“racism is an ongoing discourse that both gives rise to and emerges from many rhetorical moments—it is a continuous force requiring continuous opposition. The discourses of racism are as much visual as they are textual and oral”

“Our overarching assumption, one that carries through all principles and practices for curricular and program design, is that no one individual should be the center of the program.”

“the book advocates for experience architects to participate in the systems they build and to invite other participants to comment on the design of those systems, thus encouraging a greater fit between a design and implementation.”

This coauthored article argues that a team-taught format can make the literature survey more engaging and meaningful for students while also addressing some of the course’s traditional challenges. The article fills a gap in team-teaching scholarship, which emphasizes interdisciplinary and/or loosely collaborative arrangements over intensely collaborative models like the one the authors propose.

Over the last two decades, a growing body of scholarship has examined how whiteness is socially constructed as “objective” and “neutral” in the US and elsewhere. This article seeks to trouble such a position for white teachers in the multiracial classroom, particularly those that focus on multiethnic literatures. Drawing upon scholarship in critical whiteness studies, personal experiences with students, and reflections on multicultural literature, this article advances an educational philosophy of investment wherein privilege and subjectivity are made legible in the learning process. In this model, educators and students work toward the discomfort that often comes from recognizing the risks and rewards of acknowledging one’s positioning within a racial order.

Drawing on the author’s experience at the University of Pristina in Kosovo, the article narrates writing-to-learn strategies designed to help students to navigate a thematic approach to twentieth-century American poetry. The piece also situates this narration within the ongoing disciplinary debate on how and why students should learn to read literature.

Drawing on a survey of the content management (CM) discourse, the author highlights CM trends and articulates best practices in content strategy that CM thought leaders are helping organizations adopt. These trends and practices are changing the nature and location of rhetorical work in organizations that produce intelligent content. In these contexts, rhetorical work is located primarily in the complex activity of building content strategy frameworks that govern text-making activities. The author highlights the need for a praxis-based collaborative model for technical communication education and research, and she offers some preliminary considerations for ways that the field might move in this direction.

This study investigates important questions for any emerging high-technology firm attempting to obtain funding: Does the design of the presentation and the perceived passion and preparedness of the presenter influence expert reviewers’ assessment of the merits of the firm’s proposal? The authors analyzed 22 videotaped presentations to reviewer panels at a U.S. Department of Defense technology transfer consortium and compared the panels’ assessments of the presenting firms’ proposals both before and after the formal presentations. The data showed that, on average, higher levels of perceived entrepreneurial passion and presenter preparedness and presentation designs that effectively captured the audiences’ attention resulted in higher ratings by decision makers on the firm’s technology merit, management ability, and commercial potential.

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.

Hospitals have encountered significant changes since implementing the hospitalist model. The changes have been most prevalent in the communication between patients, primary care physicians, specialists, and hospitalists. This comparative case study examines hospitalists’ and patients’ perceptions of communication challenges. During interviews, hospitalists reported that most of their communication challenges related to patients and their families. But during group sessions, hospitalists reported that less than one third of their communication challenges related to patients and their families. A comparison of patients’ and hospitalists’ perceptions demonstrates that there are critical gaps in patient education that affect patients’ care and their trust in their caregivers.

Although Graham Pullin, an instructor of design, probably doesn't refer to himself as a technical communicator, he takes on the role of one in his book, Design Meets Disability. In this book, Pulli...

Previous scholarship in literacy and composition has noted the importance and function of ancestors in the literacy and rhetorical practices of descendants. However, such research has not explored how ancestorship functions for people at the marginalized intersection of racialized otherness and queer sexualities and genders. This article offers one response to this gap by reporting on the role of literacy in the life stories of sixty Black queer people residing in various regions across the United States who named historical erasure as a particularly detrimental form of oppression enacted by, though subverted through, literacy. An analysis of participants' uses of literacy to navigate historical erasure reveals that as participants encounter historical erasure, they disrupt its negative impact through four patterns of ancestorship: (1) literacy is used to create, discover, and affirm relationships to ancestors; (2) ancestors model the multiplicity of identities as a category of rhetorical analysis; (3) descendants’ identity formation/affirmation is affected by an ancestors’ writing and lives; and (4) descendants receive cross-generational mandates to become ancestors through literacy. Further, while African American literacies and LGBTQ literacies have each emerged as potent areas of scholarship in literacy and composition studies, the absence of a sustained and substantive discussion at the intersection of both areas contributes to a larger critical vacuum in rhetoric and composition in which we have overlooked the literacy and composition practices shaped at the intersection of race and queerness. This article begins to address this oversight through an in-depth exploration of a specific literacy and rhetorical practice among Black LGBTQ people.

