Writers typically produce their writing in bursts. In this article, the authors examine written language bursts in a sample of 33 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment. Comparisons of the children with specific language impairment with an age-matched group of typically developing children ( n = 33) and a group of younger, language skill–matched children ( n = 33) revealed the role of writing bursts as a key factor in differentiating writing competence. All the children produced the same number of writing bursts in a timed writing task. Children with specific language impairment produced a shorter number of words in each burst than did the age-matched group but the same as the language skill–matched group. For all groups, spelling accuracy and handwriting speed were significant predictors of burst length and text quality. The frequency of pauses at misspellings was related to shorter bursts. These results offer support to Hayes’s model of text generation; namely, burst length is constrained by language and transcription skills.

Moment to moment, a writer faces a host of potential problems. How does the writer’s mind coordinate this problem solving? In the original Hayes and Flower model, the authors posited a distinct process to manage this coordinating—that is, the “monitor.” The monitor became responsible for executive function in writing. In two experiments, the current authors investigated monitor function by examining the coordination of two common writing tasks—editing (i.e., correcting an error) and sentence composing—in the presence or absence of an error and with a low or high memory load for the writer. In the first experiment, participants could approach the editing and composing task in either order. On most trials (88%), they finished the sentence first, and less frequently (12%), they corrected the error first. The error-first approach occurred significantly more often under the low-load condition than the high-load condition. For the second experiment, participants were asked to adopt the less-used, error-first approach. Success in completing the assigned task order was affected by both memory load and error type. These results suggest that the monitor depends on the relative availability of working memory resources and coordinates subtasks to mitigate direct competition over those resources.

In Section 1 of this article, the author discusses the succession of models of adult writing that he and his colleagues have proposed from 1980 to the present. He notes the most important changes that differentiate earlier and later models and discusses reasons for the changes. In Section 2, he describes his recent efforts to model young children’s expository writing. He proposes three models that constitute an elaboration of Bereiter and Scardamalia’s knowledge-telling model. In Section 3, he describes three running computer programs that simulate the action of the models described in Section 2.

Although keystroke logging promises to provide a valuable tool for writing research, it can often be difficult to relate logs to underlying processes. This article describes the procedures and measures that the authors developed to analyze a sample of 80 keystroke logs, with a view to achieving a better alignment between keystroke-logging measures and underlying cognitive processes. They used these measures to analyze pauses, bursts, and revisions and found that (a) burst lengths vary depending on their initiation type as well as their termination type, suggesting that the classification system used in previous research should be elaborated; (b) mixture models fit pause duration data better than unimodal central tendency statistics; and (c) individuals who pause for longer at sentence boundaries produce shorter but more well-formed bursts. A principal components analysis identified three underlying dimensions in these data: planned text production, within-sentence revision, and revision of global text structure.

Abstract This essay examines reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln that were published in the aftermath of his death by those who had interacted with Lincoln personally. An understudied genre y Lincoln reminiscences offered judgments of Lincolns character through a portraiture style designed to make salient private as well as public dimensions of his character. We historicize the rhetoric of portraiture and trace the rise of reminiscence out of biography as a stand-alone genre, which reached unprecedented popularity in the competitive subgenre of the Lincoln reminiscence. We argue that Lincoln reminiscences featured a balance of common and uncommon virtues thought essential for a president, a balance that helped democratize and humanize presidential character.

Abstract The American Colonization Society emerged at a time when some Americans believed that a "moderate" solution to the problem of slavery could be achieved by removing free blacks to Africa. Upon announcing its formation in 1816, the society received a public rejoinder: the Counter Memorial against African Colonization. This essay explores multiple interpretations of the Counter Memorial to demonstrate the instability of colonizationists moderate rhetorical position. More specifically, this essay argues that the Counter Memorial suspends colonization within the uneasy and unresolved tensions manifested by competing depictions of blackness, or black personae, in American public discourse at the time.

