A “personally situated” approach to community-engaged rhetoric highlights the personal and performative dimensions of advocacy, which are often obscured in public and community-oriented frameworks. When applied to the advocacy practices of parents of disabled children within the context of special education, personally situated advocacy reveals how a strong personal commitment to advocacy within a highly institutionalized space can create unique and often difficult rhetorical challenges. By making these challenges more visible, personally situated advocacy suggests new possibilities for affiliation between community partners and community-engaged scholars.

As I compose this book review, the 2020 presidential primary field is shrinking as fundraising targets are hit and missed and candidates who remain are promising to make medical care affordable for...

In the 1990s, “Murphy Brown” mothers—often unwed, older, white, and professional—could embrace their alliance with stigmatized single mothers or mark their difference from them, while simultaneously demonstrating their alignment with the dominant discourse of “family values.” Many opted for the latter, gathering under the label “Single Mothers by Choice” (SMC). Using an intersectional cultural rhetorical methodology, this article identifies the axioms of “family values” and demonstrates how they shaped SMC’s efforts to legitimize themselves through an analysis of Jane Mattes’s 1994 guidebook, Single Mothers by Choice: A Guidebook for Single Women Who Are Considering or Have Chosen Motherhood.

In 2014, members of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus began contributing citations to a shared Google Document (GDoc) that suggested a relatively significant contribution of scholarship to the field of Rhetoric and Composition studies. Scholars of color have argued that rhetoric and composition scholarship fails to represent diversity in academic publications (Baca; Banks; Jones Royster; Pimentel; Ruíz). This study examines statistical data arrived at through analysis of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus Bibliography, with survey and interview data from Latinx scholars providing important context about publishing for people of color.

This article examines a lecture that Booker T. Washington delivered to the Tuskegee literary society in order to argue for Washington’s place within a Black Socratic tradition. Readings of this obscure speech invite new understandings of Washington’s habits of public address, including his pedagogical practice as a teacher of rhetoric, and illuminates how rhetors have mobilized the myth of Socrates to galvanize marginalized communities to civic action.

In this fascinating and beautifully crafted monograph, Pamela VanHaitsma adds to her own rich collection of archival, rhetorical, and gendered scholarship. A brilliant scholar, she again challenges...

Lisa Shaver’s recent monograph, Reforming Women, is the culmination of more than a decade of work on the American Female Moral Reform Society (AFMRS), much of it published in Rhetoric Review. Her s...

This essay develops the concept of material inertia, a lens for studying artifacts of material and spatial rhetorics with a focus on long durations. The essay uses the case study of the DeWitt Clinton High School building, constructed in 1906 in New York City and still in use at CUNY John Jay College, to demonstrate how friction between the building’s design and use is exacerbated over decades. The essay argues for reading long-lived spaces via material inertia to understand the rhetorical force of non-human actors across time, and calls for scholarship in material rhetorics to take specifically durational approaches.

This essay examines moments of Black women’s rhetorical impatience, or performances used to manage time within adverse conditions, to expand conceptions of kairos and self-care. It shows how disruption is a vehicle of discipline designed to promote Black women’s respect and wellness, revealing discursive postures that must inform discussions of identity, risk, and power in relation to rhetorical criticism and education.

Being at Genetic Risk: Toward a Rhetoric of Care. Kelly Pender. University Park, PA, The Pennsylvania State Press, 2018. 174 pages, $69.95 hardcover. Publisher webpage: https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08212-7.html

This article considers best practices for writing articles in science, technology, and policy, focusing on writing for international scholarly journals in nuclear security. Its two main audiences are technical communication educators/researchers and internationals wishing to publish their work in English-medium scholarly journals. I discuss publishing scenarios and challenges facing such authors and offer guidelines for producing clear, effective, publishable articles, in English, for international discourse. My approach is based on traditional rhetorical principles, plain language studies, research pursued at nuclear security conferences, feedback from internationals at writing workshops, and my experience as editor of the International Journal of Nuclear Security.

This study investigates the role of stasis, an ancient rhetorical tool with both heuristic and analytic capabilities, in entrepreneurial rhetoric, specifically in pitching and question-and-answer sessions. Drawing from a multiyear sample of Shark Tank pitches, the author found that funders expect entrepreneurs to account for stases of being, quality, quantity, and place. The findings suggest a series of associated questions within each stasis. When these questions are answered unsuccessfully, standstills occur within the funding argument; when they are successfully addressed, the stasis passes, and ventures are more likely to receive funding. The author discusses the implications of this study for entrepreneurship and professional communication.

