As advice books on caring for the home become more popular, they become more specialized. This essay analyzes one target niche of domestic advice: cleaning books for men. The authors of books like Clean Like a Man adopt as their primary persuasive strategy an ethos that establishes their own masculinity and, by extension, affirms the masculinity of readers. Though they explicitly argue for more equitable sharing of domestic tasks, the ethos adopted by the authors reveals general ambivalence about the changing notions of masculinity associated with such behaviors.

With the importance of online research, writing, and communication, computers are increasingly vital to instruction within the humanities. To help prepare teachers and administrators who engage with computerized instruction, this article examines faculty development through the lens of technology training by reporting on issues and concerns expressed by twelve technology trainers in a series of interviews. The interviewees provided their experiences and advice, including ways to approach institutional challenges, faculty participation, and pedagogical integrity. Most importantly, the author argues that technology training is a complex rhetorical activity involving a strong sense of kairos, context, and audience.

The author considers faculty development and its potential relationship to the ethos of collaborative practice modeled both by critical (Freirean) pedagogy and by interdisciplinary research. As a primary concern for any academic administrator, faculty development is not only a teaching moment but also an opportunity for reciprocal exchange, learning, and knowledge production, allowing participants to challenge the received wisdom of their fields and to come to a more rhetorical understanding of their identities. The collaborative construction of new knowledge and an emerging understanding of identities are examined in the context of two professional development and administrative contexts: the assessment by faculty of the writing of entering, first-year students and a collegewide, first-year experience (learning-community) initiative.

Current scholarship tells us that skills in teaming are essential for students and practitioners of professional communication. Writers must be able to cooperate with subject-matter experts and team members to make effective decisions and complete projects. Scholarship also suggests that rapid changes in technology and changes in teaming processes challenge workplace communication and cooperation. Professional writers must be able to use complex software for projects that are often completed by multidisciplinary teams working remotely. Moreover, as technical writers shift from content developers to project managers, our responsibilities now include user-advocacy and supervision, further invigorating the need for successful communication. This article offers a different vision of an ancient heuristic—stasis theory—as a solution for the teaming challenges facing today's professional writers. Stasis theory, used as a generative heuristic rather than an eristic weapon, can help foster teaming and effective decision making in contemporary pedagogical and workplace contexts.

Pedagogical and scholarly representations of collaborative writing and knowledge construction in technical communication have traditionally recognized consensus as the logical outcome of collaborative work, even as scholars and teachers have acknowledged the value of conflict and “dissensus” in the process of collaborative knowledge building. However, the conflict-laden work product of a Denver task force charged with recommending changes to the city police department's use-of-force policy and proposing a process for police oversight retains the collaborative group's dissensus and in doing so, illustrates an alternative method of collaborative reporting that challenges convention. Such an approach demonstrates a dissensus-based method of reporting that has the potential to open new rhetorical spaces for collaborative stakeholders by gainfully extending collaborative conversations and creating new opportunities for ethos development, thus offering scholars, teachers, and practitioners a way of reimagining the trajectory and outcome of collaborative work.

This study examines how a very light jet start-up, Eclipse Aviation, changed its ethos appeals in order to survive the loss of its principally declared innovation, a jet aircraft engine. Eclipse Aviation's corporate transformation from a spin-off company to a convergence-of-innovation company hinged on modifying an early marketing strategy. To overcome the loss of the jet engine, employees had to radically modify earlier expert representations and adopt rhetorical appeals that more closely parallel what Miller described as “cyborg discourse.” To understand how Eclipse Aviation survived the typically fatal loss of a stated primary innovation and to explore the implications that this particular start-up's rupture has for technology transfer and technical marketing, this study centers its analysis on a Web site that marketers used to “ventilate” the company and prevent financial collapse. The transformation in the company's marketing strategy illustrates how cyborg ethos appeals aggregate and discipline distributed stakeholder roles.

Drawing on the rhetorical concept of ethos, this study explores the professional identities, health-care relationships, and forms of community constructed by two midwifery websites in Ontario. Rather than facilitating communal and dialogic modes of communication with the public, these websites enact primarily a unidirectional consumption model. This design structure both reflects and reinforces the complexities of midwifery's recent shift from being an explicitly alternative form of health care, to becoming part of the dominant health-care framework.

This article describes a study that examined the tables and figures in articles from a basic research journal, The Journal of Cell Biology, and compared them to tables and figures from an applied medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine. Comparison of graphics between the two journals shows sharp differences in terms of range of graphics types, visual consistency within and between articles, or use of color. As the articles take into account what is needed by different audiences, the graphics help to build the credibility of the journal. The study also addresses the question of how scientific visuals contribute to the persuasiveness of a writer, looking at how the graphics within an article affect the credibility or ethos of the writer.

