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AbstractIn March 1703, hundreds of New England sailors returned home after years of slavery in the Barbary States. In response, Cotton Mather authored and circulated a sermon titled The Glory of Goodness. This text, ostensibly given in celebration of the captives’ return, gave voice to an exceptionalist understanding of Puritan identity premised on foreign—notably Muslim—others. It therefore informs our understanding of early eighteenth-century colonial depictions of Islam, while bearing insight for discourses surrounding Puritan exceptionalism, the rhetorical construction of race, and the articulation of religious identity in New England following the Glorious Revolution.

Book Review| December 01 2018 Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse. Edited By Richard D. Besel and Bernard K. Duffy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016; pp. ix + 370. $95.00 cloth. Jessica M. Prody Jessica M. Prody St. Lawrence University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (4): 721–724. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0721 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jessica M. Prody; Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2018; 21 (4): 721–724. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0721 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. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In order to contribute new knowledge about the digital literacies of midlife and older adults on social media, this study examines the literate practices of a subpopulation of Instagram users: female lifestyle Instagrammers and bloggers who self-identify as being over fifty. Survey results reveal why these women use blogs and Instagram, how they developed digital literacies, and who or what influences their practices. Case studies provide examples of the unique ways three women use Instagram to achieve visibility. Whereas most existing scholarship on visual depictions of age focuses on images that are controlled by other people (e.g., advertisers, community groups), I show how women use digital literacies and the affordances of Instagram and blog platforms to control their self-representations. Through their multimodal performances of identity, the women participate in discourses on aging and gender and pursue their goals of self-expression, inspiration, connection, and promotion.

Educators and researchers from a range of fields have devoted their careers to studying how reading develops and how to support students who find reading challenging. Some children struggle specifically with learning to decode print, the central issue in what is referred to as dyslexia.However, research has failed to identify unique characteristics or patterns that set apart students identified as dyslexic from other readers with decoding challenges. Nevertheless, an authoritative discourse that speaks of a definitive definition, a unique set of characteristics, and a specific form of intervention saturates policy and practice around dyslexia, and teacher educators are under increasing pressure to include this state-sanctioned information in their classes. Literacy educators’ experiences teaching reading in schools and preparing literacy professionals can add valuable perspectives to the conversation about dyslexia; however, currently their voices are largely silent in conversations around dyslexia research, policy, and practice. The current research was designed to address this gap through an intensive interview study, in which we employed a Disability Critical Race Studies framework, along with Bakhtin’s notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse to explore the perspectives, understandings, and experiences of literacy teacher educators regarding dyslexia.

&#8220;Though all representations of publics are limited because researchers filter the lived experiences of others through their own perspectives to create representative compositions, sonic collages uniquely allow for a multitude of material voices to participate within compositions that highlight each participant’s singular corporeality.&#8221;

Abstract A significant ideological shift has occurred in jurisprudential understanding of the social contract. Reading a landmark opinion from Justice Rehnquist—Paul v. Davis (1976)—as a pivot point for this shift, I identify a specific form of parsimonious judgment that has shaped the contemporary relationship between the individual and the state. Three markers of this form of judgment emerge from the opinion: (1) a claim about risks to state bureaucracy as a significant constitutional interest; (2) a slippery slope argument about institutional competence to discipline linguistic ambiguity; and (3) an interpretive practice that resolves this anxiety by binding precedent around a clear principle. This form of judgment has both ideological and normative significance. The opinion justifies a world of risk management that elevates economic liberty claims to exalted status. It disavows traditional markers of classical prudence, such as reverence for tradition, inflection of personal style as moral character, and orientation toward practical aspects of particular cases. Justifying its authority by performing its own rationale, Rehnquist’s opinion is significant for understanding how strategic invention can alter a democratic culture’s understanding of judgment, including its ethical dimensions.