Infrastructures support and shape our social world, but they do so in often invisible ways. In few cases is that truer than with various documents that serve infrastructural functions. This article takes one type of those documents—technical standards—and uses analysis of one specific standard to develop theory related to the infrastructural function of writing. The author specifically analyzes one of the major infrastructures of the Internet of Things—the 126-page Tag Data Standard (TDS)—to show how rethinking writing as infrastructure can be valuable for multiple conversations occurring with writing studies, including research on material rhetoric, research that expands the scope of what should be studied as writing, and research in writing studies that links with emerging fields. The author concludes by developing a model for future research on the infrastructural functions of writing.

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

ABSTRACT Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert in the White House's coronavirus task force, is challenged to offer responsible public communication of science despite working under a habitual liar who has no tolerance for criticism or dissent. Fauci manages this rhetorical exigence by using strategic ambiguity, the topos of the honest broker, dissociation, and a narrative that constrains executive decision making.

ABSTRACT This essay walks through the ways the pandemic structures and limits our movement in cities. It suggests that our well-worn tropes for walking, in this moment, shore up the power of the state over individual bodies. To imagine the possibility of how bodily movement might resist this power, the essay turns to a rhetorical conception of scale.

ABSTRACT The novel coronavirus pandemic is throwing into relief traditional notions and rhetorics of witness, visibility, recognition, and violence in human rights discourse. This essay articulates the ways in which the current pandemic is being framed rhetorically as a spectacular war, using rhetoric that obfuscates the structural violations that leads to the virus disproportionately impacting the precarious. It argues for a reframing of traditional paradigms of representation, recognition, and resistance toward a notion of everyday violence that accounts for the accumulation of structural and material conditions of precarity as a human rights violation.

ABSTRACT The circumstances of the pandemic, while inviting lessons from earlier reclusions, prompt reflection on what is lost when we are forced apart. The moral sense, as Darwin reminds us, is founded in communal bonds, the very things now brought into question. How then are values—and the dispositions that inform them—being challenged by a rhetoric of care?

ABSTRACT Pandemics and plagues function rhetorically, by doing violence to the structures of discourse, sociality, hospitality, and mutual engagement that characterize ethical human interaction. They infect us, as rhetorical subjects, and reorient our capacity for engagement. The coronavirus's “novelty” renders it uncertain as to how long it will last or who will be infected next; the near-uniform response to it has been a forced distance of ourselves from others and a displacement from our itineraries and our locations. Through COVID-19 we are learning that pandemic does violence to our sense of place, to how we think of respite, and has highlighted our sense of vulnerability in the midst of others.

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

ABSTRACT Philosophy combined with rhetoric offers a consolation in a time of crisis that politics cannot achieve. Political speech is guided by ideology. Philosophical speech is guided by ideas. It is the ideas that offer perspective that is so much needed in difficult and dangerous times.

AbstractIn English discourse one can find cases of the expression ‘not for nothing’ being used in argumentation. The expression can occur both in the argument and in the standpoint. In this chapter we analyse the argumentative and rhetorical aspects of ‘not for nothing’ by regarding this expression as a presentational device for strategic manoeuvring. We investigate under which conditions the proposition containing the expression ‘not for nothing’ functions as a standpoint, an argument or neither of these elements. It is also examined which type of standpoint (descriptive, evaluative or prescriptive) and which types of argument scheme (symptomatic, causal or comparison) the expression typically co-occurs with. In doing so we aim to develop a better understanding of the role and effects of ‘not for nothing’ when used in argumentation. Finally, we show that the strategic potential of ‘not for nothing’ lies in its suggestion that sufficient support has been provided while this support has in fact been left implicit.

The Cane Ridge Revival drew nearly twenty thousand participants, sparking the transformative Second Great Awakening. Barton Stone was the minister who organized and shared preaching responsibilities for the revival, and eventually, his disciples formed one of the largest American religious traditions, the Stone-Campbell Movement. In this paper, I examine portions of nine fictional dialogues published by Stone during the final year of his life, wherein he explicitly outlined the parameters of effective rhetoric or “useful preaching.” I argue that Stone developed a rhetorical theory that rebelled against authority by granting agency to the audience even in the processes of invention and interpretation, a theory that produced idiosyncratic theological convictions and a movement practically incapable of confessional unity.

