Student compositions traditionally are written for the teacher. Yet instructors of professional communication genres have discovered that students' motivation may be enhanced when they write assignments for audiences of peers within the classroom or professionals outside the campus. Yet client-based projects require writing students who have never yet written for an external audience to make a leap beyond the classroom. To bridge the gap between writing for classroom peers and writing for professional clients, this article describes a third and intermediate choice of audience, namely, external peers in cross-classroom collaborations that occur via telecommunication. The author places this intermediate-audience strategy within the larger conversation about the impact of audience on student writing outcomes, applies the strategy to professional writing pedagogy, and reports the results of a small pilot study that provide some preliminary support for the strategy.

This article discusses the rise of conservation writing as a new field of technical communication, and it offers pedagogical strategies for teaching conservation writing and building curricula. Conservation writing is an umbrella term for a range of writing about ecology, biology, the outdoors, and environmental policies and ethics. It places the natural world at the center of readers' attention, often viewing sustainability as a core value. A course or curriculum in this kind of writing would likely need to help students master a variety of genres, while providing a working knowledge in environmental law, ethics, and politics.

We review Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's original formulation of presence as a technique of argument associated primarily with the selection of individual rhetorical elements, and the recent extension of the notion by Gross and Dearin, where presence is understood as a second-order effect that denotes the systematic expression and inhibition of patterns of rhetorical elements across an entire text or rhetorical artifact. We argue for an additional extension to this more global notion of presence, one that makes it not only global within a text or class of texts, but also comparative, allowing the analyst to make rigorous comparisons of expressed and inhibited rhetorical patterns across different texts, or different classes of texts, including different rhetorical genres. A return to the original conception of presence allows us to make this extension, and we illustrate global presence within this newly proposed comparative framework by analyzing two genres of self-presentation in classroom practice: the cover letter and the self-portrait. We show the close ties between global presence and genre as ways of theorizing deep similarities across texts.

Work activities that are mediated by information rely on the production of discourse-based objects of work. Designs, evaluations, and conditions are all objects that originate and materialize in discourse. They are created and maintained through the coordinated efforts of human and non-human agents. Genres help foster such coordination from the top down, by providing guidance to create and recreate discourse objects of recurring social value. From where, however, does coordination emerge in more ad hoc discursive activities, where the work objects are novel, unknown, or unstable? In these situations, coordination emerges from simple discursive operations, reliably mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs) that appear to act as discursive agents. This article theorizes the discursive agency of ICTs, explores the discursive operations they mediate, and the coordination that emerges. The article also offers and models a study methodology for the empirical observation of such interactions.

This article introduces a simple mapping tool called Grassroots, a software product from a longitudinal study examining the use of information communication technologies and knowledge work in communities. Grassroots is an asset-based mapping tool made possible by the Web 2.0 movement, a movement which allows for the creation of more adaptable interfaces by making data and underlying database structures more openly available via syndication and open source software. This article forwards three arguments. First is an argument about the nature of the knowledge work of everyday life, or an argument about the complex technological and rhetorical tasks necessary to solve commonplace problems through writing. Second is an argument about specific technologies and genres of community-based knowledge work, about why making maps is such an essential genre, and about why making asset maps is potentially transformative. Third is an argument about the making of Grassroots itself; a statement about how we should best express, test, and verify our theories about writing and knowledge work.

The writing assignment described offers an introduction to the college research paper genre.

Closed Systems and Standardized Writing Tests by Chris M. Anson; "Information Illiteracy and Mass Market Writing Assessments" by Les Perelman "Genre, Testing, and the Constructed Realities of Student Achievement" by Mya Poe; "The Call of Research: A Longitudinal View of Writing Development" by Nancy Sommers.

In this paper, David Zarefsky suggests some constraints that political arguers face when trying to persuade an audience, and discusses some of the devices with which they respond to these constraints. In his treatment of these devices Zarefsky makes use of the concept of strategic manoeuvring as proposed by van Eemeren and Houtlosser. By taking into account the three manifestations of strategic manoeuvring-topical potential, audience adaptation and an effective presentation (van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2002, p. 139)-he identifies and discusses several possible ways of dealing with these situational constraints. Regarding the 'activity type' (van Eemeren and Houtlosser 2005) of political argumentation, Zarefsky focuses on large and open-ended public debates that engage entire societies. He rightfully indicates that it seems strange to consider these kinds of political argumentation as a specific kind of institutionalised discourse: political argumentation is in principle unregulated, free-form and requires no technical expertise of its participants in the discussion. In order to be able to discuss strategic manoeuvring within this kind of political context, characteristics of political argument need first to be specified. Zarefsky mentions four characteristics that can be of help to define the genre and to establish its conventions. In these comments, I will focus on the first part of the paper, which is about these characteristics of political argumentation: as a supplement to Zarefsky's paper, I will give a tentative analysis of how the four characteristics mentioned constrain the possibilities to manoeuvre strategically. 76-77). The activity type, therefore, may