ABSTRACTJacques Rancière's account of the political demonstration of equality makes an important contribution to long-standing conceptualizations of democracy as occurring apart from state institutions. Rancière's performative account of democracy, however, recognizes the impurity of political language used within state institutions as well as in democratic events. Rancière's polemics against “metapolitical” theories of social existence and the state take issue with how such forms of philosophy assume the primacy of their own capacity to explain political language. Community rights ordinances (CROs) demonstrate how conceptualizing shared political language as doxa reveals the possibility that a metapolitical rhetorical style can occur within Rancière's method of equality. CROs also demonstrate how the method of equality can operate in the context of democratic philosophizing.

The success of an application programming interface (API) crucially depends on how well its documentation meets the information needs of software developers. Previous research suggests that these information needs have not been sufficiently understood. This article presents the results of a series of semistructured interviews and a follow-up questionnaire conducted to explore the learning goals and learning strategies of software developers, the information resources they turn to and the quality criteria they apply to API documentation. Our results show that developers initially try to form a global understanding regarding the overall purpose and main features of an API, but then adopt either a concepts-oriented or a code-oriented learning strategy that API documentation both needs to address. Our results also show that general quality criteria such as completeness and clarity are relevant to API documentation as well. Developing and maintaining API documentation therefore need to involve the expertise of communication professionals.

“Cape Wind” is a proposed wind-energy project off the Massachusetts coast. Its environmental effects are detailed in an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Writers of an EIS must address rhetorical challenges posed by the complexity of how the “environment” is characterized by many statutes and regulations. These requirements include guidance on the document’s style, and because the text is hundreds of pages long, they also include rules on its arrangement (its genre), and its online delivery. Partly as a result, the writer’s stance is that of an impersonal, corporate author. The EIS is required to address multiple audiences that include decision makers and elected officials; public participation in the process is encouraged. Evidence about the actual audience shows that the public finds out about the project through media reports, web sites, and press releases, rather than studying the EIS. Finally, sustained opposition by a fossil-fuel lobbying group has led to the project’s apparent demise.

Using concepts and methods from technical and professional communication and linguistics, the authors conducted an observational study of the voice of community members (CMs) in the deliberation of a behavioral institutional review board (IRB). In the discourse of deliberation, they found that CMs had an effective voice in constructing the compliance of individual research protocols under IRB review. But they also found that CMs had an ineffective voice in representing their African-American community, particularly in their efforts to advocate for more consideration of minority research sites and subjects and a fuller consideration of minority community attitudes.

Book Review| March 01 2018 Clockwork Rhetoric: The Language and Style of Steampunk Clockwork Rhetoric: The Language and Style of Steampunk. Edited by Barry Brummett. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014; pp. ix + 210. $60 hardback. Andrea J. Severson Andrea J. Severson Arizona State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 180–183. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0180 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Andrea J. Severson; Clockwork Rhetoric: The Language and Style of Steampunk. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 180–183. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0180 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. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Commemorating both the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the subsequent Gay Liberation Movement, the Gay Liberation Monument projects a quiet, muted homosexuality that stands in sharp contrast to the courageous and violent assertion of homosexual identity that was Stonewall. Our essay examines this strange incongruity, revealing in the process the homosentimental style—a unique rhetorical form that attempts to negotiate the many contradictory motives animating LGBT advocacy. The Gay Liberation Monument’s use of homosentimentality refracts in many directions, simultaneously challenging dehumanizing rhetorics with affective appeals to care and friendship, presenting itself as assimilationist even as it offers coded indices of clone culture, and producing a doubled homosexual body—at once assimilationist and queer. Both the monument and the homosentimental style thus pose a challenge to binary conceptualizations of LGBT rights advocacy that separate assimilationist and queer politics.

ABSTRACTI examine the role that Descartes's theory of optics plays in Cartesian methodology. After explaining the importance of methodology in Descartes's project, I outline his method in terms of the three dimensions of time. I put this method to work by describing Descartes's search for the elusive hyperbolic lens, a lens that would offer the type of perfect vision that is necessary for the Cartesian scientific process. It soon becomes clear that this lens is the mind itself. The task of this project is thus to sculpt the mind so as to achieve the highest clarity and distinctness of scientific vision. Thus, by focusing on how the eye works and how seeing can be improved, the subject and the objects it sees both radically transform in structure, content, and kind. The Cartesian corpus thus initiates a sort of specular regime that produces a new subjectivity and a new world.

