Ehrlich and Fu’s main goal in co-authoring Civic Work Civic Lessons is to encourage young people to become more civically engaged, particularly in politics and public policy (in terms of genre, the book is a type of ‘how-to’ or ‘lessons-learned’ text, intended for a general, mainstream audience. It would be most useful to assign to… Continue reading Review:Thomas Ehrlich and Ernestine Fu. Civic Work Civic Lessons: Two Generations Reflect on Public Service, reviewed by Kathryn Yankura Swacha

ABSTRACTThis essay argues for the value of presence as rhetorical heuristic. Beginning with the philosophical tradition, the authors establish a long-standing interest in presence or isness, understood as the thing-itself outside subjectivity. We then trace how rhetorical theorists including Aristotle, Quintilian, and Perelman have privileged isness as a baseline for true conviction, positioning rhetoric as an effort to imitate material proofs. Such views highlight the tension between presence (things of the world in their isness) and the arts of presencing (the capacity of words and symbols to shape an isness), suggesting a generative frame for analysis. To demonstrate, we examine global migration. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented migrants, we posit that these individuals' paradoxical experiences of bodily presence but legal absence reveal a fraught interplay among rhetoric, state power, and competing notions of truth. However, immigration is only a case study; presence is a much more widely applicable heuristic.

Approximately 1.8 million students in the United States are homeschooled, according to 2012 data from the National Center for Education Statistics (Redford et al.). However, researchers have only begun to examine how these homeschooled students reflect on their own literacy development, especially once they have entered college. Using the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), I gather and analyze eighteen literacy narratives of currently and formerly homeschooled students, exploring how these students reflect on their own developing literacies, especially as they contrast their experiences with those of their traditionally-schooled classmates. The results of this study reveal, first, that these homeschoolers participate in a wide variety of literacy practices that both respond to and redefine those of the “traditional” classroom. Second, many of the narratives tend to embrace the “child prodigy” literacy structure, as identified and defined by Kara Alexander (2011) and Stephanie Paterson (2001). Third, four narratives reveal problems that can occur in homeschooling: namely, a parent-educator’s perceived lack of authority, and, in two cases, a tendency to trap students in unhealthy family environments. Despite these exceptions, most narratives reveal their family network as a place of vibrant literary sponsorship; and a few students narrate the “pedagogic violence” that may occur when they transition from this warm family environment into traditional secondary schools (Worsham 121). Overall, I argue that as participants in a non-dominant mode of education, these homeschoolers feel the need either to justify or to repudiate their literacy acquisition process against the dominant group. More quantitative research is needed to understand whether these experiences represent trends across the homeschooling movement.

Scholarship in literacy and composition studies has demonstrated the many connections between literacy education and citizenship production (e.g. Guerra, Wan). Despite often being neglected in conversations about literacy education and citizenship training, prison education programs and incarcerated students have a unique relationship to citizenship and can make an important contribution to that scholarship. By putting literacy studies in conversation with queer studies and critical prison studies, I argue that we as literacy educators and teachers can train ourselves to notice and push back against the harmful ideologies underlying the discourse around prison literacy education programs and citizenship education. This attention to language is essential because it has a material effect on the incarcerated students we teach, as well as the futures we imagine for our classes, programs, and the wider landscape of prison education.

AbstractThough rhetorical critics have been very attentive to John F. Kennedy’s rhetoric during the 1960 campaign, less attention has been paid to that of his conservative Protestant antagonists. To address the omission, this essay considers W. A. Criswell’s July 3, 1960 address, “George Truett and Religious Liberty,” portions of which were reprinted and widely distributed as a pamphlet titled Religious Freedom, the Church, the State, and Senator Kennedy. These texts, we argue, are exemplary of a larger Protestant strategy during the 1960 race. Because Kennedy’s candidacy had prompted fierce vitriol from the anti-Catholic Right, conservative Protestant leaders from across the denominational spectrum tempered their attacks so as not to alienate centrist voters. Their measured adoption of religious freedom arguments allowed them to occupy the respectable middle, assailing Kennedy’s Catholicism while parrying charges of religious bigotry. In Criswell’s rhetoric, we find a pure distillation of this strategy, identifying it as a species of respectability politics with enduring appeal—this time from the Right.

