This study examines the corporate environmental reports of 100 companies listed in the 2009 Fortune 1000 in order to illustrate how this type of genre communicates a green corporate ethos to audience members who are trying to distinguish between greenwashing tactics and true environmental concerns. The authors analyze how corporate environmental reports are constructed at macro and micro discursive levels to promote a socially responsible image to in-group (e.g., employees and stockholders) and out-group (e.g., consumers) members. The results of the analysis show how these reports use ideological persuasion to influence or change audience members’ opinions about corporate environmental sustainability.

Mobile professionals can choose to work in offices, executive suites, home offices, or other spaces. But some have instead chosen to work at coworking spaces: open-plan office environments in which they work alongside other unaffiliated professionals for a fee of approximately $250 a month. But what service are they actually purchasing with that monthly fee? How do they describe that service? From an activity theory perspective, what are its object, outcome, and actors? This article reports on a 20-month study that answers such questions.

This article uses research in cultural–historic activity theory, exploring patients' use of technical health care texts to produce knowledge and design their choices related to their bodies and health. Drawing on a case study of Meagan, who dealt with colitis and complications due to pregnancy, the author argues that we should consider reception and use as multisemiotic acts of repurposing, inscription, and reproduction alongside the research of the production of texts by professionals.

Women's rhetoric in the Middle Ages reflects their participation in the deliberative rhetorical genre inherited from classical antiquity. The deliberative tradition, which was often theorized by medieval rhetoricians as existing in consular practice, can thus serve as an example of women's rhetoric which, as Christine Mason Sutherland has noted, could take place in sermo. Women's letters were often hortatory, civic, and sometimes agonistic in tone. These rhetorical artifacts demonstrate that women operated in the rhetorical tradition as eloquent, powerful agents of persuasion in the civic arena, and they also show that, although unmoored from traditional spaces and practices associated with deliberation in antiquity, deliberative rhetoric was a more viable form of rhetoric in the Middle Ages than previously believed.

Recent scholarship in genre studies has extended its focus from studying single genres to multiple genres, as well as how these genres interact with one another. This essay seeks to contribute to this growing scholarship by adding a new concept, intermediary genre. That is, a genre that facilitates the “uptake” of a genre by another genre. This concept is designed to reveal a particular aspect of multiple genres: that one genre can be used to connect and mobilize two otherwise unconnected genres to make uptake possible. The concept is illustrated in case study of knowledge mobilization, an instance in which scientific research was used in the judicial system to inform public policies on eyewitness handling and police-lineup procedures. The case study shows how intermediary genres emerge, how they connect other genres, and how knowledge circulates as a result of such connections and affects policy decisions.

Tamika L. Carey , University at Albany – SUNY Enculturation : http://www.enculturation.net/rhetorical-healing-as-reeducation ( Published: January 16, 2013 ) In The Value in the Valley: A Black Woman’s Guide Through Life’s Dilemmas , motivational speaker, spiritual teacher, and self-help author Iyanla Vanzant describes one of her purposes for writing her best-selling 1996 book. She says: Black women do not understand there is no wrong in being human. There are only lessons. No matter how outlandish, ridiculous, or irresponsible our behavior may be at any given time, know, accept, love. There is nothing wrong with you. There is, however, always room for improvement and change… Self-knowledge is not about picking your scabs, beating up yourself, feeling bad about your wounds or weak spots. It means that you recognize you have them, make a commitment to nurture and strengthen them, and leave them alone to heal. (75) Such affirmations and calls for self-reflection are common features within the numerous African American self-help books and inspirational guides published for women since the nineties. The majority of these books “promise” to teach readers insights and strategies for overcoming the dis ease of past trauma or alleviating the dis content with challenges in their present lives. Readers and writers alike have found these self-help texts beneficial. For women like Brenda Sheffield, who claims that self-help books are “springboard[s] to discussing and healing [her] life and those of people [she] knows,” the benefit in reading them is learning, or re-learning, ways of being, knowing, or acting necessary for resuming one’s intended life path (Houser). For Vanzant, and other popular and profitable writers in this genre, activism is an incentive. Through writing books containing their testimonies, observations, and teachings, they pass on the ways of knowing they consider essential for the survival of their communities. Scholarship on self-help literature critiques…

Jon McKenzie , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/smart-media ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) This special section of Enculturation features four sets of experimental media projects produced at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, three by English students enrolled in different courses I have taught over the past several years and one recent experiment of my own. As indicated in the short descriptions provided by their producers, these projects vary in content, form, medium, and function, but all can be understood as emerging scholarly genres—or what we’re calling at UW-Madison smart media . At a time when bookstores are closing, when the MLA is questioning the monograph as the dominant model for dissertations, a time when academic publishers are grappling with the many challenges posed by the web, it is little wonder that smart media such as TED talks, theory comix, video essays, and interactive installations have emerged. Smart media supplement the traditional scholarly genres of book, article, and conference paper, adding elements closely identified with new media: digital images, video, and sound, as well as interactivity. These emerging scholarly genres mix ideas and affects, logos and graphe . If, as Jacques Derrida, Gregory Ulmer, and others have long argued, logocentric writing marginalizes graphe , smart media turns on the high-res display, cranks up the volume, and plays with the inputs and outputs. Writing in no way disappears: it remains a crucial though reinscribed track in a multimedia composition—or rather, design . For design is to digital media what composition is to writing: a craft that can be learned and taught, one that has a long history yet still produces surprises, amazement, and, admittedly, at times clichés and boredom. At UW-Madison, I direct DesignLab , a new design support center for student media projects that works closely with the Libraries (where it is institutionally situated), our central IT…

Research problem: This study investigates the characteristics of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which are discursive attempts at creating positive impact and indicate to readers the process of business management in society. Research questions: (1) What is the intended purpose and function of the CSR reports taken from some of the most dominant corporations in the oil, banking, and aviation industries in the US and China, and how and to what extent do these reports meet the expectations of the international discourse community? (2) Are there any differences in the discursive construction of the CSR reports taken from the different industries? If so, what are these differences, and why might they exist? Literature review: Contrasting CSR practices in China and the US are appropriate because of their economic power, and rigorous CSR reporting practices. According to previous research, CSR practices in China are mandatory for state-owned enterprises, but voluntary in the US. Interdiscursivity, the appropriation of established generic resources across genres and practices to create new forms, provides a framework for exploring differences in reports between the countries. Critical discourse analysis (analyzing discourse as social practice) and genre analysis (analyzing discourse as genre), provide methods for exploring these differences. Methodology: Using discourse analysis, this study analyzed six samples of CSRs, three from Chinese corporations, three from American corporations. Samples were selected through rigorous online search for top companies in oil, aviation, and banking. The study involved a general content analysis of the overall CSR reports using genre and critical discourse analysis, and then more focused analysis of sections on the environment. Results and discussion: The main function of the CSR reports analyzed seems to be the promotion of the company image. Although all analyzed reports drew on the discourse of goodwill and promoted company engagement with society, CSR reports from the oil industry employed discourse of self-justification more, attributing company actions to external constraints. CSR, as a generic construct in its hybrid form, seems a “typification” of three interdiscourses-discourses of promotion, goodwill, and self-justification-sociopragmatically co-constructed within an interdiscursive space. The purity of this genre lies in its hybridization, primarily in the integration of promotional cues in reporting genre, illustrating how interdiscursivity can explore the interrelationship between discursive and professional practices. The limitation of the study was the limited choice of countries and sample size. Future research could compare reporting practices of companies with newly instituted CSR practices with companies in countries with a longer history of CSR reporting.

