This study investigates how the linguistic style of CEO digital communication influences audience engagement. Using an NLP pipeline with a panel regression model on a data set of 19,566 tweets from CEOs, this study reveals that linguistic clarity and an on-platform focus are the most robust predictors of engagement; syntactic complexity and the inclusion of external URLs consistently deter engagement metrics. The effects of stylistic choices like emojis and hashtags are less consistent and depend on the type of engagement being measured. These results offer an expanded understanding of digital communication for CEOs and provide direct implications for business communication pedagogy.

Large language models continue to evolve at a far faster pace than policies at colleges and universities. Writing instruction and peer-tutoring, in consequence, will have to change faster still. In six months of testing by the researchers, ChatGPT began to produce prose with ever greater clarity, analysis, and varied (if often formulaic) stylistic choices. At the same time, all AIs tested struggled with copyrighted materials, sometimes refusing to employ them or quoting sources while claiming not to have done so. The authors include preliminary suggestions for those who staff and direct writing centers, specifically methods for adopting generative AI rather than flatly opposing it. We draw from student responses to a campus survey administered in 2023 and 2024, plus one partnership between AI and sixteen first-year students. Such adaptation to AI may prove particularly useful for those helping writers otherwise marginalized by socioeconomic background, neurodiversity, or personal identity. Finally, we advocate getting ahead of any administrative efforts to dictate terms for use of AI that may lead to reduced status, or outright elimination, of human tutors.

Academic integrity continues to concern educators worldwide. Furthermore, general guidelines for ensuring academic integrity do not seem to encompass all the angles that are required to be taken into consideration when exploring the factors that contribute to multicultural students’ decision to adhere to the norms and values of academic integrity.  This literature review focuses on how academic values can be unified through academic integrity, and specifically explores factors and perspectives of utilising academic integrity to unify academic values when teaching academic writing. The dimensions of academic values explored in this paper are: a) beliefs and attitudes of multicultural undergraduate students and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), b) the value of academic performance in academic writing classes, c) exploring the development of multicultural students’ authorial voice while maintaining academic integrity, and d) using technology to encourage academic integrity in academic writing classes. Over 56 identified sources were chosen carefully to ensure unbiased approaches to the issues of academic integrity and development of academic writing skills. The authors explored the issues from a variety of perspectives. The gap noticed in the review of literature is the disconnection between academic values and academic integrity. The authors make recommendations for future research.

This study examines how supervisor-candidate coauthoring collaborations contribute to doctoral students’ writer identity. Three candidates’ coauthorship experiences with their supervisors were investigated in depth using a multiple-case study design. Interviews, written reflections, and email correspondence between coauthors enabled thick descriptions of these candidates’ writer identity formation. Guided by Burgess and Ivanič’s framework of writer identity, the multiple-case study showed how the candidates’ autobiographical selves, discoursal selves, authorial selves, and perceived writer were influenced through the experience of coauthoring with supervisors. Notably, the candidates benefited from supervisor-candidate coauthorship by engaging in scholarly collaborations, bolstering their confidence as academic writers, and strengthening their authorial voice and rhetorical awareness. This study also reveals potential pitfalls or challenges of such collaborations, highlighting key considerations for supervisors and candidates considering coauthorship.

Authorial voice plays a key role in helping writers establish themselves as experts in their field as well as demonstrate their individual style (e.g., Tardy, 2012). Citation usage has an important impact on authorial voice in academic writing and can be implemented in various ways; namely, through citation types (e.g., integral, non-integral) and citation presentation (e.g., direct quotes, summaries, generalizations). While many researchers have examined citation type among novice and experienced writers, researchers have largely overlooked citation presentation across disciplines – that is, how experienced authors balance the use of quotations, summaries, and generalization to index authorial voice. Beginning academic writers may be encouraged to use quotations to prevent plagiarism, but it is unclear if this advice reflects patterns in published writing across disciplines. In this study, we examine the background sections (i.e., introductions and/or literature reviews) of 270 academic research papers to evaluate the extent to which various citation types and presentations are used in background sections across six disciplines. Findings which can inform disciplinary writing guides and educational materials indicate disciplinary variation in citation type, with applied linguistics using the most citations overall and physics and biology using the fewest integral citations. Disciplines also differed in their citation presentation, with some favoring summaries and others favoring generalizations while quotation was rare overall. These results have important implications for teachers and material developers who can use these patterns of source usage to compare and contrast disciplinary norms and provide direct instruction on features of academic voice. Cross-disciplinary awareness of voice features can also highlight disciplinary patterns for students, allowing them to write more like experts in their fields.

Abstract: This paper is a rhetorical analysis of Plunkitt of Tammany Hall , a book of “plain talks” by George Washington Plunkitt. Plunkitt was a prominent politician in the Tammany machine. These talks expose the inner workings of how politicians become wealthy, how Tammany operated, and how to build a political machine. He rails against his enemies—those in the civil service, the Albany government, and the Republicans, to name a few. Ultimately, Plunkitt’s rhetoric is persuasive due to his use of Irish ethnic and Catholic religious identification, his appeals to the material efficacy of patronage politics, and his populist rhetorical style.

A large body of literature on writing center pedagogy suggests that serving multilingual student writers requires approaches different from those developed for native English-speaking students, a difference that may pose unique challenges to tutors. To identify and address these challenges, we elicited tutors’ perspectives on their work with multilingual writers as well as examined how these perspectives change as tutors gain experience and in response to revisions in a training curriculum. Specifically, we analyzed survey responses provided by two consecutive tutor cohorts at three points in their first semester working at the writing center. The overriding theme to emerge from participants’ responses was that working with multilingual writers often meant working at the sentence level to help them expand their linguistic and rhetorical choices, but this tutoring was sometimes challenging. The first tutor cohort even described sentence-level tutoring as transgressive, as they struggled to distinguish it from fixing or editing writers’ prose. In contrast, the second cohort, who went through a revised curriculum, treated sentence-level tutoring as acceptable practice, theorized it in richer ways, and expressed themselves as better prepared to support multilingual writers. In addition to describing revisions to the curriculum, this study also provides pedagogical implications for tutor educators.