Book Review| June 01 2012 Transgression as a Mode of Resistance: Rethinking Social Movement in an Era of Corporate Globalization Transgression as a Mode of Resistance: Rethinking Social Movement in an Era of Corporate Globalization. Christina R. Foust. Bryan Thomas Walsh Bryan Thomas Walsh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (2): 387–390. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940583 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bryan Thomas Walsh; Transgression as a Mode of Resistance: Rethinking Social Movement in an Era of Corporate Globalization. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2012; 15 (2): 387–390. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940583 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. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

AbstractThis article discusses two twentieth-century examples of humanist controversies in order to demonstrate some rhetorical paths of thought involved in developing and securing rhetorical humanism within philosophy and rhetorical studies. The article begins with Martin Heidegger's antihumanist provocation and examines Ernesto Grassi's response in his revisionist interpretation of a nonmetaphysical Renaissance humanism. Next it takes up the post-Heideggerian moment of late twentieth-century postmodern critiques, including attacks on humanist foundationalism and essentialist notions of agency, and compares Grassi's defense of rhetorical humanism within Continental philosophy to Michael Leff's reinterpretation of Ciceronian humanism within communication studies. Both Grassi and Leff propose a rhetorical humanist alternative to Heidegger's and postmodernism's philosophical antihumanism. These two rhetoricians demonstrate an interpretive power and a rhetorical creativity that not only revitalize rhetorical humanism in the present age but also provide valuable resources for its extension into the future.

AbstractBooker T. Washington's Cotton States Exposition Address enlarges our understanding of the genre of witnessing by presenting a version of public testimony and historical remembrance sharply at odds with contemporary definitions of the genre. Washington's resolute choice to lend voice as a living witness to the atrocities of slavery in the service of conspicuously pragmatic and narrowly defined interests rather than universal human rights dramatically separates his performance of public witnessing from its late modern forms. Whereas survivors of historical atrocity in the post–World War II era ritually assume the difficult responsibility of testifying to past evils with the greatest possible accuracy, Washington relates the history of slavery—most notably its legacy of heinous human rights abuses—in radically inventive ways. The address demonstrates that those who embody the putative collective voice of subaltern communities may, in particular circumstances, call on the public to willfully forget, rather than somberly remember, the crimes of history. In doing so, the speech also suggests that the ability to bear witness may not automatically result in the ability to petition for equal human rights.

AbstractLincoln's First Inaugural Address was not designed to coax the seceded states back into the Union, because he never conceded that they had left. Rather, he sought to define the situation so that, if war broke out, the seceders would be cast as the aggressors and the federal government as acting in self-defense. To this end, he presented a principled case against the legitimacy or even possibility of secession while applying the arguments to the exigence at hand. He identifies the cause of the trouble as “unwarranted apprehension” among the southern states, announces his policy as a minimalist assertion of national sovereignty, and urges that disaffected southerners not act in haste to threaten that sovereignty further. Not only does he explicitly call for slowing down the push to war but the speech itself enacts a slowing of time. In sum, the First Inaugural illustrates both Lincoln's philosophical grounding and his rhetorical dexterity.

Design is a rhetorical activity that requires creative thinking in response to difficult situations. That creative work ultimately builds new relationships and new contexts. Sustainable design can become an approach to composition that alters ways of thinking about writing situations, keeping ethical and contextual factors in focus, and encouraging students to develop habits of situational creativity.

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This essay raises concerns over the future direction for educational aid designed to promote literacy in developing countries. The essay focuses on the EGRA (Early Grade Reading Assessment)initiative in Africa. At one level, this essay challenges the claims for empirical and research-based support for the EGRA. At a broader level, this essay raises questions regarding the viability ofexporting educational aid efforts to developing countries that are modeled after large-scale, highly prescriptive and mostly ineffective programs from the U.S. context. The essay argues fora reframing of educational aid that promotes research and development efforts that embrace a broadened view of what counts as literacy, a valuing of local contexts and a commitment to beguided by local expertise and problem solving capacities.

Multimodality is a provocative challenge to those of us who understand the primary concerns of our field to be speech and writing. At its most simplistic, Kress's work is an expansive account of ho...

Rather than function simply as a metonymic, part-to-whole relation, objects on exhibit in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) also function as synecdoches, establishing a part-to-part relation that ultimately defers their connection to the historical past. Potentially, this latter relation undermines the historical authenticity that museum-goers seem to seek, and which the USHMM designers wished to inculcate.

