In a conversation with an editor of the Journal of Second Language Writing, the question was asked, “What is the most popular topic of submitted manuscripts to the Journal?” The response was as decisive as it was quick, “That’s easy. Feedback or response to writing is by far the most commonly submitted topic.” That brief exchange triggered a number of questions that needed answers. First and foremost among those questions is, if response to writing is such a popular topic, might there be a need within our profession for another venue for such scholarship? Though the Journal of Second Language Writing is extraordinary at disseminating the highest quality research on broad aspects of second language writing, space within its pages is limited. Therefore, we determined to investigate whether there is indeed a need for another venue for quality scholarship on response to writing for international dissemination.

When Alan Gross published The Rhetoric of Science in 1990, he helped initiate a productive controversy concerning the place of rhetoric in science studies while arguing for the continued importance of the classical rhetorical tradition. However, in his 2006 revision, Starring the Text, Gross significantly draws back the classical emphasis while making more central the place of the American analytic philosophical tradition stemming from the foundational logical writings of W.V.O Quine. This essay interrogates this shift in Gross’s writings in order to find the working definition of rhetoric that threads throughout his work. This definition, I argue, turns out to be grounded more in Quine’s holistic theory of epistemology than in any sophistical or even Aristotelian conception of language as a vehicle for advocating judgment in times of deliberation and crisis. I argue that a return to the classical emphasis on situated practice can enrich the study of the rhetoric of science and build on the significant accomplishments of Gross’s work.

Providing English language learners with effective feedback on their writing is an issue facing many writing teachers. This article focuses on English language learners’ perceptions of both direct and indirect form-focused written feedback and how these perceptions might change over time. Forty-two advanced level students in an intensive English program at a large U.S. university participated in two surveys, one at the beginning of the term and one at the end. They were asked to rate and comment on the usefulness of five types of feedback (three indirect and two direct) for the purposes of both text revision and the learning of grammar and writing. Students perceived the feedback types that provide codes, comments, and/or explanations as being more useful overall in text revision than other forms of feedback. Findings indicate that students’ perceptions regarding the usefulness of feedback types changed throughout the course. Three areas of feedback that students focused on as their perceptions change are identified, as are reasons why students did or did not value each of the feedback types.

This study examined the impact of different forms of feedback on the writing of a group of 82 adolescent students in secondary English classes. During a 6-week intervention, students were randomly assigned to one of three feedback groups: peer feedback on pen-and-paper drafts, teacher feedback delivered electronically through a course management system, and automated feedback generated through computer-based writing evaluation software. Pre- and post-measures of student writing quality, length, and correctness were analyzed, and survey data explored student perceptions of their experiences. Findings indicate that all students, regardless of which form of feedback they received, wrote longer essays and scored higher on holistic ratings at post test than they did at pretest. Neither language status nor group assignment had a greater or lesser impact on performance on length or holistic quality. However, differences between feedback groups spiked on the proximal measure that examined mastery of particular aspects of the genre being taught. Both peer feedback and teacher feedback delivered electronically had a statistically significant impact on student performance in the genre of open-ended response. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future research and instruction in the secondary context.

This article traces the development of feedback from comments on product alone to the interactive process-oriented approaches that are currently the state of the art. A range of variables that impact how feedback is given and received are considered. Attention is also paid to feedback givers, their beliefs, philosophies, and practices along with a critical view of language varieties and the roles they play in teachers’ evaluation of writing. Finally, the evolution of written feedback to incorporate the development of online technologies brings us to the present time and an exploration of their use and efficacy.

The current study reports on the “rhetoric revision log,” which was developed to help second language writing students track their progress in improving rhetoric-related issues in their writing (such as organization and topic development). Sixty-six English as a second language (ESL) students were divided into one control and two treatment groups. Students in the two treatment groups used the rhetoric revision log to keep a record of teacher written feedback in several rhetoric-related areas throughout the course of one semester. The two treatment groups differed in that in one the students used only the log (log-only), while in the other (log + conference) students also participated in structured writing conferences in which the teacher discussed the rhetoric revision log with the students. Results revealed that both treatment groups improved more in their overall writing ability than the control group. Moreover, students in the log + conference group were more likely than the other two groups to improve in rhetoric-related writing features over the course of the semester. These findings suggest that using the rhetoric revision log helped students improve not only rhetoric-related aspects of their writing, but also their overall writing ability.

Much of the research on teacher response to student writing has focused on how teachers can best help their students improve their writing and, concomitantly, on the reactions teachers’ responses evoke in their students. What is largely absent as an object of study in this research is the teacher’s experience of the responding process and the effects which alternative methods of response have on the teacher’s role in the classroom. This article describes my attempts as a writing teacher to separate grading student writing from responding to student writing. Based on my observations during a modest pilot study, I suggest that the act of grading lies at the heart of the negative reactions teachers have when they respond to student writing and that eliminating grading has positive effects on the teacher’s response process, on classroom instruction, and on how teachers conceptualize their classroom role.

Research problem: The question: How Korean entrepreneurs in an entrepreneurship program revised their slide decks for their presentations (“pitches”) in response to professional communication genres representing feedback from potential stakeholders in their target markets is examined. Research questions: As entrepreneurs learn to pitch ideas to unfamiliar markets, how do they revise their slide decks for their pitches when interacting with other professional communication genres that represent the concerns of market stakeholders? Specifically, what changes do entrepreneurs make to the claims, evidence, and complexity of arguments in their pitches? Literature review: The professional communication literature demonstrates that the revision process tends to take place in documentation cycles where documents are set in interaction with each other. Yet such revision processes are not studied in detail in existing studies of entrepreneurial pitches in marketing and technology commercialization. Methodology: In this exploratory qualitative study, researchers textually analyzed 14 sets of five related document genres in the archives of an entrepreneurship program. These genres represented a full cycle of activity: application to the program, initial pitches, initial feedback from program personnel, detailed feedback from representative stakeholders in the target market, and revised pitches. Interviews and surveys of program personnel further contextualize the data. Results and conclusions: Entrepreneurs revised their claims and evidence based on their dialogue with their target market. Some of the entrepreneurs altered their slides to make more complex arguments rebutting stakeholders' concerns. These findings suggest that entrepreneurs engage in dialogue with their target markets, but their engagement tends to be guided by tacit, situated experience rather than through an explicit, systematized approach.

In this article, I explain how integrating Google Drive into your classroom can help prepare students to participate effectively in workplace writing practices and can promote student responsibility, collaboration, and effective revisions.

AbstractWhat emerged out of Kenneth Burke’s engagements with T. S. Eliot—particularly his engagements with Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral? An examination of Burke’s comments on Eliot in Permanence and Change, Attitudes Toward History, A Grammar of Motives, and A Rhetoric of Motives, as well as in his unpublished correspondence reveals examples of the emerging and developing concepts surrounding Burkean identification. Taken in the context of Burke’s own conflicting commitments to aestheticist and social perspectives on art, such a portrait supports the thesis that identification is not a one-time state to be achieved, but instead is an ongoing rhetorical–dialectical process that must be constantly maintained through negotiation. Ultimately, for Burke, Eliot and Murder reflected the rhetorical concerns he dedicated his career to exploring: How do our perspectives limit us, how do they divide us, and how do we transcend those divisions? Notes1 Collected in the Kenneth Burke Papers housed in the Special Collections Library at Pennsylvania State University. Quotations from the Kenneth Burke Papers are reproduced with permission from the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust. The Malcolm Cowley quotation on page nine (which does not appear in Jay) is also taken from a letter in the Kenneth Burke Papers and reproduced with permission of Robert Cowley.2 Dana Anderson defines identification as “the process of perceiving the self in relation to the various social scenes it occupies” (26) while Gregory Clark likewise discusses identification (and more largely, rhetoric) as a process of interaction between self (individual) and collective identity (3).3 For example, Clark discusses “identifications” that occur in “moments of identification” (3), suggesting an underlying focus on identification as discrete, countable—a moment(or moments) at the end of a process. Anderson notes the process of identification as it relates to the construction and (strategic) deployment of identity, though this analysis of identification necessarily focuses on moments of fluctuating stability where identities are perceived in relation to social scenes (26).4 For more on the expansion of the modernist canon, see Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz.5 I should note here that I have found no evidence that Burke and Eliot ever actually spoke or corresponded. In an April 27, 1947 letter to James Sibley Watson, Burke mentions his plans to attend one of Eliot’s lectures on Milton the following Saturday; however, I have found no further mention of the lecture in Burke’s correspondence. Burke nevertheless analyzes Eliot’s literary and critical publications throughout his career, although I have no evidence that Eliot ever took note of Burke.6 For a detailed argument on Permanence and Change as a cultural history, see chapter 3 of George and Selzer.7 This passage, along with several others, was subsequently deleted in the 1954 revised edition of P&C. Here I have provided the 1935 edition page numbers for the excised content; however, other references to P&C in this manuscript, unless otherwise noted, refer to the reprinted 1984 University of California Press edition. For more on the printing history and “Lost Passages” of P&C, see Edward Schiappa and Mary Keehner.8 In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke accounts for heterogeneity in consubstantiality by explaining that a “thing’s identity would … be its uniqueness as an entity in itself and by itself, a demarcated unit having its own particular structure. However, ‘substance’ is an abstruse philosophic term, beset by a long history of quandaries and puzzlements … an acting-together; and in the acting-together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (21). In other words, consubstantiality does not preclude heterogeneity because it is an act, not a state of being, and people can share in an act.9 I use transcendence here and throughout this essay in the Burkean sense—that is, the expansion of a particular perspective to encompass opposing perspectives.10 Murder in the Cathedral is Eliot’s retelling of the death of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered by knights of King Henry II in Canterbury Cathedral. Burke’s focus is primarily on the actual death scene in the play, where Becket is killed and the four murderers turn and address the audience in prose to justify their act.11 Burke provides a succinct summary of this reading in a letter to Malcolm Cowley: “Issue: the approach to God through elegance. How you leave the old locale behind, because it isn’t elegant enough. How you build up elegance by antithesis. And then search for its reality-here-and-now abroad. But eventually discover that only God is elegant enough” (Burke to Cowley, April 13, 1936).12 It is worth noting that Burke eventually says the character of Saint Thomas “specifically use[s] the dramatist grammar” by meditating on human motives “in terms of ‘action’ and ‘passion’” (GM 263). This is, however, not a novel reading of the play—many critics have also noted the action-passion motif in Murder. In the book T. S. Eliot’s Dramatic Theory and Practice, Carol H. Smith points out that a large part of the action-suffering motif “rests in the realization that to ‘act’ in the illusion of freedom from God’s laws is the strongest kind of bondage to the world of the senses, while to exercise the freedom of the will by ‘suffering’ God’s will is to be freed from the torture-wheel of life” (80–81).Burke further considers freedom and action-passion duality in the ending dialogue of The Rhetoric of Religion. Here, Satan explains that because acts are by definition free, human beings must also be free, since they are capable of action (281). The Lord goes on to point out that “action (along with its grammatical partner passion)” are the basis of drama, which is particularly important because “of the large part that the arts of comedy and tragedy will play in [humans’] outlook, extending even to their ideas of ultimate salvation” (281).13 Randy Malamud likewise describes this scene as a “shocking contrast to the play’s passionate crescendo” where the murderers “step forward and address the audience in prose rhetoric evocative of a sloppy after-dinner speech” (69).14 Burke will later point out in A Grammar of Motives that “Eliot specifically considers the action-motion relation” here (263).15 Of course, Burke makes a similar argument in his now oft-commented on address to the First American Writer’s Congress, titled “Revolutinoary Symbolism in America,” where he claims “The complete propagandist, it seems to me, would take an interest in as many imaginative, aesthetic, and speculative as he can handle—and into this breadth of his concerns weave a general attitude of sympathy for the oppressed and antipathy towards our oppressive institutions” (Simmons and Melia 268).16 I infer this from the various ways Burke discusses Eliot in other sources. In the Rhetoric, Burke contrasts Eliot’s subdued, “smart” lamentations with the “full-throated outpourings of Biblical lamentations” (318). In the following letter, Mr. A is likewise unable to “make his bellyache full-throated,” so he couches it with cleverness and romantic irony.17 Eliot’s obvious discontent with modern life has become an interpretive staple for reading his work. See Carol Smith vii; Mary Karr ix–xxvii; Burton Raffel 8–10; and Peter Ackroyd.18 Tate’s article, to which Burke refers, is “A Poetry of Ideas,” published in the June 1926 issue of the New Republic. In the particular scene Tate examines, the speaker of the poem takes a critical (or Burke says, superior) tone toward a house agent’s clerk who is seducing a young woman.19 In between these October 4 and October 8 letters from Tate to Burke is Burke’s missing response in which he critiques Tate’s stance on Eliot. Although I searched, I could not find the text of Burke’s missing letter (written sometime between Oct 4 and 8, 1941), which I infer elucidates his misgivings toward Tate’s improvised psychology for Eliot. Neither the Kenneth Burke Papers at Pennsylvania State University nor the Allen Tate Papers at Princeton University had a copy, and as a result, I can only assemble Burke’s criticisms in light of Tate’s responses, which, while helpful in piecing together the quarrel, nonetheless leave some of the details of Burke’s thought to be discovered.20 For more sites of inquiry into Burke’s evolving notion of identification, under various guises, see “Boring from Within” (1931), “Auscultation, Creation, Revision” (1932), and “Twelve Propositions” (1938).21 For a brief overview of scholarship on Burke’s guilt-purification-redemption cycle, particularly as it focuses on victimage/mortification, see David Bobbit (9–10) and William Rueckert.22 See, for example, Jeanne Fisher’s Burkean analysis of murder/suicide as a symbolic act or Brian Ott and Eric Aoki’s analysis of Matthew Sheppard’s murder and the subsequent public/media response. For Fischer, mass murderer Joseph White’s act of killing, stood in for, or symbolized the internal attitude that festered inside him toward his victims (188). Furthermore, Ott and Aoki complicate this process by adding a social dimension to Fischer’s arguments. If, as Fischer might argue, the killing of Matthew Sheppard symbolized the attitude of homophobia present in larger American society, then Ott and Aoki argue that the media coverage of the Matthew Sheppard case emphasized Burke’s scapegoat process, functioning rhetorically “to alleviate the public’s guilt concerning anti-gay hate crimes and to excuse the public of any social culpability” (1). However, despite being intimately thematically connected to Burke’s ideas of slaying and symbolism—and despite being thorough, complex, and ground-breaking articles—neither Fisher nor Ott and Aoki engages explicitly with the slaying discussion from those first few pages of A Rhetoric of Motives.23 I need to explain the difference between my senses of “transformation” and “transcendence.” Transformation in the generic sense is any type of change (terminological, perspectival, etc.), while transcendence, as it has been used so far in the more specific Burkean sense, involves achieving a stance which encompasses opposing terms or perspectives. Therefore, for my purposes here, the transcendence Burke speaks of is a type of more generic transformation, although the terms are not interchangeable.24 This is in line with Ross Wolin’s claim that “Collaboration is the key to style as the engine of identification” (189).25 This is not a new claim, but an old claim with new dimensions. Timothy Crusius likewise argues that “When language is used to overcome … differences, to foster cooperation and establish community, we are in the realm of rhetoric” (24). However, the implication one can draw from Eliot’s wheel is that establishing community is not a one-time act—it requires constant negotiation and readjustment to preserve the consubstantiality achieved.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn BelkJohn Belk is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Pennsylvania State University, 134 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA 16803, USA. jmb851@psu.edu

