Book Reviews 439 collection. Edward Harris argues that, unlike tragedy, Athenian oratory avoided the excessive expression of emotions and other histrionics because it would distract from the legal issues. Drawing on Aristotle's distinction between poetry and oratory, Harris claims that the numerous examples of emoting in the court were exceptions, rather than examples, of typical court­ room behavior. Jon Hall uses evidence from Cicero's letters and other sour­ ces to argue that judicial proceedings in the Late Republic were far more interactive and even chaotic than their modern British and American coun­ terparts. Because judges were selected publicly and were frequently wellknown politicians, they could use their service on the court to advance their own political interests. The final section, "Language and Style," also contains three chapters. Chris Carey argues that Aeschines uses a series of antitheses to cast Timarchus as feminized, depraved, and anti-democratic. He conflates Timarchus's appearance with his actions, a full-body assault that moves beyond narrative and becomes a reality seen and enacted. In contrast, Aeschines characterizes himself as metrios and a model of sophrosyne, like Solon. Konstantinos Kapparis analyzes the corpus of Apollodoros for perfor­ mance elements, arguing that Apollodoros uses vivid narrative as well as direct and indirect speech to create psychologically complex personae and to bring the action before the mind's eyes of the jurors. Finally, Alessandro Vatri uses syntax analysis to distinguish between Antiphon's forensic speeches, written for delivery, and his Tetralogies, written for publication. While the Tetralogies tend to have the more complex structures expected of a logographic text, the performed texts feature semantic ambiguities that gestures and other paralinguistic features would have clarified. Due to the broad range of topics covered in this book, more questions and ambiguities are raised than answers given. Interestingly, several chap­ ters use similar pieces of evidence to come up with opposite conclusions (Harris and Kremmydas) or to cast light on two sides of the same perfor­ mance context (Clark and Hall). While no doubt many readers will only read selections based on their research interests, the collection as a whole provides a thought-provoking roadmap of the current state of the question and indicates several intriguing avenues of future research. Hilary J. C. Lehmann Knox College Fabio Roscalla, Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile. Pavia: Pavia University Press, 2017, 130 pp. ISBN: 9788869520457 Nel corso degli ultimi anni la categoria deWeikos e stata oggetto di un crescente, giustificato, interesse. Il recente libro di Fabio Roscalla (d ora in poi R.), che viene ad arricchire ulteriormente il dibattito relativo alYeikos, si segnala per due tratti peculiari: 1) la serrata analisi testuale dei contesti 440 RHETORICA d'occorrenza del termine; 2) il zcorto circuited che viene proposto tra due ambiti apparentemente molto distanti tra loro, e non solo per ragioni cronologiche : il tribunale attico del V e IV secolo a.C. e l'oratoria cristiana dei primi secoli della nostra era. Per anticipare le conclusioni, si pud senza dubbio affermare che le analisi proposte dall'autore permettono al lettore di farsi un'idea particolarmente approfondita dell'intricato complesso di ques­ tion! sollevato dalla nozione di eikos. Da questo punto di vista, quindi, pur rifuggendo volontariamente dall'intenzione di fornire «una nuova riconsiderazione generate delYeikos» (p. 1), esse vi contribuiscono, sia pure indirettamente , mostrando come questa nozione generate si vada articolando nella dimensione concreta e variegata dei suoi usi. Non essendo naturalmente possibile ripercorrere la minuziosa disamina testuale svolta da R., mi limitero ad evidenziare, per ciascuno dei due capitoli in cui e diviso il libro, uno tra i possibili fili conduttori in grado di rendere conto della ricchezza degli spunti che esso offre. Il primo capitolo e dedicato all'oratoria ateniese e, dopo alcune considerazioni introduttive, prende le mosse da una delle piu note orazioni lisiane, la Contro Eratostene, che ha come oggetto «un evento centrale della recente storia ateniese, su cui il dibattito doveva essere ancora aperto e acceso», cosicche «Eeikos diventa [. . .] in mancanza di testimoni diretti, lo strumento di persuasione privilegiato in possesso dell'oratore» (p. 7). E' quindi particolarmente interessante osservare che in questo contesto la nozione di eikos serve non solo ad indicare una categoria...

This study asks whether grammatical and mechanical errors bother business professionals, which of these types of errors are most bothersome, and whether such errors affect perceptions of the writer and their ethos. We administered a 17-question survey to roughly 100 business professionals whose roles are not primarily writing and communication within organizations. The findings show that business professionals are bothered by these errors and that the level of bothersomeness has increased from previous studies. Additionally, the findings show that participants have clear views of writers who make errors and that the context of the error matters. The authors conclude by offering implications for technical and professional communication.

