Small-scale fishers comprise nearly all capture fishery jobs, bring known benefits to biodiversity management, and, until recently, have provided humanity with the large majority of its seafood. Despite these well-documented benefits, small-scale fishers face increasingly intense displacement because of the marine closure pathway for biodiversity repair that is forwarded in the first draft of the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework. In this paper, I analyze and contextualize conflated and extracted informational foci in marine science policy documents in order to illustrate that diminishing contexts for small-scale fisher value move through biodiversity policy texts to occupy priority positions in the first draft of the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework.

This assignment, designed for a graduate certificate program in rhetoric and composition, asks students to create a writing prompt for an audience of their choice and to accompany it with a reflective letter written to a stakeholder of their choice. To prepare, students first read scholarship on college writing assignments: what kinds students perceive as meaningful, what kinds are most typical, and what kinds are encouraged in a writing-across-the-curriculum approach. They then consider what elements of this research they can bring into their own context, both in terms of teaching (via the prompt) and in terms of sharing their learning with a relevant stakeholder (via the reflective letter, usually written to an administrator, a colleague, or a student). By allowing students to expressly connect course content to their own contexts in two genres, this assignment enacts features of the scholarship students read. While personalizing learning is valuable in any context, it is especially so in a graduate certificate program, because this increasingly common site of instruction serves students with diverse educational and professional histories and future goals.

This assignment aims to help nascent scholars break into print and develop scholarly connections between their own areas of interest and the subfield of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies (RC&WS). Drawing on advice from Ballif et al. (2008), students in my graduate seminar write a publication quality book review of a recently published monograph in RC&WS. After a series of priming activities, students engage in a structured peer review that follows guidelines I developed as book review editor at Composition Studies.

Learning management systems (LMSs) are a common software many higher education institutions rely on to facilitate online, hybrid, and web-enhanced courses. However, while our students use the LMS for online learning, less often do they study the LMS as a cultural artifact that shapes how learning happens. This assignment prepares first-year writing students to disrupt the perceived neutrality of LMSs. Students study the LMS and grapple with issues related to technology, power dynamics, audience, and purpose that are foundational to their reading and writing of other texts. Before engaging in this project, students practice conducting rhetorical analysis and inquiry research that prepare them for the kinds of thinking and questioning required for the final LMS project. The final project for the course is a three-part LMS project that culminates in a digital presentation.

This article introduces a flexible and adaptable Map Composition assignment to promote cartographic literacy. With applications to composition and writing across the curriculum, this assignment promotes students’ awareness of the rhetorical nature of maps, which is important as maps inform and influence public discourse on wide-ranging issues. Student work shows how composing a map can lead them toward improved rhetorical awareness, cartographic literacy, and engagement with place-based civic issues. The article acknowledges limitations of teaching maps in writing classes and concludes with discussion of how this assignment can be adapted to a range of courses to promote cartographic literacy in support of broader literacies and civic engagement.

Abstract Small-scale fishers comprise nearly all capture fishery jobs, bring known benefits to biodiversity management, and, until recently, have provided humanity with the large majority of its seafood. Despite these well-documented benefits, small-scale fishers face increasingly intense displacement because of the marine closure pathway for biodiversity repair that is forwarded in the first… Continue reading Extracted and Conflated Research Foci in the Global Displacement of Small-Scale Fishers: A Comparative Analysis of Context Rhetoric in UN Marine Biodiversity Policy Development

Communicative acts that deliberately disrupt how an audience understands them as either fiction or nonfiction are well-known phenomena. Still, the rhetoric of such disruptions has yet to be systematically investigated. This essay treats the experience of such disruptions as a distinct form of reflexivity, conceptualizing it as metanoic reflexivity. Drawing on recent work on fictionality theory and on theories of metanoia, the essay uses this concept to describe the reading effect that is produced when a rhetor uses nonconventional forms of fictionality to disrupt how an audience ascribes relevance to a communicative act. Through readings of Democratic campaign rhetoric from the US presidential election of 2020, the essay directs attention to how this reflexivity has moved from artistic practices to the communicative mainstream, investigates how it operates, and discusses its potential deliberative ramifications.

This essay explores the figure of “liberal tears” as a manifestation of contemporary sadistic conservative discourse in the United States. Sadistic rhetoric betrays an underlying structure of affect where hate and desire coincide. Its primary work is to enforce separation between sadistic subjects and fantasy objects that appeal to them in ways that must be disavowed for their identities to remain coherent. The liberal other is a figure both promising and threatening overwhelming enjoyment. Because of the ways in which it relies on separation and identification to generate enjoyment for its subjects, strategies like satire and empathy are insufficient to respond to sadistic conservative discourses, but rhetoric’s capacity to destabilize identities and undermine certainty remain promising contributions to engaged scholarship.

