This historical case study of a non-rule policy document (NPD) adopted by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management describes an emerging genre in environmental discourse. The NPD standardizes environmental public policy for land disposal of foundry sand, a solid waste. The collaborative writing process took six months with industry input, and the NPD was presented to two environmental boards. Two contrasts, in process and format, distinguish NPDs from rules. The NPD is an entirely new kind of writing which includes guidance for implementing statutes. The writing process in the case involves government writers and industry representatives, although it does not include other public input such as public hearings. Instead, the staff of the pollution control agency simply presents the NPD to the appropriate environmental policy boards and arranges for its publication. This article adds to the body of knowledge about technical writing in government, specifically environmental policy and non-academic genres.

Finding itself at the center of highly publicized legal and political deliberations over fairness in testing, personnel credibility, and legal liability, the training department at a North American transit authority adopted a genre system that enabled the production of objective evidence of job competence, which was then used to make objective decisions about who passed and failed various training programs. The ongoing genre-structured activity of the department involved not only the regularization of organizational texts but also the regularization of social interaction mediated by those texts, which, while producing the types of interpretively stable documents required for successful public deliberation, led to a shift in authority and social relations within the department that instigated considerable resentment and loss of morale among many veteran instructors.

This article demonstrates how students in a disciplinary writing study conducted at Miami University's business school failed to understand writing assignments based on the names of the assignments. It proposes effective writing-assignment names as prompts to connect students to previous writing experience and reinforce students' acquisition of disciplinary writing skills and genres. In addition, the article suggests that writing-assignment names offer a pedagogical tool for integrating learning across a discipline; that is, naming writing assignments encourages faculty to identify and define the types of disciplinary writing and critical-thinking skills that students should learn.

Abstract I make the claim that even though style appears to be invisible in composition studies today, paradoxically, it is ubiquitous, and I examine areas where the study of style has diffused in the field, such as genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. I both adopt and complicate Janice Lauer's notion of the “diaspora” as the site of style's migration in composition and argue that it is important to draw explicitly upon the field's rich stylistic resources for practical and pedagogical purposes.

Abstract I make the claim that even though style appears to be invisible in composition studies today, paradoxically, it is ubiquitous, and I examine areas where the study of style has diffused in the field, such as genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. I both adopt and complicate Janice Lauer's notion of the “diaspora” as the site of style's migration in composition and argue that it is important to draw explicitly upon the field's rich stylistic resources for practical and pedagogical purposes.

A university employee, Nancy, recently brought to me an idea for a nonfiction book about coping with thyroid cancer.In remission and awaiting word on her latest diagnostic scan, Nancy began our tutorial by excitedly reviewing the many and sometimes amusing lessons about life and family she had learned from her ordeal.As she explained, the book gave her a chance to explore her long-dormant writing skills, work on a project worthy of her time, and pass along what she had learned to other cancer victims.Her personal investment in the project was high, and the intensity with which she listened to my every word of encouragement and advice certainly raised the stakes for me.As we discussed where to begin and the book's potential commercial appeal, I felt edgy and alert -a condition heightened by Nancy's sudden jumps from idea to idea.I wanted to offer support but not build false hope, so I tried to balance any assurance that she had good ideas with a realistic assessment.She asked hard questions about working in a mixed genre -in her case, autobiography combined with elements of a "how-to" manual that might eventually become a sort of humorous Chicken Soup for the Cancer Survivors Soul.Some of her questions I simply could not answer, in part because many of her ideas remained half-formed and success would hinge on her persistence and writing ability.But I improvised suggestions based on some experience with creative nonfiction, a slight familiarity with "how-to" books, and secondhand knowledge of cancer-survival stories.Nancy left our ninety-minute brainstorming session with an attitude of eager determination to continue working.As good sessions sometimes do, this one left me feeling used up but exhilarated -an intellectual version of runner's high.

This article uses Aristotle's concept of ethos, the audience's perception of a speaker's character, to analyze a set of documents relating to a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. This analysis shows how the features of a successful persuasive ethos remain consistent through several genres, including scientific articles, reports, and press releases. Three major elements of a persuasive ethos include discussions of the practical implications of technical information, consistent efforts to make information accessible to the public, and a forthright representation of scientific uncertainties associated with complex technical information. By incorporating these elements into their texts, technical communicators can craft more persuasive documents dealing with controversial, high-stakes issues

Part I of this essay traces the evolution of my understanding of the exploratory essay as a discursive form and a genre for teaching writing. Part II explores my motivations for advocating a polarized definition of the essay and then concludes with a call to expand the purview of composition beyond first-year courses.