As you well know, the milieu is a notion that only appears in biology with Lamarck. However, it is a notion that already existed in physics…. What is the milieu? It is what is needed to account for action at a distance of one body on another. It is therefore the medium of an action and element in which it circulates.—Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 11 January 1978It's really hard to feel like you're saving the world when you are watching Netflix from your couch. But if we do this right nothing happens. Yeah. A successful shelter in place means you're going to feel like it was all for nothing. And you'd be right, because nothing means nothing happened to your family.—Emily Landon, MD, University of Chicago, 20 March 2020The choice of the new word indicates that everybody knows that something new and decisive has happened, whereas its ensuing use, the identification of the new and specific phenomena with something familiar and rather general, indicated unwillingness to admit that anything out of the ordinary has happened at all.—Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics” In the midst of … what?In the midst of that which does not (yet) have a singular let alone accepted name (coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, pathology, pandemic, crisis, lockdown, depression, emergency), and so in the midst of something that recalls a poignant 1918 letter from Madrid, published in JAMA, “telling our friends how we had the … the…. What should we call what we had been having?” What to call, how to refer, what to grasp—all open questions, in a milieu in which so very much is happening inside and outside what is and is not happening.In the midst of what is wholly and no longer new, whether in the change of name from 2019 novel coronavirus to COVID-19, long weeks of sheltering in place, anxious and ambiguous lockdown, or harrowing work on the floor of the ward, warehouse, and grocery. And yet what is not new is hardly familiar. There is not yet a shared vocabulary, let alone stable topoi or a reliable grammar. What's between us are pieces of discourse and discourses in pieces. What circulates are fragments, along with so many clichés peddled by PR firms (how many times can one hear, “In these [insert adjective here] times …”?), even as the truth of the cliché is a felt need to “reach for ways of thinking and speaking that are easily recognizable” (Düttmann 2020), not least in the name of thin solidarities that sound Orwellian notes (e.g., #AloneTogether) and fail to consider what the moment defies. There is no adequate account, meaningful response, or right word, all the more so as what must be said cannot be said in one breath, in that very expression that has become so uncertain, so explicit.In the midst of the contingent, as the commons are empty and fraught, as there are basic questions, perhaps the most basic questions, as to how to discern and decide, how to assess, blame, and respond, how to understand and judge, the line between necessity and possibility appears, blurs, reappears, blurs again. But contingency does not reign, at least for long. Finitude is being allocated—decisively and not infrequently by default. Consider the influential guidelines published by the Italian Society of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care on 16 March: “As an extension of the principle of proportionality of care, allocation in a context of serious shortage of healthcare resources, we must aim at guaranteeing intensive treatments to patients with greater chances of therapeutic success. Therefore it is a matter of favoring the ‘greatest life expectancy.’ … This means, not necessarily having to follow a criterion for access to intensive care like ‘first come, first serve’” (Vergano et al. 2020, 3). Of course, as a matter of course, this is but one of the rations, so many of which are covered by the façade of “the virus does not discriminate,” a podium-spoken truism that cannot hide the fact that the dice were already loaded. In the midst of disproportionate death, undue sacrifice, and the lived reality (e.g., three-mile-long food lines) of alphabet soup economic recovery (will the other curve be a U, V, W, or L?), who is to say who draws the lines, makes the cuts, and parcels relief (as one searches through Rawls looking for a meaningful word about words)? And as these actions take shape in words, when and how are they said? Under what conditions can they (not) be heard?In the midst of an exceptional onslaught, an emergency that leads some to speak of battle and others to speak of care, all in the swirl of political leaders demonstrating better and worse understandings of executive power (compare, for instance, Mr. Trump's bleach-drinking “sarcasm” with President Ramaphosa's thoughtful though certainly not uncontroversial concern), while packs of journalists pretend to be epidemiologists from their Zoom-readied “studies,” and pundits proclaim certainty in the name of folding every question back into their account of the culture war. If the “normality” of emergency has become perhaps too familiar, not least in the pages of “theory,” it may now admit to new scrutiny, as big tech enters into surveillance agreements with government, as lockdown is granted presumption, and as nations close borders (African Union 2020), all in the face of an invisible dispersion, a movement of contagion from cases to clusters to communities to states, a movement whose existence is denied (implausibly) at cost.This special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric took shape in the midst of what may well prove to be some of the COVID-19 pandemic's earlier and yet perhaps decisive days. Each of the issue's remarkable contributions grapples with this uneven, frantic, and wholly uncertain turn. Each essay poses fundamental questions and takes up multiple and often competing concerns. These are not then works that strive for the last word. In some distinction to the “plague tracts” of old, these essays compose and constitute a proper beginning, a set of provisional and experimental disclosures that forgo certain conclusions in favor of imaginative and critical insight. Indeed, the pages that follow are both chronicle and guiding light, an inquiry into key rhetorical-philosophical questions provoked by COVID-19 and close reflection on theoretical, conceptual, and practical problems that must be figured into—and which indeed work to figure—responses to the pandemic and its aftermath. Unfolding within a number of idioms and a variety of gestures, this work holds a number of crucial debates, not least whether the pandemic amounts to a common experience and how it troubles the commonplace and the exception(al), perhaps in ways that upset the very taking place of language. One can hear sadness across these pages, as well as anger. And one can hear a certain quietude, a notable reserve about the meaning of the pandemic for the future of higher education—this question is close by and pressing, in a way that may deserve separate and dedicated attention, perhaps sooner rather than later.To be sure, this issue of the journal was not planned, or at least it was not planned in any traditional way. From within and looking a bit beyond P&R's specific interdisciplinary concern, it began with the wager that this is not a moment for humanities-based inquiry to take its (given) time or demand (social, or social-scientific) distance. Such inquiry must appear and work in the midst, perhaps not as so much (often functionalist) “activism,” but as a dedicated and tireless concern for grasping and grappling with what is now (not) happening, its conditions, meanings, and values. Part of this task may be that we need to hear one of Hippocrates's aphorisms anew: “Life is short, the Art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.” If so, this will be shared work, a portion of which begins here. And indeed, this issue of the journal is the product of a remarkable collaboration, a collective effort to write in the midst of distraction, difficulty, and pain and a commitment to break the schedule in the name of publishing at speed (we hope that you will excuse whatever typos slipped through in the push). I am sincerely grateful to all of the contributing authors, and to the staff at Penn State University Press, especially Diana Pesek, Jessica Karp, and Joseph Dahm. It is an honor to work with each of you.

This article introduces a Special Issue that gathers a collection of effective tools to promote the teaching and learning of writing in school-aged and university students, across varied contexts. The authors present the theoretical rationale and technical specificities of writing tools aimed at enhancing writing processes (e.g., spelling, revising) and/or at providing writers with automated feedback to improve the implementation of those processes. The tools are described in detail, along with empirical data on their effectiveness in improving one or more aspects of writing. All articles conclude by indicating future directions for further developing and evaluating the tools. This Special Issue represents an important contribution to the field of technology-based writing instruction, in a moment in which online teaching and learning tools have shifted from being an instructional asset to a necessity. We hope that in the future the validation of each tool can be expanded by reaching out to different populations and cultural contexts.

The interest in computer-assisted interventions to promote literacy has increased over the years. In this study, we developed the Portuguese version of the GraphoGame Fluent and tested its effects on reading, spelling, and phonological awareness. Second graders struggling to read were randomly assigned to two groups: GraphoGame Fluent group (n = 15), which received a computer-assisted remedial reading intervention, or GraphoGame Math group (n = 15), which received a computer-assisted numeracy intervention. An additional, non-playing group, composed by second graders without reading difficulties, was formed (business-as-usual group, n = 15). Results showed clear benefits of GraphoGame on spelling and phonological awareness. After the intervention and one month later, the GraphoGame Fluent group displayed spelling and phonological awareness skills similar to the business-as-usual group, and above the GraphoGame Math group. Overall, these findings indicate that Portuguese struggling readers benefit from computer-assisted interventions that combine letter-sound correspondences with more complex orthographic patterns.

It is widely assumed that by identifying spelling errors and suggesting replacement words, spellcheck allows writers to revise spelling errors even if they do not have the necessary spelling knowledge. However, there have been no studies evaluating the efficacy of modern spellcheck tools for students with spelling difficulties, such as dyslexia. In fact, the very limited and dated research into use of spellcheck by writers with dyslexia indicated that, even when using spellcheck to revise spelling errors, this group left many misspellings in their texts. The current study is the first to investigate whether a modern spellcheck program allows college students with dyslexia to produce texts that are as free from misspellings as texts by their peers, and whether this affects the quality of the text in other ways.College students with dyslexia (n=18) and a control group of peers (n=18) wrote two short essays using Microsoft Word, one with spellcheck active and one without spellcheck active. Spelling accuracy and overall quality of the texts were measured. Without spellcheck, students with dyslexia made more misspellings than the control group, however, with spellcheck active students from both groups left almost zero misspelled words in their texts. Text quality was not affected. Results demonstrate that spellcheck helps college students with dyslexia to overcome the limitations that poor spelling knowledge imposes. Importantly, results indicate that spellcheck does not lead to improvements in text beyond spelling accuracy, or lead to poorer quality texts, indicating that it is suitable for use in exam conditions.

The presence of a singular rhetorical figure, the dialogismos, in Charisius' Ars grammatica, in Iulius Ruphinianus' De figuris and in some exegetical notes by Donatus to Terence, yields the opportunity to reflect on the mutual influences between rhetoric and grammar in the textbooks of the Late Empire. A mediating role seems to be played by the Progymnasmata.

This paper provides an overview of how analyses of linguistic features in writing samples provide a greater understanding of predictions of both text quality and writer development and links between language features within texts. Specifically, this paper provides an overview of how language features found in text can predict human judgements of writing proficiency and changes in writing levels in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. The goal is to provide a better understanding of how language features in text produced by writers may influence writing quality and growth. The overview will focus on three main linguistic construct (lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and text cohesion) and their interactions with quality and growth in general. The paper will also problematize previous research in terms of context, individual differences, and reproducibility

It has been suggested that students experience more autonomy in the feedback process when they communicate feedback preferences to their teacher or peers. However, little is known about what kinds of feedback students request when given this autonomy. Furthermore, when student writers supply feedback requests, it is unknown to what extent readers act in accordance with such feedback requests while providing feedback. In this study, Japanese university students made feedback requests to teacher and peer reviewers, and I evaluated the feedback requests and the feedback subsequently received. The findings indicate that the most common feedback requests were about the content and successful communication of ideas. The next most common requests concerned grammar and vocabulary, and the least prioritized requests involved organization and academic style. When students requested feedback on content, grammar, and academic style, readers increased feedback on those areas; however, feedback on other areas correlated weakly with the requests given.