Students revise a course assignment prompt in a dual-credit class to develop their conceptions of the meaning of revision.

Given the widespread use of English for the international dissemination of scholars’ research results, numerous intercultural analyses have been undertaken in the field of English for Academic Purposes in diverse genres. Rhetorical and discursive conventions across languages and cultures have been studied to help non-native English scholars to be successful in the difficult endeavour of being granted publication in international English-medium publications. The increasing competition to get one’s research published in international journals in English has resulted in the authors’ need to clearly spell out what their contribution to their discipline is, a rhetorical convention which seems to be currently crucial especially in some fields. It is the aim of this paper to trace statements of contribution in the Introduction and Conclusion sections of research articles published in two international journals in finance and to compare the results with those obtained from an analysis of three manuscripts written in English by a team of Spanish scholars sent to the same journals but which received major revision or rejection reports. Reference to these statements made by reviewers in their reports will also be analysed to explore to what extent (non) compliance with this rhetorical convention may influence their final decision (not) to recommend publication.

Drawing on the notion that revision involves the performance of a writer’s identity in a conversation with herself, this article argues for conceptualizing revision as ecstasis and ventriloquism. By using the metaphor of ventriloquism to translate theory into heuristics for teaching revision, it enacts an underlying argument that pedagogy is metaphor. In doing so, it offers four practical strategies for teaching students to revise.

Writing centers can be staffed wholly or partially by tutors with little training in science writing. This article suggests that an emphasis on scientific rhetoric, not content, may be most useful for training tutors and developing handouts and checklists to aid novice science writers in invention and revision. The article also suggests that a training program in science writing can be informed by local science faculty’s major concerns. However, these faculty discussions toward tutor training should be supplemented through WAC-WID and genre research to retain a training focus on the connection between scientific thought and scientific writing, science writings’ primary genre families, and the delivery of scientific writing to different audiences.

This article reviews insights from place-based education and ecological models of writing to show how these theories can work together to shape locally focused composition pedagogies. From place-based education, the researcher takes an emphasis on physical specificity, and from ecological models of writing, the researcher takes an emphasis on discursive constructions of places. Both orientations to place are applied to an undergraduate professional writing class in Houston, an environment that illustrates vividly how unique physical changes interact with competing discourses in the present moment. The researcher describes a revision to a major writing assignment and discusses a need for assessment criteria that allow instructors to see the value of place-based and ecological models of writing.

450 RHETORICA The Pennsylvania State University Nathan Crick, Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. 225 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-876-1 Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming foreshadows its full trajectory in the quote from Dewey that opens the book: "The end of democracy is a radical end.... It is radical because it requires great change in existing social institutions, economic, legal and cultural" (p. 1). Dewey's identification of genuine democracy as a radical ideal has a contemporary resonance in the light of resurgent progressive protest here and around the world. His call is directed at "the inequities and tragedies of life that mark the present system," just as grass-roots movements have advanced systemic critiques of systemic injustice (p. 1). But it becomes immediately clear that Dewey's invocation of radicality is in part a provocative rhetorical gesture, because he immediately qualifies it. Those who espouse radical ends must not indulge the desire "for the overthrow of the existing system by any means whatever," but work within the democratic process (p. 1). The concept of the radical is disciplined by the stipulation that there is "nothing more radical than insistence upon democratic methods" (p. 1). Dewey's quote ends by asserting that victory against systemic inequity can only come "from a living faith in our common human nature and in the power of voluntary action based on collective intelligence" (p. 1). The radical is thus put in tension with itself by Dewey's effort to find congruence between means and ends. An analogous split within the concept of the radical underlies Nathan Crick's effort to bring Dewey to the discipline of rhetoric. As the book title suggests, Dewey can help in the contemporary revision of rhetoric as an ontological project. That is surely a radical appeal given the reductive instrumentalism that has so often diminished rhetoric as a techne even within the discipline. But Crick accepts Dewey's constraint on the radical by giving presumption to faith in a common human nature, voluntary action, and collective intelligence. Within the critical rhetoric community in the United States these three presuppositions have been in play for some time, given the suspicion introduced to notions of transparent agency, the autonomy of the will, and faith in the Enlightenment project. The distinction between the two forms of radicality - one that attempts to undermine, and one that attempts to reaffirm the hopeful possibility of a unitary deliberative community through persuasion - is crucial for a grasp of the orientation of Crick's effort, since academic rhetoric in the United States is pulled between the two tendencies. The opposite case was made by Ronald Greene, who attributes to Dewey "the tendencv to translate communication into an aesthetic-moral theory of eloquent citizenship [that] Reviews 451 puts argumentation studies to work for, rather than against, new forms of bio-political control."1 The greatest service of Crick's book may be that it brings this debate to prominence. It should be said that Crick does make efforts to incorporate radical structural thinking in his rapprochement. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Stewart Hall, Thomas Kuhn, Bruno Latour, Richard Rorty and others weave in and out of Crick's widely cast net. But does Crick adequately wrestle with Dewey's faith in the public sphere, and does he address the challenge posed by a system of discursive display that, at least at the national level, seems to have subsumed public communication into a facade of consensus? That seems to me to be the real test of his assertion of radicality. Crick does address Greene's argument early on (Greene is er­ roneously excluded from the bibliography), arguing that Dewey's radicality had a material dimension, quoting Dewey to this effect: "Democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and political" (p. 6). Crick asserts that Dewey provides a "third alternative" to, on the one hand, a naive faith in the reformist power of the public sphere, and on the other hand, an impotent posture of critique against the insurmountable Leviathon (p...

This article reports on an action research study designed to stimulate the metacognitive awareness of the writing of assignments in English of a group of students from diverse language and educational backgrounds, studying health science education at masters level. In the study, students were required to give and receive feedback on a marked written assignment to a peer, and receive feedback from a consultant working at the Writing Lab. They were then required to submit a reflective report, which constitutes the key data source for this study. An analysis of the reflective reports revealed that the students claimed that they learnt about their writing habits, about good academic writing, and about the experience of giving and receiving feedback. The study suggests that although an intervention making extensive use of a variety of sources of feedback appears to be able to stimulate students’ metacognitive functioning in relation to their writing of assignments, a number of issues require concerted attention. These issues include: power relations and emotion, perceptions of legitimate authority, and the central role of the lecturer as disciplinary expert and guide. The article concludes with a recommendation for enhanced attention to intersubjective relations of power, language and identity in relation to feedback on writing, especially when peer feedback is involved.

This article seeks to formulate translator profiles based on process data from keylogging and eye-tracking, while at the same time identifying features which are shared by all translators in a sample consisting of both students and professionals. Data have been collected from 12 professional translators and 12 graduate students translating three texts of varying complexity. We found that individual behavioural characteristics with respect to initial orientation in the source text (ST), online ST reading, and online and end revision remained relatively constant across texts of varying complexity, supporting our hypothesis that translator profiles can be observed which are independent of the difficulty of the translation task. The analysis of the data also indicated that translators could be grouped into broad categories of locally-oriented and globally-oriented translation styles, which are partly, though not entirely, comparable to styles known from writing research. We also identified shared features with respect to reading and revision behaviour during drafting. Common to all translators was that they looked beyond the source text word they were about to translate, and that they made revisions while drafting the translation.

This article describes a pilot study on developmental writers’ attitudes toward and use of instructor-written feedback in multiple sections of a precollege-level writing— course at our college.

Color highlighting is used to connect revision mini-lessons to teacher comments that are easy for students to identify and quicker for teachers to generate electronically.

This study investigated situational and writer characteristics that influence the revision process. Thirty-four students who scored high on print exposure and 32 students who scored low on print exposure had 10 or 70 seconds to think about each of 2 prompts before beginning to write (prewriting time) the essays on a computer. A keystroke-logging program captured writing and editing behavior, including pauses, edits (deletions, substitutions, insertions), and prompt reviews. Quality was measured using an 8-factor, 3-point analytic scoring rubric. Results indicated that high print exposure students wrote longer and higher quality essays than low print exposure students. In addition, the short prewriting time increased prompt reviewing and average pause lengths. High and low print exposure writers showed differential responses to the prewriting time manipulation in terms of total pause-associated edits during writing. The complexity of the revision process and the importance of understanding multiple immediate variables in the writing situation are discussed.

How to engage students in the Commedia and involve them in the pleasure of decoding the rich density of Dante’s allusions to historical, literary, and Biblical characters? This article suggests that a class on the Inferno can be enriched by creating a wiki that encourages and facilitates individualized research, peer evaluation, and frequent teacher feedback.