In the interest of better understanding the challenges of enacting new pedagogies in the classroom, the following essay focuses on the role of genre and uptake in the relational negotiation of self-presentation. I argue that to bring our teaching practices in line with our best intentions and most progressive pedagogies we need to be aware not only that reliance on the legibility associated with familiar subject positions motivates student resistance in the composition classroom but, moreover, that our interest in securing self-presentations as teachers may motivate everyday interactions that work to maintain the status quo.

A genre's continuing success after migrating to a new medium may be due in part to whether the genre secures a place within a viable genre system. To explore the role of genre systems, this study examined the well-established genre of the résumé in its new position on self-published Web sites. Results from surveying 100 authors of self-published Web résumés revealed that many respondents used their résumés for the previously overlooked purpose of attracting clients for their self-employment. These self-employed respondents rated their résumés as significantly more useful than did those who had not used their résumés for this purpose. The self-employed were more likely to publicize their sites through such business-related genres as business cards and advertising material, and in turn, their sites drew in communication from more socially distant populations. These alternative publicity measures and communication networks suggest that the self employed were able to situate their Web résumés within viable alternative genre systems.

This study charts the terrain of research on writing during the 6-year period from 1999 to 2004, asking “What are current trends and foci in research on writing?” In examining a cross-section of writing research, the authors focus on four issues: (a) What are the general problems being investigated by contemporary writing researchers? Which of the various problems dominate recent writing research, and which are not as prominent? (b) What population age groups are prominent in recent writing research? (c) What is the relationship between population age groups and problems under investigation? and (d) What methodologies are being used in research on writing? Based on a body of refereed journal articles ( n = 1,502) reporting studies about writing and composition instruction that were located using three databases, the authors characterize various lines of inquiry currently undertaken. Social context and writing practices, bi- or multi-lingualism and writing, and writing instruction are the most actively studied problems during this period, whereas writing and technologies, writing assessment and evaluation, and relationships among literacy modalities are the least studied problems. Undergraduate, adult, and other postsecondary populations are the most prominently studied population age group, whereas preschool-aged children and middle and high school students are least studied. Research on instruction within the preschool through 12th grade (P-12) age group is prominent, whereas research on genre, assessment, and bi- or multilingualism is scarce within this population. The majority of articles employ interpretive methods. This indicator of current writing research should be useful to researchers, policymakers, and funding agencies, as well as to writing teachers and teacher educators.

Economics discourse is now seen as characterized by intersubjectivity and interactivity, since economists take a stance by using lexico-grammatical elements and rhetorical features to build a convincing argument from a personal perspective, to attain solidarity with readers, and to claim social participation in the economics community. Evaluation and particularly evaluative adjectives are thus a crucial feature of economics discourse. Taking a qualitative and quantitative approach, this study explores, in a small specialized corpus, the functions of evaluative adjectives, their variation across genres and registers, and whether they are constrained by the specific domain of economics. Findings show that evaluative adjectives can adopt more than one function simultaneously, they vary across genres and registers, and that they are strongly constrained by domain. Moreover, given the need to use specialized language internationally, this study wants to build, especially in NNS economists, an awareness of the features which typify economics discourse and a better understanding of the crucial role evaluative adjectives hold when economists have to communicate critical perspectives while building their professional persona.

