Reviewed are: Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy by Anis S. Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff, Reviewed by Kara Poe Alexander Beyond Post process, edited by Sidney I. Dobrin, J. A. Rice, and Michael Vastola, Reviewed by William Duffy Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Aja Y. Martinez, Reviewed by Gregory Shafer Autism Spectrum Disorders in the College Composition Classroom: Making Writing Instruction More Accessible for All Students edited by Val Gerstle and Lynda Walsh, Reviewed by Gary Vaughn

The effects of writing format (handwritten (HW) versus word processor (WP)) were examined in a sample of college students with and without learning disabilities (LD). All students wrote two essays, one in each format, scored for quality and length. Groups did not differ in age, gender, ethnicity, mathematical calculation, writing fluency, essay length or essay quality. The "interaction hypothesis" was not supported, in that the use of a word processor as a writing accommodation did not provide a differential boost to students with LD. Both groups produced longer essays in the WP versus HW condition. The best predictor of essay quality was essay length regardless of writing format. Most students in each group preferred the WP format. Interestingly, a smaller percentage of students in the LD group (72%) than NLD group (91%) used the available time for writing. Keywords: accommodations, learning disabilities, college students, writing, word processor

Beyond mechanics and spelling conventions, academic writing requires progressive mastery of advanced language forms and functions. Pedagogically useful tools to assess such language features in adolescents’ writing, however, are not yet available. This study examines language predictors of writing quality in 51 persuasive essays produced by high school students attending a linguistically and ethnically diverse inner-city school in the Northeastern United States. Essays were scored for writing quality by a group of teachers, transcribed and analyzed to generate automated lexical and grammatical measures, and coded for discourse-level elements by researchers who were blind to essays’ writing quality scores. Regression analyses revealed that beyond the contribution of length and lexico-grammatical intricacy, the frequency of organizational markers and one particular type of epistemic stance marker (i.e., epistemic hedges) significantly predicted persuasive essays’ writing quality. Findings shed light on discourse elements relevant for the design of pedagogically informative assessment tools.

Brain diseases and their medical treatment may help or hurt creativity. They do so by changing the brain’s motivational system. Scientists and cultural historians have proposed links between creativity and disorders ranging from depression and psychosis to epilepsy and syphilis, but the best evidence is for conditions such as hypomania (mild mania) that elevate energy and mood. Many writers with symptoms of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or even insomnia need advice about what medications can do to creativity. Doctors, however, typically dodge the issue. This article describes what drugs may be safest, and also reviews the effects of intoxicants such as alcohol. In general, treating severe illness has benefit to creativity that outweighs the medication side effects, but some medications are better than others.

Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

“I use epideictic rhetoric to examine how the intellectually disabled person was over time constructed and deconstructed via praise and blame.”

“Each of these essays explores the overlaps and tensions of disability and mothering in the context of subject positions and liminal spaces, the complex and often confusing space where the personal and social collide.”

Preface Personal Prologue Chapter 1: Introduction: Examining Crisis, Laurie MacGillivray and Devon Brenner Commentator Introductions, Tracy Sweeney (Early Career Teacher), Jane Fung (Veteran Teacher) and Elizabeth Moje (Teacher Educator) Part I: Reading and Writing in Times of Crisis Chapter 2: Making Contact in Times of Crisis: Literacy Practices in a Post-Katrina World, April Whatley Bedford and Devon Brenner Chapter 3: Hallelujah! Bible-based Literacy Practices of Children Living in a Homeless Shelter, Laurie MacGillivray Chapter 4: Reactions to Divorce: Communication and Child Writing Practices, Gisele Ragusa Chapter 5: When daddy goes to prison: Examining crisis through fanfiction and poetry, Mary K. Thompson Chapter 6: Reading and Writing Teenage Motherhood: Changing Literacy Practices and Developing Identities, Kara L. Lycke Chapter 7: Disability Identification: Shifts in Home Literacy Practices, Gisele Ragusa Part II: Crises Arising from Literate Practices Chapter 8: Finding Husbands, Finding Wives: How Being Literate Creates Crisis, Loukia K. Sarroub Chapter 9: A State Take-Over: The Language of a School District Crisis, Rebecca Rogers and Kathryn Pole Chapter 10: Brewing a Crisis: Language, Educational Reform, and the Defense of a Nation, Susan Florio-Ruane Part III: Reflecting on Crises and Literacy Chapter 11 Commentators' Insights, Tracy Sweeney (Early Career Teacher), Jane Fung (Veteran Teacher) and Elizabeth Moje (Teacher Educator) List of Contributors

Given societal prescriptions to conceal disability, when Michael J. Fox, seeking increased funding for Parkinson's research, addressed members of Congress in 1999 without having taken his own Parkinson's medication beforehand, his display of disability was, in his own words, “startling.” Through revealing his disability, Fox constructs a complex ethos bound up in the intersection of the body, text, and social practices. As a result, through risking the reinscription of traditional and limiting responses to disability, Fox confounds such responses, demanding that both audiences and rhetoricians rethink the relationship between disability and rhetorical practice.

Problem: E-learning has become a standard in many organizations to train its workforce and build an information network that encourages collaborative knowledge sharing. As a result of technological and global factors, the complexity of delivering successful e-learning courses and products is an increasing challenge for subject matter experts and instructional designers. Online training courses have become blended learning environments, comprised of synchronous and asynchronous modes of delivery, multiple media forms, and global and localized audiences to meet the demands and flexibility it affords. Successful blended e-learning is more than simply mixing online and live instructional modes; it can also include a combination of multiple media types, technologies, and communication modes. E-learners have become multimodal learners, with the ability to adapt to multiple media forms, environment types, and tools. Key concepts: Understanding the complex interaction of technology use, collaborative knowledge sharing, and media can facilitate more effective communication exchanges between instructor, content, and learner. Some concepts that help describe the complexities of blended e-learning include technological appropriation, technological accommodation, media richness, media synchronicity and naturalness, blended e-learning, and collaborative knowledge sharing. Key lessons: Research trends suggest learners appropriate technology and media forms, and evaluate usefulness based on a range of factors, including richness, experience, perception, and recommendation. Blended learning environments add complexity by mixing spatial (distributed and colocated) and temporal (asynchronous and synchronous) components with increased levels of collaborative knowledge sharing. From these research trends, the following best practices for developing e-learning are recommended: (1) consider media richness factors and user preferences in media and tool selection; (2) encourage personalization to foster trust; (3) facilitate collaborative knowledge sharing both inside and outside the training setting; (4) balance roles as knowledge facilitator, coach, and information manager; and (5) invest additional time in both course and instructor preparation. Implications: Blended e-learning presents a number of challenges for subject matter experts and designers of instructional content. Subject matter experts must consult with instructional designers and consider the different media platforms, environments, and formats that optimize the best pairing of content with delivery mode and media type. Content experts and designers must collaborate on methods of effectively adapting course content to account for perceived richness, user experience, and task complexity. Instructors must also invest additional time in planning and accounting for user preferences and communication practices in online training.

