetoric 6. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015. VIII + 383 pp. ISBN: 9789004278967 This is a well-researched, detailed, and well-presented literary analy­ sis of the Histories of Herodotus that substantiates the author's claim that the Histories is an under-appreciated contributor to the development of rhetoric in the 5th century. As Zali explains, the intent of the work is "to show that in the Histories there is great interest in the rhetorical situation per se; that speakers are very well aware of the process of manipulating and adapting their arguments to suit the particular audience, and they do so systematically" (3). In this way, Herodotus can be understood as anticipat­ ing the rhetorical developments of Thucydides and the more theoretically oriented works of both Aristotle and the author of the Rhetoric to Alexan­ der. The Shape of Herodotean Rhetoric is characterized by the use of specific textual examples to illustrate claims about how the text operates. It also provides an impressive mixture of contextual information that is historical, political, and cultural in scope. These elements are trained on the larger Reviews 433 purpose of "a comprehensive study of particular modes, kinds and effects of speech, exemplified through in-depth discussions of case studies and of the ways these related to two overarching narrative themes: the GrecoPersian polarity and the problem of Greek unity" (31). The focus on these two themes, through the analysis of Herodotus' rhetorical choices, is divided into three sections. In the first section, "Allo­ cation of Speech," the analysis extends to the impact of the speeches both included and excluded as well as the selective use of both direct and indi­ rect speech. Zali takes these selections and choices by Herodotus to be rhe­ torical, choices that are made in order to advance his interpretive and persuasive goals. They are also shown to be empowering for the Greeks as presented in the text and disempowering for the Persians. Zali thus makes a strong case that these choices by Herodotus were not random. As a result, while Cicero and many others have viewed him as the father of history, Herodotus should also be viewed as a significant figure in the development of rhetoric. The text includes an appendix that categorizes all of the debates and conversations in books 5-9 by speaker, addressee and mode of speech (i.e., direct, indirect, and record of a speech act). In the second section of the book, Zali shows that a narrow definition of debate, as consisting only of instances reported as direct speech, yields...

Reviews 437 dianoia (thought) in the Poetics where Aristotle assigns it to his Rhetoric, even though, Bialostosky observes, it occupies, at best, an inferred presence in that work (138). Performing a close and careful rereading of both texts, Bialos­ tosky concludes that Aristotle's assigning of dianoia to the Rhetoric is evidence of what Bakhtin calls a "hidden polemic" Aristotle conducts with a sophisticinspired "poetics of the utterance" that pre-dated both of these works. This line of argument ultimately leads Bialostosky to something of an unexpected reversal. Where he had earlier argued for a separate discipline, or "art of dialogics," he now perceives that art as but one of many that can be "responsive to the predisciplinary scene of action" (146). Drawing upon the architectonics of Bakhtin's early works, Bialostosky now thinks it possi­ ble to "refer our sometimes calcified institutionalized disciplines at least to an imagined, reconstructed common world that preceded them and still underwrites them" (147). Such a world is inaccessible, Bialostosky argues, except through the sorts of "radical inquiries" that "Bakhtin and Heidegger undertook in the 1920s" (147). Such a world is inaccessible so long as we think of disciplines as fixed, able to stay within the boundaries drawn for them. For not only does disciplinarity exceed itself in interdisciplinarity, it also discovers a surplus in its predisciplinary origins. And it is here that Bia­ lostosky sees a particular significance for Bakhtin, whose "dialogic field of discourse [is] broader than the modem disciplines or the ancient ones of rhetoric and dialectic" (82). Heard again as a complete utterance, what questions does Bialostosky's work pose for contemporary inquiry? Does Bakhtin and Voloshinov's inter­ est in intonation, for example, bear any relevance to our interest in sonic rhetorics? Does Bakhtin's regard for the historical significance of the "per­ son-idea" connect to recent investigations into the meanings of embodi­ ment? Is the shift from epistemology to ontology, as posited by the new materialism, reflected in Bialostosky's conception of Bakhtin's architecton­ ics as predisciplinary? These questions cannot be answered here. But if Bakhtin still speaks to us, as I believe he does, then Bialostosky's essays will serve as exemplary models of how to engage Bakhtin with care, insight, and admirable rigor, and collectively, as an invitation for future dialogues. Frank Farmer University of Kansas Cinthia Gannett and John C. Brereton, eds., Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies, New York: Fordham Uni­ versity Press, 2016. 444 pp. ISBN: 9780823264537 This book contributes in welcome and valuable ways to the history of rhetoric, the history of education, and current rhetorical pedagogy. It is an 438 RHETORICA enriching read, with provocative and significant theoretical implications. These essays raise important questions concerning central disciplinary issues and make available to both theorists and teachers richly encompass­ ing and hence highly generative curricular models with wide applicability. I thoroughly enjoyed the time spent perusing these pages and have already begun to draw upon the resources herein to bolster both my own scholar­ ship and teaching. This Jesuit tradition brings into view a rhetorical para­ digm that is truly "transdisciplinary" (xv). As the editors acknowledge, the book provides the "first maps of this huge intellectual geography" (xv). Therefore, I look forward to future scholarship on Jesuit contributions to rhetorical theory and pedagogy. Following the three distinct periods of Jesuit education from its beginnings in the sixteenth-century to the present day, the book is divided into three sections: 1) studies of Jesuit rhetorical instruction from 1540, when Ignatius Loyola and friends founded the Society of Jesus, to 1773, when Jesuit education was suppressed by the pope; 2) studies of Jesuit rhetorical education from 1789, when many Jesuits moved to North Ame­ rica and established colleges and universities, to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which marked the end of the rhetoric-centered curricu­ lum in Jesuit institutions; and 3) studies of developments in rhetorical ins­ truction in United States' Jesuit higher education from the 1960s to the present. Although some description of the grammar school classroom appears in several early chapters, the primary emphasis of the book is on higher education. Each section contains a loosely...