Reviews 445 Lancelot en pi ose, la polémique est muselée par les stratégies narratives et une volonté d'édification chrétienne : les opposants à la cour d'Arthur ne reçoivent pour seule réponse qu'une fin exemplaire. Pour le cheik Al-Ansari et son admirateur enthousiaste, la vérité révélée n'a rien d'une fiction. Tant que les points de vue avancés admettent la contradiction et que le débat est permis, même dans ses formes les plus agressives, l'analyse rhétorique reste un outil d'interprétation privilégié pour démystifier le discours polémique. Elle permet en outre à certains contributeurs, comme R. Micheli, Th. Her­ man, E. De Jonge, ainsi qu'aux directeurs de l'ouvrage, de proposer des hypothèses nouvelles et pertinentes qui pourront servir de jalons pour de futures recherches dans deux domaines, celui du rhétorique et du polémique, qui sont intimement liés autour du sens du combat. Benoît Sans Université Libre de Bruxelles Graves, Michael. Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric (Studies in Rhetoric and Religion 9). Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009. 450 pp. ISBN: 9781602582408 Given the challenges of working with early Quaker sermons, it's not surprising that there is relatively little work on Quaker rhetoric. Unlike the Puritans, who seemed to suffer from graphomania, early Quakers believed in impromptu preaching which means that there is a paucity of source mate­ rial for historians of rhetoric. Perhaps more troubling, early Quaker sermons were often printed by non-Quaker publishers and questions about their authenticity often arise. In Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric Graves does an admirable job working with the corpus of seventy-nine surviving Quaker sermons, situating them within a reconstruction of early Quaker theology, rhetorical theory, and die emerging transatlantic printculture . Indeed, this work needs to be read as straddling Quaker studies and the history of rhetoric as Graves speaks to both groups of scholars through­ out. For that effort alone, this work deserves special attention. Despite this achievement or perhaps because of it, this reviewer has some concerns about Graves's otherwise excellent work. Graves has long been immersed in the literature of early Quakerism and, to his credit as a craftsman, this work establishes a mastery of archival material that is rare even in the best scholarship. This study of early Quaker rhetoric fills a number of important gaps in our historical knowledge. For example, in his discussion of Robert Barclay (1648-1690), one of the most important early Quaker intellectuals, Graves claims that Barclay s under­ standing of preaching is derived from a very different model of faculty psychology from both Bacon who preceded him and Campbell who came after, which he claims is closer to modern brain science than either (pp· 446 RHETORICA 115-116). Leaving aside the questionable relationship between early modern homiletic theory and postmodern science, Graves's argument suggests that faculty psychology is far more complex and varied than many traditional his­ tories allow. Furthermore, his reconstruction of Quaker impromptu speaking theory can and should provide a guide for other scholars interested in the impromptu sermon, a genre of considerable importance in America's Great Awakening and subsequent religious revivals. The craftsmanship of this book is impressive. According Graves's on­ line profile, this work is the product of nearly forty years of research and one can detect the expertise that has gone into every footnote. Alongside the twelve analytic chapters and epilogue are the complete texts of four surviv­ ing Quaker sermons, five appendixes which examine the remaining corpus of seventeenth-century Quaker sermons, a very thorough bibliography of Quaker studies and three indices. The book is divided into four sections, each focuses on different levels of analysis and context necessary for under­ standing Quaker rhetoric. It begins with an overview of seventeenth-century rhetoric, continues with an analysis of the evolution of Quaker impromptu preaching theory, and proceeds to an examination of all seventy-nine surviv­ ing Quaker sermons and then ends with an analysis of works by key Quaker figures including Fox, Crisp, Barclay and Penn. Historians of rhetoric will likely...

Reviews 441 plification, a corpus of copiousness, an encomium of invention, a well; it is difficult to read such a long book about excess and extravagance with­ out resorting to the hyperbolic. But, hyperbole aside, this is a remarkable book. It is difficult to imagine that Johnson has left much unsaid about his subject. The display of erudition can be both dazzling and daunting—and occasionally bewildering. Simply surveying the 129 pages of notes can be remarkably instructive. In telling the story of hyperbole he seamlessly inter­ weaves ancient rhetoricians, mannerist poets, Enlightenment philosophers, and post-Modern critics—sometimes in the same sentence. In Hyperboles Johnson makes a compelling, and certainly exhaustive, case that his subject "is more than a figure of style: it is a mode of thought, a way of being" (4). This formerly neglected figure is now elevated to the status of an "liber trope" situated in the very center of human consciousness. Or as Johnson puts it in a probably irresistible paraphrase of Descartes: "I hyperbolize, therefore I am" (376). Don Paul Abbott University of California, Davis L. Albert et L. Nicolas, Polémique et rhétorique de l'Antiquité à nos jours, De Boeck - Duculot, Bruxelles, 2010. ISBN: 9782801116394 La dynamique équipe du GRAL de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles consacre un nouveau volume, fort de vingt-six contributions et d'une abon­ dante bibliographie mise à jour, aux mécanismes de la polémique. L'ouvrage s'ouvre sur une synthèse claire et inspirée de la problématique abordée, qui est signée par les deux co-directeurs. Luce Albert et Loïc Nicolas y précisent d'emblée les objectifs du recueil et justifient l'intérêt d'une ap­ proche rhétorique. Aux antipodes de la vision réductrice d'une parole pure­ ment violente, échappant à tout contrôle, la polémique est ici conçue comme« un duel par les mots » , ce qui la rend disponible pour l'analyse rhétorique et discursive. Dans leur synthèse, les deux auteurs s'attachent à identifier les modalités du polémique au-delà de ses incarnations dans des polémiques par­ ticulières, qui dépassent les frontières des genres qu'elles investissent. Selon eux, la polémique met en scène, sur un terrain commun et fictionnel, deux adversaires irréconciables ainsi qu'un Tiers, qui peut être tantôt 1 arbitre, tantôt l'un des enjeux du duel. Les acteurs du conflit passent entre eux un pacte implicite qui engendre un ensemble d'attentes et d'interdits supposés, crée le cadre d'une fiction régulée et fixe les limites de violence verbale. La polémique correspond donc à une forme de rituel qui fait peser des contraintes sur les participants, mais cette ritualisation n est pas déterminée à l'avance et les contraintes sont propres à chaque polémique. Les contra­ dicteurs construisent ensemble et tentent d accaparer à tour de role le lieu de la lutte qui n'existe que comme espace d'échange. Ils entrent ainsi dans 442 RHETORICA une dynamique de surenchère qui, dans une quête perpétuelle de 1 argument décisif, les incite sans cesse à repousser les limites et à renégocier les rapports de forces établis. Dans le dialogisme à trois termes qui se met ainsi progres­ sivement en place et évolue au fil des échanges, la critique, voire 1 injure, de l'un attend la riposte de l'autre comme un besoin vital et une opposition nécessaire : il faut accepter la coexistence de l'erreur et de la vérité pour rendre possible l'entreprise d'authentification qui fera triompher la cause pour laquelle on livre ainsi bataille. Les rapports de places fonctionnent en miroir : chacun devient à tour de rôle attaquant et défenseur, doit redéfinir sa position tout en récusant celle de l'autre. Pour vaincre, il faut anticiper et pénétrer la pensée de l'adversaire afin d'en trouver les failles. Le com­ bat se déroule généralement entre deux personnages très proches sous bien des rapports, qui se reconnaissent les capacités nécessaires...