Theorizing WPA expertise as problem-oriented, stakeholder-inclusive practice, we apply the twenty-first-century paradigm of transdisciplinarity to a campus WID Initiative to read and argue that data-driven research capturing transdisciplinary WPA methods in action will allow us to better understand, represent, and leverage rhetoric-composition/writing studies’ disciplinary expertise in twenty-first-century higher education.

Proposals are ubiquitous documents with challenges beyond the writing task itself, such as project management, strategic development, and research. Reporting on proposal instruction research in other fields and the results of an interview study with proposal writers, this article argues for a shift in how proposals are taught and conceptualized. By coaching students on the wide range of rhetorical practices that proposals require rather than how to produce proposal documents, technical and professional communication instruction can better prepare future communicators to manage and produce competitive proposals and more actively participate in these important efforts in the community, industry, and academy.

Drawing on a text-based ethnography of digital writing in a biology laboratory, this article examines the text trajectory of a scientific manuscript and a scientific team’s related writing for public audiences, including for citizen scientists. Using data drawn from texts, observations, interviews, and related artifacts, the author examines how scientists conceptualize and adapt their multimodal writing for specialized scientific audiences as well as lay audiences interested in the work of scientific inquiry. Three concepts— meaning compression, meaning expansion, and meaning attention—were used to analyze the multimodal strategies that scientists employ when composing for different audiences. Findings suggest that while scientists often restrict their writing practices to meaning compression to maintain the values and conventions of scientific genres, they also sometimes deploy a wider range of multimodal strategies when writing for nonspecialist audiences. These findings underscore the complex rhetorical environments scientists navigate and the need to support emerging scientific writers’ development as versatile writers able to adapt varied multimodal strategies to diverse rhetorical and epistemic goals.

This systematic review of 46 published articles investigates the constructs employed and the meanings assigned to writing in writing-to-learn assignments given to students in science courses. Using components of assignments associated with the greatest learning gains—meaning making, clear expectations, interactive writing processes, and metacognition—this review illuminates the constructs of writing that yield conceptual learning in science. In so doing, this article also provides a framework that can be used to evaluate writing-to-learn assignments in science, and it documents a new era in research on writing to learn in science by showing the increased rigor that has characterized studies in this field during the past decade.

ABSTRACT Our post-truth condition is both specifically contemporary and as old as philosophy and rhetoric themselves. The condition is exacerbated by instantaneous worldwide communication through rapidly multiplying forms by very large numbers of people and other entities. It is also exacerbated by the belief that contemporary philosophy and intellectual opinion support a recognition that we are in a post-truth condition. Addressing our condition requires acknowledging that truth is not a theoretical object, that it is best approached not positively but rather apophatically, and that this apophatic way is practical, not theoretical.

There has been much interest recently in researching the changes editors, supervisors, and other language brokers make to the writing of L2 researchers who are attempting to publish in English. However, studies focused on the presubmission proofreading of students’ university essays are rarer. In this study of student proofreading, 14 UK university proofreaders all proofread the same authentic, low-quality master’s essay written by an L2 speaker of English to enable a comparison of interventions. Proofreaders explained their interventions by means of a talk aloud while proofreading and at a post-proofreading interview. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data reveals evidence of widely differing practices and beliefs, with the number of interventions ranging from 113 to 472. Some proofreaders intervened at the level of content, making lengthy suggestions to improve the writer’s essay structure and argumentation, while others were reluctant to do more than focus on the language. Disturbingly, some proofreaders introduced errors into the text while leaving the writer’s errors uncorrected. I conclude that the results are cause for deep concern for universities striving to formulate ethical proofreading policies.

Functional complexity is a widespread and underresearched phenomenon in Web sites. This article explores a specific case of functional complexity by analyzing the content of UNESCO World Heritage Web sites, which have to meet demands from both World Heritage and tourism perspectives. Based on a functional analysis, a content checklist was developed and used to evaluate a sample of 30 World Heritage Web sites. The results show that World Heritage Web sites generally fall short in all content categories. A cluster analysis reveals three types of World Heritage Web sites based on their emphasis on World Heritage content versus tourism content: (a) less well-developed Web sites (no emphasis), (b) Web sites of World Heritage Sites with touristic possibilities (emphasis on World Heritage), and (c) Web sites of touristic attractions with outstanding cultural or natural value (emphasis on tourism). In all, the findings show that functional complexity poses serious threats to the exhaustiveness of a Web site’s information and that evaluation approaches based on functional analysis can be useful in detecting blindspots in the content provided.

