This article studies a set of scientific/technical articles published in Internet homepages. Focusing upon current trends on genre theory and the functional approach deployed by Halliday and Martin [1], linguistic features and schematic structure are analyzed in relation to more standard genres. The structural analysis suggests that these kind of texts imaginatively realize and assume the standpoint and main tenets of a lay audience that just consumes specific genres, most being analogous to the persuasive, manipulative, amusement-oriented genres of TV news stories, tabloids, and commercials. It is pondered that much of the “technological utopianism” (term used by Kling [2] surrounding the ever increasingly standardized Internet discourse turns the Internet into a productive vehicle to sustain technoscience as modern myth by spreading and forging that utopian imagery into the audience's consciousness, and that scientists are taking fruitful advantage of the utopian, futurist, and often sensationalist accounts of the Internet as a formidable frame to advertise themselves and the deeds achieved in their laboratories.

Although the literature has usually characterized Chinese business correspondence as indirect, this article illustrates how Chinese writers used directness in 115 extant English-language business letters to Jardine, Matheson & Company Ltd. in the nineteenth century. Taking a general speech-act approach and a linguistic pragmatics analysis to determine the incidence of directness and indirectness, the author then uses cultural analysis to understand why the writers used directness and indirectness. The analysis shows that indirectness in the organization of the message served to establish an informational context whereas directness served to signal a strong proximity dimension in the relationship between the correspondents. The article proposes that these Chinese writers may have chosen directness precisely to signal proximity, especially where power differentials were great.

(2003). Review of Technical Communication, Deliberative Rhetoric, and Environmental Discourse: Connections and Directions. Technical Communication Quarterly: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 234-236.

In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh received from Queen Elizabeth a patent to colonize any region of North America not possessed by a Christian prince. In 1585 he sent a fleet of seven ships to plant a colony under the governorship of Ralph Lane on Roanoke Island near what is now the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The colony lasted less than a year and then returned to England, where Lane produced a commercial report explaining the failure. Using research from speech communication on the rhetoric of apologia, this essay analyzes Lane's attempts to answer four criticisms of his governorship: that he mistreated the Indians, that he failed to explore the region to find commodities valuable to Raleigh and his investors, that he was an incompetent military commander, and that he deserted the colony. The essay also evaluates Lane's recommendations that future colonies be established further north on the Chesapeake Bay.

Abstract This essay examines the question of the body as it appears in Burke's texts. Drawing upon a rereading of-and friendly amendment to-Burke's action/motion writings, I argue that other terminologies of embodiment suffer from a lack of complexity and therefore offer not dialectics but rhetorics of embodiment. After briefly applying this reading of Burke to discourse on race and racial identity, the essay concludes that his action/motion polarity can be used as a critical instrument of sorts, prompting us to greater vigilance regarding the vocabularies of embodiment we employ, the terms we impose upon our bodies and ourselves.

This study investigates the practice of presenting multiple supporting examples in parallel form. The elements of parallelism and its use in argument were first illustrated by Aristotle. Although real texts may depart from the ideal form for presenting multiple examples, rhetorical theory offers a rationale for minimal, parallel presentation. The form for presenting data can also influence the way it is observed and selected, as the case of the Linnaean template for species grouping illustrates. Parallel presentation is not limited to verbal phrasing. Arranging data in tables, typical in scientific discourse, satisfies the same requirements for minimal, equivalent presentation of evidence. Arranging representational or iconic images in rows or arrays is yet another mode for the parallel presentation of evidence, although this mode has a recent history. A cognitive rationale can perhaps explain the use of parallelism to present multiple supporting examples.

Reviewers of technical documents must often work with nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English. Drawing on research in cross-cultural pragmatics and institutional discourse, we discuss linguistic patterns that document reviewers are likely to use when commenting on NNS writing. We anticipate miscommunications that may arise from some of these linguistic patterns, especially when a reviewer attempts to be both clear (so that the writer understands the comments) and polite (so that the reviewer maintains positive working relations with the writer). We recommend specific linguistic strategies that allow reviewers to balance clarity and politeness most effectively when communicating with NNSs.

