Transnational and multilingual writing data are characterized by mobile practices that rarely hold still for study. As individuals form and re-form communities in the process of migration, their language and literacy paths increasingly diversify forms of language sociality, goals, or expectations. In such cases, a priori community knowledge around genre use becomes tenuous or nonexistent. Yet, many default methodological orientations in Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) have tended to emphasize agreement, recognizability, and community cohesion, focusing analysis especially on textual typicality. This article attends to this methodological issue by resurfacing and extending a discussion of the centrifugal nature of genre. To demonstrate this shift, the article enacts a genre analysis of a multilingual community-based writing workshop, showing how centripetal and centrifugal forces run through workshop participants’ creation of a language portrait. Ultimately, the article shows that tracking genre’s stabilizing and destabilizing forces, particularly from a human perspective, provides an analytic guide to writing practices as they fragment and re-coalesce. It further demonstrates how centering the human handling of genre can orient writing researchers to the instability that is often the reality of transnational and multilingual writing.

In this article I explain how the ecological perspective, posthumanism, and rhetorical genre studies all coalesce into a theoretical framework from which to approach business communication theory and practice. I use the United States National Security Strategy as a research object to demonstrate this theoretical approach.

We conducted a post hoc analysis of 771 students’ argumentative writing plans and essays in the Criterion ® database, a digital writing tool, to explore the relations among plan features, essay quality, and writing traits. Students in the study were in Grades 5 to 10 from 68 schools. We found that older students produced writing plans that received higher scores and demonstrated greater genre-specific knowledge than younger students, but regardless of their grade, most students did not consider alternative perspectives or rebut counterarguments in their writing plans. We also found that students’ choice of plan templates was associated with the scores of their plans. Further, factor analysis showed that six of the seven plan feature scores hung together in a single factor (Factor 1) and correlated with multiple trait scores (Factor 2), accounting for most of the shared variance connecting plan scores with writing traits. The “both sides” plan feature loaded on a different factor by its own, suggesting that considering different perspectives is a challenging skill that students may need extra support to develop.

Overall, vaccine acceptance appears to be high. But vaccine hesitancy persists nonetheless. This article draws on moral foundations theory (MFT) to rhetorically explore possibilities of storytelling within the genre of the vaccine anecdote, a form of discourse common to vaccine-skeptical discourses. Informed by social scientific accounts of the moral foundations associated with high vaccine hesitancy, I analyze three examples of pro-vaccine anecdotes—an anecdote of injury, an anecdote of conversion, and an anecdote of positive outcome—to explore strategies of personal storytelling toward the values of vaccine-hesitant publics. From the analysis, I describe three specific modes of storytelling (haunting, continuing, and intuiting) while weighing their varying promise for aligning vaccine-supportive anecdotes with mild or more extreme levels of vaccine hesitancy.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the U.K. government’s means of allocating funding to universities based on assessments of the research they produce. Conducted every five years, this exercise now includes not only the ‘quality’ of research but also its real-world ‘impact’. This helps determine the £7.16 billion distributed annually to universities and influences the reputations of institutions and academics. Writers are therefore keen to make the most persuasive argument for their work they can in these submissions through the narrative case studies that the submission requires. In this article, we examine all 6,361 case studies from the last exercise in 2021 to explore the rhetorical presentation of impact through an analysis of authorial stance. We found considerable use of self-mention, hedges, and boosters, with the hard science fields containing statistically significantly more markers and applied disciplines being particularly strong users. The study contributes to our understanding of stance in academic writing and the role of rhetorical persuasion in high-stakes assessment genres.

This article describes a gamified technical writing assignment inspired by the Hunt a Killer board games. Students solve a fictional mystery by analyzing AI-generated technical documents as an introduction to the most common deliverables and genres in the field and practice of Technical and Professional Communication. Grounded in research on gamification and AI, this activity fosters experiential learning by situating technical writing genres as both structured and dynamic tools. By combining genre analysis with collaborative problem-solving, the assignment offers a novel approach to teaching genre in technical writing, emphasizing flexibility and critical thinking.

This essay shares a WAW reflection assignment that supports the development of writing knowledge for tax memos and for the accounting profession; it is taught in an undergraduate tax class for accounting students. Students develop an external tax memo and, following submission of that assignment, they write about their own writing in their completed memo. The emphasis on the WAW reflection is paragraphing, as this aspect of writing is highly valued in accounting and especially needed for an effective tax memo. Accounting education has long called for more writing-emphasis instruction in accounting courses, and this assignment answers that call.

The article addresses the issue of the so-called ‘commonplaces’ of two cultures in relation to comparative genology and generative anthropology. It focuses on three themes particularly important to both civilisations: the birth motif and genre of birthday songs, the ritual and tri-unity of dance, sound, and word, and the approach to battle and death. By comparing the genres and cultural phenomena of the Greeks and Romans with those of the Toltecs and Aztecs, the analysis reveals similarities between the ancient literatures of Mediterranean Europe and Mesoamerican tribes. Research that uses the apparatus of generative anthropology and draws from the interdependence of rhetoric and culture offers new conclusions.

The aim of this article is to present an original didactic concept that integrates the classical ideal of vir bonus dicendi peritus with the theory of rhetorical ethos and contemporary positive psychology, represented by the VIA character strengths model. The point of departure is the assumption that the speaker’s ethos – as a rhetorical category – has deep roots in the tradition of virtue ethics, developed from Aristotle through Quintilian to contemporary philosophers such as MacIntyre, Nussbaum, and Hursthouse. The article demonstrates that contemporary psychological tools, such as the VIA test, can serve as practical instruments for cultivating ethos in rhetorical education. The proposed didactic project, implemented within the framework of practical rhetoric classes, is based on an individual analysis of students’ character strengths and their mapping onto various rhetorical genres. The article seeks to build a bridge between rhetorical theory and the ethical and psychological formation of the speaker.

