This article introduces a roundtable on teaching long poems by British women writers, presented as a special session at the 2014 Modern Language Association conference in Chicago. The articles in the roundtable provide teaching strategies that are pertinent to the writers under review but can easily be extended to many more writers and works. The resistance of students to long poems by any poet, much less by women, reveals that professors still have much work to do in establishing lesser-known women writers as coequal with their better-known male contemporaries. This resistance is a teaching opportunity to address issues of genre, gender, and canonicity. In a larger sense, the articles argue for the potential of pedagogical practice to reconstitute the canon.

This article argues that the short-story cycle should be central to teaching American literature, because the genre crystallizes major tensions of American literary history: marginality and inclusion, the individual and the community, and the formation of a national literature from transnational and local materials.

This article examines illustrations in two medical texts written in China’s Northern Song dynasty. Compared with medical books produced in previous dynasties, these two texts incorporated more illustrations with enhanced beauty and usability. These visual features, I argue, carried rhetorical attributes that helped these texts negotiate their way into printing, circulation, and becoming canonical in their own genres. At the same time, they also facilitated efficient and accurate reading through reduced visual clutter and enhanced accuracy, and thus appealed to both the elite and the public readership. The article reviews these visual strategies and their implication for technical communication today.

Using the British Academic Written English corpus, this study focuses on the use of grammatical complexity features in university level texts written by first language (L1) English writers to demonstrate knowledge and perform other specialized tasks required of advanced academic writers. While the primary focus of the analysis is on writing development from first-year undergraduate to graduate students, we also consider interactions with discipline and genre. The study goes beyond most previous work on grammatical complexity in writing by investigating the use of phrasal as well as clausal features. The results show that as academic level increases, the use of phrasal complexity features in writing also increases. On the other hand, the use of clausal complexity features in student writing, particularly finite dependent clauses, decreases as academic level increases. Results further indicate that the extent of the differences across level is mediated by discipline and genre, reflecting patterns observed in research on disciplinary variation in professional academic writing.

“Because the Timely Warning genre positions the university community as a “wooden opponent” – it cannot succeed in its goal of developing relationships to maintain safety.”

Research problem: Content strategy, whether narrowly focused on the production of web-based materials for customers or managing the data, information, and documentation of an entire enterprise, has become the latest in a series of movements and methods that have sought to improve the integration of professional and technical communication with the marketing, training, and business processes of organizations. Research questions: How is content strategy defined and described in professional and scholarly literature? What do these definitions and descriptions suggest about the direction of the field of professional and technical communication? Literature review: The theoretical foundation of this study is Classical Rhetorical theory which, for thousands of years, has provided critical methods and vocabularies for the analysis of discourse; my purpose in using it here is to rely on a consistent lens that has served professional and technical communicators well. Classical rhetorical principles can give us useful insight into content strategy, the latest in a series of movements that have captured the attention of professional and technical communicators because they have promised to expand the scope of the work and move the work from the fringes of organizational activity to the center. Previous movements include knowledge management, single sourcing, and content management. Methodology: Because content strategy is an emerging area, I conducted an integrative literature review to characterize this emerging field. This involved a systematic search of peer-reviewed and professional literature on content strategy that met specific qualifications, reading and collecting information from each source about its answers to the research question and its authorship, and analyzing those data to find patterns in them. Results and conclusions: Because only two peer-reviewed sources existed on content strategy, the majority of the literature reviewed emerged from the trade press. I survey the definitions of content and content strategy provided by this literature, and found that almost every definition uses content as part of the definition, leading to some lack of clarity in all of those definitions. But three areas of consensus exist among the definitions: that content strategy is: (a) more inclusive of the lifecycle of content (addressing the processes of creating, revising, approving, publishing, and revising material), (b) integrated with technical and business requirements, and (c) largely focused on material used by customers and, therefore, focused on marketing and support documents. It primarily focuses on traditional genres of content and overlooks emerging genres. The literature suggests that content strategy provides a pathway to make the work of technical communicators more central to organizations. But the literature offers only broad advice for doing so, with few examples (other than some specific templates, which primarily benefit those who already have experience with content strategy). The advice primarily comes from authors working in consulting firms and, as a result, might not reflect the challenges that professional and technical communicators who work internally experience.

PROVOCATIONS is a Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP) series focused on peer-reviewed, open-access projects that have the same specific gravity as a short monograph, but take the form of experimental genres, fruitful and unusual collaborations, and/or mediated, born-digital formats. PROVOCATIONS projects offer new scholarly perspectives, challenge current understandings of our field, and suggest new approaches to the work we do.

Abstract Recently, the work of Jacques Rancière, particularly that work which theorizes the distinction between the police and politics as it maps onto the activity of the (re)distribution of the sensible, has become of interest to rhetorical studies. However, this work is performed with little attention to how the term “rhetoric” actually emerges in the material texts authored under the signature of Jacques Rancière. In this article, I intervene in the movements characterizing our field's contemporary uptake of Rancière's philosophy by offering a reading of his The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, paying particular attention to its mobilization of the distinction between poetics and rhetoric and offering a conceptualization of poetics that, although necessarily built from a violent characterization of rhetoric, can become a productive companion to a more egalitarian rhetoric of social change.

AbstractThe genre of philosophical commentary is characterized by an attitude of textual deference, or what I call a principle of authority. To read in conformity with the authority principle is to forego the prerogative to judge that the author has made a mistake. This article offers a defense of the principle of authority as hermeneutical precept by showing that it facilitates the practice of philosophy as care of the self. When its function is so understood, the authority principle turns out to be compatible with a substantial degree of intellectual autonomy and is also epistemically benign.

Writing researchers have long attempted to classify and describe patterns of citation and source use both to describe disciplinary differences, and to identify discourse-level characteristics of new knowledge production. The analysis of large corpora has provided great insights about the formal characteristics of citations, but little information about their rhetorical nature, which we know from interview studies as central to the understanding of source use practices. This study reports on an attempt to understand and describe patterns of source use across disciplines, genres and levels of participation through systematic verbal data analysis of documents produced by sixteen participants in expert/novice pairs (faculty advisor/doctoral advisee) from four disciplines (Computer Science, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science Engineering and Humanities and Social Sciences). The results of this analysis showed that, despite some disciplinary differences, all participants used similar patterns of reference use, namely elaboration, evaluation and relation to one’s own work.

