Increased attention to genre in writing studies has brought a proliferation of new terms and concepts for capturing the complexity of writers’ knowledge about genres, including genre knowledge, genre awareness, recontextualization, conditional knowledge, and metacognition. Definitions of these concepts have at times conflicted, and their interrelationships are often unclear. Furthermore, scholarship has tended to overlook the role of multiple languages in writers’ genre knowledge. In this article, we first trace the use of related terminology and demonstrate the need for theoretical clarity. We then propose a theoretical framework that articulates key layers of genre knowledge and their interrelations, presuming a multilingual writer. Finally, we share examples of how this proposed framework may be used in teaching and researching genre knowledge. Ultimately, we aim to contribute to ongoing theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical explorations and applications of knowing and learning genres.

“Mifsud accomplishes the rare feat of joining a skilled historical treatment with a rich set of theoretical resonances that are widely applicable to works on other periods and topics. Moreover, she accomplishes this historicized yet generative treatment in a playful, yet learned style.”

The explosive growth in the U.S. prison and jail population over the past two decades, recently exceeding two million, has earned our country the highest imprisonment rate in the world. This increase is due in part to changes made in U.S. sentencing policy in the eighties and nineties during the height of the “War on… Continue reading Review of Inner Lives: Voices of African American Voices in Prison by Candice S. Rai

The article describes the dynamics of freshman composition classes for medium-security inmates at the Saginaw Correctional Facility which were linked to parallel classes at Saginaw Valley State University, supported by SVSU student-tutors, and enhanced by collaboratively produced publications of student writing. It presents excerpts from inmates’ essays that tell their stories, explore their relationships, and… Continue reading Do You Hear What I Hear? Voices from Prison Composition Classes by Phyllis G. Hastings with Jim Morrison

This article is a teacher narrative examining the experiences of a teacher in a correctional facility writing workshop and how those experiences led her to understand that in order to effectively teach the workshop, she had to achieve a deeper understanding of the world of the prison as well as see that the success of… Continue reading Where Lifelines Converge: Voices from the Forest Correctional Creative Writing Group by Laura Rogers

ABSTRACT The multiplicity of voices reflecting on the actual crisis shows that we are not looking at extreme dichotomies but are rather facing the coexistence of contradictory elements, or elements in tension, or a state of paradox. The essay tries to list these contradictory elements—newness or repetition? solidarity or egoism? local or global? private or public? democratic or autocratic outcome? nature or culture?—in an attempt to organize the current perplexity.

ABSTRACT The essay dramatizes the strategic movement of thinking/writing through the question “What is human?” as a series of modulations in style.

How can we nurture children’s creative ability as writers outside the academic context, celebrating their unique voices, teaching them to trust their ears and value the creative process? It can be set up simply: A group of young students in an after school center. Some adults acting as mentors to help them do creative writing.… Continue reading Merging Voices: University Students Writing with Children in a Public Housing Project by Michael John Martin

Abstract During the 1924 Democratic National Convention, Will Rogers described the party’s deliberation on Saturday as “the day when I heard the most religion preached, and the least practiced of any day in the world’s history.” The Democrats had been debating over whether to officially condemn the Ku Klux Klan in the party platform. William Jennings Bryan ended his own address offering white supremacist support with an all-too-common appeal for the party to simply “return to Jesus” rather than condemn white supremacy. Among the flurry of religious rhetoric that week, one voice surprised the delegates. Just before Bryan, one son of a Confederate officer and former mayor of the Klan stronghold, Athens, Georgia, spoke. He looked small. His voice cracked. But when he spoke outside the stereotype of a Southern politician and against the KKK, Madison Square Garden erupted with both hisses and cheers. That day Andrew Cobb Erwin gave us a model of how to resist within a politically charged religious climate.

In 1902, the congressional sub-committee on territories visited New Mexico to assess its fitness for statehood. Their subsequent report recommended against statehood, in part because too much Spanish was spoken throughout the territory. This historical moment provided a rhetorical exigency for the students at the University of New Mexico to use their student newspaper as a site for negotiating citizenship in a border space. By incorporating Spanish into their English-language newspaper, these students challenged monolingual notions of literacy and advocated for a multilingual understanding of American citizenship.