Discourse, Figure signifies an event. I mean this in a variety of ways. There has been a recent event: the publication of an English translation of Jean-François Lyotard's first major book. Its translation is an event forty years delayed and signifies the closing of a major gap in the translation of Lyotard's work. Of course, both “signify” and “event” are important words for Lyotard. Discourse, Figure's goal is to “signify the other of signification” (2011, 13, emphasis his). The question of the representability of events that concerns Lyotard throughout his career originates in Discourse, Figure. I use these two words to guide my review. First I outline the events of the book: its context and its argument. Within its argument, I focus on its central chapter in order to signify the uniqueness of Discourse, Figure. Finally, I offer some thoughts on what this event may signify for us now.Discourse, Figure signifies an event in Lyotard's career. It is tempting to think of his oeuvre as discontinuous: the early phenomenological work breaks off in a flurry of political writings and activism; the psychoanalytic work coalesces into Libidinal Economy, a positively derivative book that makes a radical break with Marxism; language games yield incredulity toward metanarratives; and his later preoccupation with Kant becomes a critique of the third critique in both The Differend and his work on the sublime.Situated between his phenomenological work and Libidinal Economy, before the break with Marxism yet already politically ambivalent, Discourse, Figure signifies schism—from its title to its organization. Its first half deals with phenomenology and the second half with psychoanalysis. Between these is only the trompe-l'oeil of a veduta, the section on which I focus in a moment. The temptation to take a discontinuous view of Lyotard's career now runs up against the temptation to see a continuity in which Discourse, Figure looks back at his first book, Phenomenology, and forward toward his next, Libidinal Economy. To look for such a continuity might be to attempt a narrative of which Lyotard himself would be incredulous. Nevertheless, there can be continuity without mastery: “To link is necessary; how to link is contingent”(Lyotard 1988, 29).Lyotard only considered three of his books “real” books: Discourse, Figure, Libidinal Economy, and The Differend (Bennington 1988, 2). He regarded his other books as preparations for these major works. That it took forty years for the first of these “real” books to be translated is as remarkable as it is unfortunate. The translation had originally been undertaken by Mary Lydon, who published translations of two of its chapters in the early eighties. Her “Veduta on Discours, Figure,” a version of which was originally meant to serve as the introduction to her translation, opens by calling Discourse, Figure, “a notoriously difficult book” (2001, 10).1 Sadly, Lydon's untimely death later in 2001 ended her role in the work. The translation, already delayed in 2001, had to wait another ten years. Antony Hudek took on what I can only assume seemed an impossible task.The length of time Lydon spent translating Discourse, Figure, along with her awareness of its delay recalls a third event: the length of time Lyotard spent writing the book and his awareness of that time: “If I had to wait as long as I did to see my own resistance to writing it fall, it was (among other reasons) without a doubt out of fear of being seduced, distracted from this goal, mesmerized by language” (2011, 14). Seventeen years passed between Lyotard's first book, Phenomenology, and his first “real” book, Discourse, Figure. During those intervening years he drifted, the collected essays of that period appearing as Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud. The drifting return to those two figures eventually became Discourse, Figure, his attempt to signify the other of signification without being mesmerized by signification.Lydon's statement that Lyotard's book is difficult serves as an understatement. Discourse, Figure could be read almost as a novel or epic poem, replete with philosophical, aesthetic, psychoanalytic, religious, and political allusions. His discourse is figurative. His opening salvo, “This book protests: the given is not a text” (2011, 3), aims not just at its immediate interlocutor, Paul Claudel, and his statement that the sensible world is legible. It also takes aim at Jacques Derrida's text-centered claim that “there is no outside-text” (1976, 158). The book's lengthy engagements with Hegel, Mallarmé, Merleau-Ponty, Frege, Klee, Cezanné, and Freud, hide sidelong references to Deleuze, Levinas, Derrida, Kandinsky, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare. All of this to say that for Lyotard, the stakes are high. He grapples with Jacques Lacan by returning ever more rigorously to Freud.2 He performs Derrida's (anti)method of deconstruction without being mesmerized by language. He follows Deleuze's anti-Hegelian critique of representational difference while subtly chiding Deleuze for his neglect of the visual and his rejection of the psychoanalytic. Lyotard is in a Burkean parlor in which he has spent seventeen years listening.The first chapter, “The Bias of the Figural,” serves as an introduction, and signifies at least two more events: the book's aim and the book's arc, each of which entails its own failure. Discourse, Figure's aim, as noted, is the signification of the other of signification. Throughout the first half, phenomenology and structuralist linguistics are relied on, or rather stretched to their limits, in an attempt to represent what Lyotard will ultimately call unrepresentable: “Phenomenology … remains a reflection on knowledge, and the purpose of such a reflection is to absorb the event, to recuperate the Other into the Same” (2011, 17, emphasis his). The failure of the aim leads us to its arc.Lyotard tells us that the arc of the book is an event in which the visual comes to play less and less of a role. While its opening pages concern themselves with the very pragmatic distinction between seeing and reading, by the end of this first chapter it is clear that there will be a shift throughout the course of the book. The shift is from phenomenology to psychoanalysis but also away from figure as visuality and toward figure as rhetoric and as unconscious. In a sense, Lyotard must become dissatisfied with the answers phenomenology offers and move on to psychoanalysis.Why include the first half then? Why not just move on? “I would answer,” Lyotard explains, “that this displacement is precisely what constitutes the event for me in this book. By virtue of what order, of what assumed function of the book, of what prestige of discourse, should one attempt to erase it?” (2011, 19). In this sense the book signifies the event of phenomenology's failure to signify the event and Lyotard's move away from it. That failure creates a clear structure, one that parallels its title. After the initial chapter, the book takes shape in two halves: “Signification and Designation,” concerned with phenomenology and linguistics, and “The Other Space,” devoted to a return to Freud. And in between, Lyotard offers a crucial chapter entitled “Veduta on a Fragment of the ‘History’ of Desire.”The text proceeds through a series of ninety-degree rotations, each of which can be traced and each of which offers a way into Lyotard's complex argument. In the first half of the book, Lyotard begins by distinguishing between the negation of the sensory and the negation of language. The negation of the sensory consists in the distance between the seer and the seen, a distance that becomes confused with the distinction between subject and object. Language's negation consists not only in the gaps between signifiers but also in the distance between signifier and signified, and, most importantly, in the “no” of psychoanalysis, the “no” that says “yes.” For Lyotard, negation provides an elementary link between the seen and the said.Lyotard's first rotation is thus a move from signification to designation. Saussurian signification consists in a chain of signifiers. Between these signifiers are invariable gaps. The distance between cat and car is no greater or smaller than between cat and epistemology, structurally speaking. Thus Lyotard sees a flatness in signification that does not parallel the variable gaps of designation, the distance between me and my hand and the moon and my office. In Saussure, there is a rotation such that designation becomes confused with signification. The moon becomes another word. Flatness asserts itself over thickness. Lyotard understands this turn as representation.The title Discourse, Figure refers us to the movement from phenomenology to psychoanalysis, another event of the book, one in which Lyotard slowly moves toward taking the side of the figural. But Discourse, Figure is a deliberate book, not a spontaneous event, and there is a bit of secondary revision occurring. Freud and Lacan lurk throughout the first half, sometimes explicitly and often implicitly. It is clear that Lyotard has this larger rotation from discourse to figure in mind throughout the early chapters, and this foreshadowing creates depth and tension.So it is unsurprising that after moving from Saussure to Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard finds Freudian negation underlying structuralist linguistics and phenomenology. Lyotard ends the first half by distinguishing between opposition and difference in a chapter that perhaps owes the most to Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze sat on the habilitation committee to which Lyotard submitted Discours, Figure, and Lyotard's concept of difference is decidedly Deleuzian). Opposition corresponds to the negative difference of representation that Deleuze critiques in Difference and Repetition. In an important section of book entitled “Nonhuman Sex,” Lyotard explains that the castration complex which inaugurates difference does not primarily hinge on the opposition between the two sexes (i.e., women are not castrated men, or rather, women are not not men) but on the difference between human and nonhuman sex. Lateral to distinctions between man/woman, pure/impure, black/white, or good/evil, we find the difference of difference: “Sex is foremost nonhuman, non-opposite, transgressive with regard to oppositions” (2011, 147). The entry into representation is built on the castration complex, which owes to the death drive. It is the “yes” of the death drive that appears alongside all of these “no”s with which we have been concerned.This lateral move allows Lyotard to move toward visual phenomena. He outlines theories of curvilinear perspective (to be opposed to linear perspective via the coming veduta) as well as of peripheral vision. Linear perspective depends on an immobile focus of the eye that duplicates the false mobility of the eye. By immobilizing the eye and paying attention to the periphery we begin to understand curvilinear perspective and the death drive lurking at the corners of our eyes. These two elements, representation and perspective, frame Lyotard's veduta.The section on the veduta constitutes an abrupt rupture that sutures the book together. He offers a short history of images in the West, focusing on medieval illuminated manuscripts and the paintings of the early Renaissance, specifically those of Masaccio. Lyotard wants to move us from the sacred to the secular, through two types of thickness and through two rotations. It is a complex move, or rather two moves, each of which is worth dwelling on.Lyotard attempts to demonstrate the imbrication of discourse and figure within medieval illuminated manuscripts. The images may be read and the letters seen just as often as the reverse. Their signification is working opposite to our own. While we might represent the designated (the “real” world), the signifier for the medieval mind always signifies divine discourse. Because there is only one signified, image and text alike are infused with figure. The thickness to which Lyotard has referred throughout occupies—during the medieval period—the space between God and man: true difference.At the beginning of the fifteenth century, we see a rotation. Masaccio's perspectival paintings reveal a new thickness, one between designation and signification. Difference is no longer vertical (God-human) but horizontal (human-vase-sheep-human); transcendence is replaced with immanence. It is this rotation that opens up the possibility of nonsacred art, that is, depictions of peasants and everyday objects. Masaccio's perspective is complex, not yet strictly linear. He employs aerial perspective as well (which offers the illusion of atmospheric depth), but the two types of perspective appear within the same painting without any kind of framing device separating them.Lyotard compares this to Leonardo's use of aerial perspective, where it is carefully restricted. Leonardo has already moved to a linear perspective that is based on a rotation from picture plane to viewer: “The distance from the ‘eye-point’ to the screen is transferred onto the latter so as to establish the oblique from which the objects' foreshortening will be determined” (2011, 197). This second rotation, geometrical foreshortening, may be directly opposed to Masaccio's perspective. In Masaccio, we see naught but plastic space, ready to be invested with figural, libidinal energy. In Leonardo, each aspect of the painting must be kept separate. In Masaccio, the viewer is immanent to the world of the painting. In Leonardo, she or he is transcendent: “This rotation of meaning is directly opposed to that which I described to convey the importance of the Masaccian revolution: rather than the exteriorization of what was scripted, it is the scripting of exteriority” (2011, 197). These two rotations—first from creator to creation, then from immanence to transcendence—occur in the first few years of the fifteenth century and separate the sacred, mythopoetic world from our current secular, scientific world.Lyotard uses the term “veduta” to refer to a particular kind of painting within a painting. A window is painted on the wall, like the one placed behind Mona Lisa. This window achieves a kind of trompe-l'oeil effect. We see “through” the painting at another level. In a sense, Lyotard's veduta offers us a chance to see “through” the history of representation. The first half of the book frames this history. The second half signifies what we might see on the other side of the veduta.In the face of the failure of signification outlined in the first half and the history of its subordination of desire outlined in the veduta, Lyotard attempts to signify the other of signification by more psychoanalytic means. Here, in the second half of the book, he performs this work through a rotation from discourse to figure, exploring the unrepresentable in the paintings of Paul Klee and in the dream work that does not think. The dream- work of course cannot think, cannot perform discourse, as it operates under the sign of desire, that is, through the unconscious. Language depends on negation, and the unconscious, Freud reminds us, knows no negation. Lyotard's argument reaches its crescendo in his tripartite model of figurality: figure-image, figure-form, and figure-matrix: The figure-image, that which I see in the hallucination or the dream and which the painting and film offer me, is an object placed at a distance, a theme. It belongs to the order of the visible, as outline. The figure-form is present in the visible, and may even be visible, but in general remains unseen. This is Lhote's regulating line, the Gestalt of a configuration, the architecture of a picture, the scenography of a performance, the framing of a photograph—in short, the schema. By definition, the figure-matrix is invisible, the object of original repression, instantly laced with discourse: “originary” phantasy. Nonetheless the figure-matrix is figure, not structure, because it is, from the outset, violation of the discursive order—violence against the transformations authorized by this order. (2011, 268, emphasis his) The unconscious is not a language at all. These three parts of figurality braid themselves throughout discourse via desire. Desire's complicity with the figural operates through three transgressions that parallel the three elements of figurality: transgression of the object, transgression of form, and transgression of space. Lyotard argues that these transgressions are manifestations of the death drive and drives his point home by returning to Freud in repeated interpretations of the case study “A Child Is Being Beaten.” These readings allow us to see that the death drive acts as a baffle that moves the spool from fort to da. It is only against this movement that repetition, repression, regression, occurs. Thanatos provides the “re-” that makes possible the return. Death drives deconstruction.While we may have expected figurality to be dangerous only to structuralists, we are surprised by the truth (and it is in its surprise that we recognize its truth): figurality is not eros but thanatos. The relationship of figure to discourse cannot be spoken or drawn, for discourse is within figure and vice versa. Rather than painting a mise-en-scène, Lyotard stages for us a mise en abyme. In the final paragraphs of the book, Lyotard signifies a final rotation: between mother and spouse. Mousetrap, the play within the play in Hamlet, provides Hamlet an opportunity to meditate on his mother as “mobbled” queen. Lyotard reads “mobbled” through an associational chain that leads to “mobilized.” The mobile mother rotates her relationship from variable gap between mother and son to the invariant gap between lovers: Hamlet's “Oedipal truth” (Lyotard 2011, 388). In this final scene we may see how Lyotard prefigures Anti-Oedipus.Discourse, Figure finds us in the shadow of a recent return to Lyotard in the work of philosophers like Alain Baidou, Ray Brassier, Jacques Rancière, and Bernard Stiegler and that of rhetoricians like Diane Davis, and Lyotard was more than most to at this of rhetoric and to not only study the but to be A rotation of the book's title reminds us of the and often between discourse and as figure in discourse, so rhetoric not from without but from of visual rhetoric of Jacques psychoanalytic theories of the or on the between image and Lyotard offers a cannot only be must be space for us to on and on our Finally, images cannot be from text as as we might and image are as as discourse and have to Discourse, Figure's to and on Deleuze for have an in Deleuze's theories of While Deleuze has to say to our he that is psychoanalytic in Lyotard. we are returning to Lyotard can offer to the the of or of this us to a final event: my own failure at Discourse, Figure. It is a book that must be read and a book that up its only after That it took this long to to us is perhaps In an with Lyotard on its was with a of on my to that a book like Discourse, was at the time because it was explicitly against … I was against this way of and I that now have this book. I was (Lyotard We

Abstract From Aristotelian logic and sensate perception to Lakoffian rational and experiential meaning-making, I merge theories: Metaphor is emotive change, a use of language that expresses emotion and evokes emotion, which can inform behavior and persuade. The power of metaphor is in the physiological relationship between reason and emotion in the brain, supported by recent research from Alice Flaherty, neurologist and writer. Metaphors are sensory experiences, images brought-before-the-eye, which effect persuasion as rhetorical tools in argument. I argue that emotion-language-thought is in dialectical relationship, expressed by metaphor. Notes 1I appreciate RR reviewers Pat Hoy and Duane Roen for reviewing and offering suggestions for revision of my manuscript. Additionally, many thanks to Sara Newman for her patience and response to my inquiries. With her support and guidance, the relativity of rhetoric in everyday life continues to be seen and studied. Lastly, thank you to Theresa Enos and others at Rhetoric Review who have taken the time to allow this work publication. 2Recently, I read about being a sheep or goat from an Orthodox Christian perspective. The message was developed from a verse in the New Testament: "All nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats. And He will set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right hand, 'Come, you blesses of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world'" (Mat. 25:32). Interestingly, the article that follows attributes negative characteristics to those who are like goats as ones who: take, exploit, hoard, fear, judge, mock, and as ones who are unsatisfied, selfish, and distrusting of others. With this context, I understand anew the reference that my in-laws made to the goat in my kitchen. Meaning changes as one's knowledge base shifts over time, and metaphorical expressions evolve, even after they've been spoken.

