Since its inception in 2000, Reflections has functioned as a site of synthesis for community-based writing pedagogy, service-learning, public rhetoric, and community-engaged research. Such a diverse range of influences leads to the formation of a journal that is ever shifting in its identity, scope, and mission. This complexity is what ultimately defines Reflections: a publication that constantly pushes the boundaries of knowledge creation and strives to remain receptive to topics and voices that are often excluded from other academic sources. The following collaborative article offers a content analysis of all publications in Reflections’ twenty-year history (2000-2020). Though not exhaustive, this analysis highlights unique aspects of the journal’s history, methods, non-traditional genres, pedagogical and disciplinary impact, and evolving interactions with power and privilege that have made it the public conscience for Writing Studies.

This article is an experimental collaboration that blends qualitative data, archival research, and rhetorical theory with autoethnographic writing. Utilizing Jenny Edbauer’s (2005) conceptualization of rhetorical ecologies, we engage strategic contemplation and critical imagination (Royster and Kirsch 2012) to explore Reflections’ past, present, and future rhetorical landscapes. We designed, distributed, coded, and analyzed a fifteen-item questionnaire to discover the journal’s readership demographics, its archival contents, and its reverberating effects/affects on issues of public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy. We identified four themes—inclusivity, advocacy, pedagogy, and discovery—as the most salient features of Reflections’ twenty-year legacy. Amplifying our participants’ voices, we discuss the ways in which these four themes work to cultivate an affirming space of theoretical inquiry and ethical intervention—a networked community of mutual reciprocity that continues to transform the field of rhetorical studies today. Altogether, this article offers unique insight into Reflections’ rhetorical ecology, including its professional legacy and the ways in which the journal has innovated the genre of writing scholarship.

To investigate the contribution of formal communications (FCs) to problem-solving knowledge work, this study examines survey, interview, and observational data from 212 teams who produced contracting documents, reports, and PowerPoint presentations while working on projects for diverse organizations worldwide. The study found that these FCs engaged teams in a contextual–conceptual dynamic involving interactive pairs of integral work activities. The findings validate, integrate, and extend prior scholarship on organizational genres, writing to learn, and the role of material texts in the work process, leading to a comprehensive framework that pinpoints opportunities for managing FCs to achieve their fullest potential.

When students cowrite with others who have different levels of proficiency with the English language, they can experience unproductive conflict related to feedback avoidance. The author interviewed 20 professionals with experience cowriting across such different English proficiencies and found three strategies that can facilitate feedback and collaboration: calibrate genre and reader expectations, establish protocols for reviewing texts, and frame feedback as a learning opportunity. She suggests that these strategies can be a step toward helping students mitigate their anxieties about feedback and feel more empowered to engage with linguistically diverse peers.

At a multinational company, daily written communication between staff, supervisors, customers, and suppliers is frequently conducted using digital tools (e.g., emails, smartphones, and texting applications) often across multiple nationally, linguistically, and conceptually defined borders. Determining digital tools’ impact on intercultural encounters in professional environments like these is difficult but important given the sheer volume of digital contact in technical and professional environments and the ongoing global struggle to broker peace and productivity amid communities’ many perceived differences. Using examples drawn from a case study of binational manufacturing sister companies, I build on recent work in professional, networked written communication to analyze two WhatsApp exchanges, one between a central study participant and his customer, another between the participant and an employee. This study shows how asynchronous digital communication tools created complex “silences” in writing between participants. In these silences (e.g., a lack of or delayed response to a text) individuals try to explain others’ actions for themselves. Drawing on a combination of third-generation activity theory and Latourian actor-network theory, I show that while explaining others’ actions in writing with whatever cultural shorthand is available may remain a common part of everyday life and research, it can be a poor guide for explaining others’ actions, especially in digital writing. My study shows how research of, and instruction in, digital tool use in intercultural writing contexts requires attention to the material conditions and objectives potentially shaping one’s own as well as others’ composition choices.

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.

Despite its ubiquity across business contexts, video creation is a rarity in business communication curricula. This article is intended to offer the field of business communication education both a rationale and mechanism by which to better align with modern business communication practice. Part 1 provides a comprehensive demonstration of the pervasive uses of video in business, including statistical evidence, genre examples, and analysis of the medium’s communicative value. Part 2 (and subsequent appendices) then empowers the business communication educator to implement the change suggested in Part 1 by way of a turnkey assignment easily adaptable across business courses.

