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July 2014

  1. Embroidered Feminist Rhetoric in Andrea Dezső’s<i>Lessons from My Mother</i>
    Abstract

    AbstractArtist Andrea Desző’s embroideries, inspired by the Romanian traditional sampler, belong to the material turn in cultural and feminist studies. Based on a comparison with first-wave feminist ideas in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Women and Economics, this analysis interrogates what embroidery—as a form of discourse—tells about the little-known Eastern-European woman’s condition. In the region significantly different from Western Europe in both postcolonialist and post-Marxist analyses, these artifacts reveal the ambivalent condition of women situated at the intersection of tradition, feminist thought, and Marxist practice, after Marxist-led governments had provided women with a workplace and equality, at least in theory. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAdriana Cordali GradeaAdriana Gradea is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University, specializing in rhetoric and cultural theory. She graduated from “Romulus Ladea” Visual Arts High School in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She has a BA from “Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, a Graduate Certificate in Advanced International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy, and an MA in English from Bradley University. Her research and teaching interests are in feminist and visual rhetorics, as well as Marxism, postcolonialism, and posttotalitarian approaches.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2014.917510
  2. Toward an Ethical Rhetoric of the Digital Scientific Image: Learning From the Era When Science Met Photoshop
    Abstract

    Over the past two decades, scientific editors have attempted to correct “mistaken” assumptions about scientific images and to curb unethical image-manipulation practices. Reactions to the advent and abuse of image-adjustment software (such as Adobe Photoshop) reveal the complex relations among visual representations, scientific credibility, and epistemic rhetoric. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's model of argumentation provides a flexible system for understanding these relations and for teaching students to use scientific images ethically and effectively.

    doi:10.1080/10572252.2014.914783
  3. Craft and Narrative in DIY Instructions
    Abstract

    Abstract This article examines tutorials from the Web site, Instructables.com, to highlight the rhetorical possibilities of including personal narratives in instructions. The narratives in these tutorials offer detailed accounts of their authors' experiences when constructing their projects, thereby functioning as accounts of the authors' craft knowledge. Pitched to amateur hobbyists, rather than the professional audiences of many forms of conventional technical communication, these tutorials offer new ways of teaching craft knowledge and techniques. Keywords: amateurcraftinstructionsmotivationnarrative Additional informationNotes on contributorsDerek Van Ittersum Derek Van Ittersum is an assistant professor of English at Kent State University, where he teaches in the Literacy, Rhetoric, and Social Practice graduate program. His research examines new writing technologies and innovative writing practices.

    doi:10.1080/10572252.2013.798466
  4. Supporting Fifth-Grade ELLs’ Argumentative Writing Development
    Abstract

    This article reports instruction supporting the development of fifth grade English learners’ argumentative writing in an English language arts setting. Arguments analyzed for the study were produced by the same students on two occasions, roughly 3 months apart. In the first instance, students discussed the source text in detail, but were given no genre-specific support for writing. Following professional development, the teacher introduced students to the stages, or structural elements, expected in argumentation, with genre-specific scaffolds. Classroom data illustrate how the teacher scaffolded students’ argumentative writing. Analysis of writing data identifies the text- and stage-level features of students’ responses, with particular attention paid to students’ construction of the reason stage, in which writers must explain why textual evidence supports their overall position on a question about a character or theme. Findings describe the range of responses and point to characteristics of texts and prompt that may influence children’s written argumentation.

    doi:10.1177/0741088314536524
  5. Unwelcome Stories, Identity Matters, and Strategies for Engaging in Cross-Boundary Discourses
    Abstract

    Our fields need stories that are unwelcome—stories that bother us because we have not fully embraced the notions that our identities matter in our scholarship, our teaching, and our lives. We also need to embrace the multifaceted, intersectional nature of identity, and we need new strategies for engaging in cross-boundary discourses. I offer a queer reading of the work of three African American rhetoricians to explicate three concepts that are critical for engaging in responsible cross-boundary discourse as well as three trajectories for moving forward.

    doi:10.58680/ce201425462

June 2014

  1. From Typing to Touching
    Abstract

    As Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) grow increasingly common, this article investigates what they might do with/for writing and say about the teaching of writing. Specifically, I review three NUI writing projects, critically examining the rhetorical features of the projects and investigating the relationship between NUIs and Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs). Ultimately, I argue that NUIs are not “natural” interfaces but are as historically and socially grounded as GUIs; even so, NUIs hold the potential to invigorate a critical and activities based pedagogy, placing new focus on socially constructed meanings, material interactions, and embodied performances.

    doi:10.1558/wap.v6i1.127
  2. Extreme Puppet Theater as a Tool for Writing Pedagogy at K-University Levels
    Abstract

    The pedagogical technique of “extreme puppet theater” is posited as a collaborative and novel learning tool for motivating students to study texts by creating new ones. Examples are provided of how this approach has worked in university courses in literature, composition, and creative writing. By extension, extreme puppet theater can be applied to other subjects, at all levels of academia, in order to offer an effective and engaging alternative to traditional teaching conventions.

    doi:10.1558/wap.v6i1.121
  3. A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620 by Peter Mack
    Abstract

    Reviews 317 Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380-1620 (OxfordWarburg Studies), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 345 pp ISBN: 978-0-19-959728-4 In A bdistoi i/ of Renaissance Rhetoric 2380—1620, Peter Mack expertly describes the fortunes of Renaissance rhetoric within its academic and textual settings. Rhetoric in the Renaissance was a school subject, mostly covered in the grammar schools, with secondary importance in the universities, and thousands of rhetorical textbooks from the period survive as testimony to its ascendancy within the liberal arts curriculum. With a dizzying command of technical detail, Mack has delved into this large and complex textual record and emerged with a synthesis that will be required reading for students of the subject. Beginning with a description of the most significant ancient treatises on rhetoric, followed by a chapter on the contributions of key fifteenth-century Italians (and one notable Cretan, George of Trebizond), Mack proceeds to a series of four chapters focused on teachers whose textbooks had an extraordinary impact on the theory and teaching of rhetoric in the sixteenth century: Rudolph Agricola, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Ramus. The chapter on Melanchthon, the "dominant figure" of the years 1519-45 (p. 104), is filled out with sections on his chief students and followers. The chapter on Ramus (and his associate Omer Talon) gives a useful overview of the controversy and key combatants surrounding his polarizing reforms. With helpful tables outlining the contents of their principle writings on rhetoric, Mack charts their innovative and (again in the case of Ramus) agonistic adaptations of the classical program. The first half of the book is therefore devoted to the big players in the book market for Renaissance rhetoric - those whose work best adapted the classical program to the educational needs and occasions of the humanist school. Indeed, for much of the period that Mack describes, Renaissance rhetoric was a symbiosis of two types of books on rhetoric: classical (Ciceronian) treatises and humanist manuals. For most of the sixteenth century, there is a strong correlation between the numbers of editions of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (still generally attributed to Cicero in the period) and the most popular humanist treatises (pp. 30-2). Mack explains the apparent symbiosis by noting the frequent use of humanist treatises as a preliminary study, a prologue to the study of a full-length classical treatise. But after decades of steady demand, humanist manuals and classical treatises alike suffer steep declines in production after the 1560s. The cause of the sudden decline is not clear, though Mack offers a number of suggestions: the rising fortunes of Talon's rhetoric, which was not coupled to full-length treatises; new syntheses of classical and humanist rhetoric, such as found in the popular De arte rhetorica libri tres (1562) of the Jesuit educator Cyprian Soarez; the scholastic revival of the late-sixteenth century; or even the efficiency of the second-hand book market to meet continuing demand for humanist and classical rhetorics. 318 RHETORICA Renaissance rhetoric was equally tied up with the fortunes of the liberal arts, especially logic or dialectic. It is one of the virtues of HRR 1380— 1620 that it provides through the main part of the narrative a parallel account of the fortunes of both humanist rhetoric and dialectic. Melanchthon described his textbooks on rhetoric and dialectic as companion pieces, and even Ramus, who notoriously drew a sharp distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, distributing four of the five classical offices of rhetoric between them, insisted on the necessity and complementarity of both (pp. 142-5). Both rhetoric and dialectic were combined in a very influential method of critical reading, one of the uses of Renaissance rhetoric to which Mack is especially attentive. The parallel fortunes of rhetoric and dialectic in northern Europe that Mack tells in the first half of the book are complemented, in the second half, by a chapter on the fortunes of rhetoric in southern Europe in the sixteenth-century (chapter 8), and chapters on the contemporary fortunes of specialized rhetorical treatises: manuals of tropes and figures (chapter 10), letter-writing manuals (chapter 11), preaching manuals and legal di­ alectics (chapter 12), and vernacular rhetorics (chapter 13). In...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0033
  4. Explicitly Teaching Five Technical Genres to English First-Language Adults in a Multi-Major Technical Writing Course
    Abstract

