To investigate the generic features of firm-generated advertisements (FGAs) in cross-cultural contexts, this study analyzed 327 FGAs by Dell Technologies and the Lenovo Group on Twitter and Sina Weibo. Integrating affordances and multimodality into genre analysis, the study showed that the FGAs were characterized by (a) flexible move structure, (b) persuasive language, (c) visual illustration, and (d) hyperlinks, hashtagging (#), and mentioning (@) functions. The FGAs on Sina Weibo, compared with those on Twitter, tended to use more language play, emojis, and contextual product pictures and show more emphasis on the niche of products, incentives, and celebrity endorsement.

Writing and genre scholarship has become increasingly attuned to how various nontextual features of written genres contribute to the kinds of social actions that the genres perform and to the activities that they mediate. Even though scholars have proposed different ways to account for nontextual features of genres, such attempts often remain undertheorized. By bringing together Writing, Activity, and Genre Research, and Multimodal Interaction Analysis, the authors propose a conceptual framework for multimodal activity-based analysis of genres, or Multimodal Writing, Activity, and Genre (MWAG) analysis. Furthermore, by drawing on previous studies of the laboratory notebook (lab book) genre, the article discusses the rhetorical action the genre performs and its role in mediating knowledge construction activities in science. The authors provide an illustrative example of the MWAG analysis of an emergent scientist’s lab book and discuss its contributions to his increasing participation in medical physics. The study contributes to the development of a theoretically informed analytical framework for integrative multimodal and rhetorical genre analysis, while illustrating how the proposed framework can lead to the insights into the sociorhetorical roles multimodal genres play in mediating such activities as knowledge construction and disciplinary enculturation.

This article explores the writing and reading requirements of the literacy practices, events, and texts characteristic of work mediated by the online labor platforms of the gig economy, such as Airtasker and Freelancer, which bring together people needing a job done with those willing to do it. These emerging platform-based discourse communities and their associated literacies are a new domain of social activity. Based on an examination of seven gig economy platforms, the present article examines the core literacy event in the gig economy, the posting and bidding for tasks, together with the texts that enhance and support this process. While some tasks require written texts as the outcome or product, all tasks involve the creation of some form of written text as part of doing the work. These texts are both interactional and interpersonal. As well as being a part of negotiating and then getting a task done, they relate to the complexities of building the identities, knowledge, and relationships required of those working in a virtual work space rather than a traditional workplace. While most of these texts reflect familiar text types, the core text cycle is argued to be an “emergent” genre. Implications for education are presented.

Discourse-based interviews (DBIs) uncover tacit knowledge within written composing processes. Existing visual research methodologies offer tools for a necessary expansion of DBI to the study of tacit knowledge in visual and multimodal texts. This article outlines a feminist application of eye tracking as a visual research method used in combination with stimulated recall interviews to study tacit knowledge within college students’ reading practices of comic books. Study participants read excerpts from two female superhero comics while eye tracking equipment recorded their eye movements. In a later interview, participants watched video clips of their recorded eye movements overlaid on the comic book excerpts and reconstructed their reading processes. This article summarizes major findings from the study, including impacts of rhetorical genre expertise, gender, and comics culture on participants’ reading practices. The study demonstrates that eye tracking combined with stimulated recall interviews uncovered tacit knowledge that participants accessed as they read comics.

Writing studies and writing center scholars have recently focused much-needed attention on how graduate student writers are taught, mentored, and supported. This scholarship also points to a persistent and stubborn conundrum: Graduate students must write their way into disciplinary belonging, yet most advisors lack a language for, or even awareness of, the specialized practices and tacit expectations shaping written discourse in their fields. While graduate student–serving writing centers help fill this writing-support gap, a reliance on English and humanities graduate students for staff reproduces a status quo in which the genre awareness and rhetorical vocabulary needed to mentor advanced academic writers are neither widely distributed nor recognized and valued. This essay offers the counterexample of a graduate writing center whose consultants hail primarily from master’s and doctoral programs in the sciences and social sciences. Using feminist social reproduction theory to examine this case study of one graduate writing center, the authors explore how multidisciplinary staffing resists the enclaving of writing process and rhetorical knowledge and points to a future in which the responsibility for mentoring graduate student writers is visible, valued, and shared.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> More than 30 years ago, Harmon distinguished developmental research articles (RAs), which propose a solution to a problem, from experimental RAs, but the developmental format has received little attention. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Genre analysis of RAs has been largely restricted to articles following the standard experimental/Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion (IMRD) format, thereby excluding many developmental engineering articles. Recently, a textbook proposed Introduction, Process, Testing, Conclusion (IPTC) as a prototypical format for electrical engineering RAs, but this format has not yet been demonstrated from a corpus. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What is the macrostructure of electrical engineering RAs? 2. What are the characteristic features of each division of electrical engineering RAs? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> Section headings, wordcount, and notable features were analyzed for 75 RAs from 15 electrical engineering journals and compared with both IPTC and Harmon's developmental structure. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Only one article, a case study, followed IMRD. Sixty-seven developmental RAs followed the IPTC format. These are distinguished by the second division (P), where the new solution is described, written in extended style, comprising several sections with headings specific to the research. A paragraph at the end of the Introduction describing the organization of the paper, the location of the theoretical framework and testing methods, and a ubiquitous Conclusion also differ from IMRD. Seven developmental RAs exhibited a hybrid format with the well-known IMRD section headings superimposed on an IPTC structure. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Most electrical engineering articles are developmental and follow IPTC format. This can inform future genre analysis research and has pedagogical implications for teaching engineering writing.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Resume preparation is a common activity within technical writing classes, but the advent and increased use of resume profile and job-hunting sites, such as Indeed.com, require instructors and researchers to re-think common practices in the teaching of resume writing, particularly for writing instructors with limited disciplinary experience. Prior research for conventional resumes has quantified the disciplinarity of resumes as a function of resume quality using metrics of disciplinary discourse density, which may be useful in analyzing online resumes profiles. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How do online engineering resume profiles demonstrate disciplinarity? 2. What formatting and stylistic conventions are observed within engineering resume profiles? 3. How do rhetorical disciplinarity and conventions vary with resume profile quality? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Although past efforts have examined the resume as a critical genre for entering a professional setting, few researchers have sought to interpret the relationships between discursive and stylistic expectations and quality in online resume profiles, while also accounting for aspects of disciplinarity. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> This study compares engineering (all disciplines) resume profiles from Indeed.com with a corpus of conventional engineering resumes through qualitative genre analysis and quantitative methods for calculating disciplinary discourse density. We also characterize stylistic and rhetorical conventions for resume profiles, and statistically compare these facets as a function of resume quality. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results and conclusion:</b> Results determined that discursive strategies were significantly different between strong, moderate, and weak engineering resume profiles. Qualitative analysis captured differences in style and form that were also statistically linked with quality. Based on our results, we call for further investigation into resume profiles and reconsideration of current pedagogical approaches.