In this analysis of the intelligent design theory textbook, Of Pandas and People, I seek a better understanding of how the authors propose intelligent design as a legitimate science. By looking at this text through the rhetorical concept of imitation, I show how the authors attempt to validate the text for uses in public education classrooms. In doing this, the authors of the text attempt to imitate science, scientists and science textbooks, but do so in ways that reveal their teleological position to the scientific and legal community and alienate their creationist progenitors.

This article interrogates the commonly used creative writing workshop model, calling for a higher degree of process-oriented work in the classroom and bringing to light process-oriented models already in place in universities across the country. This discussion can serve as a springboard for classroom development of alternative teaching models.

Poster sessions aren't just for professional conferences. They are popular in a variety of academic disciplines, where they have been shown to boost motivation, foster alternative assessment, and promote peer interaction. They are gaining popularity as a classroom teaching strategy, because they promote the development of student research skills and foster positive attitudes toward research. They encourage collaboration and peer interaction. Visual presentation strategies provide opportunities for students to display their ideas and knowledge in several multimedia formats. Poster sessions also promote alternative assessment strategies such as peer and self-assessment. We report here on the ways that we have used this assignment format in our basic linguistics class, titled “The Nature of Language.” We conclude with tips on incorporating poster assignments into teacher education classes regardless of the content matter.

Service-learning projects and traditional internships both prepare the student of technical communication for the workforce in many ways. What is lacking in the scholarship is a discussion of how to successfully link these two ideas. To help teachers implement courses that bridge the gap between service-learning projects and internships, I discuss how to design a course in technical communication that actively prepares students for subsequent internships with nonprofit agencies. In specific, I outline social development and social learning theories, service-learning pedagogies, and lesson plans and assignments that integrate these theories into practice. This project serves as a model that insists that the teacher first instructs students regarding not only rhetorical aspects of document design, including audience awareness and style, but also in placing the students in internships and designing assignments to be fulfilled in internship roles. The combination of classroom practices with an internship supports the idea that students learn the value of the process of writing, including the social embeddedness that can often influence their writing.

To build upon user-centered design methods, we used a collaborative and multi-modal approach to involve users early in the design process for a website. This article presents our methods and results and addresses the benefits and limitations of the Collaborative Prototype Design Process (CPDP), including ways in which this new method can be implemented. The CPDP is an innovative approach to user-centered website design that emphasizes collaboration, iterative testing, and data-driven design. The CPDP balances the power and needs of users with those of designers and, thus, enables design teams to test more tasks and involve more users. We divided our initial team into three independent design teams to separately profile users, test usability of low-fidelity paper prototypes, and then create and test usability of resulting wireframes. After completing the user-centered design and usability testing, the three teams merged to analyze their diverse findings and create a final prototype.

Colleges of business grapple with a perceived lack of quality in their graduates’ professional writing and recognize students’ need to learn disciplinary discourses. This article describes the motivation, design, and preliminary outcomes of a business-writing prototype at Auburn University. Writing consultants trained in business communication worked with one class on a substantial writing project. They provided conferencing and written feedback, greatly lowering the faculty workload. Student surveys and informal interviews indicate that students, faculty, and consultants were satisfied with this prototype program.

This article develops a multimodal model for how claims and evidence work across linguistic, numeric, and visual modes in the professional writing of environmental scientists. I coded and analyzed two reports (Bacey & Barry, 2008 Bacey , J. , & Barry , T. ( 2008 ). A comparison study of the proper use of Hester-Dendy® samplers to achieve maximum diversity and population size of benthic macroinvertebrates Sacramento Valley, California (Report No. EH08-2) . Sarcramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]; Levine et al., 2005 Levine , J. , Kim , D. , Goh , K. S. , Ganapathy , C. , Hsu , J. , Feng , H. , & Lee , P. ( 2005 ). Surface and ground water monitoring of pesticides used in the Red Imported Fire Ant Control Program (Report EH05-02) . Sacramento , CA : California Environmental Protection Agency . [Google Scholar]) written by research scientists working for California's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) by applying concepts from studies of argument, genre, and visual representations in science. The claim-evidence patterns show initial and summative claims as well as warrants being presented in linguistic forms; however, supporting evidence (i.e., data and backing) is found in numeric, visual, and linguistic forms. These findings highlight the need to extend Toulmin's understanding of claim-evidence relationships into a more robust multimodal model.