This genre-based study comprises a comparative content analysis of textual and pictorial themes in a corpus of Dutch-English and British managerial forewords. It indicates that there are significant thematic differences between the Dutch-English CEO's statements, the British CEO's statements, and the British Chairman's statements and that these may be attributable to communicative and historical conventions as well as to current affairs in a particular business community. The present analysis, therefore, suggests that these managerial forewords cannot be considered as identical texts, although all are part of the same comprehensive document (i.e., the annual report). As such, this study suggests that text analysts, instructors, and practitioners in intercultural communication should be sensitive to both textual and contextual features for a full understanding of professional texts in intercultural discourse situations

Corpus studies are revolutionizing the study of language practice, including professional communication, by substituting actual examples of practice for prescriptive intuition. Corpora are often put together by researchers who exert much care in what goes into a corpus. Yet professional communicators also experience corpora as commodities in the marketplace, bundles of "writing models" for sale that cross genres of professional and personal communication. When writers purchase these bundles, what are the latent rhetorical strategies they are purchasing? A corpus study of 728 canned letters across 15 genres taken from a best-selling trade book was undertaken. The texts were tagged for rhetorical features and factor analyzed for latent rhetorical dimensions of proficiency. The study concludes that the latent rhetorical proficiencies brought into evidence are heavily weighted on skills of collecting or raising money. While this study requires replication over a wider sample, it illustrates how corpus approaches can help us rigorously retrieve latent rhetorical skills across a collection of rhetorically diverse texts. It further helps us see how corpus studies allow one to maintain close ties between the avowed standards of communication practice and the close description of the practices themselves

Reviews Elaine Fantham, The Roman World of Cicero's De Oratore. Pp. 364. Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2004. US$150; £ 63. ISBN: 0199263159. Cicero's De Oratore is one of most significant discussions of rhetoric in the classical corpus. It presents the mature reflections of a master orator on the art he had dominated at Rome for nearly twenty years. For the modern Anglophone student, however, the dialogue has long been rather forbidding and inaccessible. The Loeb translation of Sutton and Rackham is pedestrian at best, misleading at worst; and the archaic flavour of Watson's version does little to capture the imagination.1 The commentary by Wilkins is certainly respectable enough, but its philological focus is potentially intimidating to the reader not familiar with this genre of scholarship.2 And while the masterly multi-volumed commentary initiated in the 1980s by Leeman and Pinkster has advanced scholarly appreciation and understanding of the dialogue immeasurably, it remains inaccessible to the student who does not read German fluently.1 Fortunately in recent years the situation has started to J change. The recent English translation by May and Wisse, with its extensive introduction and explanatory notes, at last provides an excellent and af1E . W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Cicero Dc Oratore Books I, II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942) and H. Rackham, Cicero De Oratore Book III Together With De Fato, Paradoxa Stoicorum, De Partitione Oratoria (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942); J. S. Watson, Cicero on Oratory and Orators (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1848; republished, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970 and 1986). 2A. S. Wilkins, M. Tidli Ciceronis De Oratore Libri Tres (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 3rd edition 1895; republished, Amsterdam: Hakkert 1962; Hildesheim: Olms 1965; New York: Arno Press, 1979). 3A. D. Leeman and H. Pinkster, M. Tullius Cicero De oratore libri III. Kommentar. Vol. I (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1981); A. D. Leeman, H. Pinkster and H. L. W. Nelson, M. Tullius Cicero De oratore libri III. Kommentar. Vol. II (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1985); A. D. Leeman, H. Pinkster and E. Rabbie, M. Tullius Cicero De oratore libri III. Kommentar. Vol. Ill (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1989); A. D. Leeman, H. Pinkster and J. Wisse, M. Tullius Cicero De oratore libri III. Kommentar. Vol. IV (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1996). The final volume is in preparation and will be published in English. Rhetorica, Vol. XXIV, Issue 4, pp. 427-447, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . 02006 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 www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. 427 428 RHETORICA fordable entrée to the text.4 Now with the publication of Elaine Fantham's book-length study, the dialogue should finally be able to reach the wider readership in English it deserves. The thirteen chapters are organised thematically and address well the key questions raised by the dialogue. The first three set out the background to the work: first, Cicero's political situation and literary ambitions as he began its composition; next, the oratorical careers of its main interlocutors L. Crassus and M. Antonius; and finally its dialogic form, especially the artistic and intellectual debt owed to Plato. The remaining chapters focus on issues that arise sequentially as one reads through the dialogue's three books. Thus there are discussions of the orator's training and his need for a knowledge of civil law (issues that arise in Book 1); oratory's relationship with poetry and the writing of history (topics mentioned in Books 1 and 2); Cicero's use of Aristotelian sources and the orator's effective deployment of wit and humour (treated in Book 2); the role of oratory in the Roman senate and popular assemblies (a matter relevant to Book 2 but usefully expanded more generally by E); and the various aspects of oratorical style (elocutio), memory, and delivery (the focus of most of Book 3). A final chapter offers some concluding thoughts and includes a brief discussion of Tacitus' Dialogus, a work much influenced by De Oratore. This arrangement...

