In the ideal composition class of the 1990s, everything seems to run smoothly: all learning is happily collaborative, all authority is successfully de-centered, and all students are part of a conflict-free community of writers. No student is ever bored or boring, angry or provocative, and no teacher ever responds in ways that are self-serving, subjective, or idiosyncratic. Since most books and articles on the teaching of writing describe the ideal as if it were the norm, many teachers feel embarrassed by what does or doesn't happen in their own classrooms- and envious of what they believe is happening down the hall. Writing Relationships goes beyond the idealized talk about what should happen in teaching to examine what actually occurs: competition and cooperation, peer pressure and identification, resistance and sexual tension. This book is about how interpersonal relationships -- between teacher and student, student and student, and teacher and teacher -- shape the ways that teachers read and grade their students' writing and the ways students respond, or don't respond, to their teacher's suggestions. Through narratives and case studies, the author demonstrates that much of the tension, confusion, and anxiety associated with a process approach is inevitable and, in part, desirable. But this book is more than a series of failure stories: the author gives teachers specific and useful ideas and strategies for: reading student essays responding to student writing leading a discussion of an essay running a writing workshop grading setting up peer and co-authoring groups conferencing publishing in the field.

The instructor and students in a technical writing class constitute a complex organizational unit with an array of interests, needs, values, and agendas. The need to negotiate and define both shared and conflicting goals and assumptions presents a richly problematical rhetorical situation. In this context, we can use the old standard organizational genre, the memo, in ways that are both rhetorically and pedagogically rich, helping students to write themselves—and their instructors—into a more vital, satisfying, and effective learning environment.

Research Article| February 01 1994 Descartes and the Resilience of Rhetoric: Varieties of Cartesian Rhetorical Theory Thomas M. Carr,Descartes and the Resilience of Rhetoric: Varieties of Cartesian Rhetorical Theory(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), xi + 213 pp. Pierre Zoberman Pierre Zoberman 108 rue J.P. Timbaud, 75011 Paris, France. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1994) 12 (1): 115–117. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1994.12.1.115 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Pierre Zoberman; Descartes and the Resilience of Rhetoric: Varieties of Cartesian Rhetorical Theory. Rhetorica 1 February 1994; 12 (1): 115–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1994.12.1.115 Download citation file: Ris (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 ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1994, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1994 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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Kenneth Burke's New Rhetoric (1951) was meant to describe language as the basis of the interaction of individuals, objects, and courses of events in the human communication process. However, his theory can also be a useful rhetorical model to explain hypertext as a language event that relies on nested dialogues of visible text and invisible scripting. Moreover, Burke's belief that the purpose of discourse is to share knowledge with others provides a striking parallel to Vannevar Bush's original theory about hypertext. Even Burke's metaphor of a drama fits the purpose and process of hypertext.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Organizations such as universities and corporations are increasingly using electronic text media such as electronic mail and conferencing systems to communicate with associates. However, technical communicators currently have no rhetorical strategies to deal with these new and unfamiliar media; they must generate new strategies to communicate and persuade through electronic text. This paper discusses the characteristics of electronic text that call for new rhetorical strategies, examines how users function rhetorically in the new media, and outlines several strategies that technical communicators can use when communicating through electronic text.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Many authorities have come to recognize the critical importance of the Greek notion of kairos (right timing and due measure) in contemporary rhetoric. But Aristotelian scholars have generally ignored or demeaned Aristotle's use of kairos in his rhetoric, often contrasting it especially to Plato's full treatment in the Phaedrus. This lack of attention has been partially due to faulty indexes or concordances, which have recently been corrected both by Wartelle and programs like PERSEUS and IBICUS. Secondly, no one has hitherto attempted to go beyond the root kair- and examine the concept as expressed in other terms. This article will attempt to meet both of these concerns. It will first examine carefully the 16 references to kairos in the Rhetoric and show that the term is an integral element in Aristotle's own act of writing, in his concept of the pathetic argument, and in his handling of maxims and integration. There are also important passages using kairos in his treatment of style, often in conjunction with his use of the notion of propriety or fitness (to prepon). Possibly the two most important indirect uses of the concept of kairos can be seen in his definition of rhetoric and in his treatment of equity in both the Rhetoric and in the Nicomachean Ethics, probably the two most important treatments of the concept in antiquity.