The old news is that Theory with a capital “T” happened from approximately 1965–85 and then dissipated in scandal. Or to the contrary, Theory is an ancient and global activity we find wherever we have evidence of systematic reflection, upon language especially. Alive and well. But neither of these stories can be adequate given a graph like those above, and given our facts on the ground. For Theory is still, or is again robust, with Philosophy & Rhetoric as a premier venue, at the same time that it persists in literary studies and under the quasi-philosophical heading “critical theory.” Meanwhile, if Brian Leiter offers any indication in his Avital Ronell-scandal quip about theory—what they call “bad philosophy in literature departments”1—then the very question “Why theory now?” would be challenged by professional philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition, if not ignored altogether. How and to what extent has Theory consumed territory that was once occupied by philosophy per se? Is “Continental philosophy” now practically synonymous with Theory, and if so, how does that work from the two very different philosophical perspectives? From a global perspective, is professional philosophy small and getting smaller, while “theory”—until recently associated with Europeans and others who indeed consider themselves “philosophers”—large and getting larger? In what ways are theories like postcolonial, queer, and critical race related historically to philosophy? That is to say the question of philosophy/theory raised by the Frankfurt School and recently reiterated by Andrew Cole in The Birth of Theory speaks to people in rhetoric and to many others across the humanities and social sciences. In this forum I join Martin Jay, Nancy Struever, D'Angelo Bridges, Steven Mailloux, Peter Simonson, and Catherine Chaput as we address this question “Why theory now?” paying special attention to the relevant histories we need to untangle “theory” on the recent scene.One might imagine how a single question posed to seven scholars in a forum invites debate, with the answers pitched against one another. Since we can only buy one answer, it would seem the others can't be right—we are faced with an argumentative scheme of the mutually exclusive. And no doubt there are moments both within and among these essays that don't allow for easy agreement. My essay is set up polemically, so the reader is faced with a choice between a prevailing take on rhetorical theory that invokes classical antiquity, and my own contrary place and date: Ann Arbor, 1900. Bridges recalls for this P&R readership how in 1985 the literary critic Barbara Christian made us choose between Theory then consolidating in the elite practices and institutions where traditional forms of power—including most prominently white, male, and colonial—came at the expense of theory that has long been practiced elsewhere (formatively in Douglass's explicitly rhetorical My Bondage and My Freedom, Bridges will argue). And then there are familiar divides within the essays themselves, and into their presumed readership. At the end of this forum, for example, Catherine Chaput forces a question that has been percolating throughout: Isn't theory as we mean it now originally and essentially critical, running from Marx through Adorno et al., so that any other uptake like the new materialism must explain itself under pressure, or appear suspiciously uncritical and hence a quiet advocate for the powers that be?Ultimately, however, the argumentative scheme of the forum as a whole is not mutually exclusive as it might appear in a more systematic philosophical imaginary, but is rather genealogical. And we each try to be critical, while avoiding master narratives in their reductive forms—whether Marxist, colonial/decolonial, or epic as in the battle between rhetoric and philosophy—so that the essays surprise. The biggest problem with master narratives as a form of scholarship is that they can become predictable and render the scholarly work practically unnecessary: once the master narrative begins you know pretty much where it will end.Instead “Why theory now?” is purposefully polyvalent, and the answers given depend upon the scholarly uptake, which is itself an embedded practice. As the question is picked up distinctly by an intellectual historian Martin Jay, we are returned to the nineteenth-century critique of psychologism that would simultaneously produce philosophy in its most universal aspirations, along with its critique that would come by way of “theory.” Then understood through this formative moment, current conversations around post-critique, and Berkeley-style pragmatic philosophy, appear productively different. Nancy Struever, a very different type of intellectual historian, comes at the question characteristically askew by way of “not theory” and Collingwood/Noë. From the get-go according to Struever, theory has been hampered in its abstraction that is then, inevitably, subsumed into various dumb ideologies. Instead, by way of Collingwood's work on art, we see the possibilities of particular modes of inquiry that are practical all the way down. This is theory in another key, or perhaps not theory at all (just modes of inquiry). Then my piece, inspired in part by Struever's work on history and theory over the decades, hammers at an equivocation whereby we apply the term rhetorical theory indiscriminately to any systematic reflection upon language use or some other type of communication. Instead my goal is to gather inductively what we currently tend to mean when we use the term rhetorical theory, and then locate when exactly it took on its current scope that can include all sorts of things beyond such reflexive activity mentioned above. For the sake of argument, the answer I come up with is Gertrude Buck (Ann Arbor, 1900), and the Strueverite phrase I land on is “reality figured by way of its alternatives,” metaphor most prominently. D'Angelo Bridges, alternatively, foregrounds the “critical” in (critical) theory as a decolonial fact that isn't just a legacy of Hegel and Marx, but fundamentally a legacy of racialized slavery in the United States and its imperative for thought: hence Douglass and the dating 1855. Thus answering “Why theory now?” for Bridges is an account of a decolonial and antiracist imperative that works only when its history becomes legible. And in this reading it turns out that our theory is now and has always been more American than usually recognized, which would help explain much of the critical edge it has now in the book publications of Duke, Minnesota, Fordham, Routledge, now Ohio State, and so on. Then also on the genealogical front we have the piece by Steven Mailloux, which I understand this way: There is no premodern theory, in our more recent, critical sense of the term. Theory emerges out of secular modernity and its others, initiated most famously by Hegel and then worked out in various detail by midcentury German and French thinkers including Fessard, who is especially noteworthy because he makes this confrontation with modernity explicit postwar (hence the dating 1945 if we need one) and in ways indebted to but not politically aligned with Schmitt's political theology. For us beyond the historical argument, this means we would be wise to consider regularly how some version of our contemporary (critical) theory, including rhetorical, negotiates this challenge of secular modernity. Or in a formula: no secular modernity, no theory.Finally and differently we have the piece on rhetorical theory by Peter Simonson, which considers itself most prominently a “sociology of knowledge.” His work is thus historical in the sociological mode, insofar as it persistently asks the questions who is doing rhetorical theory and where exactly, and who is not doing rhetorical theory and why exactly. That said, sociology of knowledge is not indigenous to Simonson's field and those fields that name this journal—philosophy and rhetoric—so Simonson must experiment methodologically. In the end, a reductive sociological formula (e.g., knowledge = power, where power is understood, against Foucault, as unidirectional) cannot prevail. (That might give us, for example, a predictable narrative where rhetorical theory is the product of white privilege and hence can be read only as a tool of oppression.) Instead, the rhetorician that he is, Simonson offers a more circuitous story, which ultimately foregrounds the trope “irony” and the historical turn that has pitched theory, and rhetorical theory in particular, against the powers that be.So instead of systematic on the order of logical argumentation, what lies before you is in itself deeply rhetorical. We work from the places we are as only we can, while narrating for others what that work entails. In this case, we can only hope that you find that work worthwhile.

Integrating design thinking methodology into writing courses can help students to develop creative approaches to problem definition and solution development. Tracing how students work with and through written genres common to design thinking reveals the possibilities and potential of learning new patterns of inquiry and argumentation. Developing these creative habits of mind empowers students to explore and invent solutions to complex, multidimensional problems across the broad range of their disciplinary, professional, and civic lives.

Scientists and writing studies scholars agree that students need to be able to repurpose scientific knowledge across audiences, goals, and genres. This article offers a much-needed, practical example of an assignment that allows students to work towards these goals. Working collaboratively, a faculty member from biology, a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) administrator, and an Encyclopedia of Alabama (EOA) editor redesigned a conservation biology course assignment around communication with multiple audiences. The assignment required students to produce a webpage about a rare species in Alabama that fulfills the technical, scientific writing component of the course and then repurpose that webpage into an entry for EOA aimed at a non-expert audience. We elaborate on the context in which the repackaging assignment developed, explain how it fits with student learning outcomes in biology, and share themes we noticed in students' reflections on the practice of repurposing their writing.

Environmental discourses remain an important area of concern for technical communicators and rhetoricians who seek to evaluate the social actions of their genres (Dayton, 2002; Miller, 1984); addre...

Multimodality is recognized as a useful pedagogical tool, but it is often difficult to apply in real-life curricula. Further, expectations on educators and various campus units are increasingly complex and require nimble and innovative partnerships. In this article, Christina, a first-year composition instructor, and Lucie, the university’s writing center (WC) director, share their different but parallel paths to “going multimodal” for the first time. They show how they joined forces to determine how best to teach and respond to students’ diverse multimodal projects. First, Christina explains how she taught herself and her students about multimodal rhetoric and genres with the help of two dedicated WC tutors. She also outlines how she created a rubric to respond to students’ projects throughout their composing processes. Then Lucie shares her initial hesitancy about going multimodal and how she ultimately prepared her tutors to respond to the projects that Christina’s students presented. The article concludes with Christina and Lucie discussing the exciting synergy they experienced while working together and with the tutors and the challenges they faced. For composition instructors, tutors, and WC directors interested in adopting multimodal assignments, this article provides ideas and suggestions for teaching, giving feedback, and mentoring.

Research on written communication shows that rhetorical knowledge is a key domain of disciplinary writing expertise (Gere et. al. 2019). Much of the recent work in this area has focused on the social dimensions of learning this knowledge. This article builds on these conversations with a presentation of two “advanced academic writers” (Tardy, 2009) and interpreting how they conceptualize rhetorical knowledge through an understanding of academic communication as transaction and symbolic exchange (Britton & Pradl, 1982). I make a case for the value of a transactional framework for interpreting writers’ performance of genre situations. I also show that this framework can provide a “metagenre” (Carter, 2007), a way of doing writing in the discipline, and a “threshold concept” (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015), a way of thinking about writing tasks that shapes writers’ experiences of and learning with them. The two case studies provide an argument for the efficacy of rhetorical knowledge in fostering disciplinary genres when it is framed as understanding situations of communication.