Consent tools for health research generally are designed without contextual or linguistic factors in mind. This is especially true of university-based research. This case history details our design team's efforts to transform one generic consent form into a set of multimodal tools that will increase patients’ understanding of and participation in a medical study.

Principles of universal design are applied to hybrid course materials to increase student understanding and, ultimately, success.

Abstract As the steadily expanding cyberpublic presents both obstacles and opportunities for Communist Party rule in China, the party has responded by adapting the rhetorical strategies of the Model Worker (MW) commendations to a changing political environment Using role model representations to encourage particular kinds of citizen labor, the system has changed from Maoist single-lane authoritarianism to a multilane interaction between the public and the party. This essay investigates the epideicticfunction, adaptation, and modification of MW awards via Kenneth Burkes symbolic labor. Tracing the awards through the periods of leadership from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao, I explore how the structure of the MW program has evolved into a rhetorical strategy capable of stabilizing party power through the moralization of party initiatives and the promulgation of party ideals despite increases in new media forms and institutions.

AbstractPlato's confrontation with Dionysius I, the so-called “tyrant of Sicily,” became famous as a cautionary tale of the perils of offering unwelcome advice to a powerful prince. Within early modern England, this tale took on added currency in the context of humanists' ambitions to serve as counselors in the court of Henry VIII. The humanist scholar Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), who briefly and unsuccessfully served at Henry's court, re-created Plato's exchange with Dionysius I in his dramatic dialogue The Knowledge Whiche Maketh a Wise Man (1533). In his dialogue, Elyot imagines Plato returning to Athens after his brief period of enslavement, where he meets the philosopher/rhetorician Aristippus. Aristippus challenges Plato by positing that Plato's dangerous words to Dionysius violated rhetorical tenets of propriety and timing. In the course of their extended exchange, two different versions of the rhetoric of counsel surface—one based on principles of philosophy and one based on strategic rhetoric.

AbstractWhat does it mean to say rhetoric scholarship should be relevant to democratic practice? A prevailing answer to this question insists that rhetoric scholars are participants in the democratic contest for power just like all other citizens, no more and no less. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, the argument of this essay is that reducing scholarship to a mode of political agency not only produces an increasingly uninhabitable academic identity but also draws our attention away from producing results of rhetorical inquiry designed to be useful to citizens in democracy. Clinging to the idea that academic practice is a mode of political action produces a fantastic blindness to the antagonism between scholarly reflection and political agency that structures academic purpose. While empirical barriers to the production of rhetorical resources suitable for democratic appropriation undoubtedly exist, ignoring the self-frustrating character of academic desire is no less of an impediment to the production of democratically consequential rhetoric scholarship.

By examining in turn a son’s craft project, a family photograph, and an image of tectonic plates, the authors demonstrate how objects can elicit rhetorical invention.

The purpose of the present study is to examine concurrent and predictive evidence used in the validation of ACCUPLACER, a purchased test used to place first-year students into writing courses at an urban, public research university devoted to science and technology education. Concurrent evidence was determined by correlations between ACCUPLACER scores and scores on two other tests designed to measure writing ability: the New Jersey Basic Skills Placement Test and the SAT Writing Section. Predictive evidence was determined by coefficients of determination between ACCUPLACER scores and end-of-semester performance measures. A longitudinal study was also conducted to investigate the grade history of students placed into first-year writing by established and new methods. When analyzed in terms of gender and ethnicity impact, ACCUPLACER failed to achieve statistically significant prediction rates for student performance. The study reveals some limits of placement testing and the problems related to it.

I draw upon Eileen Schell’s notions of “maternal pedagogy” and an “ethic of care” to analyze archival material from the National Education Association and Educational Testing Service pilot “lay reader” programs of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that there are striking similarities between the material and social circumstances of these postwar lay readers’ labor and that of contingent faculty in first-year composition today. I additionally contend that lay reader program narratives and policies evince a longer historical trajectory of labor problems in the teaching of writing than we typically recognize. Thistrajectory illustrates a continual need for various types of “help” in achieving effective writing instruction, yet paradoxically values labor-intensive models for teachers that emphasize the personal (and interpersonal). Such conditions create a problematic “motherly” discourse for the discipline that is magnified by the gendered imbalance already typically found in the first-year writing teacher workforce.

