Students with disabilities (SWD) in general education science classes are expected to engage in the scientific practices and potentially in the writing of arguments drawn from evidence. Currently, however, there are few research-based instructional approaches for teaching argument writing for these students. The present article responds to this need through the application of an instructional model that promises to improve the ability of SWDs to write scientific arguments. We approach this work in multiple ways. First, we clarify our target group, students with high incidence disabilities (learning disability, ADHD, and students with speech and language impairments), and discuss common cognitive challenges they experience. We then explore the role of argumentation in science, review research on both experts’ (scientists’) and novices’ (students’) argument writing and highlight successful cognitive strategies for teaching argument writing with neurotypical learners. We further discuss SWDs’ general writing challenges and how researchers have improved their abilities to comprehend and evaluate scientific information and improve their domain-general writing. Cognitive apprenticeships appear advantageous for teaching SWDs science content and how to write scientific arguments, as this form of instruction begins with problem solving tasks that connect literacy (e.g., reading, writing, argumentation discourse) with epistemic reasoning in a given domain. We illustrate the potential of such apprenticeships by analyzing the conceptual quality of arguments written by three SWDs who participated in a larger quantitative study in which they and others showed improvement in the structure of their arguments. We end with suggestions for further research to expand the use of cognitive apprenticeships.

In this article, we share what we learned about undergraduates’ struggles in writing quality summaries, comparison texts, and argumentative essays that were components of a unique course, Learning How to Learn. This course was designed to address core psychological issues that impede optimal learning for students from all majors, many of whom are preparing to attend professional or graduate school. Although never intended to be a course devoted to academic writing, the struggles we uncovered made it apparent that without addressing these students’ writing difficulties, especially with argumentation, optimal learning was not achievable. For each form of writing central to the course (i.e., summaries, comparisons, and argumentation), we not only describe the challenges we have documented over the past six years, but also the instructional responses we instituted to counter those challenges. We conclude by sharing insights we have garnered from this experience that may serve others who are confronting similar issues in their students’ writing abilities.

A disquieting aspect of some contemporary public discourse is its seeming indifference to or abandonment of any pretense to truth. Among other things, unsubstantiated and misleading claims have been made about the efficacy of vaccines and other purported treatments for SARS-COVID, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and the January 6, 2021, insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. In addition, a spate of legislation restricting classroom discussion and instruction related to race, bias, privilege, and discrimination has been or is pending passage in U.S. state legislatures. These restrictions are antithetical to core functions of education, which are to inculcate the values, virtues, and advanced literacy skills that support democratic deliberation about controversial issues. This article discusses the increasing political polarization and partisan attacks on the processes of education and the threats to liberal democracy posed by this disregard for the truth. In addition, it reviews the cultural and psychological factors that increase our susceptibility to misinformation and presents a perspective about the pursuit of truth that highlights the educational affordances of disciplinary inquiry, democratic deliberation, and reasonable argumentation. The contemporary challenges are manifestations of long-standing political and cultural divisions, and their mitigation will depend on developing communities of informed citizens that are committed to the values and virtues that are foundational to liberal democracy.

In this article, we explore the uniqueness of argumentation within the field of history, considering whether historians’ processes in crafting an interpretive argument from inexact evidence might provide insights into processes vital for informed civic engagement and civil dialogue in democratic societies. We discuss the role of argumentation in history, taking both historian (expert) and student (novice) perspectives by considering what historical writing is and how it is produced, taught, and learned. Unlike other research on argumentative historical processes, we examine the role of dispositions that complement skills and enrich collaborations as historians grapple with historical problems together. We examine the role that dispositions and historical thinking skills play as students discuss evidence, plan for argumentative writing, and evaluate their peers’ ideas. We propose that the dispositions and skills involved in historians’ reading, writing, and thinking parallel the critical thinking needed for deliberative and collaborative reasoning about complex social issues. Finally, we explore how instruction and experience with deliberative collaboration within historical problem spaces may prepare students for meaningful civic engagement. We call for increased research on these potential connections.