This article presents a digital, multimodal reflective essay assignment based on Geoffrey Sirc’s “box logic” that asks students to fill a series of boxes with images, found text, and their own commentary as they critically and creatively engage with their writing experiences through media artifacts, digital technology, and design decisions.

Reviewed are: RAW (Reading and Writing) New Media, edited by Cheryl E. Ball and James Kalmbach; reviewed by Suanna H. Davis Listening to Our Elders: Working and Writing for Change, edited by Samantha Blackmon, Cristina Kirklighter, and Steve Parks; reviewed by Patricia Wilde How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, by Paul Tough; reviewed by Jeffrey Klausman Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities, by Jay Jordan; reviewed by Michelle LaFrance

Abstract This essay analyzes three pedagogical manuals on publicity design published by the National Committee of Patriotic Societies (NCPS) during the First World War. The NCPS represented dozens of nationalistic organizations dedicated to the mission of preparedness. This essay argues that in its publicity guidebooks, the NCPS suggested that propaganda designed with a Republican aesthetic could wed the working class to the war effort. Such advice was predicated on the psychological notion that affective experiences conditioned audiences for further persuasive appeals. Examination of these manuals thus highlights the importance of psychological theories of affect to the aesthetics of propaganda.

Abstract Pirates are commonly referred to as hostis humani generis, the enemy of all. This essay explores the contours of this figuration through an analysis of early nineteenth century American legal and political texts concerning piracy. I argue that pirate rhetorics in this period are part of a constitutive rhetoric of sovereignty, principally identified with Emerich de Vattel’s famous definition of sovereignty in The Law of Nations. Through an analysis of the textual milieu surrounding the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1820 decision in United States v. Smith, I show that the pirate is figured as an anti-sovereign, which allows for the consolidation of an otherwise differential system of international relations characterized by liberal, self-interested, sovereign nations. In becoming hostis humani generis, the pirate enters into an antagonistic relationship with the sovereign that provides the ontological ground for the theory of sovereignty characteristic of modern thought in international law. Supplementing Charland’s theory of constitutive rhetoric with Laclau and Mouffe’s work on antagonisms in social relations, I argue that focusing on negative identification, which is an essential component of any constitutive rhetoric, opens up unique avenues for analysis that may otherwise be obscured by attending solely to the positive dimensions of a rhetoric.

Abstract This essay examines the 1959 controversy over whether and how to commemorate the centennial of abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. I argue that the controversy arose because commemorating Brown’s raid challenged prominent U.S. public memories of the Civil War that excluded slavery and the continued existence of white supremacy. I analyze the discursive fields into which the centennial commemoration entered: the heroic, patriotic, and unifying narratives of the war championed by the national organizations tasked with commemorating the Civil War centennial, and discourses of the civil rights movement and the black press that demanded a repudiation of white supremacy and the recognition of African Americans as equal citizens. Ultimately, I contend that the rhetoric that surrounded the Harpers Ferry raid commemoration sheds light on how the civil rights movement not only challenged white supremacy in its conservative form, but also pushed against the moderate and liberal manifestations of white supremacy that were embedded in the commemoration of the Harpers Ferry raid.

Within English studies, curriculum design has typically been restricted to conversations about instructor education, where design is treated as a process of applying existing disciplinary knowledge to traditional assignments and practices. This article argues that scholars can extend the scope and value of instructor education by repositioning design as an act of inventive potential, one that invites new instructors to understand disciplinary knowledge and also to participate in the expansion of disciplinary values and practices. When fostered as an inventive act, curriculum design offers a space of welcome where new members of English studies are encouraged to contribute to the central questions and values of the field.