People communicate through language as well as visual embodied actions like gestures, yet audio remains the default recording technology in interview-based writing research. Given that texts and writing processes are understood to involve semiotic resources beyond language, interview talk should receive similar treatment. In this article, I synthesize research that examines how visual embodied actions reveal and construct embodied knowledge and stance, and I apply these lenses to my own study, showing how visual embodied actions are essential to understanding three writers’ experiences with particular writing styles. I conclude by discussing the benefits of videorecording for writing research, offering guidance on how video can help researchers explore the interview as a social practice, and suggesting ways to design the consent process with transparency and democratic practice in mind. Ultimately, this article serves as a guide for writing researchers who wish to challenge the audio default when conducting interviews.

This article reports on a study that explored cross-disciplinary variation in the use of metadiscourse markers in advanced-level student writing, put forward as a realistic target for novice writers. Starting from the stance and engagement categories included in Hyland’s model, we first conducted a comprehensive quantitative analysis of interactional metadiscourse across disciplines. For this analysis, we used an automated processing tool that generates quantity scores for each metadiscourse category. We then carried out a detailed qualitative analysis of selected items that contributed significantly to these category scores. The data for our analyses come from a corpus of 829 student papers from 16 different disciplines. The results showed notable differences in students’ use of metadiscourse features across academic divisions and disciplines. We suggest that this offers evidence of advanced students’ ability to express interactional strategies that are in line with disciplinary expectations. We also found, however, that disciplines that fall into the same academic division were not necessarily similar in their use of interactional metadiscourse, which calls into question the usefulness of existing disciplinary groupings. The findings of this study offer insights into how to build an appropriate writerly stance in different academic communities.

AbstractMayor Hubert Humphrey’s “Sunshine of Human Rights” address, delivered to the 1948 Democratic Convention, is universally acknowledged to be a great speech. Historians and biographers credit it as the major reason why the party adopted a strong civil rights plank and committed itself to the struggle from that point forward. Yet rhetorical critics have generally ignored the speech. In this essay, I argue the rhetorical force of the address is best explained through the concept of copia, or an abundant style. Humphrey’s rhetorical extravagance, in turn, suggests that critics ought to develop a new appreciation for this ancient rhetorical concept.

Preview this article: "Not Instruction, but Provocation": Clarity, the Divinity School Controversy, and Emerson's Rhetorical Imaginary of Provocative Obscurity, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/82/4/collegeenglish30580-1.gif

Smart home products continue to rise in popularity but have yet to achieve widespread adoption. There is little research on how the general population perceives benefits of different smart home devices beyond general surveys. Using a living laboratory of five solar houses that we equipped with a range of smart home devices, we assessed how university student residents learn about, use, and gain interest in adopting this smart home technology. Analysis of data confirms that users find lifestyle benefits to be the most important motivators for adopting smart home technology. Yet without training in using that technology, these benefits do not outweigh the risks associated with learning to operate that technology.

Drawing on public comments and drafts of an environmental impact statement, this article examines public participation in policy making via the federal Web site Regulations.gov . Aiming to be our “voice” in federal decision making, Regulations.gov encourages citizens to submit comments on proposed actions. Drawing on Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe’s “hybrid forum,” the author suggests that ethical and effective participatory policy making should be hybrid in scope, inclusion, and agency. While public participation in policy making is commonly positioned as an antidote to the crisis of trust in science, the author argues that such participation gone wrong could have off-target impacts, raising questions about the promise of Regulations.gov .

Drawing on interviews from faculty at one community college in Texas, this case study focuses on one college and the change process faculty experienced in integrating its developmental reading and writing curriculum. This study centers on the faculty perspective of policy and curriculum implementation, a voice that is often lost or underrepresented in the research literature and offers insight into how colleges can support their faculty who are responding to curricular change and/or policy mandates.