Rhetorical studies of water-related controversies highlight multiple interpretations of water at stake. Yet nearly every dispute over water involves not just contested meanings but contested ontologies. This essay examines water ontologies in a controversy over water wells in Ontario, Canada, which residents claim were affected by pile driving for wind turbine installation. Drawing on Annemarie Mol’s theory of multiple ontologies and the Bakhtinian term, chronotope, I show how different water ontologies emerge from spatiotemporal orientations and shift how expertise is enacted. Common water ontologies, water-as-resource and water-as-chemical-entity, enshrine white settlers as experts, despite their different stances on the issue in question. Municipal leaders, corporate representatives, and community members enacted water as an entity knowable to technoscience and exploitable by humans. An alternative ontology introduced by First Nations leaders, water-as-lifeblood, emphasizes water as a sacred, life-giving force. Speakers authorize themselves as experts by enacting water differently.

In this essay I turn to the world-renowned book and film The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power and Profit by Joel Bakan in order to conceptualize and critique what I label the rhetoric of corporate psychopathy. Doing so, I advance two interrelated claims: first, that neoliberalism’s rhetorical force is derived primarily from its extension and alteration of liberal notions of possessive individualism into a dispositif of corporate personhood. Second, I claim that Bakan’s argument that corporations are psychopaths—and his larger rhetoric of corporate psychopathy—ultimately reinscribes rather than challenges the disciplinary functions of liberal discourse in interesting ways. Thus, while the rhetoric of corporate psychopathy is an easily digestible line of argument that offers a ready-made case against corporate personhood and rights it is an argument against corporate personhood that those who oppose corporate power ought to reconsider.

As a longstanding area of practice and inquiry in rhetorical scholarship, the role of the example in rhetorical discourse has undergone its share of debates, discussions, and important advancements. One important topic of discussion on these matters involves the role of the example in providing either strategic ambiguity or experiential clarity. Through an analysis of William James’s deployment of a pragmatic rhetoric of exemplary figures in The Varieties of Religious Experience, this essay advances a view of the example as a resource for transforming the ambiguous consequences of inner ideals into pragmatic and empowered social action. In a chapter titled “The Value of Saintliness,” James invokes a cadre of saintly figures as exemplars in the attempt to cultivate democratic individuality and inspire social change efforts through the conduct of spiritual meliorism. This essay offers expanded conceptions of exemplarity and pragmatist rhetoric in contexts concerning democracy and social justice.

In Phaedrus, Plato invokes a mythic exemplum concerning the Egyptian deity Thoth. Though often interpreted as an overt critique of writing, this argument posits Thoth is offered analogically to contrast Plato's rhetorical epistemology with that of the ancient Egyptians. To do so, this argument addresses why a mythic Egyptian figure might be so significant to Plato in the 4th Century B.C. Greece, whose culture already had multiple gods and cultural heroes to whom the invention of writing is attributed, when the episode in Phaedrus is axiomatically described as a critique of writing. Because Plato may have had some degree of firsthand knowledge of Egyptian traditions it explores those traditions personified in the figure of Thoth, which should be examined as an analogical device advised by Egyptian rhetorical epistemology. A closer examination of the comparative rhetorical epistemological perspective not only illuminates Thoth's appearance in Phaedrus but also the Egyptian rhetorical-epistemic tradition. Thoth's role as epistemic mediator between humans and truth, in the broadest terms, was to act as psychopomp who moves both between humanity and the arrival at knowledge that prefigures rhetorical action.

Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells; Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book by Pauline Reid; The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by David Wiles Susan Wells. Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge. RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 211 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08467-1.Pauline Reid. Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 283 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0069-6.David Wiles. The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-49887-6. Timothy Barr Timothy Barr Northeastern University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (3): 325–330. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.325 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Timothy Barr; Review: Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells; Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book by Pauline Reid; The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by David Wiles. Rhetorica 1 August 2022; 40 (3): 325–330. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.325 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Hugh Latimer's 1548 “Sermon of the Plough” is well-known as an example of early English evangelical rhetoric. However, the sermon has often been considered as an effect of, rather than a participant in, evangelical theology. This article reads Latimer's rhetoric, especially his creation of a persona, as fully theological, using Melanchthon's valorization of rhetoric over logic as a model. Latimer's sermon produces an authority that is not limited to Latimer himself, but serves as a reformation of Catholic notions of the authoritative role of the Church, a role based upon the rhetorically effective presentation of the Bible.

Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature, by Carol A. Newsom Carol A. Newsom. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 130. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. 382 pp. ISBN 978-3-16-157723-9. Davida Charney Davida Charney University of Texas at Austin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (3): 322–324. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.322 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Davida Charney; Review: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature, by Carol A. Newsom. Rhetorica 1 August 2022; 40 (3): 322–324. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.322 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Materials compositions, such as textiles, tell stories and act as data carriers. They persist in speaking even as their makers are erased or lost. When information about a maker ceases to be available, applying principles of storytelling and rhetoric facilitates a possible re–reading of a material composition as a process of recentering the human maker.

