The police written witness statement is a major evidentiary document that has a direct bearing on the prosecution and adjudication of criminal cases. The present study examines the rhetorical structure of police written witness statements in Ghana as a genre by adopting Bhatia’s genre model to examine 120 statements on alleged criminal cases that were sampled from the Wenchi Division of the Bono Regional Police Command in Ghana. The findings suggest that the police written witness statement is typically characterized by five moves ( Disclaiming, Identifying the Witness, Stating Witness’s Involvement with the Case, Reporting the Facts , and Indicating Discharge of Legal Responsibility ) that bear facts necessary in the prosecution of crime in Ghana’s criminal justice system. The choice of lexicogrammatical features varied depending on the function of each move. The study concludes that the witness statements possess peculiar functional features that meet the legal demands of Ghana’s judicial expectations and police discourse.

Digital technologies have dramatically changed the way scientists produce, circulate, and disseminate scientific knowledge. Here we investigate women scientists’ writing activity and digitally mediated discursive practices in their professions. Using survey techniques, we identify patterns of professional and public science communication online across the disciplines. We also explore the potentially interrelated genres—“genre systems”—that routinely enact typified rhetorical actions in their professional contexts. The findings show that their socioliterate activity fully reflects the importance that their professional contexts attach to certain “privileged” genres of professional communication (e.g., journal articles), despite the fact that the respondents value highly genres of socially responsible research (e.g., blogs, infographics). Statistical analyses further confirm that “disciplinary culture” is a determining factor in the extent to which respondents engage with collaborative genres and participatory science genres. We report significant differences in the use of digital mediation tools to communicate science online to both expert and lay audiences. Finally, we discuss several implications for writing pedagogy and the development of digital skills to support scientists, especially women, who want or need to promote and disseminate their research widely.

In the United States, the 2010s saw a significant, organized wave of public philanthropy among the very wealthy. We conducted a discourse analysis of legitimation in The Giving Pledge, a philanthropic endeavor that began in 2010 in which billionaires encourage each other to publicly pledge to give away the majority of their wealth in their life or upon their death. We approach these texts with the questions, “Why do these individuals make these public pledges?” and “What rhetorical work is being done by them?” From the perspective of legitimation theory, how do these public, rhetorical acts constitute the social and economic orders into which they are made? Our discourse analysis of the pledges finds that they constitute two parts of an economic system of wealth, both wealth acquisition and the philanthropic giving of wealth. These constitutions in The Giving Pledge reify an institutional order by appending a promise to give back.

Tematem tego artykułu jest retoryka komunikacji medialnej stosowanej przez Siły Obronne Izraela (IDF), a materiał badawczy stanowią posty publikowane na oficjalnym profilu IDF na Facebooku. Analizowane posty obejmują okres od 7 października 2023 roku do 5 stycznia 2025 roku. Retoryczna analiza hasbary (propagandy IDF) opiera się na semiologii Rolanda Barthesa i teorii dyskursu Michela Foucaulta, a także na tradycji retoryki krytycznej w badaniach retorycznych. Te perspektywy metodologiczne skutecznie uchwytują procesy, poprzez które reprezentacja rzeczywistości zostaje zmistyfikowana. W ujęciu Barthesa zjawisko to można rozumieć jako mit. Z perspektywy retoryki krytycznej artykuł analizuje nie tylko oficjalne narracje, ale także to, co zostało celowo pominięte. Bada on środki retoryczne konstruujące mit IDF jako moralnej organizacji, w tym perswazję poprzez etos, charakter i eufemizmy. Równie istotnym elementem procesu mitologizacji i mistyfikacji IDF jest wykluczenie treści podważających moralne cnoty armii. W związku z tym analiza mitu IDF uwzględnia zarówno retorykę oficjalnych reprezentacji, jak i retorykę potoczną, ponieważ dyskurs czerpie znaczenie ze strategii włączania i wykluczania. Takie rozumienie krytycznej retoryki wpisuje się w twierdzenie Kennetha Burke’a, że analiza retoryczna powinna być zawsze gotowa do demaskowania mistyfikacji.

This article reports on an analysis of salient argumentative schemes, rhetorical devices and linguistic choices that are characteristic of, but also problematic for, the public deliberation in Poland on the acceptable degrees and forms of assistance provided to Ukraine and Ukrainians. By identifying the historical origins of anti-Ukrainian sentiment and the current media stereotypes used as premises in deliberation on the Ukraine war, the study traces how arguments are enhanced, sometimes through topoi and fallacies, by communicators that are against supporting Ukraine. The study draws on a multimodal dataset of textual and audio-video materials from 2022-2024. The larger aim is to enhance critical rhetorical literacy through an overview of the rhetorical strategies that render even unsound arguments acceptable and appealing.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the anti-Ukrainian rhetoric concerning migrants in Polish social media based on the category of topos, as in Discourse-Historical Approach, in order to evaluate the threats and dangers generated rhetorically. The research material comprises a corpus of far-right anti-Ukrainian comments and posts collected from Facebook and Instagram profiles. Based on quantitative insights into the corpus, the paper conducts a qualitative study to classify the topoi and highlight specific rhetorical strategies employed by the far-right toward Ukrainian migrants. The analysis shows the patterns which the users of extreme discourses employ to verbalize and rationalize their disdain for the migrants. These present the Ukrainian migrants as a threat to Polish independence and social order, argue that the support they receive is undeserved, and present ruling politicians as inept and ignorant of the needs of Poles.

