When Chiquita Brands considered relocating its corporate headquarters, competing cities started Twitter campaigns to influence the decision by communicating directly with the chief executive officer. As he used the new microblogging channel, some of his previously private communication became public, some personal communication became professional, and some professional communication became personal. The case shows how social media can significantly affect chief executive officers’ communication by encouraging boundary crossing. Understanding the connections between the private versus public and personal versus professional rhetorical categories will help business communicators make wise choices as technology continues to introduce new social media and other channel options.

Abstract This essay analyzes three pedagogical manuals on publicity design published by the National Committee of Patriotic Societies (NCPS) during the First World War. The NCPS represented dozens of nationalistic organizations dedicated to the mission of preparedness. This essay argues that in its publicity guidebooks, the NCPS suggested that propaganda designed with a Republican aesthetic could wed the working class to the war effort. Such advice was predicated on the psychological notion that affective experiences conditioned audiences for further persuasive appeals. Examination of these manuals thus highlights the importance of psychological theories of affect to the aesthetics of propaganda.

In 2012, the World Health Organization not only condoned the creation of “super-flus” (high lethality strains with heightened transmissibility), but also urged greater dispersal of these strains among research facilities around the globe. This essay analyzes that decision process using an updated theory of logos and pathos that incorporates contemporary understandings of emotion and the human brain into prescriptions for public deliberative decision-making processes. That analysis shows that, because the decision process was necessarily executed through the affective reasoning processes of the 22 narrowly-selected individuals invited to the meeting, it could not provide an optimal decision process. The essay therefore proposes that the World Health Organization should adopt an on-line, open-access discussion process for deliberating about major decisions about world health policies. The basis for the decision in affect (pathos) rather than in ostensible logos is demonstrated by textual and contextual evidence produced by the participants.

ABSTRACT As the popular narrative has it, the modern speech discipline in the United States was born out of a concern for democracy and reason. However, this story occludes other, decidedly undemocratic, foundational ideas that were at the heart of rhetoric and oratory during the first half of the twentieth century. Given contemporary concerns with both deliberative democracy and affect theory, rhetoricians and speech teachers would benefit today from a fuller understanding of some of the undemocratic ideas that influenced the modern rhetorical renaissance. This article helps accomplish this by focusing on the work of Gustave Le Bon, whose concern with persuasion and the masses was influential on early scholars of rhetorical oratory, including James Winans, William Brigance, and James O’Neill. Indeed, it was Gustave Le Bon who popularized the notion that the masses were like a psychological crowd devoid of reason and the ability to deliberate.

Senior U.S. business executives reported that in making recent promotion decisions, they had placed a great deal of weight on candidates’ interpersonal skills, less weight on oral communication skills, and even less weight on writing skills. Older business managers ranked communication skills as more important than did the younger managers. If this age-related difference is a maturation effect, younger managers may place more emphasis on communication as they mature. If the age-related difference is a cohort effect, the relative importance of communication skills for advancement may shift as Generation X executives replace boomer executives in top-level positions at U.S. corporations.

Networks have a remarkable ability to bring people together in communities, both online and offline, but such community building is not the only possible result of network use. This article examines the case of a tagging network on Twitter, the online social networking service characterized by short messages. Although Twitter has many social features that foster interaction between users, the use of hashtags to signal the topic of a message exists outside of the site’s primary social structures, creating a unique writing environment. This article analyzes a hashtagged exchange surrounding the 2009 health care debate in the United States, examining the social features of this exchange and how participants used it to communicate about that debate. While traditional social features were certainly present within the exchange, they were not prominent or common; rather, users engaged the network properties of this exchange to make connections with other networks, drawing on a form of network power called switching. The analysis focuses on how the Twitter network’s structural features affect communication between users.

Research problem: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of two types of motivational elements-verification steps and personal stories-in an instruction manual for a cell phone targeted at senior users (between 60 and 70 years). Research questions: What are the effects of adding verification steps and personal stories to an instruction manual on: (1) Seniors' confidence in being able to work with a cell phone? (2) Seniors' motivation to work with a cell phone? (3) Seniors' effectiveness and efficiency in performing tasks, and their satisfaction with the cell phone and the instruction manual (usability)? Literature review: To optimize products and services for older users, the literature suggests that two specific motivational elements may be beneficial: (1) verification steps, which provide information at the end of procedures to allow users to check if these procedures were performed correctly. These appear to users as part of conventional procedural information in user instructions and (2) personal stories, which are anecdotes or testimonials that describe how a fictitious user succeeded in completing a procedure. Methodology: We conducted a quantitative experiment in which 59 seniors between 60 and 70 years of age participated. They performed a number of tasks with a cell phone, using a version of the instruction manual with added verification steps, or a version with additional personal stories, or a control version without motivational elements. We measured participants' confidence, their motivation, and usability by asking them to answer several questionnaires and by measuring task performance. Results and conclusions: Results support the use of verification steps or personal stories as motivational elements in user instructions as they can positively affect confidence, motivation, and usability, especially when senior users encounter setbacks.

Research problem: The purpose of the study was to explore the effects of national culture and medium type on first impression bias reduction in the context of job interview and performance appraisals. Research questions: (1) Does the evaluators' national culture affect first impression bias reduction? (2) Which medium type (text or multimedia) is more effective in reducing first impression bias? and (3) Does medium effect in reducing first impression bias vary with national culture? Literature review: The purpose of the literature review is to examine the current literature in the areas of national culture, medium type and first impression bias reduction, especially in a communication context. Researchers reviewed the discussions on first impression formation, and national culture theories, and the Media Richness Theory. For media, multimedia type was found to reduce first impression bias more than text medium type. For national culture, the literature review suggested that national culture dimensions (such as collectivism, assertiveness, and uncertainty avoidance) could possibly affect first impression bias reduction. Methodology: The researchers conducted a quantitative experiment with 407 students from a US university and a Chinese university, who majored in business-related disciplines. Researchers requested the treatment group participants to access performance bias cue. The participants then performed an initial appraisal of a manager based on Denison's leadership index. The participants then viewed the job interview of the manager, via different media, and performed the appraisal again. The performance appraisal data were collected via a website. The researchers used Analysis of Variance to analyze the data. Results and discussion: This study found that for our participants, national culture reduces first impression bias more than media. It identified that first impression bias reduction in US participants is significantly greater than that in Chinese participants, independent of media used. Regardless of national culture of media users, this study found that users using text medium were able to reduce first impression bias significantly more than users using multimedia. The implications of this study are that to reduce first impression bias in cross-cultural settings, managers and employees must adapt the channels and effort allocation for communication to national culture. Managers and researchers must understand that national culture is more important than media in reducing first impression bias. The limitations of the study were the use of student participants, and absence of national culture dimensions measurement. The study was conducted in only two national cultures. Future research could use employees as participants, measure national culture dimensions, and replicate the study in various national cultures.

Integrating and using technology in the technical communication classroom is an ongoing interest and challenge for the field. Previous work tends to focus on best practices and other types of generalized advice, all of which are invaluable to teachers. But this article encourages teachers to also pay attention to sociotechnical forces and dynamics in local settings. It explains how a cartography of affect can be useful in demonstrating how technologies become imbued with meaning and significance in particular pedagog-ical contexts. The authors illustrate the value of this mapping practice through a case study of iPad integration and use in a technical communication service course and its teacher-training course. They also provide examples of heuristic questions that can guide critical cartography projects in local settings.