For Megha Sharma SehdevNow days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. —W. B. Yeats, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”Violence is a limit formation. It is neither reducible to a brute fact nor is it ineffably ethereal. To write about violence, then, is to confront—if only as disavowed remainder—critical limits, no less of the writer than of the writing itself. Fewer subjects have proven as confounding for philosophy and rhetoric, this journal’s primary charge. In both its general particulars and its specific manifolds, violence nonpluses philosophical commonplaces, upends rhetorical tropologies.Philosophy imagines itself mediator to reality’s arche, the bedrock of being. Ancient Greek philosophy sought to distinguish necessity from contingency, essence from accident, dialectic from rhetoric, logic from fallacy. Those who took up this intellectual tradition came to conceptualize violence as first and foremost a question of “nature”—more specifically, those marked out by nature to rule (propertied male citizens) and those marked out by nature for subjection (the enslaved, women, nonhuman animals). In the early modern context of European philosophy, still, despite its pretensions, deeply indebted to this Mediterranean legacy, the canonical lexicon of sensemaking centered on legitimacy and its conceptual appurtenances of sovereignty, will, and rights.Strikingly, it is in the opposed registers of analytic and continental philosophy that violence’s cataphilosophic figuration appears most salient. Consider, for example, one such famous symposium convened in the analytic journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, as narrated by political philosopher Michael Walzer: In an earlier issue of Philosophy & Public Affairs there appeared a symposium on the rules of war which was actually (or at least more importantly) a symposium on another topic. The actual topic was whether or not a man can ever face, or ever has to face, a moral dilemma, a situation where he must choose between two courses of action both of which it would be wrong for him to undertake. Thomas Nagel worriedly suggested that this could happen and that it did happen whenever someone was forced to choose between upholding an important moral principle and avoiding some looming disaster. R. B. Brandt argued that it could not possibly happen, for there were guidelines we might follow and calculations we might go through which would necessarily yield the conclusion that one or the other course of action was the right one to undertake in the circumstances (or that it did not matter which we undertook). R. M. Hare explained how it was that someone might wrongly suppose that he was faced with a moral dilemma: sometimes, he suggested, the precepts and principles of an ordinary man, the products of his moral education, come into conflict with injunctions developed at a higher level of moral discourse. But this conflict is, or ought to be, resolved at the higher level; there is no real dilemma. (1973, 160–61)Analytic political philosophy’s resolute disavowals could not be here better splayed. Morality is construed as all-encompassing. The political is not so much effaced as it is rendered derivative to a foundational drama of will, obligation, choice. Analytic philosophy’s oft-preened claim to clear, transparent, terse style proves constitutive of its desire to contain, if it cannot altogether moralize away violence.Where analytic philosophy conceives of violence as an object, its limits defined by morality’s handmaiden, the “well-ordered society” (Rawls 2001, 8), continental philosophy conjures a sublime violence that shatters and transfigures normative violence. Walter Benjamin posits a binary opposition between mythical and divine violence: “If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates, if the former threatens, the latter strikes, if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood” (1978, 297). The mysterium tremendum of Benjaminian divine violence looms transcendent, fathomless, sublime when posed against analytic philosophy’s persnickety morality. But a violence imagined as expiatory, redemptive, and cleansing is still a morality aestheticized. Benjamin’s prose can be surrealistic, by turns slashing and propulsive, slanted and opaque. In its heady movement from repulsion to fascination and back again to repulsion, he is exemplar as few before or after him of the very limits of sustained thought on violence.Rhetorical criticism, for its part, has perfected elaborate apotropaic and piacular rites to govern its discourse on violence. The Aristotelian account of the rhetorical domain as that which is concerned with persuasion, contingency, and audience, “the discourse of the many”—as distinct from dialectic, necessity, and philosophy, “the discourse of the few”—gained axiomatic assent in modern institutional rhetoric. In his influential, field-defining article, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Lloyd F. Bitzer holds that rhetoric is mainly concerned with persuasive utterances. For Bitzer, the realm of necessity is nonrhetorical: “An exigence which cannot be modified is not rhetorical; thus, whatever comes about of necessity and cannot be changed—death, winter, and some natural disasters, for instance—are exigences to be sure, but they are not rhetorical” (1968, 6).One discerns the shape of rhetorical studies’ recoil from any serious reckoning with violence in Bitzer’s staking of the field to suasory discourse. In such an account, violence is nonrhetorical, nay, antirhetorical. Other rhetoricians have departed from Bitzer’s conclusions, though still beholden to many of his premises. In a recent special issue of the journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Jay Childers argues that inasmuch as “rhetoric is human inducement,” (2022, 4) then it follows that rhetorical violence is that which functions as a form of human inducement.Childers anticipates the objection that his definition fails to account for rhetorical inducements from nonhuman phenomena. Acknowledging that these exist, he nevertheless insists that “human inducement is worthy of its own area of study” (2022, 5). His response, however, begs the question in a manner characteristic of disciplinary justifications for research. For what is under contestation cannot be whether human inducement is worth study, but rather if a critic’s presuppositions foreclose insightful etiological routes of understanding; if their definitions naturalize the historical formations from which concepts are emergent; if their rhetorical style deadens imaginative and utopian leaps. Institutional rhetorical inquiry brings violence within its purview by defining violence as acts intended to transmit a message. But in doing so, it mystifies and naturalizes infrafigurations of violence entirely irreducible to communication—epochal ecological devastation; suppurating lesions wrought by imperial, colonial, and insurgent infrastructure; and, for that matter, gratuitous, irruptive, evental coups de force.Roiling beneath rhetorical studies’ monochrome prose—fewer disciplines are as given to the fetish of “effectiveness”—is a desire for a violence that is tractable. Necessity, however, cannot be wished away through compulsive recitations of contingency. This has always been true, perhaps, but it particularly cuts deeply in the epoch of the racial capitalocene. Here, it is foolhardy to be in denial. Racial capitalism necessarily leads to planetary destruction—its circuits of accumulation necessarily drive extinction; its circuits of reproduction necessarily engineer irreversible metabolic rifts; its circuits of exchange necessarily manufacture ruses of adaptation; its circuits of consumption necessarily stimulate toxic cascades. The upshot is just as ineluctable: any serious account of violence must, of necessity, imagine an insurgent abolition against racial capitalism.Analytic philosophy’s banal moralism, continental philosophy’s ecstatic messianism, rhetorical studies’ strategic instrumentalism—these are the nodal points from which a philosophy and rhetoric of violence bump up against its limits. “Violence is never the answer,” so goes the old liberal saw. “But it is a question” has been the inevitable response to liberal sanctimony. This forum suggests it may be neither. Rather, violence contours the very limits of enunciation.The articles gathered in this forum, each in its inimitable dialogic idiom, seek to trouble the limits of violence, such troubling understood in at least three senses. The first concerns the limits that violence exerts on faculties of human sensemaking and worldmaking, how, for example, the concepts and institutions for rendering violence intelligible are revealed to be inadequate or even violent in themselves. The second sense refers to forms of violence that stretch the outer limits of extremity, owing to their cruelty, intensity, and gratuitousness. The third concerns the limits of violence when taken up as a mechanism of world making and unmaking, for instance, practices and concepts that seek forms of living that are non- or anti-violent.Catherine Besteman examines the carceral sublime, the United States’s vast and elaborate punishment system. The kinds of violence that proliferate in the prison industrial complex are as quotidian as they are spectacular. Besteman focuses attention on a particularly insidious kind—the capricious cutting off of the imprisoned from anybody with whom they have made some relational connection. When I initially invited Besteman to write an essay for this forum, she planned to coauthor her essay with Leo Hylton, a long-time intellectual collaborator incarcerated in the Maine Department of Corrections Facilities. That plan in the end did not materialize due to a characteristically cruel and arbitrary decision by the prison authorities to break off all forms of communication between the two writers. Besteman’s essay, then, draws our attention to carceral violence as a structural atrocity not only vile in its scope, intensity, and mercuriality, but also for the manner in which it recursively curls back and strikes at those who would seek to understand its reach and texture.José G. Izaguirre III examines the vexatious solidus rhetoric/violence through the lens of coloniality. Such a lens shatters an oft-assumed narrowing of violence to individual acts. An ineliminably sociopolitical view of rhetoric/violence reveals that the term “nonviolence” is a misnomer. It misleads by characterizing antiviolence as an absence. As against this view, the refusal of violence, robustly understood as antiviolence, demonstrates it as a subversive, indeed revolutionary, form of worldmaking.Alison Yeh Cheung delves into how Asian American vocal performance—and thus, Asian American identity—is rendered impossible. Cheung seeks a nuanced engagement with Asian American subjectivities that can simultaneously register their subsumption in atmospheres of anti-Blackness while ruthlessly critiquing ruses of self-reflexivity that function to foreclose invention and reinvention. Ultimately, Cheung’s call is for a mode of attention that radically destabilizes a representational politics given to the racialization of sound.Kelly Happe and Allegro Wang seek to think with the French polymath Catherine Malabou. Malabou’s concept of plasticity has been extraordinarily generative across the humanities owing in part to its bringing into relief the imbrication of the biological and the symbolic, the neuronal and the mental, the brain and the self. Happe and Wang, however, take issue with Malabou’s eupeptic conceptualization of resilience. In basing it on the deflagration emergent from disaster, such a view occludes the weather and weathering of anti-Black violence. For this reason, Happe and Wang turn to the work of the thinker and writer Christina Sharpe. Her analytic of wake work proffers searing symbolic practices that disrupt and rupture the relentless ongoingness of slavery.Belinda Walzer pushes beyond a representational critique of violence in excavating the illegibility of everyday violence in discourses of human rights. Walzer starts with a critique of Rob Nixon’s influential notion of “slow violence.” Nixon calls for innovative representational techniques for drawing attention to the delayed effects of climate injustices. However, such a stance is unresponsive to the objection that the very mechanisms of recognition exceptionalize, anachronize, and efface everyday violence. Walzer argues that transnational feminism can speak to the multiscalar and multitemporal formations of violence in a way that does better justice to gendered and racialized violence.In our final essay, Michael Bernard-Donals turns to the topic of academic freedom. The last few years have witnessed relentless attacks on universities by right-wing movements. Bernard-Donals calls attention to these forms of institutional violence even as he advances the counterintuitive idea that academic freedom is in and of itself violent. His argument rests on the notion that the very faculty that academic freedom aims to secure—the capacity for critical deliberation—works precisely by unraveling the commonplaces around which the university coheres. His essay, then, invites us to tarry in the aporia of deliberation, which at once reveals our vulnerability and our relationality.You see the great indifference of the godsto these things that have happened,who begat us and are called our fathers,and look on such sufferings.What is to come no one can see,but what is here now is pitiable for usand shameful for them,but of all men hardest for himon whom this disaster has fallen.Maiden, do not stay in this house:you have seen death and many agonies,fresh and strangeand there is nothing here that is not Zeus. —Sophocles, Trachiniae 1266–781I initially met Megha Sharma Sehdev on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Our intellectual interests overlapped across an astonishing range of themes, including philosophical anthropology, the rhetoric of philosophy, postcolonial intellectual histories, Global South feminisms, law, and aesthetics.Megha wrote with devastating clarity on the texture of quotidian violence in India. When I proposed this forum on violence, she was the first person I immediately thought to invite. As we neared the deadline for the submission of essays, she wrote to tell me the essay she’d been writing for the forum had plunged her back to a traumatic past. Her memories, she added, had “thrown off” her relationship to academic analysis. I asked her if she wanted to Zoom. She said she wanted to finish the essay first. She’d call after she was done. Two weeks later, I received the news that Megha had passed away by suicide on August 17, 2023.In the theoretical dominant, violence carves an arc toward either redemption or abjection. Against this imaginary, Megha invites us to tarry in violence’s irresolutions, deferrals, interregnums. In her brilliant ethnography of women’s encounters with the judicial system in New Delhi, Megha writes that women who filed cases against their abusive partners found themselves suspended in an indeterminate temporality of endlessly deferred hearings. The law is not so much “a technology for decision-making,” as it is “coterminous with its ‘other,’ or everyday life” (Sehdev 2017, 8). But for Megha, the interminable duration of Indian law is not simply an absence, an inert zone in which nothing happens as complainants await justice. Rather, it is productive of various forms of intimacy—both familial and public—and generative of a bewildering array of artifacts, documents, and, wondrously, a stunningly beautiful unfoldment of material culture and artistry (Sehdev 2020).Megha had a luminous mind, a resplendent imagination, a heart for the crushed of the earth. “You have seen death and many agonies/fresh and strange/and there is nothing here that is not Zeus,” resounds a threnody in Sophocles’s Trachiniae, a keening as haunting for its uncontainable grief as for its uncanny sublimity. If the abiding hubris of imperial power is the desire for violence made pure instrumentality, that of the crushed of the earth make known an infraconstitutive invention. Here there is no theodicy, no stoicism, not even the ennoblements of tragedy. If this is a violence, it is invention split open, a wail for irreplaceable particularity, a remainder of endless solidarity.2

ABSTRACT The phrase “Enlightenment rhetoric” typically denotes discourses bent on rejecting classical oratorical styles in favor of purportedly scientific ones. Likewise, scholars often associate Enlightenment rhetorical styles with the scientific epistemologies that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This article reconsiders Enlightenment rhetoric by analyzing David Hume’s 1742 essay “Of Eloquence.” More specifically, the article argues that the Scottish Enlightenment context necessitated a rhetoric that compensated for the discursive limitations of new scientific worldviews. In so doing, the article argues that Hume verbalizes the transcendent dimension of classical eloquence in ways commensurate with the emphasis on perspicuity emerging in English culture, a rhetorical maneuver that the author calls discursive transcendence. Hume’s “Of Eloquence” thus serves as a case study demonstrating how an Enlightenment writer advanced a rhetoric that both rejects and pulls from prior rhetorical traditions, constituting a new understanding of Enlightenment rhetoric.

Based on the premise alone, Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen by political communication and mass media scholar Roderick P. Hart confronts an inconvenient truth that many U.S. academics are reluctant to acknowledge—Americans, a whole lot of them, like Donald Trump. As Hart explains, Trump and Us was written to help the left-leaning, academic crowd make sense of the 2016 presidential election, and since its publication in 2020, the book has only increased in relevance. Hart offers important takeaways for anyone interested in preserving American democracy, asking, “How could 62 million Americans—half the nation (or at least half of those who voted)—vote for Donald Trump?” (4). As Hart notes, this is essentially the same question at the center of Hillary Clinton's 2017 memoir What Happened, but Clinton's book offers a more personal, behind-the-scenes account of the leadup and aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. By comparison, Hart zooms out to gain understanding of the cultural environment from which a Trump presidency emerged. Rather than an investigation into what Trump's words led people to think about him, Hart focuses on how Trump made people—especially those who voted for him—feel and what those feelings mean for American politics.For those familiar with Hart's work, it is no surprise that he turns to computer-aided analysis of a large corpus of political texts to dissect and compare Trump's words to those of other political figures. With the help of the programs DICTION 7.0, WordSmith, and AntConc, Hart situates Trump's rhetoric in reference to a database of 70,000 U.S. texts including “speeches, debates, ads, print coverage, broadcast transcripts letters to the editor, polling interviews, and social media exchanges” (27). The book presents his findings organized around six public “feelings”: conflicted, ignored, trapped, besieged, tired, and resolute. For example, in the section “Feeling Conflicted,” Hart describes the 2016 campaign as being fairly normal, if not better than average, in terms of democratic engagement. At first glance, Trump may appear to be “the least mysterious political candidate in human history” (11). However, Hart explains that to dismiss Trump as a political anomaly is to miss something critical to the American electorate and by extension its democracy—something that politicians like Hillary Clinton do not seem to understand. But Trump? He gets it. Americans, particularly those attracted to Trump's rhetoric, appreciate candor. And for the same reason that many find Trump farcical—his lack of decorum, his unfiltered communications, and his incoherent strategy—nearly just as many find him refreshing. Hart calls him an “emotional revolutionary” in his willingness to put his own feelings on display and take seriously the feelings of his supporters. Trump puts words to emotions, or, to put it in current meme-speak, Trump “says the quiet part out loud.” For many Americans in 2016, this out-loud emoting was at least entertaining and, ultimately, persuasive.Hart's second section on “Feeling Ignored” expands on the theme of Trump's ability to engage an audience through simple language and a performative populism. By comparing word size, word variety, words-per-speech, and self-references, Hart finds Trump to be verbose, using more words-per-speech than other candidates. Yet the words he uses are short, simple, and all about himself. The result is a unique rhetorical style that generates feelings of energy, simplicity, and dominance; these were compelling for many voters who previously felt unheard and unnoticed. The same rhetorical characteristics that cause many academics to cringe—his rejection of facts and accountability in favor of anecdotes and hearsay—made many voters identify with Trump, feeling like he was one of them. Through his simple and unfiltered communication style, Trump connected with voters who were put off by the more nuanced, academic, and comparatively elitist rhetoric of the political left. By focusing on “Trump-the-empath” rather than “Trump-the-man,” Hart demonstrates how Trump-the-showman turned feelings into votes. In the latter chapters, Hart details and analyzes how Trump used stories, novelty, and spontaneity to arouse voters’ passions and manipulate the media.While this reviewer found it convincing, some traditional rhetoricians might take issue with Hart's methods. Social scientists of political communication, on the other hand, are likely to embrace his quantitative approach. Either way, one should not overlook his contributions to rhetorical and political theory as well as to the less formal discourse that occurs within the halls of academia. What Hart's work tells us is that Trump is using a presidential style that, whether we find it appealing or abhorrent, resonates with many because it makes them feel important, included, and excited about politics. If the 2022 midterm elections are any indication, it does seem as though former supporters are beginning to distance themselves from Trump (the man), but Trumpism as a rhetorical strategy may have staying power. Trump's peculiar brand of rhetorical inclusion has proven to be an effective tool for building a community of loyal followers and will no doubt be used by future rhetors to do the same. It is critical that we, both as academics and citizens, understand these strategies and employ them to better ends.In the first pages of the book, Hart presents his most important claim: Trump is iconically American. While he may be grandiose, insecure, devoid of aesthetic taste, historically illiterate, and ethically dodgy, to label and dismiss him as anti-American is to misunderstand something about ourselves. Trump may not be the best of us, but he represents the part of our collective identity that we must grapple with if we want to progress as a democracy. Trump and Us is a self-analysis of sorts, raising important questions about who we are as a country and what will be necessary for the survival of American democracy. Unfortunately, Hart offers few recommendations for a path forward. Although he calls for journalists to hold themselves to higher standards and for voters to learn to listen better, Hart admits this book is only meant to be a first step. So, perhaps this is where other scholars and strategists must pick up the baton. Political strategists might ask how candidates can begin to use some of the positive aspects of Trump's rhetoric to be more inclusive, for instance. Critical cultural scholars and political philosophers might weigh in on how to do so ethically and with an eye toward social justice. Scholars of psychology and religious studies may see overlap in terms of groupthink or cult formation; and educators can find ways to increase our capacity for listening.Hart has rekindled a critical conversation to which all academics interested in politics, communication, public address, and indeed the future of American democracy have a duty to contribute. What Trump and Us reveals is our collective American identity reflected in Trump's words. Whether we choose to see beyond the cracks in our self-image or focus only on the good is up to each of us. Either choice will have collective consequences regardless of future White House occupants.

