This essay uses a cultural rhetoric framework to analyze Hermanas: Deepening our Identity and Growing Our Influence (2019), a multi-authored book by evangelical Latinas in the U.S. The distinct storytelling in the text—which layers the authors' personal narratives with discussions of biblical texts—emerges from both white evangelical and Latina cultural contexts. This communal, activist approach to personal narrative enacts rhetorical leadership by confronting systemic injustices in U.S. evangelicalism and offering readers in that community new ways to engage with dominant evangelical rhetoric and with the stories of others.

This essay investigates the relationship between academic writing and the rhetorical awareness that college students gain from evangelical backgrounds. We interviewed thirty-seven students about their experiences with reading, writing, and debate in religious contexts and how those practices informed their work in first-year writing. Interviews revealed that students observed or practiced rhetorical skills that found parallels in writing courses. Some critiqued evangelical rhetoric, at times because of skills they learned in first-year writing. These findings call for pedagogical practices attuned to the knowledge writers bring from evangelical backgrounds.

Writing consultants regularly perform emotional labor. They suppress or express emotions to welcome clients and invoke enthusiasm to cultivate writers’ confidence. Because emotional labor performs these crucial functions, it merits focused attention in writing center studies. However, while research has considered the emotional needs that writers bring, scholars have not yet sufficiently examined the affective engagements that consultations require of writing consultants. The first section of this article presents a case for treating affective dimensions of tutoring as labor. The second section analyzes five tutor-training manuals using the Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF) to identify references to emotion and affect in the texts. This analysis shows that these tutor training manuals offer limited or indirect discussions of emotional labor and neglect the fact that relational work is just as much a practiced skill as cognitive work. The final section offers implications and proposes ways these manuals could start more robust discussions of emotional labor to further writing center goals of creating supportive, collaborative environments. By teaching and valuing the emotional labor of tutors, writing centers can become more inclusive places and mitigate factors that lead to burnout.

Evangelical women who write from lived experience—in blogs, social media, and memoirs—develop a personal narrative rhetoric to negotiate contentious currents of religious thought. This essay studies the work of Sarah Bessey and Jen Hatmaker, who use this rhetorical strategy to destabilize mainstream evangelical discourses of gender and biblical authority. This study expands understandings of rhetorical practices in North American evangelicalism, particularly the contemporary, female-led Xvangelical movement. Analyzing their writing illuminates the interplay among feminist and conservative agendas in debates over gender roles and biblical authority. Because they take conservative doctrine seriously, Hatmaker and Bessey invoke an audience of evangelical readers disappointed with the political and patriarchal commitments of their churches. Finally, this essay advances conversations about the rhetoric of personal narrative. Bessey and Hatmaker explore the ways life writing creates knowledge and offers alternatives to argumentation based in certainty that often characterizes evangelical rhetoric.

This article studies the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and proposes three conceptual tools for examining the ways readers and editors of digital storytelling projects interact with writers and texts. The author advances discussions of personal narrative and the role this form of writing plays in transnational feminism and forms of humanitarian activism that increasingly take place online. Digital storytelling projects effectively circulate these personal accounts, but they benefit from scholarship that advises self-critical approaches to representing their subjects.