Abstract Documentary mediums have been called upon to refute denials of mass suffering throughout the twentieth century. This essay argues that refutation is a documentary impulse as definitive as the mission to amplify marginalized voices. Moreover, patterns in refuting denials of harm and moral responsibility indicate shifting conditions of public grievability. Comparing over a dozen documentaries about Prevention through Deterrence—a border control strategy nationalized under the Clinton administration—the analysis shows that migrant fatality maps and forensic lab footage not only document death but also refute commonplace denials of migrant human rights.

A limited mixed-method study revealed that students could alter written style after direct style instruction, but the effect faded quickly. Instead, students reverted to culturally structured intuition to make conscious, contrary choices. Thus, direct instruction in precise forms of style should probably yield to methods that build culturally structured intuition.

Warrior Writers: A Collection of Writing &amp; Artwork By Veterans offers a voice for soldiers speaking their truths and a rare glimpse inside their hearts and minds for the civilians who remain homeside, creating an open channel to the lesser known, (and rarely discussed), personal details of warfare through poetry, creative nonfiction, and photography. Editors&hellip; Continue reading Review: Warrior Writers: A Collection of Writing &#038; Artwork Veterans by Aleashia Walton Valentin

&#8220;Though certainly not new to human experience, President Trump’s self-epideictic does mark cultural shifts in deliberative styles and argumentative proofs that should be of interest to rhetoricians. The proliferation of self-epideictic may signal changes in how we argue public policy effectively, with a potential chilling effect on democratic deliberation.&#8221;

&#8220;In the aftermath of Minassian&#8217;s attack, women once again raised their voices. They offer insight into their experiences. They remind the commentariat that we&#8217;ve already had this conversation before, that we&#8217;ve warned about the dangers of online communities that radicalize aggrieved men and champion acts of gender violence.&#8221;

Dear Jessica, Thank you for the opportunity to read and talk to you about &#8220;Absent Voices: Rethinking &#8216;Writing Women Safe.&#8221;&#8216; One of the things I love most about your piece is how it takes the title of the journal and demonstrates reflection as a strong and extended verb / action. Link to PDF

My experiences teaching a service-learning composition class entitled Writing Women Safe that dealt with sexual violence against women point to a missing link between course content and community-based activism. Students in my all-female class wrote about and discussed the reality of rape, sometimes in the context of their own lives. However, for all the real talk&hellip; Continue reading Absent Voices: Rethinking Writing Women Safe by Jessica Restaino

In Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse, editors Richard D. Besel and Bernard K. Duffy attempt to address the oversight that most modern rhetorical scholarship focuses on the written works of environmentalists rather than their spoken words. To redress this paucity, the editors collect a series of analyses focused only&hellip; Continue reading Review: Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse by Garrett Stack

A few years ago in 2009 when Steve Parks was editor, Reflections came out with a special issue entitled Democracia, ¿pero para quien?, Democracy, but for whom?. Many scholars and teachers were inspired to use a number of articles in future research projects. That issue offered much needed research, voices, and hope for Latin@s, especially&hellip; Continue reading Editors’ Introduction by Isabel Baca &#038; Cristina Kirklighter

In 2009, Jennifer Hitchcock and her husband, Vernon Hall, traveled to Israel and the West Bank with a $600 Canon camera to find and capture the voices of Israeli and Palestinian nonviolence advocates and activists. Their objective was to challenge the dominant narratives of violence, terrorism, and oppression perpetuated by the mainstream U.S. media, and&hellip; Continue reading When the Rhetorical Situation Calls Us Out: Documenting Voices of Resistance and the Making of Dreams Deferred by Jennifer Hitchcock

In recent decades, Belfast writer Ciarán Carson has emerged as one of the most inventive of contemporary literary voices, in part for his unique style of textualizing space. Driven in some ways by the very specific technological challenges of the conflict zone of Troubles-era Belfast, Carson’s poetry and prose are marked by what we might describe as tech paranoia—but, in a constructive poetic answer, his texts create new logics for using tech materials, machines, and high-tech spaces in ways that privilege creativity. It is no coincidence, notes literary and technology theorist Katherine Hayles, that “the condition of virtuality is most pervasive and advanced” where centers of power are most concentrated and conflicted intersections most frequently occur. Carson’s oeuvre illustrates the point, employing the technology of the printed page to simulate and process the zone of conflict in new, postdigital ways. This article poses Carson’s texts as ideal for exploring issues that connect regional identities, technology, and the arts—including highly topical issues around terrorism and nationhood—that are highly relevant for contemporary students of literature.