This paper offers an analysis of the landmark 1961 speech given by the Federal Communications Commission chairman, Newton N. Minow (born 1926). It includes a discussion of the rhetorical situation in which the oration was delivered, review of the persuasive tactics employed by the orator and the goals he attempted to achieve, as well as assessment of the degree to which his effort was successful. The speech is analyzed against the political background of the early days of the Kennedy administration, marked by social optimism and rapid technological progress. Widely regarded as the most significant speech on television in the history of American rhetoric, Minow’s oration was delivered during turbulent times for the U.S. media and has indeed led to far-reaching changes in the nation’s broadcasting environment, including the establishment of the system of public media in the second half of the 1960s. The landmark speech caused a great deal of stir in the national consciousness as well, becoming a part of the popular culture of the decade, with the words “vast wasteland” still remembered today.

The article combines methods pertaining to Rhetorical Genre Studies and Discourse-Historical Approach in order to provide a comprehensive analysis of Krzysztof Bosak’s nomination acceptance speech which he delivered during the 2020 Confederation presidential primaries. The discussed genre of political speech is rarely realized in European contexts. Given various differences between the American and the Polish political systems, Bosak did not follow every pattern of the standard variant of the genre. Rather his speech appears to be more similar to a nomination acceptance speech of a third-party candidate. Overall, Bosak emerged as the leader of a divided and heterogeneous party, which was not given much attention by mainstream media. The paper investigates how these factors contributed to the structure and content of the speech. Moreover, recent decades have seen a rapid rise in significance of (far) right-wing movements in Europe. As Confederation is a relatively new political formation, there is a gap in research regarding the properties of its discourse. Thus, the present paper compares the discourse of the coalition with practices of politics of fear (Wodak, 2021).

The aim of this article is to provide an analytical introduction upon the ways of representation of transgender minority in new media. Through rhetorical analysis of selected content related to two high-profile transgender YouTubers, we identified five building blocks of given discourse: reduction of a structural problem to a personal one, reduction of a person’s reality to feelings, tokenization, psychiatrization of transgender identity, and ingroup gatekeeping.

This article argues that through embodied presentations and the multimodal, international and intercultural affordances of YouTube, the rhetoric of Black hair care YouTubers is tactical TPC toward social justices. We note the interactive comments section as a place for technical communicators to identify and redress issues in normative instructional discourse. This scholarship extends TPC beyond “how to do it” and “how I do it” toward “how we must view it in order to do it.’

Black Technical and Professional Communication is defined as ”practices that are centered around Black community, culture, and rhetorical practices that are inherent in the Black lived experience. Black TPC is reflective of the cultural, economic, social, and political experiences of Black people across the Diaspora” (Black TPC Taskforce). This special issue emphasizes the importance of valuing Black TPC as fundamental to developing a comprehensive understanding of the technical and professional communication.

ABSTRACTThis article examines how 14 Black professional communicators publicly share their stories about their career change into software development and other positions in the tech industry. Findings suggest that Black readers looking to shift into the tech field benefit from emotional experiences with professional development resources as they make their strategic career pivots. Black technical joy describes this rhetorical practice to find comfort in and celebration of the strategic ways Black people approach technical communication.KEYWORDS: Computer science / programmingracial studies / ethnic studies / cultural studiesblack technical joyblack rhetoricqualitative methodsworkplace studies / professional practice AcknowledgmentsMany thanks to Christopher Castillo and Jason Tham for their comments on the first draft of my proposal to this special issue. Your disciplinary perspectives from literacy studies and technical and professional communication helped me understand how to ground my research within the expectations of Technical Communication Quarterly readers. Thank you anonymous peer reviewers for your sharp observations on how this article could strengthen its argument and highlight the most salient themes in my analysis. And thanks to the wonderful editors of this special issue for their mentorship and guiding revision.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Black professionals in this article represent the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Kenya. I use Black to encompass these nationalities.2. Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison (Citation2016) argue that "color-blind racism" points out the problem of refusing to acknowledge race while associating disability with ignorance and passivity. They suggest that color-evasiveness "allows for both comprehensively situating the conceptualization and critique of color-blindness as well as thoughtfully considering how to move the underlying ideology forward expansively" (p. 158).3. For this study, I referred to McKee and Porter (Citation2008) and Quinton and Reynolds (Citation2018) for advice on the ethics of doing my Internet research study. Rather than determining if online content is private or public, "we need to think about the sensitivity of the subject we might be researching as well as the vulnerability of the research participants" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159) to decide if informed consent is required. University institutional review boards (IRB) may not have clear guidance on how to assess the ethics and harm of Internet research (My university determined my study was exempt from further review because I was not speaking directly to the authors.). In response to limited guidance or policy from IRB, scholars should make an empathetic, humanizing "probable judgment" (McKee & Porter, Citation2008, p. 725) and reflect if "it's reasonable to assume that [the authors] desire their content to be disseminated and also commented upon, which includes the analysis of their content as a data resource for research" (Quinton & Reynolds, Citation2018, p. 159).4. Agile is an incremental and iterative collaborative approach to project management that emphasizes teams' quickly delivering versions of a product or service to clients in a two-week sprint to receive feedback. Teams can then implement desired changes to the product or service in another two-week sprint. This process of iterative discovery helps teams reduce risks and ensure the product adapts to new requirements. Agile was first developed in software development in 2001 and has since been implemented in other industries.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAntonio ByrdAntonio Byrd is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he teaches courses in professional and technical communication, multimodal composition, and Black/African American literacy. He uses qualitative research and critical race studies to understand how Black adults learn and use computer programming to address racial inequality in their communities. Byrd's work has previously appeared in College Composition and Communication and Literacy in Composition Studies. He is the recipient of the 2021 Richard Braddock Award for Best Research Article in the College Composition and Communication journal.