In our previous “At Last” essay, “The “Problem’ of English Learners: Constructing Genres of Difference” (Gutiérrez & Orellana, 2006), we identified a predictable genre that characterizes much research on English Learners. We noted how the genre may unwittingly perpetuate deficit constructions and keep us from identifying other issues for redress”such as structural and institutional inequalities that create the vulnerability of non-dominant students in schools and society. In this essay, we pose alternative ways of conceptualizing, examining, and reporting our work with English Learners and members of other non-dominant groups. We hope our suggestions will facilitate efforts to research, write, and think against the grain.

Abstract This essay examines several disciplinary and pedagogical assumptions behind Aristotle's centrality in the classical rhetorical canon and calls for a reconsideration of the established hierarchical relation of Aristotle to Isocrates. Notes 1. For recent works in English see, for example, Terry Papillon; Takis Poulakos; Takis Poulakos and David Depew; Robert G. Sullivan (“Eidos/Idea in Isocrates”); and Yun Lee Too. One must also mention a new two-volume translation of Isocrates' extant works by Mirhady and Too (volume 1) and Papillon (volume 2), published by the University of Texas Press. 2. See articles by Rummel, Papillon, and Sullivan (“Eidos/Idea in Isocrates”). 3. For a more elaborate version of this argument, see chapter 2 in my Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle. 4. See David Depew's “The Inscription of Isocrates into Aristotle's Practical Philosophy” for a cogent explanation of Aristotle's hierarchical subordination of praxis to theoria and of techne to praxis. 5. A good example of scholarship in this vein is Andrea Nightingale's study Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy.

The author reads the essays in this issue from the perspective of work in rhetorical genre theory on the concept of “uptake” in order to examine some of the challenges and possibilities teachers as well as students face as they engage in the work of identifying and deploying multiple languages and discourses. He suggests that the essays allow us to see uptake both as a site for the operations of power and a site for intervening in those operations, as well as allowing us to see a number of such interventions underway.

This article presents a framework for analyzing innovative information technology adoption by organizational work groups. Concepts from three distinct theories (adoption and diffusion theory, cultural-historical activity theory, and the social construction of technology) are modified and integrated to form a hybrid, layered framework, which is then applied to a specific case to demonstrate the advantages for guiding research and analysis. The illustrative case presents the experience of a small work group in a high-technology company that implemented single-source content management.

This article employs the concept of intersubjectivity to analyze developments in and discrepancies between students’ understandings of criteria for effective writing and the criteria of their teacher. It reports on a study that employed qualitative methods of interview and classroom observation in conjunction with analysis of students’ writing and the teacher’s feedback on their writing to explore the struggles of students learning the “genre of power” (Lemke, 1988, p. 89) of the literary analysis essay. The greatest challenges for the students in this study occurred for those whose goals and expectations related to this high-stakes genre of writing were not based on the same taken-for-granted assumptions about context and purpose as were their teacher’s. The article concludes by discussing teachers’ professional responsibility to negotiate shared goals for literacy with their students.

In this brief essay, we take the opportunity to engage our literacy colleagues in a re-examination of approaches that have become normative ways of framing, representing, and describing English Learners and other nondominant students in literacy research.

In this article, I present findings from a discourse analysis of an often-overlooked genre of technical communication, regulatory writing. The study focuses on post-bellum regulations that disproportionately affected African Americans and the historical contexts in which the regulations were written. Historically, African Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds have maintained an implicit mistrust of government regulations and the government officials who write them. The justification for this mistrust is deeply rooted in the fact that for decades regulations were not written to protect the rights of African Americans nor was their input considered in regulatory writing. In Communicating Across Cultures, Stella Ting-Toomey argues, “if conflict parties do not trust each other, they tend to move away (cognitively, affectively and physically) from each other rather than struggle side by side in negotiation” [1, p. 222]. This study reveals rhetorical strategies used in historical regulatory writing that may still impact the ethos of regulatory writers.