Error correction for English language learners’ (ELL) writing has long been debated in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). Some researchers say that marking all errors in students’ papers with written corrective feedback (WCF) is not manageable, while others think it is manageable. This study examines the manageability of the innovative dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF) strategy, which has a more comprehensive approach to error feedback, and asks what factors influence the manageability of the strategy (including how long marking sessions take on average) and what suggestions experienced teachers who use DWCF have. The strategy has shown to be highly effective in previous studies, but its manageability has been questionable. A qualitative analysis of the manageability of DWCF was conducted via interviews of experienced teachers that have used DWCF and the authors’ experiences and reflections using the strategy. The results indicate that this strategy can be manageable with some possible adaptions while avoiding common pitfalls.

The presence of a singular rhetorical figure, the dialogismos, in Charisius’ Ars grammatica, in Iulius Ruphinianus’ De figuris and in some exegetical notes by Donatus to Terence, yields the opportunity to reflect on the mutual influences between rhetoric and grammar in the textbooks of the Late Empire. A mediating role seems to be played by the Progymnasmata.

This paper argues that Elizabethan handbooks on poetics enact two coevolving traditions in the history of rhetoric and poetics: one sees poetry as a rhetorical art of stylistic invention, while the other sees it as an object of study, analysis, and ethical training. To show this, I examine George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy and contrast it with William Scott’s recently discovered Model of Poesy. Puttenham demonstrates how poetic style works as a tool of rhetorical invention; Scott, on the other hand, treats poetics as a method of literary critical analysis. Scott’s poetics, I argue, is derived from a “paideutic” tradition, the aims of which mirror those found in educational treatises that concern the hermeneutic training students received in English grammar schools. Puttenham, writing for courtiers, instead makes a case for poetics as a means of rhetorical adaptation at court—his handbook, in short, shows poetry to be a rhetorical and pragmatic art of verbal performance that exists outside the schoolroom.

This study investigated how English as a Second Language (ESL) writers perceive their use of Grammarly , an online grammar checker, in relation to face-to-face tutoring at the writing center. Forty-three (N= 43) international ESL writers studying at universities in the United States participated in an anonymous online survey. Mixed methods were employed to examine participants’ perceptions of Grammarly and face-to-face tutoring at the writing center respectively as well as their perceptions of Grammarly in relation to face-to-face tutoring. Results rendered from descriptive analysis of the data revealed: 1) participants perceived both services with advantages and limitations; 2) participants used Grammarly more frequently than visiting the writing center, while they used face-to-face tutoring for a wider variety of purposes compared to Grammarly ; 3) participants reported a both/and approach toward these two writing resources and used them to meet different needs in different contexts. Implications were offered for ESL writers, instructors, writing center tutors, and Grammarly program developers.

Current composition practice relies on a decades-old summary of research concluding that a focus on grammar in students’ writing is useless, or even harmful. Conversely, hundreds of recent studies from the fields of second-language writing and applied linguistics claim to provide evidence of the benefits to providing feedback on grammar in students’ writing. This article summarizes the arguments for and against such feedback and problematizes the results of previous research by describing a quasi-experimental study measuring the effects, both positive and negative, of providing students with grammar feedback on their writing. Results show that, while feedback on specific grammatical forms improved participants’ accuracy on those forms, it also led to decreased accuracy on other forms related to but not the focus of instruction. Furthermore, the control group’s accuracy equaled or surpassed that of the two feedback groups.

This paper reports beliefs and preferences of second-language (L2) students regarding effective writing feedback strategies, especially conferences for oral and written feedback. Guiding the study were these questions: 1) Do L2 university students prefer to receive direct or indirect teacher feedback on written-language problems? 2) Do the students prefer to receive (a) written feedback (WF) only or (b) oral feedback (OF) in one-on-one conferences as well as WF? 3) In the case of 2(b), do the students prefer to receive OF during or after WF? The study employed mixed methods involving quantitative surveys of 30 Canadian university students from two English for academic purposes (EAP) writing classes and qualitative interviews with 11 of those surveyed. Results demonstrate that the students preferred direct feedback more on grammar, vocabulary, register, and clear expressions than on spelling, punctuation, and mechanics. They also preferred direct feedback more at the course beginning than at the end. More importantly, the students preferred coursework-based conferencing (Eckstein, 2013), particularly simultaneous oral-written feedback (SOWF), a conferencing format that allows students and teachers to negotiate and dialogue while teachers mark assignments. This paper details the reasons for student preferences and discusses the advantages and feasibility of a simultaneous oral-written feedback approach (SOWFA).

The purpose of the present study is to examine the resources for responding to grammatical issues in student writing that are available to writing teachers. The study analyzes two sets of data: (a) the position statements issued by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Council of Writing Program Administrators, and the National Council of Teachers of English, and (b) the best-selling writing-teacher preparation materials. The results are discussed through the theoretical lens of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) in order to portray how the field of composition studies—as a community of practice— models responding to linguistically diverse students, whether L1, L2, or international students. The results show that the expectations set by position statements are not met by writing-teacher preparation materials. Thus, teachers are lacking resources to know how to respond to students’ grammar rhetorically in the context of writing. Based on these findings, I discuss implications for responding practices and propose future avenues for research on preparing teachers to respond to student writing.

This paper extends our research into a novel Story-Writing-Coding engine, where Primary School children produce animated stories through writing computer code. We first discuss the theoretical basis of our engine design, drawing on Systemic Functional Grammar, embodied cognition and perceived animacy. This design aims to help children draw on the appearances of characters, props and scenery to evoke linguistic constructs leading to the emergence of stories. The second part of this paper reports on an empirical study where we aim to answer two research questions. First can compositions so produced be seen as valid compositions? To answer this question we conducted a linguistic analysis of coded stories and those written in an English classroom, and also using teacher ratings of these stories. Results indicate that while there are no significant linguistic differences between coded and English stories, coded stories are impoverished and should be seen as a first-draft to be revised in the English classroom. The second question was to probe our observation that while coding, children spontaneously told stories. Here we draw upon theories of embodied cognition and of perceived animacy. Our analysis suggests that these theories, taken together, help to explain the spontaneous emergence of stories.

This study introduces GAMET, which was developed to help writing researchers examine the types and percentages of structural and mechanical errors in texts. GAMET is a desktop application that expands LanguageTool v3.2 through a user-friendly, graphic user interface that affords the automatic assessment of writing samples for structural and mechanical errors. GAMET is freely available, works on a variety of operating systems, affords document batch processing, and groups errors into a number of structural and mechanical error categories. This study also tests LanguageTool’s validity using hand-coded assessment for accuracy and meaningfulness on first language (L1) and second language (L2) writing corpora. The study also examines how well LanguageTool replicates human coding of structural and mechanical errors in an L1 corpus as well as assesses associations between GAMET and human ratings of essay quality. Results indicate that LanguageTool can be used to successful locate errors within text. However, while the accuracy of LanguageTool is high, the recall of errors is low, especially in terms of punctuation errors. Nevertheless, the errors coded by LanguageTool show significant correlations with human ratings of writing and grammar and mechanics errors. Overall, the results indicate that while LanguageTool fails to flag a number of errors, the errors flagged provide an accurate profile of the structural and mechanical errors made by writers.