Our blind spot as a "risk definitions of risk are communicative claims that have constitutive force They create the very uncertainty 1994). Acccordingly, "fabricate risk analyses produce risks" (Russell & Babrow, 2011, p. 24 entrapment that Luhmann t circular process by which we are taken in by 2002). We contend that a may offer analytical tools in for setting aside the scientization constructs in favor of empirical examination of risk as an in emergent, and shifting dynamic of uncertainty

In this article I examine The Lancet Iraq casualty reports for their demonstration of prefigured accommodation, a rhetorical strategy in which the authors anticipate and attempt to influence their work's wider popularization. My reading of the reports and accompanying commentaries attends to the introduction of journalistic features and calls to political action. As part of my analysis, I interview a lead author of the reports about his rhetorical concerns in composing the work of a politically engaged science.

This article reports findings from an ethnographic action research study of Deaf and hearing parents and young children participating in a family American Sign Language (ASL) literacy program in Ontario, Canada. The study documents the context for parents’ and children’s learning of ASL in an environment where resources for supporting early ASL literacy have been scarce. Through semi-structured interviews and observations of six individual families or parent-child dyads, the study documents participants’ encounters with professionals who regulate Deaf children and their families’ access to ASL. At the same time, the setting of the ASL Parent-Child Mother Goose Program is presented as a Deaf cultural space and thereby a counter-discourse to medical discourses regarding Deaf identity and bilingualism. This space features the Deaf mother participants’ ASL literacy and numeracy practices and improvisations of ASL rhymes and stories to enhance their suitability for young children. The practices of the ASL Parent-Child Mother Goose Program leader also serve to define and support emergent ASL literacy. In addition, a Deaf cultural space inside a broader context of public services to young Deaf children provides a means for the hearing mother participants to facilitate critical inquiry of issues surrounding bilingualism, ASL, and a Deaf identity.

By understanding the verbal and nonverbal manifestations of autism as a rhetorical imperative “a perspective that involves applying Krista Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening” scholars can do much to dissolve the idea of otherness that appears in discussions of this topic.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that 86% of Internet users living with a disability or chronic illness have looked for health information online (Fox, 2007). And while so-called e-patients often start this search for information, many find themselves led to communities that provide this and more, such as Tu Diabetes, an online social network site. This pause in what can seem like an endless search for answers may be one that health professionals can gain insight from. Such extended pauses may give insight into the values of this particular community. This article provides the results and analysis of a study using ethnographic methods and rhetorical analysis to examine the texts posted by members of the social networking site Tu Diabetes in order to discern the values held by this community.

Neuroscience research findings yield fascinating new insights into human cognition and communication. Rhetoricians may be attracted to neuroscience research that uses imaging tools (such as fMRI) to draw inferences about rhetorical concepts, such as emotion, reason, or empathy. Yet this interdisciplinary effort poses challenges to rhetorical scholars. Accordingly, research in neurorhetorics should be two-sided: not only should researchers question the neuroscience of rhetoric (the brain functions related to persuasion and argument), but they should also inquire into the rhetoric of neuroscience (how neuroscience research findings are framed rhetorically). This two-sided approach can help rhetoric scholars to use neuroscience insights in a responsible manner, minimizing analytical pitfalls. These two approaches can be combined to examine neuroscience discussions about methodology, research, and emotion, and studies of autism and empathy, with a rhetorical as well as scientific lens. Such an approach yields productive insights into rhetoric while minimizing potential pitfalls of interdisciplinary work.

Recent rhetorical accounts of mental illness tend to suggest that psychiatric disability limits rhetorical participation. This article extends that research by examining how one group of the psychiatrically disabled—those diagnosed with mood disorders—is using a particular narrative genre to engender participation, what I call the mood memoir. I argue here that mood memoirs can be read as narrative-based responses to the rhetorical exclusion suffered by the psychiatrically disabled. This study employs narrative and genre theory to reveal mood memoirists’ tactics for generating ethos in the face of the stigma of mental illness.

In 1972, vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton revealed to the American public that he had been hospitalized for depression on three occasions. The revelation seriously damaged the campaign of his running mate, George McGovern, and eventually led to Eagleton's dismissal from the ticket. This article seeks to understand the Eagleton Affair by showing how the stigma of mental illness functions as a form of rhetorical disability. Using a reading of stigma in ancient Greece and the work of Erving Goffman, this article argues that stigma can be viewed as a constitutive rhetorical act that also produces a disabling rhetorical effect: kakoethos, or bad character.

Abstract This article explores the challenges and opportunities that the rising numbers of students with disabilities and the changing definition of disability pose to technical communication teachers and researchers. Specifically, in a teacher-researcher study that combines methods from disability studies, I report on the effectiveness of multimodal and universal design approaches to more comprehensively address disability and accessibility in the classroom and to revise traditional impairment-specific approaches to disability in technical communication. Notes 1. CitationCharlton (1998), in Nothing About Us Without Us, recalls hearing this slogan in South Africa in 1993 from two separate leaders of Disabled People of South Africa, Michael Masutha and William Rowland, and he writes, “The slogan's power derives from its location of the source of many types of (disability) oppression and its simultaneous opposition to such oppression in the context of control and voice” (p. 3). 2. Other principles include guidelines for equitable use, varieties of perceptible information, and appropriate size and space for approach and use. See http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/about_ud/udprincipleshtmlformat.html for quoted guidelines. 3. CAPTCHA is an acronym for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart. It is a challenge-response test that usually visually distorts and warps letters, assuming that a human can decode the letters but a computer cannot. 4. For details on the similarities and differences between usability and accessibility, see CitationThatcher et al. (2006), pp. 26–28. Chapter 1, “Understanding Web Accessibility,” is useful for students to read and discuss during this segment of the class. 5. Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance by CitationThatcher et al. (2006) is also a useful resource for students to consult, particularly Chapter 1.

Brenda Jo Brueggemann remains one of the foremost disabilities studies/deaf studies scholars in the US and has added to her extensive publications with this new text, Deaf Subjects: Between Identit...

While internationalization has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different in their approaches or rhetorics, appear to lack what we have; and how we might avoid colonialist intervention or offer consultation. These import/export focal points create key blind spots in our awareness of deep and rich writing research and programming traditions internationally, of how we fit—or do not fit—into this broader world, and of missed opportunities for self-reflection and growth.

This article argues that mid-1970s discourses of literacy crisis prompted a problematic shift toward color-blind ideologies of language and literacy within both disciplinary and institutional discussions of writing instruction for “high-risk” minority students. It further argues that this shift has continuing import for contemporary antiracist writing instruction.