Reviews 451 Nancy Worman, Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2008. 385 + xii pp. ISBN 9780521857871. Insult and character assassination have a long and entertaining history in the annals of rhetoric. Not only do they generate theoretical meditation but they can provide scholars and amateurs alike with the guilty (and for Aristotle, vulgar) pleasures of nicely turned invective. Nancy Worman's fascinating study allows classicists and those with more general interests in ancient rhetorical forms to follow patterns of defamation from Homer and the beginnings of preserved Greek literature to Aristotle and Theophrastus at the end of the fourth century B.C.E. Of the two possibilities adumbrated above, her work facilitates the austere rewards of the theoretical rather than enjoy­ able indulgence in multiple examples of splenetic venting. For the latter one might settle down with Thomas Conley's Toward a Rhetoric ofInsult (Chicago 2010), which, in addition to quotation of virtuosic and delectable passages of invective (starting with Cicero and proceeding through the Flugschriften of the Reformation to end with Monty Python and modern political cartoons), does a useful job in sketching multiple patterns of defamatory language and specifying the factors that constrain their operation. Conley surveys how slurs connected with social status, gender, ethnicity, sexual habits, and the practices of eating and drinking (among others) recur in multiple cultures. He is interested in how invective can be used to create group identity through assertion of communal values, but also in the use of insult to interrogate per­ ceived hierarchies. This generalist orientation makes the book a valuable introduction to the invective mode, and thus, coincidentally, an interest­ ing counterpart to Worman's specialist study. W. carefully maps out how a discourse of abuse developed around public and professional speakers in Classical Greece. This discourse was rooted in practices of commensality associated with banquet and symposium, and was further extended in drama, until it became part of the rhetorical arsenal in the public oratory of Demosthenes and Aeschines. W.'s narrative of a gradual elaboration of a critique of public speaking and the move of this critique into ancient oratory make this an important book. The body of the book is divided into six chapters, charting the devel­ opment of an iambic discourse ranging over a variety of genres. W. uses the ideas of Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Barthes to trace the operations of social performance and figuration in invective, relying in particular on a central notion of metonymy, so that the mouth acts as an emblem (Barthes' "blazon") of behavioral excess. After a scene-setting introduction, Chapter 1 looks at iambic literature in Archaic Greek epic, lyric, and Classical tragedy, where the language of invective is deployed to regulate excess and is regularly as­ sociated with ravenous mouths and dangerous types of consumption. Thus we encounter rapacious and aggressive kings (Agamemnon in Homer is a people-eating king," 29), harsh talk connected with (potentially cannibal­ istic) battlefield savagery, and clever speaking conceived as a trade-off for food. Greed leads both to uncontrolled aggressive speech and sly rhetorical 452 RHETORICA manipulation. These two possibilities will crystallize throughout the course of the book into two broad and recurring types: on the one hand the braggart and voracious politician characterized by crude consumption, and on the other the decadent and manipulative sophist. Chapter 2 explicitly juxtaposes these two types: voracious demagogues are set against glib, effete, and decadent sophists in the comedies of Aristo­ phanes, where "male protagonists engage the culinary as the primary metaphorical register in relation to the regulation of the appetites" (81). No accident, then, that the figure of the comic butcher or cook (mageiros) also becomes prominent. Whether effete or a braggart, an excessive speaker can be imagined as one who cooks up feasts of (deceptive) speech. Yet Worman also complicates (fruitfully) her model by considering how her types are measured against female appetites. In Greek comedy, women are cautionary models for men in their desires for sex, food, and wine; thus the prattling and decadent speaker is also feminized. Sexual appetite becomes an impor­ tant factor in the figuration of public speaking, not only in terms of female desire, but also...

454 RHETORICA speakers moved (along with a comic lexicon of abuse) from drama to oratory, surfacing also in the Platonic dialogue (although ignored for the most part by Aristotle) and proliferating in Theophrastus. Although for the sake of clarity I have focused in this review on the central opposition between the aggressive versus and the weak and decadent speaker, W. is clear that these two types exist at opposite ends of a continuum and that characteristics of one type can slide into another. Particularly welcome is her insistence that the iambic mode transcends genre. This enables her to make wideranging and successful connections between comedy, satyr play, tragedy, philosophy, and forensic rhetoric. One of the pleasures of the book is to trace the various instantiations of the paradoxical figure of Socrates from Aristophanes to Plato and Theophrastus. Socrates does not occur explicitly in the last of these, but the cumulative force of W.'s analysis compels the reader to give serious consideration to her suggestion that he is a shadowy presence in several of Theophrastus7 caricatures, the product of "a tradition of characterization that wittily assimilates to intemperate types a teacher who used his famous recalcitrance to disparage and tease haughty, boastful elites" (317). Individual readers will, of course, find places where they could desire reformulation or areas where further questions arise. I, for example, am not entirely comfortable with the contention (22) that Plato adopted the language of insult from dramatic genres—this seems to me to be perhaps an overly reductive way of formulating a process that was surely more complex. This leads in turn to problems about how informal practices of insult bleed into and from the rhetoricized versions we find in our literary texts (a reading of the treatment of invective found in Plato's Laws 934-936 would be useful here). Yet it is no insult to suggest that the book presents opportunities for future reflection; some discomfort is a small price to pay for such thoughtful and productive work. Kathryn A. Morgan University of California at Los Angeles Sergey Dolgopolski. What is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. xii + 333 pp. ISBN: 9780823229345 This book joins an increasing body of work devoted to the study of Jewish discourse. The study of Jewish rhetoric has found a place in the work of rhetoric and composition scholars who are turning their attention to the subject of non-Western or alternative rhetorics (Carol Lipson and Roberta Binkley's Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics), as well as scholars who imagine that the conceptual integrity of the notion "Jewish perspectives" can be coherently expressed as a book (Andrea Greenbaum and Deborah Holstein's Jewish Perspectives in Rhetoric and Composition). What is Talmud? Reviews 455 also shares a concern with work in Jewish studies devoted to pedagogy (Simcha Assaf), rabbinic literary activity (Daniel Boyarin, Jeffrey Rubenstein, David Stern), historiography (Ismar Schorsch), systematic Hebrew rhetorics (Isaac Rabinowitz, Arthur Lesley) and the hermeneutical activity of textbased communities (Moshe Halbertal). While there are resources enough from which to construct a course on "Jewish discourse," the idea of teaching and studying "Jewish rhetorics" is still problematic inasmuch as there is a sense that organizing the considerable scholarly activity devoted to "Jewish discourse" under the phrase "Jewish rhetorics" is at best an anachronistic projection and, at worst, an act of violent appropriation. One way to avoid the charges of appropriation or anachronism would be to treat "rhetoric" as a set of methodologies that could be productively applied to any "text." The problem with this approach is that often the methodologies that fall under the heading of rhetoric were produced in support of philosophical or historical investigations. For this reason, others have chosen to treat rhetoric as a set of concerns, or even a predisposition to ask certain kinds of questions. The idea of "Jewish rhetorics" might, in that instance as well, avoid the violence of appropriation, but "rhetoric," then runs the risk of simply being another name for something that is being productively and more accurately examined as "discourse" or "literary activity." The concept of "Jewish rhetorics" may encounter some resistance because, in avoiding the charges of anachronism or violence, "Jewish...

As rhetoricians turn increasingly to study non-Western rhetorics, they rely on postcolonial scholarship but sometimes encounter difficulties adapting its key methods—in particular, hybridity. While it is quite clearly a necessary concept for transnational rhetorics, nevertheless its literariness, ubiquity, and vagueness about agency limit its utility In this paper I draw from relevant work in genre studies, sociolinguistics, and social constructivism to propose a new version of hybridity that can take account of hybrid rhetorical forms, account for their agency with audiences, and be accountable to stakeholders in transnational settings where rhetoricians work. I finish by applying this new method to a protestant sermon preached in Mali and noting both the successes and challenges of engaging an accountable notion of hybridity.

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

In the humanities and social sciences, the essay still presents the most common form of evaluating students’ learning and familiarity with course contents, readings and academic debates. Fiona English acknowledges the value of this ‘default genre’ (Womack 1993: 43) but problematizes its dominance as it privileges particular ways of knowing and expression to the detriment of others. At times, she argues, it might even deny students opportunities for learning and understanding.