Nicolaus Caussin’s Eloquentia sacrae et humaneae parellela (1619) forges a distinctly modern history of rhetoric that ties discourse to culture. What were the conditions that made this new history of rhetoric possible? Marc Fumaroli has argued that political exigency in Cardinal Richelieu’s France demanded a reconciliation of divergent religious and secular forms of eloquence that implicated, in turn, a newly “eclectic” history of rhetoric. But political exigency alone does not account for this nascent pluralism; we also need to look at the internal dynamics of rhetorical theory as it moved across literate cultures in Europe. With this goal in mind, I first demonstrate in this article how textbooks after the heady days of Protestant Reformation in Germany tried in vain to systematize the passions of art, friendship, and politics. Partially in response to this failure, I then argue, there emerged in France a new rhetoric sensitive to the historical contingency of passionate situations. My claim is not simply that rhetoric is bound to be temporal and situational, but more precisely that Caussin initiates historical rhetorics: the capacity to theorize how discourse is bound to culture in its plurality and historical contingency.

After reviewing my career as a teacher of composition and literature and as a writing program administrator of writing across the curriculum, I discuss the potential of poetry across the curriculum as an important tool for writing “against” the curriculum of academic discourse. When they write poetry, students often express meaningful thoughts and emotions not readily available to them in disciplinary languages and contexts.

I begin with an analogy: teaching research-based argumentation and critique in composition studies is like learning how to perform hip-hop music. My analogy's focus on argumentation does not exclude traditional methods of argumentative pedagogy based on models like Stephen Toulmin's complex hierarchies or the Aristotelian triad of deliberative (offering advice), forensic (taking a side in a debate, often a legal or controversial matter), and epideictic (a speech of praise or blame appealing to an already won-over audience) discourse. Instead, I pose the analogy as a first step towards developing alternative or additional ways to engage composition students with the argumentative essay. In choosing hip-hop as a model for the composition essay, I attempt to draw upon a dominant form of contemporary culture familiar to the majority of students I encounter in my classrooms. Does a relationship between hip-hop and com-

Writing across the curriculum means more than creating opportu-nities to learn by writing; it means, also, focusing on the nature of writing for particular purposes, in particular fields. In Australia, B.A. students are required to write extensively for all of their courses, but usually receive no theoretically-informed instruction about writing itself. This paper offers a framework that discipline specialists and their students might use in analyzing the varieties of writing in their field, to inform the students ’ subsequent choices of suitable forms and language when they write for different au-diences in a professional role. The paper follows the application of this framework in an archaeology subject where an academic skills adviser collaborated with an archaeology lecturer in invit-ing upper level students to closely examine the discourse of their profession.

The first part of this article shows that research in the history of technical communication has increased in quantity and sophistication over the last 20 years. Scholarship that describes how to teach with that information, however, has not followed, even though teaching the history of the field is a need recognized by several scholars. The article provides and defends four guidelines as a foundation to study ways to incorporate history into classroom lessons: 1) maintain a continued research interest in teaching history; 2) limit to technical rather than scientific discourse; 3) focus on English-language texts; and 4) focus on American texts, authors, and practices. The second part of the essay works within the guidelines to show a lesson that contrasts technical texts by Benjamin Franklin and Herbert Hoover. The lesson can help students see the difference in technical writing before and after the Industrial Revolution, a difference that mirrors their own transition from the university to the workforce.

Spoken and Written Discourse: A Multi‐disciplinary Perspective by Khosrow Jahandarie. Stamford, Conn.: Ablex Publishing Company, 1999. 446 pp. Mattingly's “Telling Evidence”;: Re‐Seeing Nineteenth‐Century Women's Rhetorics Water Drops from Women Writers: A Temperance Reader edited by Carol Mattingly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 292 + xii. Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth‐Century America by Carol Mattingly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Uniersity Press, 2002. 175 + xv. Seeking the Words of Women: Two Recent Anthologies Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900: An Anthology edited by Jane Donawerth. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 337 + xlii pp. Available Means: An Anthology of Women's Rhetoric(s) edited by Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. 521 + xxxi pp.

Abstract This essay explores the rhetorical education of nineteenth‐century women attending the Westfield State Normal School, the second public and first co‐educational normal school in the United States. Archival research reveals that Westfield developed a program of rhetorical study that aimed to prepare both men and women to use oral and written persuasive discourse in their work as teachers. Westfield justified its progressive curriculum by arguing that advanced study in rhetoric would help future teachers to foster learning, win respect, and achieve meaningful moral influence among their pupils. While traditional gender ideologies at times complicated the efforts of female students to master oral and written persuasive discourse, Westfield's faculty and students remained committed throughout the century to the idea that study in rhetoric would aid the future teacher in cultivating a powerful public voice.