This analysis of 83 scoring rubrics and grade definitions from writing programs at U.S. public research universities captures the current state of the struggle to define and measure specific writing traits, and it enables an induction of the underlying theoretical construct of “academic writing” present at these writing programs. Findings suggest that writing specialists have managed to permeate U.S. first-year writing assessment with certain progressive assumptions about writing and writing instruction, but they also indicate critical areas for revision, given such documents’ critical gatekeeping role at postsecondary institutions. The study also raises a broader question about the difficulties of rhetorically constructing “writing ability” in a way that is consistent with the contextualist paradigm dominant in contemporary writing studies.

Giorgio Agamben's The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath can be read as a radical rethinking of a traditional rhetorical category: ethos. This is not the ethos you learned in school. Rather than a mode of persuasion, Agamben argues that ethos is the distinguishing characteristic of human language as such. In this regard, its essential characteristic is the movement it enables between a “speaker and his language.” It is this ethical relationship—what Agamben calls the articulation of “life and language” (69)—that distinguishes human speech from birdsong, insect signals, and the roar of lions. “The decisive element that confers on human language its peculiar virtue is not in the tool itself but in the place it leaves to the speaker, in the fact that it prepares within itself a hollowed-out form that the speaker must always assume in order to speak—that is to say, in the ethical relation established between a speaker and his language” (71).This doesn't put it quite strongly enough. Nor does it capture radicalness of Agamben's inquiry. Precisely speaking, Agamben is not concerned with the articulation of life and language—the linkage between the two established formally by ethos and enacted in the oath. Rather, to use one of his favorite phrases, Agamben is concerned with the zone of indistinction between life and language. Thus to the extent that ethos is the fundamental characteristic of human language, to the same extent humanity is constituted and set off from the animal kingdom by the fact that, alone among the animals, humans read their life in their language. Agamben writes, “Uniquely among living things, man is not limited to acquiring language as one capacity among others that he is given but has made of it his specific potentiality; he has, that is to say, put his very nature at stake in language…. He is the living being whose language places his life in question” (69, emphasis his). This is a radical revision of ethos: by moving freely between the two poles of the ancient concept (language and life) and reading each pole within the other, Agamben has turned ethos into a zone of indistinction that explains what it binds together: the specificity of human language and the never-ending task of anthropogenesis.To better understand this zone of indistinction, Agamben turns to an archaeology of the oath. This makes good sense. In both legal and religious contexts, the oath is the genre par excellence for guaranteeing the relation of life and language. In the most conventional sense possible, to swear an oath is to verify the correlation of deeds and words, life and language. As Agamben puts it, the oath “seems” to guarantee the “truth or effectiveness” of a proposition (5). For this reason, the oath has thrived in contexts (law and religion most prominently) where questions of truth are paramount. Yet the conventional reading of the oath as a tool for articulating words and deeds is clearly not sufficient for Agamben. To render life and language indistinguishable (not simply linkable), the oath must be more than a rhetorical technique. In its capacity to bind words and deeds together, it must be understood as archetypal of language as such. For Agamben, therefore, an oath is not one genre among many; it is the essence of language, its purest manifestation and a privileged window into its ultimate conceit. Agamben thus approaches the oath not as it exists in legal/religious contexts but as something more fundamental. In fact, his entire methodology—his archaeology—is designed precisely to foreground the fundamental indistinction of language and oath.Agamben's archaeology must not be confused with Foucault's. Eschewing transcendental categories like origin or totality, Foucault's archaeologist pursues the endless accumulation of historical statements. On this model, the archaeologist does not ask where these statements began, what motivated them, or what drove them to appear when they did. She resists every temptation to look beyond the statement to something deeper, more fundamental, or more originary than the simple historical fact of its appearance. In the sharpest of contrasts, Agamben's archaeologist purses an “arche” that is beyond all historical statements. Following philologist Georges Dumézil (who was also influential for Foucault), Agamben argues that the goal of archaeology is the “furthest fringe of ultra-history” (9). His example is the so-called Indo-European language, the entirely hypothetical language from which a great variety of historical languages supposedly sprung. His conceit is that the examination of historical statements allows the archaeologist to work backward from history to ultra-history, from specific statements to a “force operating in history” (10) to the “otherwise inaccessible stages of the history of social institutions” (9). The distance between the two archaeologies might be measured by the mathematical metaphors used to describe them. Foucault's archaeology is grounded in addition; for him the fundamental archaeological task is accumulation.1 For Agamben, on the other hand, the archaeologist requires an “algorithm,” a means of arranging historical statements into a formula that produces something more than the sum of its parts (9).In the Sacrament of Language, Agamben uses his algorithm to work backward from a variety of classical meditations on the oath (Philo and Cicero are prominent) to what he calls an originary “experience of language” (53). This experience, much like the Indo-European language, “is something that is necessarily presupposed as having happened but that cannot be hypostatized into an event in a chronology” (11). What is this “pure” experience of language (53)? Here we need to follow Agamben into the details. His first clue that the historical career of the oath might bear witness to the pure experience of language is grounded in the observation that the name of God is a recurrent (even required) aspect of the oath (e.g., “I swear by God …”). To make sense of this formulaic requirement, Agamben turns to the first-century philosopher Philo Judeaus. In his analysis of a lengthy portion of the Legum allegoriae, Agamben stresses the ambiguous function of the name of God within the formula of the oath: “It is completely impossible to tell if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God” (22). This indeterminacy between the oath and name of God is important to Agamben, and he returns to this fundamental lesson from Philo at critical points throughout the book (48, 51).The indistinction between the oath and the name of God prompts Agamben to turn to Nietzsche's one-time teacher, the German philologist Hermann Usener. Now known for his concept of momentary gods, Usener argued that every name of the gods was originally the name of an action or a brief event. Thus there were gods named after harvest, tilling, plowing, and so forth. So understood, there is no distance between the name of a god and activities in the world; the name of a given god was the activity and the activity was the name of the god (46). This, we might say, is the ultimate instantiation of ethos: there is here no distance between life and language. Indeed, it is precisely the collapsing of the distance (the indistinction) between words and things that constitutes the oath as an index to an originary experience of language. “Here we have something like the foundation or originary core of that testimonial and guaranteeing function of language.” Thus, the name of God, essential to the formulaic structure of the oath, attests to the indistinction that envelops words and deeds, the oath and language as such. The name of God “is the very event of language in which words and things are indissolubly linked. Every naming, every act of speech is, in this sense, an oath” (46).The simple act of nomination, then, points to an original experience of language. On this score, the essential characteristic of nomination is the fact that, in the act of naming, words and deeds are performatively related. “As in the oath, the utterance of the name immediately actualizes the correspondence between words and things” (49). At this point, Agamben's mode of argument resembles nothing so much as Nietzsche's “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” As Nietzsche explains in this 1873 essay, originally speaking, language was neither denotative nor semantic. Rather, all words were originally interjections, names imposed on events by the creative whim of the “intuitive man” (who would soon become the “overman”). For Nietzsche (and Agamben), in the original act of naming, words and things were related only by the aesthetic preferences of the strong; it was only as the weak repeated the original interjections of the strong that words fell into the realm of semantics, representation, and meaning.2 It is for this reason, Agamben argues, that categories long central to the understanding of language (meaning, representation, and denotation) were not part of the original (performative) experience of language. He even suggests that one day the experience of language might once more escape the paradigm of representation: “The distinction between sense and denotation, which is perhaps not, as we have been accustomed to believe, an original and eternal characteristic of human language but a historical product (which, as such, has not always existed and could one day cease to exist)” (55). Thus does Agamben revise the speech act theory of performatives. Owing to their nonrepresentational semiotics, performatives point to the original experience of language. “They represent in language a remnant of a stage … in which the connection between words and things is not of a semantico-denotative type but performative, in the sense that, as in the oath, the verbal act brings being into truth” (55). At this point we can begin to see Agamben's radical revision of ethos. As he makes the category central to the experience of language, he asks us to remove it from the realm of representation in which it functions as a technique a speaker might deploy to guarantee the truth of her words. Rather, Agamben asks us to consider ethos performatively, to see it as indistinguishable from an original experience of language.Much like Nietzsche's, Agamben's tale is one of degeneration. Once the original performative experience of language was lost (and the paradigm of representation took over), possibilities of truth and falsehood emerged. In the space that now existed between words and things, the space that had been collapsed in the act of naming and in the oath, semantics took the place of performance. It was now the question of meaning that guaranteed the articulation of life and language. But meaning, complicated as it is by rhetoric, proved an untrustworthy linkage. Thus it seemed that falsehood was a possibility written into the experience of language as such. For this reason Agamben argues that it was only after the original experience of language had been lost that law and religion—the two historical guardians of the oath—sprang up to guarantee the relation between language and life. No longer an integral part of language itself, the linkage between words and deeds needed to be vouched for by human institutions and an ever-proliferating list of blessings/curses attached to the oath. Agamben returns to this point time and again, suggesting that it is deeply significant for him. Over and again, he insists on the primacy of an experience of language from which followed a number of cultural institutions: “And it is in the attempt to check this split in the experience of language that law and religion are born, both of which seek to tie speech to things and to bind, by means of curses and anathemas, speaking subjects to the veritative power of their speech” (58).Agamben cares about more than the birth of law and religion. On a more fundamental level, in the “split in the experience of language” Agamben reads the birth of anthropogenesis. That is, because humanity is the animal that reads itself in its language, the introduction of space between words and things provoked an existential crisis from which we have not recovered. “Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being” (11). This is why Agamben considers The Sacrament of Language to be a continuation of Homo Sacer. Agamben opened (and closed) Homo Sacer with a quotation from Foucault: “Modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.”3 He ends The Sacrament of Language with the same quotation, adding this comment: “So also is he the living being whose language places his life in question. These two definitions are, in fact, inseparable and constitutively dependent on each other” (69, emphasis his). In other words, if in the original volume Agamben stressed the political production of bare life, Agamben now argues that bare life and language are structurally related.4 Indeed—and this may be his strongest claim—Agamben now argues that bare life must itself be considered a product of language. From the perspective of Agamben's oeuvre, then, we must consider Homo Sacer and The Sacrament of Language as symmetrical studies: they chart the construction of bare life from political and linguistic origins respectively. From the perspective of the rhetorical tradition, the revision of ethos must now be considered complete: if Agamben can posit ethos as the fundamental category of language, it is because language itself creates the (bare) life to which it is continuously annexed.Now, truth be told, Agamben only once characterizes his inquiry in terms of ethos (on page 68). I've framed the entire inquiry in such terms to foreground the fact that, despite the difficulty of the philosophical prose, and despite the absence of what might be thought of as a rhetorical cast of mind, The Sacrament of Language is a book that will command the interest of readers of this journal. It is book that takes canonical ideas and concepts, reads them in creative ways, and produces results that are provocative by any measure. At this moment in rhetorical studies, a moment marked by a renewed concern in nonhuman rhetorics, animal rhetorics, and the space of the speaking subject vis-à-vis language, The Sacrament of Language may prove itself an invaluable tool for rethinking rhetoric's relationship to animals, humanity, and language.I'd like to register only one qualification. Briefly put, I fear Agamben may confuse articulation and indistinction. More precisely, he tends to read indistinction where a more nuanced reader might see only articulation. A few examples. In his reading of Philo, Agamben concludes that “it is completely impossible to decide if [God] is reliable because of the oath or if the oath is reliable because of God.” This is not true. For Philo, the fact that God's words are oaths is a “corollary” deduced from the primary fact of his “sure strength” (20). Philo is certainly articulating the oath and God, but they remain distinct: one is a corollary of another. Similar objections might be leveled against Agamben's equation of law and curse (38) and the various equations of the oath with blasphemy (39), promises (27), or perjury (7). Just because there is a mutually constitutive (even symbiotic) relationship between these concepts (and Agamben is at his best demonstrating these links) does not mean that they occupy a zone of indistinction.My concern is not limited to The Sacrament of Language. Readers of Agamben know that zones of indistinction are absolutely central to the whole of his work. I could point to the zones of indistinction he posits in Homo Sacer between man and animal, law and fact, or, ultimately, life and politics.5 Or I could point to the indistinction between anomie and order that permeates his State of Exception.6 In all cases, Agamben's work relies on the careful, meticulous, and complete erasing of boundaries. Agamben reads free movement, indeterminacy, and indistinction where others have read particular forms of correlation. At times, this indistinction is grounded in readings of obscure (Philo, Usener) or extreme (the Nazi documents that circulate in the closing section of Homo Sacer) texts that may (or may not) be sufficient to establish the indistinction he needs. Near the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben makes his commitment to zones of indistinction explicit: “It is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, the difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and forms of a new politics must be thought.”7 Whether or not Agamben is correct that zones of indistinction must become a central category of our political thinking, I'd like to suggest that they must be central to our evaluation and uptake of Agamben himself. Above all, we must ask ourselves whether or not the zones of indistinction that punctuate his work at regular intervals are justified by the evidence he presents. My hunch is that some of them are and some of them are not. Indeed, zones of indistinction are the great genius and great liability of Agamben's thought: by moving freely between historically distinct ideas, by treating mutually constitutive concepts as if they were indistinguishable, Agamben enables us to ask profound questions that cut to the heart of our tradition. There is no denying this is important work. But, by the same measure, these questions only obtain because what might be called a consistent habit of (mis)reading indistinction for articulation. Whether one finds such work theoretically provocative (which it is) or historically slippery (which it is) is ultimately a question of faith.