Throughout Cherríe Moraga’s publications (1979 to present), we see her writings pivot from expressions of cohesive oneness to articulations of generative fragmentation. Moraga’s emerged attention to metaphorical woundedness participates in Chicanx rhetorics of fragmentation, which undermines colonial fictions that the self is whole and unified. Such rhetoric emphasizes potentials of semi-ness and creative energy of shame as strategies to confront Chicanx realities, and to engage contemporary theories of decolonialism, biopower, and embodied language. Moraga’s writings provide a lens through which we investigate how confirmation and ownership of rhetorics of fragmentation might nurture rhetorical homelands, particularly for Chicanx student writers.

This article participates in contemporary conversations about ethos by extending conceptions of ethos as dwelling places” or ecologies” to ethos as hospitality. Such extension involves attending to how three recent decolonial cookbook authors construct stable textual identities and ethos using rhetorics of healing, constitutive rhetoric, and utopian rhetoric. The cookbooks under analysis–Afro-Vegan by Bryant Terry (2014), Decolonize Your Diet by Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel (2015), and The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman (2017)–offer readers knowledge of African American, Mesoamerican, and Native American ancestral foodways and encourage culturally-affiliated readers to embrace these foodways in order to reclaim their communities' physical and spiritual health. The authors demonstrate a complex engagement with ethos as they reconstitute the cultural identity of their primary audiences both literally, through the consumption of food as an act rooted in the body, and figuratively, through the ways food connects us to others.

This paper examines Aeschines’s speech Against Timarchus to offer frameworks for rhetoric to examine the historical particularities of sex work. Drawing on feminist and queer rhetorics, this paper rereads Against Timarchus as well as scholarly receptions of the speech to discuss how Timarchus has been positioned outside definitions of rhetoric in ways that highlight the instability of definitions of rhetoric and state power. This paper argues that kakos and atimia are useful concepts for rhetorical historiographers for examining sex work in classical Athens, as well as interrogating the power structures upon which a given definition of rhetoric is derived from.

This article argues for the importance of British food writer Elizabeth David (1913-1992) in questioning the centrality of power in feminist rhetorical studies and thereby furthering our capacity to understand the diversity of conservative women and their rhetorical projects. The article analyzes David's pathos in her landmark volume of gastronomical essays, <i>An Omelette and a Glass of Wine</i> (1986), and shows how this rhetoric develops a conservative "political culture" which privileges human motivations within food cultures that move beyond the negotiation of power.

The climate change crisis is a matter of increasing concern to rhetoric and composition. Some scholars in the discipline, specifically on the new materialist turn, have engaged and accounted for the damage through methodologies of ontological entanglement and relationality. The potential of ontological accounts to facilitate global activism faces the obstacle of scalar derangement. By acting as Foucauldian specific intellectuals, rhetoric and composition scholars may employ new materialist ontological projects to bridge the gap between local accounts of climatological damage and a global, pluralist assemblage of climate activists.

In this study, we investigated audience awareness characteristics in elementary school students’ texts. To achieve this goal, we used a cross-sectional study design and sampled texts from 90 students in grades 1–3 (N = 270). These texts formed a corpus that was qualitatively analyzed by the research team. We used descriptive statistics to identify audience awareness patterns. Based on previous research, we expected to find considerable variation within and between grades. Therefore, we posed the following two research questions: (1) What characterizes audience awareness within grades 1–3? and (2) How does audience awareness develop between grades 1–3? We found that students used various rhetorical moves oriented toward the audience, such as greetings and closings, meta-text, explanations, and justifications. The results indicated that the students exhibited several characteristics related to audience awareness in all three grades. However, the variation within the grades was significant, while the variation between the grades was less pronounced.

As one kind of designed communication, technical communication is created for readers we assume use the content for some situated purpose. Understanding users and their situations to be varied, communicators rely on simplified models of both to create usable content. In many cases, this approach works, but in some commercial sectors, companies are recognizing a need to engage with users directly and to include them in the production of communication. Including users in the production of communication may ease the burden of communicating in ways that are sufficiently detailed, accurate, inclusive, localized, and timely, but these ventures also create challenges of collaboration that direct attention to how users are situated in infrastructures that allow them to act as effective readers and collaborators. This article presents a model of users, situating them amid infrastructures that extend their ability to take rhetorical action. The authors explain and demonstrate a heuristic for analyzing infrastructure as an extension of a user's "mediated potential" for rhetorical action.

