Bernard Malamud’s novel A New Life and its attention to midcentury writing instruction illuminates the emergence of rhetoric and composition. Malamud’s novel is what microhistorians describe as “exceptional typical” evidence, where exceptional status and typical topics combine to showcase power formations in historical context. The novel describes shifts in textbooks and writing curricula, identifies the emergence of process-oriented assessment practices, and witnesses the institutional and disciplinary marginalization of female instructors. As such, Malamud could be described as a proto-composition scholar. Reflecting upon his legacy at their institution, the authors consider the re-naming of a student lounge named after Malamud.

In increasingly online higher education environments, instructors must develop positive and community-oriented learning environments, equivalent to, if different from, face-to-face learning experiences. Connectivism and communities of inquiry are complementary theories that facilitate the design and development of online learning and enable online learners to connect with peers. This article discusses two pedagogical interventions that encourage connectivism and foster communities of inquiry in online technical communication programs: (a) a face-to-face orientation workshop at the beginning of an online program and (b) a peer-review activity in a research methods graduate course. The article explains the development, deployment, and evaluation of the activities.

Communicating risk amid moments of scientific ambiguity requires balance: Overdelivering certainty levels can cause undue alarm whereas underdelivering them can lead to increased public risk. Despite this complexity, risk assessment is an important decision-making tool. This article analyzes the circulation of the term “risk” in a corpus (74,804 words) of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention communications regarding COVID-19 from January 1 to April 30, 2020. Tracking collocations of the 147 instances of risk in this corpus reveals that experts initially framed risk away from individuals, complicating people’s differentiation between public and personal impacts. Recommendations are offered for how institutions can reframe subjectivity to promote vigilance during pandemics.

This webtext reports on research conducted at Brigham Young University in the summer of 2017 about source evaluation methods used by first-year writing students. Librarians used several methods to study how students rate online source reliability including voice recordings, screen recordings, and open response tests. This webtext provides a visual landscape of how students interacted with the articles we asked them to evaluate.

Student retention and persistence is increasingly prioritized by state and local policies as well as national scorecards and rankings—however, the policies that politicians and administrators undertake to improve university metrics tend to ignore the realities faced by students at the heart of our institutions. Drawing on a survey/interview project involving 67 students repeating first-year writing classes at a diverse institution in the Southwestern US, this article takes a student-centered approach to understand the reasons they drop first-year writing, such as health concerns, lack of engagement with the curriculum, and their incompatibility with online learning or poorly taught online classes. In making recommendations to address the challenges students face, the author calls on writing teachers and administrators to take a more activist stance in their roles, by engaging in actions such as pushing back against exploitative working conditions, recognizing the racism inherent in strict attendance policies, drawing on work from directed self-placement to better guide students when considering online writing classes, and advocating for readings and curricular choices that take into account the diversity of students in writing programs.

Empirical methods to evaluate undergraduate pedagogy have become quite common in the field of composition studies. Reflection on and evaluation of graduate pedagogy in the field is much less common, however. In this article, the authors suggest that scholars in the field endeavor to develop pedagogical methods for graduate education, while also proposing one such pedagogical approach. The first author developed an approach for the graduate course History and Theories of Composition using an adaptation of Teaching for Transfer pedagogy. With the help of his graduate student co-authors and with interviews from experienced graduate instructors and additional graduate students, the research team further developed this pedagogy to be more effectively applied to graduate courses in composition studies. We believe this approach may be one among many to use, and we encourage other scholars to further develop this method and to develop alternatives.

This program profile describes the development and implementation of The Black Ink Project at Morehouse College. The Black Ink Project is a curricular initiative intended to support the development of writing abilities among the Men of Morehouse and immerse them in the writing process in the tradition of articulating servant leadership for which the institution is known. Their study informs them of the Black Experience in Africa, America, and the Diaspora. Key to the success of The Black Ink Project is the preparation of faculty, equipping them with the knowledge of culturally relevant pedagogy and strategies for teaching and assessing writing across the curriculum and within the disciplines.

Over the past two decades, reflective writing has occupied an increasingly prominent position in composition theory, pedagogy, and assessment as researchers have described the value of reflection and reflective writing in college students’ development of higher-order writing skills, such as genre conventions (Yancey, Reflection ; White). One assumption about the value of reflection has been that skill in reflective writing also has a positive connection with lower-order writing skills, such as sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. However, evidence to confirm this assumption has been limited to small qualitative studies or deferred to future longitudinal research (Downs and Wardle). In the mixed methods assessment study presented here, we first investigated this assumption empirically by measuring the relationship between evaluative skills embedded in the genre of reflective writing and lower-order writing skills that follow sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. We found a high-positive correlation between reflection and writing assessment scores. We then used qualitative methods to describe key features of higher- and lower-scored reflective essays.

