This article charts the collaborative production of a play designed to show that performing literary history enables students' perception of history as process and performance. The play Before & After highlighted conventions of seventeenth-century prologues, epilogues, and gendered theatrical performance techniques through students' performances and participation in a postproduction survey.

The authors report on a multiyear study designed to reveal how introducing a content management system (CMS) in an administrative office at a large organization affects the office’s writing and work practices. Their study found that users implemented the CMS in new and creative ways that the designers did not anticipate and that the choices users made in using the CMS were often driven not by technology but by the social implications the CMS held for their office. By contrasting how writers negotiated specific genres of writing before and after the CMS was introduced, the authors argue for increased attention to providing flexible technologies that enable writers to innovate new tools in response to the social needs of their writing environments. This approach must be driven by research on the implications of technology in workplace communities.

In one of many scenes Frances Ellen Watkins Harper developed between student and teacher in her works, the impulsive Annette Harcourt explains her conflict with an Irish-American peer to her teache...

“Nearly a century later, Bernays’s troubling defense of anti-democratic communication as a central component of democratic governance reverberates in a recent public relations campaign to ‘enhance’ Gadhafi’s image.”

This essay chronicles an English department overhauling its rubric design, curriculum, and portfolio in order to emphasize a wider range of “real-world” writing.

Book Review| September 01 2011 The President’s Words: Speeches and Speechwriting in the Modern White House The President’s Words: Speeches and Speechwriting in the Modern White House. Michael Nelson and Russell L. Riley. Ashlyn Gentry Ashlyn Gentry Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2011) 14 (3): 578–580. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940563 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ashlyn Gentry; The President’s Words: Speeches and Speechwriting in the Modern White House. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2011; 14 (3): 578–580. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940563 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. © 2011 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| September 01 2011 A Normative Pragmatic Model of Making Fear Appeals Beth Innocenti Beth Innocenti University of Kansas, Communication Studies Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2011) 44 (3): 273–290. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.44.3.0273 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Beth Innocenti; A Normative Pragmatic Model of Making Fear Appeals. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 September 2011; 44 (3): 273–290. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.44.3.0273 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 CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2011The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay describes my design and implementation of a composition course focused on the Native American rhetorical device of survivance at work in debates on Indian removal and U.S.-Indian relations in general. Using a contact zone approach, I found that the course improved writing and thinking skills by pushing students out of their ideological and intellectual comfort zones. As a deeper benefit, the study of Native American rhetorical strategies renders the Western rhetorical tradition not only as a framework for inquiry but as an object of analysis and critique itself.

This essay invites a critique of contact zone theory and rhetoric’s origin story based on a reading of Guaman Poma’s First New Chronicle and Good Government. I read this writer’s argument for indigenous ability and reshaping of space through picture, map, and text as a multimodal effort that invites attention to classroom rhetorical power dynamics and standards.

Composition theorists concerned with students’ academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these criticisms, however, voice continues to frequently appear as a goal in guidelines for teaching writing and on high-stakes writing assessment rubrics in the United States. Given the apparent lack of alignment between theory and practice regarding its use, more empirical research is needed to understand how teachers apply voice as a criterion in the evaluation of student writing. Researchers have used sociocultural and functionalist frameworks to analyze voice-related discursive patterns, yet we do not know how readers evaluate written texts for voice. To address this gap in research the present study asked: 1) What language features do secondary English teachers associate with voice in secondary students’ writing and how do they explain their associations? 2) How do such identified features vary across genres as well as among readers? Nineteen teachers were interviewed using a think-aloud protocol designed to illuminate their perceptions of voice in narrative and expository samples of secondary students’ writing. Results from an inductive analysis of interview transcripts suggest that participating teachers associated voice with appraisal features, such as amplified expressions of affect and judgment, that are characteristic of literary genres.