Despite their central importance to a variety of endeavors and despite widespread use in both industry and academia, version control systems (software for tracking versions of files) have not been extensively studied in fields related to technical communication, rhetoric, and communication design. Git, by far the most dominant version control system today, is largely absent. This study theorizes Git as boundary infrastructure---infrastructure used to facilitate collaboration across disciplines and domains. The unique characteristics of boundary infrastructure explain how something as prominent as Git can be so invisible and help identify dangers posed by boundary infrastructure. Drawing on modes of resistance developed in feminist rhetorics, this article concludes with suggestions to ameliorate the negatives effects such infrastructure might have on collaborative knowledge work.

As artificial intelligence (AI) automates technical and dialogic processes, technical communicators produce value through articulating complex problems, facilitating new forms of participation, and managing user-generated content via experience architecture. Automated and intelligent agents are least able to grasp the context of experiences, requiring human input/feedback for maximum performance. The examples we trace both prepare communities to embrace AI as part of the available information infrastructure and create an automated infrastructure of intelligent augmented action. Following Star's anthropological investigation of infrastructure, we analyze organizational examples where rhetoric entangles AI, automation, generative design, additive manufacturing, gift labor, and assembly lines.

In this article, I focus on two competing technical communication discourses used to represent the biometric technology Ghana adopted in 2012 and subsequent elections to demonstrate how communication about technology could potentially marginalize local, nondominant knowledge systems whereas it privileges global, dominant knowledge systems. Representation of the biometric technology, therefore, reflects ways that technical communication can become complicit in silencing, excluding, and marginalizing local voices. I call attention to how communication that focuses on dominant narratives obscures and delegitimizes the knowledge of disenfranchised and less privileged groups.

This article presents an ethnographic study on the user experience (UX) design of the photo- and video-editing apps of millennial and Generation Z participants from different cultural groups. The case study calls attention to the implications of rhetorical misrepresentations of reality that photo- and video-editing apps afford and encourages future large-scale studies on the negative psychological and behavioral impacts such apps can have on users’ psychology, behaviors, and well-being. The authors use frameworks in virtue ethics to argue that despite slight variations, photo and video app UX has ethical implications that can negatively impact young adult users. For example, the study suggests that the photo and video app features tend to subvert the traditional Chinese virtues of modesty, honesty, and the middle way and that hyperbolic and playful designs can cause addictive behaviors.

The data article is a digital genre that has emerged in response to new exigencies, namely, to make data more transparent and research processes more trustable and reproducible. Following White’s framework of intersubjective stance, this article draws upon statistical tools and collocational and discourse analyses to examine the linguistic resources deployed by authors to respond to both exigencies. The results show a high presence of dialogically contractive resources (above all, passive constructions and, only in one data article section, inanimate subjects) by which authors do not fully engage with dialogic alternatives (heteroglossic disengagement). Dialogically expansive resources (anticipatory it-subjects and we-pronouns) are extremely rare, corroborating that the authors’ stance is neither monoglossic (undialogized) nor heteroglossically engaged. Further, the discourse functions and ensuing pragmatic effects of the prevailing intersubjective stance resources, significantly different between and among the data article sections, including their associated abstracts, reveal the construal of very distinct dialogic spaces for writer-reader interaction within this article type. Such intra-generic variation may be explained by the social (and rhetorical) action that the genre fulfills, namely, to describe and highlight the value of the research data.

Review Essay of the following RHM Books: Lawrence, Heidi Yoston. (2020). Vaccine rhetorics. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press. pp. 172. Hardcover $99.95.    Pender, Kelly. (2018). Being at genetic risk: Toward a rhetoric of care. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 184. Hardcover $69.95.     Rowland, Allison L. (2020). Zoetropes and the politics of humanhood. Columbus: OH: The Ohio State University Press. pp. 190. Hardcover $99.95.

Extensive evidence demonstrates that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s multimedia anti-smoking campaign, Tips from Former Smokers, is an effective public health measure. In this essay, I explain the rhetorical appeals utilized in the campaign that contribute to its resonance, arguing that the campaign invokes corporeal anxiety, an emotion that emerges from societal aversion to disability. These appeals to corporeal anxiety operate as enthymemes by relying upon an unstated premise: that disability is negative and ought to be avoided to preserve one’s normalcy. This analysis treats the campaign messages as a form of bodily rhetoric and visual argument, arguing that the campaign deters smoking through graphic bodily imagery and narratives of lost normalcy that conceptualize disability as tragedy or deficit. I conclude that the success of the campaign comes at the expense of perpetuating stigma against people with disabilities.

Abstract: Standardized Patient Programs (SPPs) enlist actors to roleplay the symptoms of various diseases and disorders, and to embody a range of personalities. These simulations are used to help improve the communicative practices and professional competencies of future healthcare workers. Focusing on the use of these programs for medical students and doctors, this article establishes a kairology of the SPP to better understand the shifting terrains of patient representation. A kairological account focuses on “historical moments as rhetorical opportunities” (Segal, 2005, p. 23) and, in the case of medicine, illustrates how “changes in [medical] practice are importantly reciprocal with changes in the terms of practice” (Segal, 2005, p. 22). I trace the SPP through various linguistic iterations to reveal how the shifting language of simulated patienthood reflects different orientations towards medical pedagogy and patient populations at significant junctures in time. I conclude my kairology with an examination of the Indigenous Simulated Patient Program, a 2011 pilot program that has the potential to better represent and serve Indigenous peoples in medical pedagogy and practice.