This paper presents a comparison of genre use at three Swiss universities from different language regions. The methodology is one of contrastive genre mapping in which we connect two lines of re-search usually seen as distinct approaches. The aim of the study is to find ways of comparing the writing cultures of different languages by collecting and comparing the genres used for teaching. Data about genres were gathered through questionnaires in which students and faculty members were asked to describe writing assignments and student texts. From the answers to these questionnaires, genre inventories were constructed and then re-checked with insiders in faculty discussions or inter-views. As results, lists of genres from the individual universities are presented, as are the patterns of genre families into which the genres were classified. It turned out that genre use shows strong similar-ities across the three universities. The main genre families are presented and differences between universities are discussed.

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

What is communication design? The term may represent, along with technical communication, information design, and content development, the latest permutation of how the work once known as technical writing has been re-named and re-professionalized. This is a reductive answer, of course, since the terms emphasize different qualities of that work and all are pinchy and baggy as generic descriptors. A different answer is that the term communication design captures an awareness that our field lacks a center. It has its genres and its processes, but as Johnson-Eilola and Selber (in press) argue, it is the focus on defining and solving problems in novel ways and in response to the exigencies of highly varied situations that underscores the importance of what we do. I prefer to see communication design as an embrace of that role, a recognition that the scope of our concern is broad: it is communication. It is also constructive work, aimed at producing concrete effects in the world. It is not just writing; it is design.

In 1854 Eliza Leslie—an author well known for her recipes, adolescent literature, and short fiction—slipped in advice to fellow women on how to write and publish under the cover of an etiquette manual. Between pages devoted to table settings, church decorum, and shopping, Leslie upheld women's right to write during a time of significant cultural ambivalence about female authorship. Leslie used the genre of an etiquette book to perform a complicated rhetorical act that simultaneously normalized, validated, and informed mid-nineteenth-century women writers at a time in which women's desire to write faced significant challenges.

Research problem: The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether style congruency on the dimensions succinct-elaborate and instrumental-affective influenced the persuasiveness of business newsletters in the Netherlands and Great Britain. Research question: Is a writing style more persuasive in a country with cultural preferences that are congruent with this writing style? Literature review: The purpose of the literature review was to present two theoretical frameworks for investigating cross-cultural differences in style preferences. Theories about cross-cultural differences in value orientations show that value orientations can be linked to cross-cultural differences in persuasion. Theories about cross-cultural differences in communication styles show that preferences for particular communication styles can be linked to cultural value orientations. Methodology: Two quantitative experimental studies were conducted among 344 business-to-business customers of a company in the Netherlands and Great Britain. Using seven-point scales, participants evaluated different versions of a newsletter on comprehensibility, attractiveness, and intention to order goods. Statistical analyses included general linear model (GLM) repeated measures and two-way ANOVAs. Results and discussion: Findings reveal limited differences between the Dutch and British participants in preferences for communication styles. Consequently, it may not be worthwhile for organizations to adjust the style of their documents to preferences in different cultures. A limitation of the current study was that it only investigated style preferences for one particular business genre (i.e., newsletters). Future research should investigate stylistic preferences in other business genres and in other cultures.

Abstract This essay examines reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln that were published in the aftermath of his death by those who had interacted with Lincoln personally. An understudied genre y Lincoln reminiscences offered judgments of Lincolns character through a portraiture style designed to make salient private as well as public dimensions of his character. We historicize the rhetoric of portraiture and trace the rise of reminiscence out of biography as a stand-alone genre, which reached unprecedented popularity in the competitive subgenre of the Lincoln reminiscence. We argue that Lincoln reminiscences featured a balance of common and uncommon virtues thought essential for a president, a balance that helped democratize and humanize presidential character.

AbstractBooker T. Washington's Cotton States Exposition Address enlarges our understanding of the genre of witnessing by presenting a version of public testimony and historical remembrance sharply at odds with contemporary definitions of the genre. Washington's resolute choice to lend voice as a living witness to the atrocities of slavery in the service of conspicuously pragmatic and narrowly defined interests rather than universal human rights dramatically separates his performance of public witnessing from its late modern forms. Whereas survivors of historical atrocity in the post–World War II era ritually assume the difficult responsibility of testifying to past evils with the greatest possible accuracy, Washington relates the history of slavery—most notably its legacy of heinous human rights abuses—in radically inventive ways. The address demonstrates that those who embody the putative collective voice of subaltern communities may, in particular circumstances, call on the public to willfully forget, rather than somberly remember, the crimes of history. In doing so, the speech also suggests that the ability to bear witness may not automatically result in the ability to petition for equal human rights.