Although authors often create literary texts in order to comment on issues of personhood and human relationships, reading and writing about literary texts in schools is often focused on close analysis of literary elements or exploration of one’s own experience with the text. Thus, students’ written arguments about literature typically do little work in the world toward understanding the human condition. In response, we argue for a theoretical and instructional framework of reading and writing about literature called Dialogic Literary Argumentation. Dialogic literary argumentation asks students and teachers to engage in reading, dialogue, and argumentative writing about how they and others make meaning out of literary texts, what the meaning says about what it means to be human together, and how we might act in and on the worlds in which we live. In this article, we explicate the various elements of this theoretical framework that situates the student’s literary argument within their own cognitive processes, social interactions in classroom events, and broader sociocultural contexts. Students’ composed arguments draw on multiple texts (the literary text, others in and beyond the classroom, their own experiences, the literary discipline, and the world), which are mediated by various classroom dialogues, scaffolds, and supports.

This essay uses Aldo Leopold’s essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” as a heuristic for analyzing the rhetorical processes of erasure that have created one of the largest open pit copper mines on the planet: The Bingham Canyon Mine (BCM). Contributing to studies of corporate rhetoric, persona criticism, and nonhuman agencies, I argue that the BCM, and its corporate owner Rio Tinto, is characteristic of Being-in-the-Anthropocene and informs rhetoricians about our extra-human ethos, or manner of dwelling, as an entwinement with corporate actors. Taking Rio Tinto as a synecdoche for corporate personhood and persona (prosōpon), I make the case for an ecological approach to corporate disclosedness that accounts for the earthly resources of corporate rhetorical invention (e.g., copper). Through the later work of Martin Heidegger, I show how the BCM has become a standing reserve within a corporate world picture that is rhetorically apparent in the rhetorical architecture of Salt Lake City, Utah.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the theoretical concept of meta-argumentative fallacy is useful. The authors argue for this along two lines. The first is that with the concept, the authors may clarify the concept of meta-argumentation. That is, by theorizing where meta-argument goes wrong, the authors may capture the norms of this level of argumentation. The second is that the concept of meta-argumentative fallacies provides an explanatory model for a variety of errors in argument otherwise difficult to theorize. The authors take three as exemplary: the straw man, both sides, and free speech fallacies.

So often left unquestioned is the very place in and from which scholarly ethos and praxis are being proposed. The goal of this essay is to call for and work towards establishing a foundation to explore such questions vis-à-visdeep rhetoricity.Deep rhetoricityinvites and demands of us all returns, careful reckonings, and enduring tasks. We illustrate possibilities ofdeep rhetoricityacross these three epistemic principles. Ultimately, we argue fordeep rhetoricityboth as an intervention into rhetorical practices and as a praxis of invention.

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This article examines how nonprofessionals in early modern England used tactical technical communication and rhetorical strategies to build medical knowledge and healthcare expertise. Using a feminist ethos and tactical technical communication lens, this article details a content analysis study of 4,045 handwritten medical recipes from England dated between 1540 and 1860. Findings from the study extend tactical technical communication by examining non-digital/non-internet spaces and how extra-institutional nonprofessionals build ethos and expertise.

ABSTRACT The welcome expansion of kairos beyond its traditional locus in public debate to a broad range of discourse forms and persuasive actions has not been matched by a reevaluation of the temporal logic of kairos, which is still seen as located in teleologic time. This article suggests that Walter Benjamin’s understanding of time could refigure kairos as a nonteleological relationship among past, present, and future. Benjamin provides a theoretical rationale for kairotic action that is distributed in time and space and accounts for kairos of objects, places, technologies, and works of art. These temporal affordances, usually developed separately in contemporary theory, are deeply connected in Benjamin’s writing; his understanding of time therefore integrates currently unconnected lines of research and supports a fluid but coherent understanding of kairotic agency.