ABSTRACTReason, religion, and public culture have been of significant interest recently, with critics reevaluating modernity's conception of secularism and calling for a “postsecular” public discourse. Simultaneously, one sees rising religious fundamentalisms and a growing style of antirationalism in public debate. These conditions make a reconceptualization of public reason necessary. The main goals of this article are to establish agnostic public reason as the conceptual guide and normative ethic for public debate in liberal democracies by considering the secular/religious reason boundary explicitly and to argue that this ethic of public reason requires a commitment to reason giving and a particular epistemic attitude but that it does not, nor should it, take precedence over first-order judgments. An ethics of citizenship based on the process of reason giving with the appropriate epistemic stance might be one step toward rectifying the problem of an increasing separation between enclave publics, even if, by design, it cannot solve fundamental disagreement.

ABSTRACTThis article explores the way Levinas communicates his ethical message through the media at work in his work: speech, writing, and rare references to modern media. Levinas's ethical message concerns the import of the relation with the other, a relation that interrupts any attempt at its thematization, including Levinas's own philosophy. Levinas's text serves as an exemplary medium for this ethical message in conveying the teaching of ethics along with the interruption it advocates. The article then extends the logic of the ethical message beyond the two key media present in Levinas's work—speech and writing—to speculate on whether the interruption it effects can be carried over to audiovisual media. Running throughout is the question of mediation, which takes the discussion outside the context of the face to face, where Levinas's thought is typically situated, to the context of the third and of justice. Levinas's thought may thus lead toward a radical ethics of media—radical in the sense that it posits the act of mediation itself as the root of such ethics.

The increasing diversity of students in contemporary classrooms and the concomitant increase in large-scale testing programs highlight the importance of developing writing assessment programs that are sensitive to the challenges of assessing diverse populations. To this end, this paper provides a framework for conducting consequential validity research on large-scale writing assessment programs. It illustrates this validity model through a series of instrumental case studies drawing on the research literature conducted on writing assessment programs in Canada. We derived the cases from a systematic review of the literature published between January 2000 and December 2012 that directly examined the consequences of large-scale writing assessment on writing instruction in Canadian schools. We also conducted a systematic review of the publicly available documentation published on Canadian provincial and territorial government websites that discussed the purposes and uses of their large-scale writing assessment programs. We argue that this model of constructing consequential validity research provides researchers, test developers, and test users with a clearer, more systematic approach to examining the effects of assessment on diverse populations of students. We also argue that this model will enable the development of stronger, more integrated validity arguments.

In recent years multimodal and multimedia have become buzzwords with substantial cache in composition circles. As Clair Lauer outlines in “Contending with Terms: ‘Multimodal’ and ‘Multimedia’ in th...

The article traces ideas of improvisation in Quintilian’s rhetorical work, presents an interdisciplinary literature review of improvisation studies, and surveys modern disciplines that teach improvisation, all with the goal of implementing these ideas into a first-year, college-writing pedagogy.

This article develops a framework for rhetorical inquiry that builds on the concept of wicked problems as conceptualized through social policy and design studies research. Responding to technical communication scholarship that calls for increased engagement with public issues and controversies, the author specifically discusses a writing course that used the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a basis for teaching problem-based rhetorical invention, document production, interdisciplinary collaboration, and professional development. The framework described in this article ultimately offers a heuristic for students to research and write about ill-defined problems that must be addressed in time but that demand sustained engagement over time—activities that begin in the classroom but ideally continue to develop throughout their personal and professional lives.

Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, China's first comprehensive medical book, served as the key link between Yi Jing, which initiated China's high-context culture, and the high-context style of modern Chinese technical communication. In the form of dialogues between Yellow Emperor and his minister, its 24 fascicles cover four major topics of the organs, diagnosis, diseases, and treatments. While examining the body and discussing various diseases and treatments, the book expands on Yi Jing's philosophy through integrating three interrelated concepts: Tao, Yin and Yang, and Five Elements (word, fire, soil, metal, and water). In this way, the book, for the first time in Chinese history, explicitly treated humans and their behaviors as individual events conditioned by the natural context, emphasizing context as the conditioning force. This emphasis on context is manifest in modern Chinese technical communication as two textual devices of establishing personal relationships and creating ideal physical environments.

Learning to read and write is seen as both the acquisition of skills useful in a modern society and an introduction to a world increasingly organized around the reading and writing of authoritative texts. While most agree on the importance of writing, insufficient attention has been given to the more basic question of just what writing is, that is, how best to think about writing as both a technology of communication and an instrument of thought. In this article we elaborate and defend the view that writing is distinctive not only as a technology for the visual representation of speech but more basically as a technology for taking language “off-line,” that is, as language enclosed by quotation marks. Writing, like oral quotation, provides a set of objects divorced from the speaker that persist in time and space and that can be considered and reconsidered somewhat independently of the context of expression and the intentions of the original author. Of special relevance are the units of meaning, namely, words and sentences. When writing turns words and sentences into objects of analysis, it facilitates distinctive modes of discourse such as extended prose and distinctive modes of thinking such as formal rationality.

Book Review| December 01 2013 Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film. By Kendall R. Phillips. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012; pp. xii + 215. $29.95 paper. Claire Sisco King Claire Sisco King Vanderbilt University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2013) 16 (4): 798–801. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.4.0798 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Claire Sisco King; Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror Film. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2013; 16 (4): 798–801. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.4.0798 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 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.

This article draws on qualitative research conducted as a part of a writing program assessment to examine the relationship between assessment, valuation, and the economics of first-year writing. It argues that the terms of labor in first-year writing complicate practices of valuation and the processes of consensus building that have become common in assessment models. It explains that if assessment is to be situated at a site and represent the work that happens there faithfully, it needs to account for how power, the economics of staffing, and differing ways of thinking about writing education necessitate struggle and the acknowledgment and representation of dissonance.

ABSTRACT This article examines Jürgen Habermas's argumentation theory for an answer to the question of the role of rhetoric in cogent argument-making practices. At first glance, Habermas's triadic synthesis of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric appears conventionally neo-Aristotelian and logocentric. However, in aligning rhetoric with a formal, idealized understanding of argument as a process, Habermas gives rhetorical evaluation an authoritative role in certifying nonrelativistic public knowledge. Further elaboration of the implications of his model reveals a radically social view of rational persuasion and of reasonable opinion formation that makes intellectual humility a central virtue. Humility heavily restricts the scope for reasonable disagreement and dissent, particularly in polarized controversies. Examination of such a controversy shows the limits of the Habermasian conception of rhetoric.

Higher education researchers have called for systemic changes in graduate education, their concerns fueled in part by poor attrition and completion rates and dismal academic job markets.Many have recommended that universities provide writing support for doctoral students at the dissertation stage. Writing researchers have an opportunity to inform these discussions. However,more research is needed to understand how graduate students’ experiences with research writing differ across disciplines and how they experience responses to their research writing from advisors, graduate peers, and journal reviewers. This study utilizes systems theory to examine one nonnative English–speaking student writing for publication as part of an environmental sciencesdoctoral program. Data consist of field interviews, semi-structured and text-based interviews with students and program faculty, and side-by-side comparison of textual revisions. Theresults describe ways traditional notions of dissertations as individual research conflicted with collaborative writing processes in the sciences and affected how the student received responses tohis writing. Additionally, this study examines the “information flow” of feedback, identifying instances in which the student was isolated from possible feedback sources and difficulties thestudent encountered in adapting past feedback to complete novel tasks. This study points to key ways writing researchers can inform current efforts to restructure doctoral research through further systems-based explorations into students’ writing experiences and models of program design that better leverage potential sources of feedback.