The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns Thomas Miller A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity Byron Hawk Toward A Composition Made Whole Jody Shipka Teaching with Student Texts: Essays toward an Informed Practice Joseph Harris, John D. Miles, Charles Paine, editors

This essay argues for an interdisciplinary, team-taught approach to the Introduction to Graduate Studies course in which faculty from literary and rhetoric/writing studies model the intersections of both fields through course texts, assignments, and theoretical frameworks. The authors also discuss the role of terminal master's programs in English and the need for graduate writing instruction.

Like many a composition instructor, I have often designed writing assignments that attempt to get students forging genuine connections between the personal and the political. Yet these assignments have not always been met with overwhelming enthusiasm from my classes, to put it politely. One possible cause for this type of response may be related to the word politics, as it seems invariably to elicit a mixture of apathy and confusion from students. So over the past several years, I have been experimenting with an assignment that bypasses overt references to politics and instead cuts straight to the conflicts surrounding students' lives—that is, the tensions bubbling up on college campuses. In this article, I reflect further on the origins of this assignment and give an overview of the engaging topics students choose to explore.

The International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, recently established by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is an alleged attempt at public outreach. The NSF encourages scientists to submit visualizations that would appeal to non-expert audiences by displaying their work in an annual “special feature” in Science magazine, and each year they present the winning image on the cover of Science as the ultimate reward. Although the NSF advertizes the competition as an attempt to educate non-scientists, the visualizations lack sufficient textual explanation in the Science special feature articles and do not demonstrate clear significance for current issues in science. This article assesses the actual motivations behind the NSF's “Visualization Challenge,” given the lack of accompanying textual information, and it explores the consequences of allowing “scientific” visualizations to float into the public sphere unexplained. It will be shown that the spirit of this competition exemplifies the current shift from “public understanding of science” to “public appreciation of science” in the growing field of Science Communication, particularly through the technique of “framing” devices. This shift in objective, accentuated in the realm of visual communication, reinforces the public's view of science as a mythic authority.

This article documents the evolution of the annual reports of the Danish company Danisco A/S from 1935 through 2007-2008. Compared to previous diachronic studies of annual reports, this study offers a finer grained description from a communicative perspective over a long period of time. Using genre theory as a framework, it analyzes the macrostructure and visual elements of these reports from a communicative standpoint paying equal attention to both of the genre’s subordinate communicative purposes: to give a true and fair view of the state of the company and to provide a positive image of the company. The findings indicate that the annual reports have four distinctive phases (1935 through 1958, 1959 through 1988, 1989-1990 through 2005-2006, and 2006-2007 through 2007-2008) that serve different communicative purposes. The study clearly shows that the annual report is primarily a statutory document and reveals that changes within organizations have a much greater and more immediate impact on changes in the annual reports than do other contextual factors.

Based on a quantitative survey of Norwegian business travelers, this study compares their use of face-to-face (FTF) meetings and videoconferences (VCs). The study finds that access and use of VCs are determined mainly by industry and the geographical structure of the enterprise. It also finds that VCs and FTF meetings differ along several dimensions, suggesting that these two modes of communication fulfill slightly different needs. Based on the survey results, the authors propose a framework to understand the emerging role of VCs. This framework would address both relational and task-based dimensions.

This special issue features articles that can help composition instructors think about ways to assess student products that are delivered in a variety of media. Although the topic of assessment is a common one, challenges arise as we apply—and adapt—our traditional assessment strategies to the features and components of compositions produced using new media. It is our hope that by engaging with the experiences of the authors of the articles in this special issue, readers of this issue will begin a conversation—among themselves, with their students—that leads them to articulate, reflect upon, and continually refine the criteria that are essential to both formative and summative assessment.

