Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.

This study examined the impact of different forms of feedback on the writing of a group of 82 adolescent students in secondary English classes. During a 6-week intervention, students were randomly assigned to one of three feedback groups: peer feedback on pen-and-paper drafts, teacher feedback delivered electronically through a course management system, and automated feedback generated through computer-based writing evaluation software. Pre- and post-measures of student writing quality, length, and correctness were analyzed, and survey data explored student perceptions of their experiences. Findings indicate that all students, regardless of which form of feedback they received, wrote longer essays and scored higher on holistic ratings at post test than they did at pretest. Neither language status nor group assignment had a greater or lesser impact on performance on length or holistic quality. However, differences between feedback groups spiked on the proximal measure that examined mastery of particular aspects of the genre being taught. Both peer feedback and teacher feedback delivered electronically had a statistically significant impact on student performance in the genre of open-ended response. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future research and instruction in the secondary context.

Research problem: The question: How Korean entrepreneurs in an entrepreneurship program revised their slide decks for their presentations (“pitches”) in response to professional communication genres representing feedback from potential stakeholders in their target markets is examined. Research questions: As entrepreneurs learn to pitch ideas to unfamiliar markets, how do they revise their slide decks for their pitches when interacting with other professional communication genres that represent the concerns of market stakeholders? Specifically, what changes do entrepreneurs make to the claims, evidence, and complexity of arguments in their pitches? Literature review: The professional communication literature demonstrates that the revision process tends to take place in documentation cycles where documents are set in interaction with each other. Yet such revision processes are not studied in detail in existing studies of entrepreneurial pitches in marketing and technology commercialization. Methodology: In this exploratory qualitative study, researchers textually analyzed 14 sets of five related document genres in the archives of an entrepreneurship program. These genres represented a full cycle of activity: application to the program, initial pitches, initial feedback from program personnel, detailed feedback from representative stakeholders in the target market, and revised pitches. Interviews and surveys of program personnel further contextualize the data. Results and conclusions: Entrepreneurs revised their claims and evidence based on their dialogue with their target market. Some of the entrepreneurs altered their slides to make more complex arguments rebutting stakeholders' concerns. These findings suggest that entrepreneurs engage in dialogue with their target markets, but their engagement tends to be guided by tacit, situated experience rather than through an explicit, systematized approach.

In this study, we examined 11 workplaces to determine how they handle termination documentation, an empirically unexplored area in technical communication and rhetoric. We found that the use of termination documentation is context dependent while following a basic pattern of infraction, investigation, intervention, and termination. Furthermore, the primary audience of the documentation is typically legal and regulatory bodies, not the employee. We also make observations about genre, collaboration, and authorship in these documents.

Scholars have recently begun to conceive of literacy practices as drawing from resources that are simultaneously situated and extracontextual. In particular, studies of transnational literacy affirm the importance of both locality and movement in literacy studies. Continuing this inquiry into the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy, the author investigates the distinct effects that shuttling between national contexts have on the accumulation and use of genre knowledge. Specifically, through a case study of one Third Culture Kid student writer, the author reports on how her genre knowledge develops in response to transnational relocations between Italy and the United States and the way this transnational genre knowledge informs her writing of a high-stakes in-school genre. This case illustrates the value of rhetorical genre studies for understanding the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy and begins to outline the distinctiveness of transnational boundary-crossing practices.

This article reports instruction supporting the development of fifth grade English learners’ argumentative writing in an English language arts setting. Arguments analyzed for the study were produced by the same students on two occasions, roughly 3 months apart. In the first instance, students discussed the source text in detail, but were given no genre-specific support for writing. Following professional development, the teacher introduced students to the stages, or structural elements, expected in argumentation, with genre-specific scaffolds. Classroom data illustrate how the teacher scaffolded students’ argumentative writing. Analysis of writing data identifies the text- and stage-level features of students’ responses, with particular attention paid to students’ construction of the reason stage, in which writers must explain why textual evidence supports their overall position on a question about a character or theme. Findings describe the range of responses and point to characteristics of texts and prompt that may influence children’s written argumentation.

This essay focuses on new materialist reconfigurations of social theory that alter understandings of agency, identity, subjectivity, and power. This research lends itself to recognizing writing as radically distributed across time and space, and as always entwined with a whole host of others. After overviewing new materialist efforts to draft a robust concept of matter, I explore the value of this work for twenty-first-century writing studies through the lens of acknowledgments, a genre wherein relationality is dramatized.

Close examination of one first-year composition student’s portfolio of process materials for an advertisement analysis assignment reveals that an early attachment to an idea and a poor understanding of audience can prevent students from developing as writers. I reflect on how greater attention to rhetorical genre theory can provide new directions for prewriting activities and strategies that may help students move beyond thinking only from the perspective of the school essay.

Abstract: In this paper, I report the effects of explicitly teaching five technical genres to English first-language students enrolled in a multi-major technical writing course. Previous experimental research has demonstrated the efficacy of explicitly teaching academic writing to English first-language adults, but no comparable study on technical writing exists. I used a mixed-method approach to examine these effects, including a control-group quasi-experimental design and a qualitative analysis to more fully describe the 534 texts produced by 316 student writers. Results indicated the genre participants constructed texts demonstrating a significantly greater awareness to audience, purpose, structure, design, style, and editing than participants taught through more traditional approaches. Within the technical genres, participants demonstrated greater awareness to audience, purpose, and editing in the job materials text type than with correspondence or procedures text types.

Spontaneous writing observed in chats, instant messengers, and social media has become established as productive modes of communication and discourse genres. However, they remain understudied from the perspective of writing process research. In this paper, we present an empirical study wherein keystrokes made by chat users in a game were recorded. The distributions of the inter-key intervals were analyzed and fitted with ex-Gaussian distribution equation, and an argument for psycholinguistic interpretation of the distribution parameters is presented. This analysis leads to establishing a threshold of 500 ms for the identification of pauses in spontaneous writing. Furthermore, we demonstrate that pauses longer than 1.2 s may correspond to higher-level linguistic processing beyond a single propositional expression (functional element of the discourse).