This essay describes writing and conversations that took place in my First Year Writing class at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. I analyze student responses to my invitation to consider more deeply—and wield more consciously—the language resources they bring into classrooms. I seek to understand the potential for their often deeply racialized assessment of their own language resources, and those of others, to enable them to build common cause across language communities and racial communities. In particular, I look at the role of Black language as a recurring trope in multilingual students’ writing about their experiences navigating the designation of “ESL” in school. I argue that the volatility of this trope—Black language serves in their work as a call-to-arms, stumbling block, source of strength, or taboo—poses a challenge to contemporary scholarship on language diversity. Ultimately, I center students’ invocations of Black language in the emerging discussion of translingual writing in composition studies, arguing that these students do the work Keith Gilyard has called for in connecting global and local US language struggles. This essay draws from a longer chapter in my book, Mapping Racial Literacies: College Students Write About Race and Segregation , in which I argue that student writing can contribute to and reshape contemporary understandings of how US and global citizens are thinking about race.

Client satisfaction surveys have long been a cornerstone of writing center assessment, but to date, research on satisfaction surveys has largely focused on analyzing client responses from the survey and their administrative uses. Research rarely investigates why clients provide the responses they do and how consultants process these responses. This study, therefore, involved conducting separate client and consultant focus groups to learn about each population’s interactions with one writing center’s optional post-session satisfaction survey and the survey results. The findings revealed that while client participants used the survey to communicate high levels of satisfaction, client participants also thought about the survey in multifaceted ways that took into account complex factors, such as their relationship with the writing center and care for consultants’ feelings. The study also showed that consultant participants valued positive feedback from clients but that consultants found their survey responses to have limited utility for professional growth and that they craved more specific and constructive feedback. This article offers considerations for how writing center professionals can better communicate the purpose of surveys to both clients and consultants, and it proposes additional forms of assessment that could allow consultants and administrators to hear the nuanced feedback clients can offer.

Training audience awareness is a significant but challenging task for teaching academic writing. To integrate the teaching of television studies with writing skills, I designed a BA seminar when working as a lecturer in the English department of a German university in 2015. I present my experience with and my students’ evaluation of training audience awareness as part of this seminar. The evaluations confirmed students’ increased awareness of the importance of incorporating audience-directed elements in writing, but indicated that the task had created obstacles, for example, regarding students’ reading comprehension. I retrospectively analyze my teaching approach and discuss possible reasons for my students’ success and difficulties with the writing assignment, and make suggestions for changes that may have better supported their learning process. I, therewith, aim to foster the integration of teaching writing within, across, and beyond disciplinary audiences in discipline-specific courses.

AbstractAccording to the argument scheme approach, to evaluate a given scheme-saturating instance completely does entail asking all critical questions (CQs) relevant to it. Although this is a central task for argumentation theorists, the field currently lacks a method for providing a complete argument evaluation. Approaching this task at the meta-level, we combine a logical with a substantive approach to the argument schemes by starting from Toulmin’s schema: ‘data, warrant, so claim’. For the yet more general schema: ‘premise(s); if premise(s), then conclusion; so conclusion’, we forward a meta-level CQ-list that is arguably both complete and applicable. This list should inform ongoing theoretical efforts at generating appropriate object-level CQs for specific argument schemes.