In a pediatric teaching hospital, the authors examined 16 novice medical case presentations that were classified as instances of a hybrid apprenticeship genre. In contrast to strict school and workplace genres, an apprenticeship genre results from the sometimes competing activity systems of student education and patient care. The authors examined these novice case presentations for the amount and patterns of time devoted to student learning and expert teaching, the difficulties created for participants, the sometimes misunderstood implicit messages delivered by experts, and the opportunities to address educational objectives. This study offers professional communication researchers a model that combines quantitative and qualitative methodologies to assess the effects of competing activity systems in the development of communication expertise.

Charettes offer a productive way of combining theory and practice to address some of the difficult matters of getting students to see and perform technical communication as students, professionals, servers, and citizens. This collaborative activity helps students prepare for an increasingly modular professional world by revealing the contingent rhetoricity of professional autonomy. Charettes can help technical writing programs and students integrate service and civic learning into the curriculum by using indigenous professional genres that actively demand stakeholder participation. The intensity and pragmatic force of charettes can assist students in building their ethos while working with fellow stakeholders. The wide range of possible documents involved in the process associated with charettes can help technical communication students and teachers explore the connections between rhetorical exigencies and genre and put their skills to good use in a culture where many are looking for new ways to build critical citizenship.

Although the rhetoric of expertise stemming from the hard and social sciences has been well researched, the scholarship has not tended to focus on acts of public expertise by scholars from the humanities. This article reports a case study in the rhetorical practices of a theologian, acting as a public expert, first attempting to affect decision making in the Waco conflict in 1993 and then attempting to participate in and shape the public debates that followed it. To compare the practices of this humanities scholar to expectations from research on the rhetoric of expertise, a rhetorical analysis was conducted on the context, style, genre, and argument in the scholar’s public writings. This article discusses (a) the role of kairos in the policy cycle in determining the scholar’s bids for acceptance as an expert, (b) the use of narrative as a generic hybrid of intra- and interdisciplinary practice, and (c) the role of “understanding” asa special topic.

Genres embody typified discursive activity that is situated in an ecology of texts, people, and tools. Within these settings, genres help writers compose recognizable information artifacts. Increasingly, however, many professions are becoming mobile, and mobile technologies (e.g., personal digital assistants [PDAs]) are creating problems of translation as writers attempt to make genres work across contexts. Mobile devices uproot genres from their native contexts, undercutting their ability to mediate discursive activity. The semantically reduced design of PDA-accessible information magnifies these problems by obscuring, but not erasing, genre characteristics that tie information to its native context. Readers must assume the burden of composing meaningful information artifacts, work otherwise offloaded to genres. The author explores the nature of this composition burden in a case study of veterinary students. He finds that context and the degree of mobility both influence student perception of this composition burden.

Research Article| January 01 2006 Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives: Multiple Genres, Voices, and Identities Nancy Mack Nancy Mack Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2006) 6 (1): 53–78. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-6-1-53 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nancy Mack; Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives: Multiple Genres, Voices, and Identities. Pedagogy 1 January 2006; 6 (1): 53–78. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-6-1-53 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2006 Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

This article examines the influence of genre and gender on comments written by 108 sixth-grade teachers in response to two narrative and two persuasive papers. There were significant genre differences. Process, conventions, artistic style, and format were the focus of significantly greater numbers of comments directed to narrative writing. In contrast, meaning, organization, effort, and ideology were emphasized to a greater degree when teachers responded to persuasive writing. Teachers tended to indicate and make greater numbers of corrections and to provide more criticisms and lessons, explanations, and suggestions when the work was attributed to a male writer. Female teachers generally wrote greater numbers of comments and tended to indicate and make more corrections. Generally, teachers were reluctant to engage with the ideologies in students’ writing. There was a correlation between convention errors and the number and types of comments.