This article argues for repositioning voice within BIPOC histories and contributions to the fields of English/rhetoric/composition studies. By reinvestigating the affordances and constraints of Expressivist-driven definitions of “voice” and the contemporary applications of imitation writing assignments, this article demonstrates alternative approaches to teaching and thinking through voice in writingbased courses.

Discussion sections of research articles are important because they are where researchers make claims for advancing knowledge in their fields. There has been a growing interest in research articles focused on Discussions. However, only a few studies have centered on the role of arguments. What is missing in this literature is the potential for rhetoricians to identify specific, sentence-level arguments. The idea is that to analyze persuasion in Discussions, rhetoricians should be able to identify arguments contributing to persuasion. Toward that aim, I refer to Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a catalyst for specific arguments and examples from thirty science research articles.

This article details a collaborative editing assignment that asks students to analyze and assess editorial contributions made to Wikipedia. This project not only provides students an opportunity to apply their understanding of grammar and style concepts to real-world editing situations, it also calls students' attention to the underlying ideological biases and rhetorical impact of subtle language choices used in specific Wikipedia articles. In explaining the rationale behind this assignment and discussing several student samples, this article demonstrates how designing writing assignments around the collaborative, multi-authored nature of Wikipedia can highlight the influence of cultural circumstances on both sentence-level stylistic choices and broader developmental editorial practices.

Writing centers, as communities of practice, often fail to question their own praxis since it is work reinforced by shared ways of knowing and being within a community. However, change cannot occur without examining and challenging assumptions and commonplaces individually and collectively. During a three-year action research study focused on training mostly monolingual tutors to engage in scaffolding and multidirectional learning with ELL, international student writers, commonplaces emerged related to contextual nature of writing, and the role of sentence-level language in tutoring and writing. Using the theoretical constructivist frameworks that inform writing center work, this article examines those commonplaces and connects them to existing interdisciplinary scholarship. While the work of examining and eliminating assumptions is an ongoing endeavor, the action research and consideration of commonplaces have led to tutor education aimed at equipping tutors to empower multilingual writers by encouraging discussions of objectives, options, outcomes, and ownership. Keywords : ELL writers, writing center, writing tutor, commonplaces Although writing centers exist in the overlap of literacy, learning, and language, we have yet to understand this positioning or resolve what it means to support learners who share this intersectional space. In fact, writing center history with ELL writers has been notably problematic. As a larger community, we have othered such writers through tutor education (Moussu, 2013; Nakumara, 2010; Thonus, 2014), non-directive pedagogies, policies restricting or refusing to assist with sentence-level language concerns, and policing of contextual language and literacy practices (García, 2017; Green, 2016; Greenfield, 2019). At the local level, as a writing center administrator, I have spent the better part of two decades fielding repeated tutor and faculty requests for more tutor training for working with ELL writers, as if the writers were the challenge rather than the systems they navigate. In 2019, as part of a doctoral program at Arizona State University, I completed an interdisciplinary three-year, cyclical action research study to improve the ways Brigham Young University’s mostly monolingual, native English-speaking tutors facilitated learning with ELL, international student writers in tutoring sessions. Initial rounds of this IRB-approved study revealed that the tutors felt comfortable instructing and motivating ELL writers, but scaffolding remained a space of uncertainty. This was notable, since scaffolding involves tailoring “the learning process to the individual needs and developmental level of the learner. Scaffolding provides the structure and support necessary to progressively build knowledge” (Kolb et al., 2014, p. 218).  Since scaffolding is central to the experiential, co-constructed learning that occurs in tutorials, I focused my study on a training intervention designed to help tutors improve scaffolding with ELL writers. As part of the training intervention, tutors participated in classroom instruction on the contextual nature of writing, scaffolding, and sentence-level language. Tutors also completed peer and administrator observations and post-observation reflective discussions. The effectiveness of the intervention and improvement with scaffolding was measured by tutor surveys, pre- and post-intervention tutor interviews, tutorial observations, and surveys and focus groups with ELL writers (Bell, 2019). Research results indicated that scaffolding and multidirectional learning and participation improved within tutorials; however, as the semesters and research cycles progressed, it became clear that the disconnect between the mostly monolingual tutors and ELL writers was less about scaffolding and more about unpacking systems and psyches. Scaffolding was a tool to facilitate multidirectional learning, but dismantling deficit thinking and systems of silos was the larger work. In communities of practice, such as writing centers, we often fail to question our own praxis since it is work reinforced by shared ways of knowing and being within a community. However, as Nancy Grimm (2009) noted in an address to the writing center community, “significant change in any workplace occurs when unconscious conceptual models are brought to the surface and replaced with conscious ones” (p. 16). The multiyear action research study resulted in a bound dissertation on a library shelf, but the work of addressing the disconnects between writing tutors and ELL writers continues because it is the work of rattling and revising our commonplaces. Although ELL writers’ and writing tutors’ questions, explanations, and asides were not measured alongside the effectiveness of the training intervention, the commonplaces they exposed revealed the need for ongoing cognitive and affective attention and sent me back to the scholarship where patterns and relationships continued to emerge and inform the work. While the focus of the initial IRB study was a training intervention within a specific writing center, this article focuses on the commonplaces and assumptions about tutors and ELL writers uncovered during the iterative, interdisciplinary research process, including how writing center work involves issues of identity and power dynamics, communities and systems, the contextual nature of writing, and the layers of sentence-level language. This examination of commonplaces offers no concrete solutions but reinforces the importance of objectives, options, outcomes, and ownership as tutors and ELL writers interact in tutoring and learning exchanges.