In 1 Cor. 10:1–22, Paul deals with the role of Christ and his relationship to God. This is an important ethical topic that Paul deems necessary to discuss with the Corinthian believers. In order to make an effective, thus persuasive, argument, he follows the ancient Greco-Roman tradition of rhetoric and poetics. I argue that vv. 1–4 is Paul’s introduction to his vivid representation of monotheism (vv. 5–22). As he presents his narrative of the wilderness events, he employs various rhetorical-poetic techniques to evoke in his hearers imaginative and emotional experiences that will transport them into a higher level of ethical consciousness, a new monotheistic reality in Christ.

Book Reviews Menico Caroli, Il velo delle parole. L'eufemismo nella lingua e nella storia dei Greet. Bari: Levante editori, 2017, 464 pp. ISBN 9788879496766 Parlare di eufemismi a proposito di alcuni autori della letteratura greca, come per esempio Aristofane, potrebbe sembrare un paradosso: come sa bene chi ha preso almeno una volta in mano il mitico saggio di Jeffrey Henderson dedicato alia 'musa maculata',1 Aristofane, e con lui tutti i poeti comici delYarchaia, diceva pane al pane e vino al vino. Eppure non sempre, tra un termine schiettamente osceno e il suo equivalente piu o meno pudico, chi scriveva commedie (o si dedicava ad altri generi letterari che, in modo analogo, non disprezzavano il greco non politically correct, come per esem­ pio il giambo o l'epigramma) sceglieva il primo. Lo dimostrano i numerosissimi esempi raccolti da Menico Caroli (d'ora in avanti C.) nel suo bellissimo libro II velo delle parole, dedicato al ruolo dell 'eufemismo nella lingua e nella cultura greca (ma con continui sconfinamenti nel mondo romano), nato da una tesi di laurea in Grammatica greca seguita da Francesco De Martino e discussa alEUniversita di Bari. C., che oggi insegna lingua e letteratura greca alEUniversita di Foggia, ha dedicato alia commedia la parte piu cospicua del suo voluminoso saggio (che, se si contano anche le died illustrazioni inserite in fondo al volume, sfiora le cinquecento pagine). L'ultimo capitolo, intitolato L'eufemismo e il comune senso del pudore, discute a lungo dei tentativi (nel complesso, peraltro, assai poco riusciti) di evitare, quando era possibile, il ricorso all'aischrologhia nelle tante scene comiche che riproducevano situazioni francamente oscene. Prima di Aristofane e dei suoi sodali, perd, C. ha affrontato anche altri autori (o meglio, altri ambiti semantici e culturali), dove l'eufemismo ha sem­ pre giocato un ruolo di primo piano. Nella seconda parte del libro, intitolata Lessico degli eufemismi greci, egli attraversa con sicurezza mondi differenti, passando dalla religione alia filosofia, dalla giurisprudenza alia storia, dalla politica al teatro, utilizzando come base documentaria non solo le testimonianze letterarie, ma anche quelle epigrafiche e papirologiche, che sono state spesso escluse dall'indagine dei linguisti. :J. Henderson, The Maculate Muse. Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (New Haven-London 19751; New York-Oxford 19912). Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVTH, Issue 3, pp. 321-332. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.38.3.j>21 322 RHETORICA Una posizione particolare occupano i capitoli che aprono la sezione: L’eufemismo e le tenebre della superstizione e "Non abbellirmi la morte''. In questi due capitoli, dedicati alia modalita dell'interdizione magico-religiosa, C. affronta i temi legati al destino dell'uomo e, in particolare, alia morte (quel concetto che, molto piu degli altri, gli antichi - cosi come fanno anche i modemi - cercavano di velare grazie alia tecnica deU'eufemismo). A dimostrazione dell'ampiezza e della profondita della sua indagine c'e inoltre il fatto che, tra i tanti autori vagliati da C., ci sono anche figure secondarie , come per esempio la misteriosa Filenide, la scrittrice di Samo vissuta tra il IV e il III secolo a.C., alia quale si deve il piu antico manuale erotico della civilta occidental, conservato in modo purtroppo estremamente frammentario da un papiro ossirinchita,2 i cui pochi resti vengono discussi nel capitolo La permuta eufemistica del difetto, dedicato al "lessico dei vizi e dei difetti, di natura e di comportamento". Un altro autore poco noto e Damascio di Damasco, ultimo scolarca dell'Accademia filosofica di Atene, che tra il V e il VI secolo d.C. scrisse l'opera Sulla vita del filosofo Isidoro, a noi nota grazie alia 'recensione' che ne fece il patriarca Fozio nella sua Biblioteca-. nello stesso capitolo, C. ricorda come, secondo il suo biografo, Damascio rifiutasse sdegnoso tutti quegli accorgimenti linguistici che permettevano di ridimensionare i difetti e le debolezze degli altri, smascherando quindi la pericolosa vicinanza tra l...