This article discusses five trends in research on writing as a learning activity. Firstly, earlier decades were marked by conflicting views about the effects of writing on learning; in the past decade, the use of meta-analysis has shown that the effects of writing on learning are reliable, and that several variables mediate and moderate these effects. Secondly, in earlier decades, it was thought that text as a medium inherently elicited thinking and learning. Research during the past decade has indicated that writing to learn is a self-regulated activity, dependent on the goals and strategies of the writer. Thirdly, the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) movement emphasized domain-general approaches to WTL. Much recent research is consistent with the Writing in the Disciplines (WID) movement, incorporating genres that embody forms of reasoning specific to a given discipline. Fourthly, WTL as a classroom practice was always partially social, but the theoretical conceptualization of it was largely individual. During the past two decades, WTL has broadened to include theories and research that integrate social and psychological processes. Fifthly, WTL research has traditionally focused on epistemic learning in schools; more recently, it has been extended to include reflective learning in the professions and additional kinds of outcomes.

Two long-standing assumptions on which writing centers operate are that individual tutoring helps students’ writing development and that the actual talk of such tutoring enables such development (Bruffee, 1984; Lunsford, 1991; Gillespie & Lerner, 2008; Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2015). Questions, long thought of as one of the most important pedagogical tools, enable writing tutors to tap into students’ knowledge of writing, help them clarify the writing task, advance their thoughts, and advise them indirectly on how to proceed further. Whereas writing center lore has emphasized the importance of questioning in non-directive tutorials, scholars have only recently begun to explore empirically tutors’ actual use of questions more generally in tutorials, the differentiated functions of questions, and the strategic use of questions in tutorial discourse (Thompson & Mackiewicz, 2014).In this study we present an original, empirical scheme for coding question types in writing tutorials derived from 15 writing tutorial sessions in our own corpus of the genre. We apply this functionally oriented scheme to one typical session to show how questions operate locally, how they are distributed across a session, as well as how they achieve both pedagogical and organizational goals within such interactions. The use of questions in this tutorial is compared with question use in 14 other sessions to discover patterns in tutors’ questioning behavior. Our findings provide insight into how tutors’ strategic use of particular question types can empower students to become more active participants in the tutorial.

This article proposes novel methods for computational rhetorical analysis to analyze the use of citations in a corpus of academic texts. Guided by rhetorical genre theory, our analysis converts texts to graph-theoretic graphs in an attempt to isolate and amplify the predicted patterns of recurring moves that are associated with stable genres of academic writing. We find that our computational method shows promise for reliably detecting and classifying citation moves similar to the results achieved by qualitative researchers coding by hand as done by Karatsolis (this issue). Further, using pairwise comparisons between advisor and advisee texts, valuable applications emerge for automated computational analysis as formative feedback in a mentoring situation.