Discussions of demagoguery are, unfortunately, back in vogue in popular political discourse. Within the contemporary political landscape, the question of whether various world leaders should be considered demagogues abounds. In the American context, many perceive strong demagogic tendencies in President Donald Trump, and others see it in candidates like Bernie Sanders. This assessment, while perhaps not always stated in such specific terms, is prevalent throughout much of the rhetoric in public debate and deliberation, with Democrats and Republicans demonizing each other with more frequency. While this discussion seems particularly relevant to the contemporary political climate, demagoguery as a term dates all the way back to some of the earliest political philosophers of the Western tradition. The term's origin was decidedly neutral, as can be seen in the likes of Aristophanes and Thucydides. Donald Trump is, in the most neutral sense of the term, a demagogue. That is to say that Trump is a leader of a group of people, a fact that his 2016 election victory affirms. Trump may also be a demagogue in the more charged sense of the word. This more charged definition finds its roots in Plato and Aristotle, who began to complicate the term before Plutarch defined the term with a negative valence that has stuck. A critical aspect of defining demagoguery in the contemporary lexicon is a focus on how an individual's rhetorical moves, with unique personal motivations, drive a public toward us versus them binaries. Much of the scholarship on the Nazis and Adolf Hitler is an exemplar of this obsession with individualistic demagoguery, as it often elucidates personal motives for Hitler's demagogic rhetoric toward the Jews. Since Hitler is considered by many to be the demagogue par excellence and some of this understanding can be traced to Kenneth Burke, this conception of demagoguery as something enacted by a particular speaker has remained dominant in rhetorical study and political philosophy.Against such a backdrop, Patricia Roberts-Miller's Rhetoric and Demagoguery provides a timely intervention into how we define and think about demagoguery. In order to accomplish such a task, Roberts-Miller traces the way demagoguery is currently envisioned, explains the deficits of that conceptualization, provides a new working definition grounded in argumentation theory, and then uses a series of examples to support her argument. Roberts-Miller takes issue with defining demagoguery as the intentional use of scapegoating by a liberal autonomous subject. For many scholars, it is easier to explain rampant discrimination, fascism, and violence as something spurred by an individual speaker rather than addressing what allowed that message to take root.Roberts-Miller therefore criticizes this approach and provides a redefinition of demagoguery as “a polarizing discourse that promises stability, certainty, and escape from the responsibilities of rhetoric through framing public policy in terms of the degree to which and means by which (not whether) the out-group should be punished and scapegoated for the current problems of the in-group” (16). Further, she contends that public policy debate in a demagogic society tends to focus on only three things: group identity, need, and severity of punishment against the out-group. To elucidate the features that flow from this definition, Roberts-Miller draws on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's concept of philosophical paired terms. This terminology, which she rephrases as binary paired terms, shows how societal demagoguery relies on binaries, which usually circle back to in-group versus out-group driven decision making. This allows rhetors to skip deliberation and sound argumentation and simply assert their position. Roberts-Miller further theorizes how these dynamics mean that political debate focuses on nonfalsifiable motivism rather than specific policy proposals. Roberts-Miller accomplishes much of this method and theory building in the introductory and concluding chapters, advancing specific case studies in the body chapters that help elucidate and nuance her redefinition.The first example Roberts-Miller turns to is the invasion of Iraq, explored in depth in chapter 1. Roberts-Miller explains that what made her write this book was the almost entirely absent policy debate prior to the invasion of Iraq. Roberts-Miller argues that policy debate must address both need and a plan. To be clear, there was plenty of ideological pseudo-debate about need in the lead-up to the invasion, but Roberts-Miller points out there was hardly any concrete policy discussion about what plans might be considered. Beginning with the necessary background information on the lead-up to this war, Roberts-Miller then pivots to an explanation of how identity was substituted for policy. President George W. Bush and his administration did all they could to avoid discussion of a particular plan for Iraq. Such deliberation, in their view, would have delayed and bogged down support for the war effort. Rather, they simply called out anyone who did not support going to war as unpatriotic, showing how identity trumped deliberation and the patriotic/unpatriotic binary flourished. The Bush administration also enacted a binary between the “Christian West” and “Muslim Middle East” as a way to further stake the war on identities rather than sound, policy debate. With these binaries, Roberts-Miller shows how the conditions for the disastrous Iraq War were achieved through demagogic rhetoric. Many in Congress and the public positioned debate itself as being anti-American, instead opting for naïve, patriotic support of the war. Without a strong policy debate, the American war strategy relied purely on best-case scenarios that did not happen. According to Roberts-Miller, relying on public debate, rather than demagoguery, may have prevented the invasion of Iraq or “at worst, have led to a better-planned war” with contingencies being considered (47).Chapter 2 builds on the binary paired terms of punishment and reward, using a number of case studies to exemplify how these terms are used in demagogic rhetoric. The first explored is Cleon from Ancient Athens. Cleon sets up the binary of everyone being either a friend or enemy and every act being either reward or punishment. Roberts-Miller works this pairing into a unique ratio of punish/enemy and reward/friend, which characterize demagoguery writ large. Cleon's “rational” assessment here shows the risks of defining demagoguery as primarily invested in leveraging emotional appeals. As Roberts-Miller pointedly observes, definitions of demagoguery as speech driven by mere strong affects is misguided since a speaker could provide good argumentation grounded in emotion, and, conversely, a speaker might be able to perform “emotionless” rationality without solid evidence. Instead, as Roberts-Miller explains through examples ranging from segregationists in the south to the Supreme Court decision in Hirabayashi v. United States, to illustrate how those claiming calm rationality, often through an invented middle ground, can actually perpetrate demagogic binaries and policies. In Hirabayashi, this worked its way back into a punishment/reward binary where Japanese Americans were falsely blamed (scapegoated) for sabotage during the attack on Pearl Harbor and were in need of punishment (internment).In chapter 3, Roberts-Miller elaborates further upon the features of her definition of demagoguery: scapegoating and rationality. Looking deeper into Japanese internment in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Roberts-Miller expands beyond the Hirabayashi ruling to examine the Roberts Commission and California attorney general Earl Warren's supposedly emotionless arguments for imprisonment. A critical component of this appeal was Warren's surface-level reasonability and a supposed willingness to let the facts guide the debate surrounding internment. However, once one digs beneath the surface, it becomes clear that this rationality is merely a façade. Roberts-Miller points to a lack of evidence that there was any Japanese American involvement in Pearl Harbor and the difference in treatment between Japanese Americans and German and Italian Americans as proof of prejudice rather than deliberation guiding decision making. This is used to prove that rationality markers are often deployed to conflate the difference between a logical argument and an argument that is made by appealing to logic. Ultimately, the Japanese were interned not because of logic in and of itself but because demagoguery cast them as an entity Americans should fear through misleading appeals to a nonexistent logic.Chapter 4 moves from a discussion of demagoguery that appeals to logic that, while flawed, is easy to understand to demagoguery that relies on argumentation that claims rationality but intentionally obfuscates logic. The case study here is Madison Grant's racist book Passing of the Great Race, which is considered a historically significant white supremacist text because of its prevalence in America and its appreciation by Hitler himself. Roberts-Miller deftly dissects Grant's demagogic argument for the superiority of the white/Nordic race through the inconsistencies in logic. Some specific problems include Grant's lack of definition for his central term “race,” an evolutionary narrative that undercuts his claims to Nordic purity, and his practically nonexistent use of citations or appeals to authority. Roberts-Miller highlights how even those contemporary reviewers who assessed the book positively cited its poor quality of argument as a negative element. Thus, with his claims not clearly grounded in proper citations, Grant's authority comes from himself. Roberts-Miller's takedown of Grant works well to boost her claim that demagoguery can guise itself with pseudo-logic, while actually being logic's antithesis.Roberts-Miller's next move is to show how demagogic rhetoric can appeal to expert opinion and be seemingly intellectual, when it is actually anti-intellectual. Chapter 5 focuses on three case studies of nonscientists—E. S. Cox, Theodore Bilbo, and William Tam—who claimed appeals to authority and that science supported their positions (with Cox and Bilbo espousing white supremacy and Tam arguing homophobic viewpoints against gay marriage). Cox relies heavily on authorities whom he believes are right because they are good people (i.e., white). Bilbo's arguments often contradict his sources, and his sources often contradict each other. Further, the Bilbo case study works to show how demagoguery is not always a calculated maneuver, as Bilbo's political career would have been better served with a less overtly racist message. Finally, Tam shows how poor, demagogic citation practices can flourish in the digital age. Tam deflected numerous questions about his sources and the facticity of his homophobic claims as being found on the Internet, which he implicitly claimed must make them true. Here, Roberts-Miller advances more theoretical insights on the anti-intellectualism of demagoguery, bolstered most compellingly by her selection of cases that all relied on so-called expert appeals to science and, with Tam, the Internet as a whole.Roberts-Miller's conclusion again reiterates her redefinition of demagoguery and why this book has provided an important move to understanding the culture of demagoguery. Roberts-Miller then lists some topics that she could not explore in depth due to length restrictions, including gender, religion, charismatic leadership, reification, demagoguery's universality, and if demagoguery harms only in cases of an essentialized out-group identity. Indeed, I was surprised that Roberts-Miller's book largely declined to give issues of gender and other power differentials greater attention in order to present a more capacious account of demagoguery. One area in particular this book could have improved on is either providing significant cases of demagoguery on the left or explaining why this omission is necessary given her theoretical redefinition. Every major example in the body chapters of this book comes from right-leaning politicians and sympathizers. While these provide stark and compelling case examples, Roberts-Miller opens by saying, “Any project that is entirely about how badly they argue is going to be a self-congratulating exercise in saying the out-group is the out-group. Trying to identify the characteristics that help people climb up the latter [sic -ladder] of extermination shouldn't be in service of purifying our communities of demagogues—we are demagogues—but in service of reflecting on what is persuading us. That's the goal of this book” (8). As such, a case study of leftist demagoguery would have done well to illustrate her point across ideological and party lines. Or if leftist demagoguery does not exist, an explanation of why that is the case would be very insightful for future research. Nevertheless, Roberts-Miller's Rhetoric and Demagoguery provides a timely and essential intervention into our conception of demagoguery in the present day. Readers of Philosophy & Rhetoric as well as those interested in political philosophy will find much practical and scholarly utility in this book.