328 RHETORICA de cinq siecles qui separe le pseudo-Platon et Maxime). L'ouvrage hesite, puisqu'il mentionne incidemment ces auteurs platoniciens, tout comme il hesite, pour les besoins de son objet, entre un traitement exclusivement philosophique et une approche plus rhetorique de la priere. On forme evidemment ces regrets parce que Ton y est conduit par l'aptitude d'AT a produire des syntheses eclairantes. Sans doute Porphyre et ses predecesseurs platoniciens n'avaient-ils pas lu Lacan, mais ils n'en tenaient pas moins lame pour structuree, consciemment et inconsciemment, comme un langage. Qu'elle ne soit pas exprimee en paroles, phonetiquement, ne change rien au fait qu'elle est foncierement logike (meme si elle se fait sans le truchement du logos, y compris du logos interieur, empreint de passion ; p. 158), qu'elle est de l'ordre du discours et que la pensee est toujours, depuis Platon, un discours, sinon un dialogue. AT nous invite a distinguer de maniere tranchee la priere silencieuse et phi­ losophique de la priere prononcee. Mais sans doute doit-on temperer cette opposition. La priere silencieuse en quoi consiste l'exercice theoretique de l'intellection, est une forme de communication, de partage et d'entente avec la divinite. C'est ce qui explique, pour n'en retenir qu'un exemple, que les demons soient designes par Porphyre comme des divinites intermediaries, des « transporters » de messages, qui font circuler prieres humaines ou pre­ scriptions divines en les transmettant d'un destinataire a l'autre. Comme le dit le debut de la longue sequence demonologique du De Abstinentia, en II 36 (§3), c'est la mission proprement angelique des demons que de transmettre des messages et des conseils. Parmi lesquels figurent les prieres. Le silence n'est aucunement suspension de l'expression et de la communication entre les hommes et les dieux. L'ouvrage d'AT connaitra la meme fortune que sa precedente synthese« demonologique », en devenant l'etude de reference sur son objet. Jean-Francois Pradeau Universite Lyon III - Jean Moulin Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xiv + 217 pp. ISBN 9781316855621 James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015, xvii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780226278629 Scholarship on rhetoric in Plato habitually suffers from certain limita­ tions. While recent decades have seen profound revolutions in how Plato's dialogues are read and interpreted (inspiring profound changes in Plato Book Reviews 329 scholarship generally), these changes have had too little impact on how Plato's treatment of sophistry and rhetoric is conceived. Among the most important of these changes is the development of literary-dramatic readings of the dialogues, which consider the works' philosophical content by relation to their literary form as dialogues. According to this view, reading Plato entails an awareness of dialogue's distinctive capacity for masking authorial intention and voice. Such a reading resists the hasty assumption that the works put forth Plato's dogmatic or doctrinal positions for which Socrates was the presumed mouthpiece. Rather, as literary-dramatic representations, the dialogues give voice to indirect positions and hidden views. In spite of this enhanced sensitivity to Plato's authorial choices, there has been on the whole no significant alteration to the view that Plato held rhetoric in contempt or extreme distrust, believing it to be a sham art, a threat to true philosophy, and an inferior method to dialectic. Hence rhetoric is mere rhetoric—the lesser counterpart of philosophy, useful only for speaking to ignorant masses, for whom more rational methods are ineffectual. He may have offered marginal and grudging allowance for rhetoric in the Phaedrus dialogue, but only as an unrealizable ideal that sacrifices practical effectiveness. This leads to the second limitation. Studies of rhetoric in Plato often orbit around the two dialogues where rhetoric is treated most explicitly— the Gorgias and the Phaedrus—and neglect the relevance of many of Plato's other dialogues for understanding his conception of rhetoric, despite the fact that language, rhetoric, and sophistry are abiding (albeit implicit) concerns across the corpus of dialogues. Where these...