The inclusion of peer feedback activities into the academic writing process has become common practice in higher education. However, while research has shown that students perceive many features of peer feedback to be useful, the actual effectiveness of these features in terms of measurable learning outcomes remains unclear. The aim of this study was to investigate the linguistic and review features of peer feedback and how these might influence peers to accept or reject revision advice offered in the context of academic writing among L2 learners. A corpus-based machine learning approach was employed to test three different algorithms (logistic regression, decision tree, and random forests) on three feature models (linguistic, review, and all features) to determine which algorithm offered the best predictive results and to determine which feature model most accurately predicts implementation. The results indicated that random forests is the most effective way of modeling the different features. In addition, the feature model containing all features most accurately predicted implementation. The findings further suggest that directive comments and multiple peer comments on the same topic included in the feedback process seem to influence implementation.

The object of this research is a learning method that uses email correspondence to promote the development of narrative writing skills in year 4 and year 5 students. Focusing on the written production of episodes of adventure novels and peer review, this learning method was applied to four classes in the Paris region over a 1-year period. The classes were paired in such a way that some students were required to read and analyze texts produced by correspondents (advice givers) while others carried out revisions using peer advice and suggestions (advice receivers). To describe the dynamics of writing, revision and learning, a qualitative analysis of the texts and suggestions given or received by the student partners is carried out. A statistical analysis comparing the texts produced by students in both groups is used to corroborate the findings of the initial analysis. Students showed an increasing awareness and consideration of the key characteristics of the practiced genre, resulting in an improvement of the quality of the texts in the course of the revision process and throughout the year. The texts produced by the advice givers improved more than the texts produced by the advice receivers. The findings are attributed to greater self-reflection and successive reformulations fostered by the elaboration of advice and suggestions.

Peer review has been viewed as a promising solution for improving students' writing, which still remains a great challenge for educators. However, one core problem with peer review of writing is that potentially useful feedback from peers is not always presented in ways that lead to revision. Our prior investigations found that whether students implement feedback is significantly correlated with two feedback features: localization information and concrete solutions. But focusing on feedback features is time-intensive for researchers and instructors. We apply data mining and Natural Language Processing techniques to automatically code reviews for these feedback features. Our results show that it is feasible to provide intelligent support to peer review systems to automatically assess students' reviewing performance with respect to problem localization and solution. We also show that similar research conclusions about helpfulness perceptions of feedback across students and different expert types can be drawn from automatically coded data and from hand-coded data.

Problem: One of the biggest problems with student and novice writing is that it often lacks clear organization and a coherent structure. However, it is difficult for newer writers to conceptualize a clear structure prior to writing a first draft. Thus, there is a need for an effective process to help writers revise early drafts with a particular focus on organizational clarity. Key concepts: Two concepts underlie this issue. The first is revision, which is the process of changing text to better achieve the writer's goals and serve the reader's needs. Two general categories of revision exist: a comprehensive edit (a thorough review of content, organization, visual design, style, illustrations, accessibility, and reuse to best serve readers) and a copyedit (a review of proper adherence to accepted language standards, which includes attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure). The second is organizational structure (the arrangement and relationship of ideas), which is critical to help readers understand and use the information in the document. Key lessons: A reverse outline-a process that helps improve document structure and organization from an early draft-was developed to help writers make the organizational structure of an existing document to assess and improve the structure in a subsequent revision explicit. Reverse outlining has four steps: (1) identifying and listing discourse topics from a written draft, (2) arranging the discourse topics into an outline, (3) assessing the structure for appropriateness to audience and purpose, and (4) creating the new structure, modifying content where necessary, and adding headings, bullets, overview statements, and other advanced organizers. The reverse outlining process has been used extensively in the classroom and in the workplace.

This action research explored the potential of audio-visual screencasting for assignment feedback on a distance learning (DL) course. A screencast is a combination of voice recording and screen capture, which can be played in any browser, like a video. Here it is used to capture a tutor’s editing and highlighting activities in a document, whilst simultaneously recording spoken feedback. Research suggests that audio-visual feedback may resolve some of the current problems with written feedback. A pilot study is reported which trialled screencasting for essay feedback on a master's level DL module at Sheffield Hallam University. Fourteen students participated and were randomly divided between two groups to receive either written or screencast feedback first. After receiving the first feedback type, students completed a short questionnaire online. The second type of feedback was then distributed to the students, who completed the same questionnaire for the second type of feedback. The results suggest that feedback is received more positively in the richer media of audio-visual screencasting and that this may encourage emotions more conducive to receiving and processing feedback and help to socialise students within the learning context by giving them a sense of belonging to the community. Simultaneous visual cues and explanations appear to help with understanding, and it is quicker to capture screencasts than it is to write feedback. However, preferences for written feedback were related to the holistic overview of a document, which could be scanned and revisited, and which was not confined to a linear delivery, nor time-limited. Audio-visual screencasting will therefore only be adopted for formative feedback during modules, and will be structured with spoken overviews.

Although keystroke logging promises to provide a valuable tool for writing research, it can often be difficult to relate logs to underlying processes. This article describes the procedures and measures that the authors developed to analyze a sample of 80 keystroke logs, with a view to achieving a better alignment between keystroke-logging measures and underlying cognitive processes. They used these measures to analyze pauses, bursts, and revisions and found that (a) burst lengths vary depending on their initiation type as well as their termination type, suggesting that the classification system used in previous research should be elaborated; (b) mixture models fit pause duration data better than unimodal central tendency statistics; and (c) individuals who pause for longer at sentence boundaries produce shorter but more well-formed bursts. A principal components analysis identified three underlying dimensions in these data: planned text production, within-sentence revision, and revision of global text structure.