This study examines the extent to which TOEIC Writing test scores relate to an external criterion: evaluations by linguistic laypersons of the functional adequacy of writing in the international workplace. Test-taker responses to two representative tasks from the TOEIC Writing test (e-mail requests, opinion surveys) were adapted for workplace role-play scenarios that laypersons read and evaluated in an online survey. After reading each role-play scenario, laypersons evaluated the text produced by their imagined interlocutor using functional adequacy scale items (comprehensibility, content adequacy, effectiveness, support and coherence). Overall functional adequacy evaluations were obtained by averaging the ratings for each of the two tasks. Layperson ratings of functional adequacy were strongly correlated with TOEIC Writing test scores (r = 0.76). Results suggested that test-takers’ writing performance is likely to be perceived as functionally adequate for test scores at which important decisions are typically made. Study results are discussed in terms of their implications for claims about the generalizability of TOEIC Writing test score interpretations with respect to those made in the international workplace, as well as the potential benefits, challenges, and limitations involved in this approach to validation.

This article examines how faculty at one college respond to student writing, how students interpret that feedback, and how through collective self-evaluation and community-building workshops some faculty paved a path toward more productive response. The first part of the findings resonate with what scholars in the 1980s discovered: that teachers’ feedback strategies often operate at cross-purposes with students’ motivations and understandings. Asking why, after forty years of scholarship, such counterproductive strategies still prevail, the study suggests burdensome workloads, lack of training, rigid applications of rubrics and genres, and isolation from peers are to blame. It then profiles three teachers who, despite these obstacles, provide deep-reaching feedback. Although their pedagogies and backgrounds differ, they share common bonds, teaching authentically from who they are, an approach that is open to all teachers once they feel freed to adopt it.

This article explores how prior experiences influence instructors’ responses to African American English–based writing. The author examines why her reaction to a student essay differed from several colleagues’; she suggests that current standards for college writing leave little room for effective nonmainstream strategies and that writing pedagogy should cultivate appreciation for such work.