Through its analysis of birth plans, documents some women create to guide their birth attendants' actions during hospital births, this article reveals the rhetorical complexity of childbirth and analyzes women's attempts to harness birth plans as tools of resistance and self-education. Asserting that technologies can both silence and give voice, the article examines women's use of technologies of writing to confront technologies of birth. The article draws on data from online childbirth narratives, a childbirth writing survey, and five women's birth plans to argue that women's silencing, or rhetorical disability, during childbirth both prompts and limits the birth plan as an effective communicative tool. The data suggest that the birth plan is not consistently effective in the ways its authors intend. Nonetheless, this analysis also demonstrates that the rhetorical failure of the birth plan can be read as, and thereby transformed into, rhetorical possibility.

Drawing on the work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the author examines how—in order to explain their positions in the academy—many students of color (including those who are both first-generation Chicano/a and first-generation college students) unfortunately rely on dominant color-blind ideology concerning freedom of choice and equal opportunity.

This article positions letters of recommendation as important and troubling indicators of faculty beliefs about diversity and access in higher education. I focus on the disclosure of disability, both by examining the history of disclosing stigmatized difference and by analyzing five letters of recommendation for an aspiring graduate student with a traumatic brain injury. I suggest that faculty must revise their letter-writing practices and engage in a type of rhetorical forecasting that questions well-intentioned disclosures of difference and imagines how various letters form a composite sketch of a candidate.

Abstract During WWII psychologist Carl Rogers introduced a verbal counseling technique that could be utilized by clergy, teachers, and USO workers to help veterans overcome problems of readjustment. Rogers's arhetorical principles were adapted for the writing classroom by Young, Becker, and Pike—an adaptation that later led composition historian James Berlin to misinterpret the implementation of Rogers's principles in his study of a WWII communication program. These misinterpretations of Rogers's original intent have resulted in debate over the rhetorical or arhetorical nature of Rogerian rhetoric and have led to an inaccurate association between Rogerian rhetoric and expressivist and therapeutic writing. Notes 1My thanks to RR reviewers Paul Bator and Janice Lauer for their detailed and helpful revision recommendations, and to my colleagues Robin Veder and Mary Richards for their generous advice on early drafts. 2 Rhetoric and Reality is required reading for many PhD programs in rhetoric and composition and as such has informed, and continues to inform, a majority of scholars in the field. Sharon Crowley cites Rhetoric and Reality as the source for her statement that "[o]ne truly radical communication skills program … was implemented at the University of Denver" (Composition 172). And David Russell refers to Rhetoric and Reality several times in support of his treatment of communications courses and expressivist writing instruction. 3Although Young, Becker, and Pike defer to Anatol Rapoport's Fights, Games and Debates as a foundation for their theory, Rapoport is rarely mentioned as the initiator of either the strategies for or the terms Rogerian argument or Rogerian rhetoric. 4See Halasek; Bator; Hairston; and Ede. 5It is now (many years following the publication of the Rogers and Young et al.'s discussion) possible for Rogers's strategy of "listening" to a reader's point of view to succeed in a synchronous online chat environment, where a writer has a present/absent audience, and the reader is capable of presenting immediate feedback to the writer. 6Young, Becker, and Pike insist that the other two prongs of their Rogerian argument strategy for writers are an alternative to conventional argument, but their proposal of delineating "the area within which he believes the reader's position to be valid" and convincing the reader that he and the writer have "moral qualities (honesty, integrity, and good will)" in common seem little more than a watered-down version of Aristotle's very conventional appeal to ethos (275). 7Rogers did later validate his person-centered approach through the formation of the Carl Rogers Institute for Peace, an organization that helped ease social tensions in such troubled areas as Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Central America. Perhaps it was this successful approach to social and political conflict resolution that initially attracted Young et al. to Rogers's principles and convinced them to attempt an adaptation of those same principles as an alternative to the agonistic type of argument taught in the writing classroom. 8The conventions of the Institute of General Semantics state that the term general semantics is not capitalized. 9In his introductory chapter to Rhetoric and Reality, Berlin does identify the use of general semantics as "a device for propaganda analysis" (10) and does give Denver credit for promoting "cooperative rather then competitive thinking" (101). 10Brigadier General Elliot D. Cooke conducted a study for the War Department in the spring of 1943 and concluded that "nearly as many men were being discharged from the Army as were entering through induction stations" due to "a thing called psychoneurosis" (11). By 1946 at least 40 percent of men receiving pensions for a physical disability were labeled as psychoneurotics, but only 10 percent of that 40 percent had seen combat. 11Archival evidence from the University of Denver reveals that enrollment rose "by 57 percent compared to the pre-war enrollments of 1939" and "the percent of Veterans on campus rose to 60 percent" (Zazzarino). 12Elbow sees the terms expressivist or expressionist as problematic and credits them both as terms of "disapproval" coined by Berlin. In defining the terms as "writing that expresses what I feel, see, think," Elbow concludes that they are "indistinguishable from any other kind of writing" ("Binary Thinking" 20). 13See also Halasek for an insightful analysis of ways in which Elbow's "Believing Game" can be applied to Rogerian principles.

Children (aged 10 to 12) with spelling disability (related to dyslexia) or with good spelling ability performed 2 fMRI nonverbal working memory tasks of comparable difficulty across groups in and out of the scanner-judging whether a pictured sea creature appeared two trials earlier (2-back) or was a target whale (0-back).The 2-back versus 0-back contrast captures ability of working memory to track changes over time. On this contrast, the good spellers and disabled spellers showed significant BOLD activation in many and generally the same brain regions. On group map comparisons, the good spellers never activated more than the disabled spellers, but the disabled spellers activated more than the good spellers in selected brain regions. Of most interest, 2 clusters of BOLD activation (distributed across brain regions) were observed in good spellers but 5 clusters were observed in disabled spellers. Within these clusters the good and disabled spellers differed in three regions (bilateral medial superior frontal gyrus, orbital middle frontal gyrus, and anterior cingulated), which are associated with cognition, executive functions, and working memory and were correlated with a behavioral spelling measure. Thus working memory is best described as a distributed architecture rather than a single mechanism; and good and poor spellers engage working memory architecture differently. We propose that spelling is an executive function for translating cognition into language (sounds and morphemes) and then into visual symbols rather than a mere transcription skill for translating words in memory into written symbols in external memory.