Using a sociohistoric developmental lens, this paper traces the construction of texts composed by fifth graders in an urban classroom in order to answer the following questions: How do children develop as writers in school? How do writing and drawing function in children’s texts? How do teaching practices shape children’s writing development? Ethnographic data collected in a fifthgrade classroom reveal how children used drawing to create classroom texts. Data show that drawing is not simply a developmental preface to writing. Rather, when given guided intellectual freedom, children integrate writing, drawing, and pictures in sophisticated and creative ways. The author traces children’s text development to show how schooling as an institution bounds and limits their use of their authorial prerogatives, their textual possibilities, and ultimately their developmental potential. She concludes by asserting that we must reconsider development in writing to include not only orthographic symbols, but also the wide array of communicative tools that children bring to writing. Any analysis of development that fails to include an analysis of the corresponding institutional practices and ideologies is liable to be no more than a contribution to the efficacy of that developmental model.

This study examines the visual rhetoric used in Chinese and American promotional business communication. Comparing banking and financial product brochures published in the two countries, the study finds similar as well as different visual strategies. Most importantly, the Chinese samples frequently use visual metaphors, whereas the American samples hardly do. Prompted by this finding, I review relevant literature on visual metaphors and examine their structures and rhetorical functions. In addition, the study suggests that buyer images and cartoon images are used differently in the two countries, whereas product-related images are used similarly. I explore the contextual and cultural roots of these findings and offer suggestions on how to visually communicate with the Chinese audience and other international audiences.

The software for a military command and control (C2) system presents an information space in which the C2 operator must manipulate a complex set of information in order to maintain the common tactical picture. A usability test of C2PC, a C2 system currently used by the U.S. Marine Corps, was performed with 13 Marines as participants. They were given problems designed to require actions similar to what they would encounter during real-world Combat Operations Center (COC) operation. The observations revealed an interesting disconnect between the underlying design assumptions and how beginner C2 operators interacted with the system. They were able to perform simple tasks, but could not combine those simple tasks into realistic tasks. These differences highlight the need for using complex scenarios when testing complex systems.

What is currently known about the history of the paragraph has relied on the work of the first English and American compositionists, humanists, and philologists of the late nineteenth century. Alexander Bain and his followers defined the requirements for the English paragraph and believed it had not existed prior to the eighteenth century. Their sole focus, on humanist and historical writing, yielded a distorted, if not an incorrect history of the paragraph. This article begins to correct that view, prevalent since 1866, by examining paragraphs of practical works, such as printed how-to books of the early English Renaissance until 1700. The variety and quantity of how-to documents increased with the growth of knowledge, advent of printing, and emergence and expansion of middle-class English readers eager for books written in an accessible, non-Latinate style. When we examine paragraphs from technical books printed as early as 1490, we find paragraphs that exemplify the qualities stipulated by Bain nearly 400 years later. The existence of well defined and formulated paragraphs throughout the English Renaissance and the seventeenth century in a wide variety of technical book—works ignored by literary scholars pursuing the history of English—suggests that the paragraph is clearly indigenous to the English composition, much more so than modern composition theory has acknowledged. This article explores example paragraphs of these first English printed technical works and begins to expand the history of the English paragraph. Further studies of later Middle English paragraphs in incunabula of practical, liturgical, and historical works will likely show the indigenous nature of the paragraph to English composition and allow scholars to see how the formation of the paragraph helped English writers over 500–700 years ago create complete texts.

In this article, the authors answer the call of the IText manifesto to use ITexts to explore fundamental issues of writing, describing instant messaging (IM) as a form of interactive networked writing (INW) and showing how IM writers discursively construct contexts. Specifically, they argue that writers use (a) deixis to build and maintain material contexts and (b) intertextuality to construct sociocultural contexts. Four intact IM transcripts were coded for instances of four kinds of deixis—space, time, person, and object—and for instances of intertextuality. Results showed that IM writers use all four kinds of deixis and that deictic elements made up almost 10% of the total words of the transcripts. In addition, two kinds of intertextual elements— direct quotation and cultural referents—were used to invoke, build, and sometimes undermine social and cultural contexts. The authors also discuss some of the material affordances and constraints of writing and conclude by arguing that INW is literally dialogic.