This study investigates politeness strategies within meetings of designers who met face-to-face and technical communicators who met via teleconference and, more specifically, politeness strategies of existing members toward group newcomers and vice versa. Based on the results of this study, I suggest that issues of power and social distance affect politeness strategies by both groups during their initial interactions and suggest that technical communication educators should better prepare students by teaching benefits, detriments, and realities of particular linguistic politeness choices.

Research problem: Due to globalization and the increased availability of online collaboration tools, individuals are now likely to work together in settings where computers are their primary mode of communication. However, because communication characteristics are different in virtual team settings, especially when they are text based, communication problems, such as deception, arise. Recent research found that deceptive individuals in virtual teams can have a negative impact on group task performance, and it recognized that in addition to the communication medium, task and group characteristics, such as task complexity and group member experience, are important influences in these settings. However, the impacts of these additional influences have not been empirically examined. Research question: Does group members' experience with each other and task complexity affect their deception detection accuracy and task performance in a computer-mediated communication setting? Literature review: Previous literature has shown that deceivers are an important influence on computer-mediated groups. However, few studies have compared different group settings, and no studies have empirically tested the impact that task and group characteristics, such as task complexity and group member experience, have on these types of groups. Methodology: An experiment was designed to test the effect of group member experience and task complexity on computer-mediated groups facing deception. Two-hundred fifty-six undergraduates (256) were selected for the experiment. Results and conclusions: Quantitative analysis, which included multivariate analysis of variance, revealed that (a) groups performing a low-complexity task were better at detecting deception than were groups performing a high-complexity task, (b) groups with members who had experience with each other had higher task performance than did inexperienced groups, and (c) experienced groups did not have higher accuracy in detecting deception than did inexperienced groups. These results highlight the importance of understanding the different affects that task complexity and group member experience have on virtual teams facing deception, and they provide insight into what practices can help minimize the impact of interactive computer-mediated deception.

Reviews Michael S. Kochin. Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Univer­ sity Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-291-03455-3 The selections in this hook are best read as a series of loosely connected essays, situated within political science, informed bv scholarship in the rhetoric of Greek and Roman antiquity They build, in a leisurely way, toward a theory of rhetoric as an art of persuasive speech especially suited to the task of the politician—the construction of political advice. In his introduction, Michael Kochin proposes to use the diffusion of ideas in scientific communities as a model of political persuasion: "the politician seeks an understanding of policy through his or her operations within political institutions, just as the scientist seeks understanding through his or her operation wdthin political institutions. Scientific knowledge is thus created and distributed throughout the netw'ork: it is not merely diffused through it from center to periphery. I appeal to this clear case to explain the unclear case of public life: because the social structure of science is well studied, the rhetorical concepts I want to explicate are more clearly visible in it" (11). That w'ould have been an interesting book, but it is not the one Kochin ended up writing. Five Chapters forgets all about scientific communication for chapters on end, and the ideas that it develops about political communication are a very mixed bag. It is, for all that, an engaging and stimulating book. Kochin offers fix e topics for the investigation of political persuasion: character (or ethos), action (or stasis), things (the creation of facts), nothing (communication that maintains relationships) and art (specifically rhetoric as a means of understanding artful speech). Issues of argument and affect are dismissed in the introduction: political persuasion, according to Kochin, depends on the credibility of the speaker and the telling power of facts, and emotion is "a junk category" (15). Both the topics that Kochin has chosen and those he has left aside offer a reader fair warning that the ride ahead will not be a trot through familiar territories. The chapters on character, action, things, and nothing approach issues of political persuasion from different directions. Character takes up the Aristotelean traits of knowledge, benevolence, and virtue, treated here under the topics of competence, identification, and empathy. The chapter also Khetorica, Vol. XXXI, issue 4, pp. 445-464, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . T2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.4.445. 446 RHETORICA discusses the ways in which political leaders "empty" their personalities of idiosyncracies, the better to reflect common values (40). He critiques theories of ethos that see it as artificial, connecting Aristotle's rhetorical ethos to his political ethos. And he introduces a theme that will connect these four chapters: any program that favors "measures, not men" as the focus of political discourse fails to take into account the public's need to judge measures by the men who advocate them. The chapter on action is an extended reading of Demosthenes' "On the Crown," taken as a model for political advocacy in its orientation to the future, and to the possible. Kochin insists that the Athenian audience's approval of the speech is an extension of its judgment of Demosthenes as a competent, benevolent counselor who represents the collective interests of the Athenians. Judgments based on motives or on the results of actions are necessarily flawed, incomplete, or irrelevant. Kochin illustrates this analysis with examples from American political discourse, including the first of many positive citations of Calvin Coolidge, a president I do not ordinarily associate with rhetorical skill. The chapter on things is one of the strongest in the book. Kochin de­ velops an account of enargeia in a discussion of political speeches that deploy facts, statistics, vivid narratives, and images. The range of examples, from Begin to Coolidge (again!) is impressive; Kochin connects the persuasive force of...

The use of online course or learning management system (LMS) tools proliferates as writing instruction grows online along with administrative concerns to improve teaching efficiencies and program assessment. While many institutions use the template feature in LMS systems (e.g. Blackboard Vista) to generate a location for teacher resources, some institutions are using LMS tools to standardize course content, delivery, and pedagogy to varying degrees. However, digital literacy issues that affect both teachers and students can negatively impact teaching and learning with LMS tools, especially in Web-based settings. It is important to understand how such tools may or may not be used effectively in standardizing writing pedagogy, particularly how designers’ unfamiliarity with course content and their own and their students’ inexperience with the tools can negatively affect pedagogy and learning with such tools. I describe a specific example of problems encountered within an extreme form of standardization in a Web-based writing course delivered via WebCT/Vista, identify implications of such standardization, and suggest considerations that educators should be aware of in their efforts to standardize writing pedagogy through LMS tools.

After reviewing the past ten years of TETYC’s “What Works for Me,” I claim these pieces offer writing instructors much more than mere teaching tips; rather, they evidence a genre in a fraught relationship to academic discourse, a genre that asks readers to consider how the ways we write the classroom affect composition as a field, our teacherly selves, and the students in our classrooms.

Educators focused on community literacy and public engagement have access to a unique critical platform from which larger social issues that impact us both as a whole and on very personal levels are open to exploration. Being particularly situated to have significant impact on community, literacy work in this area may require uncommon pedagogical strategies. Based on its comprehensive focus on sustainability, ecological literacy, sociopolitical factors that affect communities, and a multitude of other factors that underpin social injustice, ecopedagogy may be uniquely positioned to offer a more holistic view than other composition pedagogies such as place-based education and ecocomposition.

Research problem: The purpose of the study is to understand how affective reactions to color impact learning attitudes and outcomes in a computer-mediated learning environment. Research question: How do color differences change affective processes and outcomes in computer-mediated communication? Literature review: Several previous studies exploring particular characteristics and learning in computer-mediated environments influenced the review of the literature. The literature on color psychology indicates that color preferences and affective reactions to color can influence behaviors and attitudes. The literature on goal achievement motivation posits that affective dispositions influence goal orientation, motivation, and individual outcomes. The literature on affect infers that affective reactions are responses to events, and these reactions influence attitudes and behaviors. The current study draws on these prior studies to examine affective reaction to color and learning outcomes in a computer-mediated learning environment. Methodology: We conducted a quasiexperimental study with 79 participants, who listened to a visual presentation lecture with either blue or yellow background and then completed a survey on their affective reactions, learning attitudes, and outcomes. Results and discussion: The results of our study indicate that color is not neutral and may influence learning attitudes and outcomes and, hence, the color of computer technology interface design can influence learning outcomes. Practitioners and academics must take people's affective reactions to color into account in designs and studies of visual information presentations. The sample size and the focus on two color hues (yellow and blue) may have some limitations on the conclusions and generalizability of this study. Future studies should examine more color hues and color saturation to further our understanding of affective reactions to colors and consequent impact on attitudes and behavioral outcomes.