Rhetorical lore holds that epideictic address resolves itself into acts of either praise or blame. The passing of Michael C. Leff—friend to so many, colleague of a fortunate few—grants us every good reason to indulge the former, avoid the latter, and thus satisfy our need to bear witness to an extraordinary life. But we know, too, that the imperative to witness is scarcely limited to these options. This special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is conceived as a testament to the work of Leff generally but especially to a mind possessed of relentless curiosity, at once fiercely independent and disciplined, steadfast in its principles but open always to question, debate, and revision. Leff was, in a word, an explorer, and in this spirit we have asked our contributors neither to bury nor to praise him but to press on as fellow travelers into the world of ideas he so manifestly relished.That Philosophy and Rhetoric should host such an expedition seems altogether appropriate. Since the publication of its first issue in 1968, the journal has committed itself to reinventing the relationship between two ancient, enduring, and often warring traditions of thought. The genius of its founders—Henry Johnstone Jr., Carroll Arnold, Robert Oliver—lay in replacing the long-standing “versus” with an “and.” To grasp the importance of that “and” is to understand the mission of the journal, its editors, and the authors who hold its legacy in trust. It is well to be reminded of how bold that move was at the time, how uncertain its prospects. All was new, but readers quickly learned that here was a journal in full, evidence of which can be found in the roster of essays making up its first volume, among them Lloyd Bitzer's “The Rhetorical Situation, Chaïm Perelman's “Rhetoric and Philosophy,” Gerard Hauser's “The Example in Aristotle's Rhetoric,” Douglass Ehninger's “The Systems of Rhetoric,” Carroll Arnold's “Oral Rhetoric, Rhetoric, and Literature,” George Yoos's “Being Literally False.” The journal, in short, proved instrumental in opening up new ways of thinking about the subject, and it does nothing to detract from Leff's many accomplishments to recognize paths charted before him.Much of what we may say of the journal may indeed be said of the man as well. Both remained convinced of the possibilities of inquiry once emancipated from habit, complacency, and unquestioned tradition. Leff, like Johnstone et al., strained against millennia of thinking of philosophy and rhetoric as being bound in an interminable cold war; they sought, finally, not so much a detente among the powers as a full and genuine partnership. The point was not to collapse the two modes of inquiry, nor to ignore the differences that themselves might be productive of insight. It was rather to put philosophy and rhetoric into conversation with each other.The results were not altogether even—as Henry once confided to me, there were times when he thought philosophers were trying to sound like rhetoricians and rhetoricians like philosophers. But the parties remained loyal to the pact and now, more than forty years on, the enterprise continues to expand the horizons of what we know and can know about that “and.” It has produced much, though with varying degrees of emphasis and interest: ontologies of discourse, classical exegesis, informal logic; hermeneutics, poststructuralism, feminism, public sphere analysis, and, recently, Bakhtin. The range will keep widening, but the journal will retain its signature commitment to depth, rigor, and innovation.I offer these reflections on the journal as a way of suggesting that Leff and it share certain abiding investments. It remains to the authors herein to enrich the contributions of both, and so I will limit my comments on the man to only a few broad observations. As I have noted, his thinking was marked by a steadfast commitment to the humanistic bases of the disciplines, but he did not allow himself to be artificially bound by either. This stubbornness—and he could be stubborn—as often as not placed him in the role of instigator: if he did not approve of the way things were going, he set out to create the conditions for change and renewal. It is notable in this respect how many developments in scholarship he either initiated, signed onto early, or aligned himself with to certain effect. Early in his career he was instrumental, with James J. Murphy, in reinvigorating the study of classical rhetoric at the University of California at Davis, whence was born the journal Rhetorica, for which he served as second editor. At Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he further established his reputation as a student of public address and rhetorical criticism; he led and gave forceful expression to the practice of close textual analysis, with attendant interests in linguistics and discourse pragmatics, assisted in the international study of argumentation, cofounded the Public Address Conference, and rejuvenated rhetorical studies at the University of Memphis.The list is incomplete but the point perhaps made: Leff carried with him the courage of his convictions, and he acted on them by creating the enabling conditions for new avenues of inquiry. In this regard he bore out the potential of interdisciplinarity in ways all too rare in academic work today. The term itself has become justly vulnerable: skeptics have good reason to wince at its easy optimism, the frequency with which it is bruited as an inherent good and the paucity of its actual results. Interdisciplinarity can and has given warrant to ecumenical excess, and in some guises it has promoted the view of rhetoric as being by definition a pariah discipline. In my view, at least, Leff avoided these pitfalls by remaining fixed to certain constants, chief among them a conception of rhetoric as a form of habitation, that is, a mode of being and acting in which the art and the artist collaborate in a world shaped by contingency, the unexpected, and the partially glimpsed. If one word may be said to capture this sense, it is “performance.” Leff himself did not use the term overmuch, perhaps because of the freight it carried during latter decades of the twentieth century; but as a way of explaining the ways of rhetoric it runs as a leitmotif throughout nearly fifty years of thinking and writing about the subject.The third decade of Leff's career found him at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was fortunate enough to work with him when I was completing my graduate studies. The 1980s proved a tumultuous period across the humanities, no less so in rhetoric. I had occasion, then, to observe up close how a first-rate thinker negotiated the manifold challenges posed by emerging forms of postmodernism. For many, his response revealed a certain conservative strain; this much is true, but not for the reasons usually ascribed. Leff was clearly concerned to extend and revitalize neoclassical forms of analysis, and he could be rather too quick to dismiss what seemed then like novel ways of reformulating the disciplinary grounds of rhetoric. His chief concerns, however, cut much deeper than such temperamental matters. Leff's problem was not with the beau ideals of the age—Foucault, de Man, et al.—but more generally with how they were being taken up and to what effect. In the main he found such acolytes afflicted with what he called the tendency to “think in slogans” and bristled at glib dismissals of the rhetorical tradition by those unversed in that tradition. Above all, however, he was troubled by the dangers of writing agency out of the script, as if rhetoric could be reconceived independent of its habitation in the lived realities of human symbolic action. At stake, again, was the role of performance, with its related commitments to historical context, locality, and the artistic rendering of human will. Leff's work was accordingly devoted to reclaiming the realm of concrete expression from airy abstractions, to capture again the rough ground of the discipline and develop a critical vocabulary responsible to the particulars of the speech act even as it sought cautiously for certain levels of generalization.All this may at first glance seem to speak more directly of Leff the rhetorical critic than of theorist familiar to readers of this journal. I would like to submit, however, that in fact his work gives little evidence that he viewed himself operating on one or the other register. I do not mean to suggest that Leff conflated the theoretical with the critical or refused to acknowledge their different emphases and predilections. As a theorist, he was deeply conversant in the historical and conceptual grounds of philosophy and rhetoric, and at various points he proved expert in diagnosing the state of scholarship in both. Still, it must be said that Leff's interest in the “and” leaned to the right, to the ways in which rhetoric, conceived as a form of embodied symbolic performance, could be seen as at once informed by theory and straining always to outstep its explanatory reach.Such a perspective on the art meant that Leff consistently sought to place theory and practice in a tensive, often ambiguous and ironic, but always productive relationship to each other. This much is clearly evident in virtually all of his writings on Cicero, for example, and it is with reference to the Roman orator that I conclude my comments on Leff. Tully was, of course, a preoccupation of Leff's from beginning to end. The reasons for this are many, but for the most direct explanation I refer readers to the essay reprinted in this issue. It is, in my view, the most efficient representation of Leff's abiding interests, including those just noted: the rhetorical lore, its canonical figures, the stress on performativity, the embrace of ambiguity and tension, the play of theory and practice. Short of rehearsing the argument, it may be illustrative to take his description of Ciceronian humanism as a mirror of his own: “a suspicious attitude toward abstract theory not only in respect to rhetoric but also to ethics and politics; a conviction that discourse, especially discourse that allows for argument on both sides of an issue, has a constitutive role to play in civic life; a valorization and idealization of eloquence that entails a strong connection between eloquence and virtue; and a conception of virtue that is decisively linked to political activity.” With this passage in mind, let us hint briefly at the essays to follow.The emergence of rhetorical studies in modern American higher education is in several ways a curious story. All disciplines, of course, struggle early to situate themselves within the complex and contested terrain of academic inquiry, but rhetoric, more than most, struggled to locate itself between the competing demands of research and theory on the one hand, and its applied and vocational missions on the other. It is no small part of Leff's legacy that he steadfastly refused to resolve this tension into a simple disjunction between the library and the classroom. A quick glance at his bibliography gives evidence that in fact he remained for much of his career deeply interested in the interplay of rhetorical pedagogy and theory. And the ground for this interest, as we might expect, was a long-standing investment in traditions of Latin learning generally and rhetorical education in particular.The distinguished classicist Martin Camargo takes us deep into this terrain in his exploration of Anglo-Latin rhetoric in late fourteenth-century England. As if to remind us that the status of rhetoric seems never to have been altogether settled, Camargo painstakingly assembles his case to demonstrate that the subject was not, as is frequently thought, the province of the classroom alone. His extensive recovery of archival materials, rather, leads him to conclude that, if anything, “the theory and practice of rhetoric were anything but banal, trite, and jejune; they were new, hot, even controversial—not milk for infants but solid food for adults.”Leff began his career as a classicist, and he ended it as a classicist. His attunement to the tradition, however, gradually shifted over time from largely exegetical concerns to questions over the relevance and fecundity of such thought for contemporary theorizing about the art. This interest he represented on several fronts: by reclaiming neoclassical criticism for the work of textual analysis, for instance, and by revisiting the concept of decorum as it related to contemporary theory. Among Leff's most important contributions in this vein was to have reanimated debates over the centrality of invention, argument, and hermeneutics. Here again he found himself both defending and promoting certain classical traditions of thought as unjustly stigmatized by postmodern critiques, and, more positively, as a robust resource for explaining rhetorical performance. In this enterprise he enjoyed the amicable but challenging company of Steven Mailloux, with whom he carried on a lively exchange of ideas over many years. Although Leff was rather more concerned to articulate the productive disciplinary differences that might be said to obtain between them, both held constant the role that controversy plays in funding rhetorical argument.Over and against strains of antihumanist thought—ranging from Plato to Heidegger to postmodernism—Mailloux locates an understanding of humanism that rightly embraces human agency and the inventive force of tradition. At the heart of this relationship is Leff's particular brand of “hermeneutical rhetoric,” the process through which individual actors render strategic interpretations of the past to shape collective perceptions in the present. Mailloux reminds us that in no sense does this form of humanism presuppose an absolutely free agent, nor does it ever concede a sense of tradition as inherently prescriptive or determinate. On the contrary, rhetorical humanism—and the hermeneutics it enables—celebrates the deeply human capacity for making judgments in precisely those contexts marked by contingency, plurality, and the shifting demands of human community in time.The study of argumentation is in some ways anomalous. Although it cannot be said to reside at the core of either philosophy or rhetoric as a disciplinary domain, it nevertheless abides as a persistent interest for both. Indeed, it was no small part of Henry Johnstones's mission—successful, in the event—to firmly locate the subject at the interstices of interdisciplinary inquiry and thus to ensure its career and strengthen its claim on several communities of scholars at once. Leff came argumentation through two routes: in his younger years as a collegiate debater and afterward as an academic. The former, I might suggest, is not altogether without relevance to the latter. From it he retained a sense of argument as the embodied exchange of convictions about matters of public concern. This commitment was to surface again when, in the 1980s and thereafter, Leff enthusiastically joined in the renaissance of argument studies that continues to this day.At least two themes join together much of Leff's thinking about argument, and they may be observed at work in his scholarship generally. One is an entrenched resistance to what he regarded as rigid and excessively abstract approaches to the subject, and the other, not surprisingly, perhaps, is the relevance of classical lore, especially Aristotle. Both are evidenced in J. Anthony Blair's case for revisioning conventional treatments of argument and its relationships to dialectic and logic. A prominent figure in the resurgence of argumentation studies, Blair proposes an alternative understanding of how these modes of description and action comport with each other. Rhetoric, he argues, is best understood as a theory of argument as it relates to speeches, dialectic as a theory of argument as it relates to conversations, and logic as a theory of reasoning as it relates to both.I have suggested that the principle of performativity underwrites virtually the whole of Leff's interpretive corpus. Nowhere is this preoccupation more evident than in his practice as a rhetorical critic. On a number of occasions he sought to sharpen, defend, and promote this practice, most explicitly with reference to the work of textual analysis. In the process, Leff helped to established its key theoretical underpinnings, to identify, that is, those premises which might shift such criticism away from mere impressionism toward a more stable and rigorous foundation. The task was not an easy one: a number of leading critics in their own right suspected in this project a certain New Critical fondness for contextless formalism. Again, I think this charge unfounded. We need only consider his insights regarding enactment to see why: texts, he argued, are not merely the record of symbolic action but are themselves forms of action, momentarily bounded by their textness, shaped by contextual forces, and expressions of artistic judgment. “Text,” that is, is as much a verb as a noun. And certain texts, he demonstrated, are notable for the ways in which they perform their own theory; Cicero's De oratore, for example, he took to be a “cookbook that bakes its own cake.”This conception of enactment we see at work in David Zarefsky's treatment of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address. Zarefsky, preeminent among rhetorical studies in the study of the sixteenth president, shares with Leff an abiding interest in how Lincoln was able to give to his thoughts their optimal mode of expression. In the First Inaugural, Zarefsky teaches us, Lincoln exercises the generic possibilities opened to him by presenting what may be called his philosophy of republican government in its distinctly American form. He does so, however, not in the shape of a treatise but through argumentative enactment, a key example of which is found in how he seeks to slow down the deliberative judgment of the audience by slowing down the internal movement of the speech itself. Thus Zarefsky: “By coming back to the argument about secession again and again, [Lincoln] arrested the progression of the speech, halting its movement toward the final choice of peace or war. By developing separate, complete arguments, he invited consideration of the dangers of secession from multiple points of view, so that listeners would take time, not ‘hurry in hot haste’ but think ‘calmly and well’ on the subject. Lincoln's speech is an act as well as a set of propositions. The act carried out the slowing of time for which the propositions call.”Ours is not a particularly hospital time for the study of genre. A casualty of the antiformalism fashionable in much interpretive work of the 1980s and 1990s, the subject remains nevertheless a potent, if underrealized, resource for the analysis of public discourse. Leff, of course, gave to the matter considerable attention, notably in his work on Lincoln and, again, Cicero. His treatments of genre worked in large part because he understood that, contrary to the popular allegation, there was nothing inherently static or predetermined implied in its usage. Rather, he conceived of genres as a formal resource through which traditions of expression—and therefore thought—were given effect in arenas of civic action.Such a conception seems to inform Bradford Vivian's analysis of Booker T. Washington's (in)famous address at the 1895 Cotton States Exposition. For Vivian, the text of that speech offers up a case study in the act of witnessing, where the dialectics of remembering and forgetting give shape and direction to the orator's vision of social rebirth. Among the key insights he offers is that this play of opposites is managed decisively by the epideictic form itself. Far from fixing that vision within the conventional options of praise or blame, Vivian illustrates how Washington subverts the genre through tactical appeals to forget one version of the past and to champion another and so to chart a course of putatively enhanced racial relations. Whatever we may conclude about the speaker's ultimate aims and effect—Vivian leaves us no doubt as to his own views—the text itself amounts, in his words, “to a meditation on time and memory as elements of public judgment.”Time now to let our authors speak for themselves.

Circulating written drafts and conducting roundtable reviews are two important document-development activities in many work sites. Previous studies suggest that review processes are frustrating for participants and have substantial inefficiencies caused by conflicting participant purposes. This article presents two case studies of the document-review practices for clinical study reports from a large pharmaceutical company, paying particular attention to whether review efforts contributed to improvements in document quality. Findings suggest that document review did not lead to demonstrable improvement in report quality. The authors offer recommendations for improving document-review practices.

Colleges of business grapple with a perceived lack of quality in their graduates’ professional writing and recognize students’ need to learn disciplinary discourses. This article describes the motivation, design, and preliminary outcomes of a business-writing prototype at Auburn University. Writing consultants trained in business communication worked with one class on a substantial writing project. They provided conferencing and written feedback, greatly lowering the faculty workload. Student surveys and informal interviews indicate that students, faculty, and consultants were satisfied with this prototype program.

Research Problem: Studies identify peer review as an effective instructional method to improve student writing. Some teachers, however, avoid peer review, perhaps due to the workload required for assessing and correcting peer reviews. Previous studies have not proposed any method to reduce teacher workload by using an objective means to analyze the effects of peer review. Research Questions: This study assesses the degree of similarity between student essay drafts using normalized compression distance (NCD), a compression-based classification algorithm. How does peer review affect student essays, as measured by the NCD? What were the changes in essay length and holistic scores? How did students respond to peer essays? How did peer review affect students during revision? What were the NCD results? How did holistic scoring correspond to NCD results? Literature Review: Studies of pharmacists and engineers indicate that English language technical communication skills are important. Studies of peer review in language education indicate that peer comments are valuable but cultural differences and lack of confidence may impede making or using comments. Studies of NCD applied to web data, figures, and images indicate useful results. Methodology: This quantitative study used anonymous peer review and compared the results of traditional holistic scoring against a novel NCD measure. The researchers conducted the study with 35 student volunteers at a pharmaceutical university in Tokyo, Japan. The students had at least nine years of previous English instruction and previous peer-review experience. In class, students wrote an essay, anonymously reviewed a peer's essay according to instructions, then revised their own essays based on peer comments. An assessor graded the two drafts using a holistic scoring rubric. The researchers used NCD to quantify the change between drafts. Results and Discussion: Sixty percent of revisions contained more words than the originals. 51% percent of revisions received higher scores, 40% had no change, and 8.5% percent had reduced scores. Eleven percent of reviewers with low English proficiency did not identify obvious errors. Three revised essays had lower grades because the writers did not know how to incorporate peer comments. Anonymous peer review could lead to poor results where students had poor reviewing skills or did not know how to use peer comments. NCD helps teachers identify which revised essays to re-evaluate after peer review by indicating those with large quantities of changes. The study was limited by its small group of participants. Future research will examine longer essays, more participants, varied backgrounds, web delivery of NCD, and finding more factors to indicate the quality of written work to reduce teacher workload.