It will come as no surprise, perhaps, to say that writing centers have long been grounded in -some would say "bounded by" -the conventions of printed text. True, writing centers, like most of the rest of the world, have been influenced by advances in computer technology, most recently through the explosive growth of Online Writing Labs (OWLs) and computer-mediated conferencing with students, but fundamentally, most of the interactions between students and tutors still center on the handwritten or printed texts that are placed on a table between them or, perhaps, shared in a wordprocessed file. These texts are structured linearly and hierarchically, moving along a single path from beginning to end, following well-known and universally taught discourse forms that have emerged from a print -based rhetorical tradition.

2001 CCCC Outstanding Book AwardThe vast majority of academic books are written from the scholar s position, even those that primarily concern teaching. Writing/Teaching, on the other hand, is a book about teaching written from the position of the teacher. As the title suggests, Kameen s book is split into two halves yet both, in different ways and through different discourses, are derived from his work in the classroom, and his own struggle with issues and problems all teachers of writing must face.The first half is a series of essays originating from a graduate seminar Kameen team-taught with professor and poet Toi Derricotte in 1994. Included are essays Kameen wrote, a selection of pieces written by other members of the group, and a reflective postscript. These essays combine personal narrative, reflective meditation, and critical inquiry all used as discourse to depict and examine the process of teaching.The second half of the book contains essays on Plato s dialogues primarily Phaedrus and Protagoras as a means to interrogate the position of teacher through the lens of the most famous of Western pedagogues Socrates. Here, Socrates is used as a tool to examine and critique both Kameen s own teacherly identity and, in a wider sense, the set of cultural forces that pre-figure the available positions for both teacher and student in contemporary education.What unites both halves is the way Kameen approaches each the personal and the scholarly from his position as teacher. The texts presented provide the occasion for a complex and nuanced meditation on the classroom as a legitimate arena for the production of knowledge and research. Sure to be timely and controversial, Writing/Teaching will enter into the debate on whether to reconfigure the relationship between research and teaching currently taking place among teachers of composition, cultural studies, and rhetoric. Compelling reading for teachers or those contemplating a career in the profession.

Focuses on the kind of assessment that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when educators talk about classroom assessment they talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. Hopes to draw educators into new conversations about assessment and the teaching of writing.

s Kathleen Yancey points out in her history of writing assessment, evaluation in some form or another has been an important part of college writing courses for over fifty years (“Looking”). Yancey’s history recognizes the often conflicted nature of assessment for the teaching of writing. Although most writing teachers recognize the importance and necessity of regular assessment, they are also rightly concerned about the adverse effects assessment can have on their classrooms and students. This essay focuses on the kind of assessment (I use the words assessment and evaluation interchangeably, distinguishing both from either testing or grading) that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when we talk about classroom assessment we talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. This slippage of assessment, grading, and testing as interchangeable provides a discourse about assessment that is often critical and unexamined. The result of these strong connections among grading, testing, and assessing writing is that any possible connection between the teaching and the evaluating of student writing is seldom questioned or discussed. This has led us as a profession to believe that assessing student writing somehow interferes with our ability to teach it. There are of course some notable exceptions. For example, Edward M. White’s germinal text is called Teaching and Assessing Writing, and he includes the ways in which formal assessments such as holistic scoring can benefit classroom practice; but even White divides assessment and teaching into separate entities that can affect each other. Certainly portfolios have been constructed by some (Elbow, “Foreword”;