As a composition historian working with nineteenth-century American literacy artifacts, I have become increasingly aware of how particular keywords have come to dominate our histories. Specifically, I have noticed how the keyword that most resonates with my research—literacy—has been eclipsed and to some extent erased by the dominance of the keyword “rhetoric” in our history writing over the last decade. Why has this happened? How does this trend affect the materials historians look for and the questions they ask? How do our keywords modulate the voices of our artifacts? How do our keywords determine the uses we claim for history?I have surveyed book-length American composition histories published between 1999 and 2010 in order to describe the major trends shaping the kinds of histories we are producing to see if we can identify gaps and fissures, the roads not taken, in relation to these major trends. The preliminary thesis I put before you is that we are in danger of closing off certain types of materials and questions because our histories are increasingly dominated by the keyword “rhetoric.”

Reviews 113 to emergent communities, heretical selves: mystics or Ranters, for instance. Instead, lapses into heretical selfhood are signaled by the emergence of affect, which requires subvention by the inarticulate, as if emotions had to wait for the inchoate in order to appear. For example, as both character and play, Hamlet "foregrounds" the inarticulate as a "cultural construct," as a "means by which 'feeling' could surface," and as a principle of inter-subjective vulnerability (176). Perceiving this counterintuitive pulsion at work, seeing the inarticulate in a "more positive light," requires an exploration of a Tudor "aesthetics of feeling," Mazzio contends (180). Nowhere does she offer such an aesthetics. Rather, she relies on contemporary literary theory for many of her historical arguments, and readers are frequently directed to Eve Sedgwick or Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy or Hegel in lieu of evidence from the period. Yet The Inarticulate Renaissance succeeds: Mazzio focuses our attention on the suitability of English for worship and ceremony, scripture and poetry, on the fortunes of theatrical mumbling and print polemic, on audiences as 'assemblies,' above all on what Tomkis in Lingua calls a "tunes without sense, words inarticulate." However, in some ways, Mazzio's inquiry is reminiscent of the decline of rhetorical engagement late in the period she studies, of the ways in which past thinkers distrusted rhetoric as a guide to both speech and practice, of the ways oratio was emptied of ratio. In this ambitious, learned work, Mazzio is equally wary: a focus on the inarticulate is symptomatic of distrust. But it also signs a trend in contemporary scholarship. Boredom, ennui, anxiety, and now the inarticulate are experiencing a renaissance, in part because current perceptions of (early) modernity are conditioned by its failures, by its perils not its promises. One promise was transparency—of both method and communication—and 'words inarticulate' court opacity. But as 'feeling' rather than 'telling,' as a rhetoric that develops and refines a deepening commitment to pathos, inarticulation necessarily assumes the eloquence of the age. Stephen Pender University of Windsor Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xi + 290 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-18019-9 Jeremy Engels, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010. xi + 316 pp. ISBN 9780087013980-2 114 RHETORICA Sandra M. Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. x + 271 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-31129-6 Jennifer R. Mercieca, Founding Fictions. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. xi + 274 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1690-7 In 1690, as the Enlightenment was just glimmering on the English hori­ zon, John Locke calumniated rhetoric (Essay Concerning Human Understand­ ing III.10). In 1790, as the Enlightenment's dusk settled over Koenigsberg, Immanuel Kant similarly decried the art (Critique of Pure Judgment 1.53). Though a century and a continent apart, they expressed a common disdain for rhetoric. Notably absent from this account are the American continents. Recent scholarship, however, finds that the American Enlightenment yielded a wealth of innovative rhetorical practice, placing public argument at the heart (or rather in the agora) of healthy democracy. Brian Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) exemplifies a now common effort to catalogue the British and European hostility to rhetoric while lauding United States thinkers, such as James Madison, who celebrated free public debate. If the Euro­ pean Enlightenment philosophically counseled, sapere aude, then the Amer­ ican Enlightenment pragmatically retorted disputare aude. Four recent books, two by historians and two by rhetoricians, more fully chronicle this prac­ tical response to the philosophical penchant, a rhetorical contrast with the philosophes' critical Enlightenment. Sandra Gustafson's Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early Amer­ ican Republic charts the course of U.S. "deliberative democracy," which "emphasizefs] the political power of language and advancejs] a commit­ ment to dialogue and persuasion as the best means to resolve conflicts and forge a progressive tradition" (220). She highlights dueling conciliatory and prophetic traditions of public address. The conciliatory tradition dominated the United States circa 1815-1835. Paying particular attention to political and pulpit oratory, Gustafson contrasts the Hellenistic William...

ABSTRACT This article focuses on attunement as a concept that intervenes in the question of how we learn to act ethically in the face of radical alterity. I use Jacques Derrida's concept of a “contraband” tonality and Gilles Deleuze's discussion of “haptic” tone to argue that tonality resonates with dimensions of affect and desire that cannot be accommodated through familiar interpretive acts of listening, hearing, and seeing. Because we are unable to fully understand and account for the tonality of others, the article suggests, we need to approach attunement as a disposition or ethos that prolongs our engagement with the alterity of others' marks and noises. Repositioned as living practice, attunement can redefine ethical action by drawing attention to the material, physical, and emotional challenges of preserving what Diane Davis calls a “radically hospitable opening to alterity.”