Rhetorical voice is rarely discussed in business, professional, or technical communication textbooks, despite its strategic importance in aligning writer and audience so that persuasion can occur. This article identifies those aspects of the rhetorical situation that shape voice and presents a heuristic that writers can use to identify the components of voice and to construct their personae.

These notes are my recollections of a trip to see Kenneth Burke on February 19, 1993, in Andover, New Jersey, where Burke has lived for more than 70 years. The visitors were Jack Selzer, who is studying Burke's early work; Charles Mann, a longtime friend of Burke and curator of the Rare Books Room at Penn State's Pattee Library, where a substantial collection of Burke papers is housed; and Rosa Eberly, a graduate student in rhetoric at Penn State. The visitees: Burke and his friend and housekeeper, Ginnie.

Abstract: Although “community” has become an important critical concept in contemporary rhetoric, it is only implicit in ancient rhetorics. In the rhetorical thought of the sophists, Plato, and Aristotle, the polis stands as a presupposition that was both fundamental and troublesome. Various relationships between the faculty of speech and the social order are revealed in different tellings of the history of civilization by Protagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as in more formal discussions of rhetoric and politics. These ancient disagreements about the nature of community can help us reformulate the current debate between liberalism and communitarianism. A rhetorical community as a site of contention can be both pluralist and normative.

Abstract: The concem with progress and utility is shared by nineteenth-century scientists, philosophers, and rhetoricians, leading to significant correspondences among their discourses. This concern is manifest, for example, in the way in which several rhetorical treatises of the nineteenth century regard the distinction between a figure and a trope, which had been a common part of rhetorical theory since the time of Quintilian, as useless and anachronistic. By examining three nineteenth-century articulations of the justifications for erasing the trope/figure distinction from the cultural repertoire, this essay reveals structural and semantic parallels between these rhetorical treatises and the discourses of evolution and utilitarianism. Thus, the essay locates the source of the synonymity which the terms “trope” and “figure” have acquired in contemporary critical metalanguage in Victorian ideologies of progress and of the unprofitability and consequent discardability of the ancient.

Abstract: Like the Church Fathers before him, Petrarch was forced to defend secular learning against its detractors, and his defenses draw on many of the same arguments that Augustine and Jerome had used. In these defenses he blends classical rhetoric and Christian values, and his procedures also follow the traditions of classical rhetoric, relying on the epistolary form and utilizing the Ciceronian manner of debating all topics from opposite standpoints. Perhaps, however, because his indecisiveness complemented the classical rhetorical premise that many issues present many possible resolutions, Petrarch also rejects secular learning in some of his writings. His arguments are therefore conclusive only within their unique rhetorical situations.

Abstract: Gregorio Mayans y Siscar's Rhetórica (Valenda, 1757)must be regarded as a pivotal work in the evolution of eighteenthcentury Spanish rhetorical theory. Since Mayans' ideas did not appear without precedent in the Rhetórica, this article begins by tracing the development of his principles through his earlier writings about the state of discourse in Spain. A detailed analysis of the Rhetóricaitself is followed by a demonstration of how Mayans modified classical rhetoric into a rhetoricized poetics whose history became integrated into the history of Spanish literature. Thus Mayans' transformation of classical rhetoric takes its place in the development of Spanish cultural history, in which rhetoric increasingly came to be regarded as a part of the larger study of the national literature.

Business and technical communication have conventionally been separated in academe—a separation that formalist rhetorical theory has supported. Epistemic rhetorical theory, however, suggests that this separation does not reflect the profession's current understanding of workplace discourse. This article demonstrates that the labels business and technical communication are not helpful in understanding two workplace documents: a memorandum and a report. The article then explores the increased explanatory power in two epistemic theoretical approaches, social construction and paralogic hermeneutics, after which the article discusses the radical implications of these approaches for a curricular dialogue concerning workplace writing. Finally, the article describes interests inside and outside academe that preserve the status quo and thus mitigate against curricular change, positing that such change would be difficult, but not impossible, to achieve.