In this study, I use think-aloud protocol methods to determine how students respond to their teacher’s conversational and nonconversational written feedback on their writing.

The concurrent publication of The History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History—a collection of essays published over the span of three decades (1980–2005)—and Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity makes available and defines Nancy Struever's ongoing revision of the history of rhetoric and pioneering understanding of rhetoric as a mode of inquiry. In Struever's own idiom, the all-inclusive “thickness” of rhetorical inquiry—as opposed to the discriminating “thinness” of philosophy—requires some concern for a thinker's intellectual career. Indeed, taken together, the two books allow for a useful, incremental gloss of the later Struever by the earlier and vice versa. Struever authorizes this continuity in her introduction to History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, linking the last essay in her collection, on Hobbes and Vico, to the more sustained analysis of the two thinkers provided in her most recent monograph. As a whole, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity aims at illustrating “rhetoric's renewed task: the critique of philosophy's unfortunate affinities for necessity, thus determinism, that weakens, damages political thinking” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, xix). Despite this adversarial claim—and her firm awareness of the perennial quality of the quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy—Struever calls for an inside job: a rescue mission intended to liberate rhetoric by authentic rhetorical means. Among them, certainly, is a renewed intimacy between theory and practice, the “theory as practice” that Struever has called for in another work.1Struever's commitment to rhetoric as inquiry makes her wary of the academic “culture wars” that defined the linguistic turn of the late twentieth century (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, ix). One of the most fascinating aspects of Struever's career, as it emerges from these pages, is her ability to distinguish herself or, as she would prefer, to “secede” from an intellectual world whose proclivity for language hardly translated into a historical and thus profound understanding and practice of rhetoric as an investigative mode. “It is one thing to take a ‘linguistic turn’ and proclaim language as the core of politics,” Struever claims, but “it is another to proclaim the political core of language, for this generates a list of useful investigative priorities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 91).In her quest for appropriate boundaries, Struever argues against the “dysfunctional colonization of rhetoric by literary criticism,” whose adherence to Cartesian philosophy compels us to interpret metaphor “as primarily cognitive; that is, as an introspective act of a Cartesian consciousness in an isolate realm of concepts” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 1:73).2 This approach is particularly detrimental to the field of intellectual history, where the reduction of rhetoric to poetics, or worse, to a “poetic epistemology” (Paul De Man, Hayden White, etc.), leads to a self-referential focus “on texts, on products, not the events of process” (2:67). Even a “philosopher's rhetoric” such as Ernesto Grassi's, in Struever's view, remains bogged down by external “definitions” and “judgments” that often turn rhetoric into just “a techne, with some epistemic pretensions and an easy relation to theoretical axioms” (1:70). Rhetorical pragmatism should forbid “professional interference,” appeals to “empty formal relations” or to “the essentialist premises of the logical categories.” According to Struever, rather, what we need is a “rhetorician's rhetoric” devoted to restoring the discipline to its civil domain through an “account of the rhetorical premises and procedures investing specific historical initiatives and their reception” (75).So much for the pars destruens of this venture. One could argue that Struever emerges unscathed from what she views as the “fractured status of contemporary rhetorical theory” by paying heed to Vico's educational ideal. Struever's inclusive humanistic education gives her scholarship a fine edge: an equal mastery of the tools and concerns of Renaissance scholarship, intellectual history, political theory, and ancient as well as modern philosophy. More to the point, Struever shows that actual knowledge of Renaissance thought and practices can revise our fascination for Continental philosophy and protect against the pitfalls of contemporary theory's misplaced prejudice against the beginnings of modernity. A sympathetic reader of her work is bound to view the Renaissance and early modernity with the same new eyes Heidegger's unique approach to Greek antiquity afforded his students in the study of Plato and Aristotle. However, it would barely suffice to claim that Struever allows for an uncommon experience of the postmodern moment. Rather, her work thoroughly and successfully rewrites the future agenda of intellectual history and rhetorical inquiry.Struever fondly acknowledges the intellectual debts incurred to C. S. Pierce and Heidegger, from whose works she extrapolates insights that form her notions of “inquiry” and “rhetoric.” Pierce's antinecessitarian pragmatism defines the communal and temporal “constraints” of the logic of inquiry for our epoch: thought creates communal beliefs, which in turn tend to the establishment of “habits of action,” including inquiry. These premises “resonate with rhetoric's topical concerns: its engagement with a community's belief, shared opinions (endoxa) and with rhetoric's inveterate habits of activity, persuasion, as practice and goal” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 2–3). Working at a “supraindividualist” level, Pierce restores epistemology's dependence on community, the too often forsaken “locus of investigative action.” Inquiry is pragmatic: its subtilitas applicandi prevails over the correlated subtleties in knowing and interpreting (see History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 3:217–20).As for Heidegger, rhetoricians may yet learn how much they owe him. The neglected summer semester lectures of 1924 (Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie) remain, “arguably, the best twentieth-century reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 6:127). These lectures offer an “extraordinary opportunity” for those willing to share in Heidegger's recovery of the unity of “discourse” (Miteinanderreden) and “political life” (Miteinandersein) according to the originary Hellenic initiative: the “authentic life” as “political life” (106). Among the moderns, only the early Heidegger allows rhetoric to reside squarely “inside politics.” The consequences of this recovery are momentous: Heidegger aids in bypassing the “inauthentic” Platonic definition of rhetoric as a trivial art and rescues this mode of inquiry from its own “bookish retreat” as an academic discipline divested of a “precise sense of duty to action” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 133). In hindsight, one cannot but regret that Heidegger's interest in rhetoric was short lived and gave way to poetic concerns akin to those of the literary critics (to say nothing, of course, of his nefarious political allegiance).By endorsing Heidegger's prominence in “modern revivals of rhetoric” and assimilating his interpretation, Struever takes pride of place in the now long and crowded history of his reception. Yet she sits askew with respect to many other like-minded students. Like those of, for example, Gadamer or Grassi, her reading of Heidegger resonates with Vico, rhetoric, humanism, and the Italian Renaissance and early modernity. Unlike them, however, Struever does not ground her sought-for reconciliation of Heideggerianism and Romanitas in a refutation of Heidegger's anti-Platonism. Indeed, Plato seems to hold no interest for Struever.Confident of Heidegger's restoration of rhetoric to its proper domain (in the civil operations of political life), Struever embarks on an actualization of its nature as inquiry. Despite its co-originality with philosophy (for some, like Heidegger, rhetoric even takes chronological precedence) and Struever's internalist ambitions, rhetoric's vital fear of solitude asks that this discipline be defined, at least preliminarily, in confrontation. In other words, rhetoric's quarrel with philosophy is both inescapable and generative, if only the true nature of such opposition is revealed as neither a “contest of faculties” nor as an “academic rivalry” but rather as a vivifying “confrontation of two major investigative initiatives,” each characterized by its own modal allegiance: “necessity” for philosophy and “possibility” for rhetoric. Struever promotes rhetorical inquiry's kairotic infiltration and colonization of that breathing space left open by Aristotle “between partial and complete actualization,” the space of “unrealized possibilities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 6).Released into its element, rhetoric's “modal proclivity” and “revisionary capacities” are given full rein to create “counterfactual narratives of the past used as unrealized possibilities to illumine a still inadequately defined past, as well as to project future policy” (125). While this task may seem daunting, Struever's point is that it should not appear impossible. The rhetorical inquirer is not asked to rewrite history from scratch but rather to reveal “what might have been otherwise,” to indulge in exploring the “possible worlds” that open up by placing “actuality in a range of possibilities” (6). If we persist, past, present, and future may look different though strangely familiar: “The modal interest perhaps replicates defamiliarization as a critical gesture” (127).In conclusion to Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, Struever poses a pertinent question: “Where do we begin our tactics of rephrasing?” As a matter of fact, once a three-dimensional view of “possibility” is conquered and inhabited, the “where” and “when”—temporal and spatial coordinates—matter less than the “how”: that is, the appropriate attitude and strategy. In this context, the formation of strong alliances becomes of paramount importance. Thus Struever's admiration for Hobbes and Vico, who, although rarely as officially and tightly allied as in her reading, team up against political theory's dependence on the universal moral truths generated in timeless solitude by Greek philosophy. As both “topics” and “practitioners” of rhetorical inquiry, Hobbes and Vico have a lesson to teach in academic disobedience that could promote the overhaul of a political philosophy that to this day remains “fraught with fashion” and “susceptible to the quick exchange of deadening theoretical conformities” (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 19:80). “Politics demands novelty,” and Hobbes and Vico put their rhetorical “inventiveness” to the service of a “life science” that contests the “philosophical confections of ‘oughts’” (76). In this reading, the “early modernity” of Hobbes and Vico comes closer than some of these pages would suggest to the “Renaissance” of their best humanist predecessors: creative imitation, congenial alliances, and strategies of secession remain salient features of this subsequent alternative project.At the outset, the “case for the modernity of Early Modernity” rests on Hobbes's subtle appropriation of Aristotle, an appropriation that, in Struever's view, certainly glosses Heidegger's own. In this case, too, Struever's reading draws heavily on selected sources, including, the “generous frame for Renaissance inquiry” proffered by Wilhelm Dilthey's neglected Weltanschauung und Analyse. His merit is twofold. First, Dilthey manages to keep the “issues and tactics” proper to the history of rhetoric apart from those of the history of philosophy. Coming from Dilthey, the approach could only be sympathetic: humanists “are to be read as pyschologues and anthropologues” rather than as (failed) epistemologists and metaphysicians (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, 4:2). Moreover, it is to Dilthey's credit to have emphasized the Renaissance revival of Romanitas—that is, the mutually constraining relationship of individual and sovereign will (imperium).Hobbes's “roman orientation” and concern for the res publica endows his Ciceronian reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric with a pragmatic slant (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, 12). Hobbes secedes by reaching over Cartesian dualism and appropriating the “Aristotelian continuum of faculties and actions” and “definition of the soul as principle (archē) of life”: “Soul is life” (13). The interaction and continuum of faculties (sensation, perception, imagination, passion, memory, and reason) inhibit a misguided distinction between “sensitive” and “cognitive” elements and “accommodate biology” in political life. “Nature as motion, as alteration,” restlessly seeks what it lacks: “If life, then motion, if motion, then passions, if passions, then differences, if differences, then politics” (22). The goal of rhetoric as “life science” should be to guarantee movement and endlessly postpone the end products of the “rational will.” The “therapeutic” freedom of open-ended deliberation, Struever claims, has greater value than the hit-or-miss liberty of action. This is how “Hobbes follows Aristotle … in the total politicisation of rhetoric” (17). In this frame, “rhetorical pessimism”—its concern for “process” not “end”—turns into a “competence” apt to produce “not so much a list of solutions” as “an ever-expanding account of the possibilities of multiple dysfunctions.” On this point, Struever is perhaps too unflustered in admitting that “the ambitions that try to assert complete consensus” are bound to be a casualty of this new rhetorical campaign (124).Struever's sophisticated reading of Hobbes cannot be fully recounted here. It is clear, however, that the author enjoys partaking in the rowdy liberation of rhetoric her work promotes. Rhetoric's liberation in politics focuses on the motus animi that “fuels political behavior” and “drives political action” in a creatio continua insisting on “complication” (24) and “fluidity” (33). Struever's decision to read early modernity under the rubric of Dilthey's “impetuous subjectivity”—as opposed, for example, to Burckhardt's stiff “individualism”—is a productive one. But should one allow things to spin out of control? Hobbes and Vico offer a solution not by transcending the political but by extending its purview to the community and its sensus communis. A more precise sense of civil “wholeness”—not to be mistaken for philosophical “plenitude”—can be recovered in Vico's commitment to the “impersonal.” In Struever's narrative, Vico delivers what Hobbes promises: “If Hobbes is critical, Vico is hypercritical of the moralistic initiative” (49).Struever notes that Vico declares his secession at the outset of the New Science with an emphasis on “civil things” (cose civili) rather than “moral” (morali). At once, the private moral inquiry of political philosophy is forsaken together with “narratives of personal decision and heroic interventions” (42). Vico's historiography opts for an “impersonal agency”—“Achilles,” for example, “is not a proper name but a possibility of role”—that “tempers, corrects individualism as our sense of Struever's reading of and its to as a gesture” may be her in community as the place where knowledge is and Moreover, emphasis on community corrects the and of philosophy and its political At a closer if “necessity” is our only we might our will to be tightly emphasis on on the and on up to but to the of beliefs, that the range of civil actions” However, if to and it by which to that same that rhetoric or In other words, space is to the that political philosophy out of be Hobbes in Vico and still it of their for they as unrealized possibilities in Modernity” establishment and of rhetoric's true nature as inquiry the recovery of an authentic However, Struever is that her has its a author with so much of rhetoric and politics with her Struever this in her of the “academic or investigative of the most rhetorical of (History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History, Vico's well as those of thinkers such as and and thus interest in inquiry only its practice” In other words, comes up against as the is to own possibilities” (Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, Struever may be these are not as or for yet how much should a like-minded reader from a creative of and practices of Struever would an of rhetorical initiatives as opposed to of a Struever's own she is more on this If her work is a to critical the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, a early modernity is with late modernity and the At this a of rhetorical in Hobbes and Struever on of and some affinities with Vico however, as as the of Indeed, is the only unrealized possibility in Struever's a casualty of a agenda that is a with on the of or, its of and the of rhetoric's “political the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, as a with to Struever in a fine of intended to up the emphasis on in inquiry and the nature of the philosophy a point that the of the and as and a shared a of Heidegger's is now closer at Struever her of “possibility” in contemporary inquiry with a of the best and most recent rhetorical initiatives in and much the is that a rhetoric in in our of and our solitude of and of like those of Hobbes and Vico, of their A revision is bound to an of its This is even if such a as in the of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity, is as a point in the of a and career. One that History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History is not more inclusive not of Struever's past As it is, it for how Struever's could be to of its as inquiry” is critical of or persuasion, and the The of an reader can be for of its with Struever's rhetoric study or in which to be are that her work will like a literary to those to the of what Struever calls a more defined concerns as a Renaissance still this of The Renaissance early she has been a in One would not to Struever's as a to that of the her work that the is to this its Yet we a are the Renaissance and early modernity or This is a in Struever's work her in of be Struever's recent for “early modernity” less to Hobbes's and Vico's historical than to her to place herself in res and historical The of early modernity certainly more unrealized than the of the In case, a less of the should be an those who, including Struever in her own are still in the of the to this point is Struever's in Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity with respect to another Yet the she calls for one can of that to which she her The continuity and of between the humanism, and Vico's early modernity to that Struever would be on a reader of Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity has not read of her other many essays in History of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of History the “Renaissance” of and some may Struever's to up to the to rhetoric's to It is true that this approach has more often than not to a and definition of rhetoric as a rather than different of be clear, it is not the of that one but rather the that is in the a that, with Struever's and Gadamer to this vital in from which Struever is as she is from by her of of rhetoric as inquiry shows what our discipline would look like if from matter how this may its and are bound to appear just as “therapeutic” as Struever to be in to the moral from the civil rather than the other way The of by Struever to one of the most contemporary in of both its civil and Struever shows that we can the past more lesson for the