Review Article| January 01 2020 Why Johnny Can (and Should) Write Essays: A Case for an Essay-centric Writing Curriculum Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies. By Wallack, Nicole B.Utah State University Press, 2017. 230 pages. Jenny Spinner Jenny Spinner Jenny Spinner is associate professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where she teaches creative nonfiction and journalism and serves as director of the writing center. Her essays and essay criticism have appeared in Fourth Genre, Brevity, Writing on the Edge, Pedagogy, and Assay, and on NPR’s All Things Considered, among others. She is the author of Of Women and the Essay: An Anthology from 1655 to 2000 (2018) and coauthor, along with her twin sister Jackie Spinner, of Tell Them I Didn’t Cry (2006). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2020) 20 (1): 185–191. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879206 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jenny Spinner; Why Johnny Can (and Should) Write Essays: A Case for an Essay-centric Writing Curriculum. Pedagogy 1 January 2020; 20 (1): 185–191. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879206 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Review You do not currently have access to this content.

Police officers do a significant amount of high-stake writing in police reports, but report writing is given little attention in policy academies, and prevailing guidelines treat the task as a mechanical process of recording facts. As a result, officers are ill-prepared for this essential and inherently complex task. In this study, we interviewed officers to study what makes for a good police report. Our findings reveal that police reports are goal-directed genre actions. This understanding peers through the positivist emphasis on factual details to emphasize the social function of police reports in the criminal justice system.

For many, the academic job-search process involves experiencing rejection, self-doubt, and depression. And a common form of communication during this process—job-refusal letters—can reinforce these negative experiences. This article uses rhetorical genre analysis to study 131 academic job-refusal letters and the applicants’ perceptions of these letters. First it constructs a model of the common genre moves in the sample of letters, giving specific examples of variation in these moves. Then it correlates these moves with the applicants’ perceptions of the letters they received, analyzing the results for statistically significant variations in patterns of applicant perceptions. Based on these analyses, the author argues that the most typified genre moves do not contribute to applicants’ feeling valued. Instead, letters building goodwill through less typified moves and language are often more effective. Ultimately, he argues that we can make the job-search process more humane by attending to the specifics of the full range of interactions between applicants and institutions.

This article examines how three African American girls, ages 10 to 18, used journaling and interviews to better understand science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as part of their literate identities. Drawing on prior work about literate identities, the authors introduce the concept of literate intersectional identities, which describes how participants’ diverse histories, literacies, and identities traverse categories, communities, genres, and modes of meaning within the context of a STEAM workshop. The authors employed open and thematic coding to analyze the girls’ journal entries in an effort to answer a question: In what ways do African American girls’ journal writings and interviews about STEM reflect and influence their literate identities in a digital app coding workshop? Findings reveal how their writings about race, access, and the underrepresentation of women of color in STEM helped them make sense of their self-assurance, self-awareness, and agency as girls of color interested in STEM careers.

Using a mixed-methods, multi-institutional design of general education writing courses at four institutions, this study examined genre as a key factor for understanding and promoting writing development. It thus aims to provide empirical validation of decades of theoretical work on and qualitative studies of genre and the nature of genre knowledge. While showing that both simplistic and nuanced genre knowledge promote writing development, our findings suggest that nuanced genre knowledge correlates with writing development over the course of a semester. Based on these findings, we propose an expanded view of Tardy’s four genre knowledge components and argue for their explanatory power. We recognize these genre components can be cultivated by using three particular strategies: writing for nonclassroom audiences, using source texts explicitly to join existing disciplinary conversations, and cultivating two types of metacognitive awareness (awareness of the writing strategies used to complete specific tasks and awareness of one’s levels of proficiency in particular types of writing knowledge). Findings can be used to enrich first-year or upper-division writing curricula in the areas of genre knowledge, audience awareness, and source use.

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of Halliday’s Sydney School genrebased approach in teaching Chinese written composition to South Asian ethnic minority students in Hong Kong. Chinese language, with its heightened status in Hong Kong, holds a key for South Asians with low socio-economic status to obtain upward mobility (Shum, Gao, Tsung, and Ki, 2011). However, South Asian ethnic minority students, as a disadvantaged group of second language learners, lack sufficient parental and institutional support in Chinese language learning. The genrebased pedagogy derived from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was applied in this study to improve Chinese language performance of South Asian ethnic minority students for a better chance to participate in mainstream society. The SFL approach is primarily concerned with language choice in social situations and has been widely applied in sociolinguistics (Hyland, 2007, 2012). Its latest model in language teaching methodology, the ’Reading to Learn, Learning to Write’ (R2L) pedagogy, is a genre-based teaching strategy which is designed to guide students to experience different levels of language through extensive classroom reading and writing activities with selected texts. The current study is intended to extend the approach to teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. The employment of genre-based pedagogy aims to support South Asian students with their learning of Chinese written composition in the senior secondary curriculum. The Chinese teachers involved were first provided with appropriate training in the genre-based approach to language teaching focusing on the genres of Narration and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use theand Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the genre-based teaching approach, by means of pre- and post-tests after and before genre instruction. Text analysis based on SFL was then employed to analyze the students’ written composition in both pre- and post-tests in order to understand the effectiveness of the genre-based pedagogy in teaching Chinese as a second language. The finding shows that the students at the high, medium, and low levels improved both in the construction of schematic structure and the variation of lexicogrammatical choices from the whole-text, sentence and word levels respectively in their writing performance. Hopefully, the findings will help curriculum development and teacher education for teaching Chinese as a second language to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong and beyond.

Changes in technology, development philosophy, and scale have required game designers to change how they communicate and mediate design decisions. Traditional game design studios used an extensive game design document (GDD), a meta-genre that described most of the game before it was developed. Current studies suggest that this is no longer the case. We conducted interviews at four independent game studios in order to share their game design documentation processes, revealing that, while an exhaustive GDD is rare, the meta-genre functions are preserved in a variety of mediated ways.

This essay argues that Madeleine de Scudéry's engagement with the early modern dialogue genre in Conversations sur Divers Sujets reflects and strengthens the conversational theory that scholars have pinpointed as an important feminist rhetorical strategy. By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudéry enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudéry's Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot's The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudéry's feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.

We introduce “parasitic publics” as a necessary, generative addition to scholarship on publics and counterpublics. Parasitic publics are reactionary discursive spaces formed residually and institutionalized affectively through the invention, circulation, and uptake of demagogic rhetorics. They feed off of oppressive conditions in the public sphere by (1) articulating with dominant discourses to exploit dominant publics’ centripetal force and (2) safeguarding the assemblage of dominant publics against counterdiscursive challenge. To illustrate and elaborate on this concept, we use articulation theory to analyze a highly organized white nationalist collective that swarms digital forums and comment sections. Founded by a former Republican congressional aid and Ronald Reagan appointee, this collective maintains training podcasts on their politics and debate strategies, two different databases of copy-and-paste rhetorics, two rhetorical style guides, and a subforum through which they direct each other to swarm digital spaces. We conclude with implications for future research on contemporary public spheres.