Bayes's theorem allows us to use subjective thinking to find numerical values to formulate assessments of risk. It is more than a mathematical formula; it can be thought of as an iterative process that challenges us to imagine the potential for "unknown, unknowns." The heuristics involved in this process can be enhanced if they take into consideration some of the established risk assessment and communication models used today in technical communication that are concerned with the social construction of meaning and the kairos involved in rhetorical situations. Understanding the connection between Bayesian analysis and risk communication will allow us to better convey the potential for risk that is based on probabilistic assumptions.

There is increasing evidence that automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems support the teaching and learning of writing in meaningful ways. However, a dearth of research has explored ways that AWE may be integrated within different instructional contexts and examined the associated effects on students’ writing performance. This paper describes the AWE system MI Write and presents results of a mixed-methods study that investigated the integration and implementation of AWE with writing instruction at the middle-school level, examining AWE integration within both a traditional process approach to writing instruction and with strategy instruction based on the Self-Regulated Strategy Development model. Both instructional contexts were evaluated with respect to fostering growth in students’ first-draft writing quality across successive essays as well as students’ and teachers’ experiences and perceptions of teaching and learning with AWE. Multilevel model analyses indicated that during an eight-week intervention students in both instructional contexts exhibited growth in first-draft writing performance and at comparable rates. Qualitative analyses of interview data revealed that AWE’s influence on instruction was similar across contexts; specifically, the introduction of AWE resulted in both instructional contexts taking on characteristics consistent with a framework for deliberate practice.

This article reports on one university’s experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed “MonsterComp,” including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures, the main motivation behind this experiment was to enhance teacher training and support while still retaining the workshop environment and low student-to-instructor ratio of traditional composition sections. The course involves multiple stakeholders, including the WPA and graduate student program coordinators, graduate student instructors, and course-based coaches from our university's writing center. Assessment of student work, observations of the course, and surveys administered to stakeholders indicate that the course was successful in terms of teacher training and preserving student learning outcomes.

To ascertain the risk assessments parents use when making vaccine decisions, I conducted semi-structured interviews with mothers of young children. Treating these interviews as texts, I rhetorically analyzed how parents talk about their chil­dren’s vaccination in order to better understand reasons for vaccine hesitancy. My analysis reveals that despite the difference in behavior between parents who vac­cinate and parents who hesitate, there is a commonality in discourse. Three topoi emerged within these mothers’ explanation of their vaccination decisions: percep­tions of diseases, perceptions of environmental threats, and assessment of their child’s vulnerability. Considering the common ground these topoi reflect, I explore possible alternative messaging about vaccines that might better encourage vaccine uptake. Ultimately, I argue a rhetorical approach to studying public and personal discourses about health issues can prove useful for identifying key topoi, which can generate communication strategies for addressing public concerns while potentially improving support for public health initiatives

Background: The lab report is a commonly assigned genre in engineering lab courses; however, students often have difficulties meeting the expectations of writing in engineering labs. At the same time, it is challenging for engineering faculty to instruct lab report writing because they are often under-supported in writing pedagogies and usually unfamiliar with the extent of students' prior writing knowledge. Literature review: Literature on technical communication in engineering addresses the importance of a rhetorical approach to writing instruction, as well as an emphasis on genre. Extending this literature, research into writing transfer provides valuable insight for better understanding how undergraduates negotiate the engineering lab report as a new genre within this distinct rhetorical context. Research questions: 1. How effective is a transfer-focused writing pedagogy in supporting students' understanding of the genre conventions of engineering lab reports? 2. How does the transfer-focused writing pedagogy impact students' writing quality in five categories (rhetorical knowledge, organization, evidence, critical thinking, and disciplinary conventions)? 3. What are the rhetorical features that engineering students improve or struggle with the most with lab report writing? Research methodology: Four engineering instructors and two English instructors participated in this study to design and develop the lab report writing instructional module, and implemented the module materials into their engineering lab courses. The module, consisting of lab report writing instruction and assessment resources, shares a rhetorical approach and foundational writing terms with first-year composition courses to emphasize a writing-transfer pedagogy. We collected and analyzed undergraduates' lab report samples to evaluate the impact of the module on students' writing performance. Two sets of lab reports were collected for analysis: the sample sets before (control), during the 2015-2016 academic year; and after (experimental) implementation of the module, during the 2016-2017 academic year. Results and conclusions: Data collected via pre- and post-implementation writing artifacts show that a rhetorical approach to teaching lab reports helped students better understand the expectations of the lab report as a discipline-specific genre, and it developed students' understanding of the rhetorical features of engineering writing. The pilot module positively impacted the quality of students' lab reports, a finding that suggests that using a transfer-focused writing pedagogy can successfully support the transfer and adaptation of writing knowledge into gateway or entry-level engineering laboratory courses.