This useful, clearly written, and highly satisfying book is Laurent Pernot’s second major English-language contribution to rhetorical scholarship, after his 2005 Rhetoric in Antiquity (originally La rhétorique dans l’antiquité in 2000). Here Pernot builds on work from his earlier career, in particular his 1993 La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain.The point of departure, in Chapter One, is the striking proliferation of epideictic genres in later antiquity—or, at least, the number of genres recognized as “epideictic” by rhetoricians, rhetors, and their audiences. Whereas Aristotle has a limited notion of the epideictic “genus,” by Menander Rhetor’s time, roughly the late third century, the category has evolved to include a wide range of genres, each with its own distinct (if overlapping) inventional topoi. The list includes the traditional funeral speech (epitaphios logos) and the festival speech (panēgyrikos logos) as well as various kinds of encomia in praise of individuals, cities, harbors, aqueducts, and so on. There is also the imperial oration, the birthday speech, the nuptial speech delivered outside the bedroom door, the welcome-speech to an arriving official as he stepped ashore, and the farewell speech when he left. There were also forms of speech that took the functions of ancient poetry, such as the victory-speech (the epinikios logos), a prose equivalent to Pindar’s odes for victorious athletes, or Aelius Aristides’ “hymns” and “monodies” in prose (see Regarding Sarapis). At the same time a number of ancient, poetic forms persisted, such as hymns to the gods and mythic narratives (e.g., the Dionysiaca, a 48-book epic poem about the god’s conquest of India), and these were called “epideictic” too.And so on again. I have not yet even mentioned Hermogenes of Tarsus’ classification of all poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure panegyric,” i.e., as epideictic rhetoric (On Types of Style 2.12). Further, as Pernot suggests in Chapter Three (97–99), encomiastic or parainetic praise might function as an important element in practical deliberative and judicial discourse, and even as a kind of deliberative discourse in itself. (Parainesis praises ethical virtues and exhorts the listener to observe them, as in Isocrates’ To Nicocles.) While Pernot may not be willing to go that far, we do find confirmation in Byzantine lists of model texts for imitation, in which Plutarch’s Moralia (Ta Ēthika) stand as examples of the “deliberative” genre.Pernot’s basic point in Chapter One is that the “rise of epideictic” to ascendency in later antiquity was an “irresistible” and “unstoppable” phenomenon (27) that the usual histories of rhetoric have mostly failed to understand. But if we set aside the usual assumption that epideictic is “mere” display, epideictic proves itself more creative and more vital—and more pragmatically consequential—than we tend to think.Pernot addresses this challenge in two main ways. The first is to define epideictic more precisely—to specify what is not epideictic. If, for example, we follow Aristotle’s audience-subject-time definition of the three (why three?) “genres” of rhetoric, it appears that there are two fairly specific kinds of practical civic speech addressed to judges in a well-defined civic space (a court of law, a council-hall, a public assembly), and besides these a third and vaguer kind, epideictic, which is not addressed to judges but to theōroi, “observers/spectators.” The audiences of the two practical genres (jurymen, councilors) are empowered to issue legally binding decrees (Socrates is guilty; send reinforcements to the expedition in Sicily). The theōros of epideictic, in contrast, is not empowered to issue binding judgments, but is concerned with observing a display (epideixis) of praise or blame in the present moment. Epideictic is defined in terms of lack.The argument would take too long to work out here, but the ultimate effect of that definition is to assign all speech not specifically addressed to judges in some sort of court or council-hall to epideictic. All speech, after all, implicitly blames and praises in some way. If you refute my argument you “blame” its defective reasoning; if you defend and confirm it, you “praise” the quality of its undeniable proofs. Even at the level of word choice, to state the obvious, every choice implies some evaluative attitude toward what is named, and thus implicitly blames or praises it. So we have a three-part classification of rhetorical genres consisting of two specific kinds of speeches (judicial and deliberative) and all other human language use (epideictic).Pernot’s basic remedy is to limit the notion of epideictic to encomiastic discourse: a more or less determinate genre (as codified, for example, in ancient progymnasmata manuals) whose evolution can be traced from a handful of early exemplars to the profusion we see later. This move has the virtue of keeping epideictic within the category of civic discourse. The encomium, the panegyric, and their derivatives are normally performed in some sort of sanctioned civic space or event, such as a state funeral, a religious festival, a celebratory homecoming for a victorious athlete, and so on, by a person specially commissioned for the job and considered worthy of it. The speech then worked to forge or refresh a communion of shared belief by eliciting approval for the praise bestowed on the honoree—a rhetorical effect that often was more important than the honoree’s real character (see Leslie Kurke’s The Traffic in Praise).The second approach to the “unstoppable” rise of epideictic in later antiquity is mostly an extension of the first. We need to consider the socio-political structure of the Greco-Roman world, and the occasions and spaces it provided for public speech, in order to understand the proliferation of encomiastic genres. As I have argued elsewhere, we cannot explain the rise of epideictic merely by invoking the supposed “decay” of judicial and symbouleutic rhetoric. In fact, in every major town and city in the Roman Empire there were courts of law and council-halls, and these continued to be busy (if confined to local matters and restrained by procedural regulations and written law). To understand the rise of epideictic/encomiastic rhetoric, we must understand the role it played in sustaining the sense of a common culture shared by the far-flung, multiethnic elites that ran the Roman Empire (which one could argue was more like a multinational corporation than a modern state). From this perspective, the encomiastic culture of epideictic very effectively performed the role attributed in Cicero’s De Oratore to the “perfect orator.”Two quick remarks. One: identifying epideictic with civic encomia has many virtues, as noted above, but I wonder what happens to, for example, Hermogenes’ treatment of poetry, history, and philosophy as “pure” epideictic (panegyric)—as opposed to “practical” (civic) epideictic. These “pure” (meaning unmixed) types can be seen as also participating in praise and blame, and as forging or undermining different kinds of cultural communion. Two: the notion of sustaining a common culture among the Roman Empire’s administrative class—some of whom were Syrians, Greeks, North Africans, and so on—is very appealing, but I suspect that some readers will want to hear more about the less-irenic tensions in Greco-Roman culture and what role Hermogenes’ “pure epideictic” genres played in ideological insurgencies.From here I will be very brief. My water-clock has just about run out.Chapter Two, “The Grammar of Praise,” details the lists of topoi specified for different types of epideictic, offers a brief typology of speeches, and makes a list of characteristic figures (apostrophe, hyperbole, and comparative metaphor). Much of this will not be news for anyone familiar with Menander Rhetor, but it will be an excellent introduction for those who are not. The core argument, regarding epideictic as an instrument of communion, will be interesting to all.Chapter Three, “Why Epideictic Rhetoric?” takes on the traditional suspicion of epideictic as empty flattery and/or inconsequential display. Most of the arguments of this chapter are reflected in the paragraphs above: epideictic rhetoric has persuasory functions that are socially and politically consequential. Perhaps what is most interesting in this chapter is Pernot’s account of the circumstances of epideictic performance in antiquity and, especially, his estimates of the length of epideictic speeches (82): for example, Aelius Aristide’s Regarding Rome takes about one hour to deliver; imperial panegyrics took 30 minutes. (The addressees, after all, were busy people.) This chapter is worth the whole book.Chapter Four, “New Approaches in Epideictic,” suggests directions for future research. These include an “anthropological” application of speech-act theory to the performative and ceremonial aspects of epideictic discourse, and the uses of silence and “veiled” discourse to communicate what might be dangerous to say, or to promote subversive “dissent and denunciation” instead of “communion.” This will, I suspect, be the preferred direction of many readers. Pernot, however, both acknowledges that preference and calls for “a little more patience” with epideictic as an irenic and utopian instrument of communion (99–100). It may not be a bad idea to consider it that way first.

Field narratives that (re)classify technical genres as liberating for women risk supporting the notion that feminism is a completed project in technical communication scholarship. This article suggests that technical communicators reexamine the impact of past approaches to critical engagement at the intersections of gender studies and technical communication; cookbooks provide a material example. The authors illustrate how a feminist approach to cookbooks as technical/cultural artifacts can productively revise field narratives in technical communication.

While reading research often collapses or creates a binary between print and digital reading, this article argues that this approach ignores the overlap between the reading strategies we use when reading both print and digital texts. Using a genre-based approach to digital reading, this article proposes that greater attention to students' reading practices and to the genres (including conventions and contexts) students read will help them become more purposeful readers in our classrooms.