The article examines how the Ukrainian language has become a strategic battlefield in Russian propaganda, acting as a front in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. It reports on the analysis conducted within the Discourse-Historical Approach of media statements made by Russian politicians and propagandists. It shows how current attacks on the Ukrainian language are a continuation of historical practices of linguistic repression. It reveals that the rhetoric of delegitimization of Ukrainian is based on recurring topoi, such as artificiality, primitiveness, and hostility, and on well-established mental models that legitimize Russia’s takeover. The results confirm that Ukrainian is not seen as a neutral communication tool but as a hostile element in the narrative of the uniformity of the “Russian World.” Russian depreciations and delegitimizations aim to deny the existence of a distinct Ukrainian national identity as a neo-imperialist strategy to subjugate Ukraine.

This article examines various dimensions of persuasive communication during protest actions undertaken by Polish farmers in public spaces in 2023 and 2024, thereby disrupting social order. The source of information regarding the strikes is the popular general news portal rmf24.pl, which prepared a special report dedicated to these events. The analysis draws on the paradigm of the rhetoric of anger, which is conceptualised at the beginning of the article and compared to hate speech, rhetoric of violence, and similar concepts. The study employs several methodological approaches from the intersection of social sciences and humanities, including discourse analysis, semiotic analysis, and action analysis. The last section summarise how the Polish farmers' protests can be situated within the rhetoric of anger and point out fields for further research.

The manuscript explores the escalation of the Polish–Israeli diplomatic conflict in 2018, which was instigated by an amendment of the law on the National Remembrance Institute. The rhetorical analysis draws from TV news content aired by four major Polish TV stations and highlights two prominent strategic narratives: the first asserts “Poland's duty to defend truth and its reputation on the global stage”, while the second underscores the “challenging Polish–Jewish relations, which are often a subject of political maneuvering.” The study maps the uses of frames, metaphors and the Burkean pentad in the collected media materials.

Building on a critical study in Cap (2024), the present paper broadens the framework of critical cognitive discourse research with tools drawn from rhetorical theory to explore patterns of conflict-charged communication and legitimization discourse used by Polish political parties to claim and enact state leadership. The first part studies the discourse of Law and Justice, a far-right party ruling Poland in the years 2015-2023. It examines its strategies of leadership legitimization involving ideological polarization, strategic generation of internal and external conflict, threat construction and crisis management. The second part analyzes the more moderate and cooperation oriented discourse strategies implemented by three opposition parties in the lead-up to the October 2023 elections, in which the party lost power. The aim of the paper is to apply the broadened discursive-rhetorical apparatus to compare and contrast the two kinds of discourse to speculate about the longevity of an essentially conflict-charged rhetoric. It is argued that radical populist discourse can be an extremely powerful tool, able to grant long-term political leadership. However, in a yet longer perspective, such a discourse runs a considerable risk of “wearing out” and becoming vulnerable to more forward-looking and pragmatic leadership rhetoric.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>About the case:</i></b> We suggest using Aristotle's rhetorical triangle, a tool for analyzing communication in terms of logos (logic), pathos (values), and ethos (identity), in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate classes. We investigate how the triangle can enhance students’ communication skills by developing awareness of pathos and ethos, and shed light on values, considerations, and professional identity at different stages of their studies. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Situating the case:</i></b> Developing communication skills among STEM students is imperative even in the age of AI-based tools. Although many books and platforms exist to help facilitate communication in general, STEM students require practical tools to foster the rhetorical skills needed for effective and persuasive communication. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Methods:</i></b> The rhetorical triangle intervention was implemented in two undergraduate courses to help students develop the other necessary elements of effective communication beyond logos: i.e., pathos and ethos. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Results:</i></b> Our results show that the intervention enhanced students’ ability to express shared values (pathos) with their audience and fostered the development of professional identity (ethos). Our findings also revealed notable differences in professional identity expression when comparing two different samples of future scientists and engineers in their freshmen and senior years. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><i>Conclusion:</i></b> We suggest that incorporating the elements of the rhetorical triangle into STEM education can enhance students’ communication skills, particularly in expressing the value of their work and developing a strong professional identity. We recommend integrating these elements throughout various stages of the curriculum to deepen students’ understanding of effective communication and persuasion.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> Participant recruitment is a difficult stage of the research process, often resulting in considerable time and cost, with challenges in the diversity, quantity, and quality of participants. Existing scholarship on recruitment focuses on recruitment outcomes, specifically the development of a useful sample. This article directs attention from outcomes to processes by reconsidering this transactional, sample-building process as a relationship-building process through the lens of invitational rhetoric. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> The study analyzes the advertisements used on university study discovery sites (SDSs) to initiate participant recruitment and build sustainable relationships with the community. Universities rely on study advertisements to initiate recruitment on SDSs, which can serve as the foundation for the participant-researcher relationship. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> This case is situated in larger calls for research efficiency and the technical and professional communication discipline's call for less transactional and more personalized recruitment processes. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods:</b> After tracking and defining the rhetorical moves in study advertisements, the moves are characterized through invitational rhetoric to assess how they create conditions for value, safety, and freedom. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> This study finds that the main rhetorical moves of the advertisements are establishing credentials, introducing the offer (offering the product or service, essential detailing of the offer, indicating value of the offer), including study identifiers, and soliciting responses. The moves enacting invitational rhetoric are attentive to building reciprocity, transparency, and agency. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> To avoid transactional relationships with participants, researchers can incorporate invitational rhetoric into their recruitment materials by creating the conditions for value, safety, and freedom.