[Introduction] Edited by Linda S. Svitak and Christin Jaye Eaton, with Lee Svitak Dean, and published by the University of Minnesota Press, Kitchens of Hope: Immigrants Share Stories of Resilience and Recipes from Home (2025) fits neatly into the popular genre network of cookbooks that blend essay with recipe, mixing memoir with meals perfected over generations. But this book doesn't simply share the legacy of Liberian rice bread or summer beat soup. It explores the migration of these dishes and their cooks, contextualizing stories of displacement and development. Because of the breadth of this book, Mikhail Bakhtin might describe this collection as a chronotope of sorts, a configuration of time and space that "takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible" (qtd. in Bemong & Borghart, 2010, p. 4). Through Omedi Ochieng's lens of chronotopian humanitarianism, this book is a rhetorical tool for feminist scholarship seeking to counter a Eurocentric understanding of how and why people and stories move around and through the world.

Bridget C. Donnelly is an assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Her primary teaching areas include eighteenth-century British literature, the novel, and Gothic and horror literature. Her research has appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and The Literary Taylor Swift: Songwriting and Intertextuality (2024). She is completing, along with a team of undergraduate and graduate student researchers, a critical edition of Elizabeth Meeke's 1796 The Abbey of Clugny, under contract with Routledge's Chawton House: Women's Novel Series.Kishonna Gray (she/her) is a professor of racial justice and technology in the School of Information at the University of Michigan and director of the Mellon-funded Intersectional Tech Lab. Her research explores the intersections of race, gender, and digital technologies, particularly in gaming and platform culture. She is the author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming and Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live and coeditor of Woke Gaming and Feminism in Play. Gray is also a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.Ashley Nadeau is an associate professor of English at Utah Valley University in Orem, UT, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature and critical theory. Her current research project examines the role of audiobooks in undergraduate literary studies and studies on the Victorian novel. When not thinking about audiobooks, she studies the relationship between the social and architectural histories of built public space and the Victorian literary imagination. Her work has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorians Journal, The Gaskell Journal, Modern Language Studies, and Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom.Eleanor Reeds is an associate professor of English at Hastings College in Nebraska where she enjoys teaching across genres and periods in a small but vibrant department. Her research has appeared in venues such as Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, American Literary Realism, and Twentieth-Century Literature.Tes Schaeffer (she/her) previously served as an advanced lecturer in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric and as the associate director of the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Central Oregon Community College. Her fields of scholarship include composition and reading pedagogies, affect studies, and phenomenology.Krysten Stein (she/her) is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College. She is a research affiliate with the Intersectional Tech Lab at the University of Michigan's School of Information and the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Her research explores reality television and social media, with a focus on identity, political economy, and wellness. She is completing her first book, And How Does That Make You Feel? Theratainment and the Digital Commodification of Mental Health, and is a cofounding member of the Content Creator Scholars Network.Lisa Swan is an advanced lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. She holds a PhD in curriculum and instruction with a specialization in English education from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include writing studies, pedagogy, reading, teacher training, and equity.

This article examines United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID's) maternal health (MH) success stories as transnational assemblages that deploy security logics to justify external governance while appearing to celebrate local agency. Through rhetorical-cultural analysis of 25 narratives, I identify three recurring strategies—crisis amplification, representational homogenization, and paratextual techniques—that frame MH as requiring urgent intervention. These stories obscure local expertise and align care with donor-defined metrics and narrative arcs. Findings show that security logics circulate through genre conventions and design templates that normalize intervention as technical and humanitarian. I argue TPC scholars must examine assemblage mechanisms’ role in shaping representation, risk, and care transnationally.

This article reports a case study of teachers’ enactment of writing instruction for adult learners in Swedish as a second language at lower secondary level in municipal education. It highlights instructional practices and discourses surrounding writing in three classrooms. The analysis centers on literacy events initiated by teachers to support adult learners’ final individual assignments. Data consist of classroom observations (24 hours) and informal interviews with teachers. The findings reveal that teachers adopt different positions in their teaching. There are varying levels of support for students, with varying numbers of literacy events occurring both inside and outside the classroom. Teachers universally adjust their methods based on contextual factors, including diverse student groups, local agreements on content, and time constraints, raising questions about equality. Furthermore, a text-focused approach prioritizes templates and models over content. As a result, writing assignments emphasize genre awareness rather than personal views, thoughts, or experiences. In sum, teachers' pedagogical choices in writing instruction are shaped by their beliefs about writing, learning to write, and contextual factors. These differences in teaching practices seem to provide students with partly unequal opportunities for writing development. This is further elaborated in the discussion.

This paper reports on how undergraduate students evaluated writing outputs created with and without generative artificial intelligence (AI). The paper focuses specifically on two aspects of writing and AI: how prior writing knowledge influenced students’ thinking about AI tools, and how the writing skills to which they were exposed in the writing classroom helped them work with AI-generated materials. This research builds upon Bearman et al.’s (2024) work on evaluative judgement as a pedagogical tool to support learners as they work with AI-mediated texts. The paper uses this lens to identify challenges that learners have in applying writing knowledge to AI-mediated situations and to devise pedagogical means to support student learning in these contexts. We found that, while students could typically evaluate structural components of writing, they struggled to evaluate conceptual ideas both for AI and human generated texts. The findings speak more generally to the need for students to develop their evaluative abilities, as well as ways that AI may reveal and amplify existing challenges that learners have with evaluating the quality of writing, engaging with source materials, and applying genre knowledge to create meaning.

By Allison Gross and Jessica Lee. In the Fall of 2022, we set out with a handful of our colleagues in the English department to create an anti-racist writing curriculum. Of particular importance to us was crafting this curriculum for our specific context, not just as a two-year college, but also at Portland Community College (PCC) in particular, the largest higher education institution in Oregon, situated in the “whitest big city in America” (De Leon). Even though Portland itself is predominantly white, our students at PCC are far more diverse, with PCC itself situated on the traditional village site of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, and Clackamas bands of the Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River. Specifically

By Taylor J. Wyatt. Any discussion about multimodal composition inevitably invites the question: “What counts as writing?” This question of what “counts” often reveals an underlying assumption that multimodality lacks adequate academic rigor. “What counts as writing” leads to further considerations, such as identifying pedagogical strategies to help students expand their knowledge in new writing contexts and genres. In their 2016 edited collection, Chris M. Anson and Jessie L. Moore define transfer “as the ability to repurpose or transform prior knowledge for a new context” (370). As they offer their definition of transfer, Anson and Moore note the complexity of the term and write, “for many scholars transfer functions as an umbrella term, encompassing an array of theories about the phenomenon” (370). Kara Poe Alexander, Matthew Davis, Lilian W. Mina, and Ryan P. Shepherd’s edited collection Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer considers writing transfer and what counts as writing within a multimodal context.