Reviewed are: Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus, eds. Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities Jay Jordan First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground Jessica Restaino

Dear Colleagues and Friends~~This month's issue includes various genres- articles, symposium contributions, review essay, exchange, and poster page-that tap both time and space. In these collective texts, we have historical perspectives helping us understand our own past and allowing us to update our present; linkages to other fields of endeavor so as to enhance our own; connections across spaces to other sites of writing around the world; and closer looks at our own sites-hence the title of this introduction. As represented here, our field includes a capacious view, and as we expand sites of inquiry and activity, we have a more robust and complex view. In this introduction, then, I'll summarize each of these contributions before taking up two other tasks: (1) outlining the treat in store for us, in the combined September and December special issue of College Composition and Communication, we will learn from colleagues about various and diverse Locations of Writing; and (2) sharing with readers our new policy on rememberingIn our first article, Expanding the Aims of Public Rhetoric and Writing Peda- gogy, Writing Letters to Editors, Brian Gogan takes up how the conventional assignment of the letter to the editor can be located in what he calls an ap- proach to public rhetoric and writing pedagogy that is conducted according to the tripartite aims of publicity, authenticity, and efficacy. Drawing on his work with students, Gogan expands on these single-concept aims to situate them in relationships: publicity-as-condition and publicity-as-action, authenticity- as-location and authenticity-as-legitimation, and efficacy-as-persuasion and efficacy-as-participation. Gogan also argues that we should separate and emphasize the participation the letter-to-the-editor genre entails from the persuasion that may be its aspiration: when the efficacy of the letter-to-the- editor assignment is expanded so that it is understood in terms of participation that may lead to persuasion, public rhetoric and writing pedagogy embraces the fullness of the ecological model [of writing] by seeing the wide range of effects-persuasive or not-there within.Continuing recent work recovering our collective writing pasts, our next article details the experiences of several 19th century women, some of them from the U.S., making their educational way at Cambridge University. In 'A Revelation and a Delight': Nineteenth-Century Cambridge Women, Academic Collaboration, and the Cultural Work of Extracurricular Writing, L. Jill Lam- berton focuses on the writing these women engaged in, especially outside the classroom, in order both to succeed in the classroom and to affect wider spheres of influence. Defining this writing as a form of collaborative peer activity foster- ing agency, Lamberton identifies three benefits accruing to her 19th century subjects: (1) use of extracurricular writing that augmented and enriched cur- ricular learning; (2) use of writing to develop social networks and circulation; and (3) use of such writing to shift public opinion, looking outside the college or university for broader audiences to voice support and agitate for change.Mya Poe, Norbert Elliot, John Aloysius Cogan Jr., and Tito G. Nurudeen Jr. return us to the present as they consider how our writing programs can be enhanced: by adapting a legal heuristic used to determine what in the law is called impact. In The Legal and the Local: Using Disparate Impact Analysis to Understand the Consequences of Writing Assessment, these col- leagues first distinguish between inequities produced by intent from those produced unintentionally-the latter called disparate impact-before outlin- ing a three-part question-driven process that can identify such instances and work toward ways of changing them:Step 1: Do the assessment policies or practices result in adverse impact on students of a particular race as compared with students of other races? …

ABSTRACTContemporary genre theory is dominated by metaphors of evolution and speciation; this article proposes alternate metaphors of spatiality and exchange. A spatial understanding of genre permits more productive interactions between literary and rhetorical genre theory. A reading of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy as a multigenred text suggests some of the potentials of this approach.

Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound in twentieth-century American culture that offers examples of how sound functions argumentatively in specific historical contexts. Goodale argues that sound can be read or interpreted in a manner similar to words and images but that the field of communication has largely neglected sound and its relationship to words and images. He shows how dialect, accents, and intonations in presidential speeches; ticking clocks, rumbling locomotives, and machinic hums in literary texts; and the sound of sirens and bombs in cartoons and war propaganda all function persuasively in rhetorical ecologies that contain words, images, and technologies. The book opens with an anecdote that foreshadows Goodale's basic mode of operation. FDR's iconic phrase “The only thing to fear is fear itself” loses much of its persuasive power when encountered only as words on a page. A significant aspect of its rhetorical force was Roosevelt's use of a pause after “fear” and before “is.” The silent pause invited listeners to fill in the gap with their own imagined fears and allowed Roosevelt to break this tension with a strong emphasis on “is” that focuses the audience's attention on “fear itself” (1–2). The cadence and sound of his voice was tailored to take advantage of the persuasive affordances of radio and does not translate to the page. Rather than isolate sound as an object of study in the manner of sound studies, Goodale's examples and close readings prompt his readers to integrate sound into the mainstream of rhetorical scholarship.Along with McLuhan, Goodale argues that humanities researchers have neglected “ear culture.” Following critiques of modern and Western visual bias, he locates the origin of this tendency in Plato's allegory of the cave and its reproduction in scholarship that emphasizes texts and archives. Even though twentieth-century technologies have increasingly made it possible to archive sound, most digitization projects have centered on archiving texts and images, with some of the online sonic archives being almost “as ephemeral as speech itself” (5). Texts and images are also much easier to reproduce in print journals that are still the valued venue for scholarship. And sound has failed to transcend disciplinary boundaries. While words are still central to English departments and images are still central to art departments, they are both engaged widely across many fields in a way that sound is not—sound predominantly remains the scholarly property of music departments. Even the field of speech communication, for Goodale, gave up its previous emphasis on voice and sound after the invention of television—film, television, and the internet have long surpassed the phonograph and radio as areas of interest in communication (6). While there is a growing movement surrounding sound, from Jonathan Sterne in sound studies to Joshua Gunn in communication, Goodale maintains that a significant hurdle for sound's wider dissemination across the humanities is that it is difficult to “read” in the traditional humanities sense of the term. His book sets out to show how these difficulties can be overcome. Less a theoretical treatise on sound, than a series of close readings that practice this form of sound criticism, the book seeks to show that sound can be read closely and on par with images and words.In chapter 2, “Fitting Sounds,” Goodale develops readings of recorded presidential speeches to show that a significant shift occurred in the sound of presidential oratory in the period between 1892 and 1912. Grounding these readings in the notion of a “period ear,” he culls together evidence from the language of political cartoons to verbal cues in early phonographic recordings and literary novels to public speaking textbooks to show how the mixing of dialects and accents influences presidential rhetoric. Over this period, the increase in foreign-speaking immigrants, the rising influence of labor on politics, the dissemination of recording technologies, and changing ideas of masculinity drive a shift from a theatrical or orotund style through a transitional period to a vernacular, instructional voice. The orotund style, which Goodale examines through short, close readings of the speeches of Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, is modeled on Shakespearean actors and conveys a sense of elite class and power in its weightiness and gravitas. Every letter and every word is articulated clearly and heard distinctly. The style is marked by rolling r's and y's pronounced like a long i rather than ee (28). This kind of slow pacing and specific pronunciation was often needed to project to larger crowds in the less than ideal acoustic surroundings in which political speeches were often delivered. Goodale identifies a transitional, contextualizing moment marked by works such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, whose characters spoke in a more vernacular style, by actors such as Henry Irving, who rejected the orotund style in one of the first phonographic recordings of Richard III, and by speech teachers such as Brainard Gardner Smith, who began to advise orators to “speak as if before friends” (33). Goodale shows the turn in oratory that favored the instructional, plain style of professors through a close analysis of an early recording from Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 campaign that combined bits of his stump speech “The Right of the People to Rule” and his Progressive Party convention speech, “Confessions of Faith.” Roosevelt edited the speeches into a four-minute recording that was intended to reach broader audiences in the home and the saloon. Roosevelt fails to trill his r's, fails to pronounce every consonant and syllable, and speaks in the key of C (ascending and descending along the scale), in an attempt to mimic popular music, much of which was written in that key. The changing historical context created certain “sonic expectations” among public audiences that prompted Roosevelt to become the first president to sound like the people, providing Goodale with evidence that persuasively demonstrates the significance of sound in Roosevelt's recordings.Chapter 3, “Machine Mouth,” focuses on the quintessentially modern sounds of the clock and the locomotive to examine how sound can pierce or fragment identity and transform into a “sonic envelope” that protects and strengthens identity and community. What began as a “war of the working class against the clock” is taken up and celebrated by modern artists and composers and eventually turns into the accepted ambient sound of modernity. Pre–WWI artists, writers, and composers, embrace the deterritorializing of modern noise. Cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque paint with sharp staccato lines that run through their subjects, fragmenting them into multiplicities. Goodale reads this as imitating the sharp sound of modernity and its effect on listeners. Braque's Woman with a Guitar (1913) exemplifies this technique, featuring lines cutting through the figure that connote the lines of a musical staff or the strings of a guitar. Futurists such as Carlo Carra and Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti challenge visual artists and poets to render sound and noise through movement, vibration, and color. Carra sees sounds as always “freed from their origin” (58) and uses techniques such as acute angles, oblique lines, and subjective perspectives to translate these sonic sensations into images. Umberto Boccioni observes that “an object moving at speed (a train, a car, a bicycle) appears in pure sensation in the form of an emotional ambience, which takes the form of horizontal penetrations at acute angles” (58). However, this cultural work serves to familiarize and domesticate these sounds, which produces “sound envelopes.” Goodale argues that futurist poet Marinetti's attempts to imitate the ear's ability to hear simultaneous sounds from multiple directions anticipates Hitler's orations. Marinetti's writing is intentionally disturbing, violent, and chaotic. But rather than fragmenting the self, Hitler used “the sound of his voice, his mechanized armies, and the crowd to unify a massive group into a single body politic” (61). Hitler uses the microphone, loudspeaker, and radio to envelop his listeners in sound. Vocal domination and the manipulation of applause create a comforting sonic envelope. Triumph of the Will, for example, uses microphones, martial music, cheers, church bells, and Hitler's amplified voice to “make an incredibly persuasive aural experience, one that bathed listeners in an impermeable sonorous envelope” (64). Adapting to these initially jarring modern sounds, audiences recompose them into a soundscape that creates identification rather than disrupts identity—in Hitler's case with disastrous results. Goodale examines a number of sonic artists