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

This article proposes embodied and multimodal readings of student compositions from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School as a way to illuminate processes of assimilation and resistance. Drawing on Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance and the ways that the field of composition has taken up Vizenor’s work, I argue that the project remains incomplete if we confine our history of cultural rhetoric to resistant, individual, alphabetically literate voices as the sites of rhetorical sovereignty and rhetorics of survivance.

This essay explores how undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses incorporate archival research. It reviews a number of assignments described in recent publications where students undertake archival research to recover lost voices, (re)read the archive as a source of public memory, and create their own archives. These assignments demonstrate a feminist pedagogy of undergraduate archival literacy in emphasizing the feminist values of collaboration, invitation, and activism in local contexts. Finally, this essay shows how students who develop the kind of archival literacy discussed in this essay often transform their definitions and practice of academic research, while professors who teach such assignments often transform their definitions and practice of undergraduate research.

This essay considers select translations of Dante's Divine Comedy through the lens of pedagogical value while emphasizing the merit of holistic reading across the full scope of the poem and across multiple translations to gain additional insights into the original work.

Abstract In this project, I argue that J. Edgar Hoover’s style of political realism should be studied by critics because it long preceded that of President Harry S. Truman. The style belonged to a stockpile of anti-Communist imagery that helped to shape how the Truman Doctrine speech was drafted and how audiences interpreted its meanings in more local domestic politics. When Truman finally announced that the Soviet Union had challenged international protocol, I argue that he confirmed the vision that his Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director and other detractors had developed throughout the New Deal to discredit reformers who challenged issues of race, labor, and police technique. In this way, anti-Communist containment rhetoric limited the president’s ability to control the domestic security and economic agendas. The stockpile of anti-Communist discourse belonged to, I also argue, a relative of political realism—literary realism and its spinoff, literary naturalism. My final argument is that the FBI director refurbished key tropes in the stockpile, which helped Truman’s congressional opponents invoke Hoover’s authority within the executive branch and thereby displace the president’s credibility as commander in chief. Combined, Hoover and his allies in Congress and elsewhere used rhetorical realism to communicate a deterministic philosophy about human nature through a diffuse mythic narrative, coordinated between Congress, Hollywood, the press, and official FBI discourse.

In this article, I analyze the debate between Raimond Gaita and Christopher Hamilton on the rhetorical practices appropriate to achieving lucidity (full attention to moral reality). I concentrate on the deployment of untimely terms (taking “soul” as my central example) as a means by which both Gaita and Hamilton attempt to provoke lucidity in the reader. In the final sections of the article, I use this case study of the moral term “soul” to set out a theoretical model for the process of becoming lucid in order to (partially) defend Gaita's philosophical style against Hamilton's criticisms. At stake is the possibility of other forms of rigor, other forms of clarity, and other forms of cogency than analytic philosophizing typically presumes.

This article asks that we take seriously (and suggests that we have not yet taken seriously enough) Steven B. Katz's point that nonhuman rhetoric is “supplanting and replacing the physical human body” as the main site for rhetorical agency. Discussing Ian Bogost's carpentry and James J. Brown Jr. and Nathaniel Rivers's adaptation of it as rhetorical carpentry as an example of nonhuman rhetoric that does not go far enough, I suggest that Joanna Zylinska's concept of “scalar derangement”—the pathological need to put all things on a human scale—is a major impasse for a nonhuman rhetoric founded on representational methods. Instead, I offer a model of rhetorical invocation and suggest that skotison, Richard Lanham's term for deliberately obfuscatory style, provides a rhetorical practice for addressing the nonhuman at nonhuman scales. Instead of a nonhuman rhetoric of things, I maintain that in the age of climate change we should begin to consider an inhuman rhetoric.

&#8220;A techno-utopian style, the aestheticization of new technology, and the valorization of perpetual revolution represent a shift away from the managerial and risk-oriented realism of prevailing free market discourse towards an unproblematic view of the technological future and works to hasten its arrival&#8221;

We end Volume Year 51 with a set of articles that emphasize language, particularly the teaching and learning of the grammatical structure, styles, and registers that undergird the English language arts and become ever more visible in a multilingual world.