    Abstract: In this paper, I report the effects of explicitly teaching five technical genres to English first-language students enrolled in a multi-major technical writing course. Previous experimental research has demonstrated the efficacy of explicitly teaching academic writing to English first-language adults, but no comparable study on technical writing exists. I used a mixed-method approach to examine these effects, including a control-group quasi-experimental design and a qualitative analysis to more fully describe the 534 texts produced by 316 student writers. Results indicated the genre participants constructed texts demonstrating a significantly greater awareness to audience, purpose, structure, design, style, and editing than participants taught through more traditional approaches. Within the technical genres, participants demonstrated greater awareness to audience, purpose, and editing in the job materials text type than with correspondence or procedures text types.

    doi:10.17239/jowr-2014.06.01.2
  5. Student and Faculty Perspectives on Motivation to Collaborate in a Service-Learning Course
    Abstract

    This case study, an example of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research, explores student motivations to collaborate with both peer teams and community partners in a service-learning course. Written by one instructor and three undergraduates, the article draws on personal narratives, student reflections, and a postcourse student survey. Our experiences and findings suggest that in courses like these positive extrinsic factors motivate students to collaborate in ways that the extrinsic motivators in typical assignments do not, helping to foster trust and shared goals. We also share our work as an example of how to include student voices in SoTL work.

    doi:10.1177/2329490614530463
  6. Expanding Omani Learners’ Horizons Through Project-Based Learning
    Abstract

    As a relatively innovative teaching/learning approach in the Arabian Gulf region, in general, and in Oman, in particular, project-based learning requires progressive amendments and adaptations to the national culture of the learner. This article offers analysis of the current state of the approach in the local educational environment. Furthermore, it introduces the challenges of applying this unconventional type of instruction to Omani learners together with their response to the new learning conditions and philosophy. It also offers ideas on adaptations and implementation of project-based learning within the Arabian Gulf undergraduate student community.

    doi:10.1177/2329490614530553
  7. Selections From the ABC 2013 Annual Convention, New Orleans, Louisiana
    Abstract

    This article, the first of a two-part series, catalogs teaching innovations presented at the 2013 Association for Business Communication (ABC) Annual Convention, New Orleans. They were presented during the My Favorite Assignment session. The 11 Favorite Assignments featured here offer the reader a variety of learning experiences including collaborative team work, debate, budgets, cross-cultural communication, report writing, persuasion, nonprofit organizations, client communication, and writing funding proposals. Additional teaching materials—including instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the Association for Business Communication webpage http://businesscommunication.org/assignments .

    doi:10.1177/2329490614530466
  8. Teaching Teamwork Through Coteaching in the Business Classroom
    Abstract

    Business educators recognize the importance of developing teamwork as an employability skill. However, current methods used to teach teamwork have been met with mixed results from both students and educators. This article integrates research on the importance of teamwork, team development processes, and coteaching through examining a case study wherein coteaching was used as a means of conveying teamwork concepts to students. Coteaching is an alternate approach to teaching teamwork skills. In this case, the core competencies of shared values, complementary expertise, and the willingness to experiment were critical to forming and developing a functional teaching partnership.

    doi:10.1177/1080569913507596
  9. Teaching Writing in the Context of a National Digital Literacy Narrative
    doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2014.04.003
  10. Symposium on Internationalization
    Abstract

    Sisters and Brothers of the Struggle: Teachers of Writing in Their Worlds Charles Bazerman Internationalization, English L2 Writers, and the Writing Classroom: Implications for Teaching and Learning Terry Myers Zawacki and Anna Sophia Habib

    doi:10.58680/ccc201425450
  11. Review Essay: Considering What It Means to Teach “Composition” in the Twenty-First Century
    Abstract

    Reviewed are: Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus, eds. Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities Jay Jordan First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground Jessica Restaino