This article uses both actor network theory (ANT) and activity theory to trace and analyze the ways in which both Twitter and third-party applications support the development and maintenance of meaningful contexts for Twitter participants. After situating context within the notion of a ‘‘fire space’’, the authors use ANT to trace the actors that support finding and moving information. Then they analyze the ‘‘prescriptions’’ of each application using the activity-theory distinction between actions and operations. Finally, they combine an activity-theory analysis with heuristics derived from the concept of ‘‘findability’’ in order to explore design implications for Social Web applications.

This article describes the development of visual rhetoric in a historically significant museum exhibit. The study documents rhetorical change in the museum's displays, specifically in visual series depicting the horse's evolutionary development. The study also exposes the purpose of series patterning in the renovated display and the multiple views on scientific visualization this display implies. Such an analysis suggests the broad range of strategies in visual rhetoric available to science communicators working in the area of science popularization.

In his newest book, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, Gunther Kress brings visual communication into the 21st century by applying social semiotic theory (a th...

Queen Mary I was crowned in 1553, becoming the first reigning queen of England. In order to provide a powerful image of female rule to her people, Queen Mary invented a rhetorical strategy that reflected her society's oppressive gender expectations of chaste silence so that she could become a powerfully voiced ruler. Her sister and successor, Queen Elizabeth I, later mirrored Mary's strategy. England's first female monarchs created an image of female rule by employing the figures of the spouse, the mother, and the maiden, embodying conventional roles for women in Tudor society, and reclaiming them as images of power.

Informally recognized by the tribal council in 1821, the 86-character Cherokee writing system invented by Sequoyah was learned in manuscript form and became widely used by the Cherokee within the span of a few years. In 1827, Samuel Worcester standardized the arrangement of characters and print designs in ways that differed from Sequoyah’s original arrangement of characters. Using Worcester’s arrangement as their sole source of evidence, however, scholars and Cherokee language learners have misunderstood the syllabary by viewing it through an alphabetic lens. Drawing on 5 years of ethnohistorical research, this article opens with a brief history of Sequoyah’s invention to show the ways Worcester’s rearrangement bent the Cherokee writing system to the orthographic rules of the Latin alphabet, thus obscuring the instrumental logics of the original script. Next, a linguistic analysis of the Cherokee writing system is presented in an effort to recover its instrumental workings. Adding a new perspective to research on American literacy histories in general and scholarship on the Cherokee syllabary in particular, the author argues that the Cherokee language demands a writing system uniquely Cherokee, one practiced outside of an alphabetic influence and capable of representing underlying meaning and sound with each character.

Abstract In this essay, I contend that political culture and campaign journalism during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign was "pornified." Examination of broadcast journalism, viral videos, online commentary, political pop culture, andget-outthe-vote campaigns reveals the ways in which pornographic metaphors, images, and narratives infiltrated U.S. political culture during the 2008 presidential primary and general election season. I assess the media framing of candidates Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, as well as that of female voters as a group, arguing that the emergence of the pornification frame signals a backlash against the gains women have made in the U.S. political system.

The use of Self-Designed Points as part of a point-by-point grading system can encourage students to exercise more initiative about their own learning in a first-year composition course.

In this methodological and theoretical article, we address the need for more cross-case work on studies of literacy in use within different social and cultural contexts. The Cultural Practices of Literacy Study (CPLS) project has been working on a methodology for cross-case analyses that are principled in that the qualitative nature of each case, with its layers of context and interpretive meaning making by the researcher, is maintained while still allowing for data aggregation across cases. We present a model of a literacy practice that emerged from this work as one that may contribute to the work of other literacy researchers who are looking for theoretically driven ways to analyze and interpret ethnographic accounts of literacy practice on a larger scale and to answer questions about literacy practice across studies. We describe our theoretically based coding scheme, as well as the development of a large ethnographic database of literacy practices data and the technical aspects of lifting ethnographic data into a large database. We also provide a description of a pilot cross-case analysis as an example of the promise of such qualitative cross-case databases.

In working class education, one of the primary goals in addition to basic literacy was the formulation of class-based interpretations of society. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as literacy programs began to filter into the lives of the proletariat, an attempt to expand the definition of literacy past basic reading and writing skills occasioned the rise of institutions that defined literacy as not only reading and writing, but also knowledge of class and economic theory. Thus, these early proletarian programs developed a broader definition of literacy, past basic reading and writing programs, to class-based educational curriculum.