up through bluesman Bukka White's integration of locomotive sounds into song to show how this “period ear” transforms over time—modern sound starts as jarring assault and becomes ambient soundscape. Radio plays a key role in this transformation because listeners can control the volume, turn to stations that align with preestablished identities, place the radio in familiar environments such as the home or church, and place the radio at the center of a sonic envelope rather than experiencing a sonic assault from all sides.In chapter 4, “The Race of Sound,” Goodale examines sonic persuasion even more directly, showing how tropes related to race were eventually used to upend mainstream sonic segregation. This chapter focuses on music cultures of the interwar period and the ways musicians collaborated directly and indirectly in order to navigate the record industry's racialized genre categories and eventually rearticulate them. Goodale provides close readings of a recorded oral history from ex-slave Phoebe Boyd, a radio episode of Amos and Andy, and Billie Holiday's recording of “Strange Fruit.” Because sound recordings were still dominant in this pretelevision era, determination of race often had to be made through voice, which is more rhetorically malleable than bodies, problematizing the commonplace that voice is a truer reflection of the self. The heights of audio technologies—phonograph and radio—made “sonic passing” through vocal and musical style a significant rhetorical strategy (78), and musicians regularly upended segregation by performing together in clubs and studios and imitating each other's styles. The chapter is awash in examples, but the focus on Holiday directly links sonic persuasion to the metaphor of coloring: color as skin, as tone in music or sound, and as rhetorical trope (97). Following Cicero and Seneca, Goodale sees tone as casting “light or darkness on events, facts, and personalities,” coloring listener's interpretations of an argument (97). “Color” is a verb that connotes change; it conveys the idea of influencing or distorting perception that isn't limited to the visual. In 1933, Holiday joins an integrated group put together by Benny Goodman in which she is prompted to sing “straight” or in a white style, because of the sonic expectations of the time and the need to “market race” (92). But by 1939's recording of “Strange Fruit,” her signature color/ing came front and center. Holiday took her style into the antilynching protest song in order to color the listener's perceptions just as FDR did with his speeches. Goodale writes: The south's purported goodness, for example, gets an ironic treatment when Holiday twists phrases like “sweet and fresh” while eliding “gallant” into something sonically less than a full word…. Her intonation of “sudden”… is rapid, thus turning the word into an example of itself. When she forces out the word bulging, she imitates with her voice the visual appearance of something being forced outward. The word breeze is elongated, and the letter b in blood drips from Holiday's lips like the life force of the victims she describes. When Holiday sings drop her voice briefly ascends then descends in a long glissando. At the end of the dragged out drop, Holiday's vibrato sonically mimics the tension of the long rope bouncing at first then quivering, then remaining still. Her voice has gained in intensity until this moment but then fades out, suggesting that it is at this point in the song when the lynching has occurred and life has ended. (99–100) She renders the words through a form of sonic persuasion that colors them in sounds that conflate the multiple meanings of the term—race, sound, and influence—creating a sonic envelope that colors the listener's experience.In Chapter 5, “Sounds of War,” Goodale concludes his analyses with an examination of sound in the cold war period. He analyzes sonic manipulations in cold war propaganda, specifically the ways that civil defense sirens and the sounds of dropping bombs were used to greater and lesser effects. Goodale looks at the educational film Duck and Cover's misguided use of the siren, which is intended to ease fears by teaching preparedness but ends up amplifying those fears; Hollywood's use of diving bombs in the Roadrunner cartoons, which actually succeeded in alleviating fears of bombing; and the persuasive impact of sonic manipulation in President Johnson's “Daisy” campaign ad from 1964. While the sound of the air raid sirens pierced the audience's sonic envelope, the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons turn the sounds of war into comic familiarity, enveloping the listeners in a safer aural environment. In addition to providing his typical contextualization that places creator Chuck Jones as a member of Hollywood's left, Goodale offers a close reading that centers on the Doppler effect. Christian Doppler actually identified the effect using light, noticing that as an object approaches you its light waves are compressed and shift toward the higher visual frequency, blue light, and that as it moves away it shifts into light waves that are stretched into the red end of the spectrum. Christoph Ballot first tested the theory with sound, having trumpeters play on a moving train. Moving toward the listener the sound waves are compressed into the higher frequencies, and moving away they are stretched into the lower frequencies where the sound correspondingly moves down the musical scale in pitch (118). Goodale notes how this materiality of sound operates rhetorically in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons: It is a sound from the perspective of a particular listener: the listener away from whom the bomb travels. These are the sounds produced by a culture that has, since 1812, bombed others and not been bombed itself. Listen to a war film in Germany, and you are likely to hear a very different sound; the sound of something falling toward the listener has a gradually ascending or constant high-pitched scream, not an almost musical, falling whistle. The sound of the falling bomb that Jones made famous in the 1950s is the sound perceived by people who are bombers and not the bombed. It is the sound of survival, not of death. (118–19) The listener enthymematically fills in the phenomenological sonic position of survival, which is reinforced by Wile E. Coyote's continued survival after every pratfall. This kind of enthymematic identification is central to Goodale's chapter and analyses. In his discussion of America's use of soundless bombing videos during the Gulf War, he draws on Kathleen Hall Jamieson's concept “empathematic,” which combines enthymeme and empathy, filling in the argumentative warrants and identifying with the subject positions the argument offers. But the lack of sound in the grainy, video-game-like propaganda videos left American audiences “little possibility of stepping into the shoes of the Iraqis and completing the argument about the real effects of bombs” (127). The Iraqis had been turned into caricatures that survive rather than humans being bombed and thus worthy of empathy.Since Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound, readers in philosophy will find smaller amounts of theoretical development and readers in rhetoric will find a reliance on a relatively traditional sense of rhetoric. Rhetorical concepts such as the enthymeme and identification are predominant in Goodale's examples, and he adopts a relatively traditional model of interpretation based on historical context and close reading, his goal being critical awareness. What is exciting about the sonic turn for many is the potential to develop newer rhetorical concepts and theoretical models out of engagements with sound. While Goodale hints at this potential, his interpretive practice stays within relatively well-recognized territory.1 But it is important to acknowledge what is significant about book on its own terms. Just as it became clear in the late 1990s that we could no longer talk about cultural studies without digital technologies, since culture was becoming so intimately tied to the digital, Goodale makes the case that in the twentieth century we can't talk about rhetoric without sound, since persuasion has been so intimately tied to the sonic. For a broader readership in communication or composition, the book provides a persuasive rationale for acknowledging how sound potentially impacts all acts of persuasion. Sonic Persuasion makes the case for opening the field to a wide array of engagements with sound, and while it doesn't always take us to these diverse places and methods—affect beyond meaning, engagement beyond interpretation, method beyond close reading and historical context—it does provide clear disciplinary grounds for these pursuits, making it difficult to neglect the sounds that fragment and envelop everyday acts of persuasion and the slickest media manipulations.