This article examines Rachel Carson’s assimilation and revision of scientific uncertainty in her sources, annotations, and drafts for Silent Spring. It argues that Carson’s emphasis on the special topos of uncertainty was not an original invention but instead was Carson’s contribution to an ongoing scientific and political conversation about uncertainty in 1962. Carson transformed this topos into a bridge across the is–ought divide in science-related policy making, using the uncertainty topos to invite the public to participate by supplying fears and values that would warrant proposals for limiting pesticide use. Carson’s adaptation of scientific uncertainty to environmental policy making provides a historical precedent for contemporary invocations of scientific uncertainty in debates surrounding global warming, nuclear power, cancer studies, and Gulf oil drilling. The methods that the authors use to trace the development of this special topos can also serve as a pattern for excavating the histories of other pivotal topoi in the rhetoric of American science and environmental policy.

research, he has interests in writing pedagogy with a focus on technology's fundamental role in cultivating ethos and precipitating varied revision processes. This is a story of a failed study. In 2007, we set out to demonstrate that Kurzweil 3000, an adaptive text-to-speech software program, would help any student revise with its read-aloud function and numerous writing tools. During the course of the study, we confronted our misconceptions about students' technology use and realized

Although blogs used in the composition classroom have most often been employed as prewriting forums or journals, this article suggests that blogs can also be used effectively as a revision tool in the later stages of writing academic research papers.

This article presents a qualitative case study of feedback practices in the first year of a two-year master's programme. Writing and feedback are viewed as contextualized cultural practices shaped by factors at macro, meso and micro level. The empirical data consists of a text corpus of students’ essays and teachers’ comments, supplemented by interviews. Initial findings showed a discrepancy between the considerable amount of comments given by the teachers and the students’ lack of use of the feedback they received. The text analysis, based primarily on Hattie and Timperley’s (2007) model of feedback revealed several features of the feedback that counteracted learning, but a major problem was unclear goals for the writing combined with a study design that did not include revision of student texts.

The present study identifies the problems that students of the Educational Science Faculty of the Complutense University of Madrid encounter when revising and rewriting texts. This process involves developing and clarifying their thoughts in order to rewrite the text which, in turn, implies not only evaluating and improving the draft but also transforming and constructing knowledge.It is assumed that the revision and rewriting process specifically consists of identifying, diagnosing and rewriting language units or fragments of text which can be improved. This involves applying cognitive operations of information management to rough drafts at different linguistic and textual levels until the final text is collaboratively produced.In conclusion, it is argued that the potential of collaborative revision and rewriting, as well as the need for writer tutoring through guides which monitor the process and encourage reflection, should be highlighted.

Legos Build the Way to Successful Process Analysis Writing, Michelle Rhodes (New Voice) Native American Elder Stories Make Descriptive Essays Easier, Pamela Tambornino (New Voice) Teaching Writing Style and Revision, Eric Bateman Dialect and Language Analysis Assignment, Amanda Hayes (New Voice) A Scaffolded Essay Assignment on Poetry, Jane Arnold (New Voice)

Although response to student writing often consumes the majority of a writing instructor’s time and energy, studies of teachers’ philosophies and practices with regard to feedback have been relatively rare in the response literature. In the study described in this article, college writing instructors from six community colleges and two four-year universities in Northern California (N=129) were surveyed, and volunteers from this group (N=23) gave follow-up in-depth interviews. In addition, each interview participant provided 3-5 samples of student texts with their own written commentary. Based on the findings, our analysis focuses on two questions: 1. How do the participants (college-level writing instructors in Northern California) perceive response to student writing? 2. In what ways might the participants’ own practices be causing or adding to their frustrations? We found that although most of the participants value response and believe it is very important, they are often frustrated and dissatisfied with the task itself and with its apparent lack of impact on student progress. Our data analyses suggest some possible underlying explanations for these teachers’ complex attitudes toward response. The discussion concludes with suggestions of ways writing instructors can adapt or focus their response practices to increase the efficiency and quality of their feedback, to reduce frustration, and to increase satisfaction with this aspect of their teaching practice.

Abstract Although scholars in the field have begun to investigate normal schools, they still represent an underexamined site. One significant aspect of normal schools that has been overlooked is the educational activities of their alumni associations. California State Normal School Alumni Association, the focus of this analysis, provided a woman-centered space where women could engage in lively, rhetorically sophisticated public discussion of issues integral to women teachers in the 1890s. This analysis demonstrates that these alumni members, like clubwomen across the nation, participated in the process of transforming conventional assumptions about women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Catherine Hobbs and Vicki Burton for their thoughtful and helpful revision suggestions. I also thank Elizabethada Wright and Martha Chang for their encouragement and willingness to read earlier versions of this essay. 2For relevant research on normal schools, please see the following: Gold, "'Where Brains Had a Chance': William Mayo and Rhetorical Instruction at East Texas Normal College, 1889–1917" (2005) and Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947 (2008), chapter 3, "Challenging Orthodoxies at a Rural Normal College"; Gray, "Life in the Margins: Student Writing and Curricular Change at Fitchburg Normal, 1895–1910" (2008); Harmon, "'The Voice, Pen, and Influence of Our Women Are Abroad in the Land': Women and the Illinois State Normal University, 1857–1899" (1995); Fitzgerald, "The Platteville Papers Revisited: Gender and Genre in a Normal School Writing Assignment" (2007) and "A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition Studies" (2001); Lindblom, Banks, and Quay, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction at Illinois State Normal University: Credentials, Correctness, and the Rise of a Teaching Class" (2007); Lindblom and Dunn, "Cooperative Writing 'Program' Administration at Illinois State Normal University: The Committee on English of 1904-05 and the Influence of Professor J. Rose Colby" (2004); Rothermel, "'Our Life's Work': Rhetorical Preparation and Teacher Training at a Massachusetts Normal School, 1839–1929" (2007) and "A Sphere of Noble Action: Gender, Rhetoric, and Influence at a Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts State Normal School" (2003). 3Here I draw on Gold's definition of rhetorical education. (See Rhetoric at the Margins, page x.) 4The five normal schools that Ogren investigated were Genesco, New York; Florence, Alabama; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and San Jose, California. 5For examples, see Gold and Rothermel. 6As Barbara E. L'Eplattenier has asserted, "We can and should begin incorporating more explicit discussion of our primary research methods into our historical research" (68). Archival materials discussed in this article are held by San Jose State University Special Collections and Archives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Materials were gathered during two week-long and one three-day visit completed between 2008 and 2010. During the time I was completing research, San Jose Special Collections' staff was processing the normal school materials. As the material becomes available, it is being listed on the Online Archive of California. 7The association was also known as the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose and the Alumni Association of the San Jose State Normal School. 8In the field of rhetoric and composition, normal school alumni associations and West Coast normal schools have received little attention. In her history of American public normal schools, Ogren includes California State Normal School among the normal schools she examined. Although clubwomen have received attention by scholars, I have been unable to locate research on normal school alumni associations by scholars of rhetoric and composition. 9This information is from an article pasted into the Minutes of the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose for June, 1895. The article, "A Successful Session" was published in The Teacher and Student 3.1 (1895).

Reviews 215 Cicero, the priority of deliberative over judicial rhetoric, the particularity of practical judgment, and its ultimately controversial nature, usefully question contemporary theorists of deliberative democracy. The trouble with "public reason, as commonly understood, is that it aims at the unanimity of all reasonable persons. If one disagrees with the verdicts of public reason, then one convicts oneself of being unreasonable, which is not usually a welcome conclusion. In sum, this is an unusually ambitious and helpful book. I would want to rewrite slightly Garsten's judgments of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. To me, their rhetoric against rhetoric served useful progressive purposes, allowing people with a diversity of opinions to live together in circumstances that seemed to suggest that only unanimity, imposed or not, could save us from religious wars brought about by the rhetoric of certainty. Each found a way of combating the rhetoric of certainty without replacing it by skepticism. Looking back, they only succeeded in their task by severely limiting the workings of practical judgment. Aristotle and Cicero were both well aware of the dangers of civil war, yet thought we could avoid them from deliberating together, not through circumscribing the power of individual practical judgment. Neither the anti-rhetorical liberals nor the Greek and Roman rhetorical theorists Garsten discusses provide much comfort to those, like Cheney, who think that Platonic allegiance to an absolute truth is the condition for freedom and democracv. Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant saw a rhetoric of certainty as the enemy of freedom, and Aristotle and Cicero constructed forms of rhetoric that separated themselves from sophistic without the need for support from belief in absolute truths. Garsten usefully makes history more complicated, and more practical. Eugene Garver Saint John's University Bjorn Hambsch, .. ganz andre Beredsamkeit': Transformationen antiker und moderner Rhetorik bei Johann Gottfried Herder (PJaetorikForschungen 17). Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007,280 pp. ISBN 3484680172 What changed in the eighteenth century? What made literature around 1700 different from writing a century later? How was literature theorized at the beginning, and how was it theorized at the end of the century? These are questions literary historians have been asking for a long time. In the literary historiography of the German-speaking countries, they have traditionally been entwined with further questions about the development of a distinctively German literature and the postulate of a breakthrough to an authentically German literary culture. 216 RHETORICA The nationalist answer to these questions was that in the course of the century the chilly foreign classicism of the preceding era was overthrown by ethnocentric proto-romanticism, and its arid rationalism by a literature of feeling and sensibility And Germany—the Germany of the Sturm und Drang—was in the vanguard. Its self-liberation from neo-classicism and rationalism propelled its literature to the forefront of European culture, leaving other nations trailing in its wake. This heroic story was elaborated in German literary histories of the later nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. A key element in the story was the claim that the eighteenth century saw the demise of rhetoric as a system of thought governing both literary production and the criticism of literature. Rhetoric, a system of rules derived from antiquity and codified in the European revival of learning, was the vehicle through which a Latinizing and classicizing culture exerted its normalizing hegemony over the native genius of the modern age. The German champion who overthrew rhetoric and liberated his own nation's culture from its tyranny was Herder. He was the founding father of modern German literature, who by liquidating the inhibiting legacy of rhetoric unburdened a whole new generation of writers and thus made possible the literary flowering of the final third of the century. The old progressive story has proved remarkably tenacious, even if its more strident nationalist elements have naturally been censored out since 1945. Much has been done to challenge and correct it. But given Herder's crucial position in the story, it is clear that no revision would be complete until his relation to rhetoric was thoroughly re-examined. It is this much-needed task that Bjorn Hambsch has set himself in his new book. He has done an...