Obituaries are becoming an increasingly popular medium that people who have lost friends and relatives to opioid overdose are using to speak out. Many sources refer to these as addiction obituaries. In this essay, we present a generic rhetorical analysis of 73 addiction-relatedobituaries in order to question and explore this phenomenon as a potential emerging genre of rhetoric. In doing so, we argue that addiction obituaries constitute a hybrid rhetorical genre intertwining the conventions of an obituary with a public service announcement, which we call a public service death announcement, or PSDA. This symbolic form fulfills many social functions necessitated by the unique sociocultural circumstances brought forth by the opioid crisis. However, it also reveals limitations of conceiving of addiction at the level of individual faces.

A Playable Case Study (PCS) is a hybrid learning experience where students (1) participate in a fictional narrative that unfolds through an immersive, simulated environment and (2) engage in classroom activities and lessons that provide educational scaffolding and promote metacognition through in-game and out-of-game experiences. We present the Microcore PCS to illustrate the potential of this new type of experiential simulation that incorporates aspects of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) to increase immersion and teach workplace literacies in the technical communication classroom. We explore results from a pilot test of Microcore with an undergraduate technical communication course, identifying design strategies that worked well and others that led to improvements that are currently being incorporated. We also provide questions to prompt future research of playable case studies and discuss our findings in a broader context of technical communication pedagogy.

Views about what writing is and how it should be taught have varied over the years as well as across contexts. Studies of curricula, teaching materials, and teaching practices have shown a strong focus on skills, genres, and processes, but few have asked teachers about their perspectives on writing. In this article we explore what views, or discourses, of writing are currently active among teachers in Swedish compulsory education, covering ages from 7 to 15. Sixty teachers answered a questionnaire with open and closed questions. Using Ivanič’s framework for discourses of writing, the answers were analyzed holistically in order to define what main discourse, or discourses, each teacher represented. Results show that most teachers represent one main discourse, but that a combination of discourses occur, in particular among teachers from the earliest school years (1–3). The most common discourse was the process discourse, followed by genre, creativity, skills, and thinking. None of the teachers represented the social practice or the sociopolitical discourse. The results concur with findings from studies of curricula, teaching materials, and teaching practices both in Sweden and globally and are discussed in relation to what literacy skills may be necessary in the 21st century in order to participate in social and political life.

Introduction: Professional communication instructors in transnational contexts face unique challenges when helping students transition into the workplace. These challenges include preparing students for multilingual workplaces and educational settings, as well as multicultural communication in English at transnational workplaces. About the case: The authors, working at an international branch campus (IBC) in the Middle East, wanted to revise their assignments in a technical writing course for engineers in order to better prepare students for the realities of professional communication in the region. Situating the case: Engineering students matriculate into an increasingly diverse workplace, but instructors may not adequately understand the needs of employers in transnational corporations. Methods: Semistructured interviews were conducted with students and alumni of the IBC, and transcripts were coded for common themes. Results/discussion: Students and alumni had different perceptions of workplace communication genres, expectations for detailed writing, and the ability to adapt rhetorical strategies for different contexts. Alumni experienced a gap between their professors' and their workplaces' expectations for business genres and level of detail. They also reported that one of their significant challenges was adopting a flexible mindset toward written and spoken communication practices. Conclusions: Professional communication instructors should emphasize the strengths of multilingual writers, particularly their sense of language difference and rhetorical attunement, to better prepare them for the transnational workplace, in both the US and abroad. The authors describe changes in their pedagogy to help students adopt a more flexible and industry-oriented mindset toward technical communication.

This essay argues that Madeleine de Scudery’s engagement with the early modern dialogue genre in Conversations sur Divers Sujets reflects and strengthens the conversational theory that scholars have pinpointed as an important feminist rhetorical strategy. By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudery enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudery’s Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudery’s feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.

424 RHETORICA balances well her recovery of nineteenth-century women's cookbooks with a critique of "the pervasive social ordering system" of taste in the nine­ teenth century (p. 4). Offering the first book-length study of women's cookbooks as rhetorical texts, Walden makes a valuable contribution to scholarly conversations in interdisciplinary studies of food and food his­ tory, feminist histories of rhetoric, and the history of nineteenth-century American rhetorics. Paige V. Banaji Barry University Robert Sullivan and Arthur E. Walzer, eds. Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel, Leiden: Brill, 2018. 412 pp. ISBN 978904365100; David R. Carlson, ed. Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel. Cambridge, UK: Modem Humanities Research Association, 2018. 345 pp. ISBN 9781781886205 After a brief and unsuccessful career as a diplomat, Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) retreated to his estates and his library and to two life-long scholarly endeavors, the enrichment of the English language and the proper mode of national governance. The former is a task of some interest: it has its flowering a half century later in the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney. But it is the latter task that is the subject of the two books now under review, one an edition per se, the other an edition and a monograph welded together. Both books publish three dialogues, Pasquill the Playne, Of That Knowlage Which Maketh a Wise Man, and The Defense of Good Women, and one treatise, The Doctrinal of Princes. Only Carson includes The Image of Governance, a book on the duty of kingship in the form of an idealized biography of the Roman emperor Alexander Severus. Between these two books, published virtually simultaneously, there is obviously a great deal of overlap, a circumstance that permits us to reflect on the state of academic publishing as well as on the optimal means of editing and con­ textualizing printed Tudors texts. Before turning to this task, however, we need to say something about the works themselves in the context of the humanist revival in England. A work in translation from the Greek, The Doctrinal of Prince permits Sullivan and Walzer to address the state of learning in Tudor England and to underline the remarkable fact that Elyot's translation may well have been the first directly from the Greek. That without the benefit of any schooling Elyot should undertake the task says a great deal both about him and about the flowering of English scholarship in the Tudor Age. Elyot's focus on the accuracy of his translation is salutary as well. In the first edition, he rendered the Greek "and that they may suppose howe to counsaile for their weal than themselves." In the second edition, this is revised to "that thei maie suppose that you canst counsaile them better tor their weale Reviews 425 than thei can them selfes," a more accurate rendering of the Greek, and a tribute to Elyot's meticulous concern. Despite a concern for translation, rhetorical style is less a focus of Sullivan and Walzer than genre. The Doctrinal of Princes is identified as an Isocratian parainesis, advice to a young prince on proper royal behavior. Its structure is simple, an introduction designed to lay down precepts for monarchs followed by the precepts themselves followed by a short epi­ logue, resembling a peroration. The advice is deliberately not specific. Here is a sample admonition: "Haue no lasse dominion or rule ouer they selfe, than ouer other" (Sullivan and Walzer, 104). This and its fellow admo­ nitions so smack of Polonius's sententiousness that one wonders why Elyot felt compelled to reach back to ancient Greece to retrieve it; one wonders, that is, until one realizes that Elyot was living in the reign of a monarch with a strong tendency to ignore good advice. The genres of two of Elyot's dialogues are a topic of debate. Is Pasquill the Playne modeled on Platonic dialogues, or on later ones by Lucian? Sullivan and Walzer opt for the latter on two grounds: Elyot recommended Lucian in the Governour and he characterized Pasquill as "mery." Although many of Lucian's dialogues can be characterized as...