Recent trends in gender and writing research avoid or ignore the issue of essentialism while attempting to formulate a theory of “composing as a woman” that might rely on essentialist assumptions. Codifying the characteristics of “writing like a woman” or “writing like a man” can result in a limited—and limiting—conception of gender and its effect on writing. To illustrate this argument, this article uses as an example of I'écriture féminine the writing of Kenneth Burke and as an example of writing like a man the prose of Julia Kristeva. It argues for conceptualizing and studying gender as a secondary factor affecting writing rather than the principal factor.

Being bodies that learn language / thereby becoming wordlings-thus begins Kenneth Burke's revised definition of human beings.' Here I will suggest teachers of writing and literacy can use Burke to revise our discussion of words and thereby better empower the wordlings we teach. Traditionally, what have we taught our students about words? Probably the first place to look for the answer to this question is the site where our assertions about diction have most power: in the margins of their papers. What my students report about their revision processes matches what composition researchers report. Their primary concern (re: diction) is changing words to avoid such comments as WW, Abst, Amb, especially WW. That is the most potent lesson they have learned from their previous teachers about diction. I. A. Richards was right when he asserted that the best and most effective way to teach writing is to help students understand how words work in (8). The New Rhetoric reframes what we know about words work. It directs attention to the crucial importance of word-ing in both the psychological process of invention and the social process of discourse community.2 It can help us teach writing humanely, critically, and effectively both in the humanities and across the curriculum/'in the disciplines. Most composition textbooks use Burke, if at all, only by mentioning his Pentad. But this presentation of the Pentad is a red herring, an obeisance that allows us to deflect the rest of Burke, to put him under erasure.3 More important than any particular like the Pentad is what Burke can help us understand about language in general, rhetorical processes in particular. We should take into our classrooms Burke's insights into words work, into abstractions move minds, into contexts (especially of that rhetorically most important context called, perhaps misleadingly, audience [cf. Park]), into contradiction and into process-in short, into writing as a psycholinguistic, sociocultural process. In writing classes our discussion of words is all too often based in reductively narrow, dichotomized conceptions of style and diction. We will do well to let Burke remind us words are more important than that, to remind us wording can constitute knowledge and power. We should demonstrate to our students-while

My other self-as he might be called in a brief, ambiguous novelwas in this instance a bush pilot several hundred feet above Third Matagamon Lake, face to face with a strong winter wind. The plane was a Super Cub, scarcely large enough for the two of us. We sat in tandem and talked through an intercom. There is a lot of identification, even transformation, in the work I do-moving along from place to place, person to person, as a reporter, a writer, repeatedly trying to sense another existence and in some ways to share it. Never had that been more true than now, in part because he was sitting there with my life in his hands while placing (in another way) his life in mine. (249)

Classical practitioners of the art of rhetoric such as Demosthenes have long been a familiar part of the rhetorical tradition, but subsequent periods have generally been confined to the history of rhetorical theory, with little attention paid to political rhetoric or public discourse. We need to develop a more rhetorical perspective on the history of rhetoric to encompass rhetoric's dual nature as an intellectual discipline and a practical political art. Such a perspective would focus on the domain between the learned culture and the public experience, the domain where rhetorical theories are applied to discursive practices to formalize who can speak, how controversial issues are to be argued, and what political purposes such arguments serve. The eighteenth century is a dynamic period in the history of rhetoric precisely because the domain between the educated world and the public sphere was transformed by the expansion of the reading public.' Rhetoricians such as Hugh Blair were the first professors to lecture on modern culture because they taught students who came from the provinces of the English reading public.2 General histories of college English studies tend to ignore eighteenth-century rhetoricians in the assumption that the study of English is more or less synonymous with the study of literature (see Baldick, Graff, McMurty, and Palmer).3 We need more rhetorically oriented histories of modem cultural studies, not just because literature specialists have tacitly accepted the erasure of rhetoric from such studies, but also because the formation of disciplinary knowledge is a rhetorical process, and the domain of rhetoric is where disciplines set themselves off from related discourses and public audiences. Rhetoricians first introduced English into the university curriculum in the middle of the eighteenth century in Scotland, America, and elsewhere in the cultural provinces. All of the figures whom Howell has categorized as New rhetoricians came from outside the centers of English education, while Oxford and Cambridge

(1993). “The rhetorical situation revisited”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 30-40.