This study examines how and why 20 instructors (17 tenure-line and 3 nontenure-line) in introductory service courses enact their pedagogical values and address current concerns (e.g., personal branding, LinkedIn, and applicant tracking systems) when teaching résumés and cover letters. Research methods included a demographics survey, qualitative interviews, and critical discourse analysis of assignment sheets and deidentified student examples. Results provide an opportunity to renegotiate gaps between Business and Professional Communication’s research and pedagogical methods, shifting from overemphasizing formatting and checklists and toward understanding job applications as workplace genre ecologies to encourage deeper learning.

Historically, the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) has seen its ethical responsibility in a rather narrow way: TPC has been thought to be related only to precisely and correctly transmitting information, and TPC's ethical responsibilities are more related to either technology creators or users, but less so to technical communicators (Dombrowski, 2000). However, in recent years, with the rapid development and application of science and technology, scientific discourse and technical communication have made greater impacts on society and people's lives than ever before. Our discpline has increasingly realized the "complex, active, and creative" (Dombrowski, 2000, p. 3) roles technical communicators can play. Under the influence of modern theorists (Weaver, Burke, Foucault, etc.), we start to think of science itself as a value and ethical system that involves goals, ethical procedures, and decision making, and more importantly, we realize the power of the language we use for scientific and technical communication. Our ethical decisions relating to the genre, language style, layout design, and inclusion/exclusion of certain information influences readers' perceptions of the fact, shaping their knowledges, values, and beliefs of the world. As Dombrowski (2000) puts it: "as our influecne grows, so do our responsiblities" (p. 3). Now it is the right time for technical communicators to realize our expanded roles and responsiblities in doing our work and to embrace the ethical and social justice turn in our field.

Academic socialization has been a common framework in writing studies for decades. Recent scholarship on rhetorical genre studies and feedback on writing can develop this paradigm in generative ways. In particular, examining how writers take up feedback as they write in genres can inform how writing pedagogy understands such activities. This study examines and interprets the case of a graduate student as she works with in-person and textually mediated feedback in research group meetings and reviewers’ letters. Approaching graduate students as advanced academic writers—simultaneously performing the role of expert and learning the content needed to be a full member of a discourse community—enables the identification of genre competencies that are needed for such activities in students’ socialization. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential insights these genre competencies might provide for instructors who teach and mentor student writers.

This article analyzes user work during open game development and presents an alternative model for participatory design. During open development, developers publicly distribute incomplete games, discuss their design goals, and facilitate user feedback. This article examines user work on an open development forum using conventional content and discourse uptake analyses. It finds that users customize their participation, engage with multiple objects of design, and affect design through collective action.

Doctoral students in the natural sciences who are writing research for the first time and also writing in an additional language (L2) need to acquire knowledge of the genre of the research article (RA). This knowledge can be elusive. One instructional activity that can mediate genre knowledge is students acting as reviewers to peers' RA texts. However, mediation of genre knowledge is contingent on reviewers' focusing on genre features of peers' texts. To explore the focus of L2 doctoral students' peer review, this study examined online feedback provided by 24 L2 doctoral reviewers on 73 texts written by their L2 peers. To determine the potential relevance of the feedback to the scientific research article, review comments were thematically coded, and the categories of comments were then compared with descriptions of text features of RAs in the natural sciences. Findings showed that review comments focused on precision, organization, cohesion, voice and stance, and research knowledge, categories that reflect key aspects of scientific RAs.

Abstract This article examines the construction of and contestation over the idea of the nation through contemporary popular cinema in India. Building on his experience of discussing the Bollywood spy thriller Raazi (2018) in an English class, the author proposes that “reading” the film in terms of gender and genre can not only help students apply modes of textual analysis to narratives in other media but also alert them to the location of such narratives within larger discursive frameworks of defining national identities. Raazi presents a critical and ideological counterpoint to the generic conventions of the spy thriller within the increasingly polarized sociopolitical context of the Indian subcontinent. The film presents an unlikely female protagonist as both the physical agent and the psychological subject of the violence integral to the “action” of an espionage film. It also interrogates the oppositional relation between the patriotic “self” and the foreign “other” that lies at the basis of the militaristic conception of the nation and ultimately reveals the shared human vulnerability of both to the traumatic effects of pursuing the idea(l) of nationalism at the expense of individual moral integrity. Thus a close reading of the film's narrative structure and conventions, as well as a critical engagement with the historical context of its production and reception, can be pedagogically fruitful ways of understanding and critiquing the processes through which a nation is collectively imagined into being.