Although Orwell's essays—particularly “Shooting an Elephant”—are used in freshman composition classes as stylistic models of clarity for student to imitate, this practice is pedagogically unsound because Orwell's essays are examples of the contemplative essay, whose aims are very different from those of the expository prose students learn to write in composition classes.

Driving research questions from the prevailing issues and interests and developing from them new theories, formulas, algorithms, methods, and designs, and linking them to the interests of the larger audience is a vital component of scientific research papers. The present article discusses outlining purposes or stating the nature of the present research, and listing research questions or hypotheses in the introduction of academic papers. This corpus-based genre study focuses particularly on Move 3 of the model “occupying the niche.” The results indicating disciplinary variation show that the writers of Computer Science (CS) research articles, over the years have developed an increased use of outlining purpose/stating the nature of the present research, having the characteristics of purposive, descriptive, extension of the previous work, contrast to the existing work, brevity, complexity, and a description of methodology. It also shows that listing research questions or hypothesis may have distinctively different functions in developing genres as compared to the established ones such as physics.

It has been suggested that teaching professional writing students how to think visually can improve their ability to design visual texts. This article extends this suggestion and explores how the ability to think visuospatially influenced students’ success at designing visual texts in a small upper-division class on visual communication. Although all the students received the same instruction, students who demonstrated higher spatial faculties were more successful at developing and designing visual materials than were the other students in the class. This result suggests that the ability to think visuospatially is advantageous for learning how to communicate visually and that teaching students to think visuospatially should be a primary instructional focus to maximize all student learning.

We offer here a critical assessment of our experiences teaching in Kingsborough Community College's learning communities—in a descriptive, personal mode that echoes the frequent conversations we have together—to illuminate how official data fail to capture both important successes and failures and to model the kind of reflective, subjective assessment from a professorial perspective that we believe is vital for larger institutional decision making.

AbstractTo the ancient mind, magic was a powerful force to be subjected to or to control. Egypt, more than any other early culture, stressed the importance of intellectual agency as the antidote to the imperfection perceived between foundational thinking and anti-foundational speaking. Just as rhetoric seeks to express the conceptual ideal pursued by philosophical inquiry, these earlier thinkers stressed magical language as the key to unlocking the power of the cosmos. This article will explore the Ancient Egyptian concept of rhetorical magic as a practical wisdom that allows an individual to function fully within the boundaries established by a perceived cosmic order. The Ancient Egyptians applied rhetorical magic to ease the dissonance felt between intellectual engagement and the semiotically saturated cosmology in which they dwelt. These same ancient rhetorical practices hold promise in assisting our own attempts to navigate a world inundated with information.

This case study describes how one eighth-grade student, Jon, asserted Native identities in texts as he attended a middle school in the western United States. Jon—a self-described Native American, Navajo, and Paiute with verified Native ancestry—sought to share what he called his Native culture with others in his school wherein he was the only Native American, despite his perception that schools have historically suppressed this culture. To study how the texts that Jon designed in school may have afforded and constrained the expression of Native identities, the authors collected three types of data over the course of eight months: (a) interviews from Jon and his teachers; (b) fieldnotes from classroom observations; and (c) texts that Jon designed in school. Grounded in theories of social semiotics and multimodality, the findings from this study suggest that different forms of representation afforded and constrained the expression of Jon’s desired identities in different ways due to their different physical properties, due to their historical and immediate uses in context, and due to the extent to which they fulfilled different metafunctions of communication. Recognizing the tensions and ironies associated with using some forms of representation, Jon sought to combine and use multiple representations to construct desired identities and to negate undesired ones.

“After writing about a visit to Bulgaria in 1996, I returned ten years later hoping to judge whether my original application of Baudrillard’s theory on the evolution of consumer society still held up…”

“Each essay reports specific cases of rhetorical intervention in local and global issues. Both professors and students will find models for their roles in the democratic tradition, as public/organic intellectuals, or… ‘part-time peaceniks.'”