Book Reviews 229 O'Connell is very effective when analysing the use of vivid language to make the audience imagine scenes they have not witnessed themselves, dis­ cussing Aeschines' passage on the sack of Thebes, Demosthenes on Phokis, and Lycurgus on the scene at Athens after the catastrophic military defeat at Chaeronea. His analyses make use of both ancient criticism and modem lit­ erary tools. Taken together, they make a strong case for accepting the ancient commentators' evaluation of these passages as able to make the audience "see" the scene in imagination. The most stimulating part of this final section however is the final chapter on "shared spectatorship" with its examples of the interaction between the mental images of past actions or absent persons created by the orators' language and the actual sights of the courtroom. O'Connell shows how the orators encourage a type of mental superimposition (my term) of the idea of the sight evoked - and created - by the orator onto the accused present in the courtroom. This is particularly satisfying as an example of actual and virtual sights being used as a sustained strategy throughout a speech and underlines the multiple possibilities for manipulation. One area that could have been addressed in more detail is the sugges­ tion on p. 32 that appearance—real or imagined—might spark a process of enthymematic reasoning (the accused has the commonly accepted characte­ ristics of a murderer/adulterer therefore it is likely that he is guilty as char­ ged). But this rich and stimulating study has a great deal to offer specialists in ancient and modem rhetoric and in ancient Greek literature and culture. Ruth Webb Universite de Lille Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch, eds., Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus, (Beitrage zur Altertumskunde 368), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 202 pp. ISBN 9783110573978 Plato's Menexenus is a rhetorical masterpiece. That, at any rate, seems to have been the judgment of generations of Athenians, who, Cicero tells us, had someone recite Socrates' funeral oration annually (Orator 151). The speech can be stirring, especially when Socrates speaks in the voice of the dead soldiers and urges their sons to lives of virtue. But is it sincere? Before he delivers the speech, Socrates claims that it is easy to give funeral orations, since all you have to do is praise Athenians to Athenians. The speech misrepresents historical events and doesn't even reflect Socrates own sentiments, since he attributes it to Pericles mistress Aspasia. To make matters worse, Socrates seems to be delivering the speech years after he, and probably Aspasia as well, had died. The puzzles of the Menexenus have no easy answer. Unable to resolve its contradictions in a satisfactory t47av, scholars have tended to focus on its relationship with other surviving 230 RHETORICA Athenian funeral orations and with the rest of Plato's works. This thoughtprovoking volume is no exception. The contributors approach the text from the perspectives of philosophy and political thought, but their argu­ ments will also be inspiring to readers interested in rhetoric in Plato and in Classical Athens. After a brief introduction, Speechesfor the Dead reprints Charles H. Kahn's 1963 article, "Plato's Funeral Oration: The Motive of the Menexenus" Kahn argues that the Menexenus is a political pamphlet, expressing Plato's dislike of the policies of Pericles and his successors, especially the capitulation to Persia in the King's Peace of 386. The eight new essays in Speeches for the Dead are influenced not so much by Kahn's specific arguments as by his approach, which poses five questions about the Menexenus: Why Aspasia? Why the anachronisms? Why the historical distortions? Why did Plato write a funeral oration? Why did that oration continue to be delivered years after it was written? Only some of the authors invoke these questions directly, but a fundamental "why" lies behind each of the essays. They all seek to explain why the Menexenus is the way it is by treating it as a work of serious Platonic philosophy. In "Reading the Menexenus Intertextually," Mark Zelcer takes seriously Socrates' claim that Aspasia composed the speech he delivers by gluing together pieces she had left...

232 RHETORICA concludes it is the definitive guide to the Menexenus that the back cover pro­ mises, there is something here for everyone who wants to think critically about the dialogue and its problems. Peter A. O'Connell The University of Georgia Robert R. Edwards, Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus: The Ohio State Press, 2017. 230 pp. ISBN 9780814213407 It is a philological distinction commonly invoked by historians of rhetoric that invention, rhetoric's first and arguably foremost canon, has something of a double meaning. The Latin invenire can mean "to find" or "to come upon," or it can mean "to create" or "to contrive." In Invention and Authorship in Medieval England, Robert Edwards shows how medieval authors invented (in both senses of the term) authorial identities that wor­ ked within accepted traditions of literary production and interpretation, and also sometimes questioned or subverted those traditions, showing that "authorship is at once rhetorical and literary, historical and poetic" (xi). Yet, while Edwards observes that rhetorical theory was an important ele­ ment of literary production and of identification with distinct traditions, the relationship between the literary, the rhetorical, and distinct models of authorship remains comparatively underexplored. The result is a deep and compelling literary analysis of canonical English authors such as Marie de France, Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, but a somewhat incom­ plete discussion of the intersection of rhetoric and poetics in English literary culture. This incompleteness, however, should not dissuade the prospective reader from engaging with this text. Edwards' deep knowledge of classical and medieval culture is evident throughout all of the chapters of Invention and Authorship in Medieval England. Indeed, the relationship of each literary figure to classical and vernacular traditions is of paramount concern to Edwards, as he notes that "the agency . . . working in medieval English texts consciously foregrounds the decision to write within traditions and conventions" (xv), meaning that authors only achieve authorship by "consciously placing themselves through their works within the interpretive structure of a literary system" (xvi). Each chapter, then, endeavors to place each literary figure within such a liter­ ary system. Chapter 2, for instance, demonstrates how Marie de France "exer­ cises agency to revise her received materials [e.g. primarily those of Ovid] from popular and learned sources and to create a hybrid classicism in which she operates as a counterpart and conscious alternative to a Latin auetor" (34). In general, Edwards' claims in regard to such systems are well-defended; for instance, he thoroughly defends his assertion that "in Ovid's Book Reviews 233 erotodidactic poems . . . Marie finds a topic and conceptual frame for invention and authorship rather than rhetorical adornment and learned allusion" (40). This assessment is itself valuable, as it counters common readings of Marie (and indeed, many other medieval authors) that reduce their receptions and appropriations of classical literary culture to derivate borrowings, as Edwards himself observes (39). Likewise, Edwards' discus­ sion of Gower and his use of elements of scribal and textual culture—such as the accessus,- prologues, paratexts, and others (63-104)—is well-supported and fascinating. Yet, some other chapters, such as the section on Chaucer, do not fully account for the potential influence of contemporary theories of rhetoric and poetics that would have been instrumental for defining attitudes toward lit­ erary authorship. This omission is striking, first, because Edwards observes the connections between literary authorship and rhetoric in the introductory chapters of his text, and second, because his incorporation of scholarship by historians of rhetoric such as Rita Copeland and James J. Murphy suggests a knowledge of this sub-field and how it may have influenced English literary attitudes. For example, while Edwards observes that Chaucer is associated with a catalogue of works by his contemporaries, as well as that these works are largely "generated through forms of poetic imitation," (110) it was sur­ prising to see that he made little connection to the tradition of the medieval artes poetriae (aside from a reference in a footnote citing Murphy, which men­ tioned Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Venddme). Arguably these artes represent an early example of the codification of contemporary medieval poets such as Alan of...