Scholars of rhetoric and writing have long recognized the mediated nature of rhetorical action. From Plato’s early indictments of writing as enemy of memoria to Burke’s recognition of instrumental causes to recent analyses of digital mediation, the study of meaning-making refuses one-to-one, transparent theories of communication, instead recognizing that there is more to rhetorical action than humans. This article follows the trail of Haas, Swarts, and others arguing that analyses of mediation uncover much about human motives, digital communities, and rhetorical action. I argue that technologies often function as rhetorical genres, providing what Miller characterizes as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” that occur in uniquely digital spaces. Working from sites of participatory archival creation and curation, I argue that invisible rhetorical genres operating at macroscopic levels of scale are central to shaping individual and communal activity in sites of distributed social production. To support this claim, I investigate two applications—a content management system called Gazelle and a bittorrent tracker called Ocelot—to demonstrate how largely invisible server-side software shapes rhetorical action, circumscribes individual agency, and cultivates community identity in sites of participatory archival curation. By articulating content management systems and other macroscopic software as rhetorical genres, I hope to extend nascent investigations into the medial capacities of digital tools that shape our collective digital experience.

This article introduces the concept of stylization and illustrates its usefulness for studying online discourse by examining how writers have employed it in order to parody sexist products such as BIC Cristal for Her, using genderlect in order to introduce dissonance into and reframe patriarchal discourse. A corpus analysis of 671 reviews, written from August through October 2012, confirmed a dramatically higher presence of lexical items and adjectives often stereotyped as feminine, compared to a reference corpus of other parody reviews, as well as the GloWbe corpus housed at Brigham Young University. A qualitative analysis shows the stylized use of these features, and how they contribute to the construction of personas that are intended to mock the sexism inherent in BIC’s advertising. This analysis hopes to encourage more attention to how stylization functions in emerging online genres.

K6015, a South Korean firm seeking to commercialize its magnet technology in the US market, entered a technology commercialization training program structured as a competition. Through this program, K6015 (and others in the program) used several genres to progressively interest different sets of stakeholders. To understand how K6015 applied these genres, we analyze this case study in terms of interessement, a concept from actor-network theory, and standing sets of transformations, a related concept from workplace writing studies in which enacting a set of genres entails a controlled, progressive transformation of arguments. We examine the entire competition process, using K6015 and three other competitors to illustrate this process and to examine rhetorical transformations responding to different criteria. In enacting these standing sets of transformations, K6015 and other competitors transformed their innovations into commercialized technologies–and transformed themselves from innovators into entrepreneurs. Finally, we discuss implications for understanding entrepreneurship rhetorically.

This essay examines what a translingual orientation offers to the study and teaching of genre, in particular what we gain when we think of genre difference not as a deviation from a patterned norm but rather as the norm of all genre performance. A translingual perspective draws our attention to genre uptake as a site of transaction where memory, language, and other semiotic resources, genre knowledge, and meanings are translated and negotiated across genres, modalities, and contexts. Focusing on genre uptake performances shifts attention from genre conventions to the interplays between genres where agency is in constant play.

Success rates for basic writers have improved dramatically thanks to recent efforts to rethink and “accelerate” developmental education. This article will begin to answer the question of what is happening to students as they go through these accelerated options, particularly a co-requisite model like ALP. It starts by questioning the very notion of “basic writer.” There is no meaningful difference between groups of students labelled developmental and groups labelled credit-worthy. By encouraging students to think about genre—both to study genre and to write within genres—in ALP classes, the author argues that students will begin to think of themselves more as writers and less as basic writers. A simple action research project is explained and seems to validate that the intensive writing atmosphere of ALP classes can help move student identity in new directions.

Occluded genres in academia work “behind the scenes” to support and develop an academic’s professional identity. However, while significant attention has been paid to occluded genres that support an academic’s identity as a researcher, very little scholarship examines how occlusion operates in genres of pedagogy, such as the syllabus, teaching statement, or assignment prompt. These genres promote and endorse an academic’s teacherly identity, not only by expressing a teacher’s authority and expertise in the classroom, but also by representing a teacher’s pedagogical philosophy, activity, and experience in other academic scenarios beyond the classroom. In this article, I explore the characteristics of occlusion associated with these genres as well as the implications faced when their rhetorical complexity is obscured by that occlusion. Ultimately, I argue for an increased awareness and study of the occluded contexts of pedagogical genres so that we may better understand how these genres facilitate the pedagogical activity and identities of teachers within academia.

To clarify the role of desire in discursive practice, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and Lacanian theories of the unconscious. The former, it is argued, might be refined to shed more light on actors’ unconscious investments in and resistance to the desires maintained by genres. The latter, meanwhile, might be refined to address how desires are materialized in concrete situations. These refinements can be achieved when the two approaches are synthesized in a theory that figures genres as resources by which actors coordinate and materialize desires. This argument is developed through an extended investigation of students’ desires to perform particular kinds of identities as they compose career portfolios.

In addition to teaching research and writing skills, First-Year Composition classes are well situated to help students develop strategies for managing stress and increasing well-being. I describe an assignment sequence in which students interview others from three generations about topics related to happiness and well-being, analyze shared transcripts, and present their findings in two genres. Beyond providing instruction in research methods, academic writing, and multimodal composing for non-academic audiences, this sequence supports the five elements of authentic well-being outlined by positive psychologist Martin Seligman: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and purpose, and accomplishment. These assignments and related course content foster emotional literacy by prompting students to approach happiness and well-being as academic subjects and to develop practical strategies for implementing what they’ve learned.

Five scholars who study the rhetoric of health and medicine share our diverse perspectives on the Ebola outbreak that began in West Africa in March 2014. Using a unique multi-vocal approach, we raise questions for future research on the rhetoric of vaccines and vaccination, such as the role of visualizations in risk perception, the individuation of blame, the role of genres in vaccine development, and the rhetorical presence of material conditions that promote disease transmission. Our overall goal is to initiate scholarly conversation about Ebola specifically and about outbreaks and vaccine development generally. Through our conversation, we explore subjects such as risk perception and data visualization, individuation of blame, genre systems, and the materiality of outbreaks. Together, our analyses suggest that vaccines, while a highly effective means of disease prevention, can also function rhetorically to draw attention away from the broad array of material and socioeconomic conditions that lead from a single infection to an outbreak. But by investigating what is revealed, what is concealed, who is blamed, and who is exonerated in discourses about vaccines and outbreaks, rhetoricians can contribute to the development of effective—and ethical—medical and communicative interventions.