Rhetorical lore holds that epideictic address resolves itself into acts of either praise or blame. The passing of Michael C. Leff—friend to so many, colleague of a fortunate few—grants us every good reason to indulge the former, avoid the latter, and thus satisfy our need to bear witness to an extraordinary life. But we know, too, that the imperative to witness is scarcely limited to these options. This special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is conceived as a testament to the work of Leff generally but especially to a mind possessed of relentless curiosity, at once fiercely independent and disciplined, steadfast in its principles but open always to question, debate, and revision. Leff was, in a word, an explorer, and in this spirit we have asked our contributors neither to bury nor to praise him but to press on as fellow travelers into the world of ideas he so manifestly relished.That Philosophy and Rhetoric should host such an expedition seems altogether appropriate. Since the publication of its first issue in 1968, the journal has committed itself to reinventing the relationship between two ancient, enduring, and often warring traditions of thought. The genius of its founders—Henry Johnstone Jr., Carroll Arnold, Robert Oliver—lay in replacing the long-standing “versus” with an “and.” To grasp the importance of that “and” is to understand the mission of the journal, its editors, and the authors who hold its legacy in trust. It is well to be reminded of how bold that move was at the time, how uncertain its prospects. All was new, but readers quickly learned that here was a journal in full, evidence of which can be found in the roster of essays making up its first volume, among them Lloyd Bitzer's “The Rhetorical Situation, Chaïm Perelman's “Rhetoric and Philosophy,” Gerard Hauser's “The Example in Aristotle's Rhetoric,” Douglass Ehninger's “The Systems of Rhetoric,” Carroll Arnold's “Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature,” George Yoos's “Being Literally False.” The journal, in short, proved instrumental in opening up new ways of thinking about the subject, and it does nothing to detract from Leff's many accomplishments to recognize paths charted before him.Much of what we may say of the journal may indeed be said of the man as well. Both remained convinced of the possibilities of inquiry once emancipated from habit, complacency, and unquestioned tradition. Leff, like Johnstone et al., strained against millennia of thinking of philosophy and rhetoric as being bound in an interminable cold war; they sought, finally, not so much a detente among the powers as a full and genuine partnership. The point was not to collapse the two modes of inquiry, nor to ignore the differences that themselves might be productive of insight. It was rather to put philosophy and rhetoric into conversation with each other.The results were not altogether even—as Henry once confided to me, there were times when he thought philosophers were trying to sound like rhetoricians and rhetoricians like philosophers. But the parties remained loyal to the pact and now, more than forty years on, the enterprise continues to expand the horizons of what we know and can know about that “and.” It has produced much, though with varying degrees of emphasis and interest: ontologies of discourse, classical exegesis, informal logic; hermeneutics, poststructuralism, feminism, public sphere analysis, and, recently, Bakhtin. The range will keep widening, but the journal will retain its signature commitment to depth, rigor, and innovation.I offer these reflections on the journal as a way of suggesting that Leff and it share certain abiding investments. It remains to the authors herein to enrich the contributions of both, and so I will limit my comments on the man to only a few broad observations. As I have noted, his thinking was marked by a steadfast commitment to the humanistic bases of the disciplines, but he did not allow himself to be artificially bound by either. This stubbornness—and he could be stubborn—as often as not placed him in the role of instigator: if he did not approve of the way things were going, he set out to create the conditions for change and renewal. It is notable in this respect how many developments in scholarship he either initiated, signed onto early, or aligned himself with to certain effect. Early in his career he was instrumental, with James J. Murphy, in reinvigorating the study of classical rhetoric at the University of California at Davis, whence was born the journal Rhetorica, for which he served as second editor. At Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he further established his reputation as a student of public address and rhetorical criticism; he led and gave forceful expression to the practice of close textual analysis, with attendant interests in linguistics and discourse pragmatics, assisted in the international study of argumentation, cofounded the Public Address Conference, and rejuvenated rhetorical studies at the University of Memphis.The list is incomplete but the point perhaps made: Leff carried with him the courage of his convictions, and he acted on them by creating the enabling conditions for new avenues of inquiry. In this regard he bore out the potential of interdisciplinarity in ways all too rare in academic work today. The term itself has become justly vulnerable: skeptics have good reason to wince at its easy optimism, the frequency with which it is bruited as an inherent good and the paucity of its actual results. Interdisciplinarity can and has given warrant to ecumenical excess, and in some guises it has promoted the view of rhetoric as being by definition a pariah discipline. In my view, at least, Leff avoided these pitfalls by remaining fixed to certain constants, chief among them a conception of rhetoric as a form of habitation, that is, a mode of being and acting in which the art and the artist collaborate in a world shaped by contingency, the unexpected, and the partially glimpsed. If one word may be said to capture this sense, it is “performance.” Leff himself did not use the term overmuch, perhaps because of the freight it carried during latter decades of the twentieth century; but as a way of explaining the ways of rhetoric it runs as a leitmotif throughout nearly fifty years of thinking and writing about the subject.The third decade of Leff's career found him at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was fortunate enough to work with him when I was completing my graduate studies. The 1980s proved a tumultuous period across the humanities, no less so in rhetoric. I had occasion, then, to observe up close how a first-rate thinker negotiated the manifold challenges posed by emerging forms of postmodernism. For many, his response revealed a certain conservative strain; this much is true, but not for the reasons usually ascribed. Leff was clearly concerned to extend and revitalize neoclassical forms of analysis, and he could be rather too quick to dismiss what seemed then like novel ways of reformulating the disciplinary grounds of rhetoric. His chief concerns, however, cut much deeper than such temperamental matters. Leff's problem was not with the beau ideals of the age—Foucault, de Man, et al.—but more generally with how they were being taken up and to what effect. In the main he found such acolytes afflicted with what he called the tendency to “think in slogans” and bristled at glib dismissals of the rhetorical tradition by those unversed in that tradition. Above all, however, he was troubled by the dangers of writing agency out of the script, as if rhetoric could be reconceived independent of its habitation in the lived realities of human symbolic action. At stake, again, was the role of performance, with its related commitments to historical context, locality, and the artistic rendering of human will. Leff's work was accordingly devoted to reclaiming the realm of concrete expression from airy abstractions, to capture again the rough ground of the discipline and develop a critical vocabulary responsible to the particulars of the speech act even as it sought cautiously for certain levels of generalization.All this may at first glance seem to speak more directly of Leff the rhetorical critic than of theorist familiar to readers of this journal. I would like to submit, however, that in fact his work gives little evidence that he viewed himself operating on one or the other register. I do not mean to suggest that Leff conflated the theoretical with the critical or refused to acknowledge their different emphases and predilections. As a theorist, he was deeply conversant in the historical and conceptual grounds of philosophy and rhetoric, and at various points he proved expert in diagnosing the state of scholarship in both. Still, it must be said that Leff's interest in the “and” leaned to the right, to the ways in which rhetoric, conceived as a form of embodied symbolic performance, could be seen as at once informed by theory and straining always to outstep its explanatory reach.Such a perspective on the art meant that Leff consistently sought to place theory and practice in a tensive, often ambiguous and ironic, but always productive relationship to each other. This much is clearly evident in virtually all of his writings on Cicero, for example, and it is with reference to the Roman orator that I conclude my comments on Leff. Tully was, of course, a preoccupation of Leff's from beginning to end. The reasons for this are many, but for the most direct explanation I refer readers to the essay reprinted in this issue. It is, in my view, the most efficient representation of Leff's abiding interests, including those just noted: the rhetorical lore, its canonical figures, the stress on performativity, the embrace of ambiguity and tension, the play of theory and practice. Short of rehearsing the argument, it may be illustrative to take his description of Ciceronian humanism as a mirror of his own: “a suspicious attitude toward abstract theory not only in respect to rhetoric but also to ethics and politics; a conviction that discourse, especially discourse that allows for argument on both sides of an issue, has a constitutive role to play in civic life; a valorization and idealization of eloquence that entails a strong connection between eloquence and virtue; and a conception of virtue that is decisively linked to political activity.” With this passage in mind, let us hint briefly at the essays to follow.The emergence of rhetorical studies in modern American higher education is in several ways a curious story. All disciplines, of course, struggle early to situate themselves within the complex and contested terrain of academic inquiry, but rhetoric, more than most, struggled to locate itself between the competing demands of research and theory on the one hand, and its applied and vocational missions on the other. It is no small part of Leff's legacy that he steadfastly refused to resolve this tension into a simple disjunction between the library and the classroom. A quick glance at his bibliography gives evidence that in fact he remained for much of his career deeply interested in the interplay of rhetorical pedagogy and theory. And the ground for this interest, as we might expect, was a long-standing investment in traditions of Latin learning generally and rhetorical education in particular.The distinguished classicist Martin Camargo takes us deep into this terrain in his exploration of Anglo-Latin rhetoric in late fourteenth-century England. As if to remind us that the status of rhetoric seems never to have been altogether settled, Camargo painstakingly assembles his case to demonstrate that the subject was not, as is frequently thought, the province of the classroom alone. His extensive recovery of archival materials, rather, leads him to conclude that, if anything, “the theory and practice of rhetoric were anything but banal, trite, and jejune; they were new, hot, even controversial—not milk for infants but solid food for adults.”Leff began his career as a classicist, and he ended it as a classicist. His attunement to the tradition, however, gradually shifted over time from largely exegetical concerns to questions over the relevance and fecundity of such thought for contemporary theorizing about the art. This interest he represented on several fronts: by reclaiming neoclassical criticism for the work of textual analysis, for instance, and by revisiting the concept of decorum as it related to contemporary theory. Among Leff's most important contributions in this vein was to have reanimated debates over the centrality of invention, argument, and hermeneutics. Here again he found himself both defending and promoting certain classical traditions of thought as unjustly stigmatized by postmodern critiques, and, more positively, as a robust resource for explaining rhetorical performance. In this enterprise he enjoyed the amicable but challenging company of Steven Mailloux, with whom he carried on a lively exchange of ideas over many years. Although Leff was rather more concerned to articulate the productive disciplinary differences that might be said to obtain between them, both held constant the role that controversy plays in funding rhetorical argument.Over and against strains of antihumanist thought—ranging from Plato to Heidegger to postmodernism—Mailloux locates an understanding of humanism that rightly embraces human agency and the inventive force of tradition. At the heart of this relationship is Leff's particular brand of “hermeneutical rhetoric,” the process through which individual actors render strategic interpretations of the past to shape collective perceptions in the present. Mailloux reminds us that in no sense does this form of humanism presuppose an absolutely free agent, nor does it ever concede a sense of tradition as inherently prescriptive or determinate. On the contrary, rhetorical humanism—and the hermeneutics it enables—celebrates the deeply human capacity for making judgments in precisely those contexts marked by contingency, plurality, and the shifting demands of human community in time.The study of argumentation is in some ways anomalous. Although it cannot be said to reside at the core of either philosophy or rhetoric as a disciplinary domain, it nevertheless abides as a persistent interest for both. Indeed, it was no small part of Henry Johnstones's mission—successful, in the event—to firmly locate the subject at the interstices of interdisciplinary inquiry and thus to ensure its career and strengthen its claim on several communities of scholars at once. Leff came argumentation through two routes: in his younger years as a collegiate debater and afterward as an academic. The former, I might suggest, is not altogether without relevance to the latter. From it he retained a sense of argument as the embodied exchange of convictions about matters of public concern. This commitment was to surface again when, in the 1980s and thereafter, Leff enthusiastically joined in the renaissance of argument studies that continues to this day.At least two themes join together much of Leff's thinking about argument, and they may be observed at work in his scholarship generally. One is an entrenched resistance to what he regarded as rigid and excessively abstract approaches to the subject, and the other, not surprisingly, perhaps, is the relevance of classical lore, especially Aristotle. Both are evidenced in J. Anthony Blair's case for revisioning conventional treatments of argument and its relationships to dialectic and logic. A prominent figure in the resurgence of argumentation studies, Blair proposes an alternative understanding of how these modes of description and action comport with each other. Rhetoric, he argues, is best understood as a theory of argument as it relates to speeches, dialectic as a theory of argument as it relates to conversations, and logic as a theory of reasoning as it relates to both.I have suggested that the principle of performativity underwrites virtually the whole of Leff's interpretive corpus. Nowhere is this preoccupation more evident than in his practice as a rhetorical critic. On a number of occasions he sought to sharpen, defend, and promote this practice, most explicitly with reference to the work of textual analysis. In the process, Leff helped to established its key theoretical underpinnings, to identify, that is, those premises which might shift such criticism away from mere impressionism toward a more stable and rigorous foundation. The task was not an easy one: a number of leading critics in their own right suspected in this project a certain New Critical fondness for contextless formalism. Again, I think this charge unfounded. We need only consider his insights regarding enactment to see why: texts, he argued, are not merely the record of symbolic action but are themselves forms of action, momentarily bounded by their textness, shaped by contextual forces, and expressions of artistic judgment. “Text,” that is, is as much a verb as a noun. And certain texts, he demonstrated, are notable for the ways in which they perform their own theory; Cicero's De oratore, for example, he took to be a “cookbook that bakes its own cake.”This conception of enactment we see at work in David Zarefsky's treatment of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address. Zarefsky, preeminent among rhetorical studies in the study of the sixteenth president, shares with Leff an abiding interest in how Lincoln was able to give to his thoughts their optimal mode of expression. In the First Inaugural, Zarefsky teaches us, Lincoln exercises the generic possibilities opened to him by presenting what may be called his philosophy of republican government in its distinctly American form. He does so, however, not in the shape of a treatise but through argumentative enactment, a key example of which is found in how he seeks to slow down the deliberative judgment of the audience by slowing down the internal movement of the speech itself. Thus Zarefsky: “By coming back to the argument about secession again and again, [Lincoln] arrested the progression of the speech, halting its movement toward the final choice of peace or war. By developing separate, complete arguments, he invited consideration of the dangers of secession from multiple points of view, so that listeners would take time, not ‘hurry in hot haste’ but think ‘calmly and well’ on the subject. Lincoln's speech is an act as well as a set of propositions. The act carried out the slowing of time for which the propositions call.”Ours is not a particularly hospital time for the study of genre. A casualty of the antiformalism fashionable in much interpretive work of the 1980s and 1990s, the subject remains nevertheless a potent, if underrealized, resource for the analysis of public discourse. Leff, of course, gave to the matter considerable attention, notably in his work on Lincoln and, again, Cicero. His treatments of genre worked in large part because he understood that, contrary to the popular allegation, there was nothing inherently static or predetermined implied in its usage. Rather, he conceived of genres as a formal resource through which traditions of expression—and therefore thought—were given effect in arenas of civic action.Such a conception seems to inform Bradford Vivian's analysis of Booker T. Washington's (in)famous address at the 1895 Cotton States Exposition. For Vivian, the text of that speech offers up a case study in the act of witnessing, where the dialectics of remembering and forgetting give shape and direction to the orator's vision of social rebirth. Among the key insights he offers is that this play of opposites is managed decisively by the epideictic form itself. Far from fixing that vision within the conventional options of praise or blame, Vivian illustrates how Washington subverts the genre through tactical appeals to forget one version of the past and to champion another and so to chart a course of putatively enhanced racial relations. Whatever we may conclude about the speaker's ultimate aims and effect—Vivian leaves us no doubt as to his own views—the text itself amounts, in his words, “to a meditation on time and memory as elements of public judgment.”Time now to let our authors speak for themselves.