Scott Welsh is likely to elicit a sigh of relief from the many academics who struggle with what, if any, public intellectual persona they should adopt. Welsh (2012) argues against a broad swathe of mostly left-leaning rhetorical scholars that the academic's democratic duty is adequately discharged by providing suitably ambivalent rhetorical resources for others to use in their political struggles. For Welsh, following Slavoj Žižek (2008), the scholar's first obligation is to “enjoy your symptom”—that is, to demonstrate in one's discursive practice the problematic nature of trying to claim epistemic privilege in a society ostensibly of equals. The main conceptual difference between Welsh's and my own conception of academics as public intellectuals is that he understands the rhetor's imperative to deploy “all the available means of persuasion” collectively, whereas I understand it distributively.Thus, Welsh calls for a very tolerant attitude toward the exact rhetorical register in which academics engage with the public, calling on Kenneth Burke (1969) and Terry Eagleton (1990) as witnesses to the essential unpredictability and “polyvalence” of discursive uptake. In short, given sufficient time and space, anything said in any way in any context might just work, from which Welsh concludes that we should not be too judgmental of how our colleagues approach the public intellectual's role. Moreover, there may be something interesting to say—via Žižek—about the nature of the anxiety generated by the status of academics as public intellectuals. In contrast, I believe that each public intellectual is obliged to exploit the distinct communicative resources afforded by all the media. All public intellectuals should aspire to be “the compleat rhetor.” Of course, what can be conveyed in a heavily referenced tome cannot be conveyed in a three-part television series, let alone a live radio broadcast. However, the public intellectual is willing and able to play variations on her ideas across these different media. Even in our own time, despite the problems I discuss here, academics—three quite different but equally effective exemplars would be Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, and Niall Ferguson—have risen to the challenge.To be sure, the performance standards of public intellectual life may well exceed the abilities and dispositions of most academics, whose communicative comfort zone ends with their scholarly peers. I allude to what Thorstein Veblen called “trained incapacities,” which are often reinforced by the constitution of the academic field. More specifically, I have in mind not the early nineteenth- century ideal Humboldtian academic who aspired to do research worth teaching. That is very much in the mold of the public intellectual, and its spirit still imbues many liberal arts colleges (Fuller 2009, chap. 1). Rather, I mean, in the first instance, a phenomenon to which Veblen himself was responding in the early twentieth-century—namely, the rise of graduate education and the fetishization of the PhD, which effectively disabled academics' impulse to communicate with the larger society by structuring career advancement in terms of an increasingly specialized community of fellow researchers. Thus, the academic shifted from broad- to narrowcaster. However, the early twenty-first century has imposed an additional layer of difficulty, as the decline in tenurable posts has exposed academics more directly to market pressures, rendering them more biddable to fashion, which in turn erodes the sense of intellectual autonomy that the specialist researcher still retained.Given this trajectory, it is perhaps not surprising that Welsh restricts his discussion of the prospects for the academic as public intellectual in terms of the likely uptake of one's message, which in his view might as well be sent in a bottle. For a paper whose title draws attention to political agency, remarkably little is said about what if any obligation the academic might have in trying to control the public reception of his message. Here I would put the stress on “trying,” since there is no guarantee that the academic will be received in a way that he finds satisfying. However, a key moment in democratic education occurs precisely during the negotiation of this sort of potential misunderstanding, a negotiation that may be likened to what happens when theory and practice are drawn closer together. In this respect, I find Welsh's appeal to the early Habermas (1973) misguided because—like his evil twin Allan Bloom (1987)—Habermas presumes that academics would be unduly authoritarian were they to try to dictate policies based on their research. The possibility of the public character of academic rhetoric becoming overbearing was perhaps a legitimate concern for Max Weber in the early twentieth century, when universities were still very elite institutions, but the accelerated expansion of university construction since the 1960s has rendered such a concern moot. The increase in access to academic channels of discourse—from student enrollments to journal publications—has effectively diluted academic authority. Indeed, the argument has been made that external funding, given its reliable scarcity, may be eclipsing publications as the main market signal of academic merit (Lamont 2009). More to the point, there would have been no need for Richard Dawkins to hold a chair in the “public understanding of science” were there a serious chance that “the scientific establishment” might soon succeed in dominating public opinion about the nature of reality.If anything, this implied fragmentation of epistemic authority—which I have dubbed “Protscience” after the Protestant Reformation (Fuller 2010)—has only increased, as the internet empowers the modestly educated layperson to find a “second opinion” on virtually any topic of academic concern. In this respect, progress in the development of smart search engines could easily put the cautious, even-handed, “value-neutral” academic out of business. More difficult to automate is a consistent style of response across a broad range of issues that marks the autonomy of the public intellectual voice. We are much more familiar with the style of, say, Voltaire or Sartre than with the substance of what they said—and this is not because they did not say substantive, often rather unexpected, things. But their style marked them as thinking through things for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others. From that point of view, academic discourse can look like bad acting, where the presence of a script is all too evident in the performance. And here I mean not the literal presence of the written text—which is bad enough—but the academic's tendency to declare her reliance on others' work too loudly like a proud ventriloquist's dummy. The proper term for this stance is “normal science” (Kuhn 1970). It makes for a poor reading and listening experience.Thus, the rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums, relatively scarce access to which is matched by a large appreciative audience. This has meant that, for quite a while now, academics have had to compete with such “media elites” as professional writers, journalists, and other “celebrities” for prime-time television exposure (Debray 1981). Chomsky, Dawkins and Ferguson have risen to the challenge, each in his own way. Against this backdrop, Welsh's apparent satisfaction with academics simply providing Habermas-style “resources” for citizen deliberation appears profoundly unambitious. At the same time, though, given the erosion of the academic's intellectual autonomy in our time, treating one's own words as bottled messages may offer prudent career advice for people unsure of who will be writing their next paycheck. But Welsh does not seem to want to argue from such a position of abject weakness. In that case, he needs to come to grips more directly with the cognitive significance of entertainment as a modus operandi in public intellectual life—not just now but perhaps always.“Entertainment” is an early seventeenth-century English coinage designed to capture an abstract sense of tenancy, as in the case of the king who keeps a poet or playwright on retainer solely for purposes of amusement but whose proximity ends up exerting influence over his political judgment. It was just this sense of the term that had led Plato to regard the performing arts as potentially subversive of good governance. Moreover, as Adriano Shaplin (2009) has recently dramatized, Hobbes shared similar suspicions about the English court's fascination with the theatricality of experimental demonstrations, the details of which form the basis of the most influential monograph in the historical sociology of science in recent times (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). The fear evoked—or opportunity afforded—by entertainment is that after the final curtain is drawn, the audience might themselves continue acting in the spirit of the performance they had observed, effectively turning “real life” into an extension of the stage or, as Hobbes feared, the lab. It was precisely to decrease the likelihood of this happening that Aristotle stressed the cathartic function of the well-formed play: the most artful way to highlight drama's fictional character is to present its action as completely self-contained, which means that by the end all the plotlines have been resolved. Without such resolution, the line between fact and fiction may be easily blurred in an imaginatively inflamed audience. From that standpoint, the public intellectual clearly aims to violate Aristotle's strictures on good drama by wishing her brand of entertainment to outlast the experience of the actual performance so as to carry over as a motive force in the audience members once they have left the theater.My sense of entertainment's intellectually empowering character goes very much against the grain of Neil Postman's (1985) influential demonization of its alleged narcotic effects. To be sure, Postman was fixated on television, which he understood as Marshall McLuhan's absorbing yet noninteractive “cool” medium that, in Brave New World fashion, effectively sucked the life out of its viewers, a process that had been recently sensationalized by David Cronenberg in the film Videodrome (1983). But rather than the vampire, Postman might have considered the virus as the model of entertainment's modus operandi, whereby the host is not so much annihilated as simply contaminated by the guest organism. This then gets us back to the problem that originally concerned Plato, one which Antoine Artaud's (1958) “theatre of cruelty” converted into a virtue: it is not that the poets send the audience into a dream state but that the audience might enact those dreams in “real life.” The normative limits of “reality television” provide an interesting contemporary benchmark on this issue. Whereas television producers and audiences are enthusiastic about Dragons' Den styled programs (called Shark Tank in the United States) that cast entrepreneurship as a talent competition, similarly styled proposals to stage political elections have been met with the sort of disapproval that would have pleased Plato (see, e.g., Firth 2009).Against this backdrop, Welsh gets my critique of Dewey exactly wrong. Of course, Dewey was trying to be a public intellectual. In fact, the monumental level of his failure reflects the tremendous effort he put into the task. But in the end, his approach to the task was profoundly nonentertaining. He simply tried to apply his ideas without considering how the medium might affect the message. By nearly all accounts, Dewey's many public appearances and popular books over a very long career were watered down versions of the distractedly presented abstractions that marked his more technical performances. He was and is boring. Although Dewey saw the classroom as the gateway to a more democratic society, his real talent lay in taking advantage of the classroom's artificially well-bounded character to treat it as a laboratory for generating democratic sentiments. While hardly a trivial achievement, like many other laboratory-based experiments, it did not generalize. Perhaps Dewey's best chance in the public intellectual sweepstakes was taken by his followers behind the so-called forum movement, which in interwar America aimed to institutionalize deliberative democracy in the form of discussion groups in local churches, clubs, union halls, and community centers. William Keith (2007) has provided a sophisticated, critically sympathetic account of this phenomenon, which attracted the support of the reformist wing of the emerging speech communication scholarly community, who believed that in an era of mass democracy, the paramount concern of public discourse should focus on how to forge a purposeful consensus. In that context, they found classical debate practices inappropriately combative and elitist and therefore not suited to this purpose.However, the forum movement failed for reasons that would have been obvious to Dewey's nemesis, Walter Lippmann, journalism's answer to Plato. Dewey had imagined that the twentieth century would bring an end to the hereditary elites who had inhibited the populace from realizing their potential for self-governance. In many respects, the debate culture was an atavism of that predemocratic past in its casting of intellectual exchange as a confrontation of rhetorical virtuosos, observed admiringly by a mass audience. The big worry shared by Dewey and Lippmann as they debated in books and the pages of The New Republic in the 1920s was that the rise of broadcast media, especially radio, would facilitate the replacement of those old elites with a new, media-savvy breed of demagoguery that by the 1930s had come to be associated with fascist rhetoric (Schudson 2008). In this context, the forum movement was a collectively self-applied immunization strategy, as social peers—often neighbors—helped each other articulate their beliefs and desires, ideally in a way that enabled them to have a common voice in the face of the various claims increasingly pressed on them by competing ideologues and, for that matter, advertisers.Nevertheless, Keith (2007) concludes that the forum movement fell afoul of market-driven entertainment imperatives, as had such nineteenth-century precursors as the lyceum movement, which popularized New England transcendentalism, and the Chautauqua movement, which effectively spawned a self-improvement industry that has only grown with time. Big-name speakers were booked to draw large audiences, but then what passed for “discussion” was either respectful “Q&A” sessions or uncritical enthusiasm. In neither case was the original egalitarian and grassroots spirit of the movement truly maintained, a fatal structural deformation, considering the forum movement's aims. With hindsight we can say that the movement's boosters underestimated the extent to which people's beliefs and desires are constructed rather than discovered, especially once they enter relatively neutral zones of articulation. In other words, Dewey's followers were wrong to presume that some innate sense of collective reason came to light once external barriers were removed. Rather, it may be that the very possibility of “collective” thought and action is predicated on the open-ended character of individuals' ends. In short, people are by nature biddable.Lippmann took that prospect as a practical proposition, which is why he called for state licensing of commercial advertising even before Bernays (1928), the bible of modern public relations, had adumbrated advertising's likely long-term significance to “engineer consent.” Whatever else one might say about Lippmann, he took the normative character of the public intellectual's task seriously—albeit understood as guardian of the public interest, indeed often against the public's own instincts. While I do not share Lippmann's construal of the public intellectual's task, it is one that came to grips with the power of entertainment, an important of legacy of which was his own persona as the calming presence of the all-knowing insider. In contrast, the other successful twentieth-century U.S. public intellectual that I cite in “The Public Intellectual as Agent of Justice” (2006), Reinhold Niebuhr, played to the entertainment function more directly by extending the prophetic strain of Christian preaching into a call to arms to fight both poverty at home and communism abroad. His righteous politicized persona has been arguably—and perhaps even self-consciously—reinvented for a by chap. an of Welsh's to with the and is the of Slavoj Žižek as an intellectual for understanding the political position of the The not in the sort of light that Žižek which is simply a play of to scholars as members of society are in the of yet by they are to of which taken an to in many “all both and Welsh Žižek to the end, for and concludes that this is and in practice a of then for scholars to to with the that from a that with a position that is at once in but not of But this is no more than a of the of and, more the experience of that dubbed the of in modern from this is is is Welsh's of Žižek for these while a and clearly very well educated in and is not a in Welsh's Žižek does not hold a academic he and is a and the of academic life—not to with 2008). all of his while relatively academic in are through commercial with old New This means that his work is for its of on the basis of academic which of of and However, over time such has a as Žižek with his which in turn reflects a between and In short, Žižek the people Welsh claims to be is that were Žižek to apply his own of he would not himself in the position of the in the of but rather the public intellectual in the of Indeed, Žižek has been with I to by academics, with a in the public intellectual the problem of academics the of public intellectuals is even than that of academics trying to into the public intellectual