    doi:10.58680/ccc201425451

May 2014

  1. Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age
    Abstract

    Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound in twentieth-century American culture that offers examples of how sound functions argumentatively in specific historical contexts. Goodale argues that sound can be read or interpreted in a manner similar to words and images but that the field of communication has largely neglected sound and its relationship to words and images. He shows how dialect, accents, and intonations in presidential speeches; ticking clocks, rumbling locomotives, and machinic hums in literary texts; and the sound of sirens and bombs in cartoons and war propaganda all function persuasively in rhetorical ecologies that contain words, images, and technologies. The book opens with an anecdote that foreshadows Goodale's basic mode of operation. FDR's iconic phrase “The only thing to fear is fear itself” loses much of its persuasive power when encountered only as words on a page. A significant aspect of its rhetorical force was Roosevelt's use of a pause after “fear” and before “is.” The silent pause invited listeners to fill in the gap with their own imagined fears and allowed Roosevelt to break this tension with a strong emphasis on “is” that focuses the audience's attention on “fear itself” (1–2). The cadence and sound of his voice was tailored to take advantage of the persuasive affordances of radio and does not translate to the page. Rather than isolate sound as an object of study in the manner of sound studies, Goodale's examples and close readings prompt his readers to integrate sound into the mainstream of rhetorical scholarship.Along with McLuhan, Goodale argues that humanities researchers have neglected “ear culture.” Following critiques of modern and Western visual bias, he locates the origin of this tendency in Plato's allegory of the cave and its reproduction in scholarship that emphasizes texts and archives. Even though twentieth-century technologies have increasingly made it possible to archive sound, most digitization projects have centered on archiving texts and images, with some of the online sonic archives being almost “as ephemeral as speech itself” (5). Texts and images are also much easier to reproduce in print journals that are still the valued venue for scholarship. And sound has failed to transcend disciplinary boundaries. While words are still central to English departments and images are still central to art departments, they are both engaged widely across many fields in a way that sound is not—sound predominantly remains the scholarly property of music departments. Even the field of speech communication, for Goodale, gave up its previous emphasis on voice and sound after the invention of television—film, television, and the internet have long surpassed the phonograph and radio as areas of interest in communication (6). While there is a growing movement surrounding sound, from Jonathan Sterne in sound studies to Joshua Gunn in communication, Goodale maintains that a significant hurdle for sound's wider dissemination across the humanities is that it is difficult to “read” in the traditional humanities sense of the term. His book sets out to show how these difficulties can be overcome. Less a theoretical treatise on sound, than a series of close readings that practice this form of sound criticism, the book seeks to show that sound can be read closely and on par with images and words.In chapter 2, “Fitting Sounds,” Goodale develops readings of recorded presidential speeches to show that a significant shift occurred in the sound of presidential oratory in the period between 1892 and 1912. Grounding these readings in the notion of a “period ear,” he culls together evidence from the language of political cartoons to verbal cues in early phonographic recordings and literary novels to public speaking textbooks to show how the mixing of dialects and accents influences presidential rhetoric. Over this period, the increase in foreign-speaking immigrants, the rising influence of labor on politics, the dissemination of recording technologies, and changing ideas of masculinity drive a shift from a theatrical or orotund style through a transitional period to a vernacular, instructional voice. The orotund style, which Goodale examines through short, close readings of the speeches of Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, is modeled on Shakespearean actors and conveys a sense of elite class and power in its weightiness and gravitas. Every letter and every word is articulated clearly and heard distinctly. The style is marked by rolling r's and y's pronounced like a long i rather than ee (28). This kind of slow pacing and specific pronunciation was often needed to project to larger crowds in the less than ideal acoustic surroundings in which political speeches were often delivered. Goodale identifies a transitional, contextualizing moment marked by works such as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, whose characters spoke in a more vernacular style, by actors such as Henry Irving, who rejected the orotund style in one of the first phonographic recordings of Richard III, and by speech teachers such as Brainard Gardner Smith, who began to advise orators to “speak as if before friends” (33). Goodale shows the turn in oratory that favored the instructional, plain style of professors through a close analysis of an early recording from Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 campaign that combined bits of his stump speech “The Right of the People to Rule” and his Progressive Party convention speech, “Confessions of Faith.” Roosevelt edited the speeches into a four-minute recording that was intended to reach broader audiences in the home and the saloon. Roosevelt fails to trill his r's, fails to pronounce every consonant and syllable, and speaks in the key of C (ascending and descending along the scale), in an attempt to mimic popular music, much of which was written in that key. The changing historical context created certain “sonic expectations” among public audiences that prompted Roosevelt to become the first president to sound like the people, providing Goodale with evidence that persuasively demonstrates the significance of sound in Roosevelt's recordings.Chapter 3, “Machine Mouth,” focuses on the quintessentially modern sounds of the clock and the locomotive to examine how sound can pierce or fragment identity and transform into a “sonic envelope” that protects and strengthens identity and community. What began as a “war of the working class against the clock” is taken up and celebrated by modern artists and composers and eventually turns into the accepted ambient sound of modernity. Pre–WWI artists, writers, and composers, embrace the deterritorializing of modern noise. Cubists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque paint with sharp staccato lines that run through their subjects, fragmenting them into multiplicities. Goodale reads this as imitating the sharp sound of modernity and its effect on listeners. Braque's Woman with a Guitar (1913) exemplifies this technique, featuring lines cutting through the figure that connote the lines of a musical staff or the strings of a guitar. Futurists such as Carlo Carra and Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti challenge visual artists and poets to render sound and noise through movement, vibration, and color. Carra sees sounds as always “freed from their origin” (58) and uses techniques such as acute angles, oblique lines, and subjective perspectives to translate these sonic sensations into images. Umberto Boccioni observes that “an object moving at speed (a train, a car, a bicycle) appears in pure sensation in the form of an emotional ambience, which takes the form of horizontal penetrations at acute angles” (58). However, this cultural work serves to familiarize and domesticate these sounds, which produces “sound envelopes.” Goodale argues that futurist poet Marinetti's attempts to imitate the ear's ability to hear simultaneous sounds from multiple directions anticipates Hitler's orations. Marinetti's writing is intentionally disturbing, violent, and chaotic. But rather than fragmenting the self, Hitler used “the sound of his voice, his mechanized armies, and the crowd to unify a massive group into a single body politic” (61). Hitler uses the microphone, loudspeaker, and radio to envelop his listeners in sound. Vocal domination and the manipulation of applause create a comforting sonic envelope. Triumph of the Will, for example, uses microphones, martial music, cheers, church bells, and Hitler's amplified voice to “make an incredibly persuasive aural experience, one that bathed listeners in an impermeable sonorous envelope” (64). Adapting to these initially jarring modern sounds, audiences recompose them into a soundscape that creates identification rather than disrupts identity—in Hitler's case with disastrous results. Goodale examines a number of sonic artists up through bluesman Bukka White's integration of locomotive sounds into song to show how this “period ear” transforms over time—modern sound starts as jarring assault and becomes ambient soundscape. Radio plays a key role in this transformation because listeners can control the volume, turn to stations that align with preestablished identities, place the radio in familiar environments such as the home or church, and place the radio at the center of a sonic envelope rather than experiencing a sonic assault from all sides.In chapter 4, “The Race of Sound,” Goodale examines sonic persuasion even more directly, showing how tropes related to race were eventually used to upend mainstream sonic segregation. This chapter focuses on music cultures of the interwar period and the ways musicians collaborated directly and indirectly in order to navigate the record industry's racialized genre categories and eventually rearticulate them. Goodale provides close readings of a recorded oral history from ex-slave Phoebe Boyd, a radio episode of Amos and Andy, and Billie Holiday's recording of “Strange Fruit.” Because sound recordings were still dominant in this pretelevision era, determination of race often had to be made through voice, which is more rhetorically malleable than bodies, problematizing the commonplace that voice is a truer reflection of the self. The heights of audio technologies—phonograph and radio—made “sonic passing” through vocal and musical style a significant rhetorical strategy (78), and musicians regularly upended segregation by performing together in clubs and studios and imitating each other's styles. The chapter is awash in examples, but the focus on Holiday directly links sonic persuasion to the metaphor of coloring: color as skin, as tone in music or sound, and as rhetorical trope (97). Following Cicero and Seneca, Goodale sees tone as casting “light or darkness on events, facts, and personalities,” coloring listener's interpretations of an argument (97). “Color” is a verb that connotes change; it conveys the idea of influencing or distorting perception that isn't limited to the visual. In 1933, Holiday joins an integrated group put together by Benny Goodman in which she is prompted to sing “straight” or in a white style, because of the sonic expectations of the time and the need to “market race” (92). But by 1939's recording of “Strange Fruit,” her signature color/ing came front and center. Holiday took her style into the antilynching protest song in order to color the listener's perceptions just as FDR did with his speeches. Goodale writes: The south's purported goodness, for example, gets an ironic treatment when Holiday twists phrases like “sweet and fresh” while eliding “gallant” into something sonically less than a full word…. Her intonation of “sudden”… is rapid, thus turning the word into an example of itself. When she forces out the word bulging, she imitates with her voice the visual appearance of something being forced outward. The word breeze is elongated, and the letter b in blood drips from Holiday's lips like the life force of the victims she describes. When Holiday sings drop her voice briefly ascends then descends in a long glissando. At the end of the dragged out drop, Holiday's vibrato sonically mimics the tension of the long rope bouncing at first then quivering, then remaining still. Her voice has gained in intensity until this moment but then fades out, suggesting that it is at this point in the song when the lynching has occurred and life has ended. (99–100) She renders the words through a form of sonic persuasion that colors them in sounds that conflate the multiple meanings of the term—race, sound, and influence—creating a sonic envelope that colors the listener's experience.In Chapter 5, “Sounds of War,” Goodale concludes his analyses with an examination of sound in the cold war period. He analyzes sonic manipulations in cold war propaganda, specifically the ways that civil defense sirens and the sounds of dropping bombs were used to greater and lesser effects. Goodale looks at the educational film Duck and Cover's misguided use of the siren, which is intended to ease fears by teaching preparedness but ends up amplifying those fears; Hollywood's use of diving bombs in the Roadrunner cartoons, which actually succeeded in alleviating fears of bombing; and the persuasive impact of sonic manipulation in President Johnson's “Daisy” campaign ad from 1964. While the sound of the air raid sirens pierced the audience's sonic envelope, the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons turn the sounds of war into comic familiarity, enveloping the listeners in a safer aural environment. In addition to providing his typical contextualization that places creator Chuck Jones as a member of Hollywood's left, Goodale offers a close reading that centers on the Doppler effect. Christian Doppler actually identified the effect using light, noticing that as an object approaches you its light waves are compressed and shift toward the higher visual frequency, blue light, and that as it moves away it shifts into light waves that are stretched into the red end of the spectrum. Christoph Ballot first tested the theory with sound, having trumpeters play on a moving train. Moving toward the listener the sound waves are compressed into the higher frequencies, and moving away they are stretched into the lower frequencies where the sound correspondingly moves down the musical scale in pitch (118). Goodale notes how this materiality of sound operates rhetorically in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons: It is a sound from the perspective of a particular listener: the listener away from whom the bomb travels. These are the sounds produced by a culture that has, since 1812, bombed others and not been bombed itself. Listen to a war film in Germany, and you are likely to hear a very different sound; the sound of something falling toward the listener has a gradually ascending or constant high-pitched scream, not an almost musical, falling whistle. The sound of the falling bomb that Jones made famous in the 1950s is the sound perceived by people who are bombers and not the bombed. It is the sound of survival, not of death. (118–19) The listener enthymematically fills in the phenomenological sonic position of survival, which is reinforced by Wile E. Coyote's continued survival after every pratfall. This kind of enthymematic identification is central to Goodale's chapter and analyses. In his discussion of America's use of soundless bombing videos during the Gulf War, he draws on Kathleen Hall Jamieson's concept “empathematic,” which combines enthymeme and empathy, filling in the argumentative warrants and identifying with the subject positions the argument offers. But the lack of sound in the grainy, video-game-like propaganda videos left American audiences “little possibility of stepping into the shoes of the Iraqis and completing the argument about the real effects of bombs” (127). The Iraqis had been turned into caricatures that survive rather than humans being bombed and thus worthy of empathy.Since Sonic Persuasion is predominantly a history of sound, readers in philosophy will find smaller amounts of theoretical development and readers in rhetoric will find a reliance on a relatively traditional sense of rhetoric. Rhetorical concepts such as the enthymeme and identification are predominant in Goodale's examples, and he adopts a relatively traditional model of interpretation based on historical context and close reading, his goal being critical awareness. What is exciting about the sonic turn for many is the potential to develop newer rhetorical concepts and theoretical models out of engagements with sound. While Goodale hints at this potential, his interpretive practice stays within relatively well-recognized territory.1 But it is important to acknowledge what is significant about book on its own terms. Just as it became clear in the late 1990s that we could no longer talk about cultural studies without digital technologies, since culture was becoming so intimately tied to the digital, Goodale makes the case that in the twentieth century we can't talk about rhetoric without sound, since persuasion has been so intimately tied to the sonic. For a broader readership in communication or composition, the book provides a persuasive rationale for acknowledging how sound potentially impacts all acts of persuasion. Sonic Persuasion makes the case for opening the field to a wide array of engagements with sound, and while it doesn't always take us to these diverse places and methods—affect beyond meaning, engagement beyond interpretation, method beyond close reading and historical context—it does provide clear disciplinary grounds for these pursuits, making it difficult to neglect the sounds that fragment and envelop everyday acts of persuasion and the slickest media manipulations.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.47.2.0219
  2. Feature: A Case for Visual Rhetoric in Two-Year College Composition
    Abstract