To teach students how to write for the workplace and other professional contexts, technical writing teachers often assign writing tasks that reflect real-life communication contexts, a teaching approach that is grounded in the field's contextualized understanding of genre. This article argues to fully embrace contextualized literacy and better teach workplace writing, technical writing teachers also need to contextualize how they assess student writing. To this end, this article examines some of workplaces' best assessment practices and critically integrates them into an introductory technical writing classroom through a method called student-centered assessment instruments. This method engages students, as workplaces engage employees, in the assessment process to identify local requirements for writing tasks. Aligned with theory and practice, this method is not only an effective classroom assessment method, but becomes an integrated part of students' genre-learning process within and beyond the classroom.

Internal institutional genres can become fertile terrain for public policy debate when what Birkland called “focusing events” or ruptures extricate these genres from their contexts and subject them to public scrutiny. This study examines consequences for the local instantiation of the police use-of-force policy genre in the wake of a controversial shooting in Denver, Colorado, and traces ways in which the formation of a multi-interest task force charged with revising the police department's policy altered the policy's conventional activity system. In doing so, the public participated in remapping the local policy instantiation's relationship to the use-of-force policy genre and the routinized social action it performed.

The authors report on a 3-year action-research project designed to facilitate public involvement in the planned dredging of a canal and subsequent disposal of the dredged sediments. Their study reveals ways that community members struggle to define the problem and work together as they gather, share, and understand data relevant to that problem. The authors argue that the primary goal of action research related to environmental risk should be to identify and support the strategies used by community members rather than to educate the public. The authors maintain that this approach must be supported by a thorough investigation of basic rhetorical issues (audience, genre, stases, invention), and they illustrate how they used this approach in their study.

This paper gives an analytic description of why and how an instructional writing program on the improvement of cross-genre writing skills in German secondary grade level has been designed and implemented. From a diagnostic research phase, and according to theoretical expectations, coherence management and perspective taking proved to be ability components that substantially contribute to text quality across different genres. To train these two abilities in a didactical setting, two 11-unit writing courses were analogously constructed and administered in 5th and 9th grades. There were 12 intervention classes and 12 control classes in each grade, forming 48 classes with 1.145 participants. The decisions that lead to the design of the intervention study and the corresponding didactical settings are explained and justified in detail, and the developed self-learning materials are described in terms of their assumed learning potentials and the underlying didactical principles. Based on the obtained empirical experiences, the intervention is critically evaluated with respect to good intervention research and its proper description.

This essay reports on a study of first-year student writing. Based on a stratified national sample, the study attempts to replicate research conducted twenty-two years ago and to chart the changes that have taken place in student writing since then. The findings suggest that papers are longer, employ different genres, and contain new error patterns.

This essay considers the implications of using David Russell's activity theory to re-conceptualize models of community service writing (CSW) that stem from discourse community theory. Here I argue that the notion of discourse community is of limited use to practitioners committed to CSW, because it leads students to adopt unrealistic expectations about their roles in CSW projects and it prevents them from accounting for a number of important factors while doing CSW. In its place, I offer activity theory as a guiding framework that students can use to learn about the multilayered activity systems they are seeking to work in as collaborators in CSW projects.

Troilus and Criseyde is a work of magnificent scope and intimidating breadth. A strategy that I have found effective for addressing the potentially overwhelming pedagogical task of teaching this masterpiece is to ask students to analyze the relationships between genre and character. Through this process, I encourage students to engage in vectored analysis, which I describe as the examination of a text from at least two converging yet separate perspectives. Encouraging students to examine literature from complementary and vectoring perspectives enables them to make the cognitive leap from a static analysis of one issue to a more vibrant exploration of textual interplay. Vectored analysis provides a pedagogical foundation for students of all abilities to approach multigeneric texts and to reach deeper insights about them. In this essay, I demonstrate this approach with Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, but it could be readily reformulated for a range of multigeneric texts.

In the discipline of design, the most common presentation genre is the critique, and the most central aspect of this genre is the feedback. Using a qualitative framework, this article identifies a typology of feedback, compares the frequencies of feedback types between different levels of design studios ranging from novice to expert, and explores what the feedback reflects about the social and educational context of these design studios. Results suggest that the feedback socialized students into egalitarian relationships and autonomous decision-making identities that were perhaps more reflective of academic developmental stages or idealized workplace contexts than of actual professional settings—therefore potentially complicating the preprofessional goals of the critique.

This article discusses the development of a unified social theory of genre learning based on the integration of rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and the situated learning perspective. The article proposes that these three theoretical perspectives are compatible and complementary, and it illustrates applications of a unified framework to a study of genre learning by novice engineers. The author draws examples from a longitudinal qualitative study of a group of novice engineers who developed their professional genre knowledge through both academic and workplace experiences. These examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for the study of professional genre learning.