Research problem: Our study focuses on how students collaborate online to produce specific written genres, using particular collaborative technologies to work together productively, and how instructor feedback and student perspectives on collaborative work influence those activities in online classrooms. Research questions: When composing using collaborative web-based writing applications, do students focus primarily on the interface or the text space? What kinds of expectations about collaborative writing do students bring to the interface and text space? To what extent can we characterize students' acknowledgement of a third space, what we have identified as “communicative interaction?” Literature review: Workplace collaboration is important because organizations increasingly demand effective collaborators, team members, and team leaders, and technologies for sharing, cobuilding, and feedback are readily available to support these activities. Student preparation for workplace collaboration is important because students struggle when they are asked to write together, particularly when the collaborative process involves new technologies, and yet knowledge of collaborative writing strategies and experience with collaborative technologies, such as Google Docs, are the very competencies that organizations expect of them. Methodology: Thirteen groups of 3 to 4 technical writing students and science communication students enrolled in online professional writing courses at a major research university wrote feature specifications and reports on the globalization of the sciences, respectively, using Google Docs within Google Drive. Sixteen of 37 students responded to a set of questions asking them to reflect on their experiences working collaboratively, learning new genres, using the collaborative environment, and revising with instructor feedback. Results and conclusions: We found that students struggled most with adapting their already established collaborative strategies grounded in face-to-face learning situations to an online learning environment, where they felt their means of communication and expression were limited. The results suggest that effective collaborative experiences, properly executed, represent a repertoire of competencies that go well beyond only technical considerations, such as being able to effectively assign roles, set milestones, and navigate the numerous tasks and processes of writing as a team. The small number of students and the single instructor with her own particular feedback style limit the study. Future research includes looking at how different feedback styles influence student collaborative writing.

Research problem: In light of the growing popularity of LinkedIn as a self-promotional tool for the job search process, this paper examines the rhetorical structure of LinkedIn Summaries. Research questions: (1) Which rhetorical moves are found in the Summary sections of LinkedIn profiles? (2) Do the Summary sections display similar patterns of textual organization? (3) What strategies do the writers of the Summary sections deploy to achieve these rhetorical moves? Literature review: This paper has a genre analytic theoretical orientation of approach, whose underlying assumption is that genres sharing the same purposes and context of use are likely to have similar organizational patterns and to deploy similar strategies to achieve these purposes. Previous research on LinkedIn has focused on characteristics of the service and its impact on interactions, but not as a medium used in the classroom. A much deeper literature exists on job application letters, which concludes that a job application uses similar rhetorical moves, or discoursal units that perform distinct communicative functions, to a sales promotion letter. The moves include: introducing candidature, establishing credentials, essential detailing of candidature, indicating value of candidature, offering incentives, enclosing documents, using pressure tactics, soliciting response, and ending politely. Methodology: It is a study that analyzed the rhetorical structure of LinkedIn Summaries of 50 professional résumé writers in the US from a genre analytic perspective. Results and conclusions: The LinkedIn Summary shares many moves in common with the job application letter. Moves that were found in all or nearly all of the texts were establishing credentials, identifying target market and detailing service; an additional move, not seen in job application letters, was also identified-that of personal branding. However, a rigid organizational structure was not seen. The results and the methodology used to obtain them will be of use to students and others wishing to use LinkedIn to promote themselves to potential employers. The study is limited to one particular professional group in one region, but there is ample scope for further research looking at LinkedIn profiles in other professions and other parts of the world.

A hybrid assignment, a research-based academic essay paired with a research-based weblog, incorporates elements from both personal and academic writing to challenge students to critically think about how and why they write privately and publically. Students writing into this new model of public discourse can experiment with stance and tone across genres to exercise their abilities as responsible and flexible writers.

“We point out how remix and participatory culture are effective rhetorical moves against this type of psychological terrorism. By repurposing Ulmer’s genre of the “popcycle,” we put forward the concept of the “participatory popsicle.””

In this essay, I build on current work in rhetorical genre theory to read a historical genre for the affective uptake(s) it generates. Medically authored child-rearing advice literature developed as a genre in Britain between 1825 and 1850; this new genre instantiated anxiety as the central affect of middle-class maternal subjectivity. This rhetorical genre analysis both extends our understanding of this period and the history of motherhood; it also contributes to the developing affective turn in rhetorical genre studies by offering a way to begin reading for affective uptakes.

This article presents data from an electronic survey asking 101 entrepreneurs in Wisconsin and North Alabama about the documents they write before opening and while operating their businesses, the writing skills they value, and the audiences they consider when writing. The results demonstrate that entrepreneurs highly value writing and rhetorical skills, produce a huge range of documents, and require distinctive genres at different stages of their ventures. The results can help professional communication instructors, entrepreneurship and small-business consultants, and aspiring entrepreneurs to more effectively anticipate and meet the rhetorical challenges of opening and operating a business.

Background: The diffusion of component content management and structured authoring workflows and technologies in technical communication requires that instructors of documentation courses determine effective ways to teach component content management to students who may initially be intimidated by authoring environments and structures, such as the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). This teaching case describes how component content management and DITA were integrated into the Creating User Documentation course of an undergraduate professional writing program. Research questions: How can instructors of technical and professional writing best teach English and humanities students to operate within a structured authoring workflow? How can computational abstraction be combined with students' previously acquired genre knowledge to ease their adoption of the DITA to create technical documentation? Situating the case: The development of this course was informed by literature from a variety of scholarly and industry sources, which reveal connections between DITA, computational thinking, and Rhetorical Genre theory. Specifically, the concept of “layers of abstraction” guides the development of the course's structure, allowing students to separate and independently process the various aspects of a structured authoring workflow. How the case was studied: The case was studied informally through the experience of the authors as they developed and taught the course, through informal discussions and structured interviews with industry professionals, and through student reflections from discussion forum posts from Fall 2012 through Fall 2013. About the case: Initially developed with a focus on print manuals and online help, the course began teaching topic-based authoring in the mid-2000s; however, most enterprise-level editors and tools were cost-prohibitive for students and faculty. Furthermore, many computing concepts associated with structured authoring were intimidating for an audience of students in an English department. An affordable solution was adopting the open-source DITA standard, using free trials or open-source editors. The intimidation factor was minimized by designing the course around five layers of abstraction that draw on students' previous rhetorical knowledge: Layer 1: Developing quality documentation, Layer 2: Separating content from design, Layer 3: Authoring granular content with XML, Layer 4: Authoring and linking Component Content Management modules with DITA, and Layer 5: Single-sourcing and content reuse. This case discusses each layer of abstraction, the associated assignments for each layer, and the results of each layer based on student feedback. Results and conclusions: Although the course is not universally loved by students, it has seen many successes and provides a much-needed foundation in component content management and structured authoring for students who might become technical communicators. The teaching team has learned to avoid overemphasizing coding and automation in structured authoring, maintain a solid grounding on writing principles and good technical communication requirements, and draw upon students' existing knowledge of genres and their constraints.