Students in first-year composition (FYC) courses are expected to control the mechanics, vocabulary, style, and grammatical accuracy of their writing. Yet language development support, particularly that of grammar instruction in US FYC courses, has largely disappeared in recent decades, due in part to suppositions that students implicitly know grammar. This assumption is problematic given the increasing number of multilingual writers enrolling in US schools with observed needs for explicit language instruction. The present study explores whether first- and second-language writers of English perceived a need for language instruction and whether they wanted or expected it. Students from 12 sections of FYC were asked in surveys and interviews about their prior language learning experiences and current self-perceived language needs and then were asked to complete one of two self-directed language development projects (LDPs): an online, self-selected grammar and usage study project or journal entries focusing on vocabulary/style in texts they had read. Student work was collected, analyzed, and supplemented with students’ end-of-term observations and preferences about self-directed LDPs. Our findings reveal that students overwhelmingly wanted and expected language instruction and were largely positive about both types of LDPs, but they felt that language instruction should be offered in multiple delivery methods beyond just self-study. With these findings in mind, we offer pedagogical suggestions for addressing the perceived and real needs for language development of linguistically diverse FYC students.

Style pedagogies, as many composition scholars have argued, have largely fallen out of favor in the last few decades. Those who have examined the decline have pointed to the deemphasis of the text prompted by the process movement as well as the subsequent social turn in composition studies. This article, in contrast, looks to the emergence of postmodernism and the ways in which it challenged and continues to complicate the theorizing and teaching of style. The author argues that embrace of a self-reflexive, “essayistic” voice would allow the instructor to exploit postmodernist impulses while revitalizing the teaching of style.

Delivery has often been treated as an afterthought of the “real work” of writing. This article demonstrates how writers in some contexts must think very carefully about delivery from the very beginning of their process. Tracking collaborative writers’ talk, this article demonstrates how a group of writers works to anticipate delivery by repeatedly constructing delivery narratives—that is, stories about the future handoff of their document to audiences. In a complex case of LGBT policy advocacy, the writers weave together multiple delivery narratives in order to achieve consensus, revealing the influence of discursive voices, perspectives, personal and institutional histories, and disciplinary training on the group’s rhetorical strategies. This article also considers how an experienced administrative lawyer constructs delivery narratives, revealing an expert’s strategy to try to get a legitimate hearing for a novel legal interpretation.

Abstract To address U.S.–China communication patterns, this essay juxtaposes discourses of democracy in decline (now prevalent in the United States), democracy as chaos (the chief claim of the Chinese Communist Party), and democracy as hope (embodied in the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong). To illustrate the rhetorical dynamics of these three positions, the essay analyzes coverage of the Hong Kong protests, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s bravura 2014 defense of U.S. imperialism, and the CCP’s blistering responses to both Hagel and the Hong Kong protests. These U.S.–China debates about democracy as decline, chaos, and hope are then situated within global conversations about the merits of democracy and stability in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings and ongoing concerns about the course of globalization. Ultimately, the essay argues for a new political style of prudent internationalism scrubbed free of both U.S.-style moralizing and Chinese-style absolutism.

This special issue takes up a singular question: What would it mean to incorporate social justice into our writing assessments? This issue aims to foreground the perspectives of contributors whose voices are not typically heard in writing assessment scholarship: non-tenure-track faculty, HBCU WPAs, researchers interested in global rhetorics, queer faculty, and faculty of color. These voices have too often not been heard in writing assessment scholarship. There is no doubt that the first step toward projects of social justice writing assessment is to listen to those who have not been heard, to make more social the project of socially just writing assessment. The guest editors argue that there is much to be learned by making the writing assessment “scene,” as Chris Gallagher would say, more inclusive.