Michele Kennerly's ambitious book sends a gust of fresh air through the field of ancient rhetoric. But that figure doesn't really suit her metaphorics—such a central aspect of the project. To hone in on these (a better figure, as we'll see), we need to come down to earth—to the material substance of wax tablets and papyrus book rolls, and the bodies of text produced on them. Editorial Bodies is a study of the ways ancient Greek and Roman poets and orators engaged in working on and over texts in a process of “recursive composing” (3) with consequences exceeding any narrow considerations of grammatical niceties. As Kennerly explains at the outset through a careful etymological introduction, our English word “editing,” understood as a late-stage form of “textual tidying” (1), often done by someone other than the author, cannot capture the kinds of work with texts performed and extensively discussed by these ancient wordsmiths. Honing, smithing, polishing, filing—these are a few of the gritty figures for textual work Kennerly excavates, and their object of attention, the text, is very often presented as a body. And here we arrive at the idea of “corpus care” (15), Kennerly's richly polyvalent figure for the processes and vocabularies referring to work on a text, itself a material body, for the bodies of the writers, and for those who received their work: a complex and multidimensional concept.Kennerly tracks the analogy of the body with the written text through an impressive number of authors in the Greek and Roman traditions. She argues for a consistency of reference across many sources, demonstrating that writing about writing in terms of the body pervades these ancients' extensive and careful attention to the crafting of rhetorical texts. An adjunct to this claim is the observation that insufficient attention has been paid to the relation between writing and oratory in the ancient periods. Editorial tendencies and terminologies, writes Kennerly, become absorbed into habits of writing, which, for orators, could “come to be absorbed into habits of extemporaneous speaking” (3). But Kennerly admits that delivery—the body of the orator on display—is not her concern here (172–73). Actual bodies appear from time to time. Aristotle warns that the bodily evidence of labor on a text should be hidden (9). Cicero in his dialogue Brutus relates his early experience of strain on voice and body, but after working with Molo in Rhodes, “both his body and speech [are] better defined for the unrelenting demands of public speaking” (90–91). We learn that Horace had a habit of debating with himself through shut lips (112) and that Ovid's body wasted away in exile (138–51). But Kennerly is far more interested in what bodies mean in Greek and Roman rhetorical culture, and in the textual analogy. Those signifying systems coalesce in the domain of gender, performing the normative work of “policing appropriate style and delivery” to secure “masculinity's approved cultural boundaries” (98).After an introduction setting up her terminology and claims, Kennerly begins with Athenian rhetoric in the classical period (fifth and fourth centuries BCE), surveying a daunting array of figures: Herodotus, Agathon, Alcidamas, dramatists Cratinus and Aristophanes, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Aristotle, and Anaximenes. Accumulating evidence of the “somatic-graphic analogy” (23), Kennerly performs some quite targeted readings here. Plato scholars will look in vain for the philosophical investments of the Phaedrus and his layering of voices in the Menexenus. These are set aside in favor of a reading of “rhetorical management,” attributed to Socrates rather than Plato (38–39). But this book is cast clearly as a material, rather than intellectual, history, and the method becomes more successful when we move to comedians and their “play and polemic” about rhetorical training. The Alcidamas text, On Those Who Write, offers much pertinent commentary on editing, but it is with Isocrates that Kennerly finds the richest exponent so far of “corpus care.” In his late and highly self-reflective Panathenaicus, Isocrates offers a “harrowing composition narrative” including “a view of how extensive and collaborative an editorial process can be” (45). The “insult-dense” oratory of Demosthenes and Aeschines provides Kennerly with colorful evidence of commentary on modes of composition, and of moving from written to oral performance, invested by these archenemies with “considerable invective energy” (46).The next chapter, on the Hellenistic period, is a welcome addition, given that there is less attention to these centuries than to others in the existing scholarship in rhetoric. Kennerly offers a counterpoint to the familiar narrative of rhetoric's decline, making the case here that polis life continued to rely on democratic practices and the rhetorics that they demand even after the triumphs of Philip of Macedon and Alexander at the end of the fourth century. I appreciate the way she works at the seam between Greece and Rome in this chapter, pairing two Greek writers, Demetrius of Phalerum and Callimachus, with two early Roman ones, orator Cato and poet Lucilius, who lived during the same period (roughly). Because we have no surviving work by Demetrius, Kennerly interprets his style through Cicero's extensive reception of his work in Brutus, a survey of Roman orators, and Orator, on style. Trained in the Peripatetic school of Theophrastus, Demetrius led Athens for ten years under the thumb of the Macedonians and in this role made deliberative speeches (59–65). According to Cicero, his philosophical learning “softened” his speech (64) without feminizing it. Her treatment of Cato gives us a more nuanced view of a rhetor in process than the familiar shorthand version of a gruff and taciturn moralist. Close etymological work with the treatment of figurae—understood broadly as forms or styles—in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium provides Kennerly with abundant material for body-based rhetorical advice. The picture of Hellenistic rhetoric emerging from this chapter supports the assertion that the period is more accretive than derivative (76) and offers historians of rhetoric ways of rethinking the Roman relation to Greek rhetoric as more collaborative and less strictly oppositional. Where Kennerly does address the notion of a Roman inferiority complex—an anxiety of influence where letters were concerned—she attaches it to the imperial project: “editorial polish [is seen] as a solution to the general failure of Roman writing to spread and stick” (7).In chapter 3, Kennerly takes up one of her favorite figures, Cicero, highlighting his participation in a mid-first-century BCE large-scale cultural contest over style in its broadest sense (79). The struggle had to do with Atticism versus Asianism—inherited from the Greeks—and in keeping with the theme of the book, Kennerly shows how the struggle is carried out through (gendered) corporeal language. She makes the case indisputably for Cicero's interest in the use of writing before and after the delivery of the speech. There is in his process, Kennerly shows, a mix of “memory and monument,” the latter being Cicero's term for the finished text. After his exile in the mid-fifties BCE, Cicero stepped back from the vigor and intensity of his public oratory and applied his brilliance to philosophical and stylistic works on eloquence itself. In line with the purposes of her project, Kennerly does not delve into Cicero's philosophical contributions but notes that, for this consummate stylist, philosophy provides “silva (raw material; literally a forest)” (104). Later, she notes that Cicero, in his philosophical treatise De Officiis, praised the collaborative editorial practices of poets as a model for virtuous action: one should submit plans “to the scrutiny of trusted friends so that all mistakes can be caught and corrected” (151). We are treated to a more thorough analysis of Brutus and Orator, along with the less completely realized De Optimo Genere Oratorum (On the Very Best Kind of Orator). Far from simple formulae or a rejection of the new Atticism, Cicero advises a more expansive and flexible sense of style, Kennerly observes, matching each of three genres or duties of an orator—to move, to convince, and to delight—with three styles: “the weighty moves, the thin proves, and the moderate delights” (95). As with the Greeks, for Cicero the stakes are high where stylistic expertise is concerned. When an orator fails, it is not only his art or himself that he fails: it is “a client, friend, or the Commonwealth” (100). Kennerly addresses this entanglement of text, culture, and community persuasively.The chapter on Horace is refreshing, given that we have few rhetorical treatments of this poet. Kennerly highlights his compromised position in relationship to the first emperor, Octavian/Augustus, and reviews the implications for his poetic stance. Some of the most charming language in this chapter comes from Horace's Ars Poetica, where he pays a good deal of attention to style. He proposes a “compositional ethics of the slow,” advising restraint, scraping and scrubbing with the metaphorical file (127). His care in editing, Kennerly notes, is compatible with his “philosophic bent”: writing correctly arises from wisdom (130). In chapter 5 on Ovid's writings in exile, we read of his many pleas for attention, for collaboration, for editing in its most comprehensive sense. Ovid, Kennerly writes, shows an “acute rhetorical sensitivity to a situation”: his sad legal status as exile and harsh location influence his talk about writing (141). The penultimate body chapter on Quintilian is a significant one, and in it Kennerly brings to light the diligence with which Quintilian treats care of the text. She writes that he “made the managerial magisterial” (161), encouraging time, labor, and care in mastering the rhetorical art. Another important aspect of this analysis is Kennerly's attention to the gendered critical language running throughout Quintilian. A good style is always a masculine style marked by “an attractive fertility.” Tacitus and Pliny receive unusual and welcome attention at the end as well. Pliny's letters offer an accessible and revealing view of the sociality involved in composing, editing, and performing written and spoken texts in first-century CE Rome. The final chapter brings to light Cicero's famous and beloved amanuensis, Tiro: one known provider of the often unrecognized and coerced labor that went into ancient eloquence produced by elites. Kennerly ends with a reminder of the “ancient belief in the cross-indexical quality of the way one writes and the way one lives” (205).This is a beautifully prepared book; it's original and useful. The chronological movement—tracing the consistency of corporeal language across several centuries—enables the reader to follow the complex interrelations among writers and orators across the two cultures over six centuries. The attention to the original languages across the volume is meticulous. Kennerly's bibliography is very current, spanning the fields of classics, rhetoric, and poetics. She is evenhanded in her work with sources. As with all of her publications, Kennerly is a master stylist, showing how she has “love-labored” (a term from Isocrates) over this work. Her wordplay often delights. An example comes in her discussion of Isocrates, whom she characterizes as “figure-loving”: “political discourse without polish is all bluster whereas polished discourse without political import is all luster” (39). For some readers, the relentless word play may become distracting, and at times the clever tips over into the merely flip. But overall the style leavens a project entered into a field that may feel dusty and distant to students and nonspecialists. Scholars in composition / writing studies will be especially interested in the focus on writing process. At many points, we can see possibilities for contemporary comparisons and applications.Significantly, Kennerly is not pursuing stylistic manners for their own sake. She attends to contestation over what sorts of words best sustain communal life. Where I find the text really gaining purchase are the places where Kennerly points out the stakes of editorial work, and often they concern the status of the state. For example, she points out that Horace's enthusiasm for the editorial file (lima) was not only a poetic stance but also a civic one (19). We are urged to understand that editing, in the specialized sense elaborated here, is about not only the quality of the work and the status of the author but also political health and personal ethics.I will end where Kennerly ends, with comments on the canon. She claims to have shifted the canon by placing traditional names in untraditional scenes (211), and I agree that this is a contribution of the book. She also helpfully quotes and endorses Robert Gaines's proposal for an expansive reconsideration of “canon” so as to include “‘all known texts, artifacts, and discourse venues’” in a wide range of genres in “‘the ancient European discourse community’” (Gaines 2005, 65, qtd. on 210). This is an appealing invitation, one that led me to imagine how Kennerly's interest in the materials of writing and discourses of textual body care might be applied to an even wider swath of rhetorical activity in antiquity. For papyrus book rolls and wax tablets, as Kennerly knows well, were not invented in fifth-century Athens. She specifies at the outset that she will leave aside earliest examples—those with “a small chain of reception”—and concentrate on works “that have been heard and read by many” (1). This a reasonable criterion of selection. I did wish, though, that Sappho (and with her all the archaic lyric poets?) had not been dismissed so summarily (23), given the importance of the (woman's) body in her work and a substantial literature of reception. But a book can be about only so many things, and this book is about quite a few.Looking further afield, both temporally and geographically, we find many writers and speakers grappling with the materials of textual production—clay tablets in Sumeria, bone and tortoise shell in China, string knots in the Americas. And, in fact, some texts from those preclassical sites have been saved from the papyrus garbage heap. Just to take one example from the very rich repertoire of writing (on papyrus) in ancient Egypt, consider the anonymous tale “The Eloquent Peasant,” composed around 1850 BCE (Lichtheim 1973). This didactic tale features embedded speeches in the forensic mode that a peasant was required to deliver to a king/judge and then convert to writing (with the aid of a scribe) in order to get justice for a wrong. Embodied negotiations by multiple actors in the production of written and spoken texts, the quality of bodies—fine textual and debased working bodies: these are elements Kennerly has drawn on in her study of “corpus care.” The point of applying her method to such a text would be not only to expand the canon or corpus of rhetoric but also to grant the possibility of meta-consciousness about textual production not only to well-known elites of Greece and Rome but also to figures from distant times and places for whom we have only incomplete records. I'm grateful to Kennerly for her fine study and for the potential it opens up for further work in this vein.