In the critically acclaimed movie 8-Mile, Future, a host for the rap battles held in a Detroit neighborhood, proffers the above encouragement to his charge, an aspiring white rapper, played by recording sensation Eminem. Aside from the connections, real and imagined, between the emergence of Bunny-Rab bit, the character Eminem portrays, and his actual rise in the hip-hop community, the movie evokes a number of interesting quandaries about discursive strategies? voices historically ascribed to and inscribed by African Americans. Facets of Eminem's language appear to resonate with that of African American rappers, not to mention the larger oral tradition from which hip-hop discourse derives, though his existen tial experience surrounding that language cannot. Moreover, rappers speak of neigh borhoods plagued by economic disenfranchisement, disenfranchisement that some whites, like Eminem, have experienced as well. Still, Future's exhortation raises at least two questions: can a language performer (irrespective of genre) of one race truly participate in the discursive community of another? Given the material op pression that has accompanied the socially constructed denigration of African phe notypic features, can the sound of blackness be ultimately divorced from the sight of blackness?1

This article discusses a longitudinal case study of a novice engineer who has successfully challenged a workplace genre. The study shows that a combination of the novice’s family background, a university engineering communication course, and workplace experiences helped him achieve success. It also provides evidence that, even though genres may differ from workplace to workplace, experienced professionals do recognize and accept superior communication practices imported from elsewhere. Thus, best practices may be taught apart from local contexts. The case study allows technical communication instructors and researchers to refine current understanding of what mastering genres means and indicates directions for the development of new pedagogies.

Much genre research focuses on genre as typified, recurring discursive actions used by members of discourse communities. This article discusses the role of genre in a project that includes participants from different discourse communities. The participants created a single text to assist multiple audiences to ensure that buildings and facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. The author proposes a functional framework for considering the role of genre knowledge on the cross-disciplinary project.

This article chronicles changes in the author’s service-learning pedagogy, concentrating on his recent attention to genre and its consequences for course design. The cumulative influences of rhetoric, discourse community theory, collaborative assignments, and genre theory are traced. The core claim, however, is that instructors should help students grasp the concept of genre as social action. Included are descriptions of assignments for first-year and advanced courses, plus student samples of genre analysis memos.

An increasing body of research relies on genre to analyze academic and professional communication and to describe how members of a community use language. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of genre-based research in technical communication and to describe the different approaches to genre and to genre teaching. While some research focuses on the textual analysis of genres, other studies focus on the analysis of the social context and the ideology and structure of the discourse community that owns the genre, and on the role of genres as social rhetorical actions of the community. These two perspectives are also reflected in the teaching of genre in technical communication.

This article examines medical treatment forms as boundary genres, drawing on genre and disciplinary studies theories to argue that medical forms represent a commingling of the business, science, and medical professions in ways that show evidence of tension and conflict between the disciplines.

This article explores the value of rhetorical genre theory for health care and professional communication researchers. The authors outline the conceptual resources emerging from genre theory, specifically ways to conceptualize social context, professional identity formation, and genres as functioning but hierarchical networks, and discuss the way they have used these resources in two separate but complementary health-care studies: a project that documents the ways regulated and regularized resources of the genre of case presentations shape the professional identity formation of medical students and a project that extends this theoretical work to observe that genres, especially policy genres, function to regularize or control other genres and shape the identity formation of midwives in Ontario, Canada. The authors also observe that the implications of rhetorical genre theory have impelled both of these studies to develop an interdisciplinary trajectory that includes members of health-care communities as participating researchers.

Abstract The way rhetorical analysts now use the term appeals—meaning to plead or to please—has outstripped the available theories, particularly those derived from Aristotle. Indeed, Aristotle's ethos, pathos, and logos may not even be appeals in the modern sense. A revised model relates author and author positions to values in a triangulating relationship. Appeals also appear as techniques for working through varying media, not only media defined semiotically but also as forms of resistance related to cultural differences. Examples from criticism, film, and advertising provide a foundation for replacing a modes approach to rhetorical appeals with a genre approach.