Suggesting that higher education is at a pivotal time regarding the influx of veteran students on campus, this and the following essays argue that faculty have an ethical obligation to investigate and, if appropriate, respond to the veteran student demographic enrolled in two- and four-year institutions. We hope to encourage language, literature, and writing faculty to rethink their preconceptions of war, warriors, and military culture—to ask hard questions about what we know about the wars, the people who fight them, their families, and the public narratives that have controlled our access to “combat operations.” We encourage faculty to engage the complexities of war, to honor the complicated questions and dilemmas military members face, and to understand how those questions will likely filter into classrooms, social interactions, and broader national discourse. We provide our colleagues with an opportunity to hear veteran voices in the hope that classroom teachers can have some grounds on which to reconsider and engage with the culture of war. We have an opportunity to theorize classroom practices that are in clear contact with veteran experiences and, more important, an opportunity to engage with veterans and service members not simply as objects of study but as colleagues.

English has a peculiar way of redefining the selves and locations of readers, especially in countries where Anglo-American texts are studied with a multicultural awareness. Ernest Hemingway's “Hills like White Elephants” creates a world elsewhere not only for the couple who travel elsewhere but also for the students who read their story in Kerala (India) when they explore the “elsewheres” they create together as a class by translating it into Malayalam. The student-translators are apt to discover that there is more to Jig's unspoken anguish and the largely unspeakable differences that surface between the two lovers. While Hemingway's lean style is understood for what infinite suggestions it evokes in English, students surprise themselves with meanings—pregnant possibilities that suggest themselves in Malayalam, and unbeknownst to English/monolingual readers. Translation, like the extremely sparse exchanges between Jig and her lover, must exercise extreme caution, however, in committing no more words than must essentially be committed. Concealing what no longer needed concealment, or was soon to be found too big for concealment anyway, is a worrisome theme here whose reflection in translation is hard to sustain unless the Malayali translators match Hemingway's superior command of language. Besides such knowledge, a translator's intertextualities are as invisible as, and perhaps much harder to share with others than, a teacher's challenges and excitement of teaching “Hills” in English in a multilingual classroom. Perhaps from such dreams begin the responsibilities of reading a story as yet unwritten in Hemingway's classic every time we read it elsewhere.

While other students were planning their moves to big universities across the nation, Micah Wright had a different post–high school plan. He wanted to join the Marine Corps. He left for boot camp in September 2002 and started a four-year life-changing experience that resulted in him earning a Combat Action Ribbon and a Purple Heart. After his active service, he decided to start another venture: college. Though his resolve had been tested many times before, attending a university, where the halls were filled with unfamiliar college students and the classes were led by professors whose teaching styles did not match his Marine Corps training, was more difficult than he anticipated, until he realized that his identity as a Marine could be a formidable force in achieving his degree.

Human-centered design is a burgeoning field of study that has the potential to work toward actively creating more just and equitable technology design while critically interrogating the design process. To do this, human-centered design needs to consider making social justice aims a primary objective and end-goal in design. One way of integrating social justice aims into design is to employ the use of narrative inquiry. This article explores an alternative method for developing design scenarios using narrative inquiry and the feminist concepts of silence and voice as a way to promote considerations of social justice and inclusion in design. Using narrative inquiry to rethink certain aspects of the design process can help designers address issues of agency. The methodological focus of this article responds to Suchman’s call for “alternative visions” of how technology production and design can be undertaken.

AbstractCritics in both philosophy and literary studies have rightly emphasized a “poetics of transition” relating the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson to that of William James. However, less attention has been given to the ways that Emerson's philosophy of rhetoric correlates with James's rhetorical perspectives on psychology and philosophy. Fundamentally rhetorical interests in the contiguous circumstances and contingent reception of thinking link James to Emerson beyond matters of poetics and style. This article correlates Emerson's understanding of a rhetoric of metonymy as the basis of thinking with the principle of contiguity crucial to James's philosophy of mind. This relation between rhetoric and philosophy reiterates a rhetoric of mind that both Emerson and James associate with the older liberal education of the college just at the point that this curriculum is displaced by the professional, specialized disciplines of the emerging university in late nineteenth-century America.