Our mission is to provide opportunities for local communities to represent themselves by telling their stories in their own words. We document stories of local communities because we believe their voices matter in addressing issues of national and global significance. We value these stories as a way for communities to reflect upon and analyze their&hellip; Continue reading The Goals of Grassroots Publishing In the Aftermath of the Arab Spring: Updates on a Work in Progress by Stephen J. Parks

Contemporary nonprofit and governmental organizations actively mediate relationships through and compose representations of literacy initiatives and their participants’ literate abilities for multiple national and transnational audiences. Connecting Deborah Brandt’s theory of literacy sponsorship and New Literacy Studies scholars’ conceptions of literacy mediation to Bourdieu’s idea of the cultural intermediary, this article identifies critical processes of&hellip; Continue reading Literacy Intermediaries and the ‘Voices of Women’ South African National Quilt Project by Martha Webber

Using the work of Keith Gilyard (Voices of The Self) and Victor Villanueva (Bootstraps) as models for interrogating his own development as a writer of color, Cagnolatti explores the way HipHop influenced his rhetorical education in the urban and militant environment of a Los Angeles magnet high school. Through his detailed analysis of the E.M.E.R.G.E.&hellip; Continue reading Battling to be Heard by Damon Cagnolatti

This article investigates the parameters of civic engagement through digital writing. Specifically, it examines the differences between slacktivism and activism against changing citizenship styles and definitions of civic action. With the goal of rethinking the relationship between civics, digital technology, and slacktivism, it outlines a digital writing project that uses social networking technologies to enact&hellip; Continue reading Reshaping Slacktivist Rhetoric: Social Networking for Social Change by Joannah Portman-Daley

In 2009, Reflections sponsored a panel titled “De-centering Dewey,” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The following statements reflect the comments of the program participants, Ellen Cushman, Juan Guerra, and Steve Parks. A question and answer period followed these remarks, which is also reproduced below. Speaker comments have been edited for clarity. Link&hellip; Continue reading De-centering Dewey: A Dialogue by Ellen Cushman, Juan Guerra, and Steve Parks

Organized into ten chapters and an epilogue, the book focuses on recurrent themes that the research uncovered: organizations’ motivations for taking part in service learning partnerships, issues of timing, fit, management, communication and diversity. Chapters One, Ten, and the Epilogue are written by the editors, while the individual chapters are authored by the graduate students&hellip; Continue reading Review of The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning by Randy Stoecker and Elizabeth A. Tryon reviewed by Paula Mathieu

In 2008, I attended a symposium that highlighted our university’s outreach and community engagement initiatives. Sessions and exhibits ranged from promoting pesticide safety programs in Africa to local community design assistance projects. The symposium was very satisfying, but my conversations with participants often began the same way, with questions arising from my “Rhetoric and Writing”&hellip; Continue reading Review of Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric of Social Movements edited by Sharon Mckenzie Stevens and Patricia M. Malesh by Megan O’Neill Fisher

This article addresses the &#8220;problem of speaking for others&#8221; in a joint community-based research project between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Reading, Pennsylvania branch and Penn State Berks to uncover, document, and disseminate to the public African American history in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Integrating community partners&#8217; and students&#8217; voices with&hellip; Continue reading Speaking With One Another’ in Community-Based Research: (Re)Writing African American History in Berks County, Pennsylvania by Laurie Grobman

Hugh Blair’s rhetorical theory reflects the tenets of New Science, answering the call for communication as the transfer of knowledge from the composer to the audience. Reading Blair on style through the Enlightenment cognitive model of physiological psychology suggests a mutual cognitive associative model. In this model, style is essential, not ornamental, as it limits dissonance in the audience’s cognitive process through perspicuity.