Abstract This essay analyzes one moment that has forced a reconsideration of the historical public sphere: the debate between John Stubbs and Queen Elizabeth I of England over her proposed marriage to the French Duke of Alençon. Stubbs adopted an argumentative strategy in which scripture served as a source of universal truth on which to base arguments about politics. Unable to allow such a strategy to undermine her own authority, Elizabeth's response asserted the communicative, rather than transcendent, nature of argument. Reading the debate in this way, in turn, calls into question a historical, developmental model of rationality and the public sphere. Ultimately, I argue, the public sphere does not develop as a radical emergence to be documented, but instead operates as a rearticulation of argumentative positions that are consistently and always available. Notes 1There are a number of discussions of the political possibility of the public sphere specific to the field of rhetoric; a review essay by Tanni Hass, and a special issue of Communication Theory edited by Michael Huspek, give a good indication of the directions of these discussions. Gerard Hauser is explicit in describing the possibility of reforming politics through rethinking the public sphere, while David G. Levassuer and Diana B. Carlin exemplify the assumption of the “public sphere” as a thing with a real historical existence that can be measured and examined. 2Other scholars have discussed the controversy between Elizabeth and Stubbs in terms of more thematic strategies without directly discussing questions of contemporary rhetorical theory. Jacqueline Vanhoutte considers this debate as demonstrating the emergence of a rhetoric of nationalism by both Stubbs and Elizabeth, while Debra Barrett-Graves sees Elizabeth and other politicians as employing a rhetoric focused specifically on the concept of honor. Illona Bell's argument is that the queen “was less outraged by Stubbs’ militant Protestantism … than by his overt paternalism and barely concealed antifeminism” (101). Peter Mack, Janet M. Green, and Allison Heisch have treated Elizabeth's rhetoric in terms of contemporary formal practice, such as her handling of schemes and tropes, while Cheryl Glenn and Janel Mueller have discussed how Elizabeth adapted her rhetoric in light of her position as a woman monarch. 3Although he had already become Duke of Anjou by the time of his courtship with Elizabeth, I follow the scholarly convention of referring to him by his first title, Duke of Alençon, though Elizabeth refers to him at times as Anjou. 4All of these scholars were connected with what has been variously called the Leicester faction or the Sidney circle—that group of political and literary figures associated with Leicester and the Sidney family, and with the reformist Protestantism (among other reforms) generated out of Cambridge University throughout the sjxteenth century. 5As defined by Dudley Fenner in 1584: “Methode is the judgement of more axioms, whereby many and divers axioms being framed according to the properties of an axiome perfectly or exactly judged, are so ordered as the easiest and most generall be set downe first, the harder are less generall next, until the whole matter be covered, as all the partes may best agree with themselves & be best kept in memorie. For as we consider in an axiome truth or falsehood, in a sillogisme, necessary following or not following, so in Methode the best and perfectest, the worst and troublesomest way to handle a matter” (Fenner 167). 6He commissioned Abraham Fraunce's Ramist Lawier's Logike, for example. 7Although it should be pointed out that this is in practice only—in theory scriptural understanding was available to all. But divines such as Knox, because of their training and study, were often better equipped, so the thinking went, to help people come to an understanding of the truth of scripture. 8Wallace MacCaffrey sums up both the views of faction and of Stubbs's pamphlet as produced at the bidding of others: “Its central arguments were shrewdly considered, comprehensive, and very knowledgeable. Indeed, they were so well informed—and so close in content to the actual council debates—that the Queen had some ground for her suspicion that someone in the Council was behind Stubbs” (Making 256). 9It is impossible to say in fact that Elizabeth authored this proclamation; however, a number of factors suggest authorship, while the nature of proclamations themselves is such that to discuss them as belonging to the monarch is not erroneous. Frederic A. Youngs has noted this proclamation is one of the lengthiest issued under Elizabeth; it is also one of her only proclamations to do more than simply issue an agenda or reiterate a legal ruling, but actually engage an opponent. The exact legal nature of proclamations under the Tudors has been the source of much debate, in their day and in our own, but it seems most likely that under Elizabeth they were issued primarily to call attention to an existing law, and as such served mainly, due to their widespread distribution, as an educational or, in a different sense, propagandistic tool. These would be sent to local authorities throughout the country and in cities, and their contents would be disseminated and enforced by those officials—so that their effectiveness in implementation depended on the crown's relationship to the particular localities. In other words, while their legal status was uncertain, they are effective gauges of the intentions of the monarchy. More than this, these proclamations can be seen as attempts to intervene into public discourse by setting the terms of that discourse—they are efforts to shape the ways in which the world under the monarch is thought of—both in the sense that they serve as reminders of the presence and authority of the monarch, as well as in the sense that they connect a particular understanding of the world to that authority. In considering this as an expression of Elizabeth's political will that is fully implicated in her rhetoric, it is useful to point to Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, who collected the proclamations into the definitive anthology. They define a Tudor royal proclamation as “a public ordinance issued by the sovereign in virtue of the royal prerogative, with the advice of the Privy Council, under the Great Seal, by royal writ” (xvii). Whether or not they were in fact authored by a monarch's hand, proclamations were definitely authored as though by intention of the monarch, and always reflective of the monarch's interests; so Hughes calls the proclamation (vol 1, p. xxvii): “a literary form psychologically gauged to elicit from the subject an obedient response, favorable to the will and interests of the crown.” Given the personal nature of this particular proclamation, and given its unique features, to call the proclamation Elizabeth's seems to me warranted.

