Communication skills are an increasingly important component of college students’ education because these skills are in high demand from employers. This study provides a close examination of communication instruction in both a typical landscape architecture class and a modified one (i.e., with the addition of formalized communication instruction that is grounded in design), analyzing changes in students’ perceptions of their own communication abilities (self-efficacy). The study reveals that in the typical class, students had a decrease in self-efficacy whereas in the modified class, students had a significant increase in self-efficacy. Viewing these results through the lens of self-efficacy and situated learning provides a complex understanding of the influences on students’ experiences. For both teaching and research in communication across the curriculum, this study has implications about the importance of the nature of instruction.

Book Review| March 01 2013 On Martin Luther King Jr. and the Landscape of Civil Rights Rhetoric Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation. By Clarence Jones and Stuart Connelly. New York: Palgrave, 2011; pp. 224. $22.00 cloth; $14.00 paperKing's Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" Speech. By Eric Sundquist. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009; pp. viii + 295. $14.00 paper"Making a Way out of No Way": Martin Luther King's Proverbial Rhetoric. By Wolfgang Mieder. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010; pp. xiv + 551. $169.95 clothMartin Luther King and the Rhetoric of Freedom: The Exodus Narrative in America's Struggle for Civil Rights. By Gary Selby. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008; pp. xii + 217. $34.95 paperThe Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. By Jonathan Rieder. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2008; pp. xi + 394. $18.95 paper Keith D. Miller Keith D. Miller Keith D. Miller is Professor of English at Arizona State University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2013) 16 (1): 167–184. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.1.0167 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Keith D. Miller; On Martin Luther King Jr. and the Landscape of Civil Rights Rhetoric. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2013; 16 (1): 167–184. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.1.0167 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

From fundamentalist views that wish to ban the books for their use of magic, to perspectives that the books are a modern-day expression of good Christianity, controversy around the rhetorical implications of faith in Harry Potter has become critical to the culture of the book. With its focus on these questions of religious rhetoric in Rowling’s texts, this article centers specifically on the theological thread that runs through C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Harry Potter series. Lewis’s deeply embedded use of the trilemma “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?” — the question that haunts Narnia as Edmund plays the Judas to Aslan’s existence and resurrection — also winds its way through the unfolding plot of the Harry Potter series. Rowling’s narrative, however, takes its own rhetorical path. Defying and confusing traditionally stark boundaries between good and evil, mortal and immortal, Harry Potter is not the tidy story of clear ideological divisions. Rather, Rowling’s use of Lewis’s trilemma serves to complicate and illustrate the dialectic of faith and doubt, as well as the moral complexities of “good” and “evil,” in order to address an audience not necessarily Christian, but decidedly human.

At a search marketing company, each search engine optimization (SEO) specialist writes up to 10 to 12 complex 20-page monthly reports in the first ten business days of each month. These SEO specialists do not consider themselves to be writers, yet they generate these structurally and rhetorically complex reports as a matter of course, while negotiating a constantly changing landscape of a contingent, rapidly changing business sector. Under these conditions, how did the SEO specialists manage to write these reports so quickly and so well? What is the standing set of transformations that they enact in order to develop and produce these reports? And given the multiple contingencies, rapid changes, and high individual discretion at this organization—seemingly a recipe for discohesive practices—how did they maintain and develop this standing set of transformations in order to turn out consistent reports? In this article, I draw on writing, activity, and genre research (WAGR) to examine how Semoptco’s SEO specialists produced monthly reports, specifically in terms of their constant networking, audience analysis, and ethos building. Finally, I draw implications for applying WAGR to knowledge work organizations.

In this article, we undertake three critical tasks: First, we delineate major shifts in feminist rhetorical inquiry, thus describing a new and changed landscape of the field. Second, we argue that as feminist rhetorical practices have shifted, so have standards of excellence. To articulate excellence in feminist rhetorical studies, we draw attention to interconnections among three critical terms of engagement: critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation. Third, we propose an enhanced inquiry model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating feminist rhetorical work in rhetoric and writing studies.

Digital artists have created a slew of literacy-themed texts using various combinations of photography, video, music, and writing. Creators of such forms regularly post these clips to online video-sharing sites like YouTube.com, where they provide audiences with diverse messaging about the significance and value of literacy. This review examines four such clips: "Literacy Empowers (Illiteracy Awareness Documentary), " "Bookwise Quotes: The Importance of Literacy, " "Reading Kills (Protesting Literacy at the RNC), " and "21st Century Literacy. " Each one addresses a different dimension of literacy and has been accessed several thousands of times. Whether these texts achieve their disparate purposes remains an open question, but what they argue and how they articulate their messages reveal how literacy is no less contested or open to (mis)appropriation in cyberspace than in more traditional cultural domains. While each begins with an implicit acknowledgement of the unrealized promises of literacies, none offer a coherent response to the enormous and asymmetrical challenges of creating critically literate global citizens.