Reviews James J. Murphy, ed., Demosthenes' On the Crown: Rhetorical Perspec­ tives, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 232 pp. ISBN: 9780809335107 This book has a curious history. First published in 1967 by Random House under the title, Demosthenes' On the Crown: A Critical Case Study of a Masterpiece of Ancient Oratory, the exact same work was then republished in 1983 under the same name by Hermagoras Press. The current volume is a "revised version" of the 1983 publication; the 1967 publication is not acknowledged but is mentioned by one author (201, n. 30). The revision consists of a new Introduction by Murphy, five new chap­ ters (out of eight), and a new half-page epilogue by Murphy. The three retained chapters (from the 1967 publication) are chapter two, a brief sum­ mary of Aeschines' career followed by a summary of his speech Against Ctesiphon by Donovan Ochs; chapter three, a translation of On the Crown (OTC) by John J. Keaney; and chapter four, a brief structural abstract of OTC by Francis Donnelly, first published in 1941. The five new chapters are chapter one, a background chapter on Demosthenes and his times by Lois Agnew, chapters on Aristotle's three main rhetorical divisions - includ­ ing chapter five on ethos by David Mirhady, chapter six on pathos by Richard Katula, and chapter seven on logos by Jeffrey Walker - and an eighth chapter on lexis by Richard Enos. The goal of the volume, according to the introduction is to make OTC "come alive"; in more modest terms, the book seems to be aiming to pro­ vide everything a student unacquainted with the speech might need to appreciate Demosthenes's rhetorical ability and, for more advanced stu­ dents and scholars, to demonstrate how the principles of Aristotle's Rheto­ ric can help appreciate the greatness of OTC. In my view, several chapters succeed quite well in accomplishing this latter goal, while several are less successful. In chapter one, "Demosthenes and his Times," Agnew gives a thor­ ough account of Demosthenes's life and career; she is particularly good at sorting out facts from legends, and she produces a more balanced assess­ ment than the many pro-Demosthenes accounts. I note only two minor mis­ takes. On page 25, the three charges Aeschines brought against Ctesiphon's decree are misstated; the first (not having completed his term in office) is Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 4, pp. 430-439. 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:/ /www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.Org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.4.430. Reviews 431 stated twice (in slightly different forms) and the second (presenting the crown in the theater) is omitted (the correct charges are on 38, 153). And in the Harpalus affair Demosthenes was not tried in the Areopagus but by a popular jury (see 29). Chapters two and three are adequate, though barely so. Ochs's account of Aeschines's career is highly oversimplified, especially after Agnew's more complex treatment, and his summary of the speech is based on the 1928 Bude edition; a few more recent studies could have been noted (espe­ cially Harris), which are in fact in the bibliography. I cannot see any use for Donnelley's structural abstract, chapter four, which I just find confusing. In chapter five, Mirhady uses Aristotle's view of ethos to understand Demosthenes's sustained and generally successful attempt to portray him­ self as a good democratic citizen, better than his rival Aeschines. Mirhady is a bit dismayed, however, by the (also successful) use of vitriolic rhetoric to portray Aeschines as a piece of scum. In his final thought, Mirhady cau­ tions that this "sustained invective should give readers today some uneasi­ ness about the tendency of democracies to fall under the sway of negative discourse" (126). Mirhadv's concern must be even greater now than it was when his chapter was written. Katula's assignment, chapter six, is pathos. Using Aristotle's theory...

Using concepts and methods from technical and professional communication and linguistics, the authors conducted an observational study of the voice of community members (CMs) in the deliberation of a behavioral institutional review board (IRB). In the discourse of deliberation, they found that CMs had an effective voice in constructing the compliance of individual research protocols under IRB review. But they also found that CMs had an ineffective voice in representing their African-American community, particularly in their efforts to advocate for more consideration of minority research sites and subjects and a fuller consideration of minority community attitudes.

Reactionary conservative groups such as the sovereign citizen movement are increasingly prominent—and violent—in the United States. These groups cohere around their own unique discourses of law, language, and history, which are often dismissed as meaningless, or even “crazy.” Following Jacques Lacan’s injunction that the analyst must “let the subject speak,” this essay will examine sovereign citizen rhetoric as a coherent, internally consistent field of meaning exhibiting the traits of psychotic discourse in which the metaphorical operation of the law-as-signifier is disavowed. Doing so illustrates not only the powerful intersection of communication and psychoanalysis but also the potential for a rhetorical reading to challenge the most violent collective psychoses.

Although models for recovering and theorizing black women’s discourse have focused on examples of communicative eloquence, competence, verbal prowess, and depictions of strategy, these frameworks do not completely account for the racialized threats of violence black women sometimes incur as consequences for their participation in public dialogues. To understand how risk and penalty are activated against black women intellectuals on television and social media, this essay analyzes the controversy and subsequent social media backlash Wake Forest University professor and former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry experienced in late 2013 after off-hand remarks about former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s African American grandchild. When read as the consequence of feminist literacy practices and signifying enacted within a hostile surveillance culture, Harris-Perry’s experience reveals an adverse rhetorical condition that penalizes and silences contemporary black women speakers and intellectuals.

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.