This article introduces a new IText technology called Classroom Salon. The goal of Classroom Salon is to bring some of the benefits of social media—the expression of personal identity and community—to writing classrooms. It provides Facebook-like features to writing classes, where students can form social networks as annotators within the drafts of their peers. The authors discuss how the technology seeks to capture qualities of historical salons, which also built communities around texts. They also discuss the central features of the Classroom Salon system, how the system changes the dynamics of the writing classroom, current efforts to evaluate it, and future directions.

This article employs theories of counterpublics to investigate the Arab-American press before and after 9/11 as a counterpublic to the American war on terror. We use Squires's categorization of counterpublics as (1) assimilative enclaves, (2) satellites seeking separation, or (3) resistant counterpublics, actively dissenting. Using a corpus of 113 articles from Arab American News, we argue that the Arab-American press circulated stories consistent with (1) and (2) but not (3). We conclude that a strategy of active resistance required greater standing of the Arab-American point of view in mainstream American thought than Arab-Americans enjoyed.

We review Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's original formulation of presence as a technique of argument associated primarily with the selection of individual rhetorical elements, and the recent extension of the notion by Gross and Dearin, where presence is understood as a second-order effect that denotes the systematic expression and inhibition of patterns of rhetorical elements across an entire text or rhetorical artifact. We argue for an additional extension to this more global notion of presence, one that makes it not only global within a text or class of texts, but also comparative, allowing the analyst to make rigorous comparisons of expressed and inhibited rhetorical patterns across different texts, or different classes of texts, including different rhetorical genres. A return to the original conception of presence allows us to make this extension, and we illustrate global presence within this newly proposed comparative framework by analyzing two genres of self-presentation in classroom practice: the cover letter and the self-portrait. We show the close ties between global presence and genre as ways of theorizing deep similarities across texts.

This article introduces an IText system the authors built to enhance student practice in language awareness within commonly taught written genres (e.g., self-portraits, profiles, scenic writing, narratives, instructions, and arguments). The system provides text visualization and analysis that seek to increase students’ sensitivity to the rhetorical and whole-text implications of the small runs of language they read and write. The authors describe the way the system can create possibilities for classroom discourse and discussion about student writing that seem harder to reproduce in traditional writing classrooms. They also describe the limitations of the current system for wide-scale use and its future prospects.

Dan Sperber/Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1986, 254 pp.1 Alan C. Purves, ed. Writing Across Languages and Cultures: Issues in Contrastive Rhetoric, Written Communication Annual: An International Survey of Research and Theory, vol. 2. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1988. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Pp. xvii + 508.

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This paper examines the comparative usefulness of seeking to explain metaphor through the notions of ambiguity and vagueness. I argue that, despite long standing attempts to explain metaphor as a species of ambiguous language, all such attempts fail. I also argue that a less explored association, that between metaphor and vague language, can be exploited much more successfully in explaining a quite different aspect of metaphor‐why speakers might choose that trope over literal utterance in everyday contexts.