Raffaella Negretti, Hans Malmström, and Jonathan Weidow Abstract In this program profile, we describe the development of an integrated, genre-based writing curriculum in first-year engineering physics at a technical university in Sweden. The curriculum aimed at supporting undergraduate students develop disciplinary literacy and an understanding of the exigencies that different scientific genres fulfill, with a […]

Jennifer L. Bay is professor of English at Purdue University, where she teaches undergraduate courses in the professional and technical writing major and graduate courses in technical and professional writing, community engagement, experiential learning, and rhetorical theory. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly.Felisa Baynes-Ross is an assistant course director of English 1014 (writing seminars) and senior lecturer in English at Yale University where she teaches courses in expository writing, creative nonfiction, and pedagogy. Both in her teaching and writing, she is interested in aesthetics of dissent, which she explores in medieval polemical treatises and poetry and historical narratives on the Caribbean. Her published work appears in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, and The Caribbean Writer.Caitlin Cawley is the assistant director of the writing program and an advanced lecturer of English at Fordham University. She teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature, composition and rhetoric, critical theory, and film studies. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of American Studies, The Faulkner Journal, and The Oakland Review and has received generous support from the US Army Heritage Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.Tracy Clark is a senior lecturer in the Professional Writing program at Purdue University. Research interests include accessibility and usability, public health communication, multimodal content development, and the intersection of gender identity and neurodiversity in technology use.Garrett I. Colón is a doctoral candidate in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University and the assistant director of content development for the Purdue OWL. His research interests include technical and professional communication, user experience design, community engagement, and writing across the curriculum.Adrianna Deptula is a current doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University. Her research interests include science, technology, and medicine (STM); patient advocacy; and new materialism.Shelley Garcia is associate professor of English at Biola University where she teaches courses on race, gender, and culture in American literature, as well as composition and rhetoric. She has published on Chicana feminist authors who write across genre, focusing on the intersections of form, identity, and resistance. Additional research interests that have emerged from her teaching include the role of literary studies in developing intercultural competence, the theme of abjection in Toni Morrison's novels, and representations of the femme fatale in American modernist fiction.Eliza Gellis is a recent graduate of the Rhetoric and Composition doctoral program at Purdue University. Her research interests include comparative rhetorics, public and cultural rhetorics, rhetorical theory, and pop culture.Caroline Hagood is an assistant professor of literature, writing, and publishing and director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Resources for American Literary Study, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture.Emily Rónay Johnston is an assistant teaching professor in writing studies at the University of California, Merced, and a New Directions Fellow through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She holds a PhD in English studies from Illinois State University, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a BA in women's studies from the University of California, Davis. Prior to academia, she worked in a domestic violence shelter and an addiction recovery center for women. She has published articles on the relationship between writing and adversity, as well as the restorative promises of writing pedagogy in the face of adversity, in College Composition and Communication (2023), Writers: Craft & Context (2022), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (2020), and elsewhere.Pamela B. June is associate professor of English at Ohio University Eastern, where she teaches women's literature, American literature, literature and social justice, and writing courses. She is the author of two books, Solidarity with the Other Beings on the Planet: Alice Walker, Ecofeminism, and Animals in Literature (2020) and The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern, Feminist, and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Pérez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker (2010). In 2021, she earned the Ohio University Outstanding Professor Award in Regional Higher Education.Nate Mickelson is clinical associate professor and director of faculty development in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He is author of City Poems and American Urban Crisis, 1945 – Present (2018) and editor of Writing as a Way of Staying Human in a Time That Isn't (2018). Nate's scholarly writing has appeared in Criticism; Journal of Modern Literature; Journal of Urban Cultural Studies; Learning Communities Research and Practice; and Journal of College Literacy and Learning.Ryan Michael Murphy is an assistant professor of business communication in the department of business information systems at Central Michigan University. He completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2022. His current research focuses on the transfer of knowledge and skills between academic and nonacademic settings with a special interest in the ways business communication pedagogy can better recognize the experiences and knowledge students bring into the university.Jenni Quilter is executive director of the Expository Writing Program and assistant vice dean of general education in the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University (NYU). She is author of Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology (2022) and Painters and Poets of the New York School: Neon in Daylight (2014). She's currently writing and publishing about silent cinema, bodybuilding, Zeno's paradoxes, Afro-futurism, North African piracy, Norway, and animal migration. Quilter won NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award in 2014.Sahar Romani is a clinical assistant professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University (NYU), where she teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences. She has published poems and essays in Guernica, Poetry Society of America, Entropy, The Offing, The Margins and elsewhere. She's received fellowships from Poets House, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and NYU's Creative Writing Program.Megan Shea is a clinical professor and faculty mentor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tisch School of the Arts. Shea is the author of Tragic Resistance: Feminist Agency in Performance (2025). Her articles have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Shea is also an actor, director, and playwright. Her gender-bending play Penelope and Those Dang Suitors was selected as a 2018 winner in Hudson Valley Shakespeare's ten-minute play contest.Christina Van Houten is a clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tandon School of Engineering. She is completing her first book Home Fronts: Modernism and the Regional Framework of the American Century. Her articles have been published in Comparative Literature Studies, Women's Studies, Politics and Culture, and Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor.Bethany Williamson is associate professor of English at Biola University, where she teaches courses in British and global literatures, literary theory, and academic writing. Her current interests include ecocritical approaches to the long eighteenth century and articulating the humanities’ value in the age of artificial intelligence. She is the author of Orienting Virtue: Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century (2022), as well as articles in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, South Atlantic Review, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Elisabeth Windle is senior lecturer of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches advanced writing courses and introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies, as well as courses on queer US literature, true crime, and contemporary fiction. She formerly taught in the College Writing Program. Her work has been published in MELUS and Camera Obscura.Mira Zaman is an associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her research centers on representations of the devil in eighteenth-century British literature, and she is also passionate about teaching composition and rhetoric. Her scholarship has appeared in Persuasions, ANQ, Marvell Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Life.