Abstract Information and communication technology for development (ICTD) involves using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve the well-being of people in resource-constrained environments. Because ICTD projects involve crafting technical information and the ICTs that convey it, ICTD involves challenges familiar to technical communicators, such as balancing stakeholder interests and building credibility necessary to influence stakeholders. This article presents how trust and credibility affect ICTD projects, describing implications for development contexts and for distributed work environments. Keywords: credibilitydistributed workinformation and communication technologyresource-constrained environmentstrust ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author would like to thank the project stakeholders who participated in this research, as well as the Microsoft Research Technology for Emerging Markets research group, M. Haselkorn, B. Kolko, C. Lee, and K. Toyama for their support of this work. Additional informationNotes on contributorsRebecca Walton Rebecca Walton is an assistant professor at Utah State University. Her research explores how human and contextual factors affect the design and use of information and communication technologies in resource-constrained environments.

In this essay, I propose a concerted effort to begin devising a theory and pedagogy of failure. I review the discourse of failure in Western culture as well as in composition pedagogy, ultimately suggesting that failure is not simply a judgement or indication of rank but is a relational, affect-bearing concept with tremendous relevance to composition studies.

Several government agencies are seeking quality improvement in environmental policy documents by asking for the implementation of Plain Language (PL) guidelines. Our mixed-methods research examines whether the application of certain PL guidelines affects the comprehension and perceptions of readers of environmental policy documents. Results show that the presence of pronouns affects inferential comprehension of environmental impact statement summaries (EIS summaries), but that the effect varies with the reader's education level. Further, headings in question phrasing affect a reader's perception of familiarity and reliability of EIS summaries. A reader's perceptions of EIS summaries and attitudes toward the organizations creating the documents are also affected by overall design features. PL guidelines on the use of pronouns and question headings are not fully supported by our research and need further validation with regard to comprehension. This article ends with a call for further research.

The aim of this study was to analyze the consequences of emotion during narrative writing in accordance with Hayes’s model. In this model, motivation and affect have an important role during the writing process. Moreover, according to the emotion-cognition literature, emotions are thought to create interferences in working memory, resulting in an increase of cognitive load. Following Cuisinier and colleagues, fourth and fifth graders were instructed to write autobiographical narratives with neutral emotional content, positive emotional content, and negative emotional content. The results did not indicate an effect of emotional instructions on the proportion of spelling errors, but they did reveal an effect on the text length. However, a simple regression analysis showed a correlation between working memory capacity and the number of spelling errors in the neutral condition only. The potential influence of cognitive load created by emotion on the writing process is discussed.