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Although “community”; is an important concept for writing, writers have been unclear about how a sense of community relates to the writing process or to the documents produced. This study reports a comparison of several technical reports showing the influences of a writer's identification with a community on features of the resulting document. Features most affected were personal and community references within the document, writer's stance toward the reader, and definition of the rhetorical problem.

In her essay "Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center," Andrea Lunsford offers a much-needed critique of the traditional "garret" and "storehouse" models for writing-center instruction, and she argues for a collaborative model in which students work together in groups to discuss, question, write, and revise. In contrast to the storehouse and garret models that reinscribe rigidly authoritarian or naively libertarian beliefs about language use, this collaborative model dramatizes the "triangulation" or "dialogism" that theorists such as Donald Davidson, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ann Berthoff place at the heart of composing: as students seek to join in a conversation that precedes and takes place around them, as they seek to understand, complicate, and communicate their perceptions with and through others. In the collaborative writing center, Lunsford writes, students learn how knowledge and reality are "mediated by or constructed through language in social use . . . the product of collaboration" (4). Through collaboration, Kenneth Bruffee writes, students come to internalize those social conversations; they develop "reflective thought" and learn to play "silently, in imagination, the parts of all the participants in the conversation" as they write and reflect (5).

If workshop time permits, presenting faculty with the theory behind the pedagogical suggestions is helpful in convincing them to adopt these techniques. One might briefly introduce the major studies of women's moral, psychological and intellectual development, as well as recent feminist epistemological theories which have begun to influence feminist compositionists. In The Reproduction of Mothering Nancy Chodorow argues that women's continuing identification with the mother makes connected, interpersonal relationships central to their sense of self and representations of their lives. Men, on the other hand, spend a great amount of psychic energy separating themselves from the mother, and a process of isolated individuation is central to their development. Similarly, Carol Gilligan maintains, in In a Different Voice, that women's morality is based on relationships and their contexts rather than adherence to abstract principles of right. In Women's Ways ofKnowing, Mary Field Belenky and her co-authors have

In classes ranging from Advanced Expository and Women and at the undergraduate level to Gender, Language, and Writing Pedagogy and Classical and Contemporary Rhetoric at the graduate level, I have invited students to imagine the possibilities for new forms of discourse, new kinds of academic essays. I do because I believe that writing classes (and the whole field of composition studies) must employ richer visions of texts and composing processes. If are to invent a truly pluralistic society, must envision a socially and politically situated view of language and the creation of texts-one that takes into account gender, race, class, sexual preference, and a host of issues that are implied by these and other cultural differences. Our language and our written texts represent our visions of our culture, and need new processes and forms if are to express ways of thinking that have been outside the dominant culture. Finally, I believe that teaching students to write involves teaching them ways to critique not only their material and their potential readers' needs, but also the rhetorical conventions that they are expected to employ within the academy. Work in composition has been expanded enormously by theories of cognitive processes, social construction, and by the uses of computers and other forms of technology, yet, as Adrienne Rich writes, we might hypothetically possess ourselves of every recognized technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary,' but not transformative (Rich 247-48). David Kaufer and Cheryl Geisler argue that freshmen composition and writing across the curriculum have remained silent about newness as a rhetorical standard, as a hallmark of literacy in a post-industrial, professional age. They do not believe that this silence can be justified on either intellectual or pragmatic grounds . (309).