Works Reviewed: Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines. Mary Soliday. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2011. 146 pp. Print. ISBN 0-8093-3019-9.$32.00. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Jody Shipka. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2011. 173 pp. Print. ISBN 0-8229-6150-4. $24.95.

This article develops a multimodal model for how claims and evidence work across linguistic, numeric, and visual modes in the professional writing of environmental scientists. I coded and analyzed two reports (Bacey & Barry, 2008 Bacey , J. , & Barry , T. ( 2008 ). A comparison study of the proper use of Hester-Dendy® samplers to achieve maximum diversity and population size of benthic macroinvertebrates Sacramento Valley, California (Report No. EH08-2) . Sarcramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]; Levine et al., 2005 Levine , J. , Kim , D. , Goh , K. S. , Ganapathy , C. , Hsu , J. , Feng , H. , & Lee , P. ( 2005 ). Surface and ground water monitoring of pesticides used in the Red Imported Fire Ant Control Program (Report EH05-02) . Sacramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]) written by research scientists working for California's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) by applying concepts from studies of argument, genre, and visual representations in science. The claim-evidence patterns show initial and summative claims as well as warrants being presented in linguistic forms; however, supporting evidence (i.e., data and backing) is found in numeric, visual, and linguistic forms. These findings highlight the need to extend Toulmin's understanding of claim-evidence relationships into a more robust multimodal model.

This article investigates an emerging practice in palliative care: dignity therapy. Dignity therapy is a psychotherapeutic intervention that its proponents assert has clinically significant positive impacts on dying patients. Dignity therapy consists of a physician asking a patient a set of questions about his or her life and returning to the patient with a transcript of the interview. After describing the origins of dignity therapy, the authors use a rhetorical genre studies framework to explore what the dignity interview is doing, how it shapes patients’ responses, and how patients improvise within the dignity interview’s genre ecology. Based on a discourse analysis of the interview protocol and 12 dignity interview transcripts (legacy documents) gathered in two palliative care settings in Canadian hospitals, the findings suggest that these patients appear to be using the material and genre resources (especially eulogistic strategies) associated with dignity therapy to create discursive order out of their life events. This process of genre negotiation may help to explain the positive psychotherapeutic results of dignity therapy.

This study examines how changes in a key scientific genre supported anthropology’s early twentieth-century bid for scientific status. Combining spatial theories of genre with inflections from the register of economics, I develop the concept of rhetorical scarcity to characterize this genre change not as evolution but as manipulation that produces a manufactured situation of intense rhetorical constraint.

This article traces the influences of hypertext theory throughout the various genres of online publication in technical communication. It begins with a look back at some of the important concepts and theorists writing about hypertext theory from the post-World War II era, to the early years of the World Wide Web 2.0, and the very differing notions of its potential. A significant challenge during this formative period was the fact that limitations in technology and infrastructure placed limitations on the potential envisioned by these scholars. The ways in which we look at early scholarship differ even a decade or more later, in terms of some of the information technologies and tools we use today. In the Web 2.0 era, we see a trend of blending and extension beyond principles found within hypertext theory in the tools we use and user experiences we create with them.