The present study investigated the effects of applying cumulative group dynamic assessment (G-DA) procedures (Poehner, 2009) to support EFL writing development in a university context in Iran. It focused on learner achievement, patterns of occurrence of mediation incidents, and learners’ and teachers’ perceptions towards G-DA. Quantitative data was collected from learners’ performance on writing tests and the frequency of occurrence of mediation incidents involving EFL writing components based on Jacobs, Zinkgraf, Wormouth, Hartfield, and Hughey’s (1981) scale. Findings revealed that G-DA was more effective than conventional explicit intervention for supporting EFL writing development. Also, it worked best for low ability learners as compared to mid and high ability ones. Besides, the number of mediation incidents declined from 27 in session one to 8 in the final session, confirming the efficacy of G-DA in promoting both EFL writing and learner self-regulation. Most teacher mediation involved language use, vocabulary, and organization and fewer incidents involved content and mechanics. Qualitative data analysis indicated that most learners and teachers held positive attitudes towards the efficacy of G-DA for supporting EFL writing development. However, a few participants asserted that the procedures were unsystematic, stressful, time consuming, and inappropriate for large classes.

I appreciate that this paper was applauded for its thoughtful approach to assessing “prescription drug labels (PDLs)” using rhetorical principles. However, I believe the authors’ invention of the composite artifact “PDL” and their subsequent assessment based on this flawed concept is problematic and may weaken the validity of their conclusions.

Peer review is a common practice in writing studies. However, while there is considerable research on peer review, pedagogical studies on other forms of student-led assessment strategies are less prevalent. This study investigates the expansion of assessment practices into student-led rubric development and peer grading, focusing on their effect on student understanding of the writing process. Utilizing surveys and classroom observations in two second-year composition courses at a university in New York City, this study investigates student-led assessment strategies as a potent pedagogical tool, adding to literature that explores assessment as an active part of the writing process.

Higher education research has demonstrated the positive effects of service-learning on students, with particular attention to the increased attaintment of institutional outcomes such as retention and graduation. However, traditional assessment models, focused on measuring outcomes, offer few strategies for developing a holistic understanding of service learning environments. In response, this article outlines the process of heuristic tracing, a generative assessment strategy, which can be used to make visible the experiences that can not only support students’ learning gains but also value the engagement of all service learning participants—including instructors and community partners. Heuristic tracing can help stakeholders better understand the habits, attitudes, and experiences of learning that are central to service learning pedagogy.