As Annelien de Dijn tells it in her Freedom: An Unruly History, the political story of the West has been written between two concepts of liberty—one democratic, the other modern.1 The first of these dates to ancient Greece and Rome and defines freedom in terms of democratic self-government. In this understanding, citizens are free to the degree that they are able to participate in the selection and maintenance of the laws to which their community is subject. Unlike slaves—and understood, in fact, as their political opposite—free citizens are empowered to act in the public square. They have the agency to acquire knowledge, to form opinions, to take stands, to persuade others, and perhaps thereby to assist in guiding the course of the state. Along the way, they may enjoy the satisfaction and assurance that accompany the free practice of their citizenship on equal footing with their countrymen, who enjoy that practice as well. This democratic concept of liberty was the original of Western civilization, and remained dominant across the two millennia that followed.Its usurper is de Dijn's second concept, with advocates as ancient as Plato but without widespread purchase until the turn of the 19th century. This modern concept defines freedom in terms of non-interference from the state. For proponents of this view, citizens are free only to the degree that laws do not bind them, effectively casting government of whatever sort as the antagonist of liberty. Following the turmoil of the 18th century's Atlantic Revolutions, especially the Terror in France, political thinkers including Benjamin Constant and Edmund Burke reacted to democratic excess by locating freedom within the private individual. Though others have traced this development to the Protestant Reformation and the emergence of market economies, de Dijn asserts that it is best understood as a counterrevolutionary riposte. The presumption that individuals must be prioritized and popular power contained has been widely touted ever since. Today its influence is carved into our increasingly undemocratic institutions.Unsurprisingly, then, this story of long rise and short but dramatic decline follows a trajectory similar to that of rhetoric itself. Crafted by the Greeks and refined by the Romans, democratic freedom fell out of favor in Medieval Europe but bounced back during the Renaissance, found champions during the Enlightenment, and provided the vital theoretical framework for a generation of revolutionaries who were defiant of subjugation and committed to self-government. In rejecting monarchy, the architects of the United States insisted also on a degree of popular sovereignty. And in securing the franchise for (some) citizens, they built a political system in which persuasion matters, in which good ideas and rhetorical polish could wield real influence. Attractive to the rank-and-file, this model worried the elites, who quickly set to work fortifying their institutions against the mass. Early in the 21st century, their legacy survives in gerrymandered districts, disproportionate Senate representation, the Electoral College, and the passage of state-level voting restrictions, including thirty-four new laws across nineteen states in 2021 alone.2 Because rhetoric and democracy are so closely linked, the deterioration of democratic freedom unavoidably presages the forfeiture of rhetorical power.De Dijn's narrative is clearly oriented around this sense of loss. She recalls the Atlantic Revolutions as a collective eruption of democratic potential, ultimately confounded by internal complexities and class antagonisms. If the modern conception of freedom was first animated by fears of democratic anarchy and mob rule, it was refined and popularized by continental liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, who were anxious at the plight of powerless minorities. Adopted then by Federalists and Whigs, it was made to serve primarily as a rampart around the wealthy and a check upon the rest, effectively recasting equality as a threat to liberty rather than its actualization. Challenged by radical movements including abolitionism, women's suffrage, and labor, modern freedom was revived during the Cold War and represented by a fresh host of intellectual advocates. “Today,” de Dijn laments, “the West's most ardent freedom fighters (who are now more likely to call themselves conservative than liberal) remain more concerned with limiting state power than with enhancing popular control over government.” Indeed, freedom now serves as “a battering ram against democracy” rather than its raison d’être.3Long and sweeping but precise and detailed, de Dijn's account provides an illuminating backstory to the present, a compelling context in which to understand what's happening now.4 In the United States and Western Europe especially, diversifying populations are altering the composition of the citizenry and so threatening the traditional, hegemonic whiteness of the power structure. In response, resurgent rightwing movements and politicians are relying on restrictive institutions to save them and the modern conception of freedom to justify that project. By insisting that government remain small and its purview limited, by creatively sorting and containing the voters, and by challenging the legitimacy of elections themselves, the dominant agents of the American Right have worked hard to constrain democratic freedom and to secure their advantages. Over the three sections that follow, this review will consider their progress within three specific venues, applying de Dijn's two concepts of freedom to the work of rhetorical scholars examining politics, religion, and education in the United States.In politics, modern freedom is advocated most assertively by the Republican Party and most aggressively by those at the rightward reaches. In 2010, a group of these activists posted a “Contract from America” online, ostensibly revising and updating the 1994 “Contract with America” that had helped to prompt a conservative surge in Congress. Calling for a variety of crowd-sourced initiatives and claiming to speak for “the people,” this document articulated an agenda attractive to a narrow set of demographics, demanding to preempt the sort of democratic deliberation that might more accurately reflect the will of a diverse nation. At the outset of his I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States, Paul Elliott Johnson characterizes the Contract in familiar terms. It “figured the relation between the freedom of the population and the authority of government as one of inverse proportionality,” he writes, meaning that, “the less ‘the people’ are governed, the freer they are.” Surveying a short list of policy goals including fewer regulations, lower taxes, and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Johnson notes that, together, these imagined the “real” population of the United States to be “a set of radically autonomous individuals united in their possession of liberty,” with economic and popular liberty fashioned identically and used interchangeably throughout.5 For the Tea Party and its legacies, freedom has meant nothing more or less than the removal of government constraints from personal and corporate activity, consistent with a set of assumptions about who these persons and corporations are supposed to be. Fully realized, theirs is a world in which one does whatever one wants, provided only that one is one of us.For Johnson, this atomized collective is the animating ideal of conservative populism, a rhetorical mode through which a distinctly white, masculine resentment is gathered and arrayed against a nefarious liberal establishment. Cast at once as both central and marginal, the subject of this discourse is the disenchanted silent majoritarian, the white citizen with an empowered self-concept but without power itself, or at least without power in proportion to certain others with more than they deserve. “By positing a population simultaneously sure of its identity, positioned outside or beyond the messy world of politics, and in possession of a vitality self-same with freedom,” Johnson writes, “conservatism's ‘people’ is oriented with hostility toward the democratic side of the liberal democratic equation.”6 Conservative populists speak the languages of grievance and privilege, claiming entitlement unbound by accountability and indignant at restraint, especially when delivered with official sanction on legal ballots. Reproved once-too-often by electoral defeats, their rhetorical fetishization of freedom must be either abandoned entirely or validated through anti-democratic violence. In October of 2021, at an Idaho rally featuring conservative media figure Charlie Kirk, this tension was expressed succinctly by an audience member who asked his demagogic host, “When do we get to use the guns?” When the crowd responded with laughter and applause, the befuddled young man assured everyone that he was purely in earnest. “That's not a joke,” he said. “I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”7 Here de Dijn's image of the battering ram becomes especially evocative, updated, and weaponized.Though populism as a rhetorical style is traditionally deployed by mass movements against elites, conservative populism draws its boundaries vertically, uniting a portion of the mass with a portion of the elite and activating race as the applicable category for exclusion.8 If the modern concept of freedom has traditionally proven useful to the white managerial class as a means to reinforcing its prerogatives, it has also attracted the white working class with promises of autonomy and status. In each case, the appeal pledges to relieve a self-consciously self-reliant and overwhelmingly white faction of any obligation to the maintenance of a welfare state that, they suppose, caters primarily to black and brown people who do not want to work. Johnson assigns race a central role in his analysis, situating the rhetoric of conservative populism within a larger biopolitics that aligns whiteness with life and blackness with death. The white and the black circulate ominously within the conservative worldview, constituting discourses that inform and mobilize the conservative “people.” If past theoretical treatments of conservative rhetoric have understated these racialized dynamics, I the People centers them.To make his case, Johnson surveys key moments in conservative history, starting with Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential candidacy, proceeding through Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory, through Newt Gingrich's 1994 takeover of the House, through Tea Party opposition to Barack Obama in 2009, and, finally, an analysis of Donald Trump as candidate and executive. Overall, Johnson convincingly charts a rhetorical trajectory most notable for its consistency, arguing against those who claim that conservatives learned identity politics from the Left or who cite Trump as a one-off perversion of an otherwise rich and nuanced intellectual legacy. On the contrary, Johnson argues, the conservative tradition in the United States has long been driven by the same impulses that drive it today, including overt commitments to whiteness and masculinity, to hegemony and marginality, to individualism and freedom as against government and its pretensions to the common good. Stirred and mobilized still by a dogged populist tone, the movement today is the same as it ever was, if further amplified and pronounced. Proponents of democracy should be candid about what conservative populism is, and responsive to the threats that it poses.Among religious constituencies, the modern conception of freedom has been received most warmly by white evangelical Christians. Remarkably active and reliably Republican, white evangelical voters have ensured the election of conservative presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Their support proved especially decisive in 2000 and 2016, a pair of contests in which the President-elect lost the popular vote while clinching the Electoral College.9 After the latter race, in particular, when exit polls revealed that 81 percent of self-described white evangelical voters had gone for Trump, the racial, religious, and political identities had become so deeply entangled that pastors, pundits, and scholars were moved to revisit the age-old question of what, exactly, an evangelical is.10 For critical observers both within and without the fold, such an examination was necessary to explain how the teachings of Christ could possibly have moved millions into the politics of Trump. In the years since, books pledging to answer the central questions have been published to impressive sales and critical acclaim.11 One of the most recent and most nuanced has come out of rhetorical studies.In her Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, Stephanie A. Martin suggests that white evangelical voting behavior is intelligible, at least in part, in the light of evangelical sermonizing. Following the dramatic housing market collapse of 2008, Martin wondered whether the “Great Recession” would prompt white evangelicals to question the linkage between their theological and economic commitments—their concomitant beliefs in the holiness of God and of free markets. Between 2010 and 2018, she transcribed and analyzed hundreds of sermons delivered in evangelical megachurches across more than three dozen states, coding specifically for economic themes.12 Because these large churches are joined weekly by such a high volume of congregants, their discourses would provide a useful window into demographic thought and practice. And because their sermons are streamed and archived online, they would be easily accessible from home. In 2016, Martin attended to election framing as well, performing the analysis that eventually culminated in a different sort of project.Decoding the Digital Church a pair of key to the The first is that, because white evangelical megachurches are for conservative citizens, they as for the of ideas and assumptions that circulate in conservative in the to the in the these reinforcing a high degree of rhetorical or what Martin de In this made by or on with made by the on the between and politics long Though have agency in their they are also to the and of the people in the a that further the of and And because the of the and most churches make their sermons for their work is and by of as well. the conservative discourse second is that, in 2016, the political of a a rhetoric of active to the questions and of the The of most evangelical not Trump for the they delivered of an otherwise that their political while guiding their to the the of is an he by God and for by committed citizens, and who have to this and citizens should the that, this the were If by the on he so do The are the are and the is not finally, the an tension between his first two it in the his to vote their vote the and God with the the to vote as the active of the the assurance of delivered the effectively and fears and the from any accountability for the by the and candidate that their political would persuade them to one of this story is that the linkage between white evangelical identity and Republican by by by the collapse of religious and by certain to further a rightwing religious politics more committed to hegemony than to in to and by this is likely to back that small government and the to would not to be be only that they are Their provides a against the education is the of democracy have themselves, once as of Conservative advocates of have that, as should be able to their to a of their either public or to the In this way, would be within an driven by market to and or the democratic that should be and through the movement to power from and it to thereby education into in which de modern conception of freedom to the democratic his and the of How characterizes the as a between of public The first is best represented by John who that democracy with public education as an for this rather than for and have been made to of as community Because everyone in a is in the citizens are into with their and are in the generation to is to to the about how should be and are from the as in the larger public Their is their influence on an to and They in a citizens, working to an system through which citizens are second is represented by and the who first of as a means to education books such as and to and of the the to in the and while individualism as a means to economic and political the driven as an in a world of collective they imagined an in which citizens may act and without by individuals would be free to their it by and by more than personal And because individuals in a with and other the to them as They this with from a pair of and the By for and by to with a set of and they that any community could citizens an of in which to a generation of of community the democratic and are of different his analysis of and that the of the market and the on which as as the by the in a Though the United States is to a tradition of and our does the and work of we our means of education around without in the community as a that, in to democracy as a of we to practice it at the starting with the should be to and of with education advocates in that the democratic has but that it has to be the best to American education would be to with democratic institutions and then their and than and such a system would young citizens in and to in which individuals rather than certain individuals to the of the the market in education a variety of to public these are and by a common rhetorical They are in a that has proven useful for conservative notes that, their the deployed the style of a of and by “the and of individuals the of In this means that they their as in a market framework that Unlike who are to themselves in and market that appeal to a and Their key are to driven by and of with American beliefs and Their on individuals and as political and economic has If their is to be proponents of democracy in any must to their with and is not a in any case, and with at the many to speak or years from these about the decline of American democracy may either or Their critical on the American Right and its advocates in the Republican Party may either or it is to if only for the of that the scholars that American democracy is in and that the is a may more a to American politics be only of For citizens to understand the across a of the books are each of them, the threat to democracy is animated by a of or at least a of of and proponents of this modern conception the as and able to and act in the world without from others or by of both political and economic this freedom the two into a with a of and to citizens as and to an identity, it is white conservatives that they built this and to that this was built upon a set of and that, in this education should and these a subject to market and to this concept of freedom may the of its American have proven and and against large that our to the by modern freedom is a of democratic the once and In a diverse democracy the and of of In the United States, a and of those citizens may still check the conservative populist The for such are narrow and and their through constraints at from voting and through the dogged of the and the power of the Electoral Their will about in the the of and that rhetorical scholars in their from public and composition through and In that this is the sort of for which rhetorical is The is but the by the maintenance of democracy in to those the of democracy its death. books a call to

This article explores the history of the English-language style guide, a genre of writing with beginnings in the eighteenth century. Gaining popularity in the Victorian period, the style guide began to solidify as a genre dedicated to preserving certain linguistic usages. I argue that, from the nineteenth century on, the best style guides have used rhetoric as the cornerstone of their linguistic philosophy. Guides which ignore rhetorical scholarship tend to be reactionary and of limited use to the reader. To emphasize these two types of guides, I look specifically at The Queen’s English and The Dean’s English, two extremely popular, polemical style guides written in the mid-nineteenth century.

Reviewed by: Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach by AlessandroVatri Vasiliki Zali-Schiel AlessandroVatri, Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 344 pp. ISBN: 978019879590 Vatri has produced a well-researched book that helpfully and skilfully marries the cultural-historical and the linguistic character of his work. The excellent use and review of scholarship enables Vatri to achieve the purpose of the book, which is to examine, with the help of modem psycholinguistics, whether there is any linguistic difference between classical Attic prose texts intended for public oral delivery and those intended for written circulation and private performance. The book starts with a thorough discussion of the complicated relationship between oral and written style (Chapter 1). The medium alone is not a decisive divisive factor because there is a great variety of communicative situations and priorities one needs to take into consideration even when the same medium is used. And this is indeed the case with Attic prose, where we cannot clearly distinguish between “literally” oral and written texts. However, the distinction between a written and a non-written conception can be traced very early in the development of ancient Greek stylistic theory (e.g., Alcidamas, Isocrates, Aristotle). For example, Isocrates in his Philip clearly marks the difference between speeches meant to be read and those meant to be delivered: those meant to be read may not be timely, hence their persuasive ability is compromised. Speeches for reading may also not manage to persuade the listeners because they may not be successfully delivered by the reader. This affects the reception of a text and changes the emphasis of the distinction between writtenness and non-writtenness from composition to performance. [End Page 96] Chapter 2 turns to contexts of reception. In classical Athens, close scrutiny of prose texts was possible in solitary and private group reading (“off-line” perusal) but not in situations whose norms of interaction excluded this possibility, such as public oratorical performances and semi-formal small- scale epideixeis. In such public competitive contexts, there was no room for anything but clarity (saphēneia) to convince an audience unable to revisit the text (“on-line” reception). Public texts could therefore not afford obscurity of expression by contrast to private texts (“where off-line perusal is possible, there is no need to take excessive pains to ensure the optimal on-line comprehension of a text,” 35). Hence, the different contexts of reception may be associated with linguistic difference. In Chapter 3, Vatri looks at the distinction between texts that were meant for off-line perusal/reception (scriptures) and those meant for on-line reception (scripts). The writing of Attic prose texts was quite a complex process, with several oral stages—and plausibly even oral composition— preceding written dissemination. But there were also revisions of publicly delivered texts (scripts), such as deliberative and forensic speeches, after their performance and often for the purpose of making a new version of the text public through written dissemination. After examining literacy and reading in classical Athens, Vatri determines the conception of written prose texts as scripts or scriptures proceeding on a genre-by-genre basis. Chapter 4 focuses on clarity (saphēneia), which was extremely important for texts meant for on-line reception (scripts) and especially so for public speeches in particular. The centrality of clarity of expression is already highlighted in ancient Greek rhetorical literature. For “Demetrius” (for example), clarity and familiarity are key to persuasiveness; persuasiveness and clarity can be achieved through plain style—an idea that can be traced back to the criticism of Aeschylus’ obscure language in Aristophanes’ Frogs. According to “Demetrius,” plain style is distinguished not only by its clarity but also by a vividness generated by precision (aknbeia). Both Aristotle and Isocrates consider precision an important feature of texts meant for reading, which may also generate saphēneia. Vatri then looks closely at a range of examples from ancient Greek rhetorical literature to examine what they say about the rhetorical devices employed to produce saphēneia. A recurrent issue in ancient discussions is ambiguity, which can be generated by vocabulary (e.g., ambiguous character of certain...

This article explores the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, shedding light on the emergence of instructional writing from oral instruction. The 1549 text evinces qualities of preliterate oral communication identified by Ong. By contrast, the 1604 addendum reveals a trend toward modern plain style, which is even more pronounced in the 1647 Westminster Shorter Catechism. The evidence indicates the oral features were useful to the text’s technical aims. What Ramist plain style gains in precision and objectivity comes at the cost of other useful features, such as reiteration, contextualization, and agonism, which (in Tannen's phrase) involve a greater relative focus on interpersonal involvement between speaker and auditor/ reader.

As part of a larger research project on the rhetoric of sexual violence prevention in online university courses, the researcher conducted rhetorical analyses of two prevention courses from the United States and New Zealand. This study analyzed the rhetorical strategies used in two courses with attention to five subcategories: content genres, ways the content addresses the audience, messaging strategies, levels of prevention, and sentence-level choices. From the analyses, the researcher recommends rhetorical considerations for prevention courses. While the New Zealand course had more effective language choices, the US course had a better overall narrative structure.