The increasing diversity of US higher education has brought greater language diversity to institutions nationwide. While writing studies researchers have increasingly paid attention to the linguistic diversity of student writers, little attention has been paid to the growing numbers of writing teachers who speak English as a second language. This article reports on a study in which we surveyed seventy-eight nonnative English-speaking instructors and conducted follow-up interviews with eleven of them. Following a presentation of the survey data and profiles of selected interviewees, we recommend ways of working with instructors and students in order to decrease language prejudices and better facilitate the professional development of nonnative English-speaking teachers in writing programs.

Based on descriptive narratives of older, homebound adults, this article articulates how holding on to literacies is a vital part of staying engaged as an older adult. It traces a parallel between the idea of aging and literacy development. Employing the concept of heritage literacy—the decision-making processes individuals use regarding whether to adopt, adapt, or alienate various literacies and technologies over time—the article theorizes more extensively the heritage literacy practice of alienation. Alienation from literacies becomes a particularly important part of our understanding of literacy development in light of widespread experiences of aging, such as when physical health, mental health and acuity, social connection, spiritual health, or maintaining independence are challenged because of age. By examining how literacy is employed in agentive and nuanced ways in the lives of homebound adults, the article shows the impact that literacy has on aging and the impact that aging has on understandings of literacy throughout the life course.

“Brandt offers writing scholars, teachers of writing, and WAC program administrators, and consultants a way to understand writing as broadly as possible as it changes in practice and evolves in theory. Writing in the workplace, and everywhere else, happens in broad contexts and has vast social implications.”

Coeditors Laurie Grobman and Deborah Mutnick seek submissions for the Fall 2018 volume of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning. Continuing a nearly 20-year history of leading writing and rhetoric’s scholarly and theoretical study of service learning, public rhetoric, community writing, civic writing, and community literacy, the journal publishes wide-ranging… Continue reading Call for Submissions Fall 2018 (Closed)

YouTube video innovations should be more widely developed and implemented because they uniquely meet the needs of today’s diverse learners.

AbstractIn 2010, LeBron James, “The Chosen One,” humiliated Northeast Ohio by announcing on nationwide television that he was leaving the Cavaliers to play for Miami. James announced his return to Cleveland four years later through an open letter that set off euphoria in the region. This essay offers a postsecular framework to explain: (1) how James’s messianic image established a context in which his departure, in tandem with the way he announced his decision, made James a “sinner” in the eyes of Cleveland fans, and (2) how his open letter adapted the parable of the Prodigal Son to depict him as the son of Northeast Ohio who had made mistakes, rather than sinned and, simultaneously, as the wise father who was forgiving of others. James portrayed his departure as a necessary step in gaining maturity, yet—much like the Prodigal Son—admitted to a revelation about his relationship with Northeast Ohio.

ABSTRACTThe enthymeme is well known in rhetorical theory as a three-part syllogism from which one premise has been elided. The enthymeme works because the listener supplies the “missing piece,” thereby participating in the very argument by which she is persuaded. This enthymeme is widely believed to derive from Aristotle, but previous scholars have shown that the “truncated syllogism” view of the enthymeme is both un-Aristotelian and impracticable. In this article, I review problems with the syllogistic enthymeme and reasons for its improbable longevity before proposing a view of the enthymeme that derives not from the syllogism but from the legal narratives produced by early Greek orators. The enthymeme is best understood not through its deductive structure, but its emplotment. This model makes sense of Aristotle's comments without relying on a discredited syllogistic frame to explain how ancient orators argued.

I revisit the so-called Illinois Decision of 1955, which eliminated basic writing from the University of Illinois Rhetoric Program and caused a chain of similar programmatic actions on other campuses nationwide. I contend that reviewing and archiving the Illinois Decision as a locally specific act with multiple actors besides WPA Charles Roberts historicizes a familiar narrative present today—namely, how WPAs address anxieties about writing in high school versus college, and how composition students and programs are beholden to ongoing institutional and extra-institutional imperatives regarding literacy and efficiency.

Claims abound about passives and the impersonal style they create. Few studies, however, check the claims with a large, systematic analysis of texts from either academia or industry. Motivated by the need to teach effective workplace writing skills to undergraduate engineering students, this study investigates the use of passives and associated impersonal style features in 170 practitioner reports, journal articles, and student reports from civil engineering. Using multidimensional analysis (a technique from corpus linguistics) and interviews of practitioners, students, and faculty, the study found that, as expected, engineering texts, compared to nontechnical texts, have a frequent use of impersonal style features; however, they use passives for a wider range of functions than is typically described in technical writing literature. Furthermore, compared to the journal articles and student reports, the practitioner reports use significantly fewer features of impersonal style. The findings inform teaching materials that present a more realistically complex picture of the language structures and functions important for civil engineering practice.