ABSTRACT The logic of humor has been acknowledged as an essential dimension of every joke. However, what is the logic of jokes, exactly? The modern theories of humor maintain that jokes are characterized by their own logic, dubbed “pseudo,” “playful,” or “local,” which has been the object of frequent criticisms. This article intends to address the limitations of the current perspectives on the logic of jokes by proposing a rhetorical approach to humorous texts. Building on the traditional development of Aristotle’s almost neglected view of jokes as surprising enthymemes, the former are analyzed as rhetorical arguments. Like enthymemes, jokes are characterized by natural inferences that can be represented as topics, and quasi-formalized in argumentation theory as argumentation schemes. Like rhetorical arguments, jokes express a reason in support of different types of conclusions and proceed from distinct kinds of reasoning and semantic relations.

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.

ABSTRACTSpeakers may argue in ways that facilitate cooperation, without really establishing unity. If emphasis is put on the word “composite” in composite audience, then the complementary act of addressing such an audience can be understood as an orchestration of different people, who may cooperate toward a conclusion. This brings attention to the multidimensionality of issues in pluralistic communities and the range of consequences proposals may have. Following Perelman’s and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric, I discuss how the compositeness of such argumentation can be fruitfully approached pluralistically. I argue that proposals on practical issues imply concomitant situations, wherein audiences are assigned different roles to play toward the ends of argumentation. This means that rhetorical argumentation performs implicit diplomacy, with implications for different audiences and the relationships between them. I conclude this article by discussing what this pluralistic and interactional account means for the analysis and evaluation of arguments and their rhetoric.

ABSTRACT Discourses conceal as much as they reveal, but in their concealment they may invite an audience into the silences of the gaps and pauses they contain in order to reflect and find insight. The moments of opportunity provided by these gaps suggest two sides to the concept of kairos, capturing both the ability of the author/speaker to create the opportune moment in the discourse, and the ability of the reader/listener to see that moment and the experience it invites.

ABSTRACT In the West’s Will to Know and its attendant rhetorical forms, speech has been related to silence in primarily three ways. In rhetoric and dialectic, speech pursues speech; in rhetorical education, silence pursues speech; and in sacred, ascetic rhetoric, silence pursues silence. These three relations of speech to silence as a form of knowledge in the Western rhetorical tradition leave a fourth untraversed. Yet to be explored is speech in pursuit of silence. This essay turns to the Buddhist tradition of rhetoric and dialectic to identify a form of knowledge where speech—negation—pursues silence. I then trace the same model of negatory speech in pursuit of silence in the long-repressed practice of sophistic antilogos.

In this paper, we explore the gendered aspects of scientific controversy in the digital age. This project makes use of Leah Ceccarelli’s seminal work on manufactured scientific controversy by considering its implications for the discourse on GMOs and food additives published on digital food and lifestyle blogs. We perform a discourse analysis of several blogs to look at the ways that gendered online discourse and performance influences modern anti-science rhetoric, particularly that which emanates from the sphere colloquially known as crunchy living. We look at the ways the intimate and personal feminine style of digital platforms offer experiential knowledge as a substitute for science. In the current political climate of alternative facts and fake news, this study leads to broader implications about the impact of gendered discourse on the assessment of credibility in online sources.

The Lumosity games and subsequent “memory wars” illustrate the rhetorical power of statistics in public discourse. Defenders of Lumosity build upon discursive traces based in societal fears and arguments based in “science” supported through statistics and experimentation. Detractors of Lumosity argue that their experiments are faulty. A close rhetorical reading reveals that certain commonalities exist across defenders and detractors alike. Looking at the inventional strategies of the statistical analyst as rhetor demonstrates how statistical tools are granted agency to determine research outcomes. Displacement of rhetorical agency has ramifications for understanding popular scientific discourse and making decisions as a society.