or rhetoric and composition, the last decade of the twentieth century might be deemed Return of the Ancients. In many ways, contemporary scholars have taken up an earlier resurgence of the ancients, one that began decades earlier with what have since become standard historical treatments of the ancients (Kennedy, Kerferd, and Guthrie), and, perhaps most notably, in 1972, when Rosamond Kent Sprague's volume The Older Sophists made available the sophistic fragments in translation for the first time. But recent work aims to be more connective: rather than writing history for the sake of history, scholars such as Janet Atwill, Richard Enos, Susan Jarratt, John Poulakos, Takis Poulakos, Kathleen Welch, Victor Vitanza, and most recently Jeffrey Walker (Rhetoric) have reclaimed, refigured, and reread Aristotle, Isocrates, and the sophists, delineating ways in which these ancient figures might help us reframe or reconsider contemporary debates about pedagogy. The connections to feminism (arratt), cultural studies (T. Poulakos and Welch), postmodernism (Vitanza and Atwill) and the liberal arts (Atwill and Walker) have been convincing enough to spark renewed and broadened interest in how the ancients conceptualized rhetoric, how they taught, what they did. In many ways what follows is also a return to the ancients, but rather than attempt to connect the ancients to discourse already in circulation-an important task, to be sure-I want to instead explore a connection that inhered in ancient practices, a connection that isn't as apparently relevant to contemporary pedagogy, but as I will suggest just might be: that between rhetorical training and athletic training. It is important to note at the outset, as many writers have pointed out (for

This article focuses on supervising professors’ and master’s degree students’ understanding and experiences of supervision practices in a Norwegian university, with focus on differences in text cultures and text norms between and within three academic disciplines. The interview study shows that each discipline is a heterogeneous discourse community with largely unarticulated differences. The findings suggest three supervision models, described as teaching, partnership, and apprenticeship. Dominant trends in supervisory relationships and textual practices are distinguished, and characteristics of each are outlined. Connections are shown between the models supervisors adhere to, the kind of texts they expect from their students, and how they provide feedback. As an example, conflicting attitudes toward exploratory student texts are discussed. The study shows that supervision models and textual expectations are influenced by the disciplinary text cultures in which supervisors and students take part. Finally, some practical implications of the study are suggested.

Journals can be effective in cultivating formal discourse while respecting cultural differences.

Incites inquiry as to how modern American literature reflects on the problem of identity. Spotlights the contribution to modern American writing by Wallace Thurman’s "Harlem" fiction. Endeavors to link a racial imperative to a sexual imperative by means of a current theoretical discourse surrounding notions of city and community life.

ver ten years have now passed since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble began making trouble with its challenges to the systems of gender and sexuality. The book has been translated into nine languages; anniversary editions have been released, and Butler has revisited and revised its central claims in subsequent articles, interviews, and book-length works. In short, Gender Trouble, and, most particularly, the theory of performativity delineated within this book, has remained on postmodern theory's center stage since its 1990 appearance. Butler asserts that the incredible life of this text has far exceeded her original and more modest intentions for it, and she credits the continually changing context of its reception for Gender Trouble's endurance (Preface vii). While Butler's humility and attribution to audiences here are refreshing, Gender Trouble's central claims did constitute theoretical interventions of the first order, disrupting feminism as many of us knew it, and helping to found queer theory in the process. Subverting common-sense beliefs that gender and sexuality are fundamental truths of the self, Gender Trouble (in what are now statements of their own commonplace familiarity) tells us instead that both are always acts, expressions, behaviors, which, like performative speech acts, bring into existence that which they name, and, through their repetition, come to constitute the identities they are purported to be. In other

Student Writing presents an accessible and thought-provoking study of academic writing practices. Informed by 'composition' research from the US and 'academic literacies studies'from the UK, the book challenges current official discourse on writing as a 'skill'. Lillis argues for an approach which sees student writing as social practice. The book draws extensively on a three-year study with ten non-traditional students in higher education and their experience of academic writing. Using case-study material - including literacy history interviews, extended discussions with students about their writing of discipline specific essays, and extracts from essays - Lillis identifies the following as three significant dimensions to academic writing: Access to higher education and to its language and literacy representational resources Regulation of meaning making in academic writing rrent Desire for participation in higher education and for choices over ways of meaning in academic writing. Student Writing: access, regulation, desire raises questions about why academics write as they do, who benefits from such writing, which meanings are valued and how, on what terms 'outsiders' get to be 'insiders' and at what costs. Theresa M. Lillis is Lecturer in language and education at the Centre for Language and Communications at the Open University.