Reviews 299 son seul guide pour l'étude de la dispositio, et que pour Yelocutio ce sera le seul Hermogène, dont il n'avait pas encore parlé. Laissons ici le fait que ces deux décisions seraient vraiment difficiles à justifier d'un point de vue historique (Du Tronchet se souvient-il encore de Fabri? connaît-il déjà Hermogène?). Le choix de Fabri conduit à des platitudes du côté de la dispositio: nous n'avons pas besoin de lui pour apprendre qu'une lettre a un début, un milieu et une fin, même rebaptisés respectivement «cause», «intention» et «conséquence»; et Vaillancourt ne relève pas que, chez Fabri, la «conséquence», qui est la conclusion du syllogisme, peut se trouver ailleurs qu'à la fin, ce qui est tout l'intérêt de ce vocabulaire. Quant à Hermogène, si ce choix permet de bien plus fines remarques sur Yelocutio, on reste parfois sceptique: caractériser les lettres de Pasquier par la deinotès est ne pas savoir ce que désigne celleci —Pasquier n'est pas «habile» comme Démosthène au seul motif qu'il sait s'adapter à ses correspondants. De façon plus générale, la difficulté fondamentale réside dans l'image de la rhétorique qu'ont les deux ouvrages. Comme de nombreux littéraires aujourd'hui, seiziémistes ou non, leur culture rhétorique se limite à Yelocutio et, dans une moindre mesure, à Yethos. Inversement, ils ne sont pas à l'aise avec la dispositio ou avec les passions, ni même avec l'argumentation ou logos (que Vaillancourt réduit aux exempta et autres autorités). Pour la dispositio, seul La Charité ose deux analyses de lettre complète, d'ailleurs stimulantes (p. 101-106), et pour les passions Vaillancourt appelle amitié (avec renvoi à Aristote, Rhétorique, II, 4) ce qui à l'évidence relève de la gratia (p. 294, «je ne veux en rien estre ingrat...» = Aristote, II, 7). Plus fondamentalement encore, tous deux voient dans l'épistolaire le lieu où il y aura le moins de rhétorique, ce mot même ayant sous leur plume le sens trop convenu de formalismes obligés. La lettre «familière» serait, enfin, un espace de sincérité dénué de toute «rhétorique»: l'extrême du sermo déconstruit, face à l'extrême de Yoratio ou discours construit. Avec un tel présupposé, que démentent constamment et l'époque et les corpus étudiés, il n'est pas pour surprendre qu'on arrive mal à dégager du typologique réutilisable. Redisons pour finir combien ces difficultés mêmes sont instructives, car elles renvoient le lecteur de Rhetorica à une des questions fondatrices de cette revue: jusqu'où peut-on appliquer la rhétorique ancienne à des textes qui a priori en étaient informés de part en part? Francis Goyet Université Stendhal, Grenoble James P. Zappen, The Rebirth of Dialogue: Bakhtin, Socrates, and the Rhetorical Tradition (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), viii + 229 pp. In the roughly twenty years of scholarship on Bakhtin and rhetorical studies, Rebirth ofDialogue stands as the first and only book-length discussion 300 RHETORICA of dialogue as it informs both the early Socratic dialogues and the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. That rhetorician and Bakhtin scholar Jim Zappen would undertake the project is not surprising, for Bakhtin himself provides the impetus for the comparative study, citing the Socratic dialogue as a protonovelistic genre. Zappen does not, however, simply construct a series of correspondences between the two thinkers' perspectives on dialogue; rather, he examines the Socratic in terms of the Bakhtinian, noting the points at which a Bakhtinian reading of the early dialogues extends and enriches our understanding of them as "testing and contesting and creating" innovative ideas during a tumultuous fifth century bce (32). The opening chapter situates the central question of the relationship be­ tween rhetoric and dialogue within twentieth-century rhetorical and philo­ sophical studies. It also presents a central premise of the argument: the early Socratic dialogues illustrate a significant and complex cultural tension between the arete ("excellence" born of birth, status, and courage) of the Homeric tradition and a newer...

Abstract Rhetorical conceptions of the public sphere emphasize conversation as central to democracy, yet the salience of conversation to public life is being diminished by changes in the forms and formats of information that U.S. publics receive. A proliferation of reflexive representations across genres, and changed media practices, contribute to a climate in which rhetorical deliberation is undermined and various U.S. publics’ ability to discern what to believe is greatly decreased. Manufactured risks illustrate the significance of these changes and they suggest that further scrutiny of media practices and advocacy of information that serves public interests is crucial for sustaining democracy.

I argue that examining two collections of essays designed for the preparation of new writing teachers and published twenty years apart provides some important clues to what has occurred to composition studies in the interval. Building on the framework I established in two previous CCC articles, I argue that composition studies has become a less unified and more contentious discipline early in the twenty-first century than it had appeared to be around 1990. The present article specifically addresses the rise of what I call critical/cultural studies, the quiet expansion of expressive approaches to teaching writing, and the split of rhetorical approaches into three: argumentation, genre analysis, and preparation for “the” academic discourse community.