Reviews 427 Davida H. Charney, Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms. Hebrew Bible Monographs 73; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2017. xii + 156 pp. ISBN: 9781909697805. The tension within rhetorical criticism of the Bible, whether the Hebrew Bible or New Testament in Greek, is how to think of and hence to utilize the Greek and Latin rhetorical traditions. That is, do they consti­ tute the metalanguage for rhetorical criticism or are they exemplified instan­ ces of how the ancients approached rhetoric? In this volume, Charney for the most part attempts to find a middle ground, what she calls "compara­ tive rhetoric" (p. 12). By this she means that, even though she draws heavily upon ancient rhetoric, she does not believe that the ancient Hebrews knew or drew upon Greco-Roman rhetoric. Nevertheless, many of the categories of ancient rhetoric—such as the genres and some of the stylistic techniques, such as stasis theory—are central to the argument that she makes, while she also draws on some of the techniques of the New Rhetoric, such as "amplitude" (Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca) or "amplification" (Burke) and "association" or "identification." She utilizes these helpful categories, pla­ ced in the service of a close reading of selected first-person psalms, to offer rhetorical explications of their persuasive power. Charney is not concerned with the many historical factors that tend to mire much psalm scholarship, but she posits a rhetorical situation appropriate to each psalm and is atten­ tive to each text's rhetorical features. The contents of this relatively short volume include, first, an introduc­ tion that lays out Chamey's view of the psalms as argumentative discourse within Israelite public life, her definition of rhetoric in relationship to literary analysis, and, most importantly, her definition of rhetoric that draws upon both ancient and contemporary theory—all in service of her reading of the psalms as instances of ancient rhetoric, attempts by the first-person speaker to persuade God through various authorial stances. The rest of the chapters comprise various examples of how rhetoric is exemplified by individual psalms. Chapter 1 concerns praise of God as a form of currency used to per­ suade God, what she labels a form of epideictic discourse. She here treats Psalms 71,16, 26, and 131. Chapter 2 focuses upon the few psalms addressed to the speaker's opponents, drawing upon notions of amplitude and amplifi­ cation to establish the focus of each psalm. The psalms here are 4, 62, and 82. Chapter 3 treats psalmic lament as a form of deliberative rhetoric, with an established psalmic form that functions as a "policy argument (pp. 56-58). Charney discusses the lament Psalms 54 and 13 in relation to their lack of amplification, proposing that the speaker was confident in his innocence before God. She usefully draws upon the conversational implicatures of Paul Grice especially regarding the maxim of quantity. In contrast to chapter 3, chapter 4 focuses on psalms in which the speaker argues, sometimes at length (amplitude), for his innocence and attempts to persuade God to act on his behalf, as in Psalms 4, 22, and 17. Chapter 5 concentrates upon psalms in which the speaker draws strong opposition between himself and his oppo­ nents as he seeks vindication from them based upon the fairness of God. 428 RHETORICA The psalms treated here are 7, 35, and 109. Chapter 6 encompasses the few psalms in which the speaker admits to his guilt, with treatment of Psalms 130, 38, and 51. Finally, chapter 7 discusses psalms in which the speaker is involved in persuading himself rather than simply expressing his opinion regarding God or his opponents. Treated here are Psalms 77 and 73. The vol­ ume concludes with a bibliography and helpful indexes, including one on rhetorical terms. There are a few problems with this volume that cannot be overlooked. These include Charney's sometimes appearing to rely too heavily upon the categories of the Greeks and the Romans. These might restrict her categories in some instances where modern interpretation has expanded the resources regarding language function. The categorization of lament as deliberative seems to be forced by her attempt to equate the ancient categories with the biblical...

Abstract Donald Trump’s campaign violated every rule of presidential campaigns, and few commentators thought that he had a chance to win the presidency. His success can be traced to the strong affective connection that he created with core supporters. Trump used a rhetoric of nationalist populism with a charismatic outsider persona, a rhetorical pattern that functioned as an affective genre, to create this connection. This pattern is evident in campaign rallies, his speech at the Republican National Convention, and his inaugural address. Trump’s successful use of a rhetoric of nationalist populism has important implications for the status of American democracy.

Historians of rhetoric have recently explored how nineteenth-century women’s personal and romantic letters have offered a venue for the rhetorical work of raising consciousness, building coalitions, and contesting gender norms. This essay examines the work undertaken by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell in their courtship correspondence. Drawing on a body of manuscript letters exchanged between 1853 and 1855 and a selection of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals, the essay argues that the couple uses their letters to: explore their views on rhetoric; contest the genre and gender conventions being taught by manuals; and engender the possibility of forming a rhetorical alliance.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports are becoming a widespread corporate discourse practice and are often considered corporate image-building documents. The present study examines forward-looking statements in CSR reports from a genre-based perspective, aiming to better understand the textual practices of reporting genres in a globalized context and to raise awareness about ways they are used to shape perception of corporate activity. Using a corpus of 90 CSR reports in Chinese, English, and Italian and a subcorpus annotated with the “previewing future performance” move, the study combines a focus on genre-related contextual features and rhetorical patterns of CSR reports with a corpus-based study of future markers. The analysis reveals some cross-cultural variation in the distribution of the move, while its commissive function marks a common trend. Words indicating change ( miglior*/提升/improv*) are found to be frequently used for future reference in all three languages, suggesting that future discourse, though regarded as an optional element of the genre, is widely exploited by companies in actual practice to promote a committed corporate image in CSR. Based on this analysis, the study puts forward the notion of “writing conformity,” a general feature of many reporting genres, which may turn out to pose new and important challenges for professional writers.

Introduction: Technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors value audience awareness, using peer- and client-based projects to facilitate it. We explore how students' audience awareness is facilitated by the case method, which presents students with a professional communication task within a workplace scenario. Situating the case: Case-method research suggests including a detailed audience and situation, multiple genres, and multimedia. Few studies have explored how case materials facilitate students' audience awareness. About the case: A 12-week case that was consistent with case-method research asked students to respond to an engineering firm's internal problem with a proposal and report. How the case was studied: Students from two sections of a genre-based course completed reflections about their audience awareness after the proposal and report. We qualitatively analyzed 51 reflections. Results/discussion: Students stated they could understand the facts about their primary audience but couldn't identify secondary and tertiary audiences. Students stated they could identify audience needs, but they disagreed about the amount of detail to understand those needs. Also, students stated they could respond to the audience using appropriate evidence and writing style. Conclusions: When using the case method, instructors should know that students may need varying levels of detail to interpret their audience's needs. Also, including data and conflicting needs gives students opportunities to make strategic decisions about content.

The arts have not received much attention from business and professional communication (BPC) scholars who are interested in workplace communication. This article begins to fill that gap by explaining a course focused on the BPC that artists produce in their careers. Students learned BPC genres by addressing arts situations: They crafted email pitches to promoters, took promotional photography, created crowdfunding proposals, and more. I argue that teaching artist communication can give a new context to existing BPC assignments, encourage interdisciplinary initiatives, and allow for the incorporation of natively digital communication genres into existing courses.