This article documents the evolution of the annual reports of the Danish company Danisco A/S from 1935 through 2007-2008. Compared to previous diachronic studies of annual reports, this study offers a finer grained description from a communicative perspective over a long period of time. Using genre theory as a framework, it analyzes the macrostructure and visual elements of these reports from a communicative standpoint paying equal attention to both of the genre’s subordinate communicative purposes: to give a true and fair view of the state of the company and to provide a positive image of the company. The findings indicate that the annual reports have four distinctive phases (1935 through 1958, 1959 through 1988, 1989-1990 through 2005-2006, and 2006-2007 through 2007-2008) that serve different communicative purposes. The study clearly shows that the annual report is primarily a statutory document and reveals that changes within organizations have a much greater and more immediate impact on changes in the annual reports than do other contextual factors.

This article describes what scholarly multimedia (i.e., webtexts) are and how one teacher-editor has students compose these texts as part of an assignment sequence in her writing classes. The article shows how one set of assessment criteria for scholarly multimedia—based on the Institute for Multimedia Literacy's parameters (see Kuhn, Johnson, & Lopez, 2010 Kuhn , V. , Johnson , D. J. , & Lopez , D. ( 2010 ). Speaking with students: Profiles in digital pedagogy . Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy , 14 ( 2 ). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/14.2/interviews/kuhn/index.html [Google Scholar]) for assessing honor students’ multimedia projects—are used to give formative feedback to students’ projects.

Rhetoric-composition's recurring captivation with emergent brain research is sustained not only by the persuasive visual rhetoric of neuroscientific research but also by the conceptual and terministic overlaps that exist between the fields of rhetoric-composition and neuroscience. While these overlaps suggest ways research in brain science can usefully contribute to work in our field, they also instigate seductively simple “solutions” to the “problem” of epistemological uncertainty. Our neurorhetorical methodology preempts the reductive uptake of neuroscientific research while simultaneously motivating a cross-disciplinary reciprocity conducive to the goals of rhetorical inquiry and responsible writing pedagogy.

In this essay, I examine the problems I now see with the sample curriculum I proposed in College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for Writing Instruction in 2007. There are numerous factors that must be considered in designing a writing course: choice of subject matter, choice of genres to assign, sequencing of writing assignments, number of assignments, and using both content and pedagogy to enhance the possibility for positive transfer of learning for student writers. The problems in these areas of curriculum design, both in my work and in writing studies at large, as well as recommendations to eliminate those problems are explored here.

Within composition studies, transfer and rhetorical genre studies have found an especially productive partnership for exploring together whether and in what ways students transfer writing-related knowledge from one context to another. This article continues this synthesis by turning to Anne Freadman’s notion of uptake to suggest a more robust understanding of transfer for writing . As I will show, uptake foregrounds the role that heterogeneity, selection, and problem-solving play in how literate learners encounter and make sense of new writing tasks at the convergence of prior genre knowledge and current, local genred events. This micro discursive space of uptake is an important site for thinking about transfer in that it is partially through this process that prior genres meet, are transformed, rejected, or imported whole cloth into new rhetorical situations. Ultimately, this article argues that, through uptake, high road transfer is reconceived as a dynamic, problem-solving endeavor where writers can be encouraged to proactively sort through and make selections in and amongst prior genre knowledge.

The authors report on a multiyear study designed to reveal how introducing a content management system (CMS) in an administrative office at a large organization affects the office’s writing and work practices. Their study found that users implemented the CMS in new and creative ways that the designers did not anticipate and that the choices users made in using the CMS were often driven not by technology but by the social implications the CMS held for their office. By contrasting how writers negotiated specific genres of writing before and after the CMS was introduced, the authors argue for increased attention to providing flexible technologies that enable writers to innovate new tools in response to the social needs of their writing environments. This approach must be driven by research on the implications of technology in workplace communities.

This article traces the uncomfortable relationship between writing studies and the concept of learning transfer. First it reviews three stages in the changing attitudes toward learning transfer in writing theory that is influenced by rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and situated learning. Then it reviews learning transfer theory itself, an area that is seldom explicitly referred to in writing studies. The article concludes with a synthesis that brings transfer theory to bear on writing studies, suggesting directions for developing research and pedagogical practices related to business and technical communication.

Third-generation activity theory (3GAT) has become a popular theoretical and methodological framework for writing studies, particularly in technical communication. 3GAT involves identifying an object, a material or problem that is cyclically transformed by collective activity. The object is the linchpin of analysis in the empirical case. Yet the notion of object has expanded methodologically and theoretically over time, making it difficult to reliably bound an empirical case. In response, this article outlines the expansion of the object, diagnoses this expansion, and proposes an alternate approach that constrains the object for case-study research in writing studies.

This article discusses challenges involved in contrastive discourse analysis that emerged while carrying out a follow-up study into a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) program in Spain. Reversing the focus on English of much contrastive rhetoric work, the study investigates the effect of second-language-English on first-language-Spanish writing. The motivation for this focus and the choice of tools from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) for genre and clause analysis are discussed. Reflecting on the difficulties involved in contrastive discourse analysis, in particular the challenges of comparing texts, it is suggested that contrastive work benefits from a more differentiating analytical method and a more dynamic conception of language. The implications of an influence from English are also considered, with the theses of hybridity and of homogeneity contributing to indicate a role for language awareness work in schools.

This article reports on an international study of the teaching of undergraduate mathematics in seven countries. Informed by rhetorical genre theory, activity theory, and the notion of Communities of Practice, this study explores a pedagogical genre at play in university mathematics lecture classrooms. The genre is mediational in that it is a tool employed in the activity of teaching. The data consist of audio/video-recorded lectures, observational notes, semistructured interviews, and written artifacts collected from 50 participants who differed in linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds; teaching experience; and languages of instruction. The study suggests that chalk talk, namely, writing out a mathematical narrative on the board while talking aloud, is the central pedagogical genre of the undergraduate mathematics lecture classroom. Pervasive pedagogical genres, like chalk talk, which develop within global disciplinary communities of practice, appear to override local differences across contexts of instruction. Better understanding these genres may lead to new insights regarding academic literacies and teaching.

Little research has been done to explore the status of business genres in China. The present study explores the evolution of genre of resume writing in China using a grounded theory approach. This study examines the rhetorical patterns and persuasive strategies employed in resume writing in different periods in China and reveals how these changes are related to historical, social, and economic contexts in China, especially from 1979 to 2010, as well as impacts of global contexts on Chinese resume writing. This study characterizes resume writing in China and relates these features to cultural motives and cultural contexts. It concludes that current resume writing practice in China shows a glocal trend.