Many recent studies on computer-mediated communication (CMC) have addressed the question of orality and literacy. This article examines a relatively recent subgenre of CMC, that of written online sports commentary, that provides us with written CMC that is clearly based on firmly established oral genres, those of radio and television sports commentary. The examples analyzed are from two English, two French, and two Spanish online football (soccer) commentaries. The purpose of the study is to examine oral traits and genre mixing in online football commentaries in the three languages and carryover from the spoken genres of radio and television commentaries to this developing genre, following Ferguson. Special attention is paid to Web page design. The study reveals that form and content of online football commentaries are strongly affected by the style of the online newspaper.

The audience's violent response to the 2003 Rockford College commencement address illuminates challenges that surround the epideictic genre in a politically divided society. This essay explores the nature of the conflict that arose that day in order to consider ways in which the generic form of epideictic potentially facilitates communication among people with different views. This opportunity can be realized as rhetors and audiences acknowledge generic constraints, acknowledge social concerns, search for shared understanding, and commit themselves to an epideictic encounter that serves the educational function of constructively interrogating and reimagining public values.

Through analyzing specific examples, the author identifies recurring themes of the genre known as the food memoir, calling attention in particular to its value as multicultural literature

Writing in personal genres, like autobiography, leads writers to public voices. Public voice is a discursive quality of a text that conveys the writer’s authority and position relative to others. To show how voice and authority depend on genre, I analyze the autobiographies of two writers who take opposing positions on the same topic. By producing texts in genres with recognizable social functions, student writers gain agency.

In his 2007 Rhetoric Review article "Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies," Paul Butler explains that while style seems to have vanished from the field of rhetoric and composition since the 1980s, it has actually been appropriated by areas within our discipline including genre theory, rhetorical analysis, personal writing, and even race, class, gender, and difference studies. Using Janice Lauer's metaphor of the "diaspora" of composition studies to guide his analysis, Butler examines the ways that style, like invention, has "migrated" in the field. he claims that style is both absent and ubiquitous in our scholarship. Because "style in its dispersed form is often not called style but instead is named something else within the field," it remains central to our field although its presence is masked (5). That is, while it seems as though style is simultaneously absent and present in our discipline, the concept of style has remained present and it is the name style that is now absent. Therefore, style's place within composition studies is not paradoxical at all. "Style" appears to have gradually separated from the concept with which it was associated and has taken on other names that better fit the trends and developments of our discipline.

WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM linkages are generally acknowledged to help students improve as writers and engage more deeply in disciplinary course content. However, the extent to which the literacy skills that are taught in general writing courses transfer to the specific writing needs of a particular discipline remains a debatable issue. Referring to first year writing courses, Amy Devitt notes that writing courses “have been attacked as not useful, in part because of a potential lack of transferability of the general writing skills learned in composition courses to the particular writing tasks students will later confront” ( ). Margaret Mansfield similarly maintains that attempts to reproduce real world writing in the classroom are “intrinsically doomed” ( ), as do many of the essays in Joseph Petraglia’s collection, Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, which question the value of what Petraglia terms GWSI (General Writing Skills Instruction). However, an important benefit of a cross curricular model, one that receives little attention in writing across the curriculum scholarship, is that linked courses not only help students improve as writers, but they can also enable students to understand that “when people learn, they don’t take on new knowledge so much as a new identity” (Lindquist ). Identity is closely linked with writing, but WAC tends to focus primarily on the actual writing, not on the role writers play in a discourse community. In this essay, we discuss a successful linkage between a writing class and a class in Health Sciences that used rhetoric, with particular emphasis on the concepts of identity, genre, and performance, to help students gain insight into the role of writing in the field of Public Health and understand what it means to be a Public Health professional. Differences in students’ responses to essays written at the beginning of the semester as

Because communication specialists often lack the power and prestige of other knowledge workers, such as engineers and product designers, managers who direct the work of communication specialists face unique challenges. This study, based on interviews with 11 communication managers, found that their agency and identity were determined both by the structure of the organizations in which they worked and by their use of genres, technologies, and regulatory techniques. With their work undergoing transition because of globalization, outsourcing, and rapid technological change, the stories that these managers tell demonstrate the importance of studying management as it specifically applies to communication specialists.

This article reports a case study of three multinational companies that work together in a consortium, focusing on intercompany and intracompany variation in writing products and processes. The authors discuss variation in two genres: meeting minutes and internal memos. Adopting a social constructionist, communities of practice (CofP) approach, they argue that the companies form overarching constellations of CofP. Although the participants broadly work with the same genres of written documents, the form of these documents varies according to the local context, audience, and purpose. The authors discuss the implications of their findings, with particular reference to the difficulty writers face when they make the transition from writing for one community of practice to writing for another.