Abstract The author argues that we have chosen a rhetorical history that normalizes and silences rhetorical bodies. In response, the author exhumes an embodied history of rhetoric, reexamining the myths of the Greek goddess Metis as a means of enlivening rhetorical theory and history. The author then connects these myths to other rhetorical traditions invoked by Hélène Cixous and Gloria Anzaldúa, connecting Metis to Medusa and to mestiza consciousness. The author affirms the rhetorical power of the body, specifically of those bodies that challenge rhetorical norms. Notes 1I thank generous RR reviewers Richard Enos and Michelle Ballif for their advice and assistance with this essay. 2In Grosz's words, "[T]he body has remained a conceptual blind spot in both mainstream Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory" (Volatile 3). The body then becomes "what is not mind … implicitly defined as unruly, disruptive, in need of direction or judgment, merely incidental … a brute givenness which requires overcoming" (Volatile 3–4). 3Thanks to Richard Enos for his thoughtful comments in reviewing an earlier draft of this manuscript. 4Disability studies scholars use the term normate to designate the unexamined and privileged subject position of the supposedly (or temporarily) able-bodied individual. The word normative also converts the idea of normalcy into an active process—norms "are" but they also "act"—we live in a culture in which norms are enforced, a normative society. It can—and has—been argued that in antiquity there was not a concept of normalcy per se. But as Lennard Davis writes, although the word normal appeared in English only in the mid-nineteenth century, "before the rise of the concept of normalcy … there appears not to have been a concept of the normal, but instead the regnant paradigm was one revolving around the word ideal. … [I]n the culture of the ideal, physical imperfections are not seen as absolute but as part of a descending continuum from top to bottom. No one, for example, can have an ideal body, and therefore no one has to have an ideal body" (Enforcing 105). Yet Aristotle had more than one concept of ideality—he expounded on the idea of the mean, for instance. He outlined the idea of both an absolute mean, a method for measuring humans against one another, and a relative mean, a system for disciplining oneself (Nicomachean Ethics II 6–7). I would argue that the commingling of these imperatives results in a normative culture or society—both the upheld fiction of perfection and the systematic self- and Other-surveillance and bodily discipline of normative processes. 5This is true for women particularly, but the stigma of femininity is also applied to men. For instance, Demosthenes was said to have been soft and lame because he spoke with a stutter and had an overly feminine demeanor. Physical disability is mingled with femininity to discredit him—see his exchanges with Meidias in particular and Cicero's investigation of Demosthenes' self-education in De Oratore. The story of Demosthenes that has been popularized holds that through rhetorical practice Demosthenes overcame these "impediments" to become a great orator (see Hawhee; Fredal). The possibility that Demosthenes' difference could have queered his bodily/rhetorical performance in a generative sense is not addressed—indeed, any such transgressive possibility is ignored, despite that fact that other historians convincingly challenge the narratives of overcoming and passing that have been ascribed to Demosthenes (see Martha Rose). 6In contrast, an abstract, flawless (male) body becomes a tool for norming. As (Plato wrote and) Socrates said in the Phaedrus, "[A]ny discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body, as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the whole work" (128). 7In the Phaedrus, Plato could be seen to change positions slightly, suggesting that certain forms of more "scientific" and therefore "noble" rhetoric might be acceptable (see White; Ramsay; McAdon; Solmsen for a range of readings). 8I gesture here to the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and her book Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, foundational in disability studies. Garland-Thomson was one of the first scholars to show that "seeing disability as a representational system engages several premises of current critical theory: that representation structures reality, that the margins constitute the center, that human identity is multiple and unstable, and that all analysis and evaluation has political implications" ("The New Disability Studies" 19). These premises are also the premises of this essay. 9Hawhee's linkages between mêtis and wrestling, and then between wrestling and rhetoric, provide an interesting image for this form of intelligence: "the corporeality of mêtis" as "struggle" or "the swarming mass of cunning craftiness and flailing limbs" (46, 45). 10In Randy Lee Eickhoff's recent translation of the Odyssey, he points out that Odysseus, considered to be another exemplar of mêtis, uses the name me tis or "no man" as a pun (n4; 404). 11 Mêtis has the practical advantage (and perhaps theoretical disadvantage) of "disappearing into its own action [so that] it has no image of itself" (de Certeau 82). Mêtis cannot be contextualized or schematized because each time it occurs in a context, it shifts that context, and each sequence it is inserted into is distorted (de Certeau 83–84). 12In the classical context, Homer, the mythical seer Tiresias, Oedipus, the great orator Demosthenes, Paris's killer Philoctetes, Croesus's deaf son, and others form our view of disability. In these stories, typically, disability impels narrative through the themes of overcoming, compensation, divine punishment, and charity. 13As I have previously argued, we can also view mythical discourse as, in the words of Susan Jarratt, "capable of containing the beginnings of … public argument and internal debate" (35). Despite the idea, advanced by Eric Havelock in particular, that myth was rote and didactic, we might see myth as being connected to the body, as being highly rhetorical, as being an arena for mêtis—thus my retellings hopefully honor this spirit (see also Slatkin). 14The myth of Metis can be traced as far back as Hesiod (Theogony lines 886–900). 15It is worth noting that these ableist accents on the denunciation of mêtis are also accompanied by a distinct ethnocentrism and even xenophobia. The word metic meant immigrant in ancient Athens. The word is a compound of the words change (meta) and house (oikos), and literally meant someone who changed houses. Many of Plato's attacks on the flexibility, malleability, and the bodily materiality of rhetoric are aimed at the Sophists, metic non-Athenians, and are part and parcel with a larger ideological agenda. 16 Techne was similarly made practical. As Janet Atwill explains in Rhetoric Re-Claimed, techne, when it is allied with mêtis (as it is by the Sophists), "deforms limits into new paths in order to reach—or, better yet, to produce—an alternative destination" (69). Yet we now refer to technai, handbooks full of sets of rules and examples, when we think of techne. William Covino argues that "reactions against the Sophists contributed to the establishment of rhetoric as techne without magic" (20). This distortion is similar to the attempt to ally mêtis only with the forms of knowledge Plato and Aristotle most highly value—to make it precise, a science, as Aristotle does. 17When defining phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle never truly rules out the idea that one would need some form of cunning intelligence to have "prudence," and the version of phronesis he outlines is certainly an abstract form of knowledge. He suggests that to have prudence one must understand particulars as well as universals. Yet the version of phronesis that was later adopted—for instance as one of the Medieval four cardinal virtues—sheds much of this uncertainty and avoids reference to cunning intelligence. 18There also may have been a familial connection between Hephaestus and Medusa—in some myths the two are sexual partners. Their child, Cacus, was said to be a fire-breathing giant. Cacus was said to eat human flesh and nail human heads to his door. Killing him was one of Heracles's twelve labors (Graves, The Greek Myths 158). This link is not made by all scholars, though the story shows up in Ovid and in Virgil's Aeneid. 19Often, Medusa wasseen to symbolize "artful eloquence." For instance, Coluccio Salutati in the fourteenth century and Nancy Vickers in the twenty-first both argue for this reading. As Salutati suggests, the snakes on her head might be seen as "rhetorical ornaments … instruments of wisdom" because snakes are "reported to be the most cunning" (55). In this interpretation Medusa turns an audience to stone not because of her looks but because of her rhetorical power—her audience "so convinced of what they have been persuaded that they may be said to have acquired a stony quality" (56). Vickers goes further, sourcing this connection back to Plato (254). She also argues that Medusa's "stoning" be seen as a rhetorical power, an ability to change the audience's state of mind, accompanied by a somatic effect. Finally, she suggests that Medusa's rhetorical power might represent the freezing of us all before the specter of the feminine—and she asks what we might do to reverse a legacy of neutralization and appropriation of the Other. 20As an example of the ways that myths crucially disagree with one another, we can see that in Homer's version of the story, Medusa comes into the world with her head of snakes. I think such differences reveal quite marked transitions in and contestations of signification. 21Of course it matters very much whether Medusa was raped or not. As Patricia Klindienst Joplin has argued, this rape has often been elided, and responsibility for it shifted away from Poseiden to Athena. She suggests that this shifting of responsibility essentially excuses men's violence toward women and thus silences women further. 22Detienne and Vernant write that mêtis was often symbolized by the octopus. Thus this connection to the octopus of mêtis may not have been coincidental. Certainly the original Medusa myth relied upon a reference to the dangerous, trapping "knot made up of a thousand arms" that the octopus represented and that conveyed a sense of the powerful double-ness and unpredictability of mêtis (38). 23Graves writes that vials of Medusa's blood were widely distributed: The blood had the power both to kill and to cure (Greek Myths 175). There are many contradictory stories about who received the blood, who distributed it, and who used it for good, who for bad (Greek Myths 175). 24The myth may also express a male fear of Medusa's creative power—she is so "procreative" that her children Chrysaor and Pegasus spring from her dead body (Graves, Greek Myths 127). 25I would argue that as teachers, we need to avoid the temptation to "eat" mêtis and wrest control over knowledge away from students. Students' cunning strategies and divergent expressions may threaten us or challenge us, but we cannot believe that mêtis is something we use on students, that we can be the sole tricksters, holding student bodies captive. Nor can we use the brute force of Zeus or Perseus to coopt their power when it threatens us, to subordinate their thinking bodies. 26The French word métis is related to the Spanish word mestizo, both coming from the Latin word mixtus, the past participle of the verb to mix and connoting mixed blood. 27In critical theory the concept of metissage also locates and interrogates the ways that certain forms of knowledge have been relegated to the margins, and thus this concept links usefully to the stories I have been reanimating. Metissage, obviously etymologically linked to mêtis and meaning mixture or miscegenation, has been used as a critical lens through which one might observe issues of identity, resistance, exclusion, and intersectionality. Relying upon metaphors of mixture that are biological and cultural, this concept of metissage both is like and is what Gloria Anzaldúa refers to when she writes about mestiza consciousness. (See Steinberg and Kincheloe; Hardt and Negri; Gruzinski; Glissant.) 28Coatlalopeuh later becomes conflated with the Virgin of Guadalupe after the Spanish Roman Catholic conquest of Mexico. 29Carrie McMaster also suggests that we might learn from Anzaldúa's writing about her own bodily difference—having experienced congenital disease, chronic illness, disability—to "draw non-homogenizing parallels between various embodied identities" ("Negotiating" 103). In Anzaldúa's own words, "[T]hose experiences [with disability] kept me from being a 'normal' person. The way I identify myself subjectively as well as the way I act out there in the world was shaped by my responses to physical and emotional pain" ("Last Words?" 289). From this we can make some suggestions about the epistemological entailments of mestiza knowledge—it comes from unique, never "normal," bodied experiences. The "leap" that should be encouraged, then, is to see such situated knowledge as vital and perhaps even central to human experience. The "abnormal" body is not something given to women symbolically as a form of derogation; it is an engine for understanding and thus has serious rhetorical power.