Editor Jeff Sommers announces a new genre for TETYC: Classroom Research Progress Reports.

Nineteenth-century AME preacher Julia Foote self-published her spiritual autobiography twice during her itinerancy; the text—a blend of personal and collective narrative and sermonic rhetoric—enabled her to enter the more public, political discourse of religious activism. Foote engages in national sociopolitical debates, uses publically available histories, and manipulates genre to create a de facto church service over which she can preside. In essence, Foote’s text is a performative subgenre of the spiritual autobiography—the itinerant book—that literally circulates in print culture as an activist text and figuratively circulates within the psychic fervor of late nineteenth-century American Protestantism.

Much of the current research on scientific literacy focuses on particular text genres read by students within the classroom context. We offer a cross-case analysis of literacy as social practice in multicultural communities around the world, through which we reveal that individuals with no formal education, as well as people with varied levels of schooling completed, customarily and actively engage in literacy events with the goal of learning about science as part of their everyday lives. We argue that these outcomes substantiate the notion that multiple ways of being scientifically literate actually exist and that scientific literacy in its most fundamental sense is crucial in science education, despite the fact that the most common definitions and notions of scientific literacy have predominantly considered its derived sense (Norris and Phillips 224).

The facts bear out that the odds are against most scientific researchers and scholars—especially those just starting out—in their attempts to win funding for their research projects through their grant proposals. In this article, the author takes a close look at some of the proposal-related problems and pitfalls that have historically challenged scholarly grant seekers. The intellectual prowess and specialized training of academics can sometimes be their downfall, when it comes to persuading government agencies and foundations to fund their well conceived, but unconvincingly presented projects. In examining numerous studies, surveys, and insightful articles of experts in the genre of the research grant proposal, it becomes evident that technical communicators could quickly become the best friends of scholars, when the former harness the rhetorical and stylistic skills that are almost instinctive to them, and apply them to writing grant proposals, a task which is all too often a disappointing exercise for the latter.

This study examines the global-local interplay of genre features in a select sample of nonprofit grant proposals from two particular sites—Nepal and the United States. Critically analyzing the carefully selected samples from both the sites on their own terms first and then in clusters (of Nepalese and American proposals) by exploiting the genre and discourse analysis theories and techniques published in genre, genre analysis, and grant proposal scholarship, this study attempts to examine the genre of nonprofit grant proposal in both comparative and non-comparative terms. While the study acknowledges that each instance of nonprofit grant proposal is unique, complex, and therefore non-generalizable, it does draw some broad generalizations about the similarities and differences in the rhetorical “moves,” organization, and/or composition strategies of grant writers from these two different geopolitical locations. The study finds that variations observed across samples and grant writers reflect the unique rhetorical situations of these writers, whereas uniformities have to do with the global circulation of Western genre forms in the rest of the world via global organizations like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund—which are also the major donors in developing countries like Nepal. And finally, the study reaffirms the fact that constraints like funding agencies' guidelines and reviewers' preferences have a considerable influence on genre features and forms. That has been the case with both the Nepalese and American proposals sampled in this study.

Between 1884 and 1926, such publishers of technological information as Henley Publishing, Audel Publishing, John Wiley, Van Nostrand, McGraw-Hill, and Practical Publications put out dozens and dozens of technical catechisms on a wide variety of technical subjects. Then, around 1926, these publishers ceased releasing texts called catechisms. What made the genre so popular? Did it disappear? The answers to these questions provide a case study of genre adaptation, genre change, and genre persistence within technical communication.

Nonemployer firms—firms with no employees—present themselves as larger, more stable firms to take on clients’ projects. They then achieve these projects by recruiting subcontractors, guiding subcontractors’ interactions with clients, and coordinating subcontractors to protect their team performance for the client. Using fourth-generation activity theory, I examine how these firms stage-manage their ad hoc collaborations. I conclude by describing the implications for further developing fourth-generation activity theory to study such instances of knowledge work.

The death of philosopher and public intellectual Jacques Derrida drew international attention and generated public acts of mourning in the media. Several of the published obituaries for Derrida are notable for their overtly hostile and dismissive tone. This essay explores the genre of epideictic rhetoric and is grounded in Derrida’s work on mourning, analyzing several instances of “uncivil” epideictic rhetoric including three hostile obituaries and several responses to them written by friends and colleagues of Derrida for the insight that they yield regarding ethical public remembrance. We argue that a sincere engagement with the ideas of the dead, while always incomplete, is at the heart of an ethical, civil mourning.

200 RHETORICA in un determinato ámbito della precettistica retorica, collegando le finalitá e i procedimenti espressivi che le sono propri e non altri (pp- 212—213 n. 814). Alessandro Garcea Paris Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Pall ofa Women's Tradition, 1600-1900. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. xi-xv +205 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8093-8630-7 In her introduction, Jane Donawerth identifies the research gap that her new book seeks to address. Over the past thirty years, historians have inves­ tigated women's involvement in rhetorical theory in terms of its absence— "why there wasn't any" (p. 2). Furthermore, much of the conversation has tended to underscore rhetorical practices and not rhetorical theories. Don­ awerth asserts that scholars need to ask new questions: "How did women theorize communication, and if they did not do it in rhetoric and composition textbooks, where did they do it" (p. 2). Women theorized rhetoric based on their gendered experiences and on the genres that they were reading. Thus, women's rhetorical theory has centered on conversation—not oratory—as the basis for all discourse. In significant ways, Donawerth's book extends and complements her 2002 anthology, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900, which made avail­ able to scholars, teachers, and students extensive primary texts of women's rhetorical theory. Her new book builds on this collection by including an analysis of conversation as an important tradition in women's rhetorical the­ ory. In addition, she incorporates new women, particularly those defending women's right to preach, and she provides more analysis of the historical context and its influence in shaping this aspect of women's rhetoric. To construct her argument, Donawerth examines women's rhetorical theory from a variety of sources, including humanist works defending women's education, conduct books, defenses of women's preaching, and elocution manuals. In so doing, she introduces readers to the works of various women theorists during this three-hundred-year span. However, she contends that in the 1850s, when women started writing composition and rhetoric textbooks for male as well as female students, these "theo­ ries of conversation-based discourse gradually disappeared, or rather, were absorbed into composition pedagogy" (p. 2). To theorize rhetoric in this way, in her introduction Donawerth clarifies that she defines rhetorical theory as "writing about the nature and means of communication" (p. 7). She also situates her argument, outlines her historical method, and explains how she defines other terms relevant to her study. With its detailed framing of Donawerth's argument, the introduction should be helpful to those just beginning to navigate the field and to engage in these Reviews 201 discussion. Donawerth s book and several mentioned in her introduction are from the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series, which demonstrates the significant scholarly contribution this series has made. Given the constraints of this review, I will focus on the first and fourth chapters since they feature a sampling of the diverse texts examined, and the fourth chapter aligns with some of my research interests. Chapter 1 provides a start for the book's focus by analyzing women's theorizing of conversation in humanist dialogues and defenses of women's education during the seven­ teenth century. It does so by examining the writing of Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Bathsua Makin, and Mary Astell. During this period, humanist and classical rhetorical education were available only for men; however, there were some "exceptional women" who managed to receive such training (p. 19). With this education, these women fashioned theories of communication, and they published in humanist genres, including "dia­ logues, epistles, print orations, and encyclopedias" (p. 19). Donawerth argues that these four women theorists "radically revised classical rhetoric by cen­ tering their theories on conversation rather than public speech" (p. 39). In so doing, they challenged some of the limits conventionally associated with gendered discourse of this period. in chapter four, Donawerth contends that sentimental culture, associ­ ated with "the public display of emotion" and with women, found its perfect outlet in elocution (p. 105). The chapter investigates the ways nineteenthcenturv elocution manuals incorporated into this tradition of conversation "a theoretical consideration of women's bodies...