<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Background:</b></i> Instructors in STEM fields help prepare students to be effective communicators in the workplace, partially through instruction of professional genres such as client-facing reports. At the same time, class sizes are increasing, and writing assessment often falls to teaching assistants (TAs). <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Literature review:</b></i> Research suggests that TAs possess a maturing but inchoate sense of writing in their field, which potentially complicates their ability to deliver quality feedback. This study uses frame semantics, a form of discourse analysis, to probe TAs for their beliefs about writing in statistics. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research questions:</b></i> 1. When asked to describe the function and role of writing in statistics, what lexical verbs do TA informants use? 2. What frames are invoked by those verbs? 3. How do the invoked semantic frames position writing in relation to disciplinary and professional work in the field? <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research methodology:</b></i> This study interviewed three TAs from an introductory statistics course about their perceptions of writing in statistics. Frame semantics was used to analyze TA responses. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Results:</b></i> Less experienced TAs tended to perceive writing as a means of presentation, which entailed a weak sense of the role of rhetoric in technical communication and a muddied understanding of writing assessment. The more advanced TA perceived writing as a means of contextualizing statistical evidence for particular audiences. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Conclusion:</b></i> Due to their maturing perceptions of writing in their disciplines, TAs might not possess the ability to deliver quality formative feedback. One means of support for these TAs may be opportunities to discuss assessment decisions with one another, thereby calibrating against available expectations and rubrics.

Abstract: It is the role of scholars to shine the light of tradition on problems of today so the value of the rhetorical tradition is clear to a larger audience of students, citizens, and non-experts, even as these same scholars undertake the difficult, demanding work of unearthing, reinterpreting, and understanding anew the buried wisdom of that tradition. This is a rallying cry to reclaim the history of rhetoric as a theory of persuasion about contingency: to comprehend anew how the essential unpredictability of human judgment and action are guided by the power of words.

Abstract: This article offers a new interpretation of the near absence of personal naming of opponents in speeches made in the classical Athenian Assembly, casting the phenomenon as a discursive strategy which allows the orator of the moment to recommend his own superior qualities and reject his opponents not as individuals but as an undifferentiated (and uniformly wrong) mass. The article then examines Demosthenes’s use (and the sincerity of his commitment to his use) of this strategy to pursue this pair of persuasive aims across his Assembly career, and as part of the rhetorical toolkit with which he manages his transition from “outsider” status in the late 350s and early 340s BCE to a position of steadily growing political influence from 346 BCE onwards.

Fitter, Happier: the Eugenic Strain in Twentieth-Century Cancer Rhetoric (2024) by Lois Peters Agnew argues that American cancer rhetoric from 1900-1990 was built around eugenic ideology. Agnew says, "The tension between the need to acknowledge the real danger of cancer and the American insistence upon confidence and control lies at the heart of cancer rhetoric" (p. 5). This tension is delineated through a disability studies approach to analyzing historical documents regarding cancer and cancer patients. Agnew asserts that though cancer and disability are not synonymous, "the lens of disability studies can be helpful in understanding how cancer rhetoric establishes a pattern of normative responses to the phenomenon of disease" (p. 6). Her analysis of these responses relies on the work of disability studies scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thompson (1997), Jay Dolmage (2017), Sharon Snyder and Jack Mitchell (2015), Susan Sontag (1977), and Susan Wendell (2013), whose work helps to illustrate the overlap of disability, cancer, and eugenic rhetoric.

Grassroots organizations often struggle to balance short-term fixes with long-term goals. Technical communicators supporting these under-resourced groups face a similar challenge: they must navigate between short-term tactical communication and the development of resilient, socially durable writing infrastructures. This article proposes user enfranchisement as a way for grassroots organizations to make quick, tactical interventions while simultaneously building the infrastructure to make strategic, long-term changes within their sphere of influence. Enfranchising tactics may be understood as rhetorical maneuvers that provide immediate, albeit provisional, access to participation within an institution or system, giving individuals agency and building a foundation for systemic change. Drawing on the case study of a street design manual created for urban areas, the article demonstrates how user enfranchisement: performs boundary/identity work, is intended to be conspicuous, expands the agential capacity of the user by building the social capital of the communicator, and serves as a bridge to longer-term infrastructural strategies with the capacity to create change in the world.

In this article, I focus on an everyday writer, my mother, engaging in self-sponsored writing to learn (WTL) activities across her lifespan. Focusing specifically on her personal journals and her accounts of her longitudinal WTL trajectory, I trace the learning pathways she took to develop her identity as a mother across her life. Writing was a benefit to her everyday life given, as she puts it, there is no set “instruction manual” for how to parent. Additionally, I trace the “multidirectional” nature of her literacy by investigating how literacy learning circulates given Jane’s intent to pass her WTL journals down to her children as a text to learn from when they become parents (Lee). In making my argument, I extend conversations happening in our field about writing and learning as a lifewide activity. I emphasize the importance writing has on identity development and learning across one’s life and, as such, this article helps literacy studies, lifespan development of writing studies, and motherhood rhetorical studies gauge the vast ways writers write to learn outside of formal schooling.&nbsp;

This article presents “The Cure for Talking,” a pioneering conceptual framework that blends Transactional Analysis (TA) with Artificial Intelligence (AI), to produce a TA-AI Bot designed to optimize executive communication. Here, the medium of interest is written emails. The TA-AI Bot aims to change behavior through the reinforcement mechanism of repetition. The feedback system of the TA-AI Bot is designed to enhance users’ self-awareness and communication quality, that is, identification and shifting of ego states to approximate better communication; and recognition of rhetorical appeals that typify their exchanges with others. Validation of “The Cure for Talking” will require iterative research.