Studies of blind manuscript review have illustrated that readers often form impressions of or speculate about unknown authors' identities in the manuscript review task. In this article, the authors extend that work by examining the discursive and nondiscursive features that play a role in readers' active construction of author voice. Through a survey completed by 70 editorial board members of six journals in applied linguistics and rhetoric and composition, the authors identify quantitative and qualitative trends in reviewers' practices regarding voice construction. Findings indicate that many readers do build impressions of an author's identity when reviewing anonymous manuscripts and that the rhetorical nature of the review task may lead readers to attend more to some discursive features than to others.

research interests include disability rhetoric and the role of exigency in the teaching of writing. Her dissertation explores how information about students' beliefs

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Even with careful, thoughtful planning and attention to the scholarship in disability studies, any course that centers on literature featuring illness and disability inevitably interrogates the philosophical positions and social values of the disabled community, as well as those of the able-bodied, necessitating a classroom that is sensitive to discomfort encountered when participants’ deeply held beliefs come into conflict with their own desires to be seen as politically correct.

Abstract Drawing on the insights of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, this article argues that the fixation of some scholars on the status, size, and identity of rhetorical studies is symptomatic of an apocalyptic perversion. An attention to the apocalyptic tone of recent discussions about "Big Rhetoric" in conference papers and journal articles bespeaks a characteristically phallogocentric ideology of discrimination between insiders and outsiders. An examination of the ubiquity and character of this tone, I suggest, forever precludes a united rhetorical studies for two reasons: (1) we enjoy our apocalyptic too much; and (2) apocalyptic is central to the identity of rhetorical studies because it is central to disciplinarity as such. Insofar as the urgency of the apocalyptic tone is sometimes a pragmatic and political necessity, an argument is made in favor of a more playful, polytonal apocalypticism that can help us better reckon with—and sometimes avoid—rhetoric that excludes. Acknowledgments The author thanks Carole Blair, Diane Davis, Debbie Hawhee, and the blind reviewers for their helpful suggestions and wise counsel. Notes 1Arguably, the first love object is not the mother's breast, but the mother's voice; the implications of this article of faith will be detailed in my later remarks on the apocalyptic (see Silverman; and Schwarz). 2I mean to suggest that the exodus was sanctioned in both senses: there are consequences for the enjoyment rhetoric's supplementarity, a point Gaonkar earlier developed in terms of the uncanny (also see Gaonkar, "Rhetoric and Its Double" 341–366). 3That is, he is both celebrated and cursed for establishing order in the idiom of the negative. I should indicate that by "Big Rhetoric" I refer not only to the globalization of rhetoric (or what is sometimes termed the rhetoric of inquiry), but all the related issues that are collected under that name via anxiety about disciplinary identity, including: (1) how ought we define "rhetoric"? (2) how should we define rhetorical studies as a field? by object or recourse to method, or by pedagogical mission? (3) who "owns" rhetoric or where is rhetoric better situated, in departments of English or Communication Studies? (4) is there such a thing as a "rhetorical tradition?" if so, what constitutes that tradition? (5) who does or does not have the authority to define rhetoric and rhetorical studies? (6) is rhetoric inclusive or mutually exclusive of cultural studies? and so on. These many questions all speak to the fundamental anxiety about what rhetoric is and who we are as rhetoricians, and I am focused on the whole of this anxiety vis-à-vis discipline, not any one question in particular. 4The primal horde refers to a mythic scenario developed by Darwin and elaborated by Freud to explain the emergence of the social contract and incest taboo: the idealized and primal father seizes all the women for himself, driving the sons away when they reach maturity. The sons, resentful of the father's despotism but desiring his love, agree to band together, kill the father, and eat him. They do so, however, only at the price of indigestion, for they find that their ideal leader is dead and are haunted by him; consequently, they agree to live as equals and to dispossess "the women" and practice exogamy (See Freud, Totem 201–204). 5This article is the most accessible and, in my view, most accurate description of the debate surrounding rhetoric and discipliniarity. I will nevertheless take issue later with what I think is a misreading of Dilip Gaonkar's positions. 6Of course, "criticism in crisis" is a tired hat, about which more shortly, but for the moment, we can trace it to Paul de Man's "Criticism and Crisis" (in Blindness 3–19). 7For the different ways in which a more interdisciplinary yet coherent, text- or practice-centered and historically mindful rhetorical studies has been called for, see Aune, "The Politics of Rhetorical Studies" 69–76; Fuller, "Globalization"; Keith, "Identity, Rhetoric, and Myth" 106; Leff, "Rhetorical Disciplines" 83–93; Mailloux, "Disciplinary Identities" 5–29 (also see his Disciplinary Histories for a revised version); Mailloux, "Practices, Theories, and Traditions" 129–138; and Mailloux, "Places in Time" 53–68. For arguments in favor of "Big Rhetoric" or globalization, see Simons, "Rhetorical Hermeneutics" 86–109; and Simons, "Globalization" 260–274. For a diversity of views on the issue of disciplinarity, see Herbert W. Simons' edited collection, The Rhetorical Turn, as well as the edited collection by Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith, Rhetorical Hermeneutics. Finally, one consequence of this decade-long discussion was the formation of the Alliance of Rhetorical Societies—initiated by Fred Antczak, Gerard Hauser, Robert Gaines, Michael Leff, and many others associated with the Rhetoric Society of America—which brought together a diverse group of rhetoricians for three days in Evanston, Illinois in the fall of 2003. Descriptions of the discussions at the conference are printed in the third issue of volume 24 of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2004). 8For a rumination on the "death" of rhetoric, see Bender and Wellberry, The Ends of Rhetoric, especially the introductory essay by the editors, which argues that in modernity "rhetoric" has given way to the delightfully more-syllabic "rhetoricality." 9My argument, however, is deliberately elliptical, as it attempts to underscore the performative dynamics of the debate over "Big Rhetoric" performatively. By "performative" I mean to suggest that the frequent masturbatory, petulant tone and prose of the present essay is both "fun and games" as well as argumentative, a point that will become clearer as the essay progresses toward the analysis of "tone" as a rhetorical device. From time to time I use the word "playful" to denote this approach. As an aside, an important if sadly over-critiqued element of both deconstruction and psychoanalysis is their playful tone and wildly associative writing techniques, which are deliberately employed to accompany the more traditional, syllogistic argument (and sometimes in Derrida's case, against the syllogistic argument). Slavoj Žižek's work is perhaps the most accessible example of performative writing in this sense, but for a full-throttle example of this "style" of performance, see Laurence A. Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis, Volume One: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002). "All you consumer fascist types, you know who you are," opens Rickels on the topic of his style of writing, "cannot be stopped from policing the middlebrow beat to which intellectual discourse was condemned a long time ago" (xv). Although Rickels insists that his "obscurity" is less a "style of writing or argument" than the juxtapositional demand of the objects of his analysis, his rhetoric is unquestionably strategic. 10Most breaks with Freud among psychoanalysts were a consequence of disagreements about drive theory. Some thinkers believed that the drives were not sexual but something else; for example, Jung believed the drives were spiritual in nature, whereas Adler eventually argued humans are driven by self-esteem. Others advocated a complete abandonment of the drive model in favor of more "relational" model, which generally goes under the name of "object relations theory." For the classical textbook on the latter, see Greenberg and Mitchell, Object Relations. 11The better explanation here, however, is that he does not seem to give a shit, when he understands his obstinacy and petulance to be precisely what the Other wants! He very much gives a shit (by hoarding his stuff, as it were) and wants to be disciplined! See Karl Abraham, "Contributions" 370–392. 12Initially Freud believed that the drives always aimed toward pleasure and the avoidance of pain in accord with "the pleasure principle." Eventually, however, Freud changed his mind to suggest there is a "death drive," or a pursuit of something beyond pleasure and life (see Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Freud's thinking in this respect would lead Jacques Lacan to suggest that, in the end, all drives are death drives. I will discuss this later in terms of "jouissance" or "enjoyment." 13The late James P. McDaniel's recent article, "Speaking Like a State," identifies "political enjoyment" as the problematic jouissance of our time. He argues that only by owning up to satisfactions of sadism, cruelty, and pain that all of us harbor through the processes of self-knowledge and "ironic self-suspension" can we start to counter and avoid the terrible political events (and the destructive, local responses to those events) in these "times of terror" (346). In a certain sense, the critique I advance here shows how the same "psychosocial economy of enjoyment" is in play in our discussions of disciplinarity as well. 14I acknowledge that such a shift from the psychoanalytic theory of the individual psyche to the "group behavior" of rhetoricians is controversial to some readers. In his understudied monograph Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud links the two levels via the function of the "object" (understood as another person) in the individual psyche: "In the individual's life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology…is at the same time social psychology as well" (3). My approach is similarly informed (that is, that groups behave in an analogous manner to individuals; e.g., class behavior often reflects Oedipal arrangements). For a more thoroughgoing discussion of this important theoretical tangle, see Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic" 338–395. 15I would be remiss not to point out that this some who enjoy tend to be gendered male, a point well made by Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter at the same disciplinary moment that Big Rhetoric became a concern. I will return to their essay later (see Blair, Brown, and Baxter, 383–409). 16For more on this evangelical riff, see Lundberg and Gunn, "'Ouija.'" 17The most recent are Steven Mailloux ("Places in Time") and James Arnt Aune's ("The Politics of Rhetorical Studies") essays in the February 2006 Quarterly Journal of Speech, which are revised versions of papers each delivered at the inaugural Alliance of Rhetorical Societies meeting in Evanston, Illinois in 2003. As the present essay attests, the theme of the 2006 meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America guarantees there are yet more and more to come. 18The keynote address by Steven Mailloux, "One Size Doesn't Fit All: The Contingent Universality of Rhetoric," revisits the Big Rhetoric debate, as did a number of papers on the 2006 RSA Convention Program. 19For the bottom feeders such as me, the suggestion here is that tone marks an intersection of psychoanalysis and rhetoric; tone is unquestionably a rhetorical quality, but it is not a word. Tone also registers the sound of desire and enjoyment. 20 For a Lacanian riff on a similar point ("mode"), see Dolar, "The Object Voice" 19–20. 21"Voice" is a mediating, sister concept to tone, and has received closer scrutiny in rhetorical studies (see Vivian, Being Made Strange; and Watts, "'Voice'" 179–796). 22If "mourning" is "a feeling-tone perhaps unique in the modern university," as James Arnt Aune has suggested ("Politics" 71), then apocalypticism is what the discourse of the modern university shares with the current administration of George W. Bush. The difference between the academic and federal apocalyptic, suggests Ellen Messer-Davidow, is that conservatism truly mourns and moves on, whereas the academic Left seems stuck in its nostalgic weeping. Space limits expanding the argument I offer later beyond the local, however, I would suggest inability of rhetorical studies to "get over itself" or "its death" is the same problem of the academic humanities as well; we simply cannot reckon with our dehabilitating and discriminatory perversity (see Messer-Davidow 1–35). 23For context, the complete comment from the blind reviewer was as follows: "Blair et al., despite the circulation their essay has gotten, struck me as simply whining, and generalizing on the basis of a highly limited sample." 24For a more modest reengagement with the project of defining both rhetoric and rhetorical studies as a field, see Graff, Walzer, and Atwill's The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition. 25James Darsey has suggested that erring too much on the side of deliberation emasculates protest politics and reformist rhetorics of social change (see Darsey 199–210). 26Once we recognize from the start that forging a contract or agreement among very different kinds of parties only threatens the hidden premise of exclusion, then we are led to a renewed responsibility to re-read our written work and be ever wary of tone. Just like a drug addict, the pervert must own her perversion to stop hurting the self and others. Owning up to one's role in the continuance of oppressive ideological norms is difficult, but as many of those who critique ideology have argued, the systemic character of ideology requires a degree of reflexivity. 27That the latter is the founding motto of any academic department was an argument often told by Robert Lee Scott to his students during many of his rhetoric seminars. My thanks to Dr. Scott for this humorous truism. 28In other words, my argument is that a recourse to a traditional apocalyptic tone—one that tempts the logic of the Same at the expense of the other—may be justifiable as a political strategy to save lives. It seems to me less justifiable as a tone in academic discussion. This would imply not taking a side with either "little rhetoric" or "Big Rhetoric," but rather, taking up the question of definition and disciplinarity solely in the institutional or political context (e.g., how to keep the program getting axed by the dean, and so on). 29Stylistically, Nietzsche famously yoked the feminine to tonal hollows (wombs), water, and the oceanic (see Derrida, Spurs; and Irigaray, Marine Lover). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJoshua Gunn Joshua Gunn is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