Abstract Drawing from new and foundational scholarship in the field and from our experiences as teachers at a range of institutions, the authors consider how multimodal learning can support antiracist classrooms. This article emphasizes the value of cross-institutional collaboration, as the authors make a collective case for remixing the essay in first-year composition. This term denotes a method for building on the traditional college essay through activities and assignments that allow students to reevaluate and repurpose this well-established genre. The authors offer four case studies for remixing the essay—“Multimodal Translation: Playing with Post-Its” (Borough of Manhattan Community College /City University of New York), “Remixing Activism: The Essay as Personal and Political Playlist” (St. Francis College), “NYC Graffiti Autoethnography” (Fordham University), and “‘Vernacularity and Translation Activity” (Yale University). All four narratives present practices that support critical agency and linguistic justice by addressing the conventions of college writing assignments. Together, the authors offer a useful practice for composition instructors seeking to implement antiracist and multimodal instruction as well as a generative concept for administrators developing new writing curricula.

It is a mere fifty-five years since the bulk of the New Rhetoric Project (NRP) was presented to English-speaking (and -reading) audiences in the John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver 1969 translation. Not long in the grand scheme of things, but long enough for certain orthodoxies to become established in the literature. We know, for example, that this was a return to Aristotle to recover ideas that had long been lost and that would undergird the logic of value.1 And we know that the “Universal Audience” is a problematic and confused idea. But such received ideas are what this collection of essays challenges.If there has been a rhetorical turn in argumentation theory (Bolduc 2020, 9), then that turn has safely been traced to the 1958 publication of Le Traité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique (henceforth, the Traité), and the coincidental appearance of Stephen Toulmin’s Uses of Argument in the same year. Subsequent to the Traité’s publication, its authors, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, expended considerable efforts in publicizing its main themes and ideas through a series of short papers in different languages, and Perelman’s single-authored précis of the larger tome, L’empire (1977), found an immediate readership among audiences—often students, for whom the larger work was deemed too unwieldy.That dissemination aside, the need for such a collection as the one now under review arises in part because of the “errors” that have found their way into the literature, but also because the Wilkinson and Weaver English translation lacks the scholarly apparatus that would provide commentary on ideas and explain the cultural background to the concerns that arise. For example, the Traité makes continuous reference to European writers of the day with which later, non-European, audiences will be unfamiliar. And beyond this, there is a growing interest in the history of the NRP: the ideas and influences that led Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca to develop one of the most important projects in the history of rhetorical theory. Their rhetorical turn in argumentation, identifying the centrality of audience adherence to theses through the development of a range of argumentation schemes and rhetorical strategies, has fascinating antecedents in Perelman’s early philosophical thinking. To this end, Michelle Bolduc and David Frank’s expressed goal is to translate the most significant texts that remain in French and to correct current mistranslations. This collection contributes to that goal.The book comprises seven essays, along with introductions and commentaries from Bolduc and Frank. Five of the essays are by Perelman alone, and the other two were written in collaboration with Olbrechts-Tyteca, including the centerpiece, “Logique et rhétorique” (1950).One of the fascinating aspects of this volume is the insights it provides into Perelman’s own development as a thinker, especially a rhetorical thinker, independent of his work with Olbrechts-Tyteca. The five essays with his sole authorship range over twenty years, from the early thirties to the early fifties, and include one of his first publications, “De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance” (On the Arbitrary in Knowledge, 1933), published when he was only twenty-one years old. Here we have a young philosopher establishing his ideas against the dominance of logical positivism, insisting that values do not lie outside of reason. Value judgments, he argues, belong to the realm of the arbitrary, or nonnecessary, and are opposed to necessary truth judgments. This inaugurates an important, positive pluralism, as it is to the underlying realm of the arbitrary that we need to turn for human knowledge.In this essay, Perelman addresses the difficulty of imagining the other. It is not enough to put ourselves in the place of another person; “we must imagine ourselves living in another time, in another context, educated differently, with a different background. This is much more difficult” (44). We might detect here an emerging appreciation of the importance of audience as well as the roots of his conception of the Universal Audience. This is also the paper, as Bolduc and Frank point out, in which we see the first discussion of the technique of dissociation that will play so central a role in the argumentative strategies of the NRP that reconfigure the way reality appears to us (31). It is through this technique, we might recall, that concepts are modified and revalued after an incompatibility in their use develops in society.Two essays on the Jewish question, “Réflexions sur l’assimilation” (1935) and “La Question juive” (1946), occupy the focus of chapter 2. Beyond providing a sense of the cultural background against which Perelman’s ideas were developing, it tells us something about his political and cultural affiliations. Perelman was a “political Zionist” who lived through the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel, and his allegiance to Belgium kept him rooted in Europe, although throughout his life he worked in a number of capacities on behalf of Belgium Jews. The essay also shows that he saw his theoretical ideas having importance for the world that was developing around him. And in the remarks on antisemitism, we begin to see Perelman’s recognition of the significance of groups and how they operate in opposition to each other.A fourth essay, “Philosophies premières et philosophie régressive” (1949), receives an updated commentary and translation from the version Bolduc and Frank published in 2003 in Philosophy & Rhetoric and is here given its place in the emerging NRP story. The importance of this essay in Perelman’s development has been noted before. It introduces his conception of regressive philosophy in its opposition to a tradition of first philosophies, including Aristotle’s. In this essay, we also see more clearly the move to rhetoric as the importance of a rhetorical logic (the logic of regressive philosophy) is stressed. Unlike the dogmatism of first philosophy, with its goals of absolute and necessary knowledge, regressive philosophy champions what earlier was seen in the domain of the arbitrary. It returns thought to its human roots in human contexts. Thus, rhetorical logic, in the words of the commentary, “requires commitment and responsibility because it provides the guide for human action” (97).The last of Perelman’s essays, “Raison éternelle, raison historique” (1952), provides further details of his expanded sense of reason. He sees in Aristotle the license to develop a model of nonformal reason, but one that has Perelman’s own distinct features. His rhetorical definition of reason is rooted in human experience (time), action, and judgment. This is a conception of reason that will start to appear familiar to readers of The New Rhetoric.This is also one of the essays that clarifies details surrounding what has become one of the more difficult concepts associated with the NRP, that of the Universal Audience. As readers may appreciate, the literature is filled with readings (and perhaps