This essay analyzes the grammar of military graffiti in Nigeria to uncover the mindless posture with which the military deploys it to assert their power, identity, and temporal orientations in ways that not only subvert and shame a minority group and its belief systems, but also expose the brutal and liminal conditions of the state agents. This analysis extends studies of state graffiti by framing the multifold grammatical components as rhetorical acts of domination.

This study examined multiple measures of written expression as predictors of narrative writing performance for 362 students in grades 4 through 6. Each student wrote a fictional narrative in response to a title prompt that was evaluated using a levels of language framework targeting productivity, accuracy, and complexity at the word, sentence, and discourse levels. Grade-related differences were found for all of the word-level and most of the discourse-level variables examined, but for only one sentence-level variable (punctuation accuracy). The discourse-level variables of text productivity, narrativity, and process use, the sentence-level variables of grammatical correctness and punctuation accuracy, and the word-level variables of spelling/capitalization accuracy, lexical productivity, and handwriting style were significant predictors of narrative quality. Most of the same variables that predicted story quality differentiated good and poor narrative writers, except punctuation accuracy and narrativity, and variables associated with word and sentence complexity also helped distinguish narrative writing ability. The findings imply that a combination of indices from across all levels of language production are most useful for differentiating writers and their writing. The authors suggest researchers and educators consider levels of language measures such as those used in this study in their evaluations of writing performance, as a number of them are fairly easy to calculate and are not plagued by subjective judgments endemic to most writing quality rubrics.

This article examines a manageable approach that provides students with significant opportunities to write and improve their writing over time in an introductory quantitative business course. The study examines six elements of written communication skills, as evidenced by assessment data from memorandum assignments administered following pedagogical interventions throughout the semester in an operations management course. Results demonstrate that student performance of audience identification, action-oriented request, and punctuation improved. Interestingly, student performance of grammar slightly decreased. A follow-up analysis indicates that some writing mistakes were related to a lack of proofreading. This article also presents original memorandum assignments and suggestions for improvement.

Numerous studies have examined the relationship between lexical features of students’ compositions and judgements of text quality. However, the degree to which teachers’ judgements are influenced by the quality of vocabulary in students’ essays with regard to their assessment of other textual characteristics is relatively unexplored. This experimental study investigates the influence of lexical features on teachers’ judgements of English as a second language (ESL) argumentative essays. Using analytic and holistic rating scales, English pre-service teachers (N = 37) in Switzerland assessed four essays of different proficiency levels in which the levels of lexical diversity and sophistication had been experimentally varied. Coh-Metrix software was used to manipulate the level of lexical diversity, as measured by MTLD and D, and the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (TAALES) software was used to obtain differing levels of lexical sophistication, as measured by word range. The results suggested that texts with greater lexical diversity and sophistication were assessed more positively concerning their overall quality as well as the analytic criteria ‘grammar’ and ‘frame of essay’. The implications of this study for classroom practice and teacher education are discussed.

We investigated the perception and recognition of errors in a population of practitioners and academics in professional and technical communication. Specifically, we measured 303 participants’ botheration levels of 24 usage errors and then correlated those results against their ability to recognize the errors. Results indicated that practitioners were often more bothered by errors than academics and that participants’ overall botheration level might have fluctuated over the past 40 years. Participants’ botheration level also appeared to associate with their ability to identify error. Finally, we found that participants’ gender, job type, and years working in the field influence their error perception.

This research explores a presumed link between today’s use of digital media and an ever-increasing lack of rhetorical awareness in students. Specifically, the study pilots a method for measuring rhetorical awareness through students’ e-mail transactions with faculty in technical writing service courses, questioning whether rhetorical awareness has decreased in the preceding 10 years. The findings indicate that students might be more rhetorically aware today than they were 10 years ago, but levels remain below expectations.

A growing body of scholarship in the field of writing research from a cognitive perspective suggests that girls tend to outperform boys in particular writing tasks. Still, our understanding about gender differences continues to evolve. The present study specifically focused on gender differences in writing between students from Grade 4 to Grade 9. We examined differences in handwriting and self-efficacy, as well as in three measures of written composition across two genres (viz., spelling, text length, and text quality in stories and opinion essays). Moreover, we tested whether there were differences in written composition above and beyond handwriting and self-efficacy. Findings suggest that girls consistently outperformed boys in handwriting, self-efficacy, spelling, text length, and text quality. These effects were moderated by neither students’ grade nor text genre. In addition, after accounting for handwriting and self-efficacy, females still performed better than males in the three measures of written composition. Overall, findings confirmed the gender difference typically found in writing and indicated that potential explanatory variables for it may be handwriting and self-efficacy.

This study aims to explore the process of reading during writing. More specifically, it investigates whether a combination of keystroke logging data and eye tracking data yields a better understanding of cognitive processes underlying fluent and nonfluent text production. First, a technical procedure describes how writing process data from the keystroke logging program Inputlog are merged with reading process data from the Tobii TX300 eye tracker. Next, a theoretical schema on reading during writing is presented, which served as a basis for the observation context we created for our experiment. This schema was tested by observing 24 university students in professional communication (skilled writers) who typed short sentences that were manipulated to elicit fluent or nonfluent writing. The experimental sentences were organized into four different conditions, aiming at (a) fluent writing, (b) reflection about correct spelling of homophone verbs, (c) local revision, and (d) global revision. Results showed that it is possible to manipulate degrees of nonfluent writing in terms of time on task and percentage of nonfluent key transitions. However, reading behavior was affected only for the conditions that explicitly required revision. This suggests that nonfluent writing does not always affect the reading behavior, supporting the parallel and cascading processing hypothesis.

The purpose of this article is to examine the metatheoretical differences that impact how runningrecords and miscue analysis differ in (a) the quantification of readers’ produced responses totext and (b) the analysis of oral reading behaviors. After providing historical and metatheoretical overviews of both procedures, we present the data source, which included 74 records of oral readings from an extant data set collected from an informal reading inventory. Each record was coded using running record and miscue analysis procedures. We used inferential statistics to examine relationships across conceptually similar items of analysis (for example, the number oferrors or miscues). Findings from the inferential statistics show that there were significant, positive correlations between three of the five conceptually similar items, and a lack of statistically significant correlations between the use of meaning and grammar between running records and miscue analysis. Based on the findings, we argue that both procedures, which are often confused and conflated, possess metatheoretical differences that influence how oral reading behaviors are interpreted. These differences, in turn, impact how reading ability is framed and socially constructed. We conclude with the significance of this research for education professionals.

This client project is a culminating assignment in an upper-level professional writing course designed to help students understand the nature of audience-based writing in an unfamiliar writing context. The specific task is for students to revise a substantial section of the university *Faculty Policies and Procedures Manual*. Students researched their audience, analyzed samples of university manuals at other higher education institutions, exercised document design strategies, and practiced syntax revision during the project, ultimately presenting a sample of their work to faculty for feedback. Employing design workshop strategies, this assignment requires students to interview faculty in order to understand multiple users' experiences of the university Faculty Policies and Procedures Manual. In addition, an essential component for student learning in this course is reflection. This reflection is centered on the rhetorical situation of using and revising genres (Devitt, 2009) in the context of a professional environment (Clark, 2005; Kain & Wardle, 2005) in order that students avoid perceiving the class as a march through memos, reports, and emails as static formats (Miller, 1984). This project engages students independently, as they are responsible for their own revisions of 30 pages, while class time is used collaboratively on learning new ways of viewing the document's potential and the genre's function.