    Using visual rhetoric as a mode of instruction in two-year college composition can have a positive and powerful impact on teaching and learning.

    doi:10.58680/tetyc201425119
  3. “Words That You Said Got Bigger”: English Language Learners’ Lived Experiences of Deficit Discourse
    Abstract

    In recent decades, academic outcomes for English Language Learners (ELLs) have become a major focal point of research in English education. Much of the scholarly discourse on this topic reinforces a deficit orientation toward ELLs, constructing them as an educational “problem” rather than an asset (e.g., Crumpler, Handsfield, &amp; Dean, 2011; Gutiérrez &amp; Orellana, 2006; Mitchell, 2013). This article examines how ELLs at one high school in New England perceived and resisted this deficit discourse by analyzing statements these students made during public protest and personal interviews. I employ Critical Race Theory (Kubota &amp; Lin, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Solórzano &amp; Yosso, 2002) as a framework for understanding how these students—all Black, former refugees from African countries—experienced the effects of deficit discourse in their lived experience at school and in the community. Focusing on four themes—Essentialization, Educational Deficit, Intellectual Inferiority, and Resistance—I show how students came to link deficit discourse with limited educational opportunity, and how particular schooling practices—such as language/literacy testing and academic tracking into low-level English classes—came to be seen by students as an outgrowth and reinforcement of deficit discourse. In the discussion of findings, I highlight alternative forms of representation (i.e., “counter-stories”) that were put forth by the students, and outline a number of implications of this study for teaching, research, and advocacy in English education.

    doi:10.58680/rte201425159

April 2014

  1. Embracing the Messy Business of Learning: Serving Multiple Stakeholders in a Technical Communication Internship
    Abstract

    &#8220;we can prepare students for the complexities that arise in working with real-world clients by teaching them flexibility in approaching this type of work&#8221;

  2. Reimagining the Literature Survey Through Team Teaching
    Abstract

    This coauthored article argues that a team-taught format can make the literature survey more engaging and meaningful for students while also addressing some of the course’s traditional challenges. The article fills a gap in team-teaching scholarship, which emphasizes interdisciplinary and/or loosely collaborative arrangements over intensely collaborative models like the one the authors propose.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2400485
  3. The Hidden Ethos Inside Process Pedagogy
    Abstract

    The outsider ethos established by Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, and Donald Murray in their early books is a driving force behind process pedagogy. Close textual analysis of these theorists can help writing instructors better understand the role of ethos in process pedagogy and in their own teaching.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2400512
  4. Engineering and Narrative: Literary Prerequisites as Indirect Communication for Technical Writing
    Abstract

    While Engineering values direct communication, indirect communication produces a kind of literacy salient for engineers that direct communication may not offer in the way indirect communication does. This article emphasizes the inadequacies of overly emphasizing direct communication for Engineering majors and explains how teaching indirect communication in the form of literature has the potential to cover some of the inadequacies one can encounter if one were to overly emphasize direct communication.

    doi:10.2190/tw.44.2.e
  5. Communication Instruction in Landscape Architecture Courses
    Abstract

    Communication skills are an increasingly important component of college students’ education because these skills are in high demand from employers. This study provides a close examination of communication instruction in both a typical landscape architecture class and a modified one (i.e., with the addition of formalized communication instruction that is grounded in design), analyzing changes in students’ perceptions of their own communication abilities (self-efficacy). The study reveals that in the typical class, students had a decrease in self-efficacy whereas in the modified class, students had a significant increase in self-efficacy. Viewing these results through the lens of self-efficacy and situated learning provides a complex understanding of the influences on students’ experiences. For both teaching and research in communication across the curriculum, this study has implications about the importance of the nature of instruction.