misreadings) of this central idea as scholars struggle to understand it. The problem was such that Perelman himself was still trying to clarify matters late in his career (Perelman 1984). Bolduc and Frank put the confusions partly down to the Wilkinson and Weaver translation (12). Whatever the cause, there is material here to set readers down the right path. Reacting to the rather feckless audiences imagined by Aristotle in his Rhetoric, Perelman promotes audiences that are “no longer constituted by a crowd of ignorant people, but by the subject himself when it is a matter of inner deliberation or, during a discussion, by an individual interlocutor, or by what we could call the Universal Audience, formed by all reasonable humans, during the presentation of a thesis whose validity should be universally recognized” (170). Accepting that we understand “validity” here in the nonformal sense in which it is employed in the NRP, then we have a clear statement of the three audiences that will become important for Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca.The Universal Audience is not a “blank slate,” but accepts facts, values, and argumentative techniques. This audience represents “incarnate reason,” but is not provided by experience alone because it always begins with an extrapolation from “the actual adherence of certain individuals.” Thus, Perelman concludes, “We posit that the theses attributed to this audience can vary in time, that they are not impersonal but rather dependent on the person who declares them, and on the milieu and the culture which shaped him” (170–71). Thus, we see changes in the understanding of what is reasonable influencing the way people argue at different times and in different places about, say, the value to be accorded to the physically disadvantaged or about those to whom the category of “person” should be extended. This is indeed the Universal Audience that can be extracted from The New Rhetoric, but its nature is expressed far clearer in Bolduc and Frank’s new translation.The remaining two essays are authored by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca together. “De la temporalité comme caractère de l’argumentation,” from 1958, develops some of the insights in Perelman’s earlier essay on historical reason. Because time plays no role in demonstration, its importance is pronounced when we turn to argumentation. The nature and logic of argument cannot escape its history, the demands of the present, and future consequences. Here is another way in which reason informs the human condition, grounding thought in the experience of self and others and our relation to the world.It is, however, the other coauthored paper (identified as their first collaboration), “Logique et rhétorique,” from 1950, that is the most valuable essay in the collection, in terms of its anticipation of the NRP and illumination of ideas found there. It constitutes chapter 4 of the book, aptly titled “The Debut of the New Rhetoric Project.”We gain a better sense here, for example, of how Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca consider the relationship between persuasion and conviction, which can be another point of confusion in The New Rhetoric. For many scholars, and for figures such as Kant, conviction is the stronger mental state. But the authors of the NRP allow that the relationship can be reversed, a position rarely seen since Richard Whately (1963, 175). They write,True to the focus on values and action, persuasion is the conversion of conviction into action; a position or claim that is judged as correct, to which there is adherence, is personalized as it informs the behavior of the audience.Also, in accordance with its title, this article announces the importance of rhetoric for the authors and clarifies their understanding of this concept in relation to their predecessors’ views. Rhetoric differs from logic in its concern with adherence. Hence the important, but revised sense, of persuasion. As Bolduc and Frank observe, both Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca were surprised by their discovery of rhetoric (131n18), and they explain the central importance of epideictic rhetoric (often marginalized at the expense of the deliberative and judicial types) in a way not made clear in the Traité or any work prior to L’empire: “The battle that the epideictic orator wages is a battle against future objections; it is an effort to maintain the ranking of certain value judgments in the hierarchy or, potentially, to confer on them a superior status” (134). It is the association between the epideictic and value judgments that elevates epideictic in their eyes. As Perelman will later write, “In my view the epideictic genre is central to discourse because its role is to intensify adherence to values, adherence without which discourses that aim at proving action cannot find the lever to move or to inspire their listeners” (1982, 19).Further ideas, like the Universal Audience, are again rehearsed in “Logique et rhétorique.” But this is also a paper that best clarifies the distance between Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Aristotle, and this is something that deserves some discussion.One of the assumptions generally made about the NRP is that it is Aristotelian in nature and its authors neo-Aristotelians. There are, of course, grounds to support this assumption. Perelman himself speaks of the new rhetoric as a project that “amplifies as well as extends Aristotle’s work” (1982, 4). Michel Meyer, Perelman’s student, seems to confirm as much when he writes, “Perelman’s view of rhetoric has often been qualified as neo-Aristotelian because it is reasonable, if not rational, to provide arguments which are convincing due to the type of logos used” (2017, 54). And even one of the current authors in question has described Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s project as “their contemporary revision of Aristotelian rhetoric” (Frank 2023, 251). So, clearly, there are careful distinctions to be made here.Throughout the papers, the debt to Aristotle is evident and frequently acknowledged. The Aristotelian syllogism plays an important role in several discussions, and the young Perelman saw value in Aristotle’s tandem of potentiality and actuality, terms that play an important role in the Metaphysics (and, one might suggest, in the Rhetoric).2 And as we have seen, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca acknowledge Aristotle as paving the way to seeing a model of nonformal reasoning and a viable conception of rhetoric.At the same time, the logic of Aristotle’s rhetoric is not one that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca endorse. It fits smoothly into the tradition of first philosophies that the whole NRP opposes. And the vision of reason is ultimately very different, as Perelman insisted in a response to Stanley Rosen (Perelman 1959). This is made clear in “Logique et rhétorique.” Aristotle’s relevant logic, the one developed in his Rhetoric, is a logic of the plausible. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s logic, as dictated by their conception of rhetoric with its emphasis on values, is a logic of the preferable (137). Nothing could set the two systems more firmly apart. And on this distinction, if for no other, we can see why ultimately Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca would not consider themselves neo-Aristotelians.Michelle Bolduc and David Frank have provided an enormous service to present and future readers of The New Rhetoric. Elsewhere, Bolduc (2020, 288) warns against limiting the corpus of the NRP to the Traité of 1958. This volume supports that warning, bringing to light a sampling of what might be missed by such a restrictive vision. The authors have also done readers throughout the world an immeasurable service in negotiating an open-access contract with Brill. This removes all financial impediments to studying an important set of essays, and I suspect it reflects Bolduc and Frank’s belief in the value of the ideas they are presenting here, and which in further volumes they will continue to present. These are two collaborators who have thought seriously about the nature of scholarly collaboration (Frank and Bolduc 2010), deriving insights that inform their approach to their subjects here. One suspects it is a collaboration as rewarding for those involved as it is for those who benefit from its results.