How should the relationship between immediate interaction and verbal convention be understood? The present article argues that dialogism transcends the distinction between interactionist and constructionist social theories of written communication, as presented by Nystrand and colleagues. The theoretical argument is illustrated by a study of one writer who is struggling to learn argumentative writing. In analyzing this writer’s development, the focus is on grounding, specifically, the interplay between foregrounded and backgrounded parts of discourse. The results illustrate that appropriation of conventional resources for grounding is more creative and dyadically contextualized than constructionist theories may invite us to think. Simultaneously, appropriation draws on conventional communicative resources in ways that are hard to explain within interactionist theories. A dialogical model is presented to show that the Bakhtinian “double dialogue” of discourse meets in the “diatope”—that multidimensional (ecological) point of co-constitution where interaction and construction merge into one unified perspective.

This article enters an ongoing discussion about the usefulness of different theories and different research designs in the analysis of classroom writing. Starting with questions about how students interpret the norms of writing and their own selves in school writing, it demonstrates the relevance of an ecological theory of writing, methodologically connected to in-depth case studies—double histories—of the dialogical relationship of student and teacher positionings over time. The related concepts of discourse roles and positionings are discussed in the context of the theories of Bakhtin and Mead. The writing double histories of two students and their teacher over 2 years in a Norwegian upper secondary school are presented. Analysis shows informants positioning themselves dialogically in relation to their ideas about self and the other, the social meaning of their written utterances in various school genres, and their changing interpretations of the social rules of school writing.

Reviews Scott Consigny, Gorgias: Sophist and Artist (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). 296pp. Why the Sophists? Why Gorgias? Why now? W. K. C. Guthrie points to a rupture in the history of sophistic studies that leads to some preliminary answers: "It is true that the powerful impetus of this movement [i.e., the revival of sophistry since the 1930s] was given by the rise of totalitarian gov­ ernments in Europe and the second world war, and it was indeed disturbing to learn that the aim of the German Nazi Party, as described in its official programme, was the production of 'guardians in the highest Platonic sense'" (The Sophists, Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 10). Among classicists, historians, and philosophers, the interest in sophistic studies that emerged out of this historical rupture was defined by a negative impulse: If Plato's ideas support immoral ideologies, then we must turn instead to the ideas of his most bitter rivals, the Sophists. Yet the revival of sophistry specifically within rhetorical studies took on a different character. Instead of being defined by a negative impulse, studies of sophistic rhetoric were defined by the positive search for affinities between ancient and modern theories of persuasion. Robert Scott and Michael Leff, for example, found precedents for epistemic rhetoric among the sophistic fragments, and John Poulakos invoked sophistic notions of propriety and the opportune moment in his universal definition of rhetoric. Scott Consigny's Gorgias: Sophist and Artist represents a new phase in studies of sophistic rhetoric. In this complex and well-written book, Consigny avoids making problematic generalizations about "the Sophists," who were, in reality, a thoroughly disparate group of traveling teachers; he does not rely excessively on Plato's dialogues as source materials for Gorgias's art of rhetoric; and he resists the neosophistic impulse to appropriate ancient doctrines for modern purposes. In his introduction, Consigny discusses prior scholarship on the Sophists and the method of historiography that informs his analysis. Here Consigny contends that the fragmentary nature of Gorgias's texts, their questionable authenticity, and the ambiguous language in which Gorgias wrote create a "hermeneutic aporia," an interpretive impasse. Some "objectivist" scholars attempt to escape this aporia by suggesting that there is a single, correct interpretation of Gorgianic rhetoric, and it is the function of historical schol­ arship to discover it. Other "rhapsodic" scholars argue that the meaning© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XX, Number 3 (Summer 2002). Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223, USA 299 300 RHETORICA Gorgias intended in his writings is now lost forever, and they use subjective interpretations of Gorgianic rhetoric to construct neosophistic theories that have modern relevance. Consigny, on the other hand, draws from Stanley Fish's notion of interpretive communities, arguing that pure truth is inacces­ sible and pure subjectivity is insufficient. Scholarly conventions established in academic discourse communities should guide our interpretations of Gor­ gianic rhetoric. While much prior scholarship identifies Gorgias as either a subjectivist or an empiricist, Consigny favors a newly emerging third school of criticism that identifies Gorgias as an antifoundationalist. Consigny begins his antifoundationalist reading of Gorgianic rhetoric with an interpretation of On Not-Being as an attack against both philosophical truth and empirical realism. In other texts (Epitaphios, Helen, and Palamedes), Gorgias articulates a more positive antifoundationalist theory of language based on the ancient notion of the contest or agon. Here language is defined by context, by the play of interaction among participants in a linguistic game that is governed by communal rules, and words derive meaning from their role in this interaction. Within such a framework, foundational truth is impossible since each context brings with it a different set of constraints, and radical subjectivity is also impossible since these very same constraints prevent chaos. Next Consigny argues that Gorgias articulates a nascent social con­ structionist view of knowledge in which established social conventions (or "tropes") condition individuals to act in communally authorized ways. Yet Gorgias is not in favor of a micro-social theory of conventions that separate communities by focusing on their foundational...