Reviews Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xiii + 432 pp. ISBN 9781107128859 Students of the rhetorical tradition will learn a great deal from Skinner's From Humanism to Hobbes; for like Elobbes, Skinner has mastered the rhetorical curriculum that informs the humanist education of sixteenthand seventeenth-century writers like Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Milton, and, of course, Hobbes himself. Even more to the point, Skinner's mastery of this tradition has made him attentive to the fundamentally adversarial nature of their writings, allowing him to uncover the argumentative structures and stylistic figures that underwrite their persuasive effects. It has also, I expect, helped him to hone his own enviable argumentative skills, whether he is making the case for the origins of political representation in the art of the actor, the role of rhetorical redescription in Machiavelli's Prince and Shakespeare's Coriolanus, or the iconographic identity of the colossus in the frontispiece of Leviathan. Without by any means exhausting the impor­ tant and wide-ranging issues addressed in this book, these three cases will surely interest the readers of this journal because they set in high relief how deeply embedded such rhetorical strategies as personation or prosopo­ poeia, paradiastole, and enargeia are in the thinking and writing of earlv modernity. Two of the twelve essays in this collection (chapters 3 and 5) turn—or, for Skinner's devoted readers, return—to the figure of paradiastole, also cal­ led rhetorical redescription by Skinner because it refers to the orator's effort to "spin" the narrative of events, including the moral characters of the agents involved, by reframing vices as virtues and vice versa, impugning caution as cowardice, for instance, or packaging recklessness as braverv. Although arguably not among the most high-profile rhetorical figures, paradiastole, as Skinner demonstrates, propels the core mission of the rhetorician to leverage the affective power of language to alter what an audience believes, to manipulate its responses by using word-choice to elevate or denigrate its targets. In keeping with this mission, Skinner also demonstrates, rhetorical theorists from Aristotle to Quintilian to Susenbrotus to Thomas Wilson take the paradiastolic move into account, whether thev feature the technical term Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 118-132. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: wwv. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ rh.2020.38.1.118 Reviews 119 in its polysyllabic Greek form, translate it into Latin or the vernacular, or leave it nameless. Following his signature method, Skinner arms his readers with an understanding of this key term before using it to unlock the complex texts he considers in the context of the controversies they engage. In the Prince, for instance, Machiavelli counters the long-standing tradition of classical ethics exemplified by Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero's De officiis by redescribing the qualities they endorse as political liabilities destined to destroy the state, rather than maintain it. With this single-minded end of mantenere lo stato in view, Skinner argues, Machiavelli "redefines the con­ cept of virtu" (56), exposing previously held virtues such as liberality and kindness as vices when practiced in the political arena (60). Shakespeare's use of paradiastole, on the other hand, reflects a reversal in rhetorical theory that Skinner attributes to Quintilian and finds wide­ spread among Tudor rhetoricians. Whereas the figure originally serves to expose or unmask the verbal manipulation of one's adversary, it is eventually deployed to excuse one's own shortcomings and mitigate culpability by redescribing one's vices as virtues. After flagging this strat­ egy in a number of Shakespeare's plays, Skinner concludes that "It is in the assessment of Coriolanus's character, however, that Shakespeare makes his most extended use of paradiastole" (111). For the in utramque partem structure this late Shakespearean tragedy shares with all drama encoura­ ges the representation of controversy or debate, which, in this case, invol­ ves "coloring...

English writing is a key competence for higher education success. However, research on the assessment of writing skills in English as a foreign language in European upper secondary education (i.e. beyond year 9) remains scarce. The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) describes language proficiency on a scale of six ascending levels (A1-C2). For writing skills at the end of secondary education in Europe, the common standard is vantage level B2. In this study, experts from Germany and Switzerland linked upper secondary students’ writing profiles elicited in a constructed response test (integrated and independent essays from the TOEFL iBT®) to CEFR levels. Standard setting methodology (a modified examinee paper selection/performance profile approach) was used to establish the linkages. The study reports the methodology and procedure of the standard setting process and discusses the procedural and internal validity of resulting cut scores. It also applies the cut scores to a large sample of upper secondary students in Germany and Switzerland to gain evidence for external and consequential validity.

While the term neoliberalism is commonly used to explain libertarian and conservative economic perspectives, its rapidly expanding contexts influence every aspect of our cultural environment, even the contexts of higher education. This article explores how neoliberal ideology affects the contemporary teaching environment for women of color teaching ideological critique.

This program profile details the incorporation, scaffolding, and assessment of a large programmatic common reading initiative as a framework for other program directors to incorporate programmatic change and generate faculty buy-in. This profile describes the integration of a diversity-themed common reader used in a first-year experience program into a first-year composition program. The authors describe the main elements of implementation: selecting a diversity-themed common reader and preparing and executing multiple methods of faculty training. Additionally, the assessment methods of the program—including a faculty survey providing feedback on the administrative support and activities surrounding the common reading program, a survey collecting students’ diversity experiences, and student focus groups that collect the students’ responses to the pedagogical methods engaging them in diversity-themed work—are discussed. How the program’s implementation, faculty development activities, and assessment methods have been modified based on faculty engagement, student feedback, and survey results is also defined.

While Writing Studies scholars have embraced research on multilingualism, writing scholars have not developed program assessment methods that are informed by that scholarship. This profile describes a program assessment design that was informed by research on multilingualism, super-diversity, and consequential validity. This design included student survey data, student interviews, scoring data, and institutional data with specific attention to language and mobility. Such a design allowed us to capture multiple sources of evidence to make valid inferences about the writing of a complex population. Moreover, the bottom-up collaborative process used in this assessment design echoed the program’s deep-rooted commitment to social justice in ongoing program research.

In this program profile, we describe how the FYC program at Texas A&M University-San Antonio is working towards developing an antiracist and decolonial program in response to our recognition of the racialized violence and injustice the program was unintentionally inflicting on our student population. We structure this profile using comadrismo, a conversation between two Latina faculty, to describe their experiences around five themes: labor division and equity, assessment and social justice, revising programmatic documents, professional development, and constraints and shortcomings. Furthermore, we discuss the most salient aspects of this work for programs that may also be interested in seeking social justice through antiracism and decolonization. Specifically, we work through and identify three forms of labor we have learned are necessary to engaging in this work: honest and critical self-interrogation, faculty buy-in and community building, and an understanding that this kind of work is an ongoing process.