324 RHETORICA claim that "Despite his ambivalence with regard to rhetoric, Milton remain­ ed loyal in many respects to the tradition of the rhetoric handbooks, of Wilson, Peacham and Puttenham, on which he and his generation, in educa­ tional terms, were raised" (29), a claim repeated in various ways through­ out. I can think of no reason whatsoever to assume that Milton depended on English vernacular summaries of classical rhetoric unless it be that Lynch is relying on an outdated narrative about English Renaissance rhetoric. In reality, these English vernacular texts were so meagerly published as to make virtually no contribution to early education; neither were these texts included in any university curricula (Green 74-76). This is not to say that Lynch's 27-page bibliography does not already include many of the author­ itative texts for her discussion, yet other texts are missing, such as recent work on Milton and rhetoric by William Pallister and James Egan or Stephen B. Dobranski's magisterial summary of earlier Samson Agonistes criticism. But one might work forever to produce the perfect book. In the one that we have here, Lynch makes some original contributions to various conversations. Historians of rhetoric with an interest in her topics or period may well find in her text some new directions for those conversations. Stephen B. Dobranski, A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: Volume 3, Samson Agonistes, intro. Archie Burnett, ed. P. J. Klemp (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009). James Egan, "Oratory and Animadversion: Rhetorical Signatures in Milton's Pam­ phlets of 1649," Rhetorica 27 (2009): 189-217. James Egan, "Rhetoric and Poetic in Milton's Polemics of 1659-60," Rhetorica 31 (2013): 73-110. Lawrence D. Green, “Grammatica Movet: Renaissance Grammar Books and Elocutio," in Peter L. Oesterreich and Thomas O. Sloane, eds., Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour or Heinrich F. Plett (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 73-115. William Pallister, Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Jameela Lares The University of Southern Mississippi L écriture des traités de rhétorique des origines à la Renaissance, textes édités par Sophie Conte et Sandrine Dubel, Ausonius, Scripta Antiqua 87, Bordeaux 2016, 241 pages. ISBN: 9782356131614 Ce livre, qui rassemble 11 contributions, traite un sujet qui est souvent abordé dans les ouvrages sur la rhétorique de manière indirecte ou margi­ nale . 1 écriture des traités de rhétorique, c'est-à-dire leur forme et leur style. Reviews 325 L idée majeure est qu il y a à la fois homologie entre le fond et la forme et contamination de la forme par le fond. Posée au début de Pouvrage avec une citation de Boileau - traducteur et éditeur du Traité du sublime au XVIIe siècle . « Souvent il fait la figure qu'il enseigne et, en parlant du sublime, il est lui-même très sublime », cette idée se décline sur différents plans : la composition des traités, leur mode d énonciation, les métaphores récurren­ tes, la place des citations et des exemples. Sont pris en compte à la fois les traités grecs et les traités latins, l'ordre suivi étant l'ordre chronologique, avec successivement des articles sur la Rhétorique à Alexandre, Démétrios (le Pseudo-Démétrios de Phalère), la Rhétorique à Hérennius, le De oratore de Cicéron, Denys d'Halicarnasse, le Traité du sublime, Quintilien, Fronton, les Progymnasmata d'Aphthonios, Martianus Capella, et enfin, sur un plan un peu différent et en guise d'ouverture finale, des traités de poétique de la Renaissance. Il y a nécessairement des manques, comme Isocrate, Aristote ou les autres traités de Cicéron, mais ces textes sont pris en compte à propos d'autres traités ; et surtout, l'introduction générale y pallie en présentant l'ensemble de la production rhétorique. Notons que la bibliographie, pré­ sentée à la fin de chaque article, est à jour et véritablement multilingue. L'Introduction, due à Sophie Conte, est...

This preliminary study examines the rating behavior of five composition and five ESL writing teachers while evaluating a text from a university-level non-native (L2) English speaking student. Using an eye tracker, we measured raters’ dwell times and reading behaviors across four areas of interest—rhetoric, organization, vocabulary, and grammar. Results indicate that raters with differing disciplinary backgrounds read the text differently. L2 writing teachers tended to spend more time on and re-read the rhetorical, lexical, and grammatical features of the text while skipping over more of the grammar errors, while composition teachers read the text more deliberately. The findings suggest L2 writing teachers were more prone to skim and scan for information on which to base a grade while composition teachers delayed rating decisions until after reviewing the entire text, which is corroborated in previous research. These findings can expand our understanding of how disciplinary background can influence rating processes, which can inform rater training procedures, especially in disciplinary writing contexts where L2 writing is judged by individuals with and without expertise in composition or second language writing. Moreover, it demonstrates the utility of eye-tracking methods to examine the cognitive processes associated with reading and scoring student writing.

The purpose of the present study was to examine students’ metaknowledge of Procedural Knowledge (effective writing procedures) and Declarative Knowledge (knowledge of the characteristics of effective writing) with community college students through two open-response questions. Additionally, we examined common patterns of writing metaknowledge among responses to determine how these impacted their writing, utilizing the results from Coh-Metrix analyses of their writing samples. A total of 249 students from a large community college in Southwestern United States participated in the study.Analysis of their results showed participants reported commonly acknowledged ideas regarding metaknoweldge of effective writing in terms of Procedural and Declarative knowledge. Students focused on goal setting/planning, establishing purpose, writing, and revising when discussing Procedural Knowledge of writing and clarity, audience, grammar, and spelling when discussing Declarative Knowledge. A Latent Class Analysis (LCA) of a smaller group, consisting of 146 L1 English students, showed that students’ responses regarding Procedural and Declarative Knowledge did not significantly affect written performance, leading us to question students’ consistent application or understanding of writing metaknowledge. Instructional implications include encouraging students to examine their metaknowledge of writing and how it directly relates to the written product, to identify misuse or misconceptions and focus instruction.

Reviews 437 dianoia (thought) in the Poetics where Aristotle assigns it to his Rhetoric, even though, Bialostosky observes, it occupies, at best, an inferred presence in that work (138). Performing a close and careful rereading of both texts, Bialos­ tosky concludes that Aristotle's assigning of dianoia to the Rhetoric is evidence of what Bakhtin calls a "hidden polemic" Aristotle conducts with a sophisticinspired "poetics of the utterance" that pre-dated both of these works. This line of argument ultimately leads Bialostosky to something of an unexpected reversal. Where he had earlier argued for a separate discipline, or "art of dialogics," he now perceives that art as but one of many that can be "responsive to the predisciplinary scene of action" (146). Drawing upon the architectonics of Bakhtin's early works, Bialostosky now thinks it possi­ ble to "refer our sometimes calcified institutionalized disciplines at least to an imagined, reconstructed common world that preceded them and still underwrites them" (147). Such a world is inaccessible, Bialostosky argues, except through the sorts of "radical inquiries" that "Bakhtin and Heidegger undertook in the 1920s" (147). Such a world is inaccessible so long as we think of disciplines as fixed, able to stay within the boundaries drawn for them. For not only does disciplinarity exceed itself in interdisciplinarity, it also discovers a surplus in its predisciplinary origins. And it is here that Bia­ lostosky sees a particular significance for Bakhtin, whose "dialogic field of discourse [is] broader than the modem disciplines or the ancient ones of rhetoric and dialectic" (82). Heard again as a complete utterance, what questions does Bialostosky's work pose for contemporary inquiry? Does Bakhtin and Voloshinov's inter­ est in intonation, for example, bear any relevance to our interest in sonic rhetorics? Does Bakhtin's regard for the historical significance of the "per­ son-idea" connect to recent investigations into the meanings of embodi­ ment? Is the shift from epistemology to ontology, as posited by the new materialism, reflected in Bialostosky's conception of Bakhtin's architecton­ ics as predisciplinary? These questions cannot be answered here. But if Bakhtin still speaks to us, as I believe he does, then Bialostosky's essays will serve as exemplary models of how to engage Bakhtin with care, insight, and admirable rigor, and collectively, as an invitation for future dialogues. Frank Farmer University of Kansas Cinthia Gannett and John C. Brereton, eds., Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies, New York: Fordham Uni­ versity Press, 2016. 444 pp. ISBN: 9780823264537 This book contributes in welcome and valuable ways to the history of rhetoric, the history of education, and current rhetorical pedagogy. It is an 438 RHETORICA enriching read, with provocative and significant theoretical implications. These essays raise important questions concerning central disciplinary issues and make available to both theorists and teachers richly encompass­ ing and hence highly generative curricular models with wide applicability. I thoroughly enjoyed the time spent perusing these pages and have already begun to draw upon the resources herein to bolster both my own scholar­ ship and teaching. This Jesuit tradition brings into view a rhetorical para­ digm that is truly "transdisciplinary" (xv). As the editors acknowledge, the book provides the "first maps of this huge intellectual geography" (xv). Therefore, I look forward to future scholarship on Jesuit contributions to rhetorical theory and pedagogy. Following the three distinct periods of Jesuit education from its beginnings in the sixteenth-century to the present day, the book is divided into three sections: 1) studies of Jesuit rhetorical instruction from 1540, when Ignatius Loyola and friends founded the Society of Jesus, to 1773, when Jesuit education was suppressed by the pope; 2) studies of Jesuit rhetorical education from 1789, when many Jesuits moved to North Ame­ rica and established colleges and universities, to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which marked the end of the rhetoric-centered curricu­ lum in Jesuit institutions; and 3) studies of developments in rhetorical ins­ truction in United States' Jesuit higher education from the 1960s to the present. Although some description of the grammar school classroom appears in several early chapters, the primary emphasis of the book is on higher education. Each section contains a loosely...