This report details the second phase of an ongoing research project investigating the visual invention and composition processes of scientific researchers. In this phase, four academic researchers completed think-aloud protocols as they composed graphics for research presentations; they also answered follow-up questions about their visual education, pedagogy, genres of practice, and interactions with publics. Results are presented first as narratives and then as topologies—visualizations of the communal beliefs, values, and norms ( topoi) that connect the individual narratives to wider community practices. Results point toward an ecological model of visual invention and composition strategies in the crafting of research graphics. They also suggest that these strategies may be underrepresented in scientists’ education. More explicit attention to them may help improve STEM visual literacy for nonexperts.

This essay reports on a writing-based formative assessment of a university-wide initiative to enhance students’ global learning. Our mixed (and unanticipated) results show the need for enhanced expertise in writing assessment as well as for sustained partnerships among diverse institutional stakeholders so that public programming—from events linked to classroom-level learning to broader cross unit mandates like accreditation—can yield more rigorous, responsive, and mixed method assessments.

This article shares findings from a qualitative study on the experiences of students with disabilities in college-level writing and writing-intensive classrooms. I argue that normative conceptions of time and production can negatively constrain student performance, and I offer the concept of crip time (borrowed from disability theorists and disability activists) as an alternative pedagogical framework.

This essay considers the importance of nonstandard English to fostering a more inclusive and incisive Shakespeare classroom. Grady focuses on his experience as the instructor of a Shakespeare course that occasionally employed African American Vernacular English in its analysis of texts. His reflection considers how taking such language seriously encourages more genuine participation from a wide range of students. While this pedagogical approach offers one manner in which the field of early modern studies might expand points of access and foster cross-cultural dialogue, it also stands to deepen the analytic possibilities of the Shakespeare classroom. Grady uses the example of African American Vernacular English to demonstrate that nonstandard English can offer particularly nuanced means through which to investigate and discuss Shakespeare's works.

The military historian Yuval Noah Harari accounts for the enduring allure of war by calling attention to a change in soldiers' memoirs that occurred in the mid-eighteenth century. Soldiers began to describe how they felt rather than what they did. Harari introduces the term flesh-witnessing to distinguish inner experience from eyewitness testimony. Flesh-witnesses speak of combat as a transformative and indescribable experience comparable to the sublime. This view is often attributed to militarists, but Harari shows that it also motivates pacifists. Even antiwar arguments like those of Erich Maria Remarque are based on the authority of the flesh-witness. To test Harari's claims, I invited ROTC officers to speak to students enrolled in a course titled British Literature: The Twentieth Century about their military experience. The juxtaposition of Harari's research and the officers' comments provided a framework for teaching All Quiet on the Western Front and other texts about war. Whether war is portrayed as painful or exhilarating, degrading or ennobling, it is widely idealized as a crucible for the development of the self. This view makes war stories irresistible, whatever political views writers and readers may hold.

Professional and technical communication increasingly involves developing narratives that traverse multiple genres, media formats, and publishing venues. In marketing and advertising, brand stories unfold across Web sites, ad campaigns, and social media properties. A fundamental challenge in such work is multigenre coordination, leading to a key question: How do professionals manage complex ecologies of genres, media content, and interactions in ways that build and sustain narrative coherence and audience engagement? Reporting findings from a study of transmedia writers, this article argues that metageneric texts may emerge as important coordinative resources for planning, developing, and tracking uptakes within multigenre narratives. It thus contributes to professional and technical communication by describing a widening gap in scholarly approaches to metagenre; arguing for empirical examinations of metageneric constructs in tangible, flexible texts that serve situated needs in given activity systems; and demonstrating how such texts may emerge and play a formidable role in coordinating contemporary, multigenre narratives.