Recently, scholars of new media have been exploring the relationships between genre theory and new media. While these scholars have provided a great deal of insight into the nature of e-genres and how they function in professional contexts, few address the relationship between genre and new-media theories from a designer's perspective. This article presents the results of an ethnographic-style case study exploring the practice of a professional new-media designer. These results (a) confirm the role of dynamic rhetorical situations and hybridity during the new-media design process; (b) suggest that current genre and new-media theories underestimate the complexity of the relationships between mode, medium, genre, and rhetorical exigencies; and (c) indicate that a previously unrecognized form of hybridity exists in contemporary e-genres.

This study reports about a yearlong study of the initiation of novice grant writers to the activity system of National Institutes of Health grant applications. It investigates the use of cognitive apprenticeship within writing classrooms and that of social apprenticeship in laboratories, programs, departments, and universities, which introduced students to the genre system of National Institutes of Health grant proposals and helped them in moving from peripheral participation to more central participation. While cognitive apprenticeship employs devices such as modeling, scaffolding, coaching, and collaboration to enhance learning in formal settings, social apprenticeship requires socialization, interaction, and collaboration with experts, colleagues, and peers in informal settings to acquire disciplinary knowledge and experiences. The study suggests that writing instructors should acknowledge and incorporate resources in other activity systems in which students participate, i.e., their laboratories and home departments, and teach genre systems rather than specific genres to better facilitate students' enculturation to activity systems of disciplinary discourse communities.

Undergraduate literature courses tend to neglect American fiction of the 1930s, especially the proletarian novel. Disregard of this particular genre is often based on the assumption that it emphasized a crude Marxist realism opposed to aesthetic modernism. Various examples of the genre are, in fact, worth teaching, especially because they do not fall simply into either camp. Such texts include John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy and Fielding Burke’s novel Call Home the Heart.

Who doesn't love a good story?A tale of triumph or woe, of frustration or longawaited success.Such classic narratives are familiar to us all, and versions of them occur in the writing center with relative frequency.These stories we tell -whether of current successes or challenges, passed from veteran tutors to newbies, from directors to faculty and back again -teach us about our work, helping us to reflect on it and improve it.These stories are filled with compelling characters and recurring plots: the frustrated first-year student; the instructor's cryptic comments; the first scientific paper written for a major professor; the challenging task of figuring out the genre of the dissertation.These stock scenarios are familiar to us because they have all taken place in the relatively patterned institutions that host our writing centers, and these persistent patterns represent a script of sorts, one we can easily follow, whether we're the actors themselves or the audience listening to someone else's writing center stories.Patterns, of course, do get disrupted.In many ways, writing centers are in the business of disrupting patterns, working with writers to develop new approaches to writing tasks and changed relationships to their academic work.Those of us who work in writing centers must also be prepared to have our patterns disrupted, to hear how writers are really engaging with their texts: the English Language Learner who is not asking for proofreading assistance but who instead wants to know whether the evidence she presents in her argument is convincing; the chemistry student who comes in with a laboratory report, a genre often associated with arcane language and fill-in-the-blank templates, and turns the conversation quickly to her excitement over the research she is doing and the ways she might convey the essence of that research to a general reader; the returning student enrolled in an

Not only have historical studies of technical communication increased in quantity and quality over the last 15 years, but they have also entered the mainstream of technical communication research. These studies have focused on practitioners, artifacts, genres, movements, techniques, events, and the profession, as well as relevant methodology and pedagogy. There are still many opportunities for historical research in our discipline, particularly in the areas of chirographic, oral, and nonverbal communication as well as technical communication activities such as illustrating, translating, and editing and the business of technical communication. Researchers now have many online indexes, databases, and archives to assist them in locating and studying primary sources. There is a need, however, for greater coordination among scholars and a better awareness of the areas that have already been studied. Historical studies can serve teachers and practitioners by suggesting ideas, supplying precedents, creating critical distance, and establishing context.

Drawing on activity theory, the author describes and analyzes how he uses software to determine whether websites administered by his university are accessible to disabled people. He argues that, ultimately, accessibility is a rhetorical construct, in the sense that it is defined by communities rather than by sheer technical measurements.

This article investigates the contribution visual rhetoric and rhetorical genre studies (RGS) can make to health care education and communication genres. Through a visual rhetorical analysis of a patient record used in an optometry teaching clinic, this article illustrates that a genre's visual representations provide significant insights into the social action of that genre. These insights are deepened by an insider analysis of the patient record that highlights how content analyses of visual designs need to be elaborated by contextual considerations. A combined visual rhetoric and RGS analysis shows that clinical novices learn to interpret the record's visual cues to safely traverse the complex requirements of this apprenticeship genre. The article demonstrates that visual rhetoric research can meaningfully contribute to the understanding of genres by presenting an enriched contextual analysis achieved by consulting with context insiders.