AbstractAmerican politics and horror have been linked since the birth of the United States. Within this genre, two frames of horror are common: the classic and the conflicted. The 2016 presidential campaign advertisements of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton employed these horror frames in vastly different ways. Analysis of these ads as a part of an extended message to the American public reveals that Clinton primarily used a conflicted horror frame when attacking Trump, with some rare usage of the classic horror frame. Further, her campaign gave little in the way of audience efficacy through positive assessments of herself, specific policy proposals to defeat the monster, or calls for collective, mob action. Trump, however, almost exclusively used the classic horror frame to articulate threats to America. Even though this frame is more conducive to conventional demonization and fear mongering, Trump also included specific policy proposals, numerous positive assessments of himself, and a call for mob action by American voters to slay the monsters facing the country.

Risk associated with a Pacific Northwest earthquake was expressed through a moderately successful social media risk communication campaign known as #14gallons. #14gallons encouraged people to collect and store 14 gallons of fresh water per person and take a selfie with their water, tagging others to do the same. This article frames the hashtag campaign within scholarship on the rhetoric of risk, defines the genre of the "risk selfie," and then uses a modified version of Laurie Gries's iconographic tracking method to produce information about the campaign that can be productively employed by risk communication practitioners.

Rhetoric often serves as a way to bridge important differences in the act of persuasion. As a field, rhetoric has worked to include more and more diverse voices. Much more is left to be written, however, on how this admittedly important concept of diversity affects the study and practice of rhetoric. This volume of Advances in the History of Rhetoric serves as a material trace of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric’s recent attempts to highlight diversity in and among rhetorical traditions. It collects essays from those presented at the 2018 symposium on the theme of “Diversity and Rhetorical Traditions.” All of these essays were subjected to additional review to fine-tune their arguments for this special journal issue. Each displays the perils and promises of engaging diversity as a topic within – and among – rhetorical traditions. Part of the challenge of coming to terms with difference is the confrontation with something, be it a tradition, a thinker, or a text, that challenges one’s own way of understanding the world, possible accounts of it, and our structures of reasoning and justification. Marking something as “different” is better than marking that person, text, or tradition as “wrong” or “misguided.” Coming to terms with – and even simply recognizing – difference is an accomplishment, especially when it’s not followed by dismissal or rejection. We too often default to the familiar – familiar texts and standards of judgment.These tensions over engaging differences in texts and people are the classical challenges facing comparative endeavors and the field that explores diversity among rhetorical traditions–known as comparative rhetoric – has made progress in navigating these demands. Early studies in the rhetorical practices of “non-western cultures” (a term that highlights the normative challenges of difference in naming objects of study) served as important, but imperfect, starting points. For instance, Robert T. Oliver’s 1971 book, Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, represents one of the first sustained enquiries into the rhetoric of China and India, putatively on their own terms. It was a grand project, ambitious in its aims. Yet in his pursuit of respecting difference in these traditions from the familiar Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, some have argued that Oliver emphasized a “deficiency model” that emphasized Chinese or Indian rhetorics’ lack of some key characteristic (according to Western models of thought) such as logic or rational argument (Lu “Studies and Development” 112). George Kennedy’s ambitious book, Comparative Rhetoric, is a useful entry in bringing a global and systematic sense to the idea of comparative rhetoric, but it could also be faulted by its placement of the Greco-Roman tradition as a normative telos lying at the end of the rhetorical progression chartered over the course of its chapters.Building on the approach enshrined in these important endeavors, other scholars continued to interrogate difference among and between rhetorical traditions by focusing on similarities among different cultural practices. There is tension, however, over how much difference scholars attribute to different rhetorical traditions situated in radically different cultural contexts in the act of comparison. Are they commensurable? Do they both practice and theorize the same thing denoted by the term “rhetoric?” Another question arises as to the difference in epistemic access to these different traditions: who has the best access to unpack what a tradition means or implies about rhetoric? Some scholars give contemporary “natives” a special value as epistemically privileged resources in understanding long-rooted traditions of thought (Lu “Studies and Development” 113–114; Mao “Studying the Chinese”). Contrary to these positions which respect the rhetorical traditions of other cultures by walling them off (to some extent) from access by outsiders, other approaches deemphasize ideas of privileged access and focus on the method of appropriating resources and concepts from one tradition for the use in or by another tradition. Underlying all of these efforts and decision points are ontological assumptions about the objects of study (Is a tradition one thing or a diverse and conflicting set of texts, ideas, and authors?) and ethical entailments about the method of reconciling difference to one’s own tradition (How much creative rereading do we allow of another tradition?). Some have argued for – or at least asserted – that traditions can be “captured” in acts of scholarly inquiry more or less accurately, and we should thereby discount scholarship that fails some criterion of accuracy (Mao “Doing Comparative Rhetoric”; Hum and Lyon). Appealing to accuracy, even if it is possible to find a way to compare one’s attempts at descriptions to the “thing” that is being described, seems to overly limit how we might creatively engage, use, and understand diverse and different traditions (Stroud “Pragmatism,” “‘Useful Irresponsibility”). These debates about respect, accuracy, and appropriation intersect in complex ways with the previously mentioned tensions over whether “rhetoric” points to the same things and practices in diverse traditions. One point of agreement among many in these debates, however, remains: the reduction of traditions – or their “rhetoric” – to essential similarities or the reading of diverse traditions as absolutely (and incommensurately) different are less-than-useful orientations to engaging difference in rhetorical traditions. Both would paralyze us, perhaps in the service of cherished values (protecting or respecting the diverse Other), and they seem to preclude a full engagement with that which differs from our ordinary traditions, concepts, and practices. Beyond these extremes lies a middle path of creative and unique approaches to how we learn from, respect, and engage others. Difference is the problematic that drives the challenges to such an endeavor, as well as the ground for what we might construct in our contemporary accounts once we submit to listening to another tradition, speaker, or text outside of our habitual haunts.In their own ways, each of the studies collected here engage and respect difference within rhetorical traditions, even though there is a radical diversity in the traditions analyzed for this endeavor. This issue has a loose organizational pattern necessitated by this energetic but sometimes frenetic frame-shifting inherent in comparative rhetoric. The first two articles explore sources of diversity and difference within the Chinese tradition. Xing Lu’s keynote address extends her previous work on classical and contemporary Chinese rhetorical practices and highlights the ways that the Chinese tradition encompassed a radical diversity of thought, from Confucian views of benevolent rhetorical practice to the Daoists’ transcendental rhetoric. As she highlights, there was a remarkable amount of diversity within each “school” of Chinese rhetorical thought, and there was much conflict among and between these schools as they sought to come to terms with difference in accounts of moral cultivation, rhetorical practice, and the normative uses of language. The second article, authored by Rya Butterfield, also explores the differences in the Chinese tradition, albeit as viewed from a contemporary thinker who was pragmatically oriented toward making sense of conflicting classical schools of thought. Hu Shih, a student of John Dewey’s at Columbia University, sought in his recovery of the classical traditions of Chinese thought resources to solve pressing Chinese and international exigencies. As Butterfield discusses, Hu is modern in his engagement with Chinese classical sources, and he draws upon or uses resources from the west (including Greece) in how he rereads classical Chinese culture in light of China’s contemporary needs. In many ways, Hu’s rhetoric represents a pragmatist approach to striking (and constructing) a balance between modernization and preservation of China’s past schools of thought and habits of living.There are good reasons for diversifying our canon of rhetoric, as well as our methods and objects of study, by reaching out to other traditions around the globe, but there is also a value to recovering sources of differences in a tradition that our histories might overlook. The next three articles explore the problematic of difference within the Greco-Roman tradition, highlighting sources of overlooked diversity within a dominant tradition in western rhetorical studies. Kathleen S. Lamp’s keynote address engages various types of public epideictic artifacts in Augustan Rome and illustrates how they function as propagandistic and educational efforts to reconcile differences within the Roman populace. Lamp does an admirable job showing the needs of rhetoric in light of the diversity of the Roman public, as well as the rich functioning of public artworks and monuments that can also shed light on how American monuments might serve similar goals. In a related spirit, Robert E. Terrill’s article appropriates a vital concept for Greek and Roman rhetoricians, imitatio, and engages modern concerns with inclusion in rhetorical pedagogy and argument among a diverse public. Terrill’s piece shows that creative engagement with traditions and their resources can add nuance to our understanding, as well as amplify their relevance to contemporary concerns in our pluralistic communities. By reimagining mimetic pedagogy within a context of diversity, Terrill shows how Greco-Roman rhetorical sources allow room for inventive encounters with diverse publics. The third piece engaging diversity within the western tradition is authored by Janet M. Atwill and Josie Portz. Their study challenges contemporary extensions – and critiques – of the western tradition that assume its relative homogeneity. By exploring in more detail Aelius Aristides’ “Regarding Sarapis,” Atwill and Portz challenge simplistic readings of the western tradition by highlighting sources of difference, diversity, tension, and intercultural encounter within its supposedly straightforward history. By “unwriting” the narrative of Western civilization with an attention to tensions and differences within Aristides as received and as could be read, the authors illustrate how the thematic of difference can yield new insights into enduring traditions in the history of rhetoric.The final two articles in this issue emphasize rhetoric’s diverse history in traditions and genres that often escape our attention. Elif Guler and Iklim Goksel make important first steps in a project that should receive more attention in our field – that of explicating Turkish rhetoric. By focusing on two key rhetorical moments in the history of Turkish rhetoric, the Orkhon inscriptions (8th century) and Atatürk’s Nutuk (1927), they mark a valuable beginning to studying the rhetoric of this complex culture. These two texts are important, as the Orkhon inscriptions date from the pre-Islamic period and Atatürk is considered the founder and first president of modern Turkey. Guler and Goksel creatively show how these different texts from historically distinct times are made to speak to common and divergent interests in Turkish history, showing the promise of studying traditions different from the standard Greco-Roman one. The final article continues this engagement with long-standing traditions outside of those in many standard histories of rhetoric: that of the Hindu tradition. Elizabeth Thornton examines important hymns within the Rigveda, in light of concepts and tools taken from later sources in Indian traditions, and finds that there is a unique rhetorical use of form and voice in this foundational Hindu text. Thornton’s piece is also of interest to those attuned to the methodological challenges of engaging texts outside of the western tradition, since she offers an interesting discussion of how decolonializing rhetorical history will commit us to (sometimes) using native theoretical resources.What all of these pieces highlight is the promise of thinking of rhetoric’s history with an emphasis on divergences, tensions caused by differences, and spaces that lie between our accustomed answers and intellectual habits. Rhetoric has always been diverse and has always had to bridge over differences in the act of persuasion; our contemporary history of rhetoric and its traditions must mirror this diversity in scholarly practices. Many talk highly of inclusion and multiculturalism, but few of us read or speak of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, or Bhimrao Ambedkar as rhetorically interesting parts in our histories of rhetoric’s past. There is no principled reason for this oversight, and it may be rectified slowly as the world becomes more globalized and as Asian nations such as China and India gain in economic, military, and political importance. But valuing and emphasizing diversity could lead us to pay more attention to divergences both within the rhetorical tradition many of us were trained in, as well as between this tradition and the range of other grand traditions animating other regions of the globe for millennia, well in advance of such geopolitical and economic shifts. Through resisting the urge for simplistic stories and one-dimensional critiques of cultures and their values, diversifying our histories of rhetoric promises to yield new narratives and inventive readings of well-known sources that will invigorate rhetoric as a discipline.No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Common in higher education in prison (HEP) and writing studies research is the idea that writing and education are transformative for incarcerated populations. While we believe that both can be powerful tools for reflection and social change among people on the inside, the prevalence of such transformation narratives can contribute to stereotypical depictions or understandings of incarcerated people and their literacy practices. Drawing upon our experiences with the Education Justice Project (EJP), a college-in-prison program, this article argues for expanded recognition and study of literacy practices, genres, and prison education beyond those typically discussed in HEP and writing studies scholarship. In doing so, we draw on the work of Martinez (2017) to present four personal scenes of writing and education as counterstories that intervene in master narratives about how incarcerated students are transformed by literacy. This approach not only grounds our work in methodology that values the lived and experiential knowledge of marginalized people but also enables us to push back against stock stories of prison writing that might inadvertently stereotype incarcerated students. Through telling our stories in this article, we call on academics to join us in composing different stories about incarcerated students that honor the complexities of our multiple identities and literacy practices.