We report on a longitudinal case study (n = 9) about popularization writing skills in undergraduate interdisciplinary students. Writing skills were determined by analyzing components of the cognitive process model of writing proposed by Hayes. Keystroke logging and video observation were used to analyze the text construction process (the process level) in third-year writing. Genre knowledge (the control level) was analyzed through text analysis and assessment of first-year and third-year texts. Results showed that writing was highly individualized at the process level, including switches between processes, timing, number of edits, and reliance on the source text. At the control level, popularization genre knowledge did not significantly change over time and text quality remained low to average, suggesting a lack in genre knowledge. Choices in the writing process are, thus, not reflected in the quality of the writing product. These findings point to a need for explicit training in popularization discourse alongside academic discourse training.

This is a book review of Change and Stability in Thesis and Dissertation Writing: The Evolution of an Academic Genre by Paltridge and Starfield (2024).

We conduct a close reading and micro-level analysis of a market update released by Restaurant Group Plc, a UK leisure firm, during the COVID-19 pandemic to examine its communication functions. While the market update aligns with communicative action theory by enhancing information transparency, it also deploys various rhetorical strategies, including impersonalization, positive self-evaluation, and metaphors consistent with impression management. The overly optimistic tone bears no relation to subsequent corporate outcomes. This study provides valuable insights for business and professional communication practitioners and students, enabling them to interpret the linguistic characteristics of market updates as a distinct genre of corporate communication.

Background and research problem: The way in which work is done in digital contexts deviates from classical corporate, hierarchical, departmental organizations. Since digital microfirms are becoming more common, understanding the way members organize their activities through communication in this specific type of enterprise represents an appealing field to develop. Literature review: We discuss how the framework of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) allows us to analyze activity systems and trace disruptions in postbureaucratic digital work. We also review research using CHAT along with genre studies to understand, specifically, business communication and entrepreneurial rhetoric in a spaceless microfirm that provides digital services. Research questions: 1. In what activities does this microfirm engage? That is, what different objects and outcomes has it been developed to achieve? 2. How do the contradictions between these activities shape the microfirm’s organization and its orientation to clients? Methods: Guided by the components of activity systems, we coded interviews, questionnaires, instant messages, and databases. Discourse analysis allowed us to identify contradictions. Results: Both from the perspective of some team members and through artifact analysis, flexibility and closeness to the client are the firm’s value propositions. Consequently, they organize their daily activities around addressing the urgent, proximate needs of each client. Conclusion: Although the microfirm’s focus on flexibility and closeness sets it apart tactically from larger competitors, it also hinders strategic planning, requiring greater effort for group communication and decision-making. This insight helps us to understand why microfirms in general seem more tactically than strategically oriented.

Abstract In contemporary literature on argumentation, it is well-established that various genres of fiction can be used to present argumentation. For instance, in political satires, authors argue why a certain political situation is undesirable. Similarly, authors of fables argue—by means of animals as characters—that certain behaviour is desirable or unacceptable. Characteristically, authors of fiction create a fictional world in which their narratives take place. This collides with the sincerity conditions of the speech act complex of argumentation: preliminary conditions that should be satisfied for argumentation to be performed correctly. Firstly, these sincerity conditions require the arguer to believe that their standpoint is acceptable. Second, the arguer should believe that the statements they make to justify their standpoint are acceptable and third, the arguer should believe that these statements constitute an acceptable justification of their standpoint. As such, when argumentation meets fiction, the sincerity conditions do not align: how can authors—as arguers—actually believe that their uttered statements are acceptable, if these statements are oftentimes not true? The aim of this paper is to show both how proponents can accept propositions in fiction while still following argumentation’s sincerity conditions.

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into academic writing has raised questions about the syntactic complexity of AI-generated texts compared to human-authored essays. While studies have explored syntactic complexity in human writing, limited research has compared AI-generated argumentative and narrative texts, particularly in isolating cognitive overload and proficiency factors. This study addressed this gap by examining genre-specific syntactic patterns in AI-generated essays. Using the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer, the study analyzed four hundred AI-generated essays (two hundred argumentative and two hundred narrative) and employed paired T-tests and Pearson correlation coefficients to identify differences and relationships among syntactic measures. Results showed that argumentative essays demonstrated higher syntactic complexity than narrative essays, especially in production unit length, coordination, and phrasal sophistication, while subordination measures remained similar. Correlation analysis revealed that argumentative essays compartmentalized ideas through coordinated and nominally complex structures, while narrative essays integrated descriptive richness through longer sentences and embedded clauses. The findings suggest that genre-specific rhetorical demands shape syntactic complexity in AI-generated writing. Implications for teaching and learning writing and future studies are discussed.

This article looks at the practice of having first-year writing students write abstracts to prepare for drafting a research essay. Abstract writing grounds students at a moment when they may be struggling to identify a clear context for their object of analysis. The assignment asks them to read and critique sample abstracts, sourced from journals and their peers, and then write one of their own using the research assembled from an annotated bibliography. Through sharing the abstracts, students notice opportunities for expanding claims, applying evidence, and clarifying argument in their essays. In this way, the assignment enables students to develop more confidence in their ideas; it also sharpens their genre awareness, as they recognize how abstracts service both readers and writers during the research process.