Culture in second language (L2) writing has been researched extensively, though mostly under the purview of contrastive rhetoric and focused on text and contrastive genre analysis (Connor, 1996, 2004, 2008; Kaplan, 2005). Research has also focused on problematizing culture in reference to L2 writing (Atkinson, 1999, 2003; Kubota, 1999). These foci indicate reader-instructor rather than student perspectives: how L2 writers themselves perceive cultural impacts on writing. This study undertakes to fill this gap, investigating L2 student perceptions of such impacts. Study participants (n = 36), students in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing course at a Canadian university, took part in semistructured interviews and reflective writing. Data analysis identified six broad categories of cultural factors affecting student writing: (1) organizational structure as a fixed method; (2) supporting and writing arguments; (3) creating a stronger voice in writing; (4) adjusting to a new academic culture; (5) understanding clarity in academic writing in English; and (6) developing content: quality versus quantity. Findings underscore student perceptions of a monolithic, essentialist view of culture in academic writing. This is an important consideration when designing a student-centred L2 writing pedagogy that addresses student needs. Based on the findings, the article further explores implications for L2 writing instruction.

As technical genres continue to grow and morph in promising new directions, we attempt an analysis of what are typically viewed as mundane genres. We use the term gray genres, which we find useful for interrogating texts that tend to fall in categories that tend toward a blandness that is invariably difficult to quantify. We use hedonism, along with a historical accounting for this value from its classical rhetorical lineage and run it up to contemporary applications. We posit that playful stylistic choices---while typically discouraged in more technical spaces---actually improves the rhetorical canon of delivery for informative documents. We close with case studies that offer close readings of a few attempts at employing hedonistic tactics within typical gray genres.

Scholars in discourse studies have defined legitimation as the justification (and critique) of powerful institutions and their practices. In moments of crisis, legitimation tactics often shift. This article considers how such shifts are incited by unauthorized information leaks. Leaks, I argue, constitute freshly available texts that reveal privileged institutional information presented in a specialized rhetorical style. To explore how leaks are harnessed by institutional critics, I examine the 2013 Snowden/National Security Agency (NSA) crisis. Combining corpus analysis with discourse analysis, I explore how Snowden’s NSA leaks affected the online writing of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I also consider overlaps between the rhetorical patterns in the leaked NSA documents and those in the ACLU’s post-leaks writing. Findings from my analysis of legitimation and style categories suggest that, prior to the leaks, ACLU writers primarily used a character- and narrative-based style to delegitimize the NSA’s policies as illegal and secretive, and to push for their reform. After the leaks, though, the ACLU mainly used an informationally dense style rife with academic terms and vocabularies of strategic action, portraying NSA surveillance as massive and complex. As the documents moved from the NSA’s secret, technical discourses to public, critical discourses, the latter came to resemble the former rhetorically. These findings raise crucial questions about how critics can make use of leaks without necessarily relegitimizing institutional power.

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

Most tutors are trained in a core writing centers belief: Student writers who talk about their writing are student writers who will achieve better learning outcomes. Our comparative study—one of few in writing center research—examined the points in conferences in which student writers talked the most. We examined the very long turns (VLTs) of eight native English speaking (NES) student writers and eight non-native English speaking (NNES) student writers across 16 writing center conferences. We found that NESs contributed more VLTs than NNESs and that more NES conferences contained VLTs. We also found that stating goals for the conference occurred in half of the NES conferences, specifically, in the opening stage, while no NNES conferences had stated opening goals. In the three NNES conferences that contained VLTs, two contained a statement of a sentence-level goal, a description of potential content for the paper, and a period of time spent reading aloud from the paper. Of the VLTs preceded by questions, pumping questions (questions that prod student responses) occurred most frequently. We discuss the role that student-writer motivation and familiarity with the typical conference script played in the results and some implications of this comparative study for tutor training.

Research has shown that collaboratively produced texts are better in quality compared with individually written texts. However, no study has considered the role of collaboration in authorial voice, which is an essential element in current writing curricula. This study analyzes the effects of collaborative task performance in the quality of L2 learners’ argumentative texts and in their authorial voice strength. A total of 306 upper-intermediate L2 learners were selected and divided into independent ( N = 130) and paired ( N = 176) groups. Each learner/pair was asked to write one argumentative text. The quality of writings was determined by a quantitative analysis that included three measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). Participants’ authorial voice strength was assessed by two raters using an analytic voice rubric. Comparison of means revealed that pairs outperformed independent writers in all CAF measures. However, the results for the role of collaboration in authorial voice were mixed: While pairs were more successful than independent writers in manifesting their ideational voice, independent writers outperformed pairs with regard to affective and presence voice dimensions and holistic voice scores. The article concludes that, despite its positive implications for L2 writing, collaborative writing may pose challenges for learners’ authorial stance taking.

Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: An Argument on Rhetorical Style, by Marie Lund Marie Lund, An Argument on Rhetorical Style. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 220 pp. $25 (paper). ISBN 9788771844344 Arthur E. Walzer Arthur E. Walzer Arthur Walzer Professor Emeritus, Communication Studies University of Minnesota 40 Prospect Park W, 1J Brooklyn, NY 11215 awalzer@umn.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (1): 129–132. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.129 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Arthur E. Walzer; Review: An Argument on Rhetorical Style, by Marie Lund. Rhetorica 1 February 2020; 38 (1): 129–132. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.129 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 129 to rebrand old ideologies and invent new rhetorical repertoires with direct appeal to twenty-first-century audiences both at home and abroad. Reading The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong is a true delight, a delight that is made possible by Xing Lu s dispassionate and deeply engaging study of political rhetoric in modern China in general and Mao's transformative rhet­ oric in particular. As China continues to make its presence importantly felt on the world stage, understanding and developing a productive dialogue with its rhetoric is imperative. The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong should serve as an efficacious guide toward this urgent task confronting today's rhetori­ cians and politicians of all persuasions. Luming Mao University of Utah Marie Lund, An Argument on Rhetorical Style. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 220 pp. $25 (paper). ISBN 9788771844344 In An Argument on Rhetorical Style, Marie Lund builds on the work of Maurice Charland on constitutive rhetoric to advance constitutive style as an original contribution to rhetorical theory. To what extent is Lund's claim to have made an original contribution to centuries-long thought about style borne out by her argument? The first part of An Argument on Rhetorical Style is conceptual, distin­ guishing "constitutive style" from other ways of theorizing style. Lund draws on Wolfgang G. Muller's analysis to organize a taxonomy. In Topik des Stilbegriffs (1981), Muller identifies two tropes as dominating concep­ tions of style in the West: "style as dress" and "style as the man." Both have complicated histories. Style as dress would seem to see style as divorced from underlying ideas and, therefore, as decorative. But in the Renaissance, where the style as dress trope flourishes, Lund notes that ornatus was often thought of more as armament than decoration (58): for example, in John Hoskins' Directions for Speech and Style. Still, in so far as the live canons are thought of as a sequence, traditional rhetoric has fostered the idea that stylistic concerns are belated. With regard to "style is the man," this too is a complicated trope. When Comte de Buffon wrote in "Discourse on Style" that Le style c'est Thomme meme, he meant something quite different from both Quintilian who claimed that speech is commonly an index of character (Institutes, 11.1.30) and from the Romantics with their emphasis on the uniqueness of a personality as reflected in speech. Regardless of these diffe­ rences, Lund's claim that we have often theorized style as the formal embodiment of the speaker or writer's personality" (208) is true enough. Muller's two tropes of style serve as the ground on which Lund mounts her claim for a third topos: style as constitutive: "Wolfgang Muller is responsible for the first two topoi, while the last [constitutive] is my own invention," Lund writes (208). She reviews previous work on the figures 130 RHETORICA and on style generally to place her work in context and to shore up her claim of originality. Among scholars working on the rhetorical figures, Jeanne Fahnestock receives the most attention. Although Fahnestock does consider the figures as constitutive in her Rhetorical Figures in Science (p.22), she does not oppose constitutive to decorative, as Lund does. Instead, she distinguishes figures as functional or not—as advancing an argument or distracting from it. Fahnestock shows that even in scientific argument, figures are present and often serve a functional purpose by for­ mally epitomizing the structure of a scientific argument. For example, in the argument Darwin advances in the Origin that gradual change in response to natural selection turns variations from incipient species to new species, Fahnestock shows that the formal qualities of this argument are captured in the figure gradatio that characterizes Darwin's style (Fahnes­ tock 113-14). But it would be wrong to say that the gradatio is constitutive of the argument because gradatio, like all figures, is in itself skeletal, lacking evi­ dence and is not, therefore, probative. Lund also discusses Lakoff and John­ son on cognitive metaphor. But their point is that metaphor is a generative cognitive process—and therefore relates to invention. If a metaphor goes unnoticed, can we say it contributes to style? Lund's...

For decades, scholars have considered the construct of voice in student writing, and although defining the term remains difficult (see Jeffery; Tardy, Current ; Yancey), the metaphor of voice is still useful and popular in discussions about student writing (see Bryant; Elbow, Voice ). In this article, we first explore the field’s use of the term “voice” as describing writers’ subject positions within the texts and contexts in which they compose. In doing so, we represent the tensions that prior work has identified within the construct of voice. While prior empirical work explored faculty members’ identification of student writers’ voice, it has not used writing by faculty members’ own students. We then report on our study, which was designed to elicit two teachers’ identification of their own students’ voice in their writing. Findings suggest that instructors’ knowledge about their students and classroom contexts contributed to their understanding of voice in their students’ papers. The piece concludes with implications for how teachers can bring critical discussions of voice into the classroom and use our study results to inform their teaching students to attend to ideas of voice in writing.

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.

The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to examine the level of authorial voice strength among Iranian second language (L2) writers; and (b) to investigate the relationship between L2 learners’ authorial voice strength and the quality of their argumentative written task performances. Argumentative writing samples were elicited from 129 upper-intermediate L2 learners in writing courses. To quantify learners’ voice strength, these samples were scored by two raters using an analytic voice rubric. Raters also provided a holistic rating of the overall authorial voice strength in written argumentations. The quality of argumentations was measured using the TOEFL scoring rubric. While descriptive results indicated that learners demonstrated a low level of voice strength in their argumentations, results from Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) suggested positive associations between voice strength along with two of its dimensions and the quality of writings. Moreover, results from Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) pointed to the association of low and mid-level of writing quality and low voice strength, and the prevalence of high and mid voice strength in learners with high proficiency in writing. Finally, while an Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis revealed that the ‘presence’ dimension of authorial voice was the most difficult one for L2 learners, a Differential Item Functioning (DIF) analysis showed that the difficulty of the three voice dimensions did not differ significantly across genders. The findings were discussed regarding English L2 writing within the Iranian context.

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...

ABSTRACT This study contributes to the conversations on a more globalized and inclusive rhetorical praxis by focusing on how rhetoric was produced and understood by Turks – a group whose history spans centuries since their ancient origins in central Asia. We examine the ways in which Turkic/Turkish rhetoric was practiced and conceptualized in two seminal texts from the pre-Islamic and republican periods of the Turkish rhetorical tradition: the Orkhon inscriptions (8th century) and Atatürk’s Nutuk (1927). The intertextuality of these texts allows us to explore their relationships across time and space as well as mediate rhetorical styles and performances in their discourse.

In Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke wrote that rhetorical style is nothing more than ingratiation—an attempt to gain approval by saying the right thing in the right context. Marie Lund’s commendable goal in An Argument on Rhetorical Style is to argue beyond this understanding and achieve a greater conceptual consensus on style for rhetorical scholars and critics. Lund does this by developing her own concept of “constitutive style,” making style valuable as an aesthetic aspect of rhetoric, a deliberate rhetorical strategy, and an analytical category comprising communicative actions, identity constructions, and social influence. She achieves this lofty goal by re-theorizing rhetorical style, exhibiting skillful stylistic analyses in selected popular and social contexts, examining the concept of style from historical eras including the postmodern, and analyzing style from several critical perspectives. This rich and important work provides a fresh, appropriate and comprehensive framework for scholars to analyze rhetorical style from textual, interactional, social and theoretical angles. Lund invokes and engages historically with accounts of style from the classical Greek and Roman periods to the present, and does not disappoint in synthesizing these traditions before creating her transcendent “constitutive style” contribution.Lund’s book is separated into two parts—“Rhetorical Style as a Critical Concept” and “Critical Perspectives.” Three chapters are dedicated to each part. The goal of these chapters is to make style “both powerful and useful in line with other concepts in the practical and critical disciplines of rhetoric” (11). Lund argues that style needs to be re-theorized in order to accomplish this goal and introduces an expansive dialogue between research traditions in order to do so. By separating the book into these sections, Lund illuminates previously fragmented analyses of rhetorical style and is able to bring a synthesized framework to focus for the critic. She begins by covering the range of definitions of style since antiquity and explores the Sophistic treatment of style as constitutively inventive, transformational, and performative. She then guides the reader through some of the earliest etymologies of style (stylus), as well as the modern conceptions of “Style as Dress” and “Style as Man.” She describes these historical and modern definitions of style in precise detail and explains how some of them have retained analytical utility while others fall short. For example, although she sees all three conceptions of style (“Style as Dress,” “Style as Man,” and her “Constitutive Style”) as viable formations in shaping our current perceptions of style, she doesn’t view them as equally effective. She draws on Gerard A. Hauser’s view that rhetoric is not only a strategic process but also a “social practice which constructs a reality” (49). Moreover, she argues that style constitutes our social relations, moral actions, identity constructions, and worldviews. She rejects the simplicity of the topos “Style as Dress,” which characterizes style as a rhetorical ornament that dresses thought. Although Lund recognizes the aestheticizing aspect of style as worthwhile and viable for criticism, she opposes the fundamental separation of style from thought inherent in rhetoric’s five classical canons: invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory. A “Style as Dress” reduction ignores the inventive nature of style and the notion that all five canons can operate constitutively. Moreover, she rejects the presently loose versions of “Style as Man,” which convey the identity of the speaker as purely constituted through language.Instead, Lund proposes a re-theorization of style as “rhetorical language that constructs a social practice and may be turned into particular rhetorical strategies,” depending upon “the particulars of the rhetorical situation, and also, to some extent, the frame and focus of the critic” (50). It is here where Lund argues for an official third topos—“Style as Constitutive”—exploring the inventive side of constitutive rhetoric and how invented styles are ultimately performed. She supports her overall argument by weaving relevant and robust rhetorical analyses throughout her theoretical elaborations across chapters. For example, after taking stock of the contemporary research of rhetorical figures in chapter two, she analyzes how rhetorical figures function in Danish hip-hop style. She does so to “present rhetorical figures and style as significant analytical concepts that are part of a comprehensive theoretical complex” (86). This analysis is a rich, detailed and cohesive foundation for her analysis of constitutive style as argument. She includes rhetorical devices such as figures of speech and metaphor and re-conceptualizes them beyond mere ornament, substitution or value-addition. These views range from the classical to the postmodern, and Lund is able to admirably rise above them and bring clarity to the conceptual ambiguity concerning style and rhetorical devices. By drawing upon the constitutive function of rhetorical figures, Lund shows that strategic devices can be examined, not only as effective means for persuasion, but also as contributing to the very idea, topic, or style created. This is conveyed in her analysis of the Danish hip-hop style, where rhetorical figures are used strategically as textual and argumentative devices within a systematized cultural style.Lund wraps up Part I by examining the development of style in recent rhetorical criticism, noting equivalence between her constitutive style and the constructions of style brought forth by Barry Brummett and Bradford Vivian. However, Lund invokes an analysis of Danish political style to separate and bolster her own constitutive conception. She examines Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s Opening Address on the First Assembly of the Danish Parliament in 2011 to illuminate the amalgamation of rhetorical strategy and rhetorical style. She concludes that Thorning-Schmidt’s style is constitutive of collaboration, creating “the qualities, ethics, and aesthetics of cooperation rhetorically, in its practice” (121). In this way, style is developed as constitutive of rhetorical strategies, essential qualities, and as orientations toward rhetorical situations.Part II of An Argument on Rhetorical Style is dedicated to an elaboration of three critical perspectives that may be adopted when analyzing rhetorical styles: feminine, provocative, and speechwriting. The chapters include critical analyses from the three perspectives. Lund argues for the significance of constitutive style as a theoretical and critical construct, designating provocative style as a critical concept comprising argumentative stylistic devices in an interpretive frame, feminine style as a flawed rhetorical strategy, and speechwriting as dependent on her constitutive framework in order to be analyzed as stylistically constructing meaning, identity and performance at the textual level. Ultimately, Lund is dedicated to enabling the critic with a constitutive topos that recognizes the “rhetorical effects of using style to argumentative and strategic ends” (203). Style is thus constitutive of “so-called substantial qualities such as meaning, ideas, argumentation, political action, cultural values, identity, and gender” (208).Marie Lund has synthesized the work on style in rhetoric and related fields and has added to the tradition her own construct, “constitutive style.” An Argument on Rhetorical Style covers the full range of what is known about rhetorical style and advances the scholarship in admirable, pragmatic and analytical fashion. Future scholars can now adopt this new framework to further engage rhetorical style beyond the feminine, provocative, and speechwriting—something Lund was unable to fully accomplish in this comprehensive work. The limited number of critical perspectives expounded upon in Part II warrants closer attention and further contribution. Overall, the theory and critical application of constitutive style provides scholars from different critical approaches with an important, comprehensive take on rhetorical style.

For those of us who went to graduate school during the 1970s and 1980s, our understanding of early-modern rhetoric was shaped in large part by a preoccupation with clarifying the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. The curriculum at that time usually included a heavy dose of secondary literature by scholars in the tradition of Wilbur Samuel Howell, Karl Wallace, Douglas Ehninger, Vincent Bevilacqua, and Lloyd Bitzer. A common theme in those readings was an investment in mapping the primary texts of modern rhetorical theory against the background of metaphysics and epistemology. Occasionally, we read an essay like Walter Ong's “Ramist Method and the Commercial Mind,” which suggested a different approach to the subject. However, our interest in documenting the influence of Francis Bacon's scientific method on Joseph Priestley's theory of rhetorical invention or of explaining how George Campbell responded to David Hume's skepticism left us with little time to explore the influence of commercial culture on modern rhetorical theory—even in cases that probably should have been obvious like Adam Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres or Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric.Today, many of us who were originally trained as historians of rhetoric find ourselves surrounded by colleagues who dismiss the history of rhetoric courses as hopelessly passé. In fact, if we're honest, even for those of us who embrace the history of rhetoric as an essential component of liberal arts education, our files of lectures about the intricacies of Enlightenment rhetorical theory can seem increasingly remote and tired. As Christopher Hill once explained, every generation is faced with the task of rewriting history in its own way: “although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors” (1972, 15). The challenge facing historians of rhetoric, in other words, is this: how do we reframe Enlightenment rhetoric to reveal its relevance in our lives today?In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker suggests a “way in” to modern rhetorical theory that is likely to resonate with many twenty-first-century readers. Instead of approaching Enlightenment rhetoric as a reaction to modern theories of metaphysics and epistemology, Longaker reconfigures the subject around compelling problems of economics and ethics. For example, in an age of free-market capitalism and consumer culture, what is the moral grounding for our obligation to transparency and honesty in our rhetorical transactions? When attempting to flourish in an economic system that gives its highest rewards to self-interested instrumentalism and greed, is it still possible to cultivate a sense of altruism, honor, or loyalty toward others? And, furthermore, as we find ourselves inhabiting an increasingly privatized, competitive, and commercialized “marketplace of ideas,” how do we reconcile the values of free speech with the values of rhetorical decorum and politeness? For anyone who worries about the practical fallout of these sorts of questions, Longaker provides a compelling reminder that “our age is not exceptional. From its seventeenth-century financial beginning through its nineteenth-century industrial episode to its twenty-first century digital projection, capitalism has been thoroughly rhetorical” (11). In expanding upon this claim, Longaker proceeds recursively in relation to four case studies: John Locke on clarity, Adam Smith on probity, Hugh Blair on moderation, and Herbert Spencer on economy.Chapter 1 examines John Locke's obsession with discursive clarity and its role in commercial contracts. Traditional readings of book 3 of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (the treatment of the “abuses of words” and the remedies for those abuses) tend to place a heavy emphasis on Locke's relationship to British empirical sciences as inspired by his involvement with the Royal Society of London for the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge. While this focus on epistemology and scientific inquiry did obviously play an important role in Locke's analysis of the subject, Longaker advises historians of rhetoric that there is more to the story. His close reading of the Essay makes clear that Locke's attacks on sophistry and rhetoric are unusually vitriolic and inconsistent with other statements Locke made about the significance of verbal imprecision in the sciences. If we pay attention to the evolution of early drafts of Locke's Essay and if we read the Essay against the background of Locke's other writings on issues having to do with economics and business finance, we begin to realize that his frequent allusions to the relationship between argument and commerce and his analogies between sophistry and financial dishonesty are not just stylistic embellishments. Longaker explains that Locke's rule about linguistic propriety “is not just a stylistic guideline, nor is it principally a political suggestion. Locke believed that propriety in currency and language preserves commercial stability, since propriety depends on consent, and consent to a common medium permits financial and conversational exchange” (22). Longaker examines Locke's conception of an ethical obligation to propriety in commercial interactions. He then explains how Locke's requirement for clarity and his rule against disputation were implicated not only in his theory of natural law and social contract theory, but also in his analysis of misrepresentation in financial contracts. Longaker concludes the chapter with a survey of Locke's writings on education. He demonstrates how Locke's writings emphasized a “rhetorical pedagogy of clarity” (37) as an essential component in the education of the new merchant classes.In chapter 2, Longaker turns to Adam Smith's analysis of sincerity and probity. He begins by reviewing the common assumption that Smith's version of free-market capitalism transforms all goods and services into commodities, such that the value of bourgeois virtue is defined as a transactional calculation of prudence. As Smith said in The Wealth of Nations (1776), “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the baker, or the brewer that we expect [their probity]… but from their regard to their own interest” (Smith quoted by Longaker 44). That is to say, any claims about moral obligation within a capitalist system appear to be grounded in a claim to expedience—protecting one's reputation in the marketplace (in the short term, and also in the long term). However, as Longaker explains, this common interpretation of Smith is faulty. The interpretation persists because key passages have been read out of context. A more robust reading of Smith would strive to examine these passages against the background of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1762), and Smith's lectures on jurisprudence (c. 1754–1764). Longaker succinctly summarizes his survey of this literature by asserting that Smith did not, in fact, define probity as merely a “ruthless calculation of interest”: “Honesty may be prudent, and the prudent man may be honest, but he is not honest because he is prudent. Probity comes from a felt sense of right, which leads to an honest rhetorical style” (44). Longaker devotes most of chapter 2 to unpacking these claims—and, more generally, to explaining the recurring problem in Enlightenment ethics regarding the relationships between instrumental reason, moral feeling, habit, and ethical character. Longaker explains how Smith posited the psychological mechanism of fellow feeling or sympathy as the basis for capitalism's “two legal pillars,” property and contract (56–57). The capacity for sympathy can only be cultivated through the exercise of imagination—not through reason. With Smith, we see the beginnings of a decline in classical invention and the rise of aesthetics and belletristic criticism as dominating forces in rhetorical pedagogy. Longaker concludes the chapter with an examination of Smith's efforts “at promoting rhetorical criticism of imaginative literature to illustrate how he wanted students to study, discern, and produce honest discourse in the free arenas of civil society: the literary salon, the commodities exchange, and the rhetoric classroom” (44).Longaker presents Locke and Smith as having been generally optimistic about capitalism as a force for social improvement. Capitalism promotes rhetorical virtue in the sense that clarity is a necessary condition for meeting the obligations of financial contracts. Further, a felt sense of sympathy and of sincerity is an essential condition for becoming an effective participant in the marketplace. Later writers, however, became increasingly cynical about the relationship between virtue and commerce. Virtue and commerce “seemed sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory forces.” This ambivalence prompted the question, “Did capitalism make people good, or did good people make commerce possible?” (74). In chapter 3, Longaker takes this question as the starting point for his analysis of Hugh Blair. Conceding that Blair was not a systematic or consistent thinker, Longaker brings a sense of order to his analysis by focusing on Blair's participation in a debate among eighteenth-century intellectuals regarding the vice of licentiousness and the corrupting influence of material luxuries. Reviewing statements by writers such as Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Daniel Defoe, Longaker asserts that Blair's most important contribution to the “luxury debates” was the “bourgeois virtue of moderation” which would provide “a ballast to right a commercial ship listing toward overconsumption” (79). Specifically, “Christian morals and republican virtue teach good habits of moderate consumption and personal savings, habits that support commerce by ensuring reinvestment and by preventing overconsumption” (74). In his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Blair gave his students a guide to rhetorical moderation by crafting a synthesis between Locke's demand for verbal clarity and Smith's celebration of sentimental figures (88).In chapter 4, Longaker turns to Herbert Spencer as “the proper inheritor of the British Enlightenment's integration of ethics, economics, and style” but who, in the end, tracked the “decline and fall of rhetorical style and bourgeois virtue” (101). Spencer's essay “The Philosophy of Style” (1852) is usually remembered for its treatment of language as a source of “friction” which hinders the “machinery” of the human intellect: “the more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will that idea be conceived” (Spencer quoted by Longaker 102). This famous description of the “economics of style” grew out of Spencer's work in industrial engineering and his analysis of the need for efficient communication within large corporations. But Longaker claims that this is actually the least interesting feature of Spencer's analysis of style: “More interesting and more important is Spencer's adherence to the British Enlightenment faith that rhetorical style can facilitate sympathy; will ameliorate humanity, and must advance commerce” (103). This optimism that permeated Spencer's rhetorical economics was a product of his belief in the Enlightenment's theory of historical progress. He believed in the power of capitalism—not so much as an artificial creation of human beings but as a divinely ordained necessity in human evolution. Over time, however, Spencer learned to distinguish biological evolution from social evolution. In the process, according to Longaker, he became increasingly skeptical about the role and significance of individual agency. Ultimately, Spencer's fascination with the mechanisms of a deterministic evolution led him to turn away from rhetorical education and from the imaginative arts all together. As Longaker explains, Spencer “lost faith in the individual's ability to purposefully cultivate bourgeois virtue” (123).The narrative arc of Longaker's survey is clear and perspicacious. Although he examines a limited number of canonical texts in Enlightenment rhetorical theory, by shifting the frame of analysis from epistemology to economics, he succeeds in uncovering in those familiar texts many original and compelling insights. If there is any criticism one might offer, it is that, at times, the narrative is too neat and too economical. Longaker focuses so scrupulously on a progression of ideas that he sometimes neglects complicating issues that—on closer examination—may also turn out to be relevant. For example, he devotes little attention to the influence of the classical traditions of invention and argument on Enlightenment rhetoric. However, one can't help but be curious about how classical notions of scientific discovery and rhetorical advocacy were reconciled with Adam Smith's theory of economic growth in commercial society—which depends on the division of labor and specialization in the labor force (including both physical and intellectual labor). Although it may have distracted from Longaker's central interest by drawing us back to the more familiar grounds of rhetoric and epistemology, the tendency toward intellectual fragmentation—which undermines modern usage of the classical topoi—does seem to be important to any discussion of rhetorical pedagogy and bourgeois ethics. So, for instance, by ending his narrative with Spencer, Longaker overlooks other writers (John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, Alexander Bain, and John Ruskin, for example) who were preoccupied with responding to Smith's division of labor because of its dangerously dehumanizing implications. The project of reframing public discourse—and specifically, of reframing public argument—in a way that would secure social justice as a constraining value to commercial culture became pervasive to nineteenth-century ethics and economics.Longaker's “rebranding” of Hugh Blair as a “moderate man” who “taught bourgeois virtue to offset the vice of luxury and to prevent the corruption of commerce” (98) is an intriguing claim. But for those of us who are accustomed to reading Blair's lectures against the backdrop of neo-classical rhetoric and eighteenth-century classical education, the argument is not entirely convincing. For example, dating at least to Charles Rollin's The Ancient History (1729), Greek history had been a stage for attacking the commercial decadence of Athenian “popular culture” and for defending an elite “high culture.” Blair's disdain for disputation and for popular oratory and his endorsement of polite belles lettres reenacted a standard trope in eighteenth-century debates about class and economic stratification. Longaker's interpretation of Blair might be more convincing had he acknowledged this historical context—or at least provided greater attention to the way Blair's notion of belles lettres would be mobilized as a class marker.Finally, it is surprising that Longaker grants Richard Whately only a brief reference in his text. Whately was, after all, a major force in nineteenth-century British interpretation of rhetoric and of political economy. A prolific writer, he offered commentary on diverse subjects that seem directly relevant to the question of bourgeois virtue: tolerance and partisanship, charity and covetousness, luxury, argumentative clarity and consistency, humility and moral judgment, and the relationship between reason and passion in persuasive discourse. Granted, any careful examination of Whately on rhetoric, economics, and ethics, would easily fill a book by itself. Still, one suspects that by adding someone like Whately to this discussion the project might have gained an extra level of depth and nuance.Despite these minor disappointments, the bottom line is that Longaker's work stands as essential reading for anyone who is interested in the relationship between rhetoric and economics. In fact, for all of us who face the prospect of spending the remainder of our careers responding to the consequences of a collective investment in Trumpean economics—and at a time in which the Supreme Court has declared that “money is speech”—Longaker's analysis gives us ample motivation to rethink our assumptions about the relevance of Enlightenment rhetorical theory to our twenty-first-century predicament. John Locke, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Herbert Spencer each grappled with moral problems that are surprisingly similar to problems we face today. Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue may not provide a comprehensive study of the subject, but it is an impressive point of entry that is likely to inspire compelling research for the future.