A proliferation of scholarship, teaching, and activism in the field of rhetoric and composition attends to prison writing, as an ethical imperative to combat mass incarceration and its dire consequences (Jacobi, Hinshaw, Berry, Rogers, etc.). However, parole board writing— arguably the genre of writing within prison most closely tied to material liberation—remains largely unexamined, both in legal studies and rhetoric and composition. The authors of this article have been working together for the past three years in a weekly writing workshop for former “lifers”—individuals sentenced to life with the possibility of parole; in this setting, parole board writing comes up often in free writes, discussions, and formal compositions. In fact, some participants have brought the pieces they read to the parole board to workshop for discussion and even continued revision. The article analyzes this prison-writing genre with participants of the workshop who coauthor the piece. We argue that the writing and rhetorical performance required of prisoners when they face parole boards enacts institutional and rhetorical constraints while simultaneously carving out new spaces for freedom and resistance. We examine how the parole board has shifted to a standard based on evaluating an inmate’s “insight” into their crimes (as opposed to being evaluated solely on their originary crimes), and we show the ways that this shift engenders new tensions between 1) writings that affirm existing power dynamics and narratives of responsibility, accountability, repentance, and transformation and 2) writings that subvert and resist dominant discourses and challenge existing power dynamics. Thus, this carceral writing process is at once coercive and subversive, oppressive and empowering, restraining and liberating for those who participate in it.

In the field of intercultural business and technical communication, intercultural communication has been a regular topic in curriculum for decades; various teaching approaches exist for developing students’ cultural awareness and helping them achieve a theoretical understanding about the concept of culture, cultural differences, and cultural conflict. But quite often teaching and learning are limited in the classroom context, although it is true that study abroad programs are available for a small group of students. As a result, students do not have enough opportunities to interact with members of other cultures, which limits students’ potentials for gaining intercultural competence. This study explores the rhetorical nature of simulations, defines the perspective of using activity theory as a framework to understand the learning process occurring in simulations, and provides an intercultural simulation example to explain how instructors can incorporate simulations into the business and technical communication curriculum.