Analogical reasoning has long been an important tool in the production of scientific knowledge, yet many scientists remain hesitant to fully endorse (or even admit) its use. As the teachers of scientific and technical writers, we have an opportunity and responsibility to teach them to use analogy without their writing becoming “overly inductive,” as Aristotle warned. To that end, I here offer an analysis of an example of the effective use of analogy in Rodney Brooks's “Intelligence Without Representation.” In this article, Brooks provides a model for incorporating these tools into an argument by building four of them into an enthymeme that clearly organizes his argument. This combination of inductive and deductive reasoning helped the article become a very influential piece of scholarship in artificial intelligence research, and it can help our students learn to use analogy in their own writing. Every one who effects persuasion through proof does in fact use either enthymemes or examples: there is no other way. (Aristotle, 1984b Aristotle. 1984b. The rhetoric and the poetics of Aristotle, Edited by: Roberts, W. R. and Bywater, I. New York: The Modern Library. [Google Scholar], p. 26)

Research Article| January 01 2008 Toulmin's Rhetorical Logic: What's the Warrant for Warrants? William Keith; William Keith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google David Beard David Beard Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2008) 41 (1): 22–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655298 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation William Keith, David Beard; Toulmin's Rhetorical Logic: What's the Warrant for Warrants?. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2008; 41 (1): 22–50. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655298 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 CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University2008The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Arguments manifest in scientific visuals through graphic representation, content placement, and overall document structure. These arguments, designed to influence public perception, change over time in relation to sociopolitical climate. Analysis of a series of documents constructed deliberately to influence perception can help to determine patterns of argumentation and perceived exigencies. In this article, four self-guided tour brochures produced for distribution to visitors to the Glen Canyon Dam in 1977, 1984, 1990, and 1993 are analyzed in order to identify rhetorical strategies designed to influence public perceptions of the dam site, and examine how public perception of the dam, and related argumentation, is structured by sociopolitical climate.

This study challenges the prevailing interpretations of the Greek rhetorical principle of kairos “saying the right thing at the right time” and attempts to draw on a more nuanced understanding of the term in order to provide generative re-readings of three Braddock Award–winning essays.

This article presents a qualitative text analysis of persuasive documents written by a major U.S. airline in a 2004 counter-campaign against the Teamsters union. The methodology for this study is based on Stephen Toulmin's argument model, including his “double triad” and his interpretation of artistic proofs, which parallel the three classical rhetorical appeals. Actual corporate documents are featured in this article, supported by content from management conference calls that were attended by the researchers. The article concludes with implications for teaching and research in the field of technical and professional communication.

Americans contribute $240 billion dollars to charities each year, raised in part by writing letters to potential donors. While it is debatable what the reasons are for donors to give so much money, most donors seem to be moved to contribute by pathos, particularly pity. The concept of pathos as a rhetorical appeal has become more complex over the years, growing from a simple strategy to a complicated set of parameters requiring careful delineation. Beginning with the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, pathos was defined with greater clarity (especially the concept of enargia), with Aristotle's formal definitions of the emotions, and with the use of an image upon which to direct the audience's pity. Cicero adds to the theory by calling for the use of pathos in the peroration and reinforcing Aristotle's emphasis on careful audience analysis. St. Augustine and those who follow, including Renaissance, 18th-century rhetoricians, and 20th-century scholars like Kenneth Burke, argue that style can also be an effective persuasive strategy for a pathetic appeal. Accordingly, the charity letters examined illustrate not only Aristotle's and Cicero's tenets but also show that elements of style, particularly rhetorical figures and schemes, are common rhetorical strategies used in these charity letters. While at first the rhetoric of charity letters seems simple and straight-forward, to raise billions of dollars every year charity letters use sophisticated appeals to pity that have a long and interesting history.

Many graduate creative writing programs depend on “star” faculty who have been hired more because of their professional reputation as writers than because of their commitment to teaching. As a result, such programs often fail to provide reflection on teaching that would truly serve their students. One step toward alleviating this problem is to offer undergraduate courses that enable creative writing graduate students to team-teach with regular faculty.

