Abstract: This article argues that in his Philippos (Isoc. 5.149), Isocrates reinterprets the Socratic daimonion , transforming it from an inner ethical sign into a divine power legitimizing political action. Embedded in the speech's broader anti-Socratic polemic, this alteration aligns with Isocrates' conception of the politikos logos as a practical, audience-directed discourse. The daimonion passage thus exposes the philosophical foundations of Isocratean rhetoric: divine sanction for the interdependence of logos and praxis . By invoking a divine mandate that unites logos and praxis , Isocrates presents his logoi as performative texts capable of guiding Philip II of Macedon toward the common political good of Greece.

Abstract: This study explores the moral character ( ēthos ) of metic litigants and non-litigants in select forensic orations of public nature in the Demosthenic corpus and argues the ad hoc socio-economic standing of metics, their legal status, and their occupations were critical factors in constructing elaborate and complex metic portrayals (individual or collective) in forensic narratives. The evidence shows negative portrayals of metic men and women, but metics were not invariably depicted as the malevolent "other." Taking as its starting point the Aristotelian teachings about constructing ēthos in forensic narratives, which ought themselves to be ēthikai , this analysis draws attention to legal status as a critical factor in constructing moral character, and in more nuanced and complex ways than contemporary, 4th-century BCE rhetorical theory would advise. Provided these portrayals were curated to appeal to large panels of citizen dikastai , these rhetorical portrayals of metics in court may shed light on ambivalent Athenian attitudes towards metics.

Abstract: This paper examines the reception of the pseudo-Quintilianic Declamationes maiores in the 14th and 15th centuries, highlighting in particular the important role of Lorenzo Valla's Elegantie lingue Latine as a medium for humanistic engagement with these rhetorical texts. Calderini, teaching at the Studium of Rome, used the Declamationes maiores as a study text, demonstrating a practical application of these declamations in the context of humanist pedagogy. Poliziano, on the other hand, although he did not engage directly with the Declamationes maiores , still occasionally cited the controversiae in his commentaries. Together, these examples illustrate that, for humanists of the late fifteenth century, access to, understanding of, and engagement with the Declamationes maiores were often mediated by Valla's Elegantie , which served as a conduit for their interpretative practices and as a source for quotations.

This essay argued that, in the post-Dobbs era, reproductive justice-themed mural art serves a memorializing function as well as a site of utopic imagining in a time of declining access to reproductive healthcare. The author has used personal experience as a clinic escort to ground a visual rhetorical analysis of three reproductive justice-themed murals across the United States. The essay has identified recurring aesthetic elements in the murals’ compositions, including the female gaze, flowers in bloom, haloes, bold directional symbols, and affirming text. Drawing on reproductive justice scholarship and feminist rhetorical theories of place, the author argued that these aesthetic elements counter fetal personhood rhetoric and assert reproductive justice principles.

[Introduction] Edited by Linda S. Svitak and Christin Jaye Eaton, with Lee Svitak Dean, and published by the University of Minnesota Press, Kitchens of Hope: Immigrants Share Stories of Resilience and Recipes from Home (2025) fits neatly into the popular genre network of cookbooks that blend essay with recipe, mixing memoir with meals perfected over generations. But this book doesn't simply share the legacy of Liberian rice bread or summer beat soup. It explores the migration of these dishes and their cooks, contextualizing stories of displacement and development. Because of the breadth of this book, Mikhail Bakhtin might describe this collection as a chronotope of sorts, a configuration of time and space that "takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible" (qtd. in Bemong & Borghart, 2010, p. 4). Through Omedi Ochieng's lens of chronotopian humanitarianism, this book is a rhetorical tool for feminist scholarship seeking to counter a Eurocentric understanding of how and why people and stories move around and through the world.