Rhetorical theory has frequently relied on metaphors of place and positioning as heuristics to build better arguments. This article utilizes one such metaphor, that of stasis theory, as a method by which we might change the terrain of the conversation surrounding the climate crisis. As an example, the author does a rhetorical analysis of a recent agricultural report from the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment and finds that, rather than using traditional questions of conjecture and quality, the authors of the report focus on questions of procedure and definition to reframe the discussion surrounding the climate crisis. Drawing from the rhetoric in this report, the author suggests that technical communicators might similarly produce more fruitful conversations around the climate crisis if they focus on what to do (procedure) and redefining the crisis as a local issue (definition).

E. Johanna Hartelius’s monograph, The Gifting Logos: Expertise in the Digital Commons, teems with insights and provocations about the ways that the discourses of the digital commons are anchored in...

AbstractThis article explores how annotation with digital, social tools can address digital reading challenges while also supporting writing skill development for novices in college literature classrooms. The author analyzes student work and survey responses and shows that social annotation can facilitate closer digital reading and scaffold text-anchored argumentation practices.

ABSTRACT Many rhetorical theories of ethos mark their relationship with time by focusing on two temporal poles: the timely ethos and the timeless ethos. But between these two temporal poles, ethos is also durative; it lingers, shifts, accumulates, and dissipates over time. Although scholarship often foregrounds the kairotic and static senses of ethos popularized in Aristotle's Rhetoric, this article highlights how the chronic elements of ethos are no less important to rhetoric. By examining Xenophon's and Plato's representations of the trial of Socrates, this article contends that these competing views about the temporalities of ethos have a storied history that predates Aristotle's writings. This analysis also expands received understandings of Plato's contributions to rhetoric by illuminating how his view of ethos is deeply intertwined with ongoing philosophical practice. The article concludes by arguing that rhetorical studies has much to gain by more closely attending to the cumulative aspects of ethos.

In this article, we investigate the platform politics and technological dynamics at play on Facebook that allowed Russian politically motivated advertisements to be purchased with Rubles during the 2016 election season. These ads were purchased using a currency that clearly indicated an attempt by a foreign power to influence a US election, something prohibited by the FEC (Federal Election Commission, “Foreign Nationals”). In the Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing, Senator Al Franken asked Facebook VP Colin Stretch, “American political ads and Russian money: rubles. How could you not connect those two dots?”

ABSTRACT Aristotle says in the Rhetoric that leading judges into passions is like warping a rule or kanon before using it. Rather than seeing this as an exclusion of emotion from rhetoric, I argue that the ability for the pathe to bend judgment has its appropriate use in achieving equity. The pathe are themselves a kanon, resembling the soft, leaden rule used by Lesbian masons, referred to in his discussion of equity in the Nicomachean Ethics. In problematic cases, the rigidity of law requires the correction of a judge's pathetic capacity. I then read Lysias's Against Simon, a speech given under strict relevancy requirements, to show how the pathe are used in the narration of the accused party in seeking an equitable judgment. I conclude with how such a view may inform contemporary rhetorical inquiry on the emotions.

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the debate about the strawman fallacy. It is the received view that strawmen are employed to fool not the arguer whose argument they distort, but instead a third party, an audience. I argue that strawmen that fool their victims exist and are an important variation of the strawman fallacy because of their special perniciousness. I show that those who are subject to hermeneutical lacunae or who have since forgotten parts of justifications they have provided earlier are especially vulnerable to falling for strawmen aimed at their own positions or arguments. Adversarial argumentation provides especially fertile ground for strawmen that fool their own victims, but cooperative argumentation is no fail-safe protection from them either.

Rhetorical studies of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM) have provided critical understanding of how argument and argument norms within a field shape what we mean by “data.” Work has also examined how questions that shape data collection are asked, how data is interpreted, and even how data is shared. Understood as a form of argument, data reveals important insights into rhetorical situations, the motives of rhetorical actors, and the broader appeals that shape everything from the kinds of technologies built, to their inclusion in our daily lives, to the infrastructures of cities, the medical practices and policies concerning public health, etc. Big data merits continued attention from RSTM scholars as our understanding of its pervasive use and its ethos grows, but its arguments remain elusive (Salvo, 2012). To unpack the elusivity of big data, we explore one particularly illustrative case of big data and political, democratic influence: the Cambridge Analytica scandal. To understand the case, we turn to social studies of data to explore the range of ethical issues raised by big data, and to examine the rhetorical strategies that entail big data.