In much traditional discourse on success, there is an undercurrent of objectivism. Pseudo-empirical conceptions of economic success, which grant economics an undue status as an objective metric by which to measure cultural superiority, tell the comfortable, the wealthy, and the privileged that some cultures are just better by virtue of their production. This false objectivity&hellip; Continue reading Review: Octavio Pimentel. Historias de Éxito within Mexican Communities: Silenced Voices, reviewed by Shane Teague

“Walk out, dance, rise up, and demand an end to violence,” serves as a prompt for One Billion Rising, Eve Ensler’s Global V-Day: Stop Violence Against Women Movement. One Billion Rising asks women and those who love them to gather in dance, protest, and voice in a globally staged effort to demand an end to&hellip; Continue reading One Billion Rising: Theorizing Bodies, Resistance, and Engagement in a Campus Stop Violence Against Women Movement by Barbara LeSavoy

This study examines the intersection of the “bootstraps” American Dream and the América envisioned by four first-generation U.S. Latinx sixth graders in an urban English Language Learners class. The students participated in a joint Photovoice writing and photography project about the American Dream with students from a liberal arts college and articulated the importance of&hellip; Continue reading Writing our own América: Latinx middle school students imagine their American Dreams through Photovoice by Zak K. Montgomery &#038; Serena B. O&#8217;Neil

With June Jordan’s voice lodged inside my head, I traverse history and the here and now as queer immigrant scholar/teacher of color via a transnational critical optic, alert to the ravages of power. I write using experimental form to break the hold of dominant (white) rhetorical traditions that are failing us, intertwining my words with Jordan’s words amidst ongoing assaults on our lives/imaginations.