Research problem: For knowledge workers, such as IT professionals, the ties within their social network are a major channel for communicating the requisite knowledge and information. While prior studies tended to favor higher network centrality (i.e., larger volume of network ties), in this study, the researchers argue that centrality can reduce communication efficiency if the diversity of the ties is low. Research question: Which characteristic of communication ties, volume or diversity, has more influence on knowledge workers' performance? Literature review: Using social network analysis (SNA) as the theoretical framework, a review of the literature shows that social network ties have important performance implications because they can enhance an individual's access to valued resources. Studies have also examined the performance impact of “hindrance network centrality,” or how frequently a person is described by other network members as a hindrance to their performance. However, current research has overlooked the possible negative communication consequences of centrality in regards to redundant information, which may negatively affect job performance. Methodology: The current study employs a quantitative approach, using the standard SNA method of a “name generator” questionnaire to collect network data. Participants were 98 people in the IT department at a large defense company. We identified 3905 relationships and analyzed them with the UCINET software. Subsequently, social network variables, as well as performance and human capital variables were analyzed in logistic regressions. Results and discussion: Results showed a significant relationship between constraint, a measure of tie diversity, and performance. Centrality, the measure of tie volume, however, was not significantly related to performance. Our findings about the volume versus diversity of communication ties have important implications for professional communicators in the age of fast-growing social network media. A limitation of our study is that we approximated communication ties with social network links. We suggest that future studies further validate our findings by using a more direct measure of communication ties.

Research problem: When dealing with procedural documents, individuals sometimes encounter comprehension problems due to poor information design. Researchers studying the use and understanding of procedural documents, as well as technical writers charged with the design of these documents, or usability specialists evaluating their quality, would all benefit from tools allowing them to collect real-time data concerning user behavior in user-centered studies. With this in mind, the generic software Technical Instructions Processing-Evaluations and eXperiments Editor (TIP-EXE) was designed to facilitate the carrying out of such studies. Research questions: Does document design, and specifically the matching or mismatching of the terms employed in a user manual and on the corresponding device, affect the cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of procedural instructions? Can we use a software tool like TIP-EXE to assess the impact of document design on the use and understanding of a procedural document? Literature review: A review of the methods employed to study either the use of procedural documents or their cognitive processing, and to evaluate the quality of these documents, revealed the lack of tools for collecting relevant data. Methodology: TIP-EXE software was used to set up and run a laboratory experiment designed to collect data concerning the effect of document design on the performance of a task. The experiment was conducted with 36 participants carrying out tasks involving the programming of a digital timer under one of three conditions: “matching instructions,” “mismatching instructions,” “mismatching instructions + picture”. Based on a click-and-read method for blurred text, TIP-EXE was used to collect data on the time the users spent reading the instructions, as well as the time spent handling the timer. Results and discussion: Results show that “matching instructions” (when the terms employed in the user manual match the terms on the device) enhance user performance. This instructional format results in less time spent consulting the instructions and handling the device, as well as fewer errors. This research shows that TIP-EXE software can be used to study the way in which operating instructions are read, and the time spent consulting specific information contained therein, thereby revealing the effects of document design on user behavior.

Based on interviews with students who had recently returned to school, this essay demonstrates the need for, challenges of, and ways to respond to the writing anxiety many adults bring with them back to school.

The author argues that within the classroom, an affective response to Holocaust literature can be blended with an analytical approach. She demonstrates how this dual perspective is possible by examining a fragmentary song found on a child who was murdered at Majdanek.

At a time when accusations of American ignorance and anti-intellectualism are ubiquitous, this article challenges problematic assumptions about intellectualism and proposes an expanded view of intellectualism. It is important to recognize and to challenge narrow views of intellectualism because they not only influence public perceptions of and engagement with education and intellectualism, but they also affect what and how we teach in U.S. schools and aid in institutionalizing social hierarchies that privilege the knowledge, learning sites, and educational experiences of the cultural elite. To demonstrate the benefits of revising our views of intellectualism, I draw upon my observations of and interviews with adult learners participating in GED-preparation writing workshops.

Upon entering college composition courses, students often report a dislike for writing. Because researchers report that writing anxiety may be linked to high-stakes writing exams, a study of graduates of New York high schools was conducted to investigate whether the state's Regents Comprehensive Examination in English shapes attitudes or assumptions about writing. For this study, first-year writing students responded to a prompt that asked them to reconstruct an essay they wrote for the exam, as well as their feelings before, during, and after writing the essay. Evidence suggests that most students strongly dislike taking the exam. Preparing for and responding to it may impart lessons contradictory to objectives of many first-year writing programs. Most students report critical engagement with the test question but suppress critical commentary in their official responses so as to please the imagined graders, whom most students conflate with the specific audience posited by the question. The study indicates that open-form, experimental writing about standardized writing exams at the outset of the semester may help students transform resistance to writing from a general feeling to an attitude associated with a particular memory and, thus, may help clear the air for the work of college-level writing.

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.

Research Problem: Time is of the essence in technology-mediated teams. However, research has been inconclusive about the impact of team participation on outcomes. A possible reason can be found in the temporal dimension; particularly, we refer to the time points examined in relation to the entirety of the period. Indeed, we can find research attention on initial participation (IP) in fields such as social psychology. IP refers to the contributions of team members during the earlier half of the team's lifespan. Comparable efforts are in want in information systems contexts where the relevancy and saliency of IP is no less. Research Questions: Does IP affect outcomes of technology-mediated teams? Do team size and task type affect IP in technology-mediated teams? Literature Review: Based on a review of literature that includes group development, information overload, and integrative complexity, we discover an IP paradox. More intense IP, in terms of amount and equality, could decrease outcomes, namely, task performance, team learning, and outcome satisfaction. Moreover, two cornerstone boundary conditions of teamwork, team size and task type, could affect IP. Methodology: A quantitative field experiment with 49 technology-mediated learning teams that involved 245 participants was conducted. These teams used a wiki to complete a task in a course in higher education. Data were collected from a pretest survey, posttest survey, and electronic records of the wiki (editcount and wordcount). Qualitative data from participants were also sought for the sake of triangulation. The data were analyzed using partial least squares. Results and Discussion: The results show that higher IP amount and equality decreased task performance and outcome satisfaction as predicted. However, higher IP amount did not significantly affect team learning although this was significant in the hypothesized direction for IP equality. As for team size, larger team sizes increased IP amount but lowered IP equality. Task type did not affect IP amount and contrary to our prediction, multiple solution tasks instead of single solution tasks decreased IP equality. Nevertheless, the findings support the notion that higher IP leads to detrimental outcomes. This suggests the importance of coordination mechanisms in the initial period especially in time-limited teams. For instance, knowledge leaders and facilitators can step up to organize and reduce information overload during the initial period to ensure an easier time synthesizing in the later period and better task performance. The current work was limited in terms of using only objective data for participation amount and equality. Future research could involve a combination of perceptual and objective data as well as other types of participation constructs, such as task related, norms and rules, and socioemotional acts for a richer insight into the IP paradox.