Research problem: The widespread adoption of component content management in organizations calls for a comprehensive summary of the territory of this phenomenon. A summary provides stakeholders in component content management with a sense of how the practice has evolved and its implications to research, theory, and future practice. The last such review was published in 2003. This integrative literature review is intended to fill the gap in the literature by describing the current state of component content management as presented in the current publications. Research questions: How is “content” currently defined, described, and approached in the component content-management literature? What processes and tools are organizations adopting to achieve the goals of component content management? Literature review: The theoretical orientation of this review is Rhetorical Genre theory, which allows for classifying individual components as a genre characterized by granularity, reusability, and potentiality. Component content management gained recognition in the mid-1990s when early adopter organizations were looking for more efficient and effective approaches to reusing information between similar products or versions of the same product. Developments in the 2000s include a surge of publications focused on defining and describing component content management; new best practices for implementing a component content-management initiative; evolving processes and technologies for creating highly engineered, modular content that can automatically adjust to specific user requests and device capabilities; and collaborative efforts to integrate content creation and management strategies across organizational units. Scholarly and trade publications increasingly explore different concerns; whereas scholarly publications tend to offer critical perspectives on component content management, trade publications tend to describe processes and technologies and articulate best practices. Both focus on the goals of component content management, such as single sourcing, content reuse, multichannel publishing, and the structured content components required to achieve these goals. Methodology: To answer the research questions, we reviewed the body of literature on component content management. To do so, we searched library databases, Google, and Amazon.com for articles and books in both the scholarly and trade literature; we also sought out publications by well-known voices in component content management who direct successful consultant and/or research organizations. We then classified selected publications in relation to research questions and identified themes within each research question. The review did not explore other types of content management. Results and conclusions: Current component content-management literature suggests that component content management has evolved from a practice focused on single sourcing and reuse strategies for product documentation to a mature discipline concerned with designing pre-sales and post-sales information products for a multitude of devices and delivery channels. In recent years, trade publications have led the way to standardizing the discipline's core concepts, methodologies, processes, and technologies, such as structured content, structured authoring, single sourcing, component-based content strategy, Extensible Markup Language authoring tools, and component-content-management systems. Scholarly publications, however, have had comparatively little impact on advancing the discipline of component content management because only a handful of publications have focused on the topic and almost no crosstalk exists between these publications and the trade literature. Several questions about the practices of component content management still need to be answered, particularly in the areas of multilingual communication and content quality and usability. Based on the results of the literature review, we call for a coherent, robust, and ambitious component content-management research agenda that addresses topics such as content quality and usability, the diffusion of content-management systems, and global content management and that leads to studies that both advance scholarship and improve component content-management practice.

Reviews Kathleen S. Lamp. A City of Marble. The Rhetoric of Augustan Rome. South Carolina, 2013. 208 pp. ISBN 9781611172775 What is the relationship between rhetoric, both spoken and visual, and ci\'ic participation in Augustan Rome? A City of Marble. The Rhetoric of Augustan Rome, attempts to address this question, beginning in the intro­ duction by examining Augustus' Famous assertion that he "entered Rome a city of brick and left it a citv of marble". The study goes on to examine how visual displays function themselves as a form of persuasion that, in Augustus' case, helped him to win and maintain power. Her argument is that Augustan culture was heavilv influenced bv rhetorical theory, which in turn "guided ci\ ic participation and rhetorical practice" (p. 5), and fur­ ther, that the synthesis of rhetoric to image and politics in so sweeping a manner was a central aspect of Augustus' accomplishment. The first chapter surveys Rome's "rhetorical situation" upon Augustus' assumption of sole command. One of the conundrums Augustus faced was how to maintain the goodwill of those he governed. Lamp asserts (p. 13) that Augustus' attempts to gain acceptance were rhetorical from the standpoint that "thev represented a tvpe of persuasive communication between the peo­ ple and the government about the workings of the state". A significant part of his rhetorical strategy7 was his reliance on various mythological traditions such as those of Aeneas, Romulus, and of the monarchy and its demise. Chapter two ("Seeing Rhetorical Theory") argues that the ancient theory of rhetoric broadened under the empire to include other literary genres beyond oratorv, including non-traditional forms of media not usually associated with rhetoric, including coins, monuments, and city planning. The chapter inclu­ des a good discussion of the relationship between the visual and memory in rhetorical theorists, focusing on Quintilian and Cicero who clearly associ­ ated the two, and who, in addition, addressed the role of monuments and urban spaces in creating collective public memory. The next chapter ("The Augustan Political Myth") builds on the first two, and starts with a close examination of the Ara Pads as a piece of Augustan rhetoric, examining how it constructed myth and memory in Augustan Rome. She argues that the altar used conventions of rhetoric that were roughly analogous to those expounded in the rhetorical theories of Cicero and Quintilian with a view to addressing its audience. Chapter four Rhetorica, Vol. XXXIII, Issue 4, pp. 431-442. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541. C 2016 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.php7p—reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rh.2015.33.4.431. 432 RHETORICA ("Let Us Now Praise Great Men") similarly examines the Forum of Augustus and its rhetorical function; the chapter begins with a discussion of Isocrates theory of rhetoric that argued against the use of visual media or static representative forms of rhetoric, such as statuary. Of course, this is precisely what Augustus' forum was - a monument that employed a permanent, visual record intended to educate the audience in a particular set of values with a view to imitation, something that had a long-standing tradition in Rome, particularly with the use of funerary images. The chapter concludes with an interesting discussion of how the rhetoric of the forum itself parallels its function as an administrative and judicial center where oratory would be practiced. Lamp then turns in chapter five ("Coins, Material Rhetoric, and Circu­ lation") to the dissemination of the Augustan political myth. She traces, via the numismatic record, the creation of that myth, but further argues that it evolved over time, noting that the coins issued at the end of his reign indi­ cate a popular acceptance of that myth. She focuses on three aspects of Augustus' program prior to 13 BC: pietas, succession, and the trifecta of peace, victory, and prosperity. In the numismatic record after 9 BC we find emblems designed to emphasize Augustus' pietas and his role as poutifex maximus, while she notes that prior to...