    doi:10.1177/1050651913513903
  6. Book Review: Designing Texts: Teaching Visual Communication
    doi:10.1177/1050651913513876

March 2014

  1. La dottrina dell'evidenza nella tradizione retorica grecae latina di Francesco Berardi
    Abstract

    Reviews 197 Walker completes his work with a subtle admonition coupled with a call to return to what has worked and what matters—an Isocratean model of training rhetors that eschews the place of impractical (high) theory (p. 280). While it's nearly impossible to pin down the most significant contribu­ tion from The Genuine Teaehers of This Art, Walker's opus goes a long way to resolve what Alan Gross has termed the "historical discontinuity" of the rhetoiical tradition, which results from what George Kennedy labels the technical, sophistic," and "philosophic" traditions by arguing at least in the Isocratean model, a tradition rooted in pedagogy, the tripartite distinction is a false one-all three coexisted happily and, importantly, effectively (Gross, pp. 32-33).' After all, as Walker not so subtly reminds us, "what makes rhetoric rhetoric is its teaching tradition, its function as an 'art of producing rhetors'" (p. 285). Kathleen Lamp Arizona State University Francesco Berardi, La dottrina dell'evidenza nella tradizione retorica greca e latina (Papers on Rhetoric. Monographs 3), Perugia: Editrice zzPliniana ", 2012, 242 pp., ISBN 978-88-97830-01-6 L'esigenza di una nuova monografía dedicata al tema studiatissimo dell'evidenza è opportunamente giustificata da Francesco Berardi (di seguito F. B.), che rileva due prospettive altrettanto parziali nella cospicua bibliografía sull'argomento: l'una, critico-letteraria, incentrata sulla tradi­ zione alessandrina; l'altra, tecnico-retorica, frammentata nelle tassonomie polimorfe ed eterogenee dei manuali greci e latini. Scopo del volume è dunque fare ordine in questa complessa tradizione e classificare le diverse forme dell'evidenza secondo le rispettive funzioni, seguendo il modo in cui sono state concepite e si sono quindi sviluppate nella precettistica antica (pp. 11-17). La distinzione terminológica preliminare tra ¿vspyaa, vivificazione del messaggio attraverso l'uso di metafore e similitudini che animano referenti inanimati, ed ¿vápyeia, evidenza pittorica realizzata mediante l'arcumulo di descrizioni denotative (pp. 19-39), permette di comprendere perché l'evidenza sia considerata virtù fondamentale della narrazione, improntata a descrizioni minuziose e realistiche. Ribaltando la communis opinio sulla base di una cronología rigorosa, F.B. dimostra come questo apporte giunga alia ]Alan G. Gross, "The Rhetorical Tradition," in Richard Graff, Arthur E Walzer, Janet M. Atwill, eds. The Viability ofthe Rhetorical Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). See also, George Kennedy. Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 198 RHETORICA retorica dalle teorie poetiche e storiografiche, e non vice versa (pp. 41-49). Nel quadro dello stile semplice e disadorno, tale forma di evidenza pud trasformarsi, da semplice virtú narrativa deWinuentio, in qualité specifica delYelocutio. Questo processo tende poi a estendersi, al punto che, adop­ tando la dottrina dell'ornato stilistico e della figura-lumen, nelle Partitiones oratoriae Cicerone avrebbe per primo elevato chiarezza, brevità, crédibilité, evidenza, etopea e decoro al rango di parametri principali del discorso ora­ torio. Con Dionigi di Alicarnasso e Quintiliano questa evidenza si sarebbe ulteriormente connotata come frutto della collaborazione del destinatario del messaggio alla costruzione dell'illusione visiva (pp. 51-73). Infine, dallo schema accademico delle uirtutes elocutionis è probabile che sia germogliata la teoria delle categorie stilistiche (lôéoei) ove, nella prospettiva degli esiti finali dell'effetto visivo, l'evidenza è intesa essenzialmente come vigore espressivo funzionale alla purezza, alla bellezza, allô splendore, ecc. (pp. 75-88). E B. circoscrive a ragione tutti questi ambiti della dottrina retorica alio studio dell'evidenza corne effetto e li distingue dai casi in cui essa è causa di una rappresentazione mentale subordinata alla mozione degli affetti o all'ornato stilistico. Dopo aver ricordato i legami cognitivi tra cpavTaaioc e tolOoç secondo Aristotele e Quintiliano, E B. ricostruisce con grande precisione il ruolo delle circostanze (wpewpew), intese come forma più po­ tente di argomentazione e progressivamente adottate ai fini dell'amplificatio nell'esercizio di scrittura definito xoivôç tôtcoç dai progymnasmata. Poiché riguarda fatti gié accertati, quest'ultimo si colloca dopo la dimostrazione e tende dunque a corrispondere alla perorazione finale di un discorso. E B. istituisce cosí una convergenza tra i due settori, distinti dai fatto che, a differenza di quanto accade ne! zluogo comune', Pepilogo di un'orazione riguarda sempre...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0012
  2. The Genuine Teachers of This Art by Jeffrey Walker
    Abstract

    Reviews Walker, Jeffrey. The Genuine Teachers ofThis Art. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011.356 pp., ISBN: 978-1-61117-016-0 Walker s 1 he Genuine Tenehers of This Art takes its title from a line in Cicero s De orntore in which Antonius attempts to delineate "inexperienced teachers ' who do not train rhetors like Aristotle from sophists like Isocrates who train skilled speakers (pp. 5,44). The title line frames the major argument of the book—that training rhetors, that is, teaching is the unifying element of rhetoric that brings together strains of "discourse, practices, analysis, [and] teaching" (p.l). Walker claims scholars of rhetoric have much overlooked the "school masters." His attempt to correct this omission establishes Isocrates as the founder of the sophistic paideia, which Walker traces from the fourth century BCE, through the Hellenistic period and stasis theory, the late Repub­ lic in Cicero's De orntore, and finally into the Second Sophistic in the works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Through this pedagogical history, Walker ar­ gues, that for Isocrates the "handbook" (teehne) and sophistic traditions were one, effectivelv decentering the "philosophic" tradition. There are too manv high points in The Genuine Teachers of This Art, particularly' for scholars of the history of rhetoric and teachers of rhetoric and composition, to summarize here but permit me to try to touch on a few. Walker's first chapter, a (counter) reading of Cicero's De orntore, begins by classifying Aristotle's rhetoric as primarily interested in "judgment and theory" as opposed to "civic deliberation" and therefore largely outside the realm of training rhetors (pp. 19, 22). Walker makes a brief but interesting argument that Antonius' topics are not from Aristotle but rather are closer to Isocrates' ideai, arguing Aristotle is primarily referenced for the sake of authority (pp. 23, 30-1, 48). Ultimately, Walker argues what Cicero's Crassus and Antonius finally agree on—broad experience—is fundamentally Isocratean (pp. 41, 53, 56). The claim that "there was a teehne of Isocrates, and that it probably was the ancestor of the later sophistic technai” concludes Walker's second chapter (p 90). In order to advance the possibility of an Isocratean teehne, Walker must refute several lines of argument prevalent in the field, specifically that if Isocrates did write a teehne, it was more likely a collection of example speeches, that the teehne attributed to Isocrates was written by a "younger Rhetorica, Vol. XXXII, Issue 2, pp. 195-211, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . C2014 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2014.32.2.195. 196 RHETORICA Isocrates/' and that it was against Isocrates' own philosophy to write a handbook of precepts. These lines of argument, predominantly advanced by Karl Barwick, though fairly broadly accepted, are refuted by Walker at length, in part, by using parallel case based on other sophistic technai and, most interestingly, by suggesting two definitions of techne, which Walker distinguishes with a subscript to differentiate a non-creative, rule driven art with a more or less guaranteed product from a creative, methodological driven art with the possibility of a successful outcome produced by a skilled practitioner (pp. 63-75). The following chapter takes in an in-depth look at what a techne of Isocrates might have looked like with Walker concluding that the techne likely had two main parts, "the pragmatikos topos [concerned with inquiry and invention] and the lektikos topos [concerned with style] and possibly ... an organized set of progymnasmata" (p. 154). While many of Walker's conclusions in this chapter suggest the techne probably looked similar to the Rhetoric to Alexander, this third chapter is a fascinating look inside Isocrates' pedagogy. These two chapters on Isocrates are likely the most controversial in the book, and while Walker admits he has offered no "irrefutable" evidence of a techne of Isocrates, he does marshal a persuasive case based on available evidence, however scant. The Fourth Chapter, "In the Garden of...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0011
  3. Le controversiae della raccolta di Seneca il Vecchio e la dottrina degli status
    Abstract