204 RHETORICA trattandoli come fígli. Gli viene proposto, come figlio di Dio, di imitare la condotta di quest'ultimo. É «la legge della liberta» . Liberta per il servizio di Dio, sancito nell'alleanza, espresso nella vita e nel culto. Dall'esodo trae origine anche il rito pasquale. Nelle epoche successive, i figli di Israele avrebbero via via composto e cantato i sette salmi della «lode di Pasqua» (Sal 113-118) e della «grande lode» (Sal 136), poi ripresi nella celebrazione famillare della festa. Attraverso «gli inni alia liberta» la parola delLuomo e quella di Dio entraño in un reciproco scambio, costitutivo del rito. E' utilmente premesso al volume un essenziale Lexique des termes techniques (pp. 17-19), sulla terminología retorica piú frequentemente utilizzata dall'A. Sommario Prefazione. I. II dono della liberta. 1. II passaggio del mare (Es 14). 2. II Canto del mare (Es 15). II. La legge di liberta. 3. II Decálogo del libro delLEsodo (Es 20,2-17). 4. II Decálogo del libro del Deuteronomio (Dt 5,621 ). 5. Perché due Decaloghi? III. Inni alia liberta. 6. «Chi é come il Signore nostro Dio?» (Sal 113). 7. «Che hai tu, mare, per fuggire?» (Sal 114). 8. «Israele, confida nel Signore!» (Sal 115). 9. «lo credo» (Sal 116). 10. «Lodate il Signore, tutti i popoli!» (Sal 117). 11. «La destra del Signore é esaltata!» (Sal 118). 12.«Si, per sempre la sua fedeltá» (Sal 136). Francesco Pieri Facoltd Teológica dell'Emilia-Romagna, Bologna Olmsted, Wendy. The Imperfect Friend. Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. xi+293 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9136-9 Interdisciplinary interest in emotion as a critical category of thought has led to a range of scholarship discussing the ways in which affect permeates all discourse, shaping identity and behavior within private, professional, and public spheres. Wendy Olmsted's book, The Imperfect Friend, contributes to this conversation by exploring the rhetorical management of emotion evident in early modern texts. Focusing on the attempts of friends to persuade each other, Olmsted's exploration of the "gentle strand in the history of emotional persuasion" provides insight both into the organization of early modern affect as well as the role of emotion in rhetoric generally (p. 20). Like her other historical work, it is characterized by close attention to the textual basis for her claims about the practice of rhetoric and about early modern identity and culture. Olmsted traces a general distrust of strong emotion among early modern writers, as well as a distrust of the use of force or coercion to impose Reviews 205 agreement. Against the backdrop of these doubts and the powerful hope among Renaissance rhetoricians that public "eloquence could compel people to follow the laws" (p. 20), Olmsted identifies friendship as an alternative space where eloquence is used to gain assent and build emotional stability without the threat of coercion. Olmsted commits chapters to legal and religious discourse, poetry, justice, honor, and, finally, marriage. Tracing the rhetorical means of persuading emotion in these contexts reveals how, for instance, Protestant writers could envision "friendship ... as a model for ideal marriage" in order to promote marital harmony (p. 176). Olmsted finds social relationships represented in early modern literary texts and prose treatises as "nearly utopian site[s] where one friend appeals reasonably to the heart of the other" (p. 5). According to Olmsted, these texts display "historically and culturally specific topoi for producing [and regulating] emotion" (p. 6). Hospitality, for instance, emerges as one of the central topoi in Sidney's texts through which discourse on emotion is reproduced. Expecting an individual to be a good host no matter the context or guest, for instance, promoted the regulation of extremes of love, anger, and grief. Each era, Olmsted suggests, has its own cultural resources through which emotion is managed, resources that are an understudied aspect of rhetoric. As other scholars have concluded as well, emotion, far from being irrational, is open to persuasion. What Olmsted adds to our understanding of emotion is the way in which early modern culture made it possible for individuals to effect such persuasion through temperate means. Olmsted looks primarily...

This study examines the impact of a new communication tool, the social media release (SMR), on bloggers. Specifically, we seek to determine what factors will influence bloggers' intent to use SMRs or their components. Our global survey of 332 bloggers finds that bloggers' perceptions of the effectiveness of the SMR and the use of SMRs by companies positively affect their decisions to use SMRs now and in the future. We also find that bloggers' current use of SMRs influences their decisions to continue using SMRs. Implications on the use of SMRs as corporate communication tools are discussed.

This empirical study surveyed academic staff at a Swedish university about their experiences and perceptions of the use of English in their academic fields. The objective was to examine how the influence of English in disciplinary domains might affect the viability of Swedish in the academic sphere and to investigate how it might disadvantage Swedish scholars. The data findings were analyzed quantitatively and are complemented with a qualitative content analysis, outlining perception and attitude patterns in the responses. Findings suggest power asymmetry between English and Swedish, as the data contain indications of perceived unequal opportunities between native and nonnative speakers in the international academic community. Swedish scholars highlighted the nuanced expressions of academic discourse found in social science writing as creating particular difficulty when writing in English.

Problem: Questionnaires are a popular method used by global companies to gain understanding or assess various aspects of their businesses. However, using a questionnaire across cultures requires extra effort in translating it into the target language(s) and culture(s) because a good questionnaire developed in one language/culture may not necessarily “travel well” across cultures due to differences in meaning and interpretation. This tutorial synthesizes the extant research on cross-cultural communication and surveys, and provides guidance in preparing cross-cultural questionnaires. Concepts: Translation affects the design and development of questionnaires to be used across cultures in these ways: (1) It affects the theoretical concepts to be studied: indicators-questions about concrete elements that can be measured and constructs-a series of questions about abstract elements that cannot be measured directly and essentially represent an underlying concept. Constructs must be adapted into a specific cultural context to achieve accuracy in measurements. (2) Differences in the contexts-the overall cross-cultural research context (the setting and the purpose) and the cultural context (the participants and their cultural background) of the study-affect translation because concepts in the source culture might be applied differently or not exist in the target cultures. (3) Translation might unintentionally introduce bias by inadvertently changing the perceived meanings of terms and questions-creating bias in constructs, on individual items on the questionnaire, and in its administration. (4) Translation might affect equivalence of terms in the source and translated versions, including linguistic equivalence (that is, wording of items), semantics (meaning of a phrase or concept), and grammar and syntax. Suggestions: Given these concepts, consider the following items when translating questionnaires: (1) accurately adapt or adopt questions from existing instruments, (2) make sure that you adapt the language to suit the situation, (3) hire translators who understand research processes, (4) use the decentering approach (a process in which translators move back and forth amongst the languages, checking for cultural and linguistic accuracy) when preparing the actual translation, and (5) assess your overall translated questionnaire. The questionnaire assessment model is a resource for guiding the assessment.

This article argues for a rethinking of the rhetorical canon of memory as a productive tool for understanding and effectively responding to recent changes in culture, economics, and politics. After reviewing historical conceptions of rhetorical memory both before and after its “canonization,” we identify two processes at the heart of the contemporary relationships between persuasion and memory: an “externalization” of memory and commonplace rhetorical structures through information networks and technologies, and an “internalization” of memory and dispositions that takes place in human affective systems. We conclude by arguing for the value of such an expanded notion of rhetorical memory for addressing two of the more pervasive and significant registers of contemporary persuasion: advertising and populist politics.

Composition theorists concerned with students’ academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these criticisms, however, voice continues to frequently appear as a goal in guidelines for teaching writing and on high-stakes writing assessment rubrics in the United States. Given the apparent lack of alignment between theory and practice regarding its use, more empirical research is needed to understand how teachers apply voice as a criterion in the evaluation of student writing. Researchers have used sociocultural and functionalist frameworks to analyze voice-related discursive patterns, yet we do not know how readers evaluate written texts for voice. To address this gap in research the present study asked: 1) What language features do secondary English teachers associate with voice in secondary students’ writing and how do they explain their associations? 2) How do such identified features vary across genres as well as among readers? Nineteen teachers were interviewed using a think-aloud protocol designed to illuminate their perceptions of voice in narrative and expository samples of secondary students’ writing. Results from an inductive analysis of interview transcripts suggest that participating teachers associated voice with appraisal features, such as amplified expressions of affect and judgment, that are characteristic of literary genres.