Perinatal mental health disorders (PMHDs) include perinatal depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, or postpartum psychosis. U.S. rural communities often lack access to perinatal and mental health care; taken together, this health issue of PMHDs in the rural United States is complex. As polydisciplinary scholars of rhetoric of health &amp; medicine (RHM), health communication, and public health, we explore: how do rural U.S. communities navigate the public health crisis of PMHDs? To answer that question, we contextualize PMHDs within mental health rhetoric research (MHRR). We review literature about narrative and social support as tools for communicating about PMHDs in rural U.S. communities. We suggest future research directions for better understanding communication about PMHDs in the rural U.S.

Introduction to the special issue on rural health.

In the fall of 2020, a US/Mexico border community received national attention because of its high number of COVID cases. Hidalgo county reported over 51,000 COVID cases in 2020 resulting in 2,200 fatalities. Rural communities in Hidalgo were uniquely precarious to the disease because of assemblages constructed by human and material interactions that displaced Latinx/e bodies to unincorporated, underdeveloped communities called colonias. Centuries of interactions between humans and material life in the region had created and sustained an ecology of harm which exploited labor of rural citizens living in colonias. These interactions and the ecology they constitute are grounded in the Rio Grande River, which separates Hidalgo County from Mexico. From its initial arrival to the Hidalgo county region 2 million years ago, the Rio Grande River has assembled together humans and material life into relationships in which human rhetoric brings ideologies and ways of being that determine the precarity of border communities in the 21st-century.

This project integrates Reproductive Justice (RJ) commitments with insights from networked misogyny to describe the digital coercion strategies of Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) for people living in rural areas in the United States. Abortion access is increasingly mediated by commercial search engines (Mejova et al., 2022). The authors analyzed public CPC marketing strategy documents against data from over three hundred search queries across seven states with large rural populations. Taking Google search results as rhetorical artifacts, data reveals that states with restrictive abortion laws empower CPC search result visibility in several ways. CPCs disproportionately impact people who are the most reliant on internet mediation for abortion access—a population sharing significant overlap with people living in abortion deserts in rural areas.

Rural librarians are intermediaries between individuals and our health system. Librarians direct their patrons to health resources, assist with online tasks such as insurance enrollment, lend health equipment, and more. And yet, rural libraries and librarians are largely absent from rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) scholarship. Drawing from interviews with 11 rural librarians in nine states, we discovered that librarians leverage two kairotic openings for health communication: response and invitation. They succeed via three kairotic strategies: appropriateness, propriety, and opportunity. Librarians serving rural areas eschew simplistic ideographs around digital access and urge us to consider the meaning of mental health in rural America. Librarians are powerful intermediaries because they build trust through repeated conversations and a willingness to help patrons solve their problems. Our health system should recognize, celebrate, and utilize the rural library system to better serve patients.

Megan Von Bergen, Kelly Sauskojus, Amber Kent-Johnson, and Lisa King Abstract The article addresses the process of making significant programmatic changes to the PhD exams in the Rhetoric, Writing, and Linguistics division in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Drawing from the various experiences and positionalities of the authors, the article [&hellip;]

Manny Piña and Susan Wolff-Murphy Abstract This article examines the complexity with teaching for transfer (TFT) as curricular content through a qualitative study of how TFT was experienced by first-year writing (FYW) students at a regional, Hispanic-Serving public institution. Our analysis of reflective student writing supports previous studies that show that the curriculum supports the [&hellip;]

Excerpts from the most comprehensive ancient textbook on the theory and art of oratory, namely the Institutionis oratoriae libri XII by Marcus Fabius Quintilian, accompany the author in briefly presenting a (self)analysis of two university courses: Practical Rhetoric (offered in the field of e-editing and editorial techniques, publishing specialization) and Media Rhetoric (and Eristic) (Polish philology, editorial and media specialization).

Caitlin Martin and Mandy Olejnik Abstract Composition, rhetoric, and writing studies (CRWS) as a field has historically recognized the importance of mentoring for graduate students, but there can be a disconnect between learning theory and how mentoring occurs in practice. In this article, we argue for a more systematic approach to graduate student mentoring that [&hellip;]

Emily Barrow DeJeu Abstract While templates for academic writing, like those offered in the popular textbook They Say/I Say, have been embraced by some, others still question the extent to which an emphasis on form comes at the expense of substance. But ancient rhetoricians offer a theory of rhetoric that unites style and substance, and [&hellip;]

The reports the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) requires of its members provide an opportunity to study the shifting role of the private sector within the regime of human rights discourse. Using British Petroleum as a case study, I combine technical communication theories of power with Foucault's concept of governmentality to examine the rhetorical strategies in UNGC-BP communications, finding a disconnect between human rights principles and company reporting that validates rather than rejects corporate violence.

Abstract This article proposes the value hip-hop based education can add to the first-year composition classroom. It provides a framework for using hip-hop based education to scaffold traditional writing assignments, including rhetorical analysis assignments and argumentative essays using concepts like zines, cyphers, and song analysis. Drawing from culturally relevant pedagogy, linguistic justice, and Black feminist pedagogy, this article offers the genre of hip-hop to define and solidify its usefulness in composition studies and its relevance to the Black community, asserting that centering pedagogy relevant to Black students is beneficial for all students. Based on culturally relevant pedagogy's tenets, this article highlights ways culturally relevant materials can be implemented to recognize and value students’ diverse cultures and lived experiences to increase student engagement, agency, and academic success. The concepts presented here promote antiracism and multimodal learning in the classroom contributing to pedagogical research and praxis looking to disrupt hegemonic teaching and learning.