    In this paper I examine the application of the status-theory in some controversiae of Seneca the Elder's declamatory collection. The analysis of a number of significant examples shows that the declaimers not only perfectly mastered this complex rhetorical doctrine, but were also able to discuss some points of it and in case modify it, adapting the rules given by the rhetorical handbooks to the specific requirements of each single case. This leads us to the conclusion that the didactic value of the declamatory exercise never failed entirely, and in the rhetorical schools of the early imperial age it remained the fundamental instrument by which future orators learnt to put into practice the precepts transmitted in the rhetorical teaching, not only for the elocutio, but also and especially for the inventio.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0008

February 2014

  1. Multimodal Composing in Classrooms Learning and Teaching for the Digital World. Edited by Suzanne M. Miller and Mary B. McVee (2012)
    Abstract

    Multimodal Composing in Classrooms Learning and Teaching for the Digital World. Edited by Suzanne M. Miller and Mary B. McVee (2012) New York and London, Routledge. pp. 161 ISBN: 978-415-89747-1

    doi:10.1558/wap.v5i2.375
  2. Teaching the New Paradigm
    Abstract

    This article is addressed to those interested in integrating social media, as a collaborative component, into Business and Technical Writing courses. Educators find themselves under the false impression that digital natives’ familiarity with these tools will result in their embracing them as part and parcel of coursework. The reality is that today’s students need help in moving beyond the familiar applications of these virtual spaces in their personal lives and toward their uses as dynamic components of the educational experience. Relearning Facebook to do more than “friending” people, “liking” activities, and announcing one’s status involves an emphasis on the professional role of this developing medium of communication. These professional applications, therefore, must be fully integrated into the academic experience. Most Business and Technical Writing courses at Rutgers University culminate with each student submitting a research proposal, developed throughout the course of a 15-week semester. The justification for the plan of action in each proposal is based upon scholarly research. In our Collaborative Writing Practices course, the students develop their proposals in teams and are instructed to use various social networking platforms to communicate with each other, as well as with their instructor, as a supplement to the face-to-face classroom environment. In addition, each researched plan is required to advance a solution that utilizes social media. Our “triangulated” approach to instruction immerses students into social networking and helps them understand that, to be successful, collaborative writing must occur on a variety of levels. We also integrate social media into several of our online classes, where it is used to replace key elements of face-to-face courses, such as formal presentations. We have found that implementing a social media project instead of the traditional PowerPoint presentation encourages a greater level of interaction and participation among students.

    doi:10.1558/wap.v5i2.357
  3. The University and its Relationship to Teaching Writing with Technology
    Abstract

    Greetings from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, where a central part of our mission is to anticipate and create model classrooms and pedagogies that might inspire universities around the world as they reinvent themselves in the face of technological innovation. We have been particularly inspired by our colleague, Professor Richard Miller, who is at the forefront of research and practice on how digital technologies have come to bear on the future of education. In his article, “The Coming Apocalypse,” Miller (2010) explains that the “paradigm shift” occurring in higher education, once based solely on the scholarly production of copyrighted print documents, confronts the realm of resources and information open to us on the Web. He writes:

    doi:10.1558/wap.v5i2.181
  4. Google Translate in the EFL Classroom
    Abstract

    While composition has become more open to issues of world Englishes and more aware of how English writing is taught and learned in countries other than the United States, one of the issues that needs further investigation concerns the influence of increasingly powerful and accessible technologies for translation on the teaching of English writing in places where English is not the language of local communication. The most widely available technology for translation, Google Translate, can quickly convert large amounts of text from one language to another, though it does it with varying amounts of accuracy. Despite its sometimes egregious mistakes, however, it is fast becoming a tool not only for people who want to read online texts written in another language, but for composing texts. How students of English as a foreign language (EFL) might use translation technologies such as Google’s translation function when composing is an important question because it stretches (perhaps uncomfortably) the boundaries of what it means to “write in English.” How should EFL writing teachers integrate the use of such technologies into their teaching? In this article, I will explore the context of Google translation use in one country where English is not a language of local communication. Finally, I will suggest ways to use this phenomenon to rethink the notion of what it means to teach EFL writing in an age of increasingly sophisticated machine translation.

    doi:10.1558/wap.v5i2.317
  5. Remediation in data visualization
    Abstract

    Our poster is an exploration of the effects of quantifying physical experiences and refashioning them into new, interactive, live experiences through data visualization; the poster explores how data visualizations are designed to teach and effect change. Specifically, the authors explore two topics: athletic training and teacher training. Both of these fields have been inundated by data analysis tactics; sports data visualizations are highly developed and hypermediate while teacher training data are still largely immediate and static Through an analysis of these two topics in relation to theories of phenomenography and remediation, the poster discusses how the use of real-time data analysis and data visualization common in sports training might inform how that we effect change in other fields, such as teaching.

    doi:10.1145/2597469.2597474
  6. Technology and communication design
    Abstract

    As I prepare to teach the latest iteration of my course in Visualizing Information, I am struck by how quickly visualization software and techniques are advancing. As an academic, whose primary job is as a researcher and teacher, my relationship with technology is rooted at the crossroads of excitement and dread; of just catching up and being perpetually behind. I feel excitement that advancements in web functionality and design, visualization techniques, and other technology-enabled practices are finally happening and can benefit my work and the work of my students. Conversely I am filled with dread that I rarely feel fully in-the-know, much less at the bleeding edge of these developments because my job doesn't necessarily reward that kind of knowledge. As a graduate student in the fall of 2000 (Is that really 14 years ago?) I earned a webmaster certification and followed that by helping in the redesign of several websites at my university. A decade later, as an assistant professor on the tenure clock, I was composing an academic webtext and I found myself needing the help of an undergraduate student to teach me how to integrate something called jQuery into my HTML5. I was dismayed over how rusty my skills had become once my tenure responsibilities had taken over.