In preparing Suzanne Bordelon’s article for the February issue of CCC, the editorially unthinkable happened: An earlier version of her fine article replaced the final, wellrevised version as it went to the printer. In addition to my profuse apologies to Professor Bordelon, I have decided to publish the correct version of the article, delaying until September my publication of Janet Eldred’s review essay of several books on technology. The silver lining, in this instance, is a teachable moment, a rare glimpse for readers of CCC into an accountable but ultimately human (and I hope humane) editorial process: Bordelon’s article, quite good to begin with, was judged an “accept with revisions,” and she revised the article extensively and well, passing muster with a final read by one of the first reviewers and me.

In this article, I present findings from a discourse analysis of an often-overlooked genre of technical communication, regulatory writing. The study focuses on post-bellum regulations that disproportionately affected African Americans and the historical contexts in which the regulations were written. Historically, African Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds have maintained an implicit mistrust of government regulations and the government officials who write them. The justification for this mistrust is deeply rooted in the fact that for decades regulations were not written to protect the rights of African Americans nor was their input considered in regulatory writing. In Communicating Across Cultures, Stella Ting-Toomey argues, “if conflict parties do not trust each other, they tend to move away (cognitively, affectively and physically) from each other rather than struggle side by side in negotiation” [1, p. 222]. This study reveals rhetorical strategies used in historical regulatory writing that may still impact the ethos of regulatory writers.

Although the rhetoric of expertise stemming from the hard and social sciences has been well researched, the scholarship has not tended to focus on acts of public expertise by scholars from the humanities. This article reports a case study in the rhetorical practices of a theologian, acting as a public expert, first attempting to affect decision making in the Waco conflict in 1993 and then attempting to participate in and shape the public debates that followed it. To compare the practices of this humanities scholar to expectations from research on the rhetoric of expertise, a rhetorical analysis was conducted on the context, style, genre, and argument in the scholar’s public writings. This article discusses (a) the role of kairos in the policy cycle in determining the scholar’s bids for acceptance as an expert, (b) the use of narrative as a generic hybrid of intra- and interdisciplinary practice, and (c) the role of “understanding” asa special topic.

The article contends that previous scholars have misread George Pierce Baker’s efforts by focusing primarily on The Principles of Argumentation and the role of logic. Baker’s view of logic was more complex than scholars have claimed. He challenged traditional concepts of formal logic, highlighting only those aspects that would help students learn argument.

Research Article| January 01 2006 Sophistical Wisdom: Politikê Aretê and “Logosophia” Christopher Lyle Johnstone Christopher Lyle Johnstone Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2006) 39 (4): 265–289. https://doi.org/10.2307/20697163 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Christopher Lyle Johnstone; Sophistical Wisdom: Politikê Aretê and “Logosophia”. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2006; 39 (4): 265–289. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20697163 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 CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University2006The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article investigates how Confucianism inspires an indirect style in professional communication in China. Particularly, the author examines two major philosophical principles of Confucianism, Li (rituals/rules) and Ren (love/benevolence), and discusses how they encourage individuals to establish proper human relationships, to humble themselves, and to shun pure personal profits. Dictated by Confucianism, Chinese writers often focus on interpersonal relationships, humble themselves, and avoid personal profits before discussing pertinent business issues. As a result, Chinese writers are indirect in their style. They often employ the indirect style to accommodate two pragmatic acts: (a) establishing their ethos that helps create a strong bond between individuals at a more personal level and (b) building a harmonious social structure at a more societal level. Such a style is conducive to successful business transactions. So, it should not be explained as ineffective or as mere digressions.

This article examines the authors’ arduous struggle to develop a professional communication program that would not only meet their students’ professional and intellectual needs but also achieve an identity consistent with their goals as scholars and teachers of composition. Ultimately, the authors argue that a professional communication program that combines in its teaching the ethos of a liberal arts tradition along with the practical skills needed by writers in the workplace is both desirable and possible but that it must be flexible enough to allow for ongoing curricular and philosophical negotiations to meet changing contextual demands.

In the critically acclaimed movie 8-Mile, Future, a host for the rap battles held in a Detroit neighborhood, proffers the above encouragement to his charge, an aspiring white rapper, played by recording sensation Eminem. Aside from the connections, real and imagined, between the emergence of Bunny-Rab bit, the character Eminem portrays, and his actual rise in the hip-hop community, the movie evokes a number of interesting quandaries about discursive strategies? voices historically ascribed to and inscribed by African Americans. Facets of Eminem's language appear to resonate with that of African American rappers, not to mention the larger oral tradition from which hip-hop discourse derives, though his existen tial experience surrounding that language cannot. Moreover, rappers speak of neigh borhoods plagued by economic disenfranchisement, disenfranchisement that some whites, like Eminem, have experienced as well. Still, Future's exhortation raises at least two questions: can a language performer (irrespective of genre) of one race truly participate in the discursive community of another? Given the material op pression that has accompanied the socially constructed denigration of African phe notypic features, can the sound of blackness be ultimately divorced from the sight of blackness?1