According to a December 21, 2018, Michigan Attorney General report, at least 105 Michigan State University employees, between 1997 and 2015, had received complaints from women about Dr. Larry Nassar’s inappropriate touching during medical treatment. In 2014, one of these complaints was finally reported to MSU’s Title IX office, triggering an investigation that led to a report that concluded Dr. Larry Nassar’s methods of treatment were “medically appropriate” and cleared him of any wrongdoing. Rhetorical analysis of this report exposes how Nassar benefitted from a rhetorical infrastructure that was designed to offer him institutional protection as an expert in medical techniques that require extensive touching of patients. Such analysis also exposes the specific discursive practices that sustain the rhetorical infrastructures that enable this institutional protection.

Abstract  Guided by normative rhetorical theory, this study utilizes thematic analysis to explore narratives about sterilization consultations posted by childfree patients and medical providers to Reddit. This study explores the multiple meanings of sterilization, the paradoxical dilemmas competing conversational purposes create, and the communicative practices, interpretive lenses, and environmental resources patients and providers employ to manage dilemmas. The analysis reveals that voluntary sterilization inheres task, relational, and identity meanings for both patients and providers, creating paradoxical dilemmas and rendering sterilization consultations additionally challenging to navigate. Patients and providers both accept and confront paradox, adopt cultural and contextual interpretive lenses to evaluate others’ talk, and rely on childfree patient and physician social networks as environmental resources to shift the context in which talk occurs. The conclusion offers theoretical implications for normative rhetorical theory and practical implications, including: illuminating features influencing interactions in which sterilization requests are made and evaluated, and underscoring the multiple meanings that constrain patients and providers during these consultations.

AbstractThis paper argues that some words are so highly charged with meaning by a community that they may prevent a discussion during which each participant is on an equal footing. These words are indeed either unanimously accepted or rejected. The presence of these adjectival groups pushes the antagonist to find rhetorical strategies to circumvent them. The main idea we want to develop is that some propositions are not easily debatable in context because of some specific value-bearing words (VBWs), and one of the goals of this paper is to build a methodological tool for finding and classifying these VBWs (with a focus on evaluative adjectives). Our study echoes the importance of “cultural keywords” (as reported by Wierzbicka, Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese, 1997) in argument (as reported by Rigotti &amp; Rocci, Argumentation in practice, 2005), but is rather based on a German approach developed by (as reported by Dieckmann, Sprache in der Politik: Einführung in die Pragmatik und Semantik der politischen, 1975), (as reported by Strauss and Zifonun, Der politische Wortschatz, 1986), and (as reported by Girnth, Sprache und Sprachverwendung in der Politik: Eine Einführung in die linguistische Analyse öffentlich-politischer Kommunikation, 2015) about “Miranda” and “Anti-Miranda” words that is expanded and refined here. In particular, our study tries to understand why some statements, fueled by appreciative (Tseronis, 2014) or evaluative adjectives, have such rhetorical effects on a pragmatic level in the particular context of a vote on the Swiss popular initiative called “for more affordable housing”. This context is fruitful since two parties offer reasons for two opposing policy claims: namely, to accept or to reject an initiative. When one party uses arguments containing such universally unassailable adjectival groups to defend a “yes” vote (in our example, pleading for more affordable housing rents), the opposing party cannot use a symmetrical antonym while pleading for the “no” vote. The methodological tool that is proposed here could shed light on the use of certain rhetorical and referential strategies in conflicting policy proposition contexts.