Abstract The Creek colony of Thurii, founded in southern Italy around 444, BCE, was apparently planned to be a model polis. Any reconstruction of that plan must be speculative, but the stories about Thurii suggest that its design incorporated three entities not usually linked — a democratic constitution, an orthogonal street layout, and a rhetorically‐oriented educational system. In trying to understand what these things might have had to do with one another, I examine the thought of three individuals who, sources tell us, participated in the colony: the rhêtor Pericles, who apparently instigated the project; the designer Hippodamus, who supposedly laid out its streets; and the sophist Protagoras, who reportedly wrote its laws. If indeed these three collaborated on Thurii, what they may have sought there was a “bounded”; democracy, a community of free and equal citizens, governed by open, transparent, and agonistic means but guided by an unmistakable sense of rightness, something manifest not only in the town's constitution but in its educational system and built space as well.

I analyze the public and professional discourse of learning disability, arguing that medical models of literacy misdirect teaching by narrowing its focus to remediation. This insight about teaching is not new; resurgent demands for behaviorist pedagogies make understanding their continuing appeal important to composition studies.

Discusses how social identity plays a significant role in defining the nature of classroom interaction. Describes how unresolved conflict emerged when the development of authentic student voice in narrative autobiography was the primary and perhaps only objective. Presents an example of the ways in which asymmetrical power relations influence how discourse works in the expressionist composition classroom.

Presents annotations of 37 selected recent research in the teaching of English and related fields. Addresses bilingual/foreign language education, discourse processes, literacy, professional development, reading, teaching and learning of literature, teaching and learning of writing, and technology and literacy. Notes that most of the studies appeared during the six-month period from July through December 2001.

Examines the discourse in an English as a second or other language (ESoL) classroom in a best-case scenario that contrasted dramatically with more typical school settings. Samples student critical turns (SCTs) across a six-week literature-rich science unit. Shows that the teacher played a crucial role in extended dialogue among students.

Hopes to promote recognition of the importance of the intersections between discourse, place, and environment through theoretical examinations and pedagogical approaches. Offers some preliminary working definitions for ecocomposition and examines the evolution of ecocomposition; distinguishes between ecocomposition and ecocriticism; and offers some perspectives on ecocomposition pedagogy.

In what can be called a "culture of disconnect," students and teachers alike often want to engage in public discourse but do not know where to begin. The newsletters and newspapers produced to support the work of small, alternative hospitality houses and prison ministries reveal the role communication plays in the lives of active participants in democracy and show how communities of people who choose to write and publish learn from each other s examples. These extraordinary words of ordinary men and women, writing for local, often little known causes, offer ways of understanding what may motivate writers to begin to assume a meaningful public voice.

The authors argue that writing-intensive service-learning courses extend the lessons of first-year composition courses by teaching students how to understand and negotiate differences between the discourses of the academy and those of community-based organizations. While first-year writing courses lead students through successive approximations of a generalized academic discourse in the relative safety of the composition classroom, service-learning courses create conditions in which students must confront clashing discourses in action. This article present s vignettes of three different courses, one of which intentionally tapped into the discourse tensions the students faced and the other two of which encountered these tensions as impediments to successful teaching problems that could be overcome in future versions of the courses. The challenge of negotiating competing discourses will inevitably be part of any service-learning course that involves extensive writing, the authors conclude; hence this issue should be addressed explicitly in readings, class discussions, and student papers. When addressed directly, the friction between discourses can become a teachable space where teachers can help students explore options for addressing dissonance, and so provide everyone involved with an opportunity for transformation.