The forensic oratory of classical Athens exhibits two strategies which markedly display their departure from content-specific commonplaces. The self-conscious “meta-topos” and the elaborative “para-topos” are partly reliant upon the display and appreciation of innovation for their persuasive power. This valorization of creativity can be explained by evidence that rhetorical novelty was sometimes encouraged by teachers of rhetoric and was certainly influenced by the competitive display of verse performance genres. Examples of “meta-topoi” and “para-topoi” are discussed with a view to extending our understanding of originality in Attic oratory and of how we might identify instances of it.

442 RHETORICA Judy Z. Segal, Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 208 pp., $50.00 cloth, ISBN 0-8093-2677-9. Humanists who study medical discourse are a diverse crowd. They hail from disciplines ranging from anthropology and bioethics to rhetoric and composition studies. Lacking a lingua franca, these scholars understandably draw from the divergent traditions of their primary fields. What has ar­ guably been missing is a comprehensive account of medical discourse aris­ ing squarely from the rhetorical tradition. University of British Columbia rhetorical theorist Judy Z. Segal's Health and the Rhetoric ofMedicine fills this void. Demonstrating the heuristic potential of rhetorical principles for un­ derstanding health and medicine broadly construed, Segal offers a series of lucidly-rendered case studies investigating the role of persuasion in shaping patients, practitioners, and illnesses alike. Segal insists on the uniqueness of particular medico-historical moments. In “Chapter One: A Kairology of Biomedicine," she advances “a study of historical moments as rhetorical opportunities" (23). To illustrate kairology's application, Segal traces shifting accounts of the patient narrator from the eighteenth century forward. Her emphasis is not medical history per se, but how medical history reveals the types of persuasion enabled by particu­ lar changes in medicine. Kairology thus informs the rhetorically-focused medical histories to come. However, her analyses derive insights from Ken­ neth Burke and an eclectic mix of classical and contemporary rhetorical theory. Segal presents seven analysis chapters flanked by a theoretically-based introduction and conclusion in a compact 158 pages of text. These build on Segal's previous publications including reprinted portions of three essays. After the opening chapter on kairology, "Chapter Two: Patient Audience, The Rhetorical Construction of the Migraineur" examines how physicians' char­ acterizations of headache patients influence the doctor-patient encounter and preferred treatments. Segal tracks the construction of the migraineur in medical writing from 1873 through the twenty-first century wherein the migraine personality has become situated in pharmacological terms. "Chap­ ter Three: The Epideictic Rhetoric of Pathography" analyzes illness narra­ tives, and their study, as value-laden rhetoric of praise and blame. Segal focuses on three complicating narrators: the pro-anorexia internet narrator who interpellates the community, the resistant narrator of Barbara Ehrenreich who challenges the tyranny of cheerfulness in breast cancer narratives, and the commercialized narrator of Carla Cantor whose hypochondria queststory represents the pathologized subject. "Chapter Four: Hypochondria as a Rhetorical Disorder" unpacks the strategic ambiguity of hypochondriacs' discourse recasting the condition from a medical mystery to a mystery of motive with historical and current examples. In "Chapter Five: A Rhetoric of Death and Dying," the book's most haunting and personal chapter, Se­ gal interrogates end-of-life rhetoric by analyzing dialogue surrounding her Reviews 443 mother's death and advanced care planning interviews to argue that in­ stitutionalized end-of-life encounters structurally impede fair deliberation. "Chapter Six: Values, Metaphors, and Health Policy" awakens the "sleeping" metaphors in health-care-policv rhetoric, exposing the values underlying medicine is war, diagnosis is health, and body as machine, for example. "Chapter Seven: The Problem of Patient 'Noncompliance': Paternalism, Expertise, and the Ethos of the Physician" addresses problems of physician authority as embedded in the terms patient non-compliance, adherence, and concordance. In her concluding section, Segal underscores the rhetorical lexicon's utility for comprehending medicine and health. Segal ably mixes insightful application of principles to particular cases with mid-level theorizing about the place of rhetoric in medicine and health. Although she draws from an interdisciplinary reservoir, her core an­ alytic concepts are well known to suasion scholars: kairos, genre, audience, metaphor, narrative, interpellation, and ethos. A second strength is her at­ tention to intersecting interactional, public, and institutional discourses. Her persistent focus on persuasion, clear prose, and accessible explanation of concepts make this volume a solid choice for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric. It should also be useful for medical human­ ists who want to access rhetorical insights: her book shows how rhetorical thinking can uncover historical particularities while fostering generalized insights. The scope of cases considered is impressive, as are the connections to history of medicine scholarship. One of the...