The author uses a discussion of Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven to argue that cross-racial voicing on the part of white writers may in fact express an attempt to acknowledge and perhaps explore the rhetorical efficacy of a black ethos. At the same time, the author suggests that English studies scholars of all races need to create forums where cross-racial voicing can be explored, that white English professors must continue to interrogate hegemonic attempts to control and colonize African American discourse, and that teachers should design assignments that help students gain insights into the historical and contemporary struggles blacks face to characterize their own discursive practices.

I argue that examining two collections of essays designed for the preparation of new writing teachers and published twenty years apart provides some important clues to what has occurred to composition studies in the interval. Building on the framework I established in two previous CCC articles, I argue that composition studies has become a less unified and more contentious discipline early in the twenty-first century than it had appeared to be around 1990. The present article specifically addresses the rise of what I call critical/cultural studies, the quiet expansion of expressive approaches to teaching writing, and the split of rhetorical approaches into three: argumentation, genre analysis, and preparation for “the” academic discourse community.

Research Article| January 01 2005 Dealing with Online Selves: Ethos Issues in Computer-Assisted Teaching and Learning Mary Lenard Mary Lenard Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2005) 5 (1): 77–96. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-1-77 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mary Lenard; Dealing with Online Selves: Ethos Issues in Computer-Assisted Teaching and Learning. Pedagogy 1 January 2005; 5 (1): 77–96. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-1-77 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2005 Duke University Press2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2005 Reading Logos as Speech: Heidegger, Aristotle and Rhetorical Politics Stuart Elden Stuart Elden Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2005) 38 (4): 281–301. https://doi.org/10.2307/40238270 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Stuart Elden; Reading Logos as Speech: Heidegger, Aristotle and Rhetorical Politics. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2005; 38 (4): 281–301. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/40238270 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 CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2005 The Pennsylvania State University2005The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract This study explores the rhetoric of African‐American educator and abolitionist William Grant Allen through an analysis of "Orators and Oratory," an address delivered to the Dialexian Society of New York Central College. I feature Allen's effort to meld a variety of traditions and approaches to enlist his student audience in the cause of abolition. Further, I take up two related, but distinct components of "Orators and Oratory": the emphasis on appeals to the emotions and the portrayal of violence. More generally, I suggest ways in which Allen's speech serves as a window onto the rhetoric of marginalized abolitionist rhetors.

Preview this article: Review: Revisiting Racialized Voice: African American Ethos in Language and Literatures by David G. Holmes, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/56/2/collegecompositionandcommunication4048-1.gif

The author takes us back through his own and his family’s stories and histories to suggest that while academic discourse can be cognitively powerful it needs to be supplemented by memory and story, in our classrooms and in our scholarship. Memoria, mother of the muses, complements academic discourse’s strengths in logos and in ethos with pathos, providing an essential element in the rhetorical triangle, and, crucially, validating the experiences of people of color that might otherwise be silenced.

Drawing on existing work on popularizations, this investigation of book-length scholarly essays by practicing scientists across three disciplines reveals a hybrid genre that is neither popularization nor research report. The study utilizes both textual analysis and personal commentary from the writer-researchers to achieve a three-way comparison between the popularization, research article, and the book-length scholarly essay that clarifies how these essays contribute to the authors’ academic agendas. Writing for both a general audience and a jury of their peers, these academics employ an argumentative generic structure. Such argumentation develops a rhetoric of rational inquiry, where understanding how answers to perplexing problems are arrived at is just as important as the answers themselves. This genre also suggests the possible resurfacing of the essayist tradition in the sciences, as these practicing researchers engage with wider audiences in theoretical and philosophical speculation.

The media, which includes editorials, have been shown to play an important role in thedefinition of priorities in public agenda. In the domain of international matters, thepublic relies heavily on the media, and editorials play an even greater role. This articleexamines how explicit mentions of external sources of information function in theargumentative structure of editorials to achieve a persuasive effect. Acorpus of 40 editorials dealingwith Russia (taken fromLe Monde andThe New York Times between August 1999and March 2000) has been studied using a cognitive-based linguistic model of discourseanalysis. It is shown how under the guise of bringing some objectivity to the editorials’argumentation, external sources of information facilitate and enhance their subjectivity.