    doi:10.1145/2597469.2597472
  7. Levinas as a Media Theorist:
    Abstract

    ABSTRACTThis article explores the way Levinas communicates his ethical message through the media at work in his work: speech, writing, and rare references to modern media. Levinas's ethical message concerns the import of the relation with the other, a relation that interrupts any attempt at its thematization, including Levinas's own philosophy. Levinas's text serves as an exemplary medium for this ethical message in conveying the teaching of ethics along with the interruption it advocates. The article then extends the logic of the ethical message beyond the two key media present in Levinas's work—speech and writing—to speculate on whether the interruption it effects can be carried over to audiovisual media. Running throughout is the question of mediation, which takes the discussion outside the context of the face to face, where Levinas's thought is typically situated, to the context of the third and of justice. Levinas's thought may thus lead toward a radical ethics of media—radical in the sense that it posits the act of mediation itself as the root of such ethics.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.47.1.0048
  8. Guest Editor’s Introduction: The Consequences of Writing Assessment
    Abstract

    Diversity in writing assessment research means paying attention to the consequences of writing assessment for all students’ learning and writing. This special issue of Research in the Teaching of English brings together researchers from various national contexts who share such a perspective to explore the meanings and roles of writing assessment today.

    doi:10.58680/rte201424578
  9. Announcing the Alan C. Purves Award Recipient (Volume 47)
    Abstract

    The 2013 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year's award recipients, Maureen Kendrick, Margaret Early, and Walter Chemjor, for their article Integrated Literacies in a Rural Kenyan Girls' Secondary School Journalism Club, which appeared in the May 2013 issue of RTE (Vol. 47, No. 4). This qualita- tive study examines an after-school journalism club held at an all-girls school in Kenya and reveals the ways that literacy practices can foster professionalization and identity formation for students. Kendrick et al. apply Turner's (1967) notion of liminality the realm of pure possibility (qtd. p. 395) to understand the transformation they witnessed in the students, especially in relation to the pres- ence of such materials as digital voice recorders and press passes. These items, in terms of Blommaert's (2003) theorizing of placed resources, assume a particular, local, situated meaning within the context of the club: they empower the students to do investigative journalism in their school and community. The intersection of a liminal space with placed resources allowed the girls to move from performance to competence in their journalistic roles, resulting in transformed identities. This study pushes all educators to consider the classroom as liminal space in order to locate and support such transformative literacy practices and opportunities.We applaud the authors' self-reported shift from a sole emphasis on the po- tential of the donated digital communication to facilitate students' acquisi- tion of digital literacies (p. 393) to the wider exploration of the journalism club as a resource-infused place that afforded the development of integrated literacy practices and experimentation along with new writer identities of empowerment (p. 394). Such a move celebrates the persistent agency of students and teachers who, together in their given space, make sense of the tools available-be they digital recorders, press passes, books, or standardized tests. Further, Kendrick et al. suggest that in making sense of those tools and how they might authentically be put to use, the teacher and his students also make sense of themselves as users of these ideologically rich tools.We particularly appreciate Kendrick et al.'s description of the students' meaning-making process as play; they take interest in students' experimentation with the resources made available to them and with the identities associated with those tools. In this conceptualization of what happens in the journalism club, the students and their play are ultimately more important than the particular tools with which they play. …

    doi:10.58680/rte201424583
  10. The Spatialized Practices of Teaching Writing in Australian Elementary Schools: Diverse Students Shaping Discoursal Selves
    Abstract

    This paper discusses the teaching of writing within the competing and often contradictory spaces of high-stakes testing and the practices and priorities around writing pedagogy in diverse school communities. It uses sociospatial theory to examine the “real-and-imagined” spaces (Soja, 1996) that influence and are influenced by teachers’ pedagogical priorities for writing in two linguistically diverse elementary school case studies. Methods of critical discourse analysis are used to examine rich data sets to make visible the discourses and power relations at play in the case schools. Findings show that when teachers’ practices focus on the teaching of structure and skills alongside identity building and voice, students with diverse linguistic backgrounds can produce dramatic, authoritative, and resonant texts. The paper argues that thirdspaces” (Soja, 1996) can be forged that both attend to accountability requirements and also give the necessary attention to more complex aspects of writing necessary for students from diverse and multilingual backgrounds to invest in writing as a creative and critical form of communication for participation in society and the knowledge economy.

    doi:10.58680/rte201424580
  11. 2013 CCCC Exemplar Award Acceptance Speech
    Abstract

    The Exemplar Award is presented to a person who has served or serves as an exemplar of our organization, representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession. This is a written version of the acceptance speech that Keith Gilyard gave at the CCCC Convention in Las Vegas on March 15.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201424571

January 2014

  1. Rhetorical Resources for Teaching Responsible Communication of Science
    Abstract

    We report on the Teaching Responsible Communication of Science project at Iowa State University. This NSF-supported work will produce nine case studies focusing on the ethical challenges that arise when scientists communicate with the public. These case studies promise to add a normative dimension to the practical communication training offered to scientists, while at the same time contributing a rhetorical perspective to the interdisciplinary scholarship on science communication.

    doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1179
  2. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton ed. By Don M. Wolfe, and: Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition by Raphael Lyne, and: Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England by Jenny C. Mann, and: Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline, and: Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by Garry Wills
    Abstract

    Reviews 91 my own undergraduate teaching, especially Pallister's idea that there are master tropes for heaven, hell, and paradise and Shore's denial that Milton engages in iconoclasm, and I have recommended the full texts to my graduate students. Historians of rhetoric at any institution that regularly teaches Milton or his period would do well to order copies for their libraries and also to consider acquiring copies for themselves. Jameela Lares The University of Southern Mississippi The Complete Prose Works ofJohn Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82); Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 267 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00747-5; Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Fig­ uring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England, Ithaca and Lon­ don: Cornell University Press, 2012. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-4965-9; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 202 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4378-9; Garry Wills, Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.186 pp. ISBN 978-0-300-15218-0 Once upon a time (or so the story goes), the study of language and rhetoric in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature was dominated by con­ siderations of style, and style meant especially figurative language. Since then, a generation or two of critics including Joel Altman, Marion Trousdale, Thomas Sloane, Wayne Rebhorn, Frank Whigham, Victoria Kahn, Lorna Hut­ son, Peter Mack, and Lynne Magnusson have shown the importance for early modern literature and culture of a richer conception of rhetoric, one which understands rhetoric as a vital contributor to a wide range of intellectual, political, and social processes and agendas. In view of this work, one could be forgiven for suspecting that the prominence of figuration in the latest crop of books on rhetoric and the literature of Shakespeare's England means that literary criticism is doing the time warp again. As we will see, however, this is not quite your grandparents' rhetorical criticism, though the intervening years have changed less than one might have expected. The first of the four books under review here, Raphael Lyne's Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition argues that rhetoric in Shakespeare is a means not only of presentation and persuasion but also of thought. By "rhetoric" Lyne means primarily tropes, or figures of thought. He grounds this argument in recent research in cognitive linguistics, which probes the relationship between language (especially metaphor) and cognitive processes in the brain, and he devotes a chapter to surveying both this work and a wide range 92 RHETORICA of studies that find similar links between rhetoric, literature, and thought. Another chapter argues that early modern rhetoric manuals implicitly tie tropes such as metaphor and synecdoche to mental processes and thus constitute a "proleptic cognitive science" (50). Lyne then illustrates his thesis in chapters on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Qymbeline, Othello, and the Sonnets, concentrating on the thought patterns found in ornate speeches delivered at stressful moments. He reads Dream as a study of how metaphor works, showing the different ways that characters and groups in the play try to make sense of their experience: "Characters think differently and therefore they speak differently" (129). His study of Cymbeline shows how its characters, faced with "secrets, revelations, and impossibilities," "struggle to find the tropes by which to understand their world" (158). Othello depicts a world debased by Iago's ability to transfer his "twisted cognitive patterns" (186) to others, causing "a kind of heuristic short-circuit, where rhetoric becomes self-fulfilling and inward-looking" (163). The Sonnets show that thought can happen outside dramatic characters, while confirming that rhetoric can bring "heuristic failure" (209) as well as success. As this summary suggests, I don't find a distinctive thesis about Shake­ spearean thought in this book, and in noting the many critics and rhetoricians who have connected literature and rhetoric to thought Lyne undercuts his claim to originality. Possibly Lyne means his contribution to lie less in his conclusions than in his method, for he begins the Dream chapter by claiming to have found "a different way of reading some...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2014.0026
  3. Exploring Alternatives in the Teaching of Lab Report Writing: Deepening Student Learning Through a Portfolio Approach
    Abstract