As college instructors endeavor to integrate technology into their classrooms, the crucial question is, “How does this integration affect learning?” This article reports an assessment of a series of online modules the author designed and piloted for a business communication course that she presented in a hybrid format (a combination of computer classroom sessions and independent online work). The modules allowed the author to use classroom time for observation of and individualized attention to the composing process. Although anecdotal evidence suggested that this system was highly effective, other assessment tools provided varying results. An anonymous survey of the students who took this course confirmed that the modules were effective in teaching important concepts; however, a blind review of student work produced mixed results.

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This article challenges current assumptions about the teaching and assessment of critical thinking in the composition classroom, particularly the practice of measuring critical thinking through individual written texts. Drawing on a case study of a class that incorporated disability studies discourse, and applying discourse analysis to student work, “Accessing Disability” argues that critical thinking can be taught more effectively through multi-modal methods and a de-emphasis on the linear progress narrative.

Freak-show theories developed in disability studies can help us analyze how students with disabilities rhetorically represent these in college admissions essays. In particular, such theories draw attention to the social conditions that affect how disabilities are conceived and treated as well as depicted.

Abstract In this essay I examine the problematics of mainstreaming within one site of composition studies research—the composition anthology. Specifically, I apply articulation theory and feminist disability theory to argue that the mainstreaming of disability narratives within composition readers, when articulated with a theory of individual subjectivity, legitimizes the belief that accommodation is an individualized process. Thus accommodation becomes synonymous with “fitting in,” a definition that locates the responsibility for adaptation within the “abnormal” body rather than within the institutions and ideologies that construct it as such.

Increasingly, autistic students are attending college, posing new challenges to writing instructors. In particular, such students may have trouble imagining readers’ responses to their texts. Developing an appropriate pedagogy for these students may involve revisiting composition studies’ tradition of cognitive research, while not abandoning more recent constructivist theories.

This article is a report on the 2006 WAC Conference at Clemson University, written from the perspective of two international friends. We use our reflections on the conference as a springboard for exploring the current state of play of the WAC movement, and for suggesting future areas for development. We noted three common sets of metaphors at play throughout the conference: spatial/architectural; mechanical; and aging. We suggest that these metaphors are triply revealing. They help reveal the healthy and vibrant range of WAC activities; they point towards common problems and shared difficulties; and they illuminate some of our current blind spots about our own practice and our critical understanding thereof. We end with some suggestions relating to the future work we consider significant for the continuing flourishing of WAC, and look forward to WAC 2008.

Abstract This essay blends critical race theory and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's sociological theory of color-blind racism to interrogate color-blind rhetoric. It uses the Kennedy–Nixon Presidential Debates as a site that, while illustrating the widely presumed duplicitous nature of political discourse, paradoxically romanticizes and concretizes the concepts of freedom and equality as race-neutral categories. Tracing the term “color blindness” to the Plessy Versus Ferguson case, the paper exposes the rhetorical and material limitations of legal language, from the Brown Versus the Board of Education decision to current controversies surrounding affirmative action, which advocate race neutrality rather than progressive color consciousness.