Abstract An unexpected Nobel Peace Prize placed Barack Obama in a difficult position. He was, after all, commander-in-chief of a military currently engaged in two wars, one of which many felt was unjustified. The doubled rhetoric through which Obama managed this situation forecast the strategy he deploys in his Nobel Lecture itself: he invites his audience to attend to war and peace neither as wicked nor ideal but as realistic y interdependenty and indeed comparable modes of human interaction. The result is that war and peace are held in a delicate balance through the force of a somewhat vaguely articulated moral compass.

ABSTRACTFew concepts in the work of Walter Benjamin have inspired more theoretical reflections and fewer concrete examples than his notion of “the dialectical image.” As a partial corrective, this essay attempts to anchor the dialectical image—along with several related terms, notably “dialectics at a standstill,” “temporal differential,” “historical index,” and the “now of recognizability”—in a communicative practice characteristic of ordinary civic life: the introduction sequence. More than a simple rhetorical act, allowing local speakers to introduce themselves to assembled audiences, the introduction sequence is a complex sociopolitical event in which speakers divide themselves into neighbors and citizens—embodied social beings bound by webs of personal association and disembodied political actors empowered by the rule of law. Understanding this constellation of social and political agency is the basic task of this article.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the critical dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, to which a letter and several references in their work testify. It shows how affinities and differences between their respective positions can be explained from a shared theologico-political approach. Both authors believe that, in spite of secularization, political phenomena can only be adequately understood in light of certain theological concepts, images, and metaphors. However, they explain these theologico-political analogies differently. Whereas Schmitt advocates the authoritarian state, which he compares to God’s omnipotence, Benjamin endorses the proletarian revolution, in which he recognizes traces of a divine law-destroying violence. Challenging existing interpretations, this article shows how the political theologies of Benjamin and Schmitt are not static but developed in the course of their dialogue, in which both authors respond to each other’s criticism by changing and correcting their own positions in significant ways.

Reviewed are: Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, William Powers. Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication, Stuart Selber, editor. From A to &lt;A&gt;: Keywords of Markup, Bradley Dilger and Jeff Rice, editors. Technological Ecologies &amp; Sustainability, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi McKee, and Richard Selfe, editors. Generaciones’ Narratives: The Pursuit and Practice of Traditional and Electronic Literacies on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, John Scenters-Zapico.

In this article, we share findings from our process of “reading the past, writing the future” of elementary research in NCTE’s journals. Our analysis focused on major domains of the field, including literature, writing, reading, language, and multimodal literacies, and spanned Elementary English Review, which first appeared in 1924, was renamed Elementary English in 1947, and became Language Arts in 1975; Primary Voices, which ran from 1993 to 2002; and Research in the Teaching of English (RTE), which began in 1967. Findings revealed both surprising continuities across decades as well as clear and important social and cultural shifts that influenced theory, methods, and practice in the field, emphasizing the importance of 1) recognizing the level of historical and political influences in elementary literacy research, 2) paying explicit attention to how the cultural-historical zeitgeist shapes our work as scholars, and 3) interrogating how our representations of research problems may contribute to the continuance of social and cultural inequities.

Reviewed is X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent by Scott Richard Lyons.

Traditional narratives about composition and rhetoric in modern American universities need to be complicated through analyses of what has happened to these subjects at particular institutions. For a case study, the author examines Joseph Villiers Denney’s work in establishing and sustaining a department of rhetoric at The Ohio State University.

Supervisory class visits — when shaped by transparency, reflection, and reciprocity — are a unique, powerful, and positive mechanism for pedagogic and programmatic growth. Writing programs are especially well situated to transform and model effective supervisory class visits because compositionists have already addressed related challenges regarding writing pedagogies and practices.