Abstract The years following the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) witnessed energetic debate at all levels of Mexican society concerning the future of the nation. Utilizing the notion of “political fictions,” in this article I claim that a tension between two competing political fictions was laid bare and can usefully be examined through analysis of manifestos from this period. Building upon previous scholarship on this genre, I show how manifestos arose from institutional crisis and served as both the voice of the oppressed and as the bully pulpit of political elites in Mexico. I conclude by analyzing an artistic manifesto, the Comprimido Estridentista (1921), which is an early attempt to synthesize these two political fictions. Foreshadowing one of the central concerns of the postrevolutionary state, this unusual text attempts to institutionalize the promises of the Mexican Revolution.

William Keith, Christian Lundberg, and James M. Farrell have thoughtfully reviewedmy effort to explicate howmodern public speaking came to be conceptualized on the basis of antecedent text genres.My argumentwas that a newunderstanding of oral rhetoric emerged between 1890 and 1930 as authors experimentally and variously appropriated concepts and frameworks from elocution (in its several iterations), from oratorical composition (as given in new-rhetoric treatises, advanced rhetorics, and composition books), and from varietal popular or professional works (of extemporaneous speaking, debating, and audienceadapted preaching). More broadly, my “Inventing Public Speaking” represents an effort to rebalance the larger history of rhetoric, 1730–1930, along the lines of orality in the context of a post-1980 emphasis upon writingcentered schoolbooks and pedagogies. Here my three colleagues usefully expand this principle of disciplinary balance by showing how the text-based conceptualizing of rhetoric may be enhanced, in Farrell’s telling, by deeper understandings of the professional and institutional roots of the modern communication discipline and, from Keith’s and Lundberg’s perspective, by historically sensitive refinements of pedagogy to promote speechmaking that is communicative, communitarian, and deliberative. But before exploring intersections betweenmy article and the commentaries of Farrell, Keith, and Lundberg, I wish to expand a bit on what I see as the Big Problem in

This article picks up, literally, where another one leaves off: “Assessing Scholarly Multimedia: A Rhetorical Genre-Studies Approach” in Technical Communication Quarterly (Ball, 2012a). In that article, I describe how I have brought my editorial-mentoring work with Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which exclusively publishes “born digital” media-rich scholarship, into undergraduate and graduate writing classes. This article describes how the process of editorial peer review translates into students’ peer review workshops in those same writing classes.

In Golden Age Spain, religious art functioned within the boundaries of a time-honoured corpus of ecclesiastical and rhetorical theory on the image, which attempted to prevent immoderate iconic veneration aided by metaphors taken from the well-known world of portraiture, themost imitative of pictorial genres. Counter-Reformation theologians and preachers also sought to reduce the artwork's impact on irrational sensibility by urging artists to avoid the undesirable effects of awkward or lascivious images. This article will explore howthe laws of decorumequipped Post-Tridentine Spanish imagery with aesthetic values meant to reconcile delectare with docere and movere, and how this finally resulted in a dispute between high culture and popular taste, between an art favored by royal collectors (painting) and another much more generalized as a result of ecclesiastical patronage (sculpture).

Given the widespread use of English for the international dissemination of scholars’ research results, numerous intercultural analyses have been undertaken in the field of English for Academic Purposes in diverse genres. Rhetorical and discursive conventions across languages and cultures have been studied to help non-native English scholars to be successful in the difficult endeavour of being granted publication in international English-medium publications. The increasing competition to get one’s research published in international journals in English has resulted in the authors’ need to clearly spell out what their contribution to their discipline is, a rhetorical convention which seems to be currently crucial especially in some fields. It is the aim of this paper to trace statements of contribution in the Introduction and Conclusion sections of research articles published in two international journals in finance and to compare the results with those obtained from an analysis of three manuscripts written in English by a team of Spanish scholars sent to the same journals but which received major revision or rejection reports. Reference to these statements made by reviewers in their reports will also be analysed to explore to what extent (non) compliance with this rhetorical convention may influence their final decision (not) to recommend publication.

Written communication and its accumulated principles of applied design often serve conservative and preservationist goals. Literacy and its various, sprawling technological apparatuses of production and distribution preserve ideas and prepare them for uptake and adaptation. What is preserved in writing speaks with greater reliability over time and choices about design can influence the validity or appropriateness of those texts, by invoking proper voices and suggesting or demanding appropriate relationships between people and institutions organized around those texts. While this may seem an inhospitable way to open a column in a journal on communication design, my point is not intentionally disparaging. Instead it is to draw a contrast between types of communication design work: that which works to affiliate discourse with a location and practices of uptake and that which creates and works across those locations.

ABSTRACTThough popular in the nineteenth century and widespread since, the elements of the hoax form can be traced to the origins of rhetorical theorizing, principally in the strategies of probability and counterprobability developed by the early orators and sophists. This article begins by defining features of the hoax as a textual event and then describes how hoaxes use traditional rhetorical techniques of both probability and improbability to transport viewers from credulity and acceptance to doubt and disbelief, demonstrating technical mastery over rhetorical conventions of the genre to mock their targets and to entertain and instruct their audience.