When we design a course in writing, we join that debate over whether we should see individual cognition or social and cultural context as motive force in literate (Flower 282). To remind us of this debate, Linda Flower recently asked, Can we... reconcile a commitment to nurturing a personal voice, individual purpose, or an inner, self-directed process of making meaning, with rhetoric's traditional assumption that both inquiry and purpose are responses to rhetorical situations, or with more recent assertions that inquiry in writing must start with social, cultural, or political awareness? (282). Those three commitments are not really incongruous. All three can be found reconciled in advanced composition course described below. As a course built by students around individualized projects, it encourages students to apply general principles to specialized tasks. Good writers, according to Richard M. Coe, know how to apply general principles of composition to particular writing tasks and contexts (412). With so many different projects resulting from this approach, students' divergent interests must be shared in an atmosphere of collaboration. John Trimbur has stated that one of goals of collaborative learning is to replace traditional hierarchical relations of teaching and learning with practices of participatory democracy (6.11). Yet even collaborative models need to leave instructor with a certain authority. For example, James A. Reither and Douglas Vipond, whose teaching model is based on collaboration, suggest that the most powerful way to arrange this kind of situation is to organize a course so students collaboratively investigate a more or less original scholarly question or field. The teacher sets a research project or question for class, casting students as members of a research group (863). The final exam in my course acts as that long-range research project. This assignment, which is submitted to students on first day of class, summarizes

The uses of postmodern theory in rhetoric and composition studies have been the object of considerable abuse of late. Figures of some repute in the field-the likes of Maxine Hairston and Peter Elbow-as well as anonymous voices from the Burkean Parlor section of Rhetoric Review-most recently, TS, graduate student, and KF, voice speaking for a general English teacher audience (192)-have joined the chorus of protest. The charges have included willful obscurity, selfindulgence, elitism, pomposity, intellectual impoverishment, and host of related offenses. Although my name usually appears among the accused, I am sympathetic with those undergoing the difficulties of the first encounter with this discussion. (I exclude Professor Hairston in her irresponsible charge that its recent contributors in College English are low-risk Marxists who write very badly [695] and who should be banned from NCTE publications.) I experienced the same frustration when I first encountered the different but closely related language of rhetoric and composition studies some fifteen years ago. I wondered, for example, if I would ever grasp the complexities of Aristotle or Quintilian or Kenneth Burke or I. A. Richards, not to mention the new language of the writing process. A bit later I was introduced to French poststructuralism, and once again I found myself wandering in strange seas, and this time alone. In reading rhetoric, after all, I had the benefit of numerous commentators to help me along-the work of Kinneavy and Lauer and Corbett and Emig, for example. In reading Foucault and Derrida in the late seventies, on the other hand, I was largely on my own since the commentaries were as difficult as the originals, and those few that were readable were often (as even I could see) wrong. Nonetheless, with the help of informal reading groups made up of colleagues and students, I persisted in my efforts to come to terms with this difficult body of thought. I was then, as now, convinced that both rhetorical studies and postmodern speculation offered strikingly convergent and remarkably compelling visions for conducting my life as teacher and citizen. It is clear to me that rhetoric and composition studies has arrived as serious field of study because it has taken into account the best that has been thought and said about its concerns from the past and the present, and I have found that postmodern work in historical and contemporary rhetorical theory has done much to further this effort.

George A. Kennedy, trans. Aristotle: On Rhetoric (subtitled A Theory of Civic Discourse). Oxford University Press, 1991. 335 + xiii pages. The Importance of George A. Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric as a Pedagogical Tool Kennedy's Rhetoric as a Contribution to Rhetorical Theory Kennedy's Aristotle: on Rhetoric as a Work of Translation∗ James J. Murphy, ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth‐Century America. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1990. 241 + v pages. Teaching the History of Writing Instruction Thomas Miller. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 318 + viii pages. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb, eds. Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in the Postmodern Age. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. iv + 242 pages. Sandra Stotsky, ed. Connecting Civic Education and Language Education: The Contemporary Challenge. New York: Teachers College Press of Columbia University, 1991. Janis Forman, ed. New Visions of Collaborative Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1992. 200 pages. $23.50.