Abstract This article presents a prereading activity for Shakespeare's history plays, 2 Henry VI in particular. The activity involves students in carefully studying an anonymized family tree extending from Edward III through Richard III, choosing whom they believe to be the rightful heir, and posing arguments in support of their claim. The exploration of rhetoric and rule introduces students to key figures in the plays as well as the central theme of right rule. This problem-solving approach to early modern matters of succession has the further effect of introducing students to the idea that all claims to rule should be subjected to careful scrutiny.

Stephanie Bower is a professor of teaching at the University of Southern California, where she teaches upper- and lower-division writing classes as well as a seminar on climate fiction for first-year students. Her publications have included research on integrating community engagement into composition classrooms as well as reflections on a writing workshop she has cofacilitated with the formerly incarcerated.Elizabeth Brockman earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University and an MA and PhD in English from the Ohio State University. Before her tenure began in the English Department at Central Michigan University in 1996, Brockman taught middle and high school English. Upon retirement from CMU, she earned emerita status. Brockman is the founding FTC editor for Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, and she is a founding codirector of the Chippewa River Writing Project.Carly Braxton is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching instructor studying English with a concentration in rhetoric and writing studies. As a teacher of writing, Carly assists students in developing their writing skills by leaning on key pedagogical concepts that reinforce the rhetorical and situated nature of writing. However, Carly also does this by dismantling preconceived notions of what writing is and what writing should look like at the college level. Antiracist pedagogy and linguistic justice is integral to Carly's research and teaching practice.Roger Chao is the Campus Director for the Art of Problem Solving Academy in Bellevue, WA. He specializes in community literacy projects.Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday is an assistant professor of English at University of Minnesota. Her research, teaching, and service are situated at the intersection of composition studies, feminism, and critical race theory.Olivia Hernández is an English instructor at Yakima Valley Community College. Her research, teaching, and service work toward culturally responsive, punk-teaching pedagogy.Betsy Klima is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches courses on American literature and pedagogy. Her books include Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City (2023), At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850 – 1930 (2005), the Broadview edition of Kelroy (2016), and Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin (1999), with coeditor Melody Graulich. She serves as associate editor of the New England Quarterly. Her current research explores the surprising role women played in Boston's early theater scene.Chloe Leavings is a PhD student studying rhetoric and composition. She is also an adjunct English professor and former middle school English teacher. With a bachelor's in English and a master's in English and African American Literature, she prioritizes using culturally relevant pedagogy through Hip- Hop Based Education. Her research interests include rhetoric of health and medicine, Black feminist theory, and linguistic justice.Claire Lutkewitte is a professor of writing in the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts at Nova Southern University. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses including basic writing, college writing, writing with technologies, teaching writing, research methods, and teaching writing online. Lutkewitte's research interests include writing technologies, first-year composition (FYC) pedagogy, writing center research, and graduate programs. She has published five books including Stories of Becoming, Writing in a Technological World, Mobile Technologies and the Writing Classroom, Multimodal Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, and Web 2.0: Applications for Composition Classrooms.Janet C. Myers is professor of English at Elon University, where she teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture, British women writers, and first-year writing. She is the author of Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (2009) and coeditor of The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain (2016). Her current research explores the role of women's fashion in fin-de-siècle literature and culture and has been published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and Victorians Institute Journal.Scott Oldenburg is professor of English at Tulane University, where he specializes in early modern literary and cultural studies and critical pedagogy. He is the author of Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (2014) and A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty and the Household in Shakespeare's London (2020). He is coeditor with Kristin M. S. Bezio of Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace (2021) and Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace (2022); and with Matteo Pangallo of None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage (2024).Michael Pennell is an associate professor of writing, rhetoric, and digital studies at the University of Kentucky. He regularly teaches courses on social media, rhetorical theory, ethics and technical writing, and professions in writing.Jessica Ridgeway is a licensed 6 – 12 English/Language Arts teacher, with a wealth of experience in alternative, charter, magnet, and public schools. Currently, she works as a graduate teaching assistant, where she instructs Basic Writing, First-Year Composition, Intermediate Composition, and Intro to African American Literature. As an English teacher for eleven years, her passion for African American literature has flourished, including for her favorite writers Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin. She recently completed an English and African American Literature Master of Arts program, and she is currently working toward achieving a PhD in rhetoric and composition. Her research interests include cultural rhetorics, African American rhetoric, Black digital rhetoric, culturally relevant pedagogy, composition pedagogy, and Black feminist pedagogy.Fernando Sánchez is an associate professor in technical and professional communication (TPC) at the University of Minnesota. He currently serves as the coeditor of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine. His current book-length project examines participation in TPC.Tom Sura is associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI, as well as the director of college writing and director of general education. His most recent scholarship on writing-teacher development appears in Violence in the Work of Composition.Kristin VanEyk is assistant professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI. Her most recent scholarship has been published in American Speech and Daedalus.

Abstract This article proposes a revision to the traditional research essay taught in many first-year writing courses to include a methods section. By explaining their research methods, students have the opportunity to think robustly and systematically about their research questions, their research practices, and their study outcomes. Such a practice holds students and instructors accountable for a rigorous research process. As they write their methods, students learn to articulate the process of field research while they increase their knowledge of both conventions and rhetoric. Importantly, this practice pursues social justice outcomes as students reflect on their identities as researchers and consider how positionality intersects with research questions, research practices, data interpretation, and analysis.