For those of us who went to graduate school during the 1970s and 1980s, our understanding of early-modern rhetoric was shaped in large part by a preoccupation with clarifying the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. The curriculum at that time usually included a heavy dose of secondary literature by scholars in the tradition of Wilbur Samuel Howell, Karl Wallace, Douglas Ehninger, Vincent Bevilacqua, and Lloyd Bitzer. A common theme in those readings was an investment in mapping the primary texts of modern rhetorical theory against the background of metaphysics and epistemology. Occasionally, we read an essay like Walter Ong's “Ramist Method and the Commercial Mind,” which suggested a different approach to the subject. However, our interest in documenting the influence of Francis Bacon's scientific method on Joseph Priestley's theory of rhetorical invention or of explaining how George Campbell responded to David Hume's skepticism left us with little time to explore the influence of commercial culture on modern rhetorical theory—even in cases that probably should have been obvious like Adam Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres or Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric.Today, many of us who were originally trained as historians of rhetoric find ourselves surrounded by colleagues who dismiss the history of rhetoric courses as hopelessly passé. In fact, if we're honest, even for those of us who embrace the history of rhetoric as an essential component of liberal arts education, our files of lectures about the intricacies of Enlightenment rhetorical theory can seem increasingly remote and tired. As Christopher Hill once explained, every generation is faced with the task of rewriting history in its own way: “although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors” (1972, 15). The challenge facing historians of rhetoric, in other words, is this: how do we reframe Enlightenment rhetoric to reveal its relevance in our lives today?In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker suggests a “way in” to modern rhetorical theory that is likely to resonate with many twenty-first-century readers. Instead of approaching Enlightenment rhetoric as a reaction to modern theories of metaphysics and epistemology, Longaker reconfigures the subject around compelling problems of economics and ethics. For example, in an age of free-market capitalism and consumer culture, what is the moral grounding for our obligation to transparency and honesty in our rhetorical transactions? When attempting to flourish in an economic system that gives its highest rewards to self-interested instrumentalism and greed, is it still possible to cultivate a sense of altruism, honor, or loyalty toward others? And, furthermore, as we find ourselves inhabiting an increasingly privatized, competitive, and commercialized “marketplace of ideas,” how do we reconcile the values of free speech with the values of rhetorical decorum and politeness? For anyone who worries about the practical fallout of these sorts of questions, Longaker provides a compelling reminder that “our age is not exceptional. From its seventeenth-century financial beginning through its nineteenth-century industrial episode to its twenty-first century digital projection, capitalism has been thoroughly rhetorical” (11). In expanding upon this claim, Longaker proceeds recursively in relation to four case studies: John Locke on clarity, Adam Smith on probity, Hugh Blair on moderation, and Herbert Spencer on economy.Chapter 1 examines John Locke's obsession with discursive clarity and its role in commercial contracts. Traditional readings of book 3 of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (the treatment of the “abuses of words” and the remedies for those abuses) tend to place a heavy emphasis on Locke's relationship to British empirical sciences as inspired by his involvement with the Royal Society of London for the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge. While this focus on epistemology and scientific inquiry did obviously play an important role in Locke's analysis of the subject, Longaker advises historians of rhetoric that there is more to the story. His close reading of the Essay makes clear that Locke's attacks on sophistry and rhetoric are unusually vitriolic and inconsistent with other statements Locke made about the significance of verbal imprecision in the sciences. If we pay attention to the evolution of early drafts of Locke's Essay and if we read the Essay against the background of Locke's other writings on issues having to do with economics and business finance, we begin to realize that his frequent allusions to the relationship between argument and commerce and his analogies between sophistry and financial dishonesty are not just stylistic embellishments. Longaker explains that Locke's rule about linguistic propriety “is not just a stylistic guideline, nor is it principally a political suggestion. Locke believed that propriety in currency and language preserves commercial stability, since propriety depends on consent, and consent to a common medium permits financial and conversational exchange” (22). Longaker examines Locke's conception of an ethical obligation to propriety in commercial interactions. He then explains how Locke's requirement for clarity and his rule against disputation were implicated not only in his theory of natural law and social contract theory, but also in his analysis of misrepresentation in financial contracts. Longaker concludes the chapter with a survey of Locke's writings on education. He demonstrates how Locke's writings emphasized a “rhetorical pedagogy of clarity” (37) as an essential component in the education of the new merchant classes.In chapter 2, Longaker turns to Adam Smith's analysis of sincerity and probity. He begins by reviewing the common assumption that Smith's version of free-market capitalism transforms all goods and services into commodities, such that the value of bourgeois virtue is defined as a transactional calculation of prudence. As Smith said in The Wealth of Nations (1776), “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the baker, or the brewer that we expect [their probity]… but from their regard to their own interest” (Smith quoted by Longaker 44). That is to say, any claims about moral obligation within a capitalist system appear to be grounded in a claim to expedience—protecting one's reputation in the marketplace (in the short term, and also in the long term). However, as Longaker explains, this common interpretation of Smith is faulty. The interpretation persists because key passages have been read out of context. A more robust reading of Smith would strive to examine these passages against the background of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1762), and Smith's lectures on jurisprudence (c. 1754–1764). Longaker succinctly summarizes his survey of this literature by asserting that Smith did not, in fact, define probity as merely a “ruthless calculation of interest”: “Honesty may be prudent, and the prudent man may be honest, but he is not honest because he is prudent. Probity comes from a felt sense of right, which leads to an honest rhetorical style” (44). Longaker devotes most of chapter 2 to unpacking these claims—and, more generally, to explaining the recurring problem in Enlightenment ethics regarding the relationships between instrumental reason, moral feeling, habit, and ethical character. Longaker explains how Smith posited the psychological mechanism of fellow feeling or sympathy as the basis for capitalism's “two legal pillars,” property and contract (56–57). The capacity for sympathy can only be cultivated through the exercise of imagination—not through reason. With Smith, we see the beginnings of a decline in classical invention and the rise of aesthetics and belletristic criticism as dominating forces in rhetorical pedagogy. Longaker concludes the chapter with an examination of Smith's efforts “at promoting rhetorical criticism of imaginative literature to illustrate how he wanted students to study, discern, and produce honest discourse in the free arenas of civil society: the literary salon, the commodities exchange, and the rhetoric classroom” (44).Longaker presents Locke and Smith as having been generally optimistic about