The reflective essay introduces the culminating project from a specific iteration of Perspectives on the Humanities, the second universally required composition course at NYU Shanghai. For this project, students investigate a self-selected term of sociocultural significance that defies smooth migration across linguistic boundaries, especially between English and Chinese. Students can convey their research and insights through one of three genres: a “traditional” argumentative essay, an extended note, or a historical narrative. Inspired in part by Raymond Williams, this assignment aims to enhance students' rhetorical, linguistic, and cultural awareness by navigating the complexities of language and genre in a globalized context.

The End of Genre: Curations and Experiments in Intentional Discourses, Brenton Faber. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022. 244 pages, $99 eBook, $129 softcover; $129 hardcover. Publisher webpage: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-08747-9

This article examines the subject of persuasion in technical and professional communications (TPC) with a specific focus on proposals in U.S. Government contracting. It demonstrates a fundamental disconnect between the intent of proposals, which is to persuade, and the rhetorical traditions and professional boundaries of technical writers. The analysis draws on the existing rhetorical- and genre-based TPC literature and borrows from theory in other disciplines—management, organizational theory, sociology, and psychology among others. To advance the scholarship on proposals, this analysis is framed within the overall context of a structural analogy to U.S. military Information Operations (IO). Through use of analogy, it is suggested that the IO community's approach to the concepts of “influence,” “narrative,” “target audience,” and “unity of effort” may offer useful insight for State and Federal contractors to consider in their efforts to write persuasive proposals. This analysis is then used to develop a research agenda for the study of proposals. Areas for future research include the science of persuasion and the use of narrative as it relates to proposals, improved rigor in the use of target audience research, and organizational constructs to improve collaborative writing in proposals.

The police written witness statement is a major evidentiary document that has a direct bearing on the prosecution and adjudication of criminal cases. The present study examines the rhetorical structure of police written witness statements in Ghana as a genre by adopting Bhatia’s genre model to examine 120 statements on alleged criminal cases that were sampled from the Wenchi Division of the Bono Regional Police Command in Ghana. The findings suggest that the police written witness statement is typically characterized by five moves ( Disclaiming, Identifying the Witness, Stating Witness’s Involvement with the Case, Reporting the Facts , and Indicating Discharge of Legal Responsibility ) that bear facts necessary in the prosecution of crime in Ghana’s criminal justice system. The choice of lexicogrammatical features varied depending on the function of each move. The study concludes that the witness statements possess peculiar functional features that meet the legal demands of Ghana’s judicial expectations and police discourse.

Digital technologies have dramatically changed the way scientists produce, circulate, and disseminate scientific knowledge. Here we investigate women scientists’ writing activity and digitally mediated discursive practices in their professions. Using survey techniques, we identify patterns of professional and public science communication online across the disciplines. We also explore the potentially interrelated genres—“genre systems”—that routinely enact typified rhetorical actions in their professional contexts. The findings show that their socioliterate activity fully reflects the importance that their professional contexts attach to certain “privileged” genres of professional communication (e.g., journal articles), despite the fact that the respondents value highly genres of socially responsible research (e.g., blogs, infographics). Statistical analyses further confirm that “disciplinary culture” is a determining factor in the extent to which respondents engage with collaborative genres and participatory science genres. We report significant differences in the use of digital mediation tools to communicate science online to both expert and lay audiences. Finally, we discuss several implications for writing pedagogy and the development of digital skills to support scientists, especially women, who want or need to promote and disseminate their research widely.

Executive functions are attributed a central role in maintaining fluency during L2 text composition, allowing writers to orchestrate the various linguistic and cognitive processes and resources involved in writing. The study examined (1) whether language proficiency moderates the relationship between executive functions and writing fluency in L2 writing and (2) whether the effects indirectly affect text quality. Sixty university students composed two texts in English as their L2, an argumentation and a description, three executive function tasks assessing inhibition, shifting, and updating skills, a language proficiency test, and a copy task. Keystroke logging protocols were recorded with Inputlog and analyzed for writing fluency. Text quality was assessed with a holistic benchmark procedure and comparative judgments. The results revealed language-dependent and genre-specific effects of updating and shifting but not inhibition skills on writing fluency. Path models indicated that the interactions between executive functions and language proficiency indirectly affect text quality through process-related writing measures. The findings suggest a complex relation between executive functions and writing performance that depends on language proficiency and varies with task demands.

Background: Instructors in STEM fields help prepare students to be effective communicators in the workplace, partially through instruction of professional genres such as client-facing reports. At the same time, class sizes are increasing, and writing assessment often falls to teaching assistants (TAs). Literature review: Research suggests that TAs possess a maturing but inchoate sense of writing in their field, which potentially complicates their ability to deliver quality feedback. This study uses frame semantics, a form of discourse analysis, to probe TAs for their beliefs about writing in statistics. Research questions: 1. When asked to describe the function and role of writing in statistics, what lexical verbs do TA informants use? 2. What frames are invoked by those verbs? 3. How do the invoked semantic frames position writing in relation to disciplinary and professional work in the field? Research methodology: This study interviewed three TAs from an introductory statistics course about their perceptions of writing in statistics. Frame semantics was used to analyze TA responses. Results: Less experienced TAs tended to perceive writing as a means of presentation, which entailed a weak sense of the role of rhetoric in technical communication and a muddied understanding of writing assessment. The more advanced TA perceived writing as a means of contextualizing statistical evidence for particular audiences. Conclusion: Due to their maturing perceptions of writing in their disciplines, TAs might not possess the ability to deliver quality formative feedback. One means of support for these TAs may be opportunities to discuss assessment decisions with one another, thereby calibrating against available expectations and rubrics.

Mike Diana was the first artist in the United States convicted for artistic obscenity. His crime, for which he was convicted in 1994, was creating and distributing a zine titled Boiled Angel. Diana's work and subsequent conviction opens potential avenues of exploration into radical rhetorics, ethics, and perceptions of aberrance. This paper considers how endeavors labelled as aberrant or radical ask us to expand ethical boundaries, even leading us to question what we might consider "technical," "professional," or "valuable." This reconsideration of appropriateness and acceptability through extremism, which leads us through the often-fuzzy distinction between "morals" and "ethics," has the potential to open or amplify opportunities for underrepresented or marginalized authors, groups, and genres by forcing us to question why we draw the lines we draw with what we deem as socially, professionally, or morally acceptable.