Using rhetorical genre theory, the authors theorize the engineering design process as a type of embodied genre enacted through typified performances of bodies engaged with discourses, texts, and objects in genre-rich spaces of design activity. The authors illustrate this through an analysis of ethnographic data from an engineering design course to show how a genred repertoire of embodied routines is demonstrated for students and later taken up as part of their design work. A greater appreciation of the interconnection between genre and design as well as the role of typification in producing embodied genres can potentially transform how writing studies conceives of and teaches both design processes and genres in technical and professional communication settings.

Within literacy, rhetoric, and composition (LRC) studies, composing practices have been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests histories, imagination, and identities through acts of writing. Likewise, in queer LRC studies, the capacity to write with queer rhetorical agency or to recognize the impossibility of composing queer subjectivity has been tied to the living. Scholars have yet to consider with adequacy, however, the ways in which writing is equally bound up with the dead, with ghosts, histories, and ancestors that animate the imagination and attendant composing practices. Tracing the historically rooted speculative composing practices (HRSCPs) of an inquiry group of nine queer composers, this article spotlights queer ancestors as speculative resources for imagining and then composing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Specifically, this article details how three queer composers, Coyote (they/them), Helen (she/her), and Margarita (they/them), restory the imagination, happiness, and reality with the ancestors, doing so to challenge the trope of queer unhappy endings attached to realist genres. This article concludes by inviting LRC studies to explore how HRSCPs might be integrated into future research and pedagogy and thereby pursue healing for communities long marginalized within the field.

The book targets two main audiences. It primarily addresses students and instructors of technical communication, and also addresses industry practitioners. The book provides practical and theoretical examples that both the primary and secondary audiences can incorporate in their pedagogy and industry practices. The author includes learning activities at the end of each chapter that teachers/instructors can emulate in the technical communication classroom. The approaches in the book make it a significant contribution for the teaching and practice of technical communication. The author admonishes students, instructors, professionals, and industry practitioners to change technical communication by paving the way for design thinking and making. He summarizes the need to adopt design thinking as a methodology in technical communication to make designs user- and human-centered, and to advocate for social justice in our approaches to teaching, learning, and practice in the field. Thus, he calls for a rethinking of technical communication pedagogy “to focus less on genres.". The author also argues that design thinking is a necessary component of technical communication and shows how it can be incorporated into technical communication practice and pedagogy. The examples and learning activities presented in the book make it a valuable guide for students, teachers, and practitioners of technical communication. Instructors of technical communication will find the learning activities presented throughout each chapter of the book particularly useful.

As part of a larger research project on the rhetoric of sexual violence prevention in online university courses, the researcher conducted rhetorical analyses of two prevention courses from the United States and New Zealand. This study analyzed the rhetorical strategies used in two courses with attention to five subcategories: content genres, ways the content addresses the audience, messaging strategies, levels of prevention, and sentence-level choices. From the analyses, the researcher recommends rhetorical considerations for prevention courses. While the New Zealand course had more effective language choices, the US course had a better overall narrative structure.

Students face multiple challenges when transitioning from high school to college writing, with new content, audiences, genres, and task expectations. Psychometric researchers have shown that self-efficacy, competency, and affective factors can help or hinder students during this transition, but little previous research examines what students themselves say about their writing and writing experiences. This study analyses the content of 248 essays from first-year composition writers who discussed their writing identities, processes, products, and journeys. Our findings show differences between writers who view themselves positively and negatively. Instructors can use this information to design meaningful prompts, utilize process writing activities, and engage students in meaningful reflection.

Culture in second language (L2) writing has been researched extensively, though mostly under the purview of contrastive rhetoric and focused on text and contrastive genre analysis (Connor, 1996, 2004, 2008; Kaplan, 2005). Research has also focused on problematizing culture in reference to L2 writing (Atkinson, 1999, 2003; Kubota, 1999). These foci indicate reader-instructor rather than student perspectives: how L2 writers themselves perceive cultural impacts on writing. This study undertakes to fill this gap, investigating L2 student perceptions of such impacts. Study participants (n = 36), students in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing course at a Canadian university, took part in semistructured interviews and reflective writing. Data analysis identified six broad categories of cultural factors affecting student writing: (1) organizational structure as a fixed method; (2) supporting and writing arguments; (3) creating a stronger voice in writing; (4) adjusting to a new academic culture; (5) understanding clarity in academic writing in English; and (6) developing content: quality versus quantity. Findings underscore student perceptions of a monolithic, essentialist view of culture in academic writing. This is an important consideration when designing a student-centred L2 writing pedagogy that addresses student needs. Based on the findings, the article further explores implications for L2 writing instruction.