Abstract Arts and humanities fields, specifically the field of writing, are well-positioned to help educate people about the lack of diversity in nature and the consequences (both good and bad) of visiting and documenting wilderness locations with writing technologies. Writing faculty can also find creative ways to provide outdoor opportunities to their students and to give them hands-on writing experiences. This field teaches the rhetorical and critical thinking skills necessary for students to understand who and how we write about such places. Writing also teaches students to be successful in analyzing problems and generating solutions for them, which can enable students to make significant and meaningful changes that better protect our environments. Many of the initiatives, programs, and policies that, for instance, conservation agencies and organizations create, are done so through the act of writing. This article, therefore, discusses a course, Writing in the Wilderness, that is designed to show students the impacts that writing can have on their local wilderness spaces. It provides students a range of on-location assignments and activities as well as introduces them to the people that work in and for wilderness spaces.

The Loeb Classical Library was founded in 1911 by James Loeb, a retired banker devoted to the study of ancient Greece and Rome. The preface included in the first editions to be published explains Loeb’s vision for the library. Lamenting that “young people of our generation” lacked the facility to read Latin and Greek texts in the original thanks to the pressure universities were facing to provide a “more practical” education, Loeb sought to provide the “average reader” with “translations that are in themselves works of literature” and “side by side with these translations the best critical texts of the original works” (Lake 1912, ii–iii). Though naysayers occasionally mock the bilingual volumes as glorified trots, the series has been a serious work of scholarship since its inception and has gotten even better over the past twenty-five years thanks to the inclusion of more authors and the revision of outdated editions. Students of rhetoric have been major beneficiaries. Russell’s Quintilian (2002), Mirhady’s Rhetoric to Alexander (2011), and Laks and Most’s Sophists (2016) are just a few of the fundamental texts recently published. The Loeb Classical Library now exceeds five hundred volumes, red for Latin and green for Greek. This entire collection is available to subscribers online, fully searchable in English and the original languages and by both page and section numbers. Now Gisela Striker has revised J. H. Freese’s edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, taking account of improvements to the Greek text since it was published in 1926. The updated edition remains primarily the work of Freese; only his name appears on the spine. I refer to it as Freese/Striker and to the original edition as Freese. Line number references in this review are all to Freese/Striker. Professor Striker taught me more than twenty years ago in a course on Cicero’s Republic.In assessing Freese/Striker, it is important first to recognize what a Loeb volume is and what it isn’t. The Loebs are Greek and Latin texts, but they are not, with rare exceptions, critical editions with lists of variant readings or discussions of manuscript families. The Loebs are translations, but they are not accompanied by comprehensive introductions, detailed notes, or overviews of scholarly debates. Their value lies in the way the facing texts complement one another, and their core audience is readers with enough Greek or Latin to benefit from having the original language in front of them. A work such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, however, is exceptionally hard to appreciate without ancillary material. Although Freese/Striker includes a rich introduction and valuable footnotes, these are limited by the scale of the book; the Greek text and translation alone come to 469 pages. Readers who are looking for editorial guidance on a larger scale and in English can and should supplement Freese/Striker with the annotated translations of Kennedy (2nd ed. 2007), Reeve (2018), Waterfield/Yunis (2018), and Bartlett (2019), according to their interests or expertise. Kennedy’s translation is likely to be most useful to students new to the Rhetoric. Formatted as a textbook, it divides the text into sections, prefacing each section with a title and summary. The translations of Waterfield/Yunis, Reeve, and Bartlett are continuous texts without subheadings or summaries. The editors all discuss philosophical, political, and rhetorical issues. Of the three, Waterfield/Yunis’s introduction and notes are most concerned with the Rhetoric as a work of rhetorical theory and are the most accessible and comprehensive option for rhetoricians or nonspecialist readers. Reeve’s Rhetoric belongs to the New Hackett Aristotle Series and is intended for philosophers like the other volumes in that series. Reeve’s introduction and notes emphasize the Rhetoric’s relation to central issues in Aristotle’s thought. Bartlett offers an “interpretive essay” at the end of the volume rather than an introduction; this is a clear overview and summary of the text with particular focus on the Rhetoric’s concern for the role of rhetoric in politics and communal life.For those working with the original Greek, what Freese/Striker has to offer is invaluable. Indeed, since no commentary on the complete Greek text of the Rhetoric has been published in English since Cope’s in 1877, Freese/Striker replaces Freese as the primary resource for English-speaking readers with questions about how to construe the Greek. Reading Aristotle’s Greek is difficult, mostly because he expresses complex ideas in dry, technical, and above all concise language. For those working backward from the English to the Greek, however, these challenges can be virtues. The grammar is straightforward, and the vocabulary is relatively limited. This means that an individual with two years or so of Greek could, with patience and care, use Freese/Striker to work with Aristotle in the original. The search functions in the online version make this easier; one can quickly find relevant Greek passages by searching the English translation (or vice versa). Freese/Striker, therefore, fulfills Loeb’s ambitious goal of making Aristotle in the original available to people with enough Greek to understand it with a facing translation. This is even more valuable today than it was when Freese was published. The growth of rhetoric as an academic field means that rhetoricians without the time to reach advanced proficiency in Classical Greek are engaging with Aristotle’s text on a regular basis and can benefit from the updated text and translation that Freese/Striker provides.Freese/Striker prints and