Reviews Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 349 pp. ISBN: 9780815634454 Shannon Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. 257 pp. ISBN9781611173833 Rhetoric is an ability. So begins the blithe Englishing of Aristotle's defi­ nition of rhetoric. In early translations it appears as a faculty, following the European vernaculars and the Latin translation of Aristotle's dunamis with facultas. Yet even if this translation flattens the complex significance of Aristotle's original sense, it happily brings us within the orbit of pressing problems in our own moment. We may now pose new questions: If rhetoric insists it be thought of as an ability, how might we inflect this idée reçue of the field by thinking through the meaning of rhetoric from a position of disability? This is not a matter of simple inversion. Disability is not the opposite of ability but the suspension of the assumptions of ableism. In this sense, it is like disbelief. We say we are in a 'state of disbelief' precisely when we are presented with incontrovertible evidence that commands assent. Disability rhetoric, then, seeks to illuminate the unreflective assump­ tions and heuristics that we commonly use to make judgments concerning the conditions and abilities of others. In Disability Rhetoric and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, Jay Timothy Dolmage and Shannon Walters offer book-length elaborations of what such a rhetoric might be. The authors do not simply challenge rhetoric about disability or examine disability advocacy rhetorically, although both these aims are crucial to their projects. The authors argue that a thoroughgoing criticism of ableism requires a reexamination of rhetorical history and theory. The classical tradition's inability to think through bodily difference made it narrower than it otherwise might have been. Quintilian asserted that the limits of rhetorical education could be found in the body of the orator, "for assuredly no one can exhibit proper delivery if he lacks a memory for retaining what he has written or ready facility in uttering what he has to speak extempore, or if he has any incurable defect of utterance." Any such "extraordinary deformity of body ... cannot be remedied by any effort of art" (11.3.10). Unable to think of bodily difference as anything but deformity gave ancient rhetorical theory a Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 2, pp. 205-215. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.2.205. 206 RHETORIC A false sense of order and precision, erected upon the assumption that audience and orator could be treated as positions within a discourse rather than approa­ ched within the complexity of situated and contested embodiment. These books can be taken as complementary projects. Dolmage wishes to extend and reinterpret the repertoire and vocabulary of critical rhetoric. Walters focuses on the inventional strategies of disabled persons and their circles. This is not to say that Dolmage neglects invention or Walters criti­ cism. Disability rhetoric shows the imbrication of criticism and invention, since both rely upon practices of sensitization. We might extract six maxims to serve as guideposts for furthering this critical-inventive program. 1. Modes of communication require invention and shape meaning. The con­ stitution of communication between Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller in the now famous story of their experience at the water pump (Sullivan hand­ spelling 'water' in Keller's palm after running water over her hand, marked by Keller as her entry into language) resulted from a pragmatic awareness of possible channels of meaning-making. Walters argues that many of these possibilities reside within touch and her book serves in part as a collection of examples showing the variety and power of haptic communication. Perhaps even more importantly, a disability rhetoric would attend to the way in which the mode of communication constitutes and affects the meaning of the communication. Rather than appealing to the sensus communis...

Reviews 213 concerned primarily with prescriptive correctness. He traces pedagogies that have used these ideas at various times in western schools, but his biggest con­ tribution is examining theories that challenge this paradigm. For example, feminist stylistics, he contends, challenges the rules of convention. Pointing to the works of Cixous and Kristeva, Ray shows that textual structure and organization should be challenged as points of gendering stylistic choice. The last two chapters are on researching style and teaching style. Ray's chapter on researching style shows that there are still major gaps in the research; for instance, he notes that there have been no ethnographic studies on writing styles to date. Additionally, he describes the use of quantitative methods used to describe style, and data mining to describe stylistic featu­ res of writing. Beyond this, there are opportunities for research in rhetorical analysis, stylistics, and discourse analysis. The concluding chapter argues for better teaching strategies in the classroom. The fear is that teaching style will not liberate a curriculum but rather enslave it to prescriptive grammar study. Ray assuages these fears with suggestions for incorporating style in the classroom to develop writing, including ways in which classical rhetoric informs writing instruction in current theory. He invites interdisciplinary work in the classroom to discuss style from the perspective of various dis­ course communities enabling students to see diverse approaches to compo­ sition. Ray ends the chapter on a hopeful note: "For those teachers who adopt them, these guiding principles bring style out of the shadows of col­ lege writing classes, helping to improve students' writing while also per­ haps increasing their satisfaction in producing academic texts required for their success" (p. 219). A significant issue with Ray's book is that it does not quite live up to its lofty claim that "an in-depth, historical, and theoretical understanding of style helps teachers make writing more satisfying and relevant to stu­ dents" (p. 5). This may be true, but the topic is immense, and this is a rather slim volume. At best, Style is, as the title suggests, an introduction. The chapters do establish a framework for style, but they are not genuinely indepth discussions. However, Brian Ray's Style is an invitation for scholars to fill in those gaps, and I believe this book paves the way helpfully for future research. Robert L. Lively Arizona State University A. Pennacini, Discorsi eloquenti da Ulisse a Obama e oltre, Seconda edizione riveduta e corretta, Alessandria: Edizioni dell Orso, 2017 (I ed., 2015), 592 pp. ISBN 9788862746090. Adriano Pennacini é stato uno dei precursori, nell'universitá italiana, del tentativo di intrecciare lo studio delTantica técnica retorica con gli studi classici e con le nuove discipline della comumcazione. Presidente della 214 RHETORICA International Society for the History of Rhetoric dal 1991 al 1993, ha affidato a un corposo volume un 'eloquente' saggio del suo método di analisi della comunicazione persuasiva, che spazia dalla prima 'retorica' omerica fino a quella del (penúltimo) Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America e comprende nell'oltre del titolo un esempio della origínale eloquenza di Jorge Bergoglio, papa Francesco. Raccolte di discorsi non mancano nelle biblioteche degli studiosi di retorica. Attingendo alia rinfusa in quella personale (assolutamente parziale e selettiva), posso ricordare: F. Sallustio, Belle parole. I grandi discorsi della storia dalla Bibbia a Paperino, Milano: Bompiani 2004 (anche in questo caso, una diacronicitá quasi esaustiva); G. Pedullá (cur.), Parole al potere. Discorsi politici italiani, Milano: Rizzoli, 2011; C. Ellis, S. Drury Smith (eds.), Say it Plain. A Century of Great African American Speeches, New York-London: The New Press, 2005; C.M. Copeland, Farewell Goodspeed. The Greatest Eulogies of Our Time, New York: Harmony Books, 2003; C. Knorowski (ed.), Gettysburg Replies. The World Respond to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Guilford, Connecticut: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Raccolte importanti (e ne ho elencate davvero pochissime fra le tante circolanti nelle varié parti del mondo), che offrono testi accompagnati spesso da riflessioni e inquadramenti generali, ma che difficilmente si prefiggono e realizzano lo scopo che ha avuto in mente Pennacini nel raccogliere discorsi anti­ chi e moderni accompagnati ciascuno da prove di analisi: quello, cioé, di«mostrare la durata...