This study examined multiple measures of written expression as predictors of narrative writing performance for 362 students in grades 4 through 6. Each student wrote a fictional narrative in response to a title prompt that was evaluated using a levels of language framework targeting productivity, accuracy, and complexity at the word, sentence, and discourse levels. Grade-related differences were found for all of the word-level and most of the discourse-level variables examined, but for only one sentence-level variable (punctuation accuracy). The discourse-level variables of text productivity, narrativity, and process use, the sentence-level variables of grammatical correctness and punctuation accuracy, and the word-level variables of spelling/capitalization accuracy, lexical productivity, and handwriting style were significant predictors of narrative quality. Most of the same variables that predicted story quality differentiated good and poor narrative writers, except punctuation accuracy and narrativity, and variables associated with word and sentence complexity also helped distinguish narrative writing ability. The findings imply that a combination of indices from across all levels of language production are most useful for differentiating writers and their writing. The authors suggest researchers and educators consider levels of language measures such as those used in this study in their evaluations of writing performance, as a number of them are fairly easy to calculate and are not plagued by subjective judgments endemic to most writing quality rubrics.

ABSTRACT The Panathenaicus is often referred to as one of the weakest and most enigmatic of Isocrates’ orations. It has been criticized for lacking innovation, coherence, and rhetorical style. Furthermore, it concludes with a curious use of dialogue otherwise foreign to Isocrates. In this article, I read the dialogue alongside the apparently digressive proemium and argue not only for the speech’s internal unity, but for its creativity and intellectual complexity. I demonstrate how the Panthenaicus connects Isocrates’ Panhellenic project with his civic-minded paideia in a way that simultaneously identifies Academic philosophy and attempts to subordinate it to Isocratean philosophia.

ABSTRACTJacques Rancière's account of the political demonstration of equality makes an important contribution to long-standing conceptualizations of democracy as occurring apart from state institutions. Rancière's performative account of democracy, however, recognizes the impurity of political language used within state institutions as well as in democratic events. Rancière's polemics against “metapolitical” theories of social existence and the state take issue with how such forms of philosophy assume the primacy of their own capacity to explain political language. Community rights ordinances (CROs) demonstrate how conceptualizing shared political language as doxa reveals the possibility that a metapolitical rhetorical style can occur within Rancière's method of equality. CROs also demonstrate how the method of equality can operate in the context of democratic philosophizing.

In teaching technical writing for nearly 20 years, I have recognized the importance of including writing assignments focused on improving students' clarity and effectiveness at the sentence level. I present a writing assignment for STEM students ranging from freshman to graduate-level. Students first find a published abstract in their discipline and then use readability tools to analyze the abstract's style. They revise the abstract for better readability while maintaining professional tone. This assignment reinforces research skills, audience awareness, and reflection on sentence-level stylistic choices.

Research problem: Interest in plain-language communication has been growing in many sectors of business and government, but knowledge about its development is scattered and in need of synthesis. Research questions: 1. How did plain language in the US evolve to gain acceptance by industry, government, and the public? 2. In what ways have advocates changed their vision of plain language? Literature review: My review identified a corpus of more than 100 publications relevant to the history of plain language from 1940 to 2015. Methodology: I evaluated the literature on plain language to identify milestones, events, and trends between 1940 and 2015. I focused on the evolution of plain language and on ways that practitioners altered their perspective of the field. Results: Between 1940 and 1970, plain language focused mainly on readability. During the 1970s, some practitioners began to employ usability testing. By the mid-1980s, there was a widespread sense that plain-language advocates had shifted priorities from readability to usability. Between 1980 and 2000, advocates broadened their vision-beyond word- and sentence-level concerns to include discourse-level issues, information design, and accessibility. Between 2000 and 2015, advocates continued to worry over their old questions (“Can people understand and use the content?”), but also asked, “Will people believe the content? Do they trust the message?” By 2015, plain language had gained significant momentum in business, government, medicine, and education. Conclusions: Plain language evolved over the past 75 years from a sentence-based activity focused on readability of paper documents to a whole-text-based activity, emphasizing evidence-based principles of writing and visual design for paper, multimedia, and electronic artifacts. Plain-language practitioners expanded their concerns from how people understand the content-the usability and accessibility of the content-to whether people trust the content. In addition to a narrative about the field's evolution, I offer a Timeline of Plain Language from 1940-2015, which chronicles the field's highlights. Together, the narrative and timeline offer a fairly comprehensive view of the current state of plain language and allow those with an interest to dig deeper.

Background: Although plain language is almost universally promoted by teachers of professional writing, editors, and communication professionals, some have argued that the effects of and preferences for plain style in written messages differ among groups of individuals. Research questions: 1. Do professionals prefer plain style? 2a. Do preferences differ for different categories of style? 2b. Do preferences differ for different groups of workers? Literature review: Style, the word- and sentence-level elements in a written text, is a critical element of plain language. There is evidence that plain style, however, affects readers differently based on their level of subject matter knowledge. Plain style is even criticized by a few. There is a long history of tensions surrounding linguistic prescriptivism, the notion that one manner of language use is superior to all others. Further, readers' preferences for writing style, plain or otherwise, may not be consistent across occupational positions, education levels, nationalities, personality types, or genders. Research methodology: We conducted a quantitative study of preferences for two major style categories (conciseness and word choice) using an online survey instrument. The student-recruiter technique provided us with usable responses from 614 working adults in the US. Using that data, we calculated proportions of respondents, with confidence intervals, who chose the plain-style options. We also used statistical tests to explore associations between preferences and respondent characteristics. Results and conclusions: Our findings support an overwhelming preference for plain style among US professionals who are native speakers of English. Reader preferences were stronger for elements associated with word choice than with conciseness. Those with lower education levels and blue-collar occupations had lower preferences for plain style. The study had two major limitations: 1. We investigated only two aspects of plain style rather than the full range of elements that make up plain language. 2. Our data-collection instrument presented readers with an artificial rather than an authentic reading experience. Future research may investigate the role of personality on stylistic preferences and the attributions readers make about writers based on their style.

This article presents findings from a rhetorical analysis of job advertisements posted by the fastest growing companies in the United States ( Inc. 5000 rankings). The analysis suggests that companies rely on standard rhetorical figures and share similar rhetorical visions of novelty that likely effect their organizational culture, paradoxically make them homogeneous, and potentially oversell positions that require prosaic job duties. Suggestions to authors of job advertisements include writing with fewer clichés and metaphors, since they tend to reify ageist stereotypes. Suggestions for job seekers include doing rhetorical analyses of advertisements and writing résumés so they comply with job advertisements’ creative rhetorical styles.