translates a Greek text that is superior to Freese’s. Establishing the Greek text of the Rhetoric is daunting. Aristotle’s laconic and elliptical style led scribal variants and downright errors to creep into the medieval manuscripts, some out of a well-intentioned attempt to make the Greek clearer. In addition, Aristotle seems to have revised and rethought his ideas over the thirty or so years that he worked on the Rhetoric, meaning that some apparent problems in the Greek may not be scribal errors but evidence of Aristotle’s work in progress. Freese based his text and translation on the best editions available in 1926, those of Bekker (1837) and Roemer (1898). In 1976, Kassel published an edition that placed the Greek text on the soundest footing it has been on in probably two thousand years. Freese/Striker is based on this edition, joining other modern English translations of the Rhetoric. Roberts/Barnes (1984), Kennedy, Waterfield/Yunis, and Bartlett are all based on Kassel’s edition. Reeve is based on Ross’s Oxford text (1959) but takes account of Kassel’s proposals.Most of the textual changes from Freese are subtle but important, and they begin as early as the first page, where Freese/Striker has Aristotle say in 1.1.3 1354a14 that previous writers of rhetorical handbooks “have worked out only a small portion of this art,” and Freese that they “have provided us with only a small portion of this art.” The oldest medieval manuscripts have the verb pepoiēkasin, “they have made,” but “they have made only a small portion of this art” makes little sense and seems to be a mistake. At some point, a corrector seeking to fix the problem changed the verb to peporikasin (“have provided”), which Freese adopts. Kassel (1971, 118), following a suggestion of Spengel, realized that Aristotle probably wrote peponēkasin (“have worked out”), which differs from the transmitted pepoiēkasin in just one letter, and which is used similarly with the word for “portion” in Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations. Improvements to the text of the Rhetoric on this scale occur throughout Freese/Striker. A more considerable shift in sense from Freese to Freese/Striker is illustrated by the following sentence from the section in book 2 on mildness (2.3.14 1380b15-17):The difference depends on Kassel’s preference for the reading helōsin (“they have convicted”) over eleōsin (“they pity”). The oldest manuscript has eleousin (“they pity”) in the indicative mood where the subjunctive is required. One option is simply to correct this to the subjunctive. This is the solution Freese adopts with eleōsin, although he adds a footnote acknowledging that helōsin is a possibility. Helōsin is attested in some manuscripts, including in a correction to the manuscript that has eleousin. Since “they have convicted” (helōsin) and “they pity” (eleōsin) are both possible, the choice between them depends on the degree of logical connection one sees between the two clauses. In following Kassel, Freese/Striker makes conviction the organizing principle: People (i.e., judges) have mild sentiments toward the people they convict, especially if they feel that an offender has already suffered more than enough for a punishment. Freese’s interpretation, on the other hand, removes the passage from the context of passing a sentence: People have mild sentiments when they feel pity toward an offender, especially if they feel that the offender has already suffered more than enough for a punishment (cf. Grimaldi 1988, 60-61).Textual editing is as much art as science, and the two proposals of Kassel that I have just discussed have not been universally embraced. Like Freese/Striker, Waterfield/Yunis translates Kassel’s text. Kennedy translates Kassel’s text for the first example but retains “they pity” for the second one, acknowledging in a footnote that “they have convicted” is an option. Reeve translates a different text from both Freese and Kassel for the first example and the same text as Freese in the second, also including the alternate possibilities in his endnotes. Bartlett translates the same text as Freese for the second example; for the first, he seems to accept the manuscript reading “made,” rendering it as “written of.” In both cases he notes the alternate possibilities in his notes. Finally, Roberts/Barnes translates Kassel’s text for the second example, but, like Bartlett, seems to accept “made” for the first, rendering it as “constructed”; Roberts/Barnes has no note in either case (although the translation consistently follows Kassel and notes Kassel’s readings at many points). I have surveyed these translations to show that Freese’s text and translation are not to be condemned out of hand and in some cases may be defensible. The age of the volume, however, means that readers will not systematically encounter an alternate version in a note, as they do in these instances in Kennedy, Reeve, and Bartlett. Readers who continue to use Freese from convenience (it is in the public domain and freely available through Google Books) risk being led astray. In following Kassel, Freese/Striker reflects the modern consensus and brings us closer to what Aristotle is likely to have written, fulfilling Loeb’s promise to give readers the best critical text currently available.Freese/Striker does reject some of Kassel’s bolder proposals. The discussion about the three types of speeches offers an example. In 1.3.2 1358b6-7, Kassel brackets the enigmatic clause that spectators are judges of “the ability of the speaker,” as a signal to readers that it should not be considered part of the original text even though it appears in all the medieval manuscripts. Kassel’s objection (1971, 124–25), that the clause seems to interrupt the sense of Aristotle’s argument by contradicting the distinction he has just drawn between spectators and judges, is reasonable. By using brackets, Kassel alerts the reader that he rejects the clause but does not go so far as to remove it entirely from the text. Brackets for dubious passages are a convention familiar to readers of Latin and Greek, but they clutter up translations and risk confusing readers unfamiliar with the convention. Freese/Striker uses them sparingly. Roberts/Barnes includes this clause about the speaker’s ability in brackets, with a note explaining that Kassel excised it, while Waterfield/Yunis omits it entirely. Freese/Striker (as had Freese) retains the clause without brackets (as do Kennedy, Reeve, and Bartlett), mentions Kassel’s opinion in a footnote, and points the reader to a passage in book 2 where Aristotle once again states that a spectator of an epideictic speech is a kind of judge (although the cross-reference should read 1391b16-17 rather than 1391a16-17). Since the Loebs do not allow for the kind of caution that brackets and textual apparatus provide in critical editions of Greek texts, Freese/Striker’s decision