complex of social formations. In the field of composition and rhetoric, such systems have been described as communities. The term is useful in the theory and analysis of writing because it embraces the rhetorical concern with social interchange (discourse) and with situation or context (community). But the term can lead the analyst astray by prompting an uncritical acceptance of as a natural element or transcendental category. Because community, like discourse itself, is socially constructed-by the analyst as well as by the people who claim membership-the act of identifying communities is never innocent, never free of ideological influences. As both Lester Faigley and Joseph Harris have noted, the word community is almost always used positively, and herein lies its danger to rhetorical analysis. If the community is always good, who but the perverse could question or rebel against practices that sustain the community? However, to accept this irresistible goodness as somehow prior to discourse (above question) would amount to abandoning a key premise of rhetorical criticism-the idea of the rhetorical situation (Bitzer), which demands that the analyst acknowledge the possibility of transformation among the elements and aims of discourse, including location. In addition to changing language and changing minds, the enterprise of rhetoric suggests that speakers and writers have the power to transform the site of discourse, the community itself. In this essay I argue that as a defense against an uncritical adoption of the community concept rhetorical theory needs to keep alive competing concepts of discourse communities, so that alternatives exist in the description and analysis of discourse practices. Recent definitions of discourse communities have established a rather too-narrow foundation upon a communitarian ethic. At the present time, when liberalism's stock is down, communitarianism appears to be a strong alternative for understanding the relation of people to government and culture (Lasch). In liberalism, social organization depends upon two strong formations-the individual, who may enjoy a wide range of rights and freedoms at the possible cost of

First, I'd like to offer analysis of Halasek's and Bernard-Donals' utterances, but it may also be taken as rhetorical or tendentious characterization of them. If we begin with the two points of reference provided by our session's title, and Rhetorical Criticism, I think we can say that Halasek identifies herself as rhetorical critic or theorist who belongs to community of like-minded rhetorical critics and theorists, one that together poststructuralist thought, social constructivism, and writing and pedagogy. For them Bakhtin's vilification of is problem and his alternative rhetorical tradition is an opportunity. Halasek can summarize the Bakhtin attacks and distance herself from it as a definition of that is not ours and she can appropriate as much more congenial to herself and her fellow rhetoricians the rhetorical tradition of oppositional genres and discourse moves with which Bakhtin identifies the novel. She imagines Bakhtin's hostility to as consequence of his hostility to the official languages of Russia during his lifetime and imagines herself and her colleagues as also opposed to a of oppression but apparently not confronted with similar authoritarian political situation. Instead of identifying herself exclusively with parodic rhetoric opposed to an official monologic she posits dialogic rhetoric which can contemplate the tensions between polemic and rhetorics in the professional and pedagogical tasks of textual and cultural analysis. Bakhtin offers her better way of doing what rhetorical critics were already doing. Halasek welcomes Bakhtin's tension-filled genres and joyful relativity in prose that is relatively free from tension and clear about where it stands. She can separate Bakhtin's vilification of from his celebration of it, choose one side over the other, and even explain away Bakhtin's adherence to the side she rejects as function of his particular historical situation. She is at home with the listeners she posits and brings them Bakhtin they can use without having to change their minds about or politics. Bemard-Donals, on the other hand, writes tension-filled and ambivalent prose in the name of escaping from relativism and uncertainty. He is not at one with what he takes to be the community of contemporary rhetorical but sees it as plagued by the collapse of distinction between science and that he somehow wants to reassert He persists in commitment to theory or science or dialectic or history that he believes rhetorical critics like Fish and Rorty have subsumed under rhetoric, and he turns to Bakhtin not to assimilate him to the consensus in current rhetorical but to find way out of the impasse of current rhetorical theory. The Bakhtin he needs for his purposes is not the celebrant of parody and joyful relativity but the theorist of the socially constituted subject who can provide rhetorical criticism with scientific model for understanding how subjects are formed in language. In effect, he wants to substitute Bakhtin's sociolinguistics of the subject for the psychology of the subject Plato calls for in the Phaedrus as the scientific foundation for that could then know, as he put it in his

Public relations writing has been neglected as a research topic in professional communication. This article uses rhetorical theory from a number of fields to examine a topic of recent concern—shared, or negotiated, meaning—in relation to two very different samples of public relations writing: the public relations texts produced by political-advocacy organizations involved in the midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s and an entry from an organizational newsletter. More specifically, the article studies the role of four rhetorical elements—exophoric and intertextual references, metaphors, and narratives—in generating a shared meaning. In doing so, the article develops the thesis that narratives were particularly important to this public relations writing because they provided a comprehensive, compelling framework for belief and thus contributed greatly to the shared meaning created by writers and readers.