Curriculum designers and literacy policymakers sometimes assume that variation in teaching practices can be minimized using scripted and standardized curriculum. While standards and common understandings can be helpful, scripted curricula ignore the fact that curriculum is an enacted practice orchestrated by individuals. While reading scholars have studied this issue, it has yet to be examined in writing studies. In a four-month ethnographic study, I examined how a kindergarten teacher interpreted scripted writing curriculum through enacted lessons. The interpretation problematizes the ideologies embedded within curricular scripts, including emphases on genre, mechanics, and printed texts. Analysis of child writing revealed a socially constructed practice in which genre, mechanics, and letters were tied to social intentions and meanings. While scripted curricula can confine teachers’ abilities to make responsive decisions, I document how the focal teacher translated curricular materials with students, thus creating space for official curriculum, teaching practices, and children’s writing to coexist. Such flexible spaces make room for both teacher and student voices in innovative and inventive writing pedagogies.

This issue is our most multimodal collection to date, including our first slidecast essay (“The Quiet Country Closet”) and our first full audio essay (“Voices in Egypt”), as well as a number of other essays that incorporate images, video, and additional modes beyond alphabetic text.

“C.K.’s approach to kairos, to the complex forces that shape rhetorical situations, offers an alternative to the dominant mode of contemporary networked rhetoric: snark.”

The “Influence” model of introductory literature class focuses on a single central text, the works that influenced its composition, and works that developed from it, encouraging students to make connections among texts. Such a course model repositions power in the classroom by offering students the opportunity to participate in list creation.

This essay provides an approach to teaching T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The approach is designed to disassociate the student from the annotation usually provided by either Eliot or an editor. The assignment is presented in multiple frameworks and hopes to make students deal with the poem’s specific lines. The process described has students identify voice shifts in the poem. It is certainly true that there are differing opinions about voice in The Waste Land, but the point of the assignment is not to involve the student in this debate (at least initially). The explicit pedagogical goal of the approach described in this essay is to enable students to develop their own views on the poem and to create a reading that is independent of editorial direction. This develops their ability to read critically and increases their comfort level with a difficult text.

Public writing spaces, such as blogs and social media sites, are expanding quickly with new websites, web applications, and other interfaces constantly available to users. As these digital composing spaces continue to expand, it is important that writers are capable of operating within them, yet many composition students lack the rhetorical awareness to present effective arguments in multimodal digital interfaces. To address this issue, the author designed a project to introduce students to public writing while reflecting on the implications of the permanence of their writing, the searchability of these public spaces, and their responsibility as writers. This project began by asking students to reflect on their own online personae, be it through Facebook profiles, personal blogs, or online class forums. Utilizing websites like Yelp and YouTube offered students the opportunity to see how others present themselves online and the effectiveness of composers in these digital spaces. Taught in an online course format, this project demonstrates how writing can live outside of the traditional classroom space and contribute to the students’ community. For the writing teacher, it creates the occasion to delve into students’ understandings of ethics in online writing while illustrating the rhetorical components necessitated by composing in digital media.

Why would an English professor enroll in an upper-level biology class? This article describes an experiment in interdisciplinarity: an English professor takes a class titled Scientific Imaging in order to enhance her teaching of nature writing. The author outlines thirteen specific lessons imparted by her experience as a student in a class devoted to photographing elements of the natural world and creating images suitable for scientific presentation, and then she explains how she adapted the principles from Scientific Imaging for use in a creative nonfiction class focusing on nature writing. The article concludes with a discussion of the results of this interdisciplinary experiment and suggestions for promoting interdisciplinary learning as a mode of faculty development.

This article presents the authors’ innovative approach to the challenges of teaching students in a large lecture survey course to perform effective close readings, and sets forth a rigorous qualitative assessment of students’ learning. It describes a combination of teaching strategies integrated to encourage students’ skills acquisition as well as content mastery, and to make the course writing intensive without also being grading intensive. It demonstrates the effectiveness of these strategies by analyzing evidence of student learning. The authors advocate for an instructional model that gives students ample opportunity for active learning and for practicing close reading skills. The authors conclude with a brief coda calling for more scholarship and reflection on faculty-graduate student collaboration in both scholarship and teaching.