Bridget C. Donnelly is an assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Her primary teaching areas include eighteenth-century British literature, the novel, and Gothic and horror literature. Her research has appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality (2024). She is completing, along with a team of undergraduate and graduate student researchers, a critical edition of Elizabeth Meeke's 1796 The Abbey of Clugny, under contract with Routledge's Chawton House: Women's Novel Series.Kishonna Gray (she/her) is a professor of racial justice and technology in the School of Information at the University of Michigan and director of the Mellon-funded Intersectional Tech Lab. Her research explores the intersections of race, gender, and digital technologies, particularly in gaming and platform culture. She is the author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming and Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live and coeditor of Woke Gaming and Feminism in Play. Gray is also a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.Ashley Nadeau is an associate professor of English at Utah Valley University in Orem, UT, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature and critical theory. Her current research project examines the role of audiobooks in undergraduate literary studies and studies on the Victorian novel. When not thinking about audiobooks, she studies the relationship between the social and architectural histories of built public space and the Victorian literary imagination. Her work has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorians Journal, The Gaskell Journal, Modern Language Studies, and Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom.Eleanor Reeds is an associate professor of English at Hastings College in Nebraska where she enjoys teaching across genres and periods in a small but vibrant department. Her research has appeared in venues such as Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, American Literary Realism, and Twentieth-Century Literature.Tes Schaeffer (she/her) previously served as an advanced lecturer in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric and as the associate director of the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Central Oregon Community College. Her fields of scholarship include composition and reading pedagogies, affect studies, and phenomenology.Krysten Stein (she/her) is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College. She is a research affiliate with the Intersectional Tech Lab at the University of Michigan's School of Information and the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Her research explores reality television and social media, with a focus on identity, political economy, and wellness. She is completing her first book, And How Does That Make You Feel? Theratainment and the Digital Commodification of Mental Health, and is a cofounding member of the Content Creator Scholars Network.Lisa Swan is an advanced lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. She holds a PhD in curriculum and instruction with a specialization in English education from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include writing studies, pedagogy, reading, teacher training, and equity.

Abstract Students in first-year composition are often asked to read multiple texts quickly and independently during the process of researching and writing research essays, yet reading is rarely an explicit pedagogical focus. Researchers in metacognition and readerly expertise agree that expert reading is purposeful, defined in part by agility in engaging with a text, its context and its embeddedness within larger conversations and with one's own intentions beyond or within such conversations. Drawing from these concepts of readerly purpose and source use, we propose a theory of mining reading — a way of reading for conversation. Mining reading is when readers mine a text to understand the text's message within a broader topic or disciplinary conversation and make a text mine by identifying its use for the reader's rhetorical purpose. We describe ways to scaffold mining reading from our writing classes and share findings from student reflections, gathered with IRB approval, about the affordances and constraints of this approach. We ultimately situate mining reading as one way to help students understand reading as an active meaning making process and develop a flexible sense of purpose and agency in their research essays.

The CIA's Operation PBSuccess represents a pivotal moment in Cold War securitization that illuminates technical communication's role in security contexts. We use Haas and Frost's apparent decolonial feminist (ADF) rhetoric of risk to trace how communicators mediated security logics across cultures and networks while exploiting technological asymmetries between the US and Guatemala. Building on theories of risk and (in)security framing, we demonstrate how the scriptwriters and hosts of Radio Liberación , as technical communicators, functioned as security actors complicit in the decades-long aftermath. We conclude by calling on technical communicators to approach risk communication through continued decolonial praxis.

This article examines United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID's) maternal health (MH) success stories as transnational assemblages that deploy security logics to justify external governance while appearing to celebrate local agency. Through rhetorical-cultural analysis of 25 narratives, I identify three recurring strategies—crisis amplification, representational homogenization, and paratextual techniques—that frame MH as requiring urgent intervention. These stories obscure local expertise and align care with donor-defined metrics and narrative arcs. Findings show that security logics circulate through genre conventions and design templates that normalize intervention as technical and humanitarian. I argue TPC scholars must examine assemblage mechanisms’ role in shaping representation, risk, and care transnationally.