The report “Education in the Balance” represents a significant new acknowledgment of the centrality of teaching faculty to the academic project on the part of professional organizations in English studies. David Bartholomae is right to worry that the emergence of positions for teaching faculty may “enact an argument about the separation of teaching and research” that should be resisted, and healthy models of the academic workplace should make sure that teaching and research remain meaningfully responsive to one another. Recent developments in higher education, which promise an ever finer fragmentation of the academic labor force—along with new possibilities for labor abuses—make this especially urgent.

In teaching a course on death in modern theater to fifteen undergraduates, I had to engage with a real-life death “drama” (the death of a peer of my students) that impinged on my class, presenting me with an uncomfortable pedagogical conundrum. I had to re-think my objectives as an instructor and my conception of the classroom as a safe space. In this article, I rehearse this complicated and potentially fractious class scenario and scrutinize my approach to it. I investigate the potential merits of thinking, feeling, and working through crisis in a classroom situation, thereby fashioning a type of pedagogical “third space” in which ideational and circumstantial crossover is allowed. Some of the issues that arise are the ways in which we can situate pedagogy in praxis with “real life” and what challenges are provided?

Many students in American universities are unable to absorb information from a Shakespeare text in the lecture-discussion format. Consumption of electronic media has both absorbed increasing amounts of their time and encouraged passive modes of learning. My response is to seek a pedagogy that produces, on the one hand, in active interpreters of complex language, and, on the other, a participatory, collegial classroom through a pedagogy fusing traditional modes of literary criticism with active modes of learning.

Although books in the For Dummies series and other similar series have found commercial success, the approach to information design they use has not received much attention in technical communication journals. This article reports on readers' responses to information presented in the magazine Nursing Made Incredibly Easy! and two other nursing journals. Three groups of readers (two groups of nursing students and one group of nursing faculty members) responded to three articles they read by completing questionnaires and participating in focus groups. Nursing Made Incredibly Easy! was regarded as easy to read and as a good starting point for less-experienced readers, but its tone and style elicited some strong objections as well. The article provides observations and recommendations about using an informal approach to information design.

Previous research has suggested the need for developing technical communication education in Chinese universities. Following this suggestion, this article examines the possibility of integrating technical communication into China’s English major curriculum. Based on findings from two universities, the article discusses the design of China’s English major curriculum and Chinese teacher and student perspectives on technical communication. The author suggests that China’s English for Specific Purposes (ESP) education provides a promising home for integrating technical communication and that this integration can enhance China’s current ESP education. The author presents three integration models and discusses questions for future research.

This study explores the types of feedback and implicated relational systems in an online design critique using an inductive analysis of an online critique about a project focused on designing a new food pyramid. The results reveal eight types of feedback and three implied relational systems, all of which suggest relational archetypes that are disconnected from typical preprofessional activity systems. These results illustrate the potential for the online medium to be a space in which participants pursue idealized relational identities and interactions that are not necessarily authentic approximations of actual relational systems. Using these results as a foundation, the author discusses the potential relevance of the online medium to this setting and the implications of relational authenticity and genre knowledge on oral genre teaching and learning.

Students are expected to come into the current college classroom already possessing certain skills including the ability to write at the appropriate academic level regardless of discipline and the ability to create well-structured arguments. Research indicates, however, that most students entering college are underprepared in both areas. One strategy that may help students write at a more academic level is teaching students to focus on spending their time on revision. In the current study, we examine two potential sources of difficulty in the revision of argumentative essays: a poorly developed argument schema and a poorly developed global revision task schema. We created and tested the effectiveness of two written tutorials designed to provide college students information to saturate their knowledge base as well as provide them with procedural tasks to complete. We found that without instruction, students focused their revisions on making local wording changes that did not qualitatively improve their essays. An argument tutorial helped students make higher level global changes, include more argument content, and improve the structure of the essay. A global revision tutorial also helped students make more substantive structural changes. Thus, both tutorials helped students improve their revisions, and the tutorials were completed independently by the students successfully.

This study assesses the benefits and drawbacks of assigning a collaboratively written midterm paper in nontraditional and traditional introductory college composition courses. Students’ responses suggest a radically different model to be tested in the future.

This essay recounts the authors’ experiences as community college faculty members in a learning community linking first-year composition with a class in life-career planning and development.