Oral presentations are a common genre in technical and business communication courses. While it is important for students to develop a professional ethos when presenting information, in this article I argue that textbooks’ discussion of professional dress and voice privilege cisgendered bodies and erase the differences and bodily experiences that transgendered individuals face. This may cause dissonance in trans students who may come to believe that they must choose between their genders and being professional.

Stance is a growing focus of academic writing research and an important aspect of writing development in higher education. Research on student writing to date has explored stance across different levels, language backgrounds, and disciplines, but has rarely focused on stance features across genres. This article explores stance marker use between two important genre families in higher education—persuasive argumentative writing and analytic explanatory writing—based on corpus linguistic analysis of late undergraduate and early graduate-level writing in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The specific stance markers in the study, both epistemic and textual cues, have been shown to distinguish student writing across levels; this study, then, extends the analysis to consider the comparative use of these markers across genres. The findings show two stance expectations persistent across genres as well as significant distinctions between argumentative and explanatory writing vis-à-vis stance markers that intensify and contrast. The findings thus point to important considerations for instruction, assignment design, and future research.

The IEEE Guide to Writing in the Engineering and Technical Fields is a concise manual for engineers, technical professionals, scientists, researchers, teachers, and students to improve their writing skills. Each chapter is short—ranging from 20 to 40 pages—and the entire book is 200 pages, including appendices. The book accomplishes its purpose of providing recommendations for writing activities and for "assessing the social situation of writing, then using that assessment to make writing decisions" (p. 5). Throughout the book, the authors offer short, manageable takeaway lessons to help readers make writing decisions and learn IEEE style for references. Compared to other engineering communication textbooks and manuals, this guide is short and manageable, yet its approach still considers the rhetorical and contextual dimensions of writing. Because it is brief, the guide does not explicitly cover ethics, risk communication, information graphics, presentations, and global or international communication. It also does not provide as many examples or complete samples of the genres and best practices discussed. Finally, as with other textbooks, some genres are missing, such as reviews, evaluations, and regulations. Nevertheless, these limitations do not diminish the value of the book in giving a concise and convenient overview of standard engineering communication genres and a rhetorically grounded framework for readers to use when writing in the engineering workplace. The book has potential for use in writing-intensive courses, where students must compose documentation for labs and projects, as well as for in-house training for employees. Its hybrid framework for making decisions as you write is flexible and can be applied to many different writing situations. Furthermore, the guide offers valuable, basic help on writing mechanics. It offers readers an approach to engineering communication that can help them think about the decisions that they make when they write and make thoughtful, informed choices in their writing.

Reviews Wendy Dasler Johnson, Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 265 pp. ISBN: 9780809335008 Sentimental poetry is not a common subject of rhetorical analysis. Nor is it a highly regarded literary form. However, Wendy Dasler Johnson argues that for a large number of antebellum American women, sentimental poetry served as an important rhetorical space where they could voice their opinions on social and moral issues. Specifically, Johnson presents a deep and focused analysis of the sentimental verse of antebellum America's three most popular female poets: Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Julia Ward Howe. Thanks to three decades of feminist recovery scholarship, Sigourney, Harper, and Howe are not entirely obscure figures in literary and rhetorical histories. Scholars of nineteenth-century American literature have recovered the writing of these three women, and feminist historians of rhetoric have recognized their rhetorical accomplishments as reformers in education, abo­ lition, temperance, and suffrage. However, their sentimental poetry remains a blind spot in both literary and rhetorical scholarship. While rhetorical scho­ lars do not usually consider poetry as part of these women's rhetorical oeuvre, literary scholars have struggled to analyze their verse. Johnson quotes (p. 1) the lament of literary scholar Cheryl Walker, who, upon the rediscovery of antebellum American women's sentimental poetry, said, "The problem is, we don't know how to read their poems." Johnson claims that a rhetorical framework is the solution to this problem. A literary/rhetorical divide has marginalized women's sentimental poetry in both literary and rhetorical his­ tory, and Johnson's study actively traverses this divide. To recover antebellum women's sentimental verse, Johnson argues that poetry, especially sentimental poetry, is a rhetorical genre. "[M]any hold to a modernist view," Johnson writes, "that literature by definition makes no arguments" (p. 4). However, nineteenth-century Americans, influenced by the belletrism and faculty psychology found in the rhetorical theory of George Campbell and Hugh Blair, understood poetry as a sub­ category of rhetoric, and they valued sentimentalism as part of the process of persuasion. Citing Campbell, Johnson demonstrates how eighteenthand nineteenth-century rhetorical theory linked "'sentiment to moral Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 2, pp. 207-212. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 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://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.2.207. 208 RHETORICA and 'sensible/ not to an excess of feeling" (p. 7). As Campbell explains, "what is addressed solely to the moral powers of the mind, is not so prop­ erly denominated the pathetic, as the sentimental."1 Thus, as Johnson concludes, poetry is a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism is a rhetor­ ical appeal that "works alongside pathos or persuasion of public feeling" to "invok[e] arguments about ethics, rational values, and judgments" (p. 18). Eventually, sentimentalism "got linked to women pejoratively," alongside the rise of women's literacy and the establishment of elite, white, male English departments (pp. 7-8). This feminization of sentimental verse played no small part in the marginalization of the genre. However, as John­ son demonstrates, in early nineteenth-century America, poetry was a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism was considered a masculine discourse, which women co-opted in order to write about public issues. True to the rhetorical nature of her project, Johnson divides her study into three main parts: "Logos" (or rhetorical aims), "Ethos" (writing perso­ nae), and "Pathos" (audience appeals). In each section, Johnson offers anal­ yses informed by literary research, eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, and postmodern theories of semiotics that work to foreground the rhetoric of sentimentalism in the verse of Sigourney, Harper, and Howe. In Part 1, which consists of one chapter, Johnson examines the "reasoning and theo­ ries of persuasion" that these three women use to justify their right and their duty to write (p. 12). According to Johnson, sentimental logos does not rely on syllogism but rather is found in sentimental poets' use...

This article describes a one-session classroom activity that employs an unusual creative nonfiction genre (the hermit crab essay) to initiate first-year writers into the practice of successfully integrating academic research in their work. I share step-by-step instructions for implementation, along with classroom resources and materials necessary to conduct the assignment.

This paper describes developmental writing paths within a Colombian major in Industrial Engineering. The accounts were created through retrospective descriptions of students' writing experiences collected by a qualitative survey and analyzing writing samples. The study shows that writing throughout the major embraces diverse functions (Writing to learn; Writing to apply content knowledge; Writing to research; Writing to communicate ideas), and traces diverse developmental paths (Writing for innovation; Lab writing; Writing for company analysis; Writing for conducting a senior thesis). This analysis also reveals that different types of problems (improving profits in companies or creating new devices) can be treated through different types of genres (research proposals in companies and projects of innovation), despite the fact that the same label (report) is being used by participants to group writing experiences. One of the writing functions in the major that seems overtly identified by the students is conducting a senior thesis. Since there are other writing functions present across the curriculum, further studies and pedagogical debates with faculty members are necessary to define what writing developmental paths are expected from the students and how many curriculum projects (that include explicit teaching on theories of disciplinary writing and genre knowledge) across the curriculum should be undertaken.