Working with accounts of famous trials can involve students in thinking through and critiquing important techniques of argumentation.

Abstract This essay argues for the value of Confederate women's Civil War diaries to rhetorical history. As women faced the dangers and deprivations of war, they turned to their diaries to respond, using personal writing to rehearse and construct an effective ethos. By practicing "self-rhetorics," diarists prepared themselves to speak and act effectively in the contexts of war. One woman's diary, that of Priscilla "Mittie" Bond, serves as a case study.

This article investigates children's evaluation/selection of ideas in writing-related tasks. The critical dimension being considered was to what extent the communicative goal that defines argumentation establishes basic criteria with which children decide whether to include counterargument in a text. Data analysis focused on participants' decisions and, most important, the rationales they present for their decisions. Two constraints seem to drive evaluation/selection processes. First, the content constraint, whereby a writer focuses on agreement with the idea itself; second, the rhetorical constraint, defined as a writer's perception of an idea's value in increasing the acceptability of his or her point of view. Counterargumentation must be perceived as a valuable rhetorical strategy if specific counterarguments are to be incorporated into a text; otherwise, counterargumentation remains part of the process of selection/evaluation without becoming explicit in the product of such a process—the text.

Abstract This essay argues that the word logos meant “a gathering or composition “ in Homeric Greek and that it retained this sense through the fifth century BCE. It first builds a philological case for the composition/ gathering meaning of logos. Next, it addresses the historiographic question of how the interpretation of logos as logic/language has come to prevail in our histories of Greek thought. Finally, it demonstrates the relevance that the composition/gathering reading of logos can have for the history of rhetoric by showing how it can help in rethinking the “rivalry “ between muthos and logos.

Writers often address letters to people with whom they have few if any personal connections. To increase understanding of rhetorical decision making in such noninterpersonal settings, this article analyzes letters to a United States senator. The analysis draws from three bodies of research on persuasion: situational context, persuade package, and personal constructs. On the basis of that theoretical grounding—and using deliberative democracy theory and the strategic-choice model—the authors develop hypotheses linking situation attributes and writer attributes to letter attributes. The results show that topic, position, sex, and technology are significantly related to the writer’s choice of appeals, argumentative complexity, and structural directness. They also demonstrate a strong link between technology and message length. These results raise several possibilities for further study, such as whether advocates sometimes address messages to an accessible person while aiming their argumentation at an archetypal authority figure.

Homer's Iliad is an epic story about human character, which predates the Aristotelian lectures by some four hundred years. While classical scholars have always valued Aristotle's notion of ethos as a primary factor in persuasion, few have traced this concept to this earlier period. Following a close analysis of speeches in the Iliad, this examination attempts to reconstruct what Homer's theory of character might have looked like. While Aristotle seems to have understood character much differently than did Homer, enough evidence exists to suggest that Aristotle may have embraced Homer's Iliad and the story it tells about the importance of age, social convention, and the heroic.

Notes that educators must think about the possibilities for using autobiographical narrative ethically and effectively in academic writing and research, and they need to ask how the personal affects writing that is less personal. Considers how regardless of the stance toward the personal, no one can be an informed writer or reader without considering how subjectivity informs ways of knowing.

This article uses Chaim Perelman's theories of argumentation to examine a recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, Promoting Health: Intervention Strategies from Social and Behavioral Research (2000). The IOM's text explores social and behavioral research to devise multipronged intervention strategies; it focuses on social, economic, behavioral, and political health as a means of assuring population health—and thereby expands the conventional boundaries of public health. Since Chaim Perelman's rhetoric is seldom applied in the field of health communication, employing his ideas to consider the role of style, arrangement, and argument in such a cutting-edge document can illuminate public health writing, as well as shed new light on Perelmanian rhetoric.

Although Toulmin models of argumentation are pervasive in composition textbooks, research on the model's use in writing classrooms has been scarce'typically limited to evaluating how students' essays align with the model's elements (claim, data, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, backing) construed as objective standards. That approach discounts Toulmin's emphasis on context. In contrast, this study of a major university's summer composition program for high school students employs Wenger's notion of communities of practice and Bakhtin's notion of response to trace how classroom contexts mediate students' and teachers' understandings of a Toulmin model. The article presents a case study of a controversy that emerged when participants attempted to identify the main claim in one student's essay. The controversy arose, the analysis suggests, as participants positioned competing tacit and explicit representations of claims with/against other rhetorical terms (for example, thesis), variously interpreted the assigned tasks, and negotiated over tasks and texts.