As rhetoricians combine antiracist and postmodern discourses to compose a hybrid critical discourse on whiteness, they fail to consider the contradictory attitudes toward historical knowledge embodied by the two original discourses. Repressed from the hybrid discourse’s content, the contradictory attitudes nonetheless surface in its style. On one hand, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by active sentences that strive to represent historical dynamics, following the antiracist imperative to ameliorate historical amnesia. On the other, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by abstractions and vague actions, which reflect postmodernist skepticism of historical knowledge. Abstract nouns replace specific agents and social groups, while weak verbs gesture toward unspecified practices and processes. These stylistic elements constitute “stactive” sentences that substitute a feeling of historicity for concrete historical dynamics. Uncritical immersion in the stactive style can limit the field’s and the public’s ability to develop a much-needed historically rich discourse on whiteness.

This article identifies five categories of resources that preservice teachers drew on as they considered student writing and planned their own approaches to assessing and teaching writing. Identifying these resources helps us better understand how beginning writing teachers think about student writing—and better understand mismatches that commonly occur between what teacher educators teach and what new teachers actually do. Our study builds on literature that considers how writing teachers are prepared, extends research about how preservice teachers use what they learn, and adds layers of detail to literature about the resources that beginning teachers draw upon to aid and support them in their work. The pedagogical and research projects described in this study stem from a communities-of-practice framework. Our methods surfaced preservice teachers’ claims about writing and the resources they drew upon to support those claims. Drawing upon our rhetorical view of writing, we worked inductively to identify these claims and resources, using grounded analysis of transcripts from preservice teachers’ VoiceThread conversations to develop a taxonomy of 15 resources grouped into 5 categories: understanding of students and student writing; knowledge of context; colleagues; roles; and writing. This research has implications for educators and researchers working in teacher preparation. Scaffolded instruction is essential to help beginning teachers use particular resources—and to employ resources in ways connected with rhetorical conceptual frameworks. To that end, the taxonomy of resources can be used as a tool for individual and programmatic assessment, as well as to facilitate scaffolded instruction.

This article examines the oral communication training that took place in Eloqi, a virtual language-learning community. Eloqi (a pseudonym) was a for-profit start-up that built and operated a proprietary Web-based, voice-enabled platform connecting English-language learners in China with trainers in the United States. While it existed, Eloqi’s unique platform was used to deliver short, one-on-one lessons designed to improve students’ oral English communication skills. Using the ethnography of communication and speech codes theory, a theoretical–methodological approach, the author presents an analysis of the speech code, or code of communicative conduct, employed at Eloqi. This code of English logic, which Eloqi’s community members associated with native English speech, comprised six locally defined rules for oral English speech; namely, speech had to be organized, succinct, spontaneously composed rather than rehearsed, original and honest, proactively improved, and positive. This article discusses the significance of this code, particularly as it pertains to cultural communication, and concludes with some implications for researchers and practitioners in business and technical communication.

This essay considers a student-led protest that took place in 1882 at Syrian Protestant College as a moment of rhetorical negotiation in which (Arab) students unsuccessfully construct and deploy an "imagined America" to speak back to (American) faculty and administrators. This essay's historical analysis helps illustrate the high stakes and implicit promises of transnational knowledge economies today and in the past, as represented in and through the globalization of American-style institutions of higher education and the assumptions about citizenship, and literate practices, that are attached to it.

This article investigates the spatial politics at work in composition and rhetoric's turn toward revisionist historiography. Drawing on critical spatial theory, the author seeks to answer a fundamental question: What would it mean to formulate a historiography for composition that brings an interrelation of space and time, of spatial and historical work, to the fore? This article expedites this foregrounding by highlighting the ways in which the divisions between time and space have already grown increasingly tenuous in our revisionist historical scholarship and by providing this interrelatedness a vocabulary—a space-time hermeneutic—to highlight and predict its theoretical and political implications.