Abstract The experiences of defeat and occupation by Germany and liberation by the Allies wrought considerable gender damage upon France during the Second World War. In this essay, I examine appropriations of “Quand Madelon,” a popular World War I song that reemerged during the early weeks of France’s liberation, arguing that these appropriations offered one discursive resource by which patriots reasserted the manly strength of their nation. By reviving old archetypal notions of eroticized, subservient femininity and tough, virile masculinity, the tunes exerted discipline over “wayward” French women and eased gendered anxieties about the nation’s ability to reclaim its status as a sovereign nation. Courting widespread favor, even among French women, the songs made this gender discipline more palatable by pairing it with visions of a sexualized, civically engaged womanhood.

Disciplinary histories of composition studies argue that the mission of communication programs shifted during World War II: from striving to democratize higher education to promoting uncritical patriotism. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) rarely figure into these histories, in part because they seldom appeared in the era’s scholarly publications. Recently digitized African American newspaper archives invite a counter narrative of wartime democratizing pedagogy. Press coverage highlights the Hampton Institute Communications Center, the most widely publicized and politicized site of literacy instruction during the war. The controversy it engendered shows Hampton and other HBCU curricula forwarding wartime literacies that constituted patriotic resistance to Jim Crow segregation.

This article discusses findings from two interconnected ethnographic studies on the out-of-school literacy practices of Black adolescent males: 18-year-old Khaleeq from the US Northeast, and 18-year-old Rendell from the US Midwest. The data analyzed derive from their engagements in nonschool, community-based, social justice initiatives that, we argue, represent rejections of deficit narratives about who they are (their racialized and gendered identities) and what they allegedly cannot do (their literacy capacities and capabilities). Utilizing a critical literacy approach that attends to out-of-school contexts, race, and counternarratives allows us to demonstrate how they questioned narratives of failure that unfairly place blame on Black youth and not on the structural inequalities endemic to US society. These narratives include (among others): the widening gap in achievement and high school graduation rates between Black and White male students in the United States; the school-to-prison pipeline and increasing drop-out and push-out rates that impact high school–aged Black males; and the overrepresentation of Black males in special education classes. Khaleeq and Rendell used literacies to question these racialized narratives and their consequences, and to produce counternarratives to negative assumptions about Black adolescents. As a result, we focus on how they cultivated their literacies, nurtured their spirits, and charted their own trajectories within community spaces when school was not enough. This analysis offers implications for how literacy practitioners and researchers can narrow the school community divide by lovingly attending to the out-of-school literacies of Black adolescents.

ABSTRACTTranshumanism that is centered on artificial intelligence shares core features with large-scale data collection and surveillance that commercial and governmental entities pursue: the idea that knowledge is informational in nature, that technologies are value neutral, and that ethical challenges can be framed in technical-procedural terms. In this article, I am mainly concerned with the latter, society-wide, manifestations of these features. Here, criticisms leading to technical-procedural changes in data practices are of limited use because they foster an illusion of foundational headway while leaving questionable assumptions about knowledge and values intact. Because what is closest is hardest to glean, we may more readily discern these assumptions if we see them operating in a milieu that is at once quite different and strikingly familiar. Ancient rhetoric manifests versions of our three factors. Plato's critique of rhetoric, along with aspects of his philosophical methodology, helps us see why we should contest increasingly prevalent views of knowledge and values—and do so before other constructions become unfathomable.

This essay describes a graduate course, The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Context, that I developed and taught in fall 2011 at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The essay was developed from an oral presentation that was part of a teaching panel at the Northeast Victorian Studies Association annual conference in the spring of 2013. The course was my final effort to “go wide” in teaching Victorian literature in its larger context, a desire that grew increasingly difficult to satisfy as the canon of Victorian literature became enlarged and thus somewhat unstable. I also wanted to organize the readings so that my students might get a sense of the literary context in which Victorian readers might have experienced the individual texts when they read them in the nineteenth century. In an effort to describe how I got to the syllabus for The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Context (included as an appendix), I give a personal sense of the history of the field of Victorian literature over the last fifty years, tracing the development of the field of English literature in general and Victorian literature in particular. I end with my evaluation of the course I developed, its strengths and its weaknesses, and what I learned from it.

This article describes graduate mentorship experiences at the Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) research center at Michigan State University and offers a stance on graduate student mentorship. It describes WIDE’s mentorship model as feminist and inclusive and as a means to invite researchers with different backgrounds to engage in knowledge-making activities and collaborate on projects. Additionally, the article explains how WIDE enables growth for its researchers, teachers, and leaders. To illustrate these ideas, the authors provide multiple perspectives across faculty mentors, former graduate students, and current graduate students in order to discuss how WIDE researchers practice mentorship and how this mentorship prepares students for future work as scholars and researchers. Finally, the article suggests ways other research centers can adapt WIDE’s approach to their own institutional context.