This case study investigates how two ESL graduate students, Ian and Sam, use ChatGPT in their research writing after receiving a comprehensive tutorial based on Warschauer et al.’s (2023) AI literacy framework. We analyzed their engagement with ChatGPT across prompt categories including genre, content, language use, documentation, coherence, and clarity. Data were collected from research paper drafts, ChatGPT chat histories, and interviews. Data analyses included coding ChatGPT prompts, textual analysis of drafts, and thematic analysis of interview transcripts . Results show that while both participants utilized ChatGPT for understanding genre conventions and content development, they developed distinct approaches reflecting their individual backgrounds. Ian selectively used ChatGPT for specific assistance needs, while Sam engaged more systematically, particularly for APA style and coherence checks. Both approaches maintained academic integrity and scholarly voice, demonstrating that Generative AI tools can be effectively tailored to individual needs without compromising ethical standards. This study highlights how advanced ESL writers can adapt GenAI tools to their unique writing processes, offering insights into the diverse ways AI can enhance academic writing while preserving individual agency. The findings suggest that AI integration in academic writing can be customized to support diverse writing goals and backgrounds.

Abstract This article proposes the value hip-hop based education can add to the first-year composition classroom. It provides a framework for using hip-hop based education to scaffold traditional writing assignments, including rhetorical analysis assignments and argumentative essays using concepts like zines, cyphers, and song analysis. Drawing from culturally relevant pedagogy, linguistic justice, and Black feminist pedagogy, this article offers the genre of hip-hop to define and solidify its usefulness in composition studies and its relevance to the Black community, asserting that centering pedagogy relevant to Black students is beneficial for all students. Based on culturally relevant pedagogy's tenets, this article highlights ways culturally relevant materials can be implemented to recognize and value students’ diverse cultures and lived experiences to increase student engagement, agency, and academic success. The concepts presented here promote antiracism and multimodal learning in the classroom contributing to pedagogical research and praxis looking to disrupt hegemonic teaching and learning.

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, we explore research article abstracts created by generative artificial intelligence (AI). These synthetic genres—genre-ing activities shaped by the recursive nature of language learning models in AI-driven text generation—are of interest as they could influence informational quality, leading to various forms of disordered information such as misinformation. We conduct a two-part study generating abstracts about (a) genre scholarship and (b) polarized topics subject to misinformation. We conclude with considerations about this speculative domain of AI text generation and dis/misinformation spread and how genre approaches may be instructive in its identification.

Drawing upon scholarship on cultural-historical activity theory and writing across difference, this study investigated how students reflect on critical incidents in writing-intensive courses that are expansive by design, that is, spanning courses, semesters, communities, and cultures, and seeking to orient students toward critical incidents as catalysts for expansive learning. Findings indicate that students who reported valuing/understanding critical incidents in developing more expansive conceptualizations of literate activity tended to be further along in their studies, to be enrolled in courses with more reflective writing and semester-long community-engagement projects, and to have assumed significant team responsibilities. Students most frequently reported finding helpful concepts and design elements associated with the expansive-by-design classroom, and least helpful prior knowledge, skills, and experience (or lack thereof). The authors recommend more research into designing and assessing curricula bolstered by a writing across difference framework to illuminate the relationship between agency, sociocritical literacy, critical incidents, and expansive learning.

This mixed-methods study examined the effects of different models of online professional development (PD) on 21 US elementary teachers’ writing instruction, on the teachers’ confidence, and on students’ writing quality. Participants were first-grade teachers who were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Coaching-plus-Manual (C+M), Manual (M), or Business-as-Usual (BAU). All teachers received online-PD but the C+M and the M conditions received PD on genre-based writing-strategy instruction. The M group taught using only the manual of that approach but the C+M also received coaching. Results found that C+M teachers increased the most in their writing confidence, and C+M students wrote papers of better quality at posttest compared to the M and BAU students.

The author analyzes two different meanings of the words debate and debating in Polish: as process of collective thinking, searching the best solution of certain problem of community and as a „battle”: confrontation of two opinions. These two faces of debates could be connected with two rhetorical exercises (suasoriae and controversiae), two rhetorical genres (genus deliberativum and genus iuridicum) and two models of modern debates: deliberative debate and Oxford debate. Then two education projects, based on these concepts of debates are presented debates about plastics among pupils of secondary schools in Płock (case study of use the concept of Oxford debate) and Gdańsk Academy of Debate (based on the concept of deliberative debate). Then the author discusses numerous advantages and disadvantages of the use of Oxford debate and deliberative debate as a tools of rhetorical and civil education. Probably these two concepts of using debates in rhetorical education are complementary and should be used together, or a new format of debate, combining „battle” and „brainstorming”, should be invented.

This study compares AI-generated (ChatGPT and Gemini) and human-written business refusal texts. A genre analysis found that AI-generated texts are formulaic and less nuanced than human-written texts. Applying a rating of professional writing quality, inferential statistics revealed no significant difference in scores between Gemini and human-written texts, but revealed ChatGPT as lower. Human assessors identified authorship of AI-generated texts with an accuracy rate of 68.1%, and human-written texts with 86% accuracy. Key concerns for assessors were tone, relationship, language choice, content, and structure. The findings inform four key areas of focus for teaching business writing in the AI age.

This ethnographic case study provides authentic insights into the intertextual negotiation processes for a particular merger-and-acquisition (M&A) transaction in the context of international legal practice, involving interdisciplinary legal and business professionals. Using genre and discourse analytical methodology, this study focuses on the interactional discourse practices and textual products used for negotiation of the primary sale and purchase agreement. By providing sociolinguistic insights into the M&A negotiation process, these research findings can promote a better understanding of the professional discourse activities and interactional role behaviors for this very important area of international business law practice.

Misinformation has generated much discussion in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and attendant "Infodemic," as the World Health Organization (WHO) dubbed the challenge of disordered information. Rhetorical genre studies can offer important insights about how misinformation functions within informational ecologies by revealing how typification and recurrence provide opportunities for misinformation to take hold. This article develops a genre-based framework to study scientific and technical misinformation as illicit genres through concepts of genre function and abusability.