capitalism as a force for social improvement. Capitalism promotes rhetorical virtue in the sense that clarity is a necessary condition for meeting the obligations of financial contracts. Further, a felt sense of sympathy and of sincerity is an essential condition for becoming an effective participant in the marketplace. Later writers, however, became increasingly cynical about the relationship between virtue and commerce. Virtue and commerce “seemed sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory forces.” This ambivalence prompted the question, “Did capitalism make people good, or did good people make commerce possible?” (74). In chapter 3, Longaker takes this question as the starting point for his analysis of Hugh Blair. Conceding that Blair was not a systematic or consistent thinker, Longaker brings a sense of order to his analysis by focusing on Blair's participation in a debate among eighteenth-century intellectuals regarding the vice of licentiousness and the corrupting influence of material luxuries. Reviewing statements by writers such as Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Daniel Defoe, Longaker asserts that Blair's most important contribution to the “luxury debates” was the “bourgeois virtue of moderation” which would provide “a ballast to right a commercial ship listing toward overconsumption” (79). Specifically, “Christian morals and republican virtue teach good habits of moderate consumption and personal savings, habits that support commerce by ensuring reinvestment and by preventing overconsumption” (74). In his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Blair gave his students a guide to rhetorical moderation by crafting a synthesis between Locke's demand for verbal clarity and Smith's celebration of sentimental figures (88).In chapter 4, Longaker turns to Herbert Spencer as “the proper inheritor of the British Enlightenment's integration of ethics, economics, and style” but who, in the end, tracked the “decline and fall of rhetorical style and bourgeois virtue” (101). Spencer's essay “The Philosophy of Style” (1852) is usually remembered for its treatment of language as a source of “friction” which hinders the “machinery” of the human intellect: “the more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will that idea be conceived” (Spencer quoted by Longaker 102). This famous description of the “economics of style” grew out of Spencer's work in industrial engineering and his analysis of the need for efficient communication within large corporations. But Longaker claims that this is actually the least interesting feature of Spencer's analysis of style: “More interesting and more important is Spencer's adherence to the British Enlightenment faith that rhetorical style can facilitate sympathy; will ameliorate humanity, and must advance commerce” (103). This optimism that permeated Spencer's rhetorical economics was a product of his belief in the Enlightenment's theory of historical progress. He believed in the power of capitalism—not so much as an artificial creation of human beings but as a divinely ordained necessity in human evolution. Over time, however, Spencer learned to distinguish biological evolution from social evolution. In the process, according to Longaker, he became increasingly skeptical about the role and significance of individual agency. Ultimately, Spencer's fascination with the mechanisms of a deterministic evolution led him to turn away from rhetorical education and from the imaginative arts all together. As Longaker explains, Spencer “lost faith in the individual's ability to purposefully cultivate bourgeois virtue” (123).The narrative arc of Longaker's survey is clear and perspicacious. Although he examines a limited number of canonical texts in Enlightenment rhetorical theory, by shifting the frame of analysis from epistemology to economics, he succeeds in uncovering in those familiar texts many original and compelling insights. If there is any criticism one might offer, it is that, at times, the narrative is too neat and too economical. Longaker focuses so scrupulously on a progression of ideas that he sometimes neglects complicating issues that—on closer examination—may also turn out to be relevant. For example, he devotes little attention to the influence of the classical traditions of invention and argument on Enlightenment rhetoric. However, one can't help but be curious about how classical notions of scientific discovery and rhetorical advocacy were reconciled with Adam Smith's theory of economic growth in commercial society—which depends on the division of labor and specialization in the labor force (including both physical and intellectual labor). Although it may have distracted from Longaker's central interest by drawing us back to the more familiar grounds of rhetoric and epistemology, the tendency toward intellectual fragmentation—which undermines modern usage of the classical topoi—does seem to be important to any discussion of rhetorical pedagogy and bourgeois ethics. So, for instance, by ending his narrative with Spencer, Longaker overlooks other writers (John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Alexander Bain, and John Ruskin, for example) who were preoccupied with responding to Smith's division of labor because of its dangerously dehumanizing implications. The project of reframing public discourse—and specifically, of reframing public argument—in a way that would secure social justice as a constraining value to commercial culture became pervasive to nineteenth-century ethics and economics.Longaker's “rebranding” of Hugh Blair as a “moderate man” who “taught bourgeois virtue to offset the vice of luxury and to prevent the corruption of commerce” (98) is an intriguing claim. But for those of us who are accustomed to reading Blair's lectures against the backdrop of neo-classical rhetoric and eighteenth-century classical education, the argument is not entirely convincing. For example, dating at least to Charles Rollin's The Ancient History (1729), Greek history had been a stage for attacking the commercial decadence of Athenian “popular culture” and for defending an elite “high culture.” Blair's disdain for disputation and for popular oratory and his endorsement of polite belles lettres reenacted a standard trope in eighteenth-century debates about class and economic stratification. Longaker's interpretation of Blair might be more convincing had he acknowledged this historical context—or at least provided greater attention to the way Blair's notion of belles lettres would be mobilized as a class marker.Finally, it is surprising that Longaker grants Richard Whately only a brief reference in his text. Whately was, after all, a major force in nineteenth-century British interpretation of rhetoric and of political economy. A prolific writer, he offered commentary on diverse subjects that seem directly relevant to the question of bourgeois virtue: tolerance and partisanship, charity and covetousness, luxury, argumentative clarity and consistency, humility and moral judgment, and the relationship between reason and passion in persuasive discourse. Granted, any careful examination of Whately on rhetoric, economics, and ethics, would easily fill a book by itself. Still, one suspects that by adding someone like Whately to this discussion the project might have gained an extra level of depth and nuance.Despite these minor disappointments, the bottom line is that Longaker's work stands as essential reading for anyone who is interested in the relationship between rhetoric and economics. In fact, for all of us who face the prospect of spending the remainder of our careers responding to the consequences of a collective investment in Trumpean economics—and at a time in which the Supreme Court has declared that “money is speech”—Longaker's analysis gives us ample motivation to rethink our assumptions about the relevance of Enlightenment rhetorical theory to our twenty-first-century predicament. John Locke, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Herbert Spencer each grappled with moral problems that are surprisingly similar to problems we face today. Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue may not provide a comprehensive study of the subject, but it is an impressive point of entry that is likely to inspire compelling research for the future.