Through genre awareness, first-year writing students compose a book review to practice habits of mind.

“The insights afforded by GFA matter—especially for research that is designed to create spaces in which to listen to marginalized people’s perspectives.”

For at least the last several decades, argumentative writing has been of central importance in secondary and higher education, and this emphasis has been heightened by argumentation’s designation as a “cornerstone” of the Common Core State Standards. Moreover, this focus on argumentation has been encouraged by extensive scholarship that investigates how argumentation is learned and deployed in various settings and how the teaching of argumentation might be improved. However, far less attention has been paid to determining why so many literacy educators,researchers, and policy makers believe that privileging argumentative writing is justified.Using a methodology that combines ethnographic case study of writing pedagogy in an urban high school with theoretical analysis of scholarly writings that endorse argumentation, in this essay I demonstrate that the prominence of argumentation is underwritten by three commonly held assumptions: (1) that argumentative writing promotes clear and critical thinking, (2) that it provides training in the rational deliberation that is essential for a democratic citizenry, and(3) that it imparts to students a form of cultural capital that facilitates their upward academic and socioeconomic mobility. My findings are that these assumptions are unwarranted and that schools’ overemphasis on argumentation imposes severe limits on what counts as valid thought,legitimate political subjectivity, and a feasible strategy for addressing economic inequality. This study’s implication is that educators should reassess the value of argumentation and revise ELA curricula to include more diverse genres and discursive modes.

This article aims to engage specialists in writing pedagogy, assessment, genre study, and educational technologies in a constructive dialog and joint exploration of automated writing analysis as a potent instantiation of computer-enhanced assessment for learning. It recounts the values of writing pedagogy and, from this perspective, examines legitimate concerns with automated writing analysis. Emphasis is placed on the need to substantiate the construct-driven debate with systematic empirical evidence that would corroborate or refute interpretations, uses, and consequences of automated scoring and feedback tools intended for specific contexts. Such evidence can be obtained by adopting a validity argument framework. To demonstrate an application of this framework, the article presents a novel genre-based approach to automated analysis configured to support research writing and provides examples of validity evidence for using it with novice scholarly writers.

AbstractThe public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article. Correction StatementThis article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1. 1I thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Andrew King for their generous comments and my colleague Michael Zerbe for his advice and time. This article is stronger for their input.2. 2For examples of this scholarship, see Charles Bazerman's The Languages of Edison's Light, Alan Gross, Joseph Harmon, and Michael Reidy's Communicating Science, and James Wynn's Evolution by the Numbers.3. 3For examples of recent projects discussing the role of rhetoric in public debates about science, see Leah Ceccarelli's On the Frontier of Science, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon's Science from Sight to Insight, and Aimee Kendall Roundtree's Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination.Additional informationNotes on contributorsGabriel CutrufelloGabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at gcutrufe@ycp.edu.

Quad charts are a genre frequently used in scientific and technical environments, yet little prior work has evaluated their potential for reinforcing technical communication fundamentals. This article provides background information about quad charts and notes the benefits of implementing quad charts in the classroom. In particular, introducing engineering students to this genre appeals to their tendency to outline information and incorporate visuals in the planning stages of the composing process. The authors share their approach for integrating quad charts within a collaborative project in a fluid dynamics course and note the ways in which the genre facilitated effective project planning and communication within student teams.

This essay draws on genre theory and recent conceptualizations of the personal as rhetorical in order to investigate the collective stakes of writerly self-representation. Contextualizing and analyzing a widely published early twentieth-century genre, the vocational autobiography, I argue that female professionals made use of the rhetorical resources available in the genre to personalize their professional identities, counteracting a widespread discourse of exceptionalism and flouting widespread advice about the necessity of strict separation between personal and professional identities. By using personal narratives to depict their gendered and embodied presence in powerful professional spaces such as laboratories and newsrooms, female writers made use of this genre to normalize their presence and to open up access to such spaces for other women.

Genre analysis has become an important tool for teaching writing across the disciplines to non-native English-speaking (EL2) and native English-speaking (EL1) graduate students alike. Since the pressing needs of EL2 graduate students have meant that educators often teach them in separate classes, and since genre-based research into teaching higher-level writing has been largely generated in fields such as English for Academic Purposes, we have an insufficient understanding of whether this instructional mode plays out similarly in EL1 and EL2 classrooms. Launching a genre-based course on writing research articles in parallel sections for EL1 and EL2 graduate students provided an opportunity to address this knowledge shortfall. This article qualitatively examines the different classroom behaviors observed in each version of the course when a common curriculum was used and specifically explores three key themes: initial receptivity, nature of student engagement, and overall assessment. Our study shows that although EL2 and EL1 learners have similar needs, the obstacles to their benefitting from genre-based instruction are different; EL2 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support that transcends linguistic matters, while EL1 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support despite their linguistic competence. Providing the same mode of instruction can benefit both populations as long as educators are sensitive to the specific challenges each population presents in the classroom. The insights gained contribute to the scholarship on genre-based teaching and offer ways of better meeting the needs of EL1 and EL2 students alike.