ABSTRACT Following recent scholarship, this article investigates the relationship among Adam Smith's lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, his Wealth of Nations, the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and his lectures on jurisprudence. According to Smith, the rhetorical theory regarding genre and style improves practical judgment that is central to both economic and legal affairs. Though Smith's lectures on rhetoric feature no overt mention of these legal or commercial applications, when we read these lectures alongside his lectures and writings on jurisprudence and economics, we see that Smith had developed numerous applications for the practical judgment that he taught his students when, under his guidance, they analyzed literary texts. Noting the interrelation among Smith's work on rhetoric, law, and economics allows us to see that others in the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Hugh Blair and Henry Home Lord Kames, similarly found connections among jurisprudence, political economy, and rhetorical theory.

The epideictic genre of rhetoric has traditionally included public, ceremonial types of rhetoric, such as eulogies and public speeches, that affirm communities. Public memorials and even lyric poetry, however, also epideictically constitute personal and communal identities. When read through the theoretical lenses of Kenneth Burke and Emmanuel Levinas, Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” seems to evoke a public, communal attitude in readers. This epideictic effect challenges the conventional dichotomy between public and private audiences, inviting us to think more broadly about epideictic rhetoric and its audiences.

In Golden Age Spain, religious art functioned within the boundaries of a time-honoured corpus of ecclesiastical and rhetorical theory on the image, which attempted to prevent immoderate iconic veneration aided by metaphors taken from the well-known world of portraiture, the most imitative of pictorial genres. Counter-Reformation theologians and preachers also sought to reduce the artwork’s impact on irrational sensibility by urging artists to avoid the undesirable effects of awkward or lascivious images. This article will explore how the laws of decorum equipped Post-Tridentine Spanish imagery with aesthetic values meant to reconcile delectare with docere and movere, and how this finally resulted in a dispute between high culture and popular taste, between an art favored by royal collectors (painting) and another much more generalized as a result of ecclesiastical patronage (sculpture).

Rebecca Nowacek (2011) observes that “scholarship on transfer in the field of rheto-ric and composition has understandably focused on first year composition: what knowledge and abilities transfer out of, and less commonly, into FYC ” (p. 99). There is consensus in this research that all too often students fail to transfer skills learned in their first-year composition courses to other writing contexts across the curric-ulum. There is also consensus that composition instructors wishing to encourage transfer should focus on metacognitive awareness of writing processes; understand-ing of key writing studies concepts like rhetorical situation, genre, and discourse community; and making explicit connections to students ’ future college and pro-fessional reading and writing tasks (Beaufort, 2007; Bergmann & Zepernick, 2007; Clark & Hernandez, 2011; Fishman & Reiff, 2008; Wardle, 2007). What scholars have focused less attention on is how these lessons learned from the research on transfer and first-year composition might inform the design not just of first-year composi-tion courses, but of university writing across the curriculum (WAC) efforts, from a student’s first year to his or her final semester. With the exception of Anne Beaufort (2007) and David Smit (2004), even researchers who have studied courses across disciplines have focused their advice not on the structural design of campus WAC programs, but on what individual instructors can do to encourage transfer (Caroll,

While romantic letters are usually understood as unstudied and natural expressions of heartfelt love, I argue they are learned through genre instruction and crafted through rhetorical practice. In the nineteenth-century United States, manuals taught generic conventions for epistolary address, pacing of exchange, and rhetorical purpose, embedding within this instruction a heteronormative conception of romantic relations. Yet these same conventions were susceptible to queer adaptation, particularly in the epistolary practices of writers composing same-sex relations. Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus were African American women who learned but reinvented the conventions by negotiating category-crossing forms of address, timing exchange with urgency rather than restraint, and repurposing the romantic letter to erotic and even political ends. Analyzing Brown and Primus's letters alongside manuals thus underscores the dynamic ways both instruction and practice shape romantic letters and life.

Using Ivanic’s (2004) framework, the study of 20 elementary teachers examines the relationships among teachers’ beliefs about writing, their instructional practices, and contextual factors. While the district-adopted curriculum reflected specific discourses, teachers’ beliefs and practices reflected a combination of discourses. The nature of the professional development tended to reinforce particular discourses, but occasionally offered an alternative. The three cases revealed how teachers negotiated the tensions among various discourses. Beth exemplified a skills discourse, but demonstrated beliefs about writing as communication; however, she did not articulate tensions between the discourses and followed the district, skillsinfused curriculum. Amber borrowed from skills, traits, process, and genre discourses without resolving potential contradictions, resulting in instructional practices that had little coherence. Jackson, who brought in his own writing as a hip-hop artist, illustrated the social practices discourse as well as creativity and genre discourses to create an enhanced version of a district-adopted curriculum. Implications for practice include raising teacher’s awareness of the contradictory discourses that surround them.

This multivocal webtext details one graduate class’s experiences creating Gregory L. Ulmer’s "mystory" projects fromInternet Invention(2003). As a result of their experiences, the authors find the mystory genre reveals to us the ways in which different discursive networks influence what we do, and do not, see both inside and outside the classroom.

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

Writing centers can be staffed wholly or partially by tutors with little training in science writing. This article suggests that an emphasis on scientific rhetoric, not content, may be most useful for training tutors and developing handouts and checklists to aid novice science writers in invention and revision. The article also suggests that a training program in science writing can be informed by local science faculty’s major concerns. However, these faculty discussions toward tutor training should be supplemented through WAC-WID and genre research to retain a training focus on the connection between scientific thought and scientific writing, science writings’ primary genre families, and the delivery of scientific writing to different audiences.