The author argues reading, hearing, and then composing musical lyrics involving grammatical concerns can help college writing students to edit more effectively for a song's grammar topic. Explaining that the songs need to offer specific advice, such as how to both spot and correct the grammatical problem, the writer offers lyrical examples and provides scholarly evidence for this approach. The essay explains what Grammar Jam is, why music can work, and how to use the tactic in the classroom.

In this project, I investigated student perceptions of dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF), a specific method of providing accuracy feedback, in developmental writing classes for multilingual students. Via a quasi-experimental design using treatment and control sections of a developmental writing program’s three levels, I collected and contrasted survey data from a total of 145 students. I then interviewed three students (one international and two generation 1.5) representing a range of perceptions of DWCF. Participants generally appreciated and valued DWCF, especially as a complement to a grammar textbook, and students of classes that used DWCF reported higher scores on most survey items, such as quality of grammar feedback and general class instruction. I also present students’ pedagogical suggestions for better integration of DWCF in writing classes.

This article reports on a study focused on understanding the relationship between teachers’ emotional responses and the larger contextual factors that shape response practices. Drawing from response and emotion scholarship, this article proposes affective tensions as a way for understanding the tug and pull that teachers experience between what they feel they should do (mostly driven from a pedagogical perspective) and what they are expected to do (mostly driven by an institutional perspective) in a contextual moment. The case study of Kim, a community college instructor, offers an analysis of two affective tensions that emerged from her think-aloud protocol (TAP): responding to grammar/sentence errors over content and responding critically to students she likes. Kim’s case reveals the underlying affective tensions between individual emotions, cultural constructions, and institutional contexts that are negotiated while she responds to student writing. This article concludes with suggestions for identifying emotions and affective tensions that both influence and paralyze writing teachers’ response practices.

Background: Over a decade ago, the Stanford Study of Writing (SSW) collected more than 15,000 writing samples from undergraduate students, but to this point the corpus has not been analyzed using computational methods. Through the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques, this study attempts to reveal underlying structures in the SSW, while at the same time developing a set of interpretable features for computationally understanding student writing. These features fall into three categories: topic-based features that reveal what students are writing about; stance-based features that reveal how students are framing their arguments; and structure-based features that reveal sentence complexity. Using these features, we are able to characterize the development of the SSW participants across four years of undergraduate study, specifically gaining insight into the different trajectories of humanities, social science, and STEM students. While the results are specific to Stanford University’s undergraduate program, they demonstrate that these three categories of features can give insight into how groups of students develop as writers.Literature Review: The Stanford Study of Writing (Lunsford et al., 2008; SSW, 2018) involved the collection of more than 15,000 writing samples from 189 students in the Stanford class of 2005. The literature surrounding the original study is largely qualitative (Fishman, Lunsford, McGregor, & Otuteye, 2005; Lunsford, 2013; Lunsford, Fishman, & Liew, 2013), so this study makes a first attempt at a quantitative analysis of the SSW. When considering the ethics of a computational approach, we find it important not to stray into the territory of writing evaluation, as purely evaluative systems have been shown to have limited instructional use in the classroom (Chen & Cheng, 2008; Weaver, 2006). Therefore, we find it important to take a descriptive, rather than evaluative approach. All of the features that we extract are both interpretable and grounded in prior research. Topic modeling has been used on undergraduate writing to improve the prediction of neuroticism and depression in college students (Resnik, Garron, & Resnik, 2013), stance markers have been used to show the development of undergraduate writers (Aull & Lancaster, 2014), and parse trees have been used to measure the syntactic complexity of student writing (Lu, 2010).Research Questions: What computational features are useful for analyzing the development of student writers? Based on these features, what insights can we gain into undergraduate writing at Stanford and similar institutions?Methodology: To extract topic features, we use LDA topic modeling (Blei, Ng, & Jordan, 2003) with Gibbs Sampling (Griffiths, 2002). To extract stance features, we replicate the stance markers approach from a past study (Aull & Lancaster, 2014). To describe sentence structure, we use parse trees generated using  Shift-Reduce dependency parsing (Sagae & Tsujii, 2008). For each parse tree, we use the tree depth and the average dependency length as heuristics for the syntactic complexity of the sentence.Results: Topic modeling was useful for sorting papers into academic disciplines, as well as for distinguishing between argumentative and personal writing. Stance markers helped us characterize the intersection between the majors that students hold and the topics that they are writing about at a given time. Parse tree complexity demonstrated differences between writing in different disciplines. In addition, we found that students of different disciplines have different syntactic features even during their first year at Stanford.Discussion: Topic modeling has given us a picture of interdisciplinary study at Stanford by showing how often students in the SSW wrote about topics outside their majors. Furthermore, studying interdisciplinary Stanford students allowed us to examine the intersection of a student’s major and current topic of writing when analyzing the other two sets of features. Stance markers in the SSW show that both field of study and topic of writing influence the ways in which students employ metadiscourse. In addition, when looking at stance across years, we see that Seniors regress towards their First-Year habits. The complexity results raise the question of whether different disciplines have different “ideal” levels of writing complexity.Conclusions: The present study yields insight into undergraduate writing at Stanford in particular. Notably, we find that students develop most as writers during their first two years and that students of different majors develop as writers in different ways. We consider our three categories of features to be useful because they were able to give us these insights into the dataset. We hope that, moving forward, educators will be able to use this kind of analysis to understand how their students are developing as writers.

This paper examines the language, literacies, communicative, and rhetorical practices of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The work pays attention to the communication practices of the BLM and Hip Hop generation in its extension of Black and African American language traditions and prior liberation movements in their unapologetic performance of Black chants, Black grammar, phonology, vocabulary, Black fashion and music, to die-ins, hands-up, and the technologization of the movement through social media, Black Twitter, hashtags, and memes. The language and literacies of the Black Lives Matter movement represent diverse identities within Black community, vernacular associated with various economic and educational classes, diaspora, culturally rooted, Hip Hop generations, cis-gendered women, men, as well as LGBTQ and gender non-conforming. In this way, the language and literacies of BLM promote the value of ALL Black lives.