Oral presentations are a common genre in technical and business communication courses. While it is important for students to develop a professional ethos when presenting information, in this article I argue that textbooks’ discussion of professional dress and voice privilege cisgendered bodies and erase the differences and bodily experiences that transgendered individuals face. This may cause dissonance in trans students who may come to believe that they must choose between their genders and being professional.

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.

A team from the University of Dayton, consisting of undergraduate students, a faculty facilitator, and practitioner partners, conducted an innovative oral history project documenting the experiences of ordinary people who lived through the unrest following Michael Brown’s death in 2014. The Moral Courage Project, as it was called, sought to investigate the spectrum of stories&hellip; Continue reading Listening to Ferguson Voices, Finding the Courage to Resist by Joel R. Pruce

Activists and change agents have long used all of the tools and resources available to them to accomplish their goals: they’ve used their voices (rallies, canvassing, lobbying politicians, even talking with friends about causes near to their heart); the written word (letters to the editor, posters, flyers, and community newspapers/zines); their bodies (strikes, marches, sit-ins,&hellip; Continue reading Teaching with Vision, Teaching Social Action: An Interview with Dr. Kristie Fleckenstein by Lauri B. Goodling

Scholarship in community writing and service-learning has called attention to the lack of community partner voices in the assessments of writing partnerships. This article foregrounds those missing perspectives by reporting on the consequences of a community literacy program, Writing for Change, from the perspective of the high school youth involved. Analysis of high school student&hellip; Continue reading What Changes When We “Write for Change?”: Considering the Consequences of a High School-University Writing Partnership by Heather Lindemann &#038; Justin Lohr