    Over the last seven years, I have spent time across three continents talking to scientists and mathematicians about their beliefs and attitudes and experiences related to writing in their respective disciplines.I have been impressed by the passion and insight with which most have talked about writing and its relationship to critical thinking, and I have often been surprised by how they engage in these practices.For example, rather than working from an a priori hypothesis, many researchers in the STEM disciplines compose backwards, from the results to the introduction.And when reading, many seem to move from the middle of a paper outwards, beginning with the results and method, using an extremely critical eye, and then perhaps scanning out to the introduction and the discussion, or dispensing with these sections altogether.Over and over again, I heard this same story from different scientists, as if it were a secret each alone had stumbled upon.In addition, collaboration, conversation and peer review are very much part of the language of composition that takes place in the sciences (co-authorship, the hierarchies of disciplinary or interdisciplinary teams, the drafting process and the use of technology), but we who work in WID (writing in the disciplines) and WAC (writing across the curriculum) programs are constantly challenged: "How do we teach process in ways that are disciplinarily appropriate?"Historically, we haven't done this well.As Burton and Morgan observed on the training of mathematicians as writers,

    doi:10.37514/dbh-j.2014.2.1.07
  4. Knowing What We Know about Writing in the Disciplines: A New Approach to Teaching for Transfer in FYC
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2014.25.1.03
  5. Doing Time with Literacy Narratives
    Abstract

    Drawing on a semester-long qualitative study of teaching writing at a men’s medium-high security prison, this article explores the complex ways in which literacy and incarceration are configured in students’ narratives, as well as my own as their teacher.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2348938
  6. Reading Yourself
    Abstract

    Drawing on the notion that revision involves the performance of a writer’s identity in a conversation with herself, this article argues for conceptualizing revision as ecstasis and ventriloquism. By using the metaphor of ventriloquism to translate theory into heuristics for teaching revision, it enacts an underlying argument that pedagogy is metaphor. In doing so, it offers four practical strategies for teaching students to revise.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2348902
  7. “Odd Topics” And Open Minds
    Abstract

    Teaching nontraditional themes in first-year writing courses sometimes confuses students and frustrates instructors. This article shows how using a transformative, critical-thinking pedagogy challenges the content and purpose of “English” courses—making such themes more accessible while improving students’ use of rhetorical inquiry to both analyze and compose texts.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2348929
  8. Wicked Problems in Technical Communication
    Abstract

    This article develops a framework for rhetorical inquiry that builds on the concept of wicked problems as conceptualized through social policy and design studies research. Responding to technical communication scholarship that calls for increased engagement with public issues and controversies, the author specifically discusses a writing course that used the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a basis for teaching problem-based rhetorical invention, document production, interdisciplinary collaboration, and professional development. The framework described in this article ultimately offers a heuristic for students to research and write about ill-defined problems that must be addressed in time but that demand sustained engagement over time—activities that begin in the classroom but ideally continue to develop throughout their personal and professional lives.

    doi:10.2190/tw.44.1.c
  9. The Rhetoric of Reach: Preparing Students for Technical Communication in the Age of Social Media
    Abstract

    Abstract The authors argue that technical communication instructors are in a particularly apt position to teach social media as key to students’ lives as technical communicators and future professionals. Drawing on the concepts of reach and crowd sourcing as heuristics to rearticulate dominant cultural narratives of social media as deleterious to students’ careers, the authors offer a case study of an introductory professional and technical communication pedagogy that helped to disrupt uncritical deployments of social media. Keywords: crowd sourcingpedagogyreachsocial media ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors give many thanks to Dr. David J. Reamer and the students enrolled in his technical writing course at the University of Tampa for their feedback and comments on the student documentation published on Instructables. The authors also appreciate thoughtful and engaged reviewer comments that helped us to develop this article. Notes Students are not misguided in their concerns about social media use and its connection to employment, and perhaps even university admissions practices. As of May 13, Citation2013, the National Conferences of State Legislatures reports that social-media privacy protection laws are being introduced or are pending in 36 states. These states are seeking to stop the practice of employers and universities from requesting logins and passwords of employees or students to their social media sites. According to the conference, four states already have such protections, including Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (para 1). These same laws are under debate as both industry and regulatory finances groups argue for the veracity of having access to social media outlets in order to monitor employee discussions of sensitive financial information (Eaglesham & Rothfeld, Citation2013, para 1). In the particular semester discussed, students all used Instructables to ensure they were working with the same interface and design features and to allow for more robust user-testing. We understand that some students in professional and technical writing courses might be eager to learn about and use social media for their professional development, but we see this position as equally capable of reinforcing the binary of good/bad that is worthy of complication. Neither position affords human agency because technology is the determinant factor in either a student's success or failure. Additional informationNotes on contributorsElise Verzosa Hurley Elise Verzosa Hurley is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Her research interests include technical and professional communication pedagogy, visual rhetoric, and multimodal composition. Her work has appeared in Kairos. Amy C. Kimme Hea Amy C. Kimme Hea is Writing Program Director and Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona, and author of Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Researchers.

    doi:10.1080/10572252.2014.850854
  10. Tweeting an Ethos: Emergency Messaging, Social Media, and Teaching Technical Communication
    Abstract

    The expanding use of social media such as Twitter has raised the stakes for teaching our students about individual and organizational ethoi. This article considers the role of organizations' Twitter feeds during emergency situations, particularly Hurricane Irene in 2011, to argue for a pedagogical model for helping students collaboratively code tweets to assess their rhetorical effects and to improve their own awareness and use of microblogging as a communication tool.

    doi:10.1080/10572252.2014.850853
  11. Winifred Black's Teacherly Ethos: The Role of Journalism in Late-Nineteenth-century Rhetorical Education
    Abstract

    This essay recovers the rhetorical career of San Francisco Examiner journalist Winifred Black to demonstrate how professional journalists used late-nineteenth-century newspapers for rhetorical education and social change. I analyze two campaigns—the “Orphan's Santa Claus” and the “Little Jim” crusade—to demonstrate how Winifred Black constructs a persuasive ethos capable of inspiring the writing and social action efforts of male and female children from various socioeconomic classes. Specifically, Black revises the rhetorical tradition of the “stunt girl reporter” in order to craft a teacherly ethos anchored in a “symbolic motherhood”—an effective rhetorical strategy due to close cultural links between teaching and mothering. Combined with aspects of what Karlyn Kohrs Campbell terms a “feminine style,” this ethos allows Black to promote not merely social change, but a particular kind of rhetorical education that: (1) privileges moral principles over grammatical and mechanical correctness and (2) blurs gender and class lines.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2013.861008