Research problem: Over the past decade, the popularity of fantasy sports games has grown dramatically. A fantasy sport is a simulation game in which game players act as owners to build, manage, and coach imaginary teams that compete against one another, based on statistics generated by actual players or teams of a professional sport. In line with this, we have seen the emergence of various forms of media content being produced directly for those who participate in fantasy sports games-the most prolific example of this is writing for fantasy sports. This study aims to establish an understanding of how fantasy sport articles are currently being constructed by assessing the contributions of professional journalists and amateur writers. Research questions: RQ1: If the standardization of written discourse genres stems from the reciprocity between generic conventions and the responses to situations, then what are the differences between the discourse strategy used by professional journalists and that by their amateur counterparts in fantasy sports writing? RQ2: What are the writers' rhetorical goals and the reader-writer relationships they wish to establish through the fantasy sports texts? Literature review: This study is rooted in the notion of genre, a communicative event through which the writer and reader interact to make meanings in a particular context. Communication of fantasy sports involves the production of content that provides readers with news, analysis, and opinions about-and knowledge of-matters that concern the games, thus creating pools of intelligence which other fantasy sports players can use, add to, argue against, or ignore. This amateur-produced content and resulting knowledge communities formed by fantasy sports players have led to a genre development that professional communicators should examine because it reflects so much technical documentation and instructions have migrated into user-generated spaces. “The move” in genre analysis is a meaningful rhetorical unit that is related to the communicative purpose of a social activity and that contributes to the text's overall strategy within its situational context. Moves operate in coherence rather than isolation in a text. Methodology: A discourse analysis was conducted on 60 fantasy sports texts (30 by professional journalists and 30 by amateur writers) randomly selected from a few specific sources in 2012. A custom move scheme was devised for analyzing fantasy sports texts in this study. The results were analyzed using a chi-square test. Results and discussion: Results reveal significant differences between the discourse strategy used by professional journalists and that by amateur writers. These differences include amateur writers differing to some extent in their rhetorical goals from professional journalists as they offer media consumers a more balanced spread of information, that professional journalists place a substantially lower value on making predictions, that amateur writers and professional journalists share similar regard in terms of the appropriate amount of casualness to include in their writing although amateur writers are more included to build casualness in their articles, and that the use of writing techniques to invite further connection or engagement from readers is being underutilized by both professional and amateur writers. The major implications for the professional communicators are the insights into user-generated content, an approach in which organizations increasingly rely on for their product and service documentation.

This article examines how the Computers in Writing-Intensive Classrooms (CIWIC)/Digital Media and Composition (DMAC) Institute has realized founding director Cynthia L. Selfe's commitment to prioritizing people first, then teaching, then technology. I analyze how institute curricula introduce and model pedagogies for teaching digital composing, foster networking among participants, articulate a critical stance toward technology, and encourage newcomers to enter the field as administrators and scholars (as well as teachers). I also draw on participant documents (social media posts, publications, and CVs) to investigate the uptake of these ideas. Moving forward, I suggest that in light of the institute's growing emphasis on digital composing, 1) knowledge-making should be seen as the larger frame for CIWIC/DMAC work, and 2) research should be added to the institute's existing articulation of the field in terms of people→teaching→technology.

Perelman rediscovered the values aspect of epideictic: It “strengthens the disposition toward action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds.” Burke's entelechy claims that humans unconsciously act upon themselves in accordance with the implicit value systems of the entelechies with which they identify. The two are here merged in a genre study of the gospels.

Protein folding is an important area of research in bioinformatics and molecular biology. The process and product of protein folding concerns how proteins achieve their functional state. A particularly difficult area of protein folding is protein structure prediction. There are many possible ways a protein can fold, and this makes prediction difficult, even with the aid of computational approaches. Protein folding prediction requires significant human attention. Foldit, an online science game, provides an innovative approach to the problem by enlisting human beings to solve puzzles that correlate with protein folding possibilities. Such work aligns broadly with emerging trends in citizen science, where non-experts are enlisted for productive alliances. We examine Foldit, commonly looked at as a dynamic community, and suggest such communities actually have potential to be relatively static and to reproduce and maintain a set of power relations. We make this argument by combining perspectives from Rhetorical Genre Studies and Actor-Network Theory.

AbstractPeople use software in service of complex tasks that are distributed over sprawling and idiosyncratically constructed technological and social networks. The aims and means of carrying out those tasks are not only complex but uncertain, which creates problems for providing help if the tasks, starting points, and endpoints cannot be assumed. Uncertain problems are characteristic of networks, and software forums stand out as effective public spaces in which help can be pursued in a network fashion that differs from traditional help documentation. This article describes the results of a quantitative descriptive study of such practices in four software forums.Keywords: documentationforumsinstruction setsnetworks NotesThis study received an exemption approval from North Carolina State University IRB on November 24, 2010. IRB approval #1774. A condition of approval is that all quoted material is kept anonymous to the extent possible.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJason SwartsJason Swarts is a professor of English at North Carolina State University. His research and teaching centers on mobile communication, coordinative work practices, and emerging genres of technical communication.

This volume consists of a unique genre that is compiled from Omar Swartz’s previously published “online and otherwise small print periodicals during the years of 2001–2009” (ix). The book consists ...

This article analyzes literature on university–workplace partnerships and professional writing pedagogy to suggest best practices for workplace mentors to mentor new employees and their writing. The article suggests that new employees often experience cultural confusion due to (a) the transfer of education-based writing strategies and (b) the employees' lack of cultural knowledge of the new workplace. The article then outlines implied mentoring strategies based upon this transfer and lack of cultural knowledge. The article also analyzes the literature on discourse community theory, activity theory, service learning, and internships, each of which also imply potential mentoring practices. These comprehensive best practices are also contextualized through social cognitive, community–cultural, and motivational–attitudinal components that writing mentors should consider when mentoring writing in the workplace.