Reviewed by: Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells Timothy Barr Susan Wells. Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge. RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 211 pp. ISBN-978-0-271-08467-1. Pauline Reid. Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 283 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0069-6. David Wiles. The Players’ Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-49887-6. The works reviewed here celebrate the openness and indefiniteness of rhetoric’s domain by arguing against its assimilation of a disciplinary mode of scholarship. They work from three distinct positions while drawing from the early modem and (mostly) English archive. Susan Wells’s argument for a “transdisciplinary rhetoric” (it is part of the RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric) is sustained throughout each chapter of her reading of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, refiguring what Nancy Struever has called rhetoric’s “theoretical insouciance” as its value for playing tavern-keeper at a crossroads of other disciplines’ inquiries. Pauline Reid’s work explicitly targets the boundaries between new media and bibliographic studies by showing how early modem print involved visual modalities beyond the oft-rehearsed oral-print divide. David Wiles offers a fresh perspective by taking counsel for the discipline from a position without one: the professional actor of the early modern English and French stage. Each has a distinct refrain: transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and a kind of “undisciplining”—unlearning the trained incapacity of academic theorization. Wells opens her book with an autobiographical note. She first read The Anatomy of Melancholy for her comprehensive exams in the mid-1970s. Although her scholarship did not initially take her into uncovering the allusive world of Burton’s massive work, she describes being impressed by the voice of his prose. It was one “utterly at ease with its learning ... thin, rhythmic, quizzical, the voice of an eccentric and intimate friend” (1). Although such notes are often left in the prefatory material, here it is germane to the work. Reading Wells is to hear her performance of just such a voice witty, opinionated, with an erudition that feels like an inviting gesture at a cherished library rather than the intimidating cage of fingers pressed against the don’s lips in office hours. Wells’s style is part of her argument: like Burton, she is a scholar writing for other scholars, but—also like Burton—she refuses any idée fixe, a symptom of melancholy and today of too academic a discipline. Her second chapter, published in an earlier form in Philosophy & Rhetoric, is a contribution to genre studies. Is a genre like a genus, a category [End Page 325] for an assembling of species? Or, as she argues, is it a kind of space for exchange rather than classification? The Anatomy is a sui generis work. Rather than merely dismissing all the previous scholarship devoted to locating it in a taxonomy—an admittedly “old-fashioned project” (40)—Wells reflects on the underlying metaphors of the field. Even the idea of a “hybrid genre” relies upon the species metaphor (49). Burton identifies his work variously as “satire, as a treatise, as a cento, as a consolatio, or as a drama, satire, and comedy, but not as a satiricocento or a dramatic treatise” (40). His use of genre is often skew, bent to his peculiar and often-changing purposes. He delves into the medical genre of observationes less for clinical knowledge and more for the narrative color and moral insight that these cases might provide. Sometimes he interpolates speech into these stories for dramatic effect, as when in a case of love-melancholy he has the stricken Lady Elizabeth say, “O that I were worthy of that comely Prince ...” (66). Elsewhere he neglects the more florid detail of the original observation in order to make a point. One case tells of “two Germans who drank a lot of wine and within a month became melancholy.” Their symptoms were diverse: one “sang hymns...

This article explores the history of the English-language style guide, a genre of writing with beginnings in the eighteenth century. Gaining popularity in the Victorian period, the style guide began to solidify as a genre dedicated to preserving certain linguistic usages. I argue that, from the nineteenth century on, the best style guides have used rhetoric as the cornerstone of their linguistic philosophy. Guides which ignore rhetorical scholarship tend to be reactionary and of limited use to the reader. To emphasize these two types of guides, I look specifically at The Queen’s English and The Dean’s English, two extremely popular, polemical style guides written in the mid-nineteenth century.

Hugh Latimer’s 1548 “Sermon of the Plough” is well-known as an example of early English evangelical rhetoric. However, the sermon has often been considered as an effect of, rather than a participant in, evangelical theology. This article reads Latimer’s rhetoric, especially his creation of a persona, as fully theological, using Melanchthon’s valorization of rhetoric over logic as a model. Latimer’s sermon produces an authority that is not limited to Latimer himself, but serves as a reformation of Catholic notions of the authoritative role of the Church, a role based upon the rhetorically effective presentation of the Bible.

Anaxagoras is a missing author in the history of Greek rhetoric. His style has often seemed archaic and naive, unworthy of in-depth study. Nevertheless, the main so-called Gorgian figures are present in his fragments. They are not used with simply ornamental purposes but with a strongly expressive and even speculative intent. By examining in detail some texts (Lanza frr. B12; B6; B4), such systematicity and speculative depth of the use of the main rhetorical figures can be detected. Thus some conclusions about the contemporary Athenian culture can be inferred.

Reviewed by: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature by Carol A. Newsom Davida Charney Carol A. Newsom. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 130. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. 382 pp. ISBN 978-3-16-157723-9. In Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, Carol A. Newsom has collected eighteen of her essays that appeared between 1989 and 2016 and one previously unpublished essay. Unlike many volumes of this sort, the whole greatly exceeds the sum of its parts. Apart from its usefulness as a survey to scholars and students, the book advances Newsom’s scholarly agenda. Newsom works with texts circulating in and around Jerusalem during the late Second Temple period. This was a time of intellectual ferment: proto-gnostic sects proliferated; established religious practices were being challenged, defended, and modified. Newsom argues persuasively that these groups were led by sophisticated readers and rhetors. The leaders grasped that the Hebrew Bible, still undergoing canonization, is polyphonic and intertextual. Further, the texts that they created deployed polyphony, enargeia, and other rhetorical techniques to shape communal identity, attract adherents, and help individuals cope with the precarity of their status. These arguments are advanced in each of the book’s four topical sections. First are six essays that explain and apply Newsom’s methods of rhetorical criticism. Second are four essays illustrating how the Qumran community—responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls—shaped communal and individual identity. Third are three essays that lay out an ethno-psychological model for mapping conceptions of self and agency across cultures. The essays apply the model to the Hebrew Bible and a variety of Second Temple texts. Last are six reception studies that examine how narratives of the period are taken up and transformed both in antiquity and in modern times. Newsom, a chaired emerita professor of theology at Emory University, has published on so many aspects of Second Temple literature over her career that she has plenty of essays on method, theory, and application to choose from. As a result, even without additional commentary, the sections build coherent arguments. Each section opens with introductory issues of [End Page 322] theory, method, and scope and develops with close textual analysis and suggestive implications. The first section on methods reveals what Newsom means by rhetorical criticism and what theorists she relies on most. Like many biblical scholars, her immediate rhetorical touchstone is George Kennedy. But he does not inspire her to read widely in the Greco-Roman tradition. She is not concerned to trace possible cross-influences during the Hellenistic period. Instead Newsom turns to Bakhtin and Burke and the more literary strand of twentieth-century rhetorical criticism. For Newsom, rhetorical strategies in scripture reflect the identities and ontologies of their compositors and shape those of readers and writers to come. Accordingly, this section accomplishes two tasks for Newsom. First, the section launches Newsom’s larger claims that Second Temple communities deployed rhetorical strategies to shape individual and communal identities with case studies of Job (chapter 2), Proverbs 1—9 (chapter 3), Jewish apocalyptic texts (chapter 5), and texts from Qumran (chapter 6). Second, for biblicists new to rhetorical approaches, it introduces concepts and methods of rhetorical criticism, including Bakhtinian polyphony and dialogism (chapters 1 and 3), genre studies (chapters 2 and 4), and a variety of basic rhetorical concepts (chapters 5 and 6) such as epideictics, arrangement, enargeia, and kairos, though she doesn’t always employ these terms. While displaying nuanced rhetorical sensibilities, Newsom would clearly benefit from additional reading in rhetorical scholarship, particularly Carolyn Miller’s classic “Genre as Social Action”1 and William FitzGerald’s Spiritual Modalities for its use of Burke’s religious terministic screen to draw Burkean implications for prayer and religious practice.2 In Section Two, Newsom argues that the Qumran community—a break-away Jewish sect that deliberately positioned itself against the practices in the Second Temple—was “intentional and explicit in the formation of the subjectivity of its members” (159). First, she argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls served as a library for the community (chapter 7), based...