Reviews Heinrich E Plett, Rhetoric uud Renaissance Culture. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. 581pp. scholars. Most of us excel in one or two areas, but he has contributed valuable work in four different fields: historical and theoretical studies of came to general attention with a substantial monograph (based on his 1969 Bonn doctoral dissertation), Rhctorik dcr Affekte. Enylische Vkirkuuysdsthetik im of the importance given to moving the feelings in English Renaissance rhetoric, an understudied topic at that time, remains worth reading and might have become trulv influential had it appeared in English. Professor Plett had already published a student text, Einfidiruug iu die rhetorische Fextanalyse (Hamburg, 1971), which moved from rhetorical criticism into general linguistics, a mo\ e which he consolidated in Textwissenschaft und Textanalyse. Senuotik, Empiustik, Rhctorik (Heidelberg, 1975), subsequently translated into Rumanian (1983). Plett's latest work on rhetorical theory is Systematische Rhctorik: Konzcpt uud Analysen (Munich, 2000), which attempts a svstematization of rhetorical figures using modern linguistic terminology. In 1977 Plett produced the first of several volumes collecting essays bv himself and other scholars, Rhctorik. Kritischc Positional zum Stand dcr Forschuny (Munich). In consecutive vears he published complementary vol­ umes deriv ing from conferences held at the Zentrum fiir Rhetorik- und Renaissance-Studien that he had founded at the University of Essen, each containing 18 essavs in German, French, and English: Renaissance-Rhetorik. Renaissance Rhetoric (Berlin, New York, 1993; see my review in Renais­ sance Quarterly, 49 [1996]: 438-40), and Renaissance-Poetik. Renaissance poetics (Berlin, 1994). Another conference he organized produced a volume called Die Aktualitdt der Rhetorik (Munich, 1996). Having been so active in providing a forum for other scholars' work, it was only fitting that his colleagues re­ paid his good deeds with one of the best Rhetoric Festschriften of recent years, Rhetorica Movet: studies in historical and modern rhetoric in honor ofEieinrich F Plett, ed. P. L. Oesterreicher and T. O. Sloane (Leiden, 1999). Heinrich Plett's work has always been marked by a wide reading and the diligent use of primary and secondary sources, an important compoRhetorica , Vol. XXV, issue 4, pp. 435-448, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . G2007 by The international Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2007.25.4.435. 436 RHETORICA nent of scholarship which resulted in his producing a wide-ranging primary and secondary bibliography, Englische Rhetorik und Poetik 1479-1660. Eine systematische Bibliographie (Opladen, 1985; see my review, Wolfenbütteler Renais­ sance Mitteilungen, 13 [1989]: 75-80). A decade later Plett issued a corrected and enlarged edition, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics. A Systematic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Leiden, 1995; see my review, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 5 [1998]: 260-65). Professor Plett describes the volume under review, Rhetoric and Renais­ sance Culture, as "the result of more than thirty years' work on Renaissance rhetoric" (p. vii). It is systematically organized (the chapters are labelled "AF "), beginning with an overview of the "Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric" (pp. 11-84). Then comes the longest chapter, “Poetica Rhetorica. Rhetorical Poetics in the Renaissance" (pp. 85-294), divided into the five stages of composition (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, actio). The survey widens to take in rhetoric's relationship with the visual arts and with music, in a chapter awkwardly titled "Intermedial Rhetoric" (pp. 295-412). Chap­ ter D, “Poeta Orator: Shakespeare as Orator Poet" (pp. 413-498) consists of five parts, four of which the author has translated from essays published in German between 1981 and 1995. Chapter E, "Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence" (pp. 499-552), is profusely illustrated (the volume as a whole con­ tains 94 plates), and is followed by two detailed indices, of names and sub­ jects. The volume is handsomely designed and printed, with a commendably high degree of accuracy. Although the over-all structure is clear, there is an unfortunate degree of overlapping between sections, and the same quotations reappear several times over, often with the...

In 1974, the traffic-accident data archive maintained by the Department of Transportation for the state of Iowa was transferred from a primarily paper-based system to a mainframe computer. Data reg...

This article explores the nature of epideictic rhetoric in science through a close textual analysis of three Nobel lectures. It examines the effects of the genre shift from original research reports to ceremonial speeches, revealing significant differences from Fahnestock's analysis of the genre shift from forensic research reports to epideictic articles in the popular press, especially a move toward greater candidness about the research process. Epideictic scientific rhetoric, therefore, can be said to celebrate the scientific method in general as much as it does the particular line of research at hand.

The traditional distinction between writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines (WID) as writing to learn versus learning to write understates WID's focus on learning in the disciplines. Advocates of WID have described learning as socialization, but little research addresses how writing disciplinary discourses in disciplinary settings encourages socialization into the disciplines. Data from interviews with students who wrote lab reports in a biology lab suggest five ways in which writing promotes learning in scientific disciplines. Drawing on theories of situated learning, the authors argue that apprenticeship genres can encourage socialization into disciplinary communities.