International professional writers must consider cultural and linguistic differences in their rhetorical choices. Yet limited studies have explored the practice of international and multilingual professional communication. This article reports on a corpus-based contrastive study of wine-tasting notes (TNs) produced in North America and Spain. The findings reveal that the Spanish TNs focus on sensory attributes whereas the North American TNs focus on narrative elements about wineries and food pairing. The authors conclude by positing the importance of a context-centered rather than a language-centered approach to international professional communication.

This article builds a heuristic that raises the artificial intelligence (AI) literacy of Latine students. Nefarious people are exploiting marginalized Latine communities by using AI in creative partnerships, similar to those described in technical communication research, to build social profiles of Latines. These people are rhetorically using AI in passive-income and voice-over scams that target Latines who are insecure about their financial and citizenship situations. The heuristic offered here guides instructors on how to increase Latine students’ AI literacy by making these students aware of the rhetorical relationships between nefarious individuals and AI.

This article explores how public writers view rhetorical decisions in their use of quantitative information to educate, inform, and move audiences toward action. Using the concept of “statistical framing” to describe how writers signal evaluations of numbers to their readers, we set out to learn how these writers connected their rhetorical goals to how they framed quantitative information. We interviewed 14 writers using the discourse-based interview method and found that, for various reasons, writers valued speeding up and slowing down evaluations of numbers.

This article draws on narratives of 45 career-change professionals and explores the use of models as onboarding tools through the lens of writing transfer and the crucial rhetorical thinking and metacognition that it requires. These interviews show that the use of models often limits the opportunity for writing transfer for these professionals by deemphasizing the “invention” phase while they learn to write new documents in their new workplaces. The article argues that invention, rooted in rhetorical thinking, in the workplace can be a prompt for writing transfer, which is often difficult for new communicators in professional settings. The author suggests ways to position students as advocates of invention-related practices in their future workplaces, so that writing transfer might happen more seamlessly.

On Friday morning, December 2, 1955, less than 18 hours after Rosa Parks’s arrest, copies of an anonymous, half-page leaflet began circulating in Black neighborhoods of Montgomery, Alabama. It called for a 1-day boycott of city buses on Monday, December 5. The leaflet was the work of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), namely, its president, Jo Ann Robinson. After drafting the text on the night of December 1, she drove to her office at Alabama State College (ASC) to copy it, then, the next day, with helpers, distributed those copies across the city. By evening, nearly everyone in Montgomery’s Black community knew of the boycott plan. This article offers the fullest examination yet of that leaflet, one of the most impactful texts of its kind in U.S. history. It analyzes its composition, which drew on years of activism by the WPC; its reproduction, using a mimeograph machine at ASC; and its distribution, by car, foot, and hand, across a divided urban landscape. Rhetoric and writing studies help us uncover the material resources, social context, and situated processes that enabled that text; history reminds us of its extraordinary mobilizing power.

This study examines how entrepreneurs’ public-speaking competence shapes investor sentiment and firm valuation in China’s emerging industries. Drawing on nine cases across digital technology, cryptocurrency, and new energy vehicles, we analyzed narrative structure, emotional marker density, credibility anchors, and delivery dynamics. Findings from this mixed methods study shows that while narrative structure and emotional marker density cues has no significant effect on Investor Sentiment, credibility anchors and delivery dynamics significantly enhance investor sentiment, which mediates their effect on firm valuation change. These results highlight that credibility anchors and delivery dynamics function as the strongest communicative signals, amplifying investor confidence and valuation outcomes. For practitioners, the study underscores the strategic value of cultivating credibility and delivery skills to strengthen market trust and access to capital. By linking communication and entrepreneurial outcomes, this research clarifies how rhetorical competence can be leveraged to support firm growth in competitive environments.