Writing studies’ “recent enthusiasm” (Roderick CF 25) for complexity theory has morphed into higher education’s rabid embrace of reform. New curricula claim commitment to an “advanced,” “networked,” and “global” culture by erasing introductory composition, thereby dismissing the practices of those courses. Examples abound, but the author pays particular attention to the 2013 overhaul of general education at the nation’s largest public university. She then draws on a year-long ethnography of one English 111 class to show how this course is a hospitable environment for genres that seek what Systems Biologist Stuart Kauffman calls “the adjacent possible.” The “adjacent possible” represents unfinished combinations of complex structures—those that haven’t fully evolved but make visible what’s next in our expanding biosphere. The author defines one such genre and reveals how it offers another route to complexity and another understanding of FYC: as the gateway course to complexity.

Classifying the literature survey course as an exit from literary study more often than an “introduction” to advanced courses, this article explores how sophomore-level literature courses can use the genre of published literary blogs to help student writers find relevance in their reading of unfamiliar texts.

As Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) utilized in workplaces, classrooms, and community organizations continue to proliferate, it follows that the kinds of knowledge necessary to assemble those technologies in order to engage in effective professional communication are becoming increasingly complex. This article details a study conducted of two student teams engaged in a service-learning class in which they were tasked with producing high-quality digital products---a mini-documentary and a simple, but interactive website---for client organizations---an art classroom in a local public school and a mentoring initiative within a local non-profit. The main findings of this study are that students mobilized a variety of resources and created a flexible network of technologies, knowledges, people, and modes of communication in order to address issues pertinent to their clients. In addition, I argue that the most important resource students mobilized was knowledge itself, indicating that one of the most important aspects of digital composing may be in-depth, practical knowledge of technologies, modes, and the genres they involve. Ultimately, the implications of this limited, classroom-based case study are that a situated understanding of how to assemble knowledges for the effective design of communication within a given communication infrastructure may be more important than access to the most cutting-edge modes and technologies, especially when working with resource-poor organizational clients.

Curriculum designers and literacy policymakers sometimes assume that variation in teaching practices can be minimized using scripted and standardized curriculum. While standards and common understandings can be helpful, scripted curricula ignore the fact that curriculum is an enacted practice orchestrated by individuals. While reading scholars have studied this issue, it has yet to be examined in writing studies. In a four-month ethnographic study, I examined how a kindergarten teacher interpreted scripted writing curriculum through enacted lessons. The interpretation problematizes the ideologies embedded within curricular scripts, including emphases on genre, mechanics, and printed texts. Analysis of child writing revealed a socially constructed practice in which genre, mechanics, and letters were tied to social intentions and meanings. While scripted curricula can confine teachers’ abilities to make responsive decisions, I document how the focal teacher translated curricular materials with students, thus creating space for official curriculum, teaching practices, and children’s writing to coexist. Such flexible spaces make room for both teacher and student voices in innovative and inventive writing pedagogies.

Despite the fact that a considerable proportion of today’s writing programs operate according to the principles of genre-based instruction, research has not adequately dealt with the teaching of various genres (e.g., job application letters). Nor has research, to date, attempted to address the issue of written corrective feedback in conjunction with genre-based instruction. This study, therefore, aimed to investigate the impact of written corrective feedback in the context of genre-based instruction on job application letters. To this end, 120 Iranian advanced-level EFL learners at Kish Institute of Science and Technology participated in the present study. After administering the TOEFL test, 80 students scoring within ±1 SD of the mean score were randomly assigned to one of two experimental groups?namely, Direct Feedback Group or Indirect Feedback Group. Having sat a writing pretest, the participants received genre-based instruction on how to compose job application letters. Meanwhile, they were supplied with direct or indirect feedback on their writing. Following this instruction, a writing posttest was administered, the results of which showed that direct corrective feedback was more effective than indirect corrective feedback in the context of genre-based instruction on letters of job application.

This article examines the influential Chinese science book Brush Talks from Dream Brook, written by Shen Kuo in the 11th century. I suggest that Brush Talks reveals a tension between institutionalized science and science in the public, and a gap between the making of scientific knowledge and the communication of such knowledge to the general public. In writing Brush Talks, Shen preserved and popularized grassroots science and technology in the most respected medium of his time—the printed book. In the article, I ask what formal elements of this book reveal about the choices Shen made as a literati author to connect to his primary readers, most of which were middle and lower class lay audiences. As I will argue, he used three approaches that aided him in speaking to the public about science and technology—an ethnographic approach to knowledge, innovative uses of genre, and a straightforward writing style.

Although self-assessment is an important genre in both the academy and the workplace, it is often static. The resulting fixed identities are problematic in a creative economy that requires fluidity. Drawing on the work of Carruthers and Goffman, among others, we argue that memory and meditation, encompassing inventory and invention and coupled with rhetorical performance, constitute dynamic self-assessment.

Teaching problem: Students' written assignments show that they tend to list ideas rather than provide evidence-based arguments. This might be because they do not have a framework to base their arguments on. Research question: Does the communication model framework help students to write evidence-based arguments when evaluating the communicative effectiveness in corporate blogs? Situating the case: The ability to engage in argument from evidence is one of the Next Generation Science Standards for scientific and engineering practices. Thus, it is important for engineering students to know how to present evidence-based arguments. The communication model framework was introduced to provide students with a framework to base their arguments on. This framework builds on the genre-based and academic literacies approaches to teaching writing. More companies are now using corporate blogs (an open, participatory, and globally networked social media tool) to engage stakeholders directly across multiple contexts. The framework is useful in analyzing evolving genres like corporate blogs because it is not only structured but also flexible. About the case: This teaching case describes the use of the communication model framework as the basis for students' arguments. The framework was used in a general writing course for engineering students. Working in groups, the students used the framework for their oral practice critique and their critique assignment on a given piece of academic writing or corporate blog. They also had to write a reflection paper individually at the end of the course. Results: Overall, the mixed groups and international students groups made a stronger attempt to apply the framework compared to the Singaporean student groups. The students' educational backgrounds, the group dynamics within the group, and the nature of the discussions affected the level of adoption of the framework in their writing. Conclusions: This teaching case reflects the value of mixed group, face-to-face discussions, and personal reflection in teaching students evidence-based writing, and calls for more research on flexible frameworks as genres evolve.