In response to increasing interest in Vygotskian sociocultural theory in second-language learning (Lantolf and Thorne, 2006; Swain, Kinnear, and Steinman, 2015) and the call for understanding language-learning processes in relation to contexts surrounding individuals (e.g., Polio and Williams, 2009; Ferris and Hedgcock, 2014), this study adopts a sociocultural approach – more specifically, an activity theory (Leont’ev, 1981) framework – to explore an undergraduate student’s approach to L2 writing in a preparatory writing course. Using a single case study design (Duff, 2014), I investigated how a student from China learned to write academic papers that met the academic norms in an English as a second language (ESL) writing class in an American university. Specifically, I analyzed how his writing activity aligned with his instructor’s proposed approach to a writing task. Through the analysis of course materials, the participant’s written work, observations, email communications, and interviews, I tracked how his agency (Bhowmik, 2016; Casanave, 2012; Lee, 2008; Saenkhum, 2016) as a writer developed over his first semester in the ESL program. Findings indicate that while the participant did not follow the operations assigned by the instructor, he acted strategically to accomplish selected parts of his writing assignments. His mediated actions were driven by his goals and motives that were understood from within his social and cultural environments, and interacted with each other in a dynamic and constructive manner. Overall, the study underscores the need for flexible approaches to writing instruction and the usefulness of employing activity theory as a framework in studying L2 writing processes.

Providing comments on student writing is one of the most important, difficult, and time-consuming activities instructors undertake. Many studies have examined written feedback, and much research has shown the problems associated with this form, ranging from time spent providing thoughtful feedback to students’ confusion about the commentary. Some instructors have used audio commentary to address these issues. Audio commentary has been researched for years; the results have indicated that students prefer audio commentary, and it is perceived as more personal and positive by instructors and students. To date, little research has looked closely at audio commentary to understand if or how it might differ from written in form and function. This research uses as multicase approach and genre analysis to examine the organisational moves and discourse analysis uncover why audio commentary is perceived differently by both producers and consumers of this genre. Results show that audio commentary does not differ in form or function from its written counterpart, but metadiscursive features may play a role in how the genre is perceived by both instructors and students, providing real evidence of how audio commentary is different from written.

Research conceptualization is challenging for doctoral and master’s writers, particularly multilingual students engaging in thesis writing or writing for publication. In doctoral and master’s student writing, research conceptualization appears in three genres: problem statements, research proposals and introduction sections or chapters. Swale’s (1990; Feak and Swales, 2011) CARS model is most often used to analyze conceptualization in these genres. While very useful as an analytical tool, the CARS model does not translate well to pedagogy. I argue that Merriam’s (2009) problem/purpose statement and questions (PPS&Q) format provides a flexible and accessible technique to make the process of research conceptualization visible and to help students focus their research throughout the writing process. Navigating problem formulation and gap spotting requires highly complex literacies and Merriam’s method allows students to begin simply and build complexity. While genre visibility provides a way for doctoral and master’s students to access high-level literacies demands, it can also be formulaic and constraining and needs to be taught with critical awareness.

We write as musicians and fans who are also writing teachers; we feel we have contributions to make in the form of "sympathetic resonances" we have observed between music and writing, most especially as we consider ways both music and writing can be harnessed to question and subvert power, to understand and complicate genres and expectations, to foster community, and to project and shape identity.

This assignment challenges students in an English Language Arts teacher education program to compose a proleptic autobiography—a genre of writing that transforms the customary retrospective autobiographical essay assignment as a way to encourage students to envision and create their future professional selves. The goal of the assignment is to support students’ development of realistic expectations of their imminent careers as educators and to foster a deeper appreciation of diverse learners. Composing such an imaginative narrative can help students develop stronger professional dispositions as they consider aspects of their future careers such as work/life balance, economic concerns, developing confidence, and providing support and encouragement to their students.

This study uses both qualitative and quantitative research methods in a mixed-methods approach to investigate whether the principled use of author-devised cover letters (CLs) within doctorate writing groups can result in more useful reviewer feedback comments than would be attained through the use of instructor-devised writing assessment rubrics. In this context, CLs are self-devised written documents that help the reviewers give the author useful and critical written feedback comments. Twenty participants in different discipline-specific writing groups were given explicit instruction about the importance and content of CLs during the peer feedback process. Their perceptions of a useful CL were obtained from post-course questionnaires and analysed qualitatively. In addition, their CLs at various stages of the feedback process were analysed quantitatively for genre, social presence, and evidence of teaching instruction, and compared to the CLs produced by 20 PhD students in similar writing groups who received minimal CL instruction. The study found that author-devised CLs, as opposed to instructor-devised rubrics, can allow the authors the flexibility of providing text-specific background details, requesting reviewer help on specific textual aspects, using social presence to develop a sense of writing community, and provide reflection upon their own writing.

As technical genres continue to grow and morph in promising new directions, we attempt an analysis of what are typically viewed as mundane genres. We use the term gray genres, which we find useful for interrogating texts that tend to fall in categories that tend toward a blandness that is invariably difficult to quantify. We use hedonism, along with a historical accounting for this value from its classical rhetorical lineage and run it up to contemporary applications. We posit that playful stylistic choices---while typically discouraged in more technical spaces---actually improves the rhetorical canon of delivery for informative documents. We close with case studies that offer close readings of a few attempts at employing hedonistic tactics within typical gray genres.

Technical and professional communication master’s students work with a faculty advisor to complete a three-credit independent research (IR) project, featuring original research. Stakeholders recommended the IR thesis be revised to better communicate IR to industry. Using a writing, activity theory, and genre theory lens, I analyzed what contradictions emerged between academic and workplace activity systems as stakeholders recommended genre revisions. I analyzed faculty and professional advisory board meeting transcripts, alumni and student surveys, and a Graduate School director and thesis examiner interview. Results indicated the thesis’ spectrum of functions, from its strengths encouraging students’ research proficiency to the limiting way it showcases IR as a product, not a process. Stakeholders suggested no thesis changes but recommended IR genre system modifications. As agents of change, students are uniquely positioned to use the IR genre system to address workplace communication problems and help mend our discipline’s academia-industry divide.

When writing journal articles, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) researchers produce a number of other genres such as grant proposals and conference posters, and their new articles routinely build directly on their own prior work. As a result, STEM authors often reuse material from their completed documents in producing new documents. While this practice, known as text recycling (or self-plagiarism), is a debated issue in publishing and research ethics, little is known about researchers’ beliefs about what constitutes appropriate practice. This article presents results of from an exploratory, survey-based study on beliefs and attitudes toward text recycling among STEM “experts” (faculty researchers) and “novices” (graduate students and post docs). While expert and novice researchers are fairly consistent in distinguishing between text recycling and plagiarism, there is considerable disagreement about appropriate text recycling practice.