This article tests the value of Kenneth Burke's methodology of placing screens before seemingly unproblematic objects to reveal their complex and often contradictory natures. The scientific article reporting experimental results is explored through three such “terministic screens”—the sermon, the playscript, and the blueprint. The result tells as much about Burke as a thinker as it does about the ways of thinking about the experimental article.

Classical rhetoric's ability to inform and empower the teaching of technical writing has been for the most part ignored in technical writing textbooks. This absence is curious, given the enormous body of scholarly material affirming classical rhetoric's usefulness for that purpose. While teachers wait for textbooks with explicitly classical roots, three key concepts can provide the basic framework for incorporating classical rhetorical theory into contemporary technical writing studies.

I suspect that many people who buy sentimental greeting card verse have the same preconceived ideas about such verse that I had before I began a serious study of it a few years ago. To my mind, greeting card verse was a trite and trivial form of poetry, filled with flowery language, poetic diction, and figures of speech, appealing to emotions in excess of the occasion-artificial, affected, and insincere. To my surprise, however, I discovered that greeting card verse, although often written in meter and rhyme, is not poetry, nor is it intended to be, but a rhetorical composition, a message transmitted from one person to another. Although its rhymes and meters are frequently trite (this may account for its wholesale condemnation), the sentiments it expresses, although commonplace, are seldom trivial. It uses few figures of speech, little or no poetic diction, and almost no flowery language. Nor are its emotions in excess of the occasion. The sentiments and emotions it expresses are no different than those that you and I might express at a wedding, a graduation, an anniversary, or a birthday, or at Christmas, New Year's, or Easter-good luck, congratulations, I love you, I'm thinking of you, have a joyous holiday, and so forth. Finally, greeting card verse is neither artificial, affected, nor insincere, but straightforward, genuine, and sincere. In fact, it exemplifies beautifully an important kind of ceremonial discourse, and I can think of no better way of introducing writers to the ancient art of epideictic discourse than through a careful analysis and understanding of the rhetorical strategies used by writers of greeting card verse. Paradoxically, greeting card verse is both universal and particular. The message of greeting card verse must be general enough to fit representative rhetorical situations (Quinn 22), yet particular enough to fit immediate occasions. Like proverbs, maxims, quotations, and anecdotes, when they are decontextualized and put into collections, greeting card verse is decontextualized when it is put on racks of cards in card shops, drug stores, and supermarkets. Under appropnate circumstances, however, the person who buys greeting card verse recontextualizes it, appropriates it to his or her own intention, and sends it to someone else as a personal message. As a result, there is a dialogic relationship set up between the writer's intention and the sender's intention, between the writer's words and the sender's words. But as Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out, do not all of the

Developing alliances with industry may be one of the primary factors in creating a technical communication program that blends sound rhetorical theory and pedagogy with the discourse knowledge of technical communication practitioners. Creating an Advisory Board is one way to forge this alliance. This article describes how such a board was created, the influence it had upon program development, and the insights both industry and academia gained from this alliance. Although industry and academia are not the same, both had overlapping goals: to develop a symbiotic relationship that would provide students and faculty with the technological expertise practicing technical communicators could offer, but, at the same time, to provide a construct true to the missions of a liberal education.