ABSTRACT This article culls a theory of rhetorical vision from Aristotle's Rhetoric by examining the cluster of terms that bears on his theory of visual style. Rhetorical vision stands apart from but complements visual rhetoric in that it attends to the rhetorical and linguistic conjuring of visual images—what contemporary neuroscientists call visual imagery—and can even affect direct perception. The article concludes by examining rhetorical vision in Demosthenes' Epitaphios. At stake in this investigation is the visible and visual liveliness of rhetoric and its ability to alter sense perception.

A decade ago, my colleagues and I (Geisler et al., 2001) published an IText manifesto in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication to call attention to the impact of information technologies with texts at their core. These ITexts, we claimed, represented ‘‘a new page in the story of the coevolution of humanity, culture, and technology,’’ promising to change both the nature of texts and their role in society. The manifesto arose out of discussions in May 2000 at the annual meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America on the future of research on text-making activities and how they affect and are affected by new information technologies. About 14 months later, the IText manifesto was published in the pages of this journal. Three years later, a special issue of JBTC illustrated ‘‘the ubiquity of IText’’ with articles on Web technologies, dictation, screen capture, and text visualization (Geisler, 2004).

This article analyzes The Business of Being Born, a documentary that critiques dominant American childbirth practices, practitioners, and locations as overmedicalized, and offers midwife-attended homebirth as a safe, viable option. The rhetorical-cultural analysis focuses on the documentary's reception, including twenty-six film reviews and two statements issued by the American Medical Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The article demonstrates the role of ethos in genre reception, with a particular look at celebrity ethos associated with documentaries. The article suggests not only that visual arguments such as documentaries currently affect cultural conversations more readily than print arguments but also that dominant discourses and ideologies delimit those conversations' boundaries.

This study examines the impact of a new communication tool, the social media release (SMR), on bloggers. Specifically, we seek to determine what factors will influence bloggers' intent to use SMRs or their components. Our global survey of 332 bloggers finds that bloggers' perceptions of the effectiveness of the SMR and the use of SMRs by companies positively affect their decisions to use SMRs now and in the future. We also find that bloggers' current use of SMRs influences their decisions to continue using SMRs. Implications on the use of SMRs as corporate communication tools are discussed.

Knowledge contribution in virtual communities is an important issue in the field of knowledge management. Based on Ames's theoretical framework on motivation, we propose a model for knowledge contribution in problem-solving virtual communities (PSVCs). The model includes two second-order individual motivations, with four major mechanisms in PSVCs that are associated with these motivations. Results confirm that only egoistic motives affect members' knowledge contribution in PSVCs. Further, knowledge repository and social identity are found to be important mechanisms for promoting knowledge contribution through egoistic motives. This paper concludes with theoretical and practical implications and provides insights for future research.

For one hundred years, North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a Historically Black College and University, has promoted the concept of service as a means of building a stronger academic and social community. At NCCU, service manifests in many forms; however, during the fall 2009 semester, a group of college students collaborated with high school students on a handwritten letter-writing project. The cross-aged teaching initiative employed different theoretical practices that helped NCCU students become rhetors who immersed themselves in rhetorical situations that promoted change. This article focuses on the impact of this literacy-based service-learning experience on NCCU students’ perception of themselves as change agents and problem solvers and on their rhetorical and analytical thinking skills. It also focuses on high school students’ readiness to form a partnership with NCCU students and reveal the problems that negatively affect their lives. Since university students engaged in a rhetoric of change, this partnership is an example of how NCCU continues its founder’s legacy.

This article analyzes classroom discussions of Boaz Yakin's 1994 film Fresh—an unsettling urban drama about a young boy (Fresh) who devises a creative escape from the drug dealers in his environment: he buys a large amount of cocaine that he uses to trick those dealers into thinking that they're all trying to break into each others' markets. In the end, he turns these negative and violent forces against each other and then enters the Witness Protection Program. The social commentary in the film is paramount since it highlights the disturbing cultural reasons why a twelve–year-old African American boy has to devise his own escape from the inner city. Most important, class discussions of (as well as the writing assignments focused on) Yakin's film necessarily confront the role that class hierarchies play in America as well as the cultural myths—like the unconditional individual—that affect many of our expectations and assumptions. Herein resides the film's pedagogical importance: it offers an intensely emotional and intellectual challenge to many of our foundational understandings of American values and cultural narratives. That is, it critiques the problematic rationalizations (like “the just-world phenomenon”) that seek to not only dis-empower but also neglect whole segments of American society.

In undergraduate natural science courses, two types of evaluators are commonly used to assess student writing: graduate-student teaching assistants (TAs) or peers. The current study examines how well these approaches to evaluation support student writing. These differences between the two possible evaluators are likely to affect multiple aspects of the writing process: first draft quality, amount and types of feedback provided, amount and types of revisions, and final draft quality. Therefore, we examined how these aspects of the writing process were affected when undergraduate students wrote papers to be evaluated by a group of peers versus their TA. Several interesting results were found. First, the quality of the students' first draft was greater when they were writing for their peers than when writing for their TA. In terms of feedback, students provided longer comments, and they also focused more on the prose than the TAs. Finally, more revisions were made if the students received feedback from their peers-especially prose revisions. Despite all of the benefits seen with peers as evaluators, there was only a moderate difference in final draft quality. This result indicates that while peer-review is helpful, there continues to be a need for research regarding how to enhance the benefits.

In the United States, composition researchers have consistently depicted First-Year Composition (FYC) teachers' responses to students' faith-based writing in terms of a conflict narrative. According to Goodburn (1998), Lindholm (2000), Perkins (2001), and Vander Lei and Fitzgerald (2007), FYC teachers hold strict secular expectations and reject the religious identity and expression of their fundamentalist Christian students. This study explores this conflict narrative by analyzing how 24 FYC teachers in the Midwestern United States describe their own religious identities as well as those of their institutions and respond to two faith-based student texts. The study results challenge simplistic depictions of the conflict narrative. The religious affiliations of the FYC teachers coincide with national averages and neither relate to how teachers described the religious environment of their institutions nor the grades the teachers gave the faith-based texts. Furthermore, rhetorical variables such as genre and audience awareness affect teachers' responses to faith-based writing. Composition researchers, this study concludes, need to complicate how they depict situations in which students express their religious identity within secular post-secondary institutions.

Individual agency is necessary for the possibility of rhetoric, and especially for deliberative rhetoric, which enables the composition of what Latour calls a good common world. Drawing on neurophenomenology, this essay defines individual agency as the process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their structure in response to the perceived consequences of their actions. Conceiving of agency in this way enables writers to recognize their rhetorical acts, whether conscious or nonconscious, as acts that make them who they are, that affect others, and that can contribute to the common good. Responsible rhetorical agency entails being open to and responsive to the meanings of concrete others, and thus seeing persuasion as an invitation to listeners as also always agents in persuasion.

Earlier research on assessment suggests that even when Native English Speaker (NSE) and Non-Native English Speaker (NNES) writers make similar errors, faculty tend to assess the NNES writers more harshly. Studies indicate that evaluators may be particularly severe when grading NNES writers holistically. In an effort to provide more recent data on how faculty perceive student writers based on their nationalities, researchers at two medium-sized Midwestern universities surveyed and conducted interviews with faculty to determine if such discrepancies continue to exist between assessments of international and American writers, to identify what preconceptions faculty may have regarding international writers, and to explore how these notions may affect their assessment of such writers. Results indicate that while faculty continue to rate international writers lower when scoring analytically, they consistently evaluate those same writers higher when scoring holistically.