This study examines 50 business responses to negative reviews on Amazon.com in order to identify common genre moves for responding to negative online reviews. To complement the genre analysis and assess the effectiveness of these common genre moves, the author conducted a survey seeking consumers’ feedback on three typical business responses to negative online reviews. This investigation not only provides feedback on how businesses can publicly respond to negative online reviews but also presents an empirical case on how we can balance genre stability and variation and go beyond just teaching typified genre features in our genre pedagogy.

In this article, I consider the political ramifications of the Kansas shooting—specifically, a Republican politician’s uptake of Kuchibhotla’s widow, Sunayana Dumala, to support broadly anti-immigrant policies—as a form of rhetorical “brownwashing.” Racist violence is written into the deep structure of the U.S. settler colonial state, and we cannot neatly periodize it within presidential administrations. That being said, . . . “brownwashed” conservatism in the aftermath of the Trump era reveals the contradiction between conservative understandings of “acceptable heterogeneity” and violent, racist acts that do not discriminate between different members of “heterogeneous” racialized peoples. Rhetorics of acceptable difference perpetuate ideologies that make racist, violent acts possible.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Social media, increasingly conceptualized as communicative genres, has become a tool for individuals to promote social bonds, as well as a platform for corporations to engage with the public and build corporate identity. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Genre analysis has seldom been used in investigating social media use and corporate identity construction, especially the relationship between corporate identity and the interaction of message content and communicative style. Therefore, this study intends to implement Lomborg's framework of genre analysis for social media studies to compare Weibo posts of Chinese banks with Twitter tweets of US banks in terms of thematic orientations (message content) and communicative styles (indicated by speech act use) and thus examine their corporate identities. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What thematic orientations do Chinese and American banks develop in their microblogging messages? 2. What communicative styles do Chinese and American banks develop in their microblogging messages? 3. How are corporate identities formed through the interaction of thematic orientations and communicative styles of the microblogging messages of Chinese and American banks? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> We collected posts and tweets from the official microblogging accounts of 10 Chinese and US banks on the Fortune Global 500 list, identified thematic orientations and communicative styles, and conducted a comparative analysis of corporate identities based on the interaction of thematic orientations and communicative styles. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results and conclusions:</b> In analysis of thematic orientations, Chinese banks are more likely to post messages of <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">entertainment, operation,</small> and <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">product</small> . In terms of communicative styles, their messages are more likely to be characterized by directness, inexpressiveness, and independence politeness overall. Specifically, they tend to send <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">entertainment</small> posts directly and in the involvement politeness style, <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">operation</small> posts indirectly and in the independence politeness style, and <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">product</small> posts in the independence politeness style. As such, Chinese banks may best be described as the audience's friendly companions, objective and authoritative press spokesmen, and competitive innovators, a combination that implies values of relationship, authority, and competition in collectivism-oriented, high-power distance, and high-context cultures. By contrast, US banks are more likely to tweet messages of <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">service</small> . Overall, their messages are more likely to be characterized by indirectness, expressiveness, and involvement politeness. Specifically, they tend to send <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">service</small> tweets indirectly and in the involvement politeness style. As such, US banks may best be described as financial product sellers and considerate service providers, a combination that suggests customer-oriented values in individualism and high uncertainty avoidance cultures. In addition, both Chinese and US banks claim to be good corporate citizens. This comparative analysis sheds light on identity construction and provides instructive frameworks for cross-cultural communication on social media platforms.

Reviewed by: Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work ed. by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey Jennifer Keohane Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey, eds. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 274 + xviii pp. ISBN: 9781611177978 Feminist rhetoricians have pursued recovery projects for many years. Seeking to demonstrate that women had multifaceted impacts on public life, they dove deep into archives to find the forgotten fragments of their public statements. In the engaging introduction to this collection, Letizia Guglielmo labels this practice “recollecting,” which she defines both as an act of bringing to mind but also as an act of “gathering or assembling again what has been scattered” (2). Indeed, this volume serves as such recollection, bringing together fourteen eclectic essays on women’s contributions to many arenas of symbolic and collective life. As with many feminist rhetorical projects, the editors—Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey—insist that recovery of forgotten women is not the end goal of their volume. Instead (and inspired by work by Jessica Enoch and Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch), they explore the rhetorical work required to remember women alongside how the memories of women come to be created, used, or erased in various situations (x). The editors segment the book into four different sections: new theoretical frameworks, erased collaborators, overlooked rhetors and texts, and disrupted memories. To the editors’ credit, the afterword recognizes that alternative organizational schemas could also have served to organize these diverse essays into a readable flow. Organization by chronology, methodology, or genre of text would facilitate additional insights into female reputation management and construction. The editors have selected the organizational scheme they use to “provide a structure for thinking about ways to re-collect existing narratives [and] create a heuristic for suggesting new research possibilities and venues” (257–8). As a result, however, each section contains rhetors and projects that are quite different. The collection as a whole features rhetors stretching from Byzantine historian Anna Komnene to Nigerian anticolonial activist Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti to oral expression teacher Anna Baright Curry. [End Page 342] The collection’s greatest contribution is in recovery. Indeed, the rhetors and rhetorical practices studied here will likely be unfamiliar to most. And, for more recognizable speakers like Crystal Eastman and Dorothy Day’ authors bring new insights and lenses to examine their rhetoric. Many of the authors in this “re-collection” answer Enoch’s call to examine rhetorical work broadly with great creativity and strength. That is, they interrogate questions of why some of these rhetors have been forgotten or have had their reputations tarnished throughout history. In the first section, “New Theoretical Frameworks,” the editors feature essays that “suggest new methodologies for reexamining the work of women” (xi). Essays by Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher, Alice Johnston Myatt, Maria Martin, and Ellen Quandahl foreground new ways of engaging the memory of women. In one particularly interesting contribution, Myatt explores the phases involved in reclaiming women’s reputations. Using Rosalind Franklin, a largely unknown scientist integral to the discovery of DNA’s structure, she shows how and why her reputation passed through erasure, refutation, reclamation, and restoration (41–2). Other contributions look to indigenous theory and social circulation as ways to understand the struggle and successes of women as anticolonial activists, physicians, computer programmers, and historians. The second section, “Erased Collaborators,” explores how women’s work can be expunged when women collaborate with men, who are often subsequently credited for their contributions. Essays from Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart, Henrietta Nickels Shirk, and Suzanne Bordelon provide insights into the way these collaborations often disadvantaged women. Shirk, for instance, creatively analyzes the partnership between John James Audubon and painter Maria Martin by reading both their exchanged letters and the images on which they collaborated—he painted the birds and she the backgrounds for the famous Birds of America almanac. Yet, of course, Audubon’s fame and status far outshone Martin’s own, and her artistic skills are forgotten. In the third part, the editors call our attention to “Overlooked Rhetors and Texts” and examine activity that is not included in traditional definitions of...