Reviewed are: Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition, by Anis Bawarshi; The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change, edited by Richard M. Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko; and Writing Genres, by Amy J. Devitt.

Through an examination of the work of the nineteenth-century American rhetorician Henry Noble Day the author suggests that the causal relationship usually identified between economic formations and genres such as exposition is not a purely one-way process. Day’s rhetorics, he argues, were not only shaped by the economies of Taylorism but also were themselves engaged in a sociohistorical process of class formation, suggesting that such a study of the connections among managerialism, current-traditional rhetoric, and class formation raises important questions for our own work today.

Insights from activity theory—specifically, David Russell’s synthesis of activity theory with genre theory—suggest ways to understand and ease problems of clashing expectations encountered in professional writing classes that use a client-based assignment model for service-learning.

One goal of college technical writing courses is to prepare students for real-world writing situations. Business writing textbooks function similarly, using guidelines, sample assignments, and model documents to help students develop rhetorical strategies to use in the workplace. Students attend class, or read and perform exercises in a textbook, with the faith that these skills will apply to workplace writing. In an attempt to better understand the similarities and differences between industry and academe's expectations of one genre of workplace writing, the memo, we compared the perceptions of memo quality by engineering faculty, students, and practitioners. All three groups responded to three sample memos taken from textbooks used by engineering professors in their undergraduate classrooms. The results indicate that students' and engineers' opinions of memo quality were more closely related to one another than to professors' comments, focusing on content, while professors were the most critical of style issues.

Instructors in multi-major professional communication courses are asked to teach students a variety of workplace genres. However, teaching genres apart from their contexts may not result in transfer of knowledge from school to workplace settings. We propose teaching students to research genre use via activity theory as a way of encouraging transfer. We outline theory and research relevant to teaching genre and provide results from a study using activity theory to teach genre in two different professional communication courses.

This article traces the historical and conceptual development of what is known as activity theory, from Vygotsky and Luria, to A. N. Leont’ev, to Engeström, in order to illustrate what I see as two problems with the activity theoretic approach, especially as manifest in the work of Leont’ev and Engeström: what I call the boundary and/or focus problem and the unit-of-analysis problem. In the second half of the article, I explore the social semiotic of an everyday artifact, the “speed bump,” and introduce a discovery heuristic for examining how this artifact functions mediationally in human activity. In so doing, I have tried to discover activity through principled analysis, rather than assuming activity or activity system a priori.

Abstract This paper presents a critical assessment of Vives's major rhetorical treatise, De ratione dicendi (1533). In terms of structure it shows that the first book is concerned with the linguistic basis of style, that the second deals with the qualities of style, the four aims of rhetoric, decorum and disposition and that the third presents guidance on composing ten genres of writing practised by humanists. The paper describes Vives's original contributions to the analysis of the linguistic basis of style, the qualities of style, emotional manipulation, decorum, and the composition of history and commentary. In assessing Vives's work it makes comparisons with rhetoric texts by Agricola, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Ramus. It finds that Vives's reform of rhetoric is based in his encyclopaedic grasp of human learning but that this very encyclopaedism can cause weaknesses in his discussions of particular topics. De ratione dicendi tells us a great deal about Vives's perceptiveness and breadth of reading but, with only three sixteenth century editions, it was not a successful textbook.

This paper presents a critical assessment of Vives’s major rhetorical treatise, De ratione dicendi (1533). In terms of structure it shows that the first book is concerned with the linguistic basis of style, that the second deals with the qualities of style, the four aims of rhetoric, decorum and disposition and that the third presents guidance on composing ten genres of writing practised by humanists. The paper describes Vives’s original contributions to the analysis of the linguistic basis of style, the qualities of style, emotional manipulation, decorum, and the composition of history and commentary. In assessing Vives’s work it makes comparisons with rhetoric texts by Agricola, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Ramus. It finds that Vives’s reform of rhetoric is based in his encyclopaedic grasp of human learning but that this very encyclopaedism can cause weaknesses in his discussions of particular topics. De ratione dicendi tells us a great deal about Vives’s perceptiveness and breadth of reading but, with only three sixteenth century editions, it was not a successful textbook.