Neuro-realism is a widely cited concept describing a textual phenomenon in popular science news wherein brain research uncritically validates or invalidates the “realness” of particular beliefs or practices. Currently, no research on neuro-realism examines the variable rhetorical roles of such statements, that is, how they support specialized arguments or enhance social functions across genres of public communication. This article details the nuances of neuro-realism, arguing that neuro-realism is much more than a singular textual phenomenon but a flexible rhetorical vehicle manifesting in at least three forms: commonsense, judicial, and rational. Each form serves a larger argumentative purpose, and each can be consistently linked to a popular news subgenre, illuminating how neuro-realism’s stunning lack of criticality proves permissible and reproducible in popular science publications.

Those of us who teach English literature are familiar with the wide range of skills and capacities of our students. It remains a challenge, though, for English students to demonstrate the applicability of those skills beyond the academy, for instance, to prospective employers. This essay argues that creative education through experiential learning provides important opportunities for students and enhances their development as independent individuals who make their own decisions. To examine the pedagogical benefits that such learning can have in the humanities, this article draws on two extracurricular projects that we coordinate, NuSense, an undergraduate online journal, and Shakespeare after School, a community drama program for children. The skills the student volunteers draw upon to complete these projects include research, editing, writing, analysis, dramaturgy, and time management. In other words, NuSense and Shakespeare after School utilize the core skills of English studies and help students both hone and demonstrate those skills in a practical and public setting.

This article reexamines Henry’s 2006 proposal for training technical communicators as “discourse workers,” as a solution within a certain postmodern problematic, in which changing economic conditions in the late 1990s and early 2000s made workers vulnerable to exploitation, outsourcing, and layoffs. Henry used postmodern and critical theory to describe discourse as a medium of leverage for enabling workers to define new workplace agencies. Even though Henry’s discourse worker is an appealing concept buttressed by solid theory, it did not become a widely implemented model for pedagogy or workplace practice. To reexamine Henry’s concept, the authors exchange late 20th-century postmodern theory for the more recent articulation of “post-postmodern” theory proposed by Nealon and explore the implications of swapping out the postmodern puzzle piece for a post-postmodern puzzle piece in Henry’s formulation of the discourse worker.

The work of Carol Berkenkotter and others who have expanded the realm of personal narrative studies over the past several decades would not have been possible without the pioneering efforts of those who first brought the study of narrative to nonliterary discourses. By revisiting what personal narratives were to these pioneers—working outward from William Labov in particular—this article considers how the early expansion of the field helps us to understand the far wider expansion of multimodal personal narrative today. In doing so, I suggest that understanding the notion of a personal narrative requires a twofold commitment to inquiry: first, about what makes it narrative; and second, about what makes it personal. These commitments hinge on two crucial junctures, what I call the problem of scope and the problem of autonomy. Framed as questions, the former asks, When does a narrative begin and end? The latter asks, Whose narrative is it? This recuperative essay shows that the heuristics of scope and autonomy can be useful ways to think about the ongoing complexities of personal narrative and its analysis.

Applied Pedagogies: Strategies for Online Writing Instruction, edited by Daniel Ruefman and Abigail G. Scheg. Boulder: UP of Colorado for Utah State UP, 2016. Print. Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction, edited by Beth L. Hewett and Kevin Eric DePew. Fort Collins: WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press, 2015. Print. A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI) by the CCCC Committee on Best Practices for Online Writing Instruction. Conference on College Composition and Communication. Mar. 2013. Web.

Corley argues that college faculty can more effectively instruct student veterans by renewing their commitment to widely acknowledged hallmarks of excellent instruction: welcoming all students; giving clear and direct feedback; approaching self, subjects, and students with moral seriousness; teaching with integrity; relating the subject matter to everyday concerns; and holding all students to high standards. Through classroom anecdotes and descriptions of military life, Corley demonstrates numerous points of connection between military culture and the best instructional practices described.