434 RHETORICA svista, se ho ben rilevato, alia nota 62, p. 173, dove luserit Asopida di Ovidio, Metamorfosi, 6,113 va corretto in Asopida luserit. Un contributo dotto e laborioso, dunque, questo della L.: destinato a imporsi, al pari di quelli che lo hanno preceduto nella medesima collana, come strumento irrinunciabile di consultazione per l'intelligenza dei due testi scolastici e come punto di partenza di qualsiasi ulteriore contributo all'interpretazione di questa ancora misconosciuta ma straordinariamente affascinante produzione letteraria. Mario Lentano University di Siena She René Nimlist, The Ancient Critic at Work. Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek Scholia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ix + 447 pp. ISBN 1107403049 This is an exceptionally useful book, one many people have for sev­ eral years wished for so that they could read it. The scholia, the marginal comments in manuscripts of Greek literary texts that encapsulate the com­ mentaries of ancient scholars, are the best source we have for ancient practical criticism. However, scholia are immensely difficult. Their sometimes tech­ nical Greek is difficult, and the difficulties are compounded by the process of amalgamation and abbreviation they have undergone. Often they are corrupt besides. This is the first attempt at a systematic, book-length study of literary criticism in the scholia. Not surprisingly, the scholia to the Iliad predominate, because they are by far the richest extant, but Niinlist uses those on the Odyssey, Hesiod, the dramatists, the orators, and Theocritus too. Niinlist says in the introduction that such a discussion could be orga­ nized in two ways: around Greek terms, and around underlying concepts. He has wisely chosen the second—he is very helpful in pointing out the variability in terminology in the scholia—while providing a handy glossary of literary terms at the back. (One could also conduct a literary study of the scholia to a particular text, but that would not offer the breadth this book does.) The first section considers concepts found in scholia on a vari­ ety of authors and genres, while the second part deals with characteristics that, in the view of ancient critics, were confined to Homer or to drama. The first few chapters are narratological—plot, time, narrative and speech, focalization but the discussion expands to cover a variety of issues, in­ cluding style, characterization, mythology, indirectly conveyed or hidden meanings. For Homer, there are chapters on type scenes, speeches, epithets, gods, similes, and "reverse order," while a long chapter on drama deals with such questions as entrances and exits, costumes and props, and acting. The selection of topics represents issues that are prominent in the scholia. The Reviews 435 book does not look at rhetorical figures, but it frequently refers to the close connection between literary criticism and rhetoric in antiquity It does not usually engage in source-criticism (an obsession of older work on scholia), but occasionally discusses ancient scholarly controversies. This is a learned book, and I have learned an immense amount from it—and it has directed me towards many questions that I hope that I, or my students, may explore further. It is at times more descriptive than profoundly critical. Throughout, although Niinlist is aware of imposing modern cate­ gories on ancient critics, he is biased in favor of seeing similarities rather than differences. His ancient critics are foreshadowers of Genette as students of narrative, of Arendt in understanding type-scenes, of Parry on epithets. I am not entirely easy about equating focalization with the ancient solution "from the character," because structuralist narratology offers a precise definition of "focalization," and the ancient critics are not so clear about exactly what they mean. Perhaps because of this slant towards modern questions, the book does not treat "appropriateness" except in passing, though it argues (p. 250 n. 46) that "appropriateness is not exclusively a moral category." It com­ ments on the chauvinism of the Homeric scholia (the critics are pro-Greek and typically try to understand Homer as pro-Greek, too), but has little to say about the problem of Homer's cultural authority. Scholia often praise Homer for opposite practices in different passages— here for being brief, but there for being expansive. This is unlikely to be...

Much recent discussion of ‘academic literacies’ has focussed upon the ways in which students are accultured into appropriate discourses and genres in the academy. This may be particularly true where a discipline has a very strong sense of lexicon and content. In awareness of this, semi-structured interviews were carried out in the spring of 2009 with three highly experienced academic writers in the department of Accounting and Finance at the Manchester Business School. The main focus of this paper is on academic literacy practices. The results of the interviews are discussed in this paper, which examines the relationship between experienced writers and their discourse community, the norms within which they work, the place for creativity, and the extent to which each of these may be negotiated. It will firstly consider the concepts of ‘discourse community’ and ‘Community of Practice’ (CoP), before discussing notions of creativity and ideas-generation as a means of informing the academic work that these writers develop.

The difficulties students face when writing academically in an L2 have been widely acknowledged (Dudley-Evans 2002 et al., Paltridge 2001 and Swales 1990). While many higher education institutions in English-speaking countries have started to offer modules that support non-native (and native) students in their academic writing, very little is being done in this respect in developing countries, for example in Latin America (Carlino 2007 and Vargas 2007). In this paper, a project will be presented that aimed at fostering academic literacy in an M.A. course on research methods in a Mexican public university. Different pedagogic strategies, such as a needs analysis, explicit instruction on the target genre (the literature review), collaborative writing, a research journal, peer-reviews and group discussions were combined in order to achieve rapid improvement in this resource-poor environment. Through constant mutual feedback from, and communication with, peers, this transitional discourse community (Bruffee 1999) of twenty-four students moved towards the norms and conventions associated with the respective genre. The strategies employed might be of interest to instructors in academic writing who work under similar difficult conditions and/or time constraints.

Reviewing keynotes and papers presented at the 2005, 2007 and 2009 EATAW conferences, and subsequent academic and digital literacies research, this paper considers the current agenda for academic writing teachers. It discusses pedagogic issues arising, for instance, from research on genre, multimodality, online communities, and the challenges and resources for the generation of students problematically called the ‘net generation’. Looking at two wings of academic writing research, those focusing on the ‘textual’ and those on processes and contexts, it raises the question of a common agenda for disciplinary writing studies, one exploring the transformatory processes and effects of disciplinary meaning making in ‘the digital university’.

This article traces the history of the five-paragraph theme and the views about it, along with arguing for its elimination in writing instruction in favor of problem-based, “rich-task” writing experiences for students.

Composition theorists concerned with students’ academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these criticisms, however, voice continues to frequently appear as a goal in guidelines for teaching writing and on high-stakes writing assessment rubrics in the United States. Given the apparent lack of alignment between theory and practice regarding its use, more empirical research is needed to understand how teachers apply voice as a criterion in the evaluation of student writing. Researchers have used sociocultural and functionalist frameworks to analyze voice-related discursive patterns, yet we do not know how readers evaluate written texts for voice. To address this gap in research the present study asked: 1) What language features do secondary English teachers associate with voice in secondary students’ writing and how do they explain their associations? 2) How do such identified features vary across genres as well as among readers? Nineteen teachers were interviewed using a think-aloud protocol designed to illuminate their perceptions of voice in narrative and expository samples of secondary students’ writing. Results from an inductive analysis of interview transcripts suggest that participating teachers associated voice with appraisal features, such as amplified expressions of affect and judgment, that are characteristic of literary genres.

This article uses both actor network theory (ANT) and activity theory to trace and analyze the ways in which both Twitter and third-party applications support the development and maintenance of meaningful contexts for Twitter participants. After situating context within the notion of a ‘‘fire space’’, the authors use ANT to trace the actors that support finding and moving information. Then they analyze the ‘‘prescriptions’’ of each application using the activity-theory distinction between actions and operations. Finally, they combine an activity-theory analysis with heuristics derived from the concept of ‘‘findability’’ in order to explore design implications for Social Web applications.

This article analyzes The Business of Being Born, a documentary that critiques dominant American childbirth practices, practitioners, and locations as overmedicalized, and offers midwife-attended homebirth as a safe, viable option. The rhetorical-cultural analysis focuses on the documentary's reception, including twenty-six film reviews and two statements issued by the American Medical Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The article demonstrates the role of ethos in genre reception, with a particular look at celebrity ethos associated with documentaries. The article suggests not only that visual arguments such as documentaries currently affect cultural conversations more readily than print arguments but also that dominant discourses and ideologies delimit those conversations' boundaries.

While longitudinal research within the field of writing studies has contributed to our understanding of postsecondary students’ writing development, there has been less attention given to the discursive resources students bring with them into writing classrooms and how they make use of these resources in first-year composition courses. This article reports findings from a cross-institutional research study that examines how students access and make use of prior genre knowledge when they encounter new writing tasks in first-year composition courses. Findings reveal a range of ways student make use of prior genre knowledge, with some students breaking down their genre knowledge into useful strategies and repurposing it, and with others maintaining known genres regardless of task.

Writing pedagogy and civic literacy can form an interactive, interdisciplinary partnership beneficial to students. Students learn to compare the classical rhetorical genres of epideictic, forensic, and deliberative rhetoric to modern ceremonial, judicial, and legislative rhetorical genres. Elements essential to writing pedagogy – ethos, logos, pathos, claims, warrants, and enthymemes – become meaningful as students engage in civic-themed reading and writing assignments designed for first-year composition. Writing pedagogy enriched with a civic literacy motif encourages students to practice writing to authentic audiences for genuine civic purposes.