This article examines the rhetorical framing of San Jose’s “Winchester Mystery House” house tour to consider the role of spatiality in shaping the ethos and subsequent public remembrance of women. Built in the late nineteenth-century by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune, the sprawling Victorian mansion is now a popular tourist attraction that has become a metonym for the architect herself, whose memory remains shrouded in stories of séances, seclusion, and mystery. The article traces the image of Winchester as a bizarre and spooky widow to the public tour and the spatial rhetorics of her house itself. The house challenges our limited notions of space—particularly domestic space—with implications for other sites of women’s public memory and the ethos of the woman rhetor.

ecent social justice awakenings such as the "Me, too" movement and Black Lives Matter indicate a rising social consciousness that understands that perpetuating privilege is itself a form of complicity. In Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing, Rosanne Carlo fortifies movement against complicity as she decries current undertakings in rhetoric and composition that would discount expressivist writing as integral to the desired outcomes for writing in higher education. In particular, Carlo implores rhetoric and composition scholars to consider the ways in which the field's preoccupation with outcomes and professionalization ignore the material realties of class and race consciousness. Through a careful synthesis of theory, personal explication, and pedagogical example, Carlo offers insight into how a transformative ethos-rooted in place and the material-is central to writing that produces identification across difference.

Scholars in the field of writing and rhetorical studies have long been interested in professional writing and the ways in which experts frame their research for disciplinary audiences. Three decades ago, rhetoricians incorporated stasis theory into their work as a way to explore the nature of argument and persuasion in scientific discourse. However, what is missing in these general arguments based on stasis are the particular arguments in science texts aimed at persuasion. Specifically, this article analyzes arguments from the stasis of value in introductions of science research articles. This work is grounded in the Classical topoi, or topics, cataloging types of arguments and identifying seven topoi. I analyzed 60 introductions from articles in three different science journals, totaling the number of value arguments and arguments comprising the topoi. Findings yielded different proportions in types of arguments, sharp disparities among the journals, and widespread use of value arguments. The broader issue at work in this article is how scientists make a case for the importance of their research and how these findings might inform writing and argumentation in the sciences.

There is a particular urgency in this political moment to understand children’s experiences with current events. Drawing from data generated following the 2016 presidential election, this paper focuses on three racially and linguistically diverse children’s persuasive compositions. Within a critical literacies writing unit focused on (im)migrant experiences, children called on legislators to act on the Republican administration’s policies. Building on the understanding that all literacies are political and that teaching and learning are value-laden tasks, the author engaged a cultural rhetorics orientation—grounded in the understanding of texts, bodies, materials, and ideas as interconnected aspects of communication—for data generation and analysis. The findings highlight how children strategically employed rhetoric to persuade. They used logos, pathos, and ethos, as well as story, a central tool for meaning-making and building practices in the world. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how children, when properly supported, can agentively participate in critical literacies and act on real-world politics. Through the stories of young children, this study emphasizes what children have to tell adults and what a cultural rhetorics orientation, through its emphasis on story, enables literacies researchers and educators to understand about children’s composing.