Reviewed by: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash by Richard Hidary Brandon Katzir Richard Hidary, Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107177406 Recent scholarship on the Second Sophistic has demonstrated the extent to which that period, in the first centuries of the common era, had a profound influence on rhetoric as a cultural practice. In particular, as Timothy Whitmarsh has noted, “[Oratory] was one of the primary means that Greek culture of the period, constrained as it was by Roman rule, had to explore issues of identity, society, family and power” (5). The Second Sophistic lays the groundwork for the Byzantine tradition, which itself had an enormous influence on the European rhetorical tradition. Yet, the literary cultures inspired by Roman Hellenism were not limited to Greek speakers. Classical Jewish texts like the Mishna, the Talmud, and various midrashim were composed or redacted in the same literary culture that gave rise to Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists. Richard Hidary’s Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric argues that the Jewish culture which produced the Mishna was affected by the cultural and literary ferment of the Second Sophistic. Hidary observes that the Second Sophistic bears numerous similarities to its contemporary rabbinic movement. He notes, “the rabbis also pushed to uphold their own distinctive Jewish identity and pride in the face of Roman dominance and they too studied and taught inherited religious traditions from antiquity” (5). Like the Greek orators, the Talmudic sages “studied, codified, and lectured about their own past traditions and in a similar way used this as a strategy for upholding their culture and values” (6). The strength of Hidary’s approach lies in his nuanced examination of a range of rabbinical genres. Each of the chapters proceeds in a similar fashion: they begin by explaining the significance and structure of a particular genre of rabbinical writing followed by an explanation of how that genre intersects with rhetorical genres of the Second Sophistic. Hidary explores some rabbinical writing—such as aggadic midrashim, the Talmud Yerushalmi, the Talmud Bavli—as well as some lesser known genres, like the progymnasmata in rabbinical literature. He compares the role of lawyers in Roman and rabbinical courts, the heavenly court in rabbinical literature, and Plato’s heavenly court. Hidary offers a fresh perspective to each genre. Of particular interest is his analysis of Sabbath sermon, which, according to [End Page 340] Hidary, is the mainstay of rabbinical declamation and has its origins in the Second Temple period, which ended in 70 CE. Hidary argues that there is a formal connection between rabbinic homilies and the aggadic midrash. He observes that while some scholars have suggested that “works of midrash aggadah are transcripts of actual synagogue sermons,” most believe they are literary creations, even if they were perhaps sometimes read aloud. Each chapter of aggadic midrash begins with a proem which expounds upon a Biblical verse. Hidary notes that “the verse usually lacks an obvious connection to the Torah lectionary and thus raises the curiosity of the audience. The audience is kept in this state of suspense until the speaker finally manages to connect the opening verse with the first verse of the Torah lectionary, thus delivering his main point with a memorable punch line” (50). Hidary argues that the exordium is the model for the midrashic proem, pointing out that Aristotle “writes that the prooimion of epideictic speeches should begin with an unrelated subject and then transition into the main topic of the speech” (53). But Hidary emphasizes that while the rabbis’ rhetorical form may look Greek, their arguments are designed to demonstrate the superiority of the Jewish people and the Sinaitic revelation. Hidary draws a connection between the Hellenistic orators of the Second Sophistic who “turned to Attic oratory to revive Greek pride in the face of Western Roman political domination” and the rabbis who “[apply] the rhetorical technique of the Greeks to their teaching of Torah,” an application which was ultimately aimed at demonstrating “the perfection of Scripture” (77). The later chapters of Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric compare classical and rabbinic...

Reviewed by: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions ed. by Christa Gray et al Christoph Pieper Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel, eds., Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 366 pp. ISBN: 9780198788201 Studying antiquity means studying fragments, given the highly fragmented nature of our knowledge of its politics, art, and literatvire. Within [End Page 346] this mosaic of bits and pieces, texts that have been transmitted as fragments are a specifically challenging field of research, one that has attracted lots of scholarly attention in recent decades. Fragments of oratory are a specific case within this field: as the editors of the volume stress in their introduction, every speech we read as text is, in a way, already a fragment, as it is the textualized reduction of a complex form of communication that includes words and arguments. Also, the vocal qualities of the speaker, his performance and auctoritas—all these aspects are lost to our immediate perception, even if the full text of a speech is transmitted. And yet, the relevance of fragments for understanding the persuasiveness and impact of oratory in the ancient world is huge. Studying the fragments of Roman Republican oratory therefore means more than simply reading and interpreting the fragments and testimonies in Malcovati’s Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta; in order to reconstruct their rhetorical potential, one needs a thorough understanding of their historical and cultural embeddedness, and a good grasp of the transmitting author’s own agenda. The volume under review, one of the preliminary proceedings that prepare the new edition of the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators (FRRO) by Catherine Steel and her Glasgow team, has an outspoken interest in the fragments’ context that goes beyond textual representation: it includes reconstructions of performance and sensory surrounding. It reflects on the relevance of the speaker’s authority and on the changing cultural climate in the second and first centuries bce, when the interaction with Greek culture increased in Rome and when rhetoric challenged the traditional political hierarchy based on auctoritas (Alexandra Eckert). The authors of the volume approach the methodological challenges in an admirably undogmatic way that includes traditional philology, historical studies, and modern theoretical approaches. In this short review, I can merely offer some lines that run through the volume (by no means an exhaustive list). The volume is divided into two parts: transmission and reconstructions; but as happens with good conference volumes, important questions return throughout the book. A first important theme is the transmitting author, whose reasons for quoting or summarizing must be taken into account when studying (not only oratorical) fragments. S. J. Lawrence convincingly argues that Valerius Maximus’ collection of dicta should not be understood as neutral; instead Valerius wants to demonstrate the limits of oratory in Republican times (which influences his choice of exempla). Armando Raschieri, in a rather additive overview, analyses the contexts in which Quintilian quotes Republican orators. Generally, one of the aims of studying fragmentary Republican oratory has always been to get beyond Cicero for our knowledge about what speaking in the Republic meant and looked like. But as Cicero’s canonical status and his canon of orators in the Brutus were so powerful after his death, one has to be aware of the Ciceronian intertext that shapes later ancient readers’ perceptions. Alfredo Casamento tackles the problem of how to deal with Cicero’s legacy in his treatment of [End Page 347] Sulpicius Rufus and Cotta in the Brutus, whereas Ian Goh and Elena Torregaray Pagola look for genres not influenced by Cicero in which relevant information on Republican oratory can be found: Republican satire (Goh with a very dense, associative, and inspiring reading of Lucilius’ book 2), and comedy (Torregaray Pagola with a close reading of a section of Plautus’ Amphitruo). John Dugan contributes a methodologically far-reaching chapter for the case of Macrobius’ quotation of the second-century bce orator Gaius Titius. His working method has the potential to offer unexpected results for other fragments as well: based on New Historicism and Clifford Geertz’ concept of thick descriptions, Dugan concludes that “the only Titius we will read will be that which...