The classical Greek discourse on techne has much to offer technical communication teachers concerned about the relationship between theory and practice, but this potential has not yet been realized. Plato's and Aristotle's discussions about the relationship between techne and rhetoric, for example, encompass questions about the rhetorical goals of the speakedwriter and about the role of theory in teaching rhetorical art that are of continuing relevance to the modern discourse on technical communication. The aim of this article is to identify several points upon which a fruitful dialogue between ancient and modern discourses can begin. First, I supply some background on how the term techne was used up through the fourth century BCE. Then I discuss how the modern discourse on technical communication (including material from popular textbooks) both converges with and departs from Plato's and Aristotle's statements on the relationship between techne and rhetoric. Finally, I point out areas for further discussion as teachers of technical communication continue to reflect upon and refine their pedagogies.

The article provides a framework for organizing and structuring the research of historical researchers who analyze technical and scientific publications. Because historical research spans both decades and centuries, an effective research methodology is essential. The framework consists of a multifaceted 10-step method for studying the written discourse of scientific and technical communication, specifically for interpreting historical data obtained from articles published in technical and scientific journals. The method is a reliable means for making sense of the enormous body of data that awaits historical researchers in the volumes of scientific and technical discourse already published.

This essay examines Montaigne’s admiration for ancient Sparta from a rhetorical and an ideological standpoint. The praise of Sparta in the Essais takes the form of a paradoxical encomium which allows Montaigne to challenge the received opinions of his time and to define his own values against the prevailing discourse of humanism. In the process the Essais also confront the problem of comparing the past to the present and of reconciling ancient and modern institutions. In this way the praise of Sparta emerges not only as a rhetorical exercise but also as an essay of self-definition and an inquiry into historical relativism.

Abstract John Quincy Adams's speech on behalf of the kidnapped Africans aboard the slave ship Amistad points to a troubling dilemma in rhetoric: that the power of rhetoric is limited by the audience's perception of what is plausible, and that can, as in the case of the Amistad argument, mean that outrageously unjust but intransigent and powerful interests set the limits of discourse. If rhetorical theory promotes decorum, what is the place of principled dissent and sincere outrage?

Abstract This essay traces the reception of a new grammatical‐rhetorical theory of personification in the canon of textbooks widely used to teach vernacular literacy in the nineteenth century. Invented, in 1751, by James Harris’ Hermes, a work in universal grammar, this new doctrine contributed to the increased masculinity of standard literate performance. Hermes increased the representivity of gendered pronouns and required a contradictory use of gendered personification as if it were both literal and figurative. As a result, two distinctive relations to language were made possible. For men, grammar and rhetoric appear in strict opposition and are always representative of their experience of language. Women literates, who were not taken into account by the masculinist sensibility of Hermes, were assigned, de facto, an anomalous position and a potentially more critical relation to language. The texts of Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen and Sarah Willis ("Fanny Fern “) provide examples which demonstrate that women recognized and profited from their anomalous difference, which suggests the creation of a historically specific l'ecriture feminine.

Abstract As the discourse of traditionally marginalized voices becomes increasingly salient in rhetorical studies, standpoint theory—which emphasizes the epistemological importance of the perspectives of oppressed groups—could play a significant role in textual analysis. This essay first outlines the central tenets of standpoint theory and the debate they have generated. We then suggest how standpoint theory, with some significant modifications and expansions, may function as a productive methodology for rhetorical analysis. We demonstrate this potential contribution to our field through analyses of two nineteenth‐century texts: Jane Austen's Persuasion and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

In this story I listen closely to the ways in which two late nineteenth-century American Indian intellectuals, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Charles Alexander Eastman, use the discourses about Indian-ness that circulated during that time period in order to both respond to that discourse and to reimagine what it could mean to be Indian. This use, I argue, is a critical component of rhetorics of survivance.

The connection between language and empiricism is a central issue in technical writing and communication, more so than in other fields. Our field deals with technical and scientific knowledge which is oftentimes very definite and objective, yet there has been increasing recognition over the past few decades that this knowledge is socially constructed and rhetorically negotiated. Debates have ensued over the rhetoricity of technical communication in contrast to its empirical and instrumental aspects. W. V Quine, one of the most influential American philosophers of the twentieth century, however, rejected the distinction between empirical knowledge and knowledge stemming from language and social negotiation. Understanding technical writing and communication through the lens of Quine's theory ameliorates the tension between instrumental and rhetorical/humanistic views of technical discourse by recognizing the validity of both views and integrating the two. This understanding in turn will facilitate our pedagogical interactions with technical and scientific majors.