In Phaedrus, Plato invokes a mythic exemplum concerning the Egyptian deity Thoth. Though often interpreted as an overt critique of writing, this argument posits Thoth is offered analogically to contrast Plato’s rhetorical epistemology with that of the ancient Egyptians. To do so, this argument addresses why a mythic Egyptian figure might be so significant to Plato in the 4th Century B.C. Greece, whose culture already had multiple gods and cultural heroes to whom the invention of writing is attributed, when the episode in Phaedrus is axiomatically described as a critique of writing. Because Plato may have had some degree of firsthand knowledge of Egyptian traditions it explores those traditions personified in the figure of Thoth, which should be examined as an analogical device advised by Egyptian rhetorical epistemology. A closer examination of the comparative rhetorical epistemological perspective not only illuminates Thoth’s appearance in Phaedrus but also the Egyptian rhetorical-epistemic tradition. Thoth’s role as epistemic mediator between humans and truth, in the broadest terms, was to act as psychopomp who moves both between humanity and the arrival at knowledge that prefigures rhetorical action.

Humira® has been the top selling pharmaceutical since 2014. As a former Humira® user, for the treatment of Crohn’s disease, I explore how we understand the concept and experience of chronicity as it is represented in advertisements for Humira® and manifested in embodied reactions to these advertisements. Through a layered narrative method that combines rhetorical analysis with autoethnography, I analyze 13 Humira® commercials. I argue that Humira® commercials operate through a curative imaginary (Kafer, 2013), which not only assumes viewers desire to be immune-typical but also defines normative orientations to time. This case study reveals how direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising obscures cultural and systemic sources of (dis)ablism, including the ways striving for normalcy is in and of itself an experience of chronicity, and disregards experiences of chronicity that disrupt normalizing boundaries of time.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disease that progresses along a fluctuating course of changing capacities, affects approximately 5.7 million Americans, an estimate expected to skyrocket as the baby boomer generation ages. Adopting a rhetorical field methods approach I analyze the transcripts of qualitative interviews of 3 patients and 28 caregivers to understand how the chronicity of AD affects informal caregiving strategies as well as the lived experiences of persons with AD. Employing a new materialist framework along with rhetorical enactment theory, I posit chronicity as rhetorical action distributed not only among human and nonhuman agents but also across moments, requiring special attention to time and timing. I argue chronic illness is rhetorically enacted through three material-discursive practices: ontological practices that enact reality, alignment practices that facilitate or disrupt cooperation among entities, and mnemonic practices that enact and outsource memory among AD caregivers. Across all three kinds of practice, a material-discursive sense of kairos and chronos is advanced.

This article considers how scientists and other researchers frame and integrate online patient registry data into their work. In the case of rare chronic conditions, online patient registry data extend the geographic boundaries that limit research involvement and make efficient use of limited federal funding for research. Through a rhetorical analysis of peer-reviewed journal articles, which I evaluate as artifacts, I show how a selection of them seek to recognize patients’ labor through traditional acknowledgements and provide tangible benefits to patient communities. At the same time, the proliferation of online patient registries and lack of publications suggests that patients’ labor is often overlooked and disregarded. This work reveals how online patient data registries change our understanding and approach to researching chronicity. I conclude by offering ethical considerations for rhetoricians who choose to use and publish data from these registries.