David E. Kirkland argues that our understanding of literate practice in relation to space needs to be radically reworked to account for new digital dimensions that are dispersed, discontinuous, and yet deeply woven into everyday and institutional worlds. His account highlights the way these digital spaces pepper the official landscape of schooling, fracturing the dominance of official discourse as students’ diverse linguistic, literate, and semiotic practices infuse this complex composite space.

This article reports data from questionnaires assessing the day-to-day experiences that members of the technical communication field have in carrying out their research. The data revealed that most members experience at least some frustration and numerous constraints that prevent them from doing the kinds and amounts of research that they want to do and that may affect the quality of their research. In short, technical communication scholars face an array of challenges. This article presents examples of these challenges and ideas that respondents had both for lessening the challenges scholars face and for better preparing graduate students. It suggests several practical initiatives for addressing these challenges along with realistic strategies for implementing those initiatives.

This is a qualitative case study of two students' composing processes as they developed a documentary video about the Dominican Republic in an urban, public middle school classroom. While using a digital video editing program, the students moved across multiple media (the Web, digital video, books, and writing), drawing semiotic resources from each as they did so. Using sociosemiotic and dialogic-intertextual theoretical frameworks, the author examines how the interface of the video editing program influenced the students' composing by making new types of semiotic resources available and new means of combining these resources. As they moved across these media in a nonlinear fashion, the students created an interactive context for composing that transcended the individual possibilities of each respective medium. This suggests that multimedial composing environments offer a rich intertextual landscape and unique ways of making meanings.

Book Review| January 01 2006 Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth BurkeClark, Gregory Larry Rosenfield; Larry Rosenfield Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Lawrence W. Rosenfield Lawrence W. Rosenfield Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2006) 39 (2): 172–173. https://doi.org/10.2307/20697147 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Larry Rosenfield, Lawrence W. Rosenfield; Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2006; 39 (2): 172–173. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20697147 Download citation file: 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 Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University2006The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Many companies have entered a new era of human resources management—one based on transaction cost economics and one in which downsizing has become a permanent part of the corporate landscape. But their insistence on communicating decisions to downsize solely in economic terms is creating serious problems among employees who survive the layoffs. Disloyalty, disaffection, increased absenteeism, and even acts of sabotage are growing among workers who view downsizing as a social, not economic, issue. This article discusses the new era of human resources management and reviews survivor literature in an effort to provide guidance to companies about how to communicate downsizing, specifically, and how to communicate with the postdownsized workforce, generally.

The authors report an investigation of the discourse practices of the “affiliated professions” of software engineering design. Lists of design issues generated by students in computer science and technical communication were compared to lists produced by experts affiliated with software engineering and by students entering an unaffiliated profession. The results suggest that (a) the affiliated experts addressed a more balanced set of issues, (b) the students in computer science looked more like the affiliated experts in their attention to technical issues and more like the unaffiliated students in their attention to human issues, and (c) the students in technical communication looked more like the affiliated experts in their attention to the human issues and more like the unaffiliated students in their attention to the technical issues. The results are discussed in terms of a landscape of highly clustered, fractured, and stratified affiliated professions over which students travel during their educational and professional careers.

A new orientation toward intercultural and international communication will demand a redefinition of the professional communicator and professional communication: Translation—understood in a broad sense—will become a crucial skill. Analyzing what is absent from contexts and messages will become just as important as editing and refining what is present in them. This article considers the process of translation in the framework of the postmodern debate about language and reality as well as the economic, cultural, and social phenomena that have transformed the communication landscape during the past 50 years.

This article reports results from a year-long study of the specific ways that children’s literacy practices enhanced their understanding of themselves and their social worlds in a classroom where they were encouraged to read, write, and talk about personally and socially relevant subjects. Throughout the school year the researchers documented the nature of classroom activities and the ways that they were taken up by children in their reading and writing practices. In response to various classroom activities and in relation to many out-of-school experiences, children’s reading and writing were found to function for them in a variety of personal and social ways, enabling them to understand the complex urban landscape they inhabited, to explore new roles and social identities, to wrestle with vexing social problems, and to envision ways of reconstructing their lives and their worlds. The strengths and limitations of this particular integration of action research and critical literacy are also discussed.

(1990). A sense of place, a spirit of adventure: Implications for the study of regional rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 225-232.

In light of recent theoretical and empirical developments in the areas of reading, writing, and learning, this article proposes a view of literacy learning in which various forms of reading and writing are conceptualized as unique ways of thinking about and exploring a topic of study en route to acquiring knowledge. Throughout this article, we take the theoretical position that a topic of study is analogous to a conceptual “landscape” about which knowledge is best acquired by “traversing” it from a variety of perspectives. In this system, different forms of reading and writing represent the “traversal routes” through which an individual can explore a given content domain. Specifically, we wish to argue that more complex or diverse combinations of different forms of reading and writing provide a learner with the means to conduct a more critical inquiry of a topic by virtue of the multiple perspectives or ways of “seeing” and thinking that these reading and writing exchanges permit. Finally, in light of this theoretical orientation, we contend that the ability to direct dynamically one's own reading and writing engagements en route to learning is central to conducting an inquiry of this nature. This perspective suggests a reexamination of a line of research that has pursued the question of how writing in combination with reading influences thinking and learning.