What makes societies see, acknowledge, and constitute an issue as a crisis which should be acted upon? We address this by examining a specific instance of media attention to a creeping health crisis, namely the communication of an individual non-governmental actor, the influencer Ingeborg Senneset. We ask: What is the rhetorical agency of an individual opinion leader (influencer) in a health risk situation such as the creeping AMR-crisis? Our study demonstrates that the rhetorical agency of Senneset as an influencer rests on three interrelated communicative strategies: First, she enacts what we term a multiple ethos implying both the expertise of a professional and the authenticity of an ordinary person; Second, she uses narratives of fear with a rational grounding; Third, she establishes and works rhetorically within a diverse digital ecology where she publishes, posts, and comments on several different platforms, where the different posts and publications reinforce each other.

This article engages with rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholarship on embodiment and expertise in online health communication to demonstrate how rhetorical tactics help patients make embodied health decisions. This study analyzes 320 online postings, 84 published narratives, 30 surveys and written reflections, and 10 interviews in an online health community for Asherman syndrome (AS), a rare illness that develops after reproductive surgery. The findings of this study highlight how patients incorporate online information into their decision-making practices by accumulating embodied knowledge, tailoring questions, insisting on specific treatments, and switching healthcare providers. This article argues that patients’ rhetorical tactics, when shared and accumulated over time, can transform treatment outcomes.

This paper explores how an intellectual account that describes eyes as cameras shapes clinical practices of measurement and correction in vision care. For patients with eye movement disorders (EMDs), which are complex, not easily treated, and often incurable, the acuity-centric system of vision care often reduces their experiences to standardized assessments that fail to address the full scope of their needs. Bringing together rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) research, quality-of-life studies, patient testimonies, and qualitative responses from our survey of people with EMDs, we examined patients’ frustrations within a system that prioritizes acuity correction over a nuanced understanding of their complex conditions. We used the framework of the quest narrative as derived from the domains of theater and improv to highlight the multiplicity of ways that people with non-normative bodies navigate a normative infrastructure over time. This paper contributes to RHM scholarship in two primary ways: 1) by operationalizing critical disability studies critiques of biomedical normativity within care contexts and 2) detailing the care-related experiences of people defined as having rare disabilities or diseases.

We draw on William L. Benoit’s image repair theory to examine the case of Jesse Gelsinger, who died during a clinical trial testing the safety of a highly anticipated gene therapy treatment. We argue the primary biomedical researcher blamed for Gelsinger’s death used image repair strategies to frame his controversial research as a regrettable but important moment in the larger pursuit of frontier science in which he claimed to have acted humanely. We explain how health and medical professionals apologizing for biomedical tragedies risk demeaning the public they already harmed. Our study tries to account for image repair’s essential but contradictory role in dangerous frontier biomedicine, and we draw novel connections between image repair strategies and the rhetorical concepts of synecdoche and metonymy.

Advanced technologies and other rapid changes in the global business environment, especially following the pandemic of 2020, have fundamentally disrupted how, when, and where we work. Through design thinking, business communicators can reenvision the affordance of traditional rhetoric to thrive in this new workplace. The article opens with a scenario based on the postpandemic problem of accommodating a hybrid style of work and then describes how the mindset and method of design thinking transform traditional rhetoric. Grounded in empathetic collaboration, design thinking positions rhetoric as a recursive, nonlinear, and nimble process and provides new perspectives on rhetoric’s time-tested persuasive appeals.

This study examines the role of risk visualizations in public health communication through an analysis of the MyWater-Flint Map and Flint Service Line Map , developed during the Flint water crisis. Applying a newly proposed social justice-oriented framework for risk visual design, the study evaluates these maps' effectiveness in communicating risk through dimensions of accessibility, accountability, ethics, productive usability, hybrid collectivity, open systems, and circulation. Findings highlight the importance of community participation in the production and dissemination of risk visualizations. This work sheds light on visual risk communication theory, professional practice, and technical communication instruction.

For those like me who were eagerly awaiting the publication of the second edition of Document Design: From Process to Product in Professional Communication , you will not be disappointed! The new edition exceeds my expectations for updated content and examples—while staying true to the original focus on design theory and principles in practice. It balances foundational aspects of visual rhetoric and usability, while providing new insights on digital technologies and production.

As Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) adopts User Experience (UX) methods, gaps persist in integrating UX-specific knowledge and practices into curricula. This article advocates for Conversation Design (CxD) as a crucial yet overlooked intersection of TPC and UX. CxD focuses on creating human-centered interactions for chatbots, voice assistants and other conversational interfaces, aligning well with TPC's rhetorical foundations in audience, purpose, and context. Integrating CxD into TPC curricula equips students for emerging industry demands and drives academic innovation. The article defines CxD, examines its relevance to TPC, offers instructional strategies, and presents a course-based case study as a curricular model.

Abstract This essay explores synecdoche as an extended argumentative structure in Roman defenses of rhetoric. While contemporary scholarship often limits synecdoche to semantic substitution or distinguishes it from metonymy, theorists have recognized its potential as a form of argument. In Roman rhetoric, Quintilian describes synecdoche as both a trope of part-whole relations and a parallel argumentative form in Institutio Oratoria with comparable aims and lexical choices. This study examines how Roman rhetoricians, notably Quintilian and Cicero, employed synecdoche in extended arguments in defense of rhetoric. These arguments structured interconnected ideas such as categorical distinctions, hierarchical significance, and temporal sequence by employing synecdochal structures. By comparing ancient definitions and examples, this analysis reveals synecdoche’s capacity to organize complex argumentative discourse, offering a lens to scrutinize its structural and functional role.

This study examines the rhetorical endeavors of a grassroots citizen and a youth activist in addressing official ignorance and denial surrounding the Flint water crisis. These civic participants engaged in extensive communicative, interactive, and affective labor to assess and communicate risks, raising public awareness and pushing for policy change. This article theorizes an extended materialist social justice framework by illustrating the complex interactions between immaterial labor and different types of social justice.

By Natalie Shellenberger. This bibliographic essay explores the use of Derrick Bell’s concept of interest convergence in the fields of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies since his definition of the principle in 1980. After a brief overview of the concept of interest convergence and its implications to the fields of rhetoric and writing/composition studies, the main focus of this essay will turn to how it is currently taken up within the discipline: pedagogical development, writing administration, and academic scholarship and where to go from here.

This paper investigates the relationship between practical argumentation (PA) and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). PA is argumentation providing justification for an agent’s action. PA has been described in terms of a three-level structure composed of practical, evaluative, and classificatory argumentation schemes. RST is a linguistic theory that models the hierarchical structure of monological discourse in terms of discourse coherence relations. RST’s Motivation relation is intended to increase an agent’s inclination to perform some action. Our investigative approach was to analyze argumentation schemes of PA in examples of RST involving Motivation and to analyze RST structure for texts that have been used as examples of PA. The results of the investigation show uses, not only of Motivation, but also RST’s Antithesis, Concession, Evaluation, and Solutionhood. In some cases the RST analysis reflects the layered composition of argumentation schemes of PA.

By Meghan Hancock. I came to Threshold Conscripts: Rhetoric and Composition Teaching Assistantships—as I think many of us would—with vivid memories of my first semester teaching first-year writing. I felt some panic and anxiety, of course, at the very idea of a teaching role, but I was also struggling to reconcile the conflicting roles I carried. As Laura R. Micciche puts it in the Foreword to this collection, I was “not-quite teacher and not-quite student,” but was, nevertheless, asked to take on the important role of introducing students to college-level writing (xii). The anxieties and learning moments brought about by these intersecting identities make graduate student instructors of composition a rich and vital population to study, and yet as this collection consistently argues, the field of Writing Studies needs more scholarship examining their experiences. It is this gap that Threshold Conscripts, edited by William Macauley, Jr., Leslie R. Anglesey, Brady Edwards, Kathryn M. Lambrecht, and Phillip K. Lovas, addresses in its collective works that closely analyze the lived experiences of graduate RCTAs (rhetoric and composition teaching assistants) as they attempt to balance their multiple roles as teachers and students.