Written communication is an important skill across academia, the workplace, and civic participation. Effective writing incorporates instantiations of particular text structures - rhetorical moves - that communicate intent to the reader. These rhetorical moves are important across a range of academic styles of writing, including essays and research abstracts, as well as in forms of writing in which one reflects on learning gained through experience. However, learning how to effectively instantiate and use these rhetorical moves is a challenge. Moreover, educators often struggle to provide feedback supporting this learning, particularly at scale. Where effective support is provided, the techniques can be hard to share beyond single implementation sites. We address these challenges through the open-source AcaWriter tool, which provides feedback on rhetorical moves, with a design that allows feedback customization for specific contexts. We introduce three example implementations in which we have customized the tool and evaluated it with regard to user perceptions, and its impact on student writing. We discuss the tool's general theoretical background and provide a detailed technical account. We conclude with four recommendations that emphasize the potential of collaborative approaches in building, sharing and evaluating writing tools in research and practice.

AbstractThe Gates Foundation invokes a third way in education reform debate by appealing not to government regulation or market competition but to philanthropic investment as a catalyst for improving educational equity. While the foundation praises this investment as transcending the conventional polarities of debate, I argue that this praise assigns a familiar form of blame toward public education and educators, for it declares philanthropists the only reformers whose commitments to educational civil rights remain uncompromised by political-economic self-interest. In light of this analysis, I qualify the deliberative potential of praise as a rhetoric of education reform.

Abstract This essay considers civil rights mass meetings as rhetorical events that operated with doubled purpose. Surveying three 1960s civil rights scenes, the study reveals how meetings provided spaces to recharge and regroup at the same time that they functioned as sites for countermovement engagement. Centering attention on this fluid movement among purposes offers insights into strategies activists devised for double-voicing. For the speakers and meetings analyzed here, metonymy, parrhesia, and religious reframing provided rhetors with modes for exploiting outsiders’ presence at these events while continuing to use the meeting for their own ends.

Abstract This essay examines how President Trump’s vacillations between overt and colorblind racism represent the intensification of white racial anxieties in anticipation of an impending demographic shift toward a nonwhite majority. Trump’s contradictory rhetoric on race becomes legible in the context of white ambivalence, a condition that entails that white identity, history, and culture be respected as morally superior but, at the same time, not be characterized as white supremacy. Examining a selection of Trump’s campaign and postelection rallies, I show how white ambivalence constitutes a perverse mixture of overweening and explicit valorizations of people of color and, simultaneously, a forceful disavowal of racial conversations that might otherwise implicate white identity in the legacy of white supremacy.

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

AbstractThis paper aims to address the need in rhetorical scholarship to recognize the obstacles that atheists face in the public sphere. I propose that, within the United States, there is a systematic normalization of theism, which I refer to as theistnormativity. While theistnormativity is advanced through various systems within a society, I argue that presidents reinforce theistnormativity through their use of religious political rhetoric. I reason that the theistnormativity that is prominent in presidential inaugural addresses from 1933 to 2017 contributes an ideal space that privileges theists and marginalizes atheists.

Book Review| June 01 2020 A Way Forward: Reflections on the Presidency and Presidential Campaigns Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us about Donald J. Trump. Edited by Ryan Skinnell. Exeter, U.K.: Imprint Academic, 2018; pp. iii + 200. $29.90 paper.The Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in the Digital Age: Insiders and Outsiders in Democratic Politics. By Mark Rolfe Singapore: Springer, 2016; pp. x + 259. $109.99 cloth; $109.99 paper.Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t: How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation (Without Even Knowing It). By Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-Hye Han. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018; pp. xi + 208. $79.95 cloth; $32.95 paper. Devin Scott Devin Scott Devin Scott is a Ph.D. student studying Rhetoric and Political Culture in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (2): 367–379. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.2.0367 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Devin Scott; A Way Forward: Reflections on the Presidency and Presidential Campaigns. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2020; 23 (2): 367–379. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.2.0367 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

I weave stories on my relationships with the land, ancestral knowledge, and my experiences in doing research to theorize a relational scholarly practice. I invite readers to contemplate and grapple with me on what land-based knowledges, Indigenous intellect, and relationality can offer rhetoric and composition studies.

This article uses storytelling, rhetorical analysis, and critical historicization to critique the color-blindness of the writing studies movement’s two key texts, Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Down’sWriting about Writingreader and Linda Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s edited collectionNaming What We Know. Juxtaposing the writing studies movement with contemporary translingual and hip-hop theory as well as the history of the Students’ Right to Their Own language resolution and CUNY’s Open Admissions period, the author argues that the writing studies movement’s pivot toward neoliberalizing higher education excludes multilingual and diverse writers from its pedagogical audience as well as its conception of writing expertise. The author calls for a broader conception of writing studies that can theorize literacy in all its complex global instantiations.