What dynamics govern the "reclamation" of contested terms? Applying Burke's notion of terministic screens illuminates the reclamation efforts surrounding contested—terms "Black" and "queer," both historically derogatory (and therefore discouraged) and now broadly reclaimed (and acceptable). In such reclamations, redemptive in—nature, the derogatory term is portrayed not as false but as misunderstood. But the reclamation movements surrounding "nigger" and "faggot" have been restricted,—i.e., acceptable only for in-group use (and mockingly directing attention to their derogatory history). Various reclamation narratives challenge the semantic binary—of derogation and reclamation: they indicate not "successes" or "failures" but different styles of reclamation.

Common definitions of style have tended to treat it as an artifact controlled by the producer, overlooking two features afforded attention in sociocultural linguistics: dynamism and co-construction. Although some scholars have highlighted style’s interactivity, their accounts have not yielded a comprehensive theory. This essay advances and illustrates a more rigorous definition of style as a fluid activity in which meaning is often contested, continually negotiated, and necessarily informed by interlocutors’ beliefs. Ultimately, in integrating and expanding on theories of style’s interactivity and contingency, it provides guidance for style researchers and demonstrates the value of cross-disciplinary conversation around style.

This article describes a sequence of assignments to guide students through an informed effort at making contributions to Wikipedia that persist, and suggests ways this set of exercises in social informatics may also serve a number of common goals in a variety of writing, literature, and other courses: analyzing and writing for explicit editorial guidelines (“standards” in information science, “house style” in editorial practice); understanding, conforming to, and even negotiating conventions of genres and subgenres; collaborating online; writing for an audience that not only is real but also talks back; and developing deep understanding of revision and the writing, editorial, and publication processes. Students first learn Wikipedia policies and practices and analyze the historical development of articles before they make contributions. The pedagogical opportunities arguably outweigh the concerns of those who doubt the credibility of an open-authored encyclopedia.

This essay argues that the mechanical voice of Stephen Hawking requires theorizing the public as a voice object. I contend that Hawking’s mechanical voice threatened his audience with what Jacques Lacan called the object voice, a voice in excess of bodies and languages that functions as an elusive object-cause of desire. Upon showing how the psychoanalytic account of voice and rhetorical scholarship on publics may mutually inform one another, I argue that, due to the role of publics as an objet petit a, the strange qualities of Hawking’s synthesizer were rhetorically surmounted. In sum, this essay considers whether Hawking’s mechanical voice was really all that different from our own.

Book Review| March 01 2016 A Voice that Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement A Voice that Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement. By Maegan Parker Brooks. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014; pp. 314. $60.00 cloth. Aric Putnam Aric Putnam St. John’s University and the College of Saint Benedict Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (1): 144–147. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.1.0144 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Aric Putnam; A Voice that Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2016; 19 (1): 144–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.1.0144 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. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| March 01 2016 Speaking with the People’s Voice: How Presidents Invoke Public Opinion Speaking with the People’s Voice: How Presidents Invoke Public Opinion. By Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014; pp. ix + 195. $33.00 cloth. Jeffrey A. Kurr Jeffrey A. Kurr Pennsylvania State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (1): 135–138. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.1.0135 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jeffrey A. Kurr; Speaking with the People’s Voice: How Presidents Invoke Public Opinion. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2016; 19 (1): 135–138. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.1.0135 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. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article examines how creative writing pedagogy and composition pedagogy can be put into productive conversation by using expressivism and social constructionism as a shared frequency, allowing for a deepening of the pedagogical options available to teachers. The end result of this analysis is a proposal for a dual course pairing of composition and creative writing. Within this proposed arrangement, creative writing, on the one hand, would emphasize expressivist pedagogies that grant students centrality in the classroom while still exploring the ideological implications of the writing act. Composition, on the other hand, would focus on scholarship, research, and theory, while still employing creative writing activities that keep student writers from feeling utterly marginalized.

This article reviews the history of federal adult education policy in order to draw composition scholars into broader educational policy discussions shaping literacy instruction at all educational levels. Adult education policy in the 1960s framed literacy as an element of human capital necessary for economic advancement, a limited characterization reinforcing assumptions that literacy education should generate more productive workers. These early policy discourses are reflected in our current economically driven educational climate, and I suggest that examining such historical and discursive contexts provides composition scholars and educators a stronger basis for actively engaging in policy conversations impacting their work.