This piece examines In Memory’s Kitchen, a collection of recipes, poems, and letters compiled by Mina Pächter in the Terezîn Concentration Camp. The author argues that a proper reading of the text involves understanding genre, acts of resistance, and genre bending. Without applying these complex concepts to the texts, readers are at risk of misreading Pächter’s text as a cookbook rather than a memory text of spiritual resistance.

ust as musical codas persist beyond the end of musical work, Coda-a new sec- tion of the Community Literacy Journal devoted to creative writing-offers space for the representation of the lingering effects of community engagement, public engagement, and activism. Beginning with this, our inaugural effort, Coda will publish creative writing in a range of genres and voices in a move to expand conversations about writing studies, to document and preserve the work of community writing, and to encourage more creative writing. We invite readers and writers who are eager to create knowledge in new ways to join us in enacting writing as a form of communion.

Exploring literacy practices of home cooks, this article analyzes how cookbooks are remixed by users (with writings, clippings and other ephemera added to the text throughout its use).The practice of remixing the text with further editing by its user/audience illustrates the multilayered literacies at work in establishing authorship within the domestic space.The article builds its argument around one remixed cookbook as a case study, describing the remix-literate practices of the user, as the woman who used this cookbook remixed the text and genre to fit her needs and interests.This literacy practice is argued as a remix, which results in a transformation of the text itself and of the authority of the user.Both the original authorship (the act of compiling recipes from the church community) and the remixed authorship (the added ephemera and handwritten editing done by the user of this particular copy) are analyzed in tandem.

The circulation of scientific and technical genres in online publics can shape both public opinion and policy deliberation about issues such as global warming. While rhetoric and professional writing scholarship has documented the myriad ways that genres are transformed as they circulate across discursive boundaries, few examine how argument shapes those transformation and circulations. Drawing on Gieryn’s concept of boundary-work, this article analyzes arguments in the discussion pages of Wikipedia articles about global warming to document how editors argue about genre as they deliberate over what counts as reliable sources of global warming knowledge. This analysis demonstrates how argument mediates genre uptake and circulation. In doing so, it helps account for how technical and scientific genres circulate in contemporary online publics.

University business incubators (UBIs) are uniquely positioned to foster transnational entrepreneurship and the evolution of business and technical communication practices on a worldwide basis. UBIs facilitate the launch of start-ups by professors, students, researchers, and local entrepreneurs. This study uses assemblage theory to profile four UBIs. Its findings concern their process of exporting incubation models and training transnational entrepreneurs, the roles of alumni and students, and the genres and conventions of entrepreneurship.

What aspects of writing are doctoral students metacognitive about when they write research articles for publication? Contributing to the recent conversation about metacognition in genre pedagogy, this study adopts a qualitative approach to illustrate what students have in common, across disciplines and levels of expertise, and the dynamic interplay of genre knowledge and metacognition in learning to write for research. 24 doctoral students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) were recruited from subsequent runs of a genre-based writing course and were interviewed within a 2-year period when they submitted an article for publication, 3 to 11 months after course completion. Over time and across disciplines, doctoral students’ metacognition converges on four main themes: genre analysis as a “tool” to read and write, audience and the readers’ mind, rhetorical strategies, and the writing process. Furthermore, these themes are extensively combined in the students’ thinking, confirming conceptualizations of expertise as an integration of knowledge types. Metacognition of these themes invoked increased perceived confidence and control over writing, suggesting key areas where metacognitive intervention may be promising.

The standards and practices in journalism that best serve democratic deliberation remain a matter of intense scrutiny in the digital age. The United States has a long history of journalists exposing self-interested behaviors of political or corporate elites with investigative journalism. With online media, journalistic practices encompass fact-checking against a variety of sources, and countering the claims of other journalists from competing outlets. This article aims at delimiting the rhetorical properties of an emerging genre of YouTube counter-journalism. The study reports on a rhetorical and eristic analysis of the main patterns of countering in a sample of videos posted on YouTube on the subject of the US presidential campaign in spring 2020. The analysis reveals some ways in which YouTube journalists break down the dominant media narratives and present counterclaims and critiques, which is usually accompanied by fact-checking, showcasing evidence and providing alternative explanations or counterarguments. However, counter-journalism is not free from eristic devices that may misrepresent political issues for the subscribers.

The purpose of this study was to explore writing in sixth-grade textbooks in Japan and the affordances of contemporary everyday texts to be used alongside textbooks as mentor texts for writing. Mentor texts are often used in writing instruction; however, their affordances have not been well-researched. Considering that Japanese teachers modify textbook lessons with other materials, we sought out everyday adult and children’s texts found in newsstands, bookstores, convenience stores, internet sources, and libraries that shared some features with textbook genres of writing. Textbook lessons and everyday texts were analyzed using concepts from social semiotics to discover their organization, producer, user, design, layout and multimodal elements. The affordances of textbook lessons and everyday texts functioning as material resources are developed in this paper through three focal genres, poetry, informative, and persuasive writing.

How might explicitly prompting graduate students to self-regulate intervene in their development of writing knowledge and practices across multiple semesters? This study takes a close look at how prompted self-reflection on writing intervenes in a graduate student’s development of self-regulation and genre knowledge as he transitions from MA to PhD program in rhetoric. We present the case of one graduate student, ‘Eric,’ who was explicitly taught conventions and strategies for writing and prompted to reflect on writing projects over several semesters using an in-process protocol. Aligning data from in-process protocols, interviews, and drafts of Eric’s writing, we construct a fine-grained narrative that shows a complex and recursive relationship among Eric’s development of knowledge about academic genres, self regulation practices, and sense of scholarly identity. This narrative raises questions about how genre knowledge and self-regulation inform each other in graduate-level writing, and it offers an example of a self-regulation intervention that may help graduate students develop specialized ways of writing.

Most textbooks and trade press books on engineering communication are genre based, proscription based, or some are a combination of the two. Henderson takes a different approach to teaching the rules of English grammar and how to apply those rules to craft effective sentences. His approach is mathematics based, presenting the rules of English grammar as sentence equations. This approach makes the book particularly intriguing as a resource for teaching students of engineering and science. Henderson's "A Math-Based Writing System for Engineers: Sentence Algebra & Document Algorithms" presents a distinctive approach and methodology for clear engineering communication, particularly suited to its specific audience. Henderson's methodology, grounded in the "universal language" of mathematics, is unique and refreshing. The book is a welcome addition to available resources for these students and their instructors.

The reviewer concludes that, overall, Hanganu-Bresch and Flaherty’s "Effective Scientific Communication: The Other Half of Science" is an excellent introduction to scientific communication. Genre move analysis blended with step-by-step guidance and genre examples make this book a valuable guide for helping students in STEM fields acquire basic scientific communication skills. The book also provides food for thought for ESP teachers to foster research and encourage better-informed teaching practices.