This paper discusses idiomatic expressions like ‘that says it all’, ‘that says a lot’ etc. when used in presenting an argument. These expressions are instantiations of the grammatical pattern that says Q, in which Q is an indefinite quantifying expression. By making use of the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation and the linguistic theory of construction grammar it is argued that instantiations of that says Q expressing positive polarity (‘it all’, ‘everything’, ‘much’, ‘a lot’, ‘something’) can fulfil the role of an argumentation’s (explicitly expressed) linking premise. Furthermore, an analysis of these expressions as presentational devices shows that an arguer can use them for strategic reasons, i.e. to leave the exact formulation of the standpoint implicit and to present the argument as self-evident. Using these devices derails into fallaciousness when the context offers insufficient clues to reconstruct the standpoint or when the argument does not offer the kind of support that would be required by the specific instantiation of Q. The argumentative function of instantiations of that says Q expressing negative polarity (‘little’, ‘nothing’ and other denials of those expressing positive polarity) is that an antagonist can use them to attack the justificatory power of the protagonist’s argument.

This article addresses the challenge of writing instruction in a standards-based environment where students are accountable for mastering different genres and text types. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), now adopted by the majority of states in the USA, provide exemplars of successful papers in the different disciplines, but offer no guidelines for teaching, particularly to inexperienced writers or English language learners. Since a text in any genre can be developed in a limitless variety of ways, students need a methodology for analyzing effective texts, and for developing their own. This article proposes that focusing on grammatical choice offers an entry point into understanding the craft of Explanations and Arguments. To illustrate, four samples of high school writing are analyzed from the published CCSS exemplars: two Explanations and two Arguments, all with very different purposes and development. The analysis demonstrates the central role that grammar plays in constructing these differences. Specifically, the analysis focuses on information management across noun groups for the Explanations, and on verb choice and modality for the Arguments. Drawing on functional grammar insights, this article proposes a pathway for students from the analysis of model texts to the effective construction of their own.

Spelling deficiencies are becoming a growing concern among employers, but few studies have quantified this phenomenon and its impact on recruiters’ choice. This article aims to highlight the relative weight of the form (the spelling skills) in application forms, compared with the content (the level of work experience), in recruiters’ judgment during the selection process. The study asked 536 professional recruiters to evaluate different application forms. The results show that the presence of spelling errors has the same detrimental impact on the chances of being shortlisted as a lack of professional experience, and recruiters’ spelling skills also moderate their judgment.

It is established that transcription skills (handwriting and spelling) constrain children’s writing. Yet, little is known about the mechanism underlying this relationship. This study examined the mediating role of bursts and pauses on the link between transcription skills and writing fluency or text quality. For that, 174 second graders did the alphabet task and wrote a story using HandSpy. Path analyses indicated that writing fluency and text quality models were excellent descriptions of the data, with 80% and 46% of explained variance, respectively. Results showed that handwriting and spelling influenced writing fluency only indirectly via burst length and short pauses duration (full mediation); and that whereas only handwriting contributed to text quality directly, both handwriting and spelling contributed to text quality indirectly, via burst length (partial mediation). These findings suggest that better transcription skills allow students to write more words without pausing, which in turn results in more fluent and better writing.

370 RHETORICA Graban finds that she is unable to delineate Gougar's affiliations as stable and permanent because her relationships with other suffragists and politicians evolved throughout her life. And lastly, class-consciousness as the organizing topoi allows Graban to "complicate the language surrounding ... the middle class lens [typically used] to view social uplift in Gougar's work" (p. 154). In her final chapter, Graban presents more textual examples of irony through a critical frame—one from Golda Meir, prime minster of Israel, one from Madeline Albright, American diplomat, and another from Barbara Jordan, investigator of the Watergate Scandal. Although some might think Graban falls into the trap of "tokenism," whereby examples of a few stand in for all women, she works against it as she selects archives based on their ironic potential and qualities. Furthermore these archives are situated panhistorically so as not to essentialize women or their writings as representative of a specific place or time. In addition to alleged "tokenism," some might find fault with the scant textual evidence taken from Anne Askew's archive in chapter one. Yet, these critics should keep in mind the erasure of women's rhetoric throughout the Renaissance and employ their critical imagination to reconsider the potential for the evidence that does exist.2 It is also important to note that Graban not only examines textual evidence, she also employs "historical residue" as evidence—residue that includes: organizing topoi, intersecting contexts, and the positioning of audiences. Graban's scholarship resets the terms of scholarly engagement for those working in the field of rhetoric and history by resituating irony and using it to destabilize historical narratives and the ways in which these nar­ ratives are remembered. Tiffany Kinney, University of Utah, Salt Lake City Laurent Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. xiv, 166 pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-1133-2 In 1993 Pernot's highly acclaimed, two-volume work, La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain appeared. In 2012 at the meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, with ISHR sponsorship, Pernot conducted a three-day seminar on epideictic for twenty participants (among whom was the current reviewer). Using the format of the seminar but drawing content from his earlier book, Pernot has now produced a concise but 2 J. J. Royster and G. Kirsch, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 72-73. ' Reviews 371 example-packed history, analytical summary, and contextualizing assessment of the theoretical treatises and actual speeches of ancient Greco-Roman epideictic rhetoric. Two questions drive the presentation: (1) How was it that epi­ deictic, originally the minor player in the famous trio of judicial, deliberative, and epideictic, acquired the far-and-away dominant role of the three in the Imperial age? and (2), What, in fact, was that role? Through an impressive breadth and depth of reading and a precise deployment of select ancient sour­ ces, Pernot shows how "every encomium is at once a literary work, a moral problem, and a social rite" (ix). In Chapter 1, "The Unstoppable Rise of Epideictic" (1-28), Pernot surveys the meager evidence for epideictic texts from Classical Greece to Republican Rome (1-9). Epideictic was, in those centuries, something of a sidecar to the normally stand-alone two wheels of deliberative and judicial oratory. Yet, as the chapter title suggests, the epideictic sidecar will "tri­ umph" (9) in the Imperial period, and the path of that triumph is delineated in the rest of the chapter (9-23). The conclusion? The Imperial period, for the whole of that Greco-Roman world—especially in Greek—"was the begin­ ning of a new rhetorical world order, in which oratory served no longer to rip apart an adversary or to cow an assembly, but to spread honeyed praise and trumpet meritorious conduct with previously unparalleled frequency and variety" (28). Chapter 2, "The Grammar of Praise," (29-65) surveys the methods and means of epideictic in light of the teaching texts that survive, drawing espe­ cially from Menander Rhetor, but Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle are also quoted and even Aelius...

This study explored the effects of transcription on translation products and processes of adolescent students in grades 4 to 9 with and without persisting specific language disabilities in written language (SLDs-WL). To operationalize transcription ability (handwriting and spelling) and transcription mode (by pen on digital tablet or by standard US keyboard), diagnostic groups contrasting in patterns of transcription ability were compared while composing autobiographical (personal) narratives by handwriting or by keyboarding: Typically developing students (n=15), students with dyslexia (impaired word reading and spelling, n=20), and students with dysgraphia (impaired handwriting, n=19). They were compared on seven outcomes: total words composed, total composing time, words per minute, percent of spelling errors, average length of pauses, average number of pauses per minute, and average length of language bursts. They were also compared on automaticity of transcription modes-writing the alphabet from memory by handwriting or keyboarding (they could look at keys). Mixed ANOVAs yielded main effects for diagnostic group on percent of spelling errors,, words per minute, and length of language burst. Main effects for transcription modes were found for automaticity of writing modes, total words composed, words per minute, and length of language bursts; there were no significant interactions. Regardless of mode, the dyslexia group had more spelling errors, showed a slower rate of composing, and produced shorter language bursts than the typical group. The total number of words, total time composing, words composed per minute, and pauses per minute were greater for keyboarding than handwriting, but length of language bursts was greater for handwriting. Implications of these results for conceptual models of composing and educational assessment practices are discussed.