to prefer the reading of the manuscripts in cases such as this serves readers best. In all the places where Freese/Striker does print a different Greek text from Kassel, the change is acknowledged in a footnote.Besides the alterations based on Kassel’s text, Freese/Striker keeps closely to the translation in Freese, updating it to accord with modern English style: “that” instead of “which” more consistently in restrictive clauses, “on this account” instead of “wherefore,” and similar minor changes in wording. More consequential changes include more transparent renderings of the Greek. Among the most significant is this sentence from book 1 about the two different types of pisteis (1.2.2 1355b36):By broadening the scope of pisteis and eliminating the unavoidable connotation of real and fake in “inartificial” and “artificial,” Freese/Striker offers a much clearer sense of what Aristotle means. There is a trade-off. Rendering pisteis as “means of persuasion” obscures the fact that Aristotle seems deliberately to be appropriating the terminology of professional speechmakers for his own novel purposes. Pistis (the singular of pisteis) is a word used in judicial oratory for “proof” in contexts where “means of persuasion” would make little sense. Seeking to make the best of a tricky situation, Freese/Striker uses “means of persuasion” throughout the translation, except where pisteis unambiguously means “proofs.” Freese/Striker is not alone in favoring “means of persuasion.” Reeve uses it, and Roberts/Barnes and Bartlett offer “modes of persuasion.” Waterfield/Yunis stands out by keeping the time-tested “proofs.” Kennedy avoids the issue by printing pisteis without a translation. Another significant improvement over Freese is Freese/Striker’s rendering of ēthos and its cognates in most cases with the vocabulary of character rather than morality or ethics. Freese/Striker’s “considerations of character” (1.8.6 1366a13) and “adapt our speeches to character” (2.18.2 1391b28) are more accurate than Freese’s “ethical argument” and “make our speeches ethical,” as well as free of the moral judgment that Freese’s English imposes on the Greek. Finally, Freese/Striker’s use of “unfamiliar,” while perhaps not quite catching the nuance of the Greek xenos and xenikos in Aristotle’s discussion of style, avoids the negative connotations that Freese’s “foreign” often has in contemporary English.Freese features a twenty-one-page introduction that includes mini-biographies of rhetoricians before Aristotle, a comparison of the Rhetoric to the Gorgias and Phaedrus, an aside on the Rhetoric to Alexander, and accounts of the most important manuscript and of William of Moerbeke’s thirteenth-century translation into Latin. This remains useful, and some may miss it, but the information is all readily available elsewhere. The new introduction in Freese/Striker is more selective and more directly about the Rhetoric. In ten pages, it introduces the reader to Aristotle’s project, the contents of the Rhetoric, and ancient rhetoricians’ lack of interest in it after Aristotle’s death. A highlight, reflecting Striker’s expertise in Aristotle’s logic, is the concise explanation of how the theory of argument in the Rhetoric is an adaptation of the one in the Topics. There is also a new chapter index in the form of an outline that is easier to use than the paragraph-length summaries in the seventeen-page “Analysis” of the text in Freese. Freese/Striker retains from Freese the “Select Glossary of Technical and Other Terms.” This is not, nor is it meant to be, a comprehensive handlist of rhetorical concepts. As the name implies, it is a convenient place for readers of the Greek to look up technical terms or familiar words that Aristotle uses in unique ways. Most of the definitions are taken directly from Freese or lightly revised. Freese/Striker’s entries for dialektikē and sēmeion, however, are clear and concise introductions to these difficult topics, a marked improvement on Freese’s. Where Freese discusses dialektikē without specific references to how Aristotle uses it in other works, Freese/Striker summarizes the explanation in the Topics of how dialektikē is a technique of developing or refuting a thesis through questions and answers and then shows how rhetoric does more than dialectic by also seeking to persuade an audience. And where Freese’s explanation of sēmeion is abstract, Freese/Striker gives us a concrete definition (“a proposition stating a fact that points to a related other fact, so that the existence of the second fact may be inferred from the first”) followed by an example of how this works in practice (fever points to illness). The same general principle of retaining but updating governs Freese/Striker’s policy toward Freese’s rich explanatory footnotes. Many of these have been kept with no changes, some have been revised (often silently correcting oversights), and some new ones have been added. In the interests of brevity, some notes have also been excluded, and, as with the introduction, readers may miss these. Taken as a whole, however, the slightly more concise notes remain useful, especially for readers who will use Freese/Striker as a primary resource, rather than one of the more extensively annotated translations I mentioned earlier in the review.Freese/Striker ends with an index of proper names and a general index. These items too are taken from Freese, with deletions (for example, “hair (worn long in Sparta)” and “pancratiast”) and additions or corrections (for example, “licentiousness” for akolasia and “weakness of will” for akrasia rather than “incontinence” for both). With search engines, indexes are less important than they once were. This one demonstrates how helpful they can still be. The entry for “article, the, use of” refers us to 3.6.5, a section on how to use the definite article in Greek where the translation in Freese/Striker does not use the word “article.” A lexical search for “article” would turn up nothing in 3.6.5, and one for “the” would be next to useless.De Gruyter is selling Kassel’s edition of the Rhetoric for $430. It is not available as an electronic text online. Since many research do not include it in their the way that even most can it is through For the of of Freese/Striker Kassel’s text with Striker’s editorial At the same readers should that no edition, including Freese/Striker, is a version of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. serious scholarly work would be well by it, Kassel’s edition, and an of other translations and English and other their This is the case for all Loeb volumes, Freese/Striker it does Readers a and text accompanied by an lightly translation. As a first of for work on Aristotle in Greek, it should be on the real or of English-speaking of Greek rhetoric and, in the of James Loeb, of academic or in working through Aristotle’s ideas with an toward his own language.