Erasmus uses female persona, named Folly, to deliver his written mock-encomium The Praise of Folly, published in 1511. Critics have taken little note of her gender, however. Walter Kaiser compares her briefly to Mother Nature (94-95), while still associating her fertility connotations with the phallus. Thomas 0. Sloane refers to her in passing as a kind of muse or other traditionally female and therefore nonrational spirit (67). It does seem somewhat anachronistic and historiographically to dwell on her gender, since, as Sloane notes, female personae were common in Renaissance written orations and dialogues, and they can be traced back through medieval and classical avatars. Female fools were not uncommon, either; William Willeford suggests that Erasmus's is derived from the fool named Mother Folly who figured prominently in carnivals of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods (177). But when I read The Praise of Folly, I can't take the persona's gender for granted, especially as she's depicted in Holbein's illustrations for an early edition of the Praise: woman in fool's cap and bells and an academic gown, speaking from rostrum to an audience of men similarly attired (see Moriae 1989). I became fascinated by this image of while doing research on Erasmus for Bruce Herzberg's and my recent anthology, The Rhetorical Tradition (1990). I couldn't figure out how to get my improper interest in the female persona into this book, however, because an anthology, while of course enacting an ideological agenda through its inclusions and exclusions, must pretend that its choices are not tendentious, that they always rely on arguments already made. Foregrounding in the anthology seemed to go too far in the direction of violation of these constraints of the anthology genre-or at least, so I was informed by my co-author and many of the readers thanked in our Preface, so I bowed to consensus. Now, however, I would like to elaborate the argument I wished had already been made, view that unabashedly articulates Erasmus and with postmodern feminist concerns. I'd like to explore the possibility that the persona of the female fool may have interesting implications for post-modern rhetors, particularly those of us who wish to espouse left-oriented or liberatory political values. My paper, therefore, will have two parts. First, I will consider the implications of Folly's gender as an aid to interpreting Erasmus's mock-encomium, notoriously difficult text. In the process of explaining the interpretive problems in The Praise of Folly, I will provide sort of anatomy of skepticism which, I believe, has bearing on the post-modern situation. Then in the second part, I will try to explain my fascination with The Praise of in terms of problems confronting contemporary rhetorical studies. The problem in which I am particularly interested is that of finding compelling version of rhetorical authority from which to speak on behalf of oppressed groups in spite of the

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Sales activities have been understood by some to be negative, one-sided rhetorical encounters. Teachers of technical communication will find it more helpful to view sales proposals as aimed toward the construction and maintenance of long-term relationships, a view held by far-thinking sales professionals. Hermeneutic theory, by offering a different conceptual relationship between means and ends than even new rhetoric suggests, can help clarify the process by which ethical know-how intersects with persuasion. Consequently, it can offer technical communication instructors a valuable perspective from which to teach sales proposal writing.

Business communicators today risk legal liability as courts are increasingly holding writers and their employing organizations responsible for reasonable—although often unintended—interpretations of their routine writing. Research and pedagogy have not kept abreast of this change. Rhetorical theory, particularly a social perspective, provides a useful foundation for understanding judicial resolution of claims arising out of writing; however, theory must also account for factors not encompassed within extended audience analysis. Current texts offer general descriptions of the laws most likely to affect business writers; in addition, writing pedagogy must provide specific strategies for avoiding liability-prone prose.

It has been twenty years since Richard Young, Alton Becker and Kenneth Pike brought out their challenging and revolutionary book, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. Though cast in the mold of a rhetorical handbook, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (like many of the best rhetorical handbooks, including Aristotle's Rhetoric) attempted to do more than relay the accumulated rhetorical wisdom of its age in a predigested form suitable for students. It was an attempt to synthesize a complete rhetorical system, a system that in some ways built on and in some ways departed from the classical model. Arguing that Profound changes are taking place in the system of Western values that has for centuries guided conduct (8), Young, Becker and Pike wanted to rethink rhetoric from its foundations, using concepts borrowed from problem-solving theory, game theory, dialogic communication, linguistics, and Carl Rogers' nondirective therapy. Out of these materials they created a rhetoric that they claimed offered new goals, new ways of creating ideas, and new ways of managing the rhetor-audience relationship. I would like to focus primarily on Young, Becker and Pike's use of principles. I see this as their most interesting, possibly most enduring, and certainly most controversial contribution to modern rhetoric, a contribution that escapes the bounds of the eighteen pages in which they explicitly discuss Rogers and subtly but pervasively dominates the entire work. The propriety and the pedagogical utility of Young, Becker and Pike's Rogerian rhetoric has been debated before, by Andrea Lunsford, Diane C. Mader, and Lisa Ede among others. This debate has centered chiefly on two questions: whether rhetoric as developed by Young, Becker and Pike is genuinely different from Aristotelian rhetoric and on whether it is fair to its main source, therapy. This debate is far from trivial and it is far from closed; this article to some extent will continue it. But it is time to step back and, from our twenty-year vantage point, ask some larger questions that enclose and put into perspective these more local questions of fairness to sources. To do so, let us look at Young, Becker and Pike's version of rhetoric both in its historical context and in the context of the larger rhetorical sys-

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