The history of writing to learn college science is tied to the development of laboratory methods. Such student-centered learning was widely hailed in the 1890s as student enrollments increased dramatically and a backlash grew against lecture and recitation methods. However, as the author shows using archival examples from Dartmouth College, Amherst College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, science educators have too often relied on reductive measures of students' grasp of content rather than the kind of argument about scientific findings that is the stuff of real scientific writing and of real science. Although some contemporary science educators continue to tout the value of writing to learn science, the laboratory report or research article itself is a genre that dominates student activities but still largely suffers from the ills of its predecessors. Ultimately, the author calls for a renewed focus on laboratory writing, for both science education and writing studies, to fulfill the promise of previous reform efforts.

332 RHETORICA Darstellung der Entwicklung des Genres Stâdtebeschreibung bzw. Stâdtelob von der Antike bis in Guicciardinis Zeit. Guicciardinis im Titel der Arbeit genanntes Werk (Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi altrimenti detti Germania inferiore, 1567) wird nicht besprochen; wichtigstes Ergebnis für die Forschung zu dieser Schrift dürfte eine gegen Ende gemachte Feststellung des Autors sein: "No feature which one meets within Guicciardini's Descrittione seems to be without precedent." (S.355, Anm.69) Ein hilfreiches Register (S. 356-373) und ein Nachweis der Erstpublikationen der Beitrâge (S.374) beschliefien den Band. Wer ihn zur Gànze oder auch nur in Ausschnitten liest, wird dem Autor Bewunderung für die Breite seiner Interessen, seine Kenntnis der Primàr- und Sekundàrliteratur und die Detailgenauigkeit seiner Analysen nicht versagen. Dabei kônnte man sich auf Melanchthon berufen, welcher in seiner Rhetorik in einem Abschnitt über das Kommentieren sagt: "[...] qui eo est vel usu vel ingenio, ut in auctoribus videre possit, quur hoc loco, quur sic singula tractentur, ilium vehementer probandum censeo." Auch diese Passage ist Classens Analyse natürlich nicht entgangen (vgl. S.264). Johannes Gôbel Universitat Tubingen Lindal Buchanan, Regendering Delivery: The Fifth Canon and Ante­ bellum Women Rhetors. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. 202 pp. With the publication of Lindal Buchanan's Regendering Delivery, South­ ern Illinois University Press's Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series has become the national leader in book-length studies of gender and rhetorical performance. While only the seventh in the series, Regendering Delivery is the fourth to deal with this subject (the others are Nan Johnson's Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, Carol Mattingly's Appropriate [ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America, and Roxanne Mountford's The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces'). Building on these works, Buchanan adds to our understanding of antebellum women's opportunities and strategies for speaking in public, par­ ticularly in three areas: elocutionary instruction for girls in public schools, public speaking occasions for young women in private colleges, and delivery styles of antebellum women activists. A central claim of Regendering Delivery is that throughout history, Amer­ ican women have had far greater access to elocutionary instruction than has been commonly thought. In Chapter 1, "Readers and Rhetors: School­ girls' Formal Elocutionary Instruction," Buchanan offers evidence that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, girls as well as boys were taught elocu­ tion as part of their reading curriculum. Eighteenth-centurv readers such as Reviews 333 Noah Webster s popular American Selection ofLessons in Rending and Speaking included elocutionary instruction (both actio and pronuntiatio) and sample debates and declamations for practice. Textbooks acknowledged schoolgirls as an audience (e.g., through instructions on conduct), making clear that reading and elocution were first thought to be gender-neutral subjects. As Buchanan s analysis shows, it was not until the nineteenth century that sep­ arate readers for girls and hoys were published, with selections from oratory omitted in some hooks for girls. Nevertheless, pronuntiatio continued to be taught, and girls participated in school-sponsored exhibitions in which they spoke before audiences, as Buchanan richly illustrates in Chapter 2. Chapter 2, "Practicing Delivery: Young Ladies on the Academic Plat­ form, ' offers a decisive response to Robert J. Connors's controversial claim that co-education was responsible for the demise of oratory in nineteenthcentury colleges and universities. Buchanan agrees with Connors that there were some changes to the curriculum in the nineteenth century, but disagrees with the reasons Connors offers. Young women spoke before public audi­ ences at school-sponsored events for fifty years prior to 1830, and throughout the nineteenth century women admitted to co-educational institutions such as Oberlin fought for the opportunity to speak in public, sometimes form­ ing their own clubs to practice in private. Weaving together a history from biographies of such famous Oberlin graduates as the Reverend Antoinette Brown, Buchanan establishes that co-education provided women hard won opportunities to develop their oratorical skills, which they later exploited in the fight for women's rights. Chapter 2 includes many interesting glimpses into the compromises forced upon college...