In U.S. secondary schools there is an overriding emphasis on formulaic approaches to argumentative writing instruction in English language arts that tends to trivialize disciplinary norms of argument and evidence because of institutional pressure to bolster students’ test performances.&nbsp; This paper seeks to provide an ethnographically-informed framework for understanding for whom, how, when, and to what extent it is possible for students to participate, through writing, in the study of literature as the central disciplinary content of English language arts. The corpus of data used in this study of an 11th grade International Baccalaureate (IB) classroom (26 students) consisted of classroom instruction (video-recordings and field notes) that occurred across an initial instructional unit (September 8th to November 3rd). Of particular importance is a summative writing assignment, teacher interviews and collaborative data analysis (with video clips), student interviews about instruction and their writing, samples of student writing, and related documents. We also analyzed two essays written by the two case study students in response to a writing assignment that the teacher, described as an IB “literary commentary with an unspecified topic” that she reframed as a literary argument. Discourse analysis of a series of events within instructional conversations revealed that rather than prescribed forms, the teacher offered “possible” writerly moves for her students’ arguing to learn. Consequently, her students enacted their writerly moves in a variety of patterns suggestive of disciplinary ways of knowing in English language arts rather than in a pre-set formula that they had learned in previous grades. In order to trace how the students enacted modes of participation (procedural display and deep participation) in disciplinary activity (literary argumentation) as writing practices and shifting writer identities&nbsp; we also conducted a multi-phased and multi-layered ana

ABSTRACTOne of the most important developments in twentieth-century rhetorical theory is Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's insight that concepts, when under strain, can be split or dissociated into two separate terms. Not a simple binary, these terms remain interconnected in a value hierarchy with one term serving as the normative frame for the other. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca theorize that either term can be dissociated further, producing a fan-type dissociation. Unlike ordinary dissociations, fan-types place three or more terms in hierarchical relationship, resulting in unique rhetorical features. Fanning a dissociation can serve three basic rhetorical functions: purging undesirable elements, preserving less undesirable elements from total devaluation, and purifying desirable elements. Building on these basic functions, rhetors can perform complex rhetorical actions, from intensifying a dissociation's values to completely undoing a dissociation. Long ignored by theorists and critics, fan-types complicate our understanding of dissociation, argumentation, and value-based reasoning, and therefore deserve more scholarly attention.

Lula Pace (1868–1925), a Texas Baptist science professor, ultimately weathered an antievolution campaign that roiled her denomination. Responding to this controversy, Pace engaged in demarcation (that is, discursive boundary-work) regarding the relationship of science and religion. Pace employed ethos strategies that blended the scientist’s supposedly gender-neutral expertise, the engaged educator’s concern for students, and the sincere Christian’s exercise of those individual freedoms privileged in Baptist tradition. This blended ethos highlights how scientific expertise and religious identity may serve as resources for developing a personal rhetoric to negotiate diverse community values and how ethos strategies depend upon demarcation.

Chronos and kairos are often understood as separate from one another in discussions of rhetorical temporality. For online and other highly mediated contexts, however, chronos and kairos can be understood as deeply related and intertwined. Via the concept of transduction, this article introduces machine time, which describes rhetorical time across a broad range of digital contexts, including online discussion forums and computer code.

This study asks whether grammatical and mechanical errors bother business professionals, which of these types of errors are most bothersome, and whether such errors affect perceptions of the writer and their ethos. We administered a 17-question survey to roughly 100 business professionals whose roles are not primarily writing and communication within organizations. The findings show that business professionals are bothered by these errors and that the level of bothersomeness has increased from previous studies. Additionally, the findings show that participants have clear views of writers who make errors and that the context of the error matters. The authors conclude by offering implications for technical and professional communication.

Considering recent returns to pre-Aristotelian understandings of ethos as the creation of dwelling spaces, this article argues that dwelling in algorithmically mediated spaces such as Facebook is intrinsically connected to ethos. The 2016 Dueling Protests in Houston, Texas serve as a case study of how Facebook’s platform functioned as a crucial tool for the Russian Internet Agency’s (IRA) disinformation campaigns. Examining interactions in these ethe ecologies reveals how algorithms shape community perceptions and constructions of ethos.

Integrating design thinking methodology into writing courses can help students to develop creative approaches to problem definition and solution development. Tracing how students work with and through written genres common to design thinking reveals the possibilities and potential of learning new patterns of inquiry and argumentation. Developing these creative habits of mind empowers students to explore and invent solutions to complex, multidimensional problems across the broad range of their disciplinary, professional, and civic lives.