Kant’s Philosophy of Communication provides a valuable and thought-provoking reassessment of Kant’s place in the rhetorical tradition. Complementing recent work by Scott Stroud, Pat Gehrke, and others who have essayed an expanded role for rhetoric in Kant’s critical works, Ercolini focuses on texts at the edges of the Kantian canon to produce an account of an “‘other’ Kant” (7) who provides a counter-narrative to caricatures of enlightenment thought as being dismissive of rhetoric (220). Ercolini frames Kant’s enlightenment as a practice: a process of embodied, collective knowledge production and critique with a robust role for rhetoric, communication, and social exchange (220). In addition to contributing to rhetorical studies of Kant, this account of Kant as an explorer of the social, embodied, and affective dimensions of thought takes a place beside the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas, who have explored Kant’s continued relevance for contemporary philosophical and political concerns.The first two chapters of Ercolini’s book address Kant’s relationship to rhetoric in conversation with existing rhetorical scholarship on Kant. Ercolini sums up rhetorical engagement with Kant’s most direct discussions of rhetoric, arguing that, while Kant disparages a narrow vision of oratorical practice, his work accords a wide role to “communication, reasoned public discourse, deliberation, critique and other elements” (6) of the broad intellectual projects associated with contemporary rhetorical studies. These chapters also push back against the austere image of Kant’s life that modern philosophy has inherited, discussing Kant’s interest in billiards and gambling, the vibrancy of his lectures, and his lively social milieu (7–8), all of which attest to an interest in discussion and public engagement. Ercolini’s observations in these chapters complicate Kant’s attitude toward rhetoric rather than establishing him as its champion, but this approach is an asset: Kant is set on philosophical common ground with rhetoric without underplaying the tensions and complexity found in his thought.In an elegant compositional gesture, the following chapters mirror each major aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy, treating the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic facets of the “other” Kant. In Chapter 2, Ercolini examines the tepid response that initially greeted the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on Kant’s reply to a critical review by Christian Garve that set much of the tone for the Critique’s initial reception. Working through Kant’s exchanges with Garve, as well as the polemic against Garve’s review in the Appendix to the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Ercolini argues that the failure of other philosophers to effectively popularize the insights of the first Critique prompted Kant to reflect on the need for popular philosophical work. Kant distinguishes “alleged popularity’” (78) that renders philosophical insight in buzzwords and slogans without intellectual rigor from true popularity: writing that places critical philosophy in conversation with public concerns in order to prompt collective debate and advance the task of thought beyond the musings of the lone philosopher (64). In this sense, “the monument of Western intellectual history known as the first Critique actually serves as a propaedeutic to the Prolegomena” (66) and its popular articulation of critical philosophy.In its inversion of the status of Kant’s Critiques relative to his more avowedly popular philosophy, Chapter 2 serves as the fulcrum of the book’s argument, providing a clear rationale for the ethical and aesthetic discussions in the rest of Ercolini’s book. Chapter 3 extends the idea of popularity to develop an “embodied ethics” (91) out of Kant’s anthropological texts and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, arguing that even as Kant insists on the purity of the categorical imperative, he cannot escape the impurity of empirical examples and the ethical vertigo they create. Kant’s anthropological texts offer a parallel ethics focused on the “dynamic between discipline and enjoyment” (129) that characterizes sociability and conversation in public, and emphasize the body and its pleasures, offering insights for communication ethics centered on alterity and the care of the self.Chapters 4 and 5 mirror the later critical philosophy’s discussion of aesthetic judgment. Chapter 4 introduces the Critique of Judgment’s key concepts, and frames Kant’s turn to aesthetics as both a primary site of concern about rhetoric and an account that, rather than dismissing rhetoric, “infuses [it] with a capacity and power that certainly deserves attention and respect,” even if it remains a worry for Kant (163). Chapter 5 engages Kant’s writings on tone and style. Ercolini argues that Kant’s explicit reflections on style provide a set of strategies for effective popular scholarship, as well as a guide to ethical rhetoric that emphasizes liveliness, perspicuity, a balance between logical and aesthetic perfection, and a style that is “communicable and intelligible to all who have functioning faculties in common” (174). Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of tone, Kant’s term for the affective dimension of language. Beyond augmenting the observations about style from earlier in the chapter, the discussion of tone affirms that style and rhetoric for Kant are more than merely ornamental: they affectively dispose the listener in accordance with a given message (190). While more work remains to expand this connection, Ercolini’s discussion of tone sets up the basics of a materialist theory of rhetorical style that merits future expansion.Beyond the contributions it makes to rhetorical studies of Kant, Ercolini’s book is important to scholars of rhetorical history for the way it brings the world of eighteenth-century German philosophy to life. The book places many of Kant’s occasional essays in context as engagements in the public debates of Kant’s time (201), and uses that context to make a powerful case for those essays’ significance as public scholarship. Ercolini also fleshes out Kant’s role in the German enlightenment, particularly with respect to rhetoric’s place in the academic system in which Kant taught (48–57), and deftly treats Kant’s debates with other scholars and his participation in Königsberg’s social circles. These discussions generate the book’s most significant claims about the history of rhetoric—against the thesis that the enlightenment heralded a denigration of rhetoric, Ercolini argues that scholars need only look in the right places to find evidence of a vibrant rhetorical culture of which Kant was a part.Kant’s Philosophy of Communication is an enjoyable read that will provide substantial food for thought to philosophers of communication, historians of rhetoric and philosophy, theorists of public scholarship, and anyone familiar with the basics of Kant’s critical philosophy. The primary place the book could do more (and its biggest opening for future work) is in the implications it outlines for rhetoric’s discussions of contemporary philosophy. Ercolini places her reading in conversation with a number of more contemporary uptakes of Kant’s work (14), and engages at length with Deleuze’s work on Kant (in Chapter 4) and Foucault’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” (in the introduction and conclusion). These readings work well as written, but the short circuit they make between Kantian enlightenment and the concerns of contemporary materialist and poststructuralist theories of rhetoric remains to be explored. Moreover, some of the traveling companions Ercolini selects for Kant sit uneasily together—Foucault’s and Habermas’s versions of enlightenment would hardly agree, and while that tension is highlighted (212-–13), the implications of the “other” Kant for the relationship between these thinkers are not fully explored. If taken at their full value, Ercolini’s claims about Kant might productively trouble many of rhetoric’s narratives about modernity and its afterlives. Such troubling deserves to be further pursued, in this work or future projects.

Book Review| May 01 2017 Review: Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment, by Mark Garrett Longaker Mark Garrett Longaker, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric), University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. 170 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-07086-5. Glen McClish Glen McClish San Diego State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (2): 234–236. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.2.234 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Glen McClish; Review: Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment, by Mark Garrett Longaker. Rhetorica 1 May 2017; 35 (2): 234–236. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.2.234 Download citation file: Ris (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 All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 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.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

234 RHETORICA drawn to images from these periods - "the body's inside and outside, the heart offered on an outstretched hand" - that reveal "historically elaborated semiot­ ics of the self," expressing competing views of what constituted a moral bal­ ance of public and private (214). So, when she offers her detailed case study of irony and sincerity in the ethos of author Dave Eggers, it is grounded in a historical understanding of these terms. Historians of rhetoric may find themselves frustrated by aspects of Korthals Altes's book, a point she acknowledges as a likely effect of the wide net she casts. For example, her central term, ethos, is not as thoroughly historicized as are other framing concepts like sincerity, irony, and hermeneutics. While she traces these over centuries, her approach to ethos is to provide snapshots from ancient Greece and Rome and then to pick up the term in its modern uses in narrative analysis. This method drops at least one major thread that seems highly germaine to her project: the pre-Aristotelian sense of ethos, robustly revived in the last two decades, as location or haunt. Korthals Altes's use of topoi answers her need to flesh out the rhetorical commonplaces of ethos construction, but her discussion of the textual, virtual, and physical spaces that modem authors inhabit calls out to ethos's more ancient meaning. Further, the degree to which ethos overlaps with related terms like posture, self, persona, and implied author, are never made clear. But in placing ancient renderings of ethos within modem methods of literary criticism, Ethos and Narrative Interpretation reminds us just how fraught and complex the practice of reading others has always been. Daniel A. Cryer, Roosevelt University Mark Garrett Longaker, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric), University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. 170 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-07086-5. While reading Mark Garrett Longaker's recent book, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment, I was struck by the author's reluctance to employ contemporary theory as a lens through which to evaluate Enlightenment perspectives on civic virtue, eco­ nomics, and rhetoric, for indeed, twenty-first-century rhetorical studies often marshal critical perspectives to try the past. While it is impossible to read his­ torical texts innocently, Longaker strives to explore his principal figures—John Locke, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, and Herbert Spencer—on their own terms. Thus, I was not surprised when in his conclusion he explicitly addresses his approach, revealing that although he is "a political socialist and a historical materialist," he adheres to the principle audite et alteram partem: "listen even to the other side" (pp. 134-35). It is this careful listening, which enables Reviews 235 Longaker to articulate his subjects significance in the British Enlightenment, that perhaps best characterizes this fine volume. In his introduction, Longaker concisely presents his "principal argument"—that "in the late seventeenth, mid-eighteenth, and mid-nineteenth centuries a British philosopher, a political economist, a rhetorical theorist, and a sociologist all tried to cultivate bourgeois virtue by teaching rhetorical style, each building on others' ideas and each addressing a unique stage of capitalist development" (p. 2). Each of the study's four chapters features one of Longaker's principal theorists, along with his key rhetorical emphasis: Locke and clarity, Smith and probity, Blair and moderation, and Spencer and economy. In chapter 1, Longaker astutely distills Locke's well-known recommenda­ tions concerning the abuses of language and his mistrust of disputation into "four rules to remedy language's infirmity" (p. 14). Conducting a "synthetic reading" of Locke's work, he then demonstrates how each rule elucidates dif­ ferent areas of the philosopher's corpus. For example, the "Rule of Propriety" describes Locke's view of both effective language and stable currency. Longaker closes the chapter by suggesting that Locke's actual prose style conforms to his rules of clarity and that his writings on education "developed a rhetorical pedagogy of clarity" (p. 37). Although most scholars of rhetoric who consider Locke tend to highlight a few of his well-worn...

Abstract In an attempt to create more meaningful and effective assessment, the Howe Writing Center at Miami University implemented a new post-consultation/exit survey. During the course of the Fall 2012 semester, over 800 students responded to the post-consultation survey. Writing center theory has documented the limitations of the post-consultation survey; however, this type of feedback still represents the best and most accessible way to assess and expand the knowledge of writing centers. This assessment project provided important feedback concerning the writing center at Miami University about student demographics that use the writing center, including academic year and classes students wanted to work on. The assessment project also contributes to writing center theory and discourse by providing a different narrative for non-native English speaking students and native English speaking students that use the writing center. The assessment challenges the view that writing from non-native English speaking students is only concerned with so-called "lower order" writing issues and writing from native English speaking students is primarily concerned with so-called "higher order" writing issues. Instead, it was found that non-native English speaking students are interested in working on many "higher order" concerns and were very similar, after sentence-level concerns, in their writing needs to native English speaking students.

From 2012 to 2015, the online grammar program Grammarly was claimed to complement writing center services by 1. increasing student access to writing support; and 2. addressing sentence-level issues, such as grammar. To test if Grammarly could close these two gaps in writing center services, this article revisits the results of a Spring 2014 study that compared Grammarly' s comment cards to the written feedback of 10 asynchronous online consultants. The results showed that both Gram-marly and some consultants strayed from effective practices regarding limiting feedback, avoiding technical language, and providing accurate information about grammatical structure. However, the consultants' weaknesses could be addressed with enhanced or focused training, and their strengths allowed for important learning opportunities that enable student access to information across mediums and help students establish connections between their sentences and the larger whole. This article concludes that each writing center should consider their own way of closing these gaps and offers suggestions for multiple consultation genres, new services, and strategies for sentence-level concerns.

Discourse-based interviews (or DBIs) have long been used in writing research to investigate writers’ tacit genre knowledge, including their rhetorical motivations for sentence-level wordings. Meanwhile, researchers in English for Academic and Specific Purposes (EAP/ESP) have used corpus techniques to uncover patterns of such wordings, ones that index community-valued ways of knowing and meaning. This article brings together these two methods in a novel way. By offering a case study of Richard, an advanced undergraduate writer majoring in philosophy at a U.S. university, the article demonstrates how systematic analysis of Richard’s writing informed and enriched DBIs with him and his professor, Maria. Specifically, corpus-based text analysis revealed that Richard regularly expressed an epistemic stance in his course essays in ways that are conventional and valued in philosophical argumentation, while the DBIs revealed that neither Richard nor Maria were consciously aware of these stance patterns, despite regular appearance in both their writing. Taken together, these findings point to the value of using corpus techniques prior to the DBI to identify meaningful choices in language that likely otherwise would be missed. The findings also raise important questions about the acquisition of disciplinary discourses and the sources of knowledge that foster that acquisition.

Western education has always stressed the need for an intelligent use of literalness, especially in the fields of natural sciences. Plain style, clear expressions, transparent meanings, and methods of disambiguation were held in high esteem while tropes and figures like metaphor, hyperbole, irony, chiasmus etc. were viewed with suspicion, and their use was discouraged. Yet, in the writings of Kenneth Burke, especially his essay "Linguistic approaches to problems of education"(1955), and subsequently in other publications such as The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey ed. 1990), and The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry (Herbert Simons ed. 1990), it has been shown that rhetoric pertains to all domains of teaching, learning and research. It is from here that the present paper departs in order to recall some of Kenneth Burke's flamboyant contributions to the study of rhetoric, which help us to better understand how figurative forms of expression are indispensible not only in educational practice but also when we think and argue about the discipline itself. Can Western forms of education claim universal relevance, or are they in other cultural contexts inappropriate - even destructive? The search for an answer will lead us to Maimire Mennasemay, an eminent Ethiopian scholar who more than anyone else has tried to figure out what the development of genuine forms of education in his country may involve.