Major trends, such as outsourcing and offshoring, and field-specific factors, such as the advent of content management systems, have fundamentally changed technical communication in recent years. These changes have been widely discussed in the literature of the field, and this article traces their impact on technical communicators in Finland, a high-cost country where downturns in the export industry and the downsizing of major employers are currently coinciding. Through the framework of activity theory, the article looks at the historical changes in the industry as sources of tension and contradictions that need to be understood in order to support professionals in the industry. With the help of interview data, the authors explore the tensions experienced by technical communication professionals in the face of such changes. This analysis leads to the formulation of a hypothesis of historical contradictions currently at play in the field of technical communication. Developmental potentials stemming from these contradictions are outlined as potential ways forward for technical communicators who notice similar tensions in their own environments.

With their timely, interactive nature and wide public access, social media have provided a new platform that empowers stakeholders and corporations to interact in crisis communication. This study investigates crisis communication strategies and stakeholders’ emotions in response to a real corporate crisis—the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214—in order to enhance our understanding of socially mediated crisis communication. The authors examine 8,530 responses from Chinese stakeholders to crisis communication on the Chinese microblogging Web site Sina Weibo. Their findings suggest that the integrated use of accommodative and defensive communication strategies in the early stage of postcrisis communication prevented escalation of the crisis.

This article describes a statewide integrated developmental and first-year writing program that uses multiple measures placement data about college readiness to inform curriculum and faculty development.

Successful research writers construct texts by taking a novel point of view toward the issues they discuss while anticipating readers’ imagined reactions to those views. This intersubjective positioning is encompassed by the term stance and, in various guises, has been a topic of interest to researchers of written communication and applied linguists for the past three decades. Recognizing that academic writing is less objective and “author evacuated” than Geertz and others once supposed, analysts have sought to identify the ways that writers use language to acknowledge and construct social relations as they negotiate agreement of their interpretations of data with readers. Despite prolonged and widespread curiosity concerning the notion of stance, however, together with an interest in the gradual evolution of research genres more generally, very little is known of how it has changed in recent years and whether such changes have occurred uniformly across disciplines. In this article we set out to explore these issues. Drawing on a corpus of 2.2 million words taken from the top five journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we seek to determine whether authorial projection has changed in academic writing over the past 50 years.

Abstract This essay investigates the authenticity of Geraldine Hoff Doyle’s widely accepted status as the model for the World War II–era “We Can Do It!” poster. After considering the rhetorical nature of the so-called woozle effect, the analysis endeavors to counter this particular woozle by plotting a reverse narrative. Taking the form of a quest that moves backward through a metaphorical forest of visual rhetoric, the essay initially traces the sources of Doyle’s tale into the recent past and, subsequently, into the original visual context. At length, it debunks Doyle’s claim while identifying Naomi Parker as a previously unknown figure in the controversy surrounding the poster.

This article explores the relationship between first-person pronoun use and “personal” writing. First, a quantitative examination of 160 papers written for a college literature class reveals how frequently students actually self-reference. Then, three categories of first-person references are developed: General Claims, Process Claims, and Personal Claims. These categories illuminate important differences in first-person pronoun use, including the degree to which each type is genuinely personal and their wide-ranging rhetorical possibilities.

Caroline Bowles's long narrative poem Ellen Fitzarthur (1820) offers a seduction tale reminiscent of Amelia Opie's The Father and Daughter (1801), tracing the seduction of a cloistered young woman by an unscrupulous military sailor taken in by Ellen's widower father after a shipwreck. Deceived by the sailor, Ellen follows him but is abandoned, pregnant, and subsequently travels home with her infant daughter, arriving repentant and exhausted at her ancestral home after a long and difficult journey. There she discovers her recently deceased father's grave, upon which she dies in shock, leaving her daughter to be taken in by the family of a villager who turns out to be Ellen's foster brother. Pairing Bowles's poem with Opie's novel allows students to explore the roles of genre (and generic conventions) in the presentation of similar tales and to examine both the technical and the aesthetic effects and consequences of authorial choices grounded in these different literary genres.

Although standard language ideologies have been well researched and theorized, the practices that lead to the reproduction and enactment of these ideologies deserve attention. Specifically, there remains a need to study language that both reveals reliance on standard language ideologies and perpetuates these ideologies within the field of writing studies, undermining the field’s efforts to challenge standard English’s ongoing privileged position. This article examines the role of language in perpetuating perceptions of standard English as linguistically neutral regardless of personal or field-wide views about linguistic equality and the value of linguistic diversity. Specifically, I describe the discursive practices of standard language ideologies—what I term standard language discourse—that allow for a positioning of standard English as normal, natural, non-interfering, and widely accessible. Finally, I explore how to resist or challenge this positioning.