334 RHETORICA ration" among antebellum women (because Truth's speech was reproduced by Frances Gage). Because Regendering Delivery provides so little analysis of African American women speakers' unique struggles, this relatively uncriti­ cal treatment of white antebellum reformers' relationship to Sojourner Truth is disappointing. Chapter 5 and the conclusion, which would have benefitted from further development, foster confusion over the book's theory of delivery. Nevertheless, this criticism should not deter scholars from picking up this fine book, which makes important contributions to the feminist study of the history of rhetoric. Roxanne Mountford University ofArizona Joseph Roisman, The Rhetoric of Manhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 283 pp. A book entitled The Rhetoric ofManhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators was probably as inevitable as was the study of gender and sexuality in the ancient world. As gender studies matured as an academic discipline, the scholarly examination of masculinity could not remain far behind, despite the expected quip that all previous scholarship was "masculine studies." In fact, men's studies forms an important complement to women's studies and deserves to stand as an important element of rhetorical studies as well. Anyone interested in exploring the overlapping fields of rhetoric, on the one hand, and ideologies and practices of masculinity, on the other, will find The Rhetoric ofManhood: Masculinity in the Attic Orators an important resource for scholars of ancient rhetoric and rhetorical theory more generally despite the fairly narrow focus revealed by the subtitle. As the full title suggests, Roisman has limited his focus to one genre— ancient oratory—which in turn further limits his study to a roughly onehundred year span of Athenian history, from the late fifth century to the 320s bce. In practice, the focus is even narrower, as this study must inevitably rely most heavily on a small handful of orators (chiefly Demosthenes and Lysias) with the largest corpus of orations. However, this tight methodological lens brings its own benefits, and in fact is less restricting than it might at first appear to be. In the first place, as Roisman himself notes (quoting Loraux), the context for ancient oratory—the political life of the city and its citizens— was so thoroughly imbricated with notions of masculinity that "the true name of the citizen is really aner [man], meaning that sexual identity comes first" (1). Thus what it meant to be a virtuous citizen, friend, and speaker, a benefit to friends and a harm to enemies, can be seen as largely co-terminous within the political and legal arena with what it meant to be a virtuous and capable man in general. Reviews 335 Further, though ancient oratory was once suspect as too rhetorical to be reliable as historical evidence, it is now valued as an important resource precisely because it depends for its effectiveness on its believability to its audience. More than any other genre, oratory had to appeal to beliefs that the audience was willing to accept. This does not mean that orations accurately reflect social practices and behaviors, but it does suggest that they remain within the bounds of what politically active Athenian men thought they and their city valued, and how it ought to put those values into practice. This study of ancient orations turns out to be a particularly valuable resource for self-representations of and for Athenian men. The Athenian masculine ideology that Roisman discovers turns out to be quite broad and complex, including standards of behavior in youth (chapter 1); the roles and responsibilities of the adult male as husband, father, kin, friend, and citizen; the role of shame (chapter 3); the relationship between masculinity and social status (chapter 4); military service (chapter 5); the struggle for power (chapter 6); the negotiation of desire and self-control (chapter 7); the mastery of fear (chapter 8); and old age (chapter 9). Of particular interest for historians of rhetoric in this context are sections devoted to the struggle for political power and assertions of manliness be­ tween speakers and audiences. Roisman reveals not only the value of oratory as a source of information about masculine ideology in ancient Greece but shows as well how oratory was...

This article explains the procedure, content, and impact of a unique intergenerational exchange: the service-learning component of a capstone writing course focused on the complex genre of memoir. The investigation of memoir writing was conducted both theoretically and experientially as undergraduate writers worked in pairs to "ghost write" the memoirs of a fascinating group of senior citizens. This exploration of memoir—and of age as a frequently overlooked dimension of diversity—proved a powerful nexus for demonstrating the long-held belief that carefully-structured, community-based pedagogy significantly benefits its participants both affectively and academically.

Borrowing from the ethnographic genre that Van Maanen (1988) called the confessional tale, this commentary reflects on the political, ethical, and professional concerns that arise when critical intellectuals work in a government installation that maintains the nation’s nuclear stockpile. The authors suggest that the future is, as Haraway (1997) argued, ineluctably technological and that the best way to engage this cultural formation is from within, eschewing the easy politics of the science wars and articulating critical projects with the hard work of science. The modernist ideal of unconflicted ideological positions and research—stories of good guys and bad guys—is a disabling illusion. Practicing rhetoricians face a kind of “worldliness” that Hall (1989) described as a necessary counterpart to the “clean air” of theory. The authors invite their colleagues to join them in grappling with political and ethical analyses in a world of impure identity in which knowledge and power circulate promiscuously.

Graduate students often feel anxious about whether their writing is as it should be—and if not, why not? (How should it be? And how can they tell, other than by pleasing or displeasing their supervisors?) At the same time, some wish to be more creative, but not to risk the success of their academic “audition.” This article discusses a WAC-like seminar that, drawing on genre studies, helps to mediate these concerns for graduate students in an Australian university. They are introduced to genre analysis and encouraged to find patterns of structure, style, or strategy in theses in their area. At the same time, they look at examples that suggest a range of possibilities for creativity. The seminar demonstrates how the “interpersonal” work of a thesis can be achieved both by adhering to convention and by diverging from it.