Kathleen Lyons Abstract This article explores the role writing teachers play as access-makers. Invoking theories of embodiment, relationality, disability, social justice, and making, the article offers a technē of access as rhetorical framework for developing and implementing accessible writing pedagogies. Technē is often associated with processes of making and knowing; meanwhile, access is a rhetorical […]

This article the Doomsday Clock and the Nuclear Football as interconnected technical communication artifacts that function as two sides of a “spurious coin” in the securitization of nuclear deterrence. While the Clock externalizes existential risk through apocalyptic rhetoric, the Football internalizes it within exclusive military command structures—together legitimizing perpetual nuclear crisis. Drawing on technical communication scholarship and critical security studies, the analysis argues that both artifacts sustain nuclearist ideology by reinforcing deterrence as common sense. The Clock's ominous countdown and the Football's ever-present launch capability are mutually validating and together normalize nuclear brinkmanship as the price of global security.

The article considers the subject of art/science intersections by presenting the affinities between the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and the visual artist Tadeusz Mysłowski. In the Introduction, their encounter is contextualized in an overview of earlier approaches to the study of such intersections, especially the changes in rhetorical theory and practice which led to the so-called rhetorical turn in the last decades of the 20th century. In Part 2, the evolution of visual rhetoric and the rhetoric of mathematics as autonomous subject areas within the broader field of rhetoric is discussed as constituting crucial parallel developments that now provide scholars with adequate tools to analyze and describe instances of rhetoricization of scientific and artistic communication. In Part 3, the example of the Mandelbrot/Mysłowski conjunction is scrutinized to bring out the rhetorical ramifications of their respective geometries – of fractals in the case of the mathematician and of elemental geometric-organic forms in the case of the artist.

The attacks of September 11 stand among the most rhetorically charged events that have shaped the collective imagination and political discourse of the twenty-first century. The global aftermath redefined national security, identity, and, crucially, the rhetorical function of borders. In the post-9/11 landscape, borders became discursive constructs, rhetorically framed to delineate justice from injustice, inclusion from exclusion, and served as rhetorical tools of exclusion and control rather than protection and unity. These shifting borders targeted marginalised communities, particularly migrants from third-world countries and those of Muslim descent deemed as a threat. Guantánamo Bay came to embody this ambiguous rhetoric of confinement, where language and law were manipulated to evade accountability. This study analyses how the film Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush (2022) displays the formation and enforcement of physical and ideological boundaries. Through the lens of American exceptionalism as a rhetorical strategy, the film exposes how national security discourse redefines borders to justify exclusionary practices and extraordinary legal measures. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical framework of the ‘state of exception,’ the study examines how sovereign powers suspend legal norms while strengthening systemic control. Crucially, the analysis investigates how the film enacts rhetorics of resistance through its portrayal of the agency of migrants such as Rabiye Kurnaz, and the demand for visibility, dignity, and voice. By focusing on the rhetorical dimensions of national security, legality, and citizenship, this article contributes to an understanding of how borders are lines on a map but powerful rhetorical devices that shape lived realities.

This article explores how Peter Santenello’s Border Series, viewed more than ninety million times on YouTube, depicts U.S. migration in the early 2020s. After years abroad as a travel vlogger, Santenello returned to the United States determined to show the country from the ground up, arguing that mainstream outlets overlook crucial realities. His Border Series is part of this turn. Through close readings of selected episodes, the paper identifies three recurring rhetorical patterns in his coverage of migration to the U.S. First, Santenello’s hand-held camera gains entry to police trucks, farm fields, hotels, and desert contacts to the mainstream representations which are considered to be politically biased. Second, each video functions as a “third space” where roles remain fluid: migrants appear as commodities or humanitarian cases, sheriffs shift from protectors to reluctant aid workers, and viewers assign these labels through real-time debate. Third, Santenello’s civic-traveler style combines storytelling with witnessing; by rejecting the journalist label yet featuring multiple viewpoints, he widens the circle of voices that narrate the border and resists classical media framing. Taken together, these patterns show that digital, personality-driven reporting is remapping migration discourse, turning contested ground into a shared arena for seeing and arguing.