Abstract This essay blends critical race theory and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's sociological theory of color-blind racism to interrogate color-blind rhetoric. It uses the Kennedy–Nixon Presidential Debates as a site that, while illustrating the widely presumed duplicitous nature of political discourse, paradoxically romanticizes and concretizes the concepts of freedom and equality as race-neutral categories. Tracing the term "color blindness" to the Plessy Versus Ferguson case, the paper exposes the rhetorical and material limitations of legal language, from the Brown Versus the Board of Education decision to current controversies surrounding affirmative action, which advocate race neutrality rather than progressive color consciousness. Notes 1I appreciate Lorien Goodman, Steven Mailloux, Catherine Prendergast, Jacqueline Jones-Royster, and Victor Villanueva for making comments on a rough draft of this essay. I wish to especially acknowledge RR reviewers Keith Miller and Barbara Warnick for their insightful suggestions. 2Though it has been well documented that many blacks switched allegiance from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party with Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, many others remained loyal to the GOP. Of particular note here were the two preconvention meetings that the NAACP sponsored in 1960, one in Los Angeles for the Democrats and the other in Chicago for the Republicans. Of the combined 14,500 who attended these meetings, 7,500 attended the pre-Republican convention. According to Roy Wilkins, the NAACP was determined to remain nonpartisan. Aside from this, several prominent African Americans, according to Taylor Branch, wanted Democrats other than Kennedy to receive the presidential nomination. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, for example, initially supported Lyndon Johnson. Baseball great Jackie Robinson, a Republican, supported Democrat Hubert Humphrey during the primaries. Robinson said he would support Nixon if Kennedy were nominated, and Powell, as the third Kennedy-Nixon Debate reveals, eventually made some outlandish statements in support of the Democratic frontrunner. Powell's support, if not these statements themselves, may be attributable to the bribe Powell sought and received from the Kennedy camp. See The Crisis, August-September issue of 1960 and Branch's critically acclaimed Parting the Waters. 3While Nixon alludes to Lincoln five times in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination in July 1960, he does not invoke his name at all during the four debates. Kennedy alluded to Lincoln twice during his acceptance speech and four times during the debates. Though both men referred to how slavery supposedly fueled Lincoln's moral fervor for the Union's cause, all of the references gloss over the inequities that African Americans were experiencing during the 1960s, and only one of these references, ironically, identifies their race. Equally important, domestic freedom became a synecdoche for America's international agenda. Lincoln's larger-than-life status as a harbinger of freedom for blacks has been well researched and critiqued. For a fairly recent, provocative analysis, see Lerone Bennett's Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream. 4The Republican and Democratic respective civil rights planks of 1960 are worthy of rhetorical analysis aside from this study. As might be expected, both parties appealed to the spiritual, legal, and moral implications for civil rights that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence supposedly suggest. More surprisingly, each plank condemns racial discrimination as a practice that extends beyond southern borders. Both planks also appeal to the civil rights acts of 1957 and 1960 as the foundation and impetus for racial progress. While the Democratic platform set a deadline of 1963 (an acknowledged link to the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation) to comply with the Brown decision, the Republican platform rejects this specific timetable, believing that it would actually encourage delays in school desegregation. Under proposals to ensure voting enfranchisement, the Republican platform proposes that "completion of six primary grades in a state accredited school is conclusive evidence of literacy for voting purposes." In contrast, the Democratic platform promises to "support whatever action is necessary to eliminate literacy tests and the payment of poll taxes as requirements for voting." These passages underscore a fascinating ironic twist, for it was the Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) who started and protected literacy tests as one way of disenfranchising black voters; yet the Republican proposal could be viewed as an appeasement to the Southern Democrats' constituency. 5The widely recognized birth date for the Sit-in Movement is February 1, 1960. Only nine days later, according to Lerone Bennett, "the movement had spread to fifteen Southern cities in five states." By March 22, "more than one thousand blacks had been arrested in sit-in demonstrations." No wonder Nixon felt compelled to say a word about this movement. Curiously, he did not say more. More curiously, Kennedy says nothing on this topic during the debates. 6Kennedy admits during this debate that he borrows the phrase "moral leader" from Franklin Roosevelt. The Democratic Platform also uses the expression. In reality, Kennedy, according to Mary Dudziak among others, would not become fully convinced about civil rights until after the Birmingham campaign of April and May 1963, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in September would transform him into a full-fledged moral leader. 7At the close of the fourth debate, Nixon asserted that with regard to "civil rights," the Republican Party had made "more progress in the past 8 years than in the whole 80 years before." The Republican platform, from which Nixon lifts this statement almost verbatim, specifies what "progress" Nixon may be alluding to, namely the civil rights legislation passed in 1957 and 1960. 8King had little tolerance for permutations of "liberalism" that were not radically progressive on the issue of racial justice. Two stellar examples of this posture are his speeches, "Give Us the Ballot," delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1957, and the other, "The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness," delivered at the Golden Anniversary Conference of the National Urban League in 1960. Both speeches contain sections that challenge Northern liberals to examine their motives behind fears about achieving racial justice. See The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., James M. Washington, editor. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid G. Holmes David G. Holmes is Associate Professor of English and Blanche E. Seaver Professor in Hu-manities at Pepperdine University, where he teaches courses in rhetoric, composition, the civil rights movement, and the Harlem Renaissance. His most recent essays have appeared in College English and in the anthology Calling Cards. His research interests include epistemologies and rhetorics of racism, theories of ethos, and the civil rights movement mass meetings.

From a rhetorical perspective, Mendel’s work and its reception elicit two important questions: (a) why were Mendel’s arguments so compelling to 20th century biologists? And (b) why where they so roundly ignored by his contemporaries? The focus of this article is to examine the latter question while commenting on the former by employing several tactics for rhetorical analysis including historical, textual, and audience analyses. These analyses suggest that Mendel’s argument resembles 20th century biological arguments in its use of mathematical principles and formulae to both inform the design of experiments and support the law-like regularity of conclusions. These procedures, however, were not regarded by his audience of hybridists, botanists, cytologists, and naturalists as sufficiently persuasive or necessarily even legitimate. I will argue that had he taken a more rhetorical tact and considered the position of his audience on the legitimacy of the scope of his conclusions, his methods for making arguments, and his assumptions about heritable characters perhaps his arguments wouldn’t have fallen on deaf ears.

This article critically analyzes how technical communication practices both construct and are constructed by normalizing discourses, which can marginalize the experiences, knowledges, and material needs of people with disabilities. In particular, the article explores how disability studies theories can offer critical insights into research in two areas: safety communication and usability. In conclusion, the article offers ways that disability studies can intervene in the pedagogy of usability, communication technology, linguistic bias, narrative, and discourse communities.

To fairly evaluate the writing of deaf and hard-of-hearing students, instructors should focus on the meaning, not the developmental errors, in the text.

Booth and Elbow engage in a dialogue about what has become even more important in recent years, namely how we come to believe what we believe and convince others to believe with us. Booth speculates that one needs to commit oneself to combating both dogmatism and skepticism by embracing the rhetoric of assent, and offers rules to help us “learn how to listen”; Elbow agrees with Booth on a number of points but argues for the special value of dissent, perhaps even “unreasonable” dissent, before going on to offer specific classroom practices that can advance their common goal of critical thinking.