In a relatively short time, market and political forces have intensified the reach of artificial intelligence (AI). AI has become, in a word, climatic—not only a discrete technological system but also a creeping assemblage of ideological, material, and political forces. This article tracks these forces by developing rhetorical climates of AI as a conceptual framework. In doing so, I aim to (1) link the harms of climate change with the rapid buildout of AI infrastructure and (2) shift the frame of the conversation by emphasizing the extractive, exploitative, enclosed, and knotted supremacist conditions that have been prerequisites for building AI systems at scale. While these pervading rhetorical climates may seem unchangeable, I track how microclimates of resistance have developed, in the past and in the present. In particular, I emphasize the importance of bodily intelligence in navigating asymmetrical conditions of power felt in the AI industry. The article concludes by discussing how rhetoric and writing studies can weather the unfolding rhetorical climates of AI by diagnosing conditions, seizing moments, and plotting futures to imagine a less extractive and less harmful world.

Style is a perennial concern within rhetorical studies. As one of Aristotle’s five canons, style has inspired a great deal of rhetorical theory over the past two millennia and counting. Hence, it would be reasonable to presume that there is not much, if anything, else original to contribute to the well-trodden domain of the stylistic. However, Taylor Black’s Style: A Queer Cosmology challenges this assumption by offering a fresh take on its titular concept. The book’s grounding in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies allows its author to speak to multiple audiences at once, including those invested in queer theory, race and ethnicity, popular culture, new materialism, and literary criticism. To this inventory, I would add anyone interested in the art of rhetoric, particularly those committed to incorporating new, diverse perspectives into the field’s existing analytical tool chest. Tonally whimsical but nonetheless boldly argued, Style dramatically reframes a timeworn concept in the rhetorical lexicon that many of us have likely—and mistakenly—come to take for granted.Readers of this journal will be immediately seduced by Black’s provocative rethinking of style as elemental. Here, the term “elemental” directs attention toward style as “the rudimentary source of difference that distinguishes one thing from another, something perhaps, more closely aligned with myth than fact: an immaterial force or energy, perhaps supernatural in essence, that imbues everything under the sun” (5). As Black infers throughout the book’s introduction, style is the expression of difference available to all human and nonhuman beings. More than aesthetic ornamentation, or the mere ability to make oneself appear outwardly beautiful, style is a mysterious yet universal condition of possibility underlying the cultivation of a personality. Style names the intertwined processes of self-fashioning and self-discovery that produce individuation as its outcome. And though everyone “has” a style, Black asserts, “not everyone is a stylist” (15). Black posits the figure of the stylist to denote a minoritarian subject who transmutes the experience of oppression into a purposeful performance of self. Upon realizing their exclusion from a majoritarian social order organized by deeply embedded attachments to a hierarchy of difference that discriminates on bases of race, gender, sexuality, class, and other intersecting codes of identification, stylists turn their failure to conform into an opportunity for opening possibilities for alternative futures.In other words, from the limitations that accompany experiences of structural oppression, style authorizes potential. Referencing Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Black suggests stylists tend to dwell in cosmology, a form of storytelling or narrative fabulation about the universe’s origins and one’s place in its ongoing unfolding. “Stylists,” Black poetically avers, are “naturally drawn to understanding the universe better by virtue of developing a more and more acute consciousness of who and what they are and how they came to be” (20). Black highlights style’s fundamental elementality as emerging from cosmic renderings of marginalized experience and the pursuit of a future otherwise. To further illustrate this elemental notion of the stylistic, Black assembles an eclectic corpus of texts by those he calls “subterranean American stylists” (5), namely Quentin Crisp, Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others, whose lives and work he examines over seven chapters divided into three main parts. Each chapter supplies unique insights on the elementals of style, as well as its subject matter, thus allowing Black to support the thesis constructed in the introduction without ever seeming overly redundant.The first part of Style, “The Mystery of Personality: Queerness as Style,” consists of a preface and two chapters oriented around the specific ways stylizations of queer selfhood may function as a survival strategy and, relatedly, a means for exploring elemental mysteries of personality and being. In the initial chapter, Black analyzes texts authored by openly gay memoirist and cultural commentor Quentin Crisp, who became famous for his humorous and often brash approach to publicly discussing social issues during the last half of the twentieth century. In Crisp’s work, Black locates the inextricable relationship between style and repetition. As someone perceived by the public as an “effeminate homosexual” living during an era prior to many of the legal protections hard won by the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, Crisp deployed style ritualistically as a “path to self-preservation” (35). Crisp did so by consistently rejecting status quo standards of masculinity and defiantly repeating a style of self-presentation that blurred lines of intelligibility between available gender categories. “What Crisp has to offer us,” Black contends, is an embodied, temporal theory of style; that is, a “way of transforming being in time into an endless process of becoming: a transvaluation of life into a self-sustaining set of habits that attempt to align one’s body and spirit with the sometimes unrecognizable and not immediately knowable elements of the world” (38). From a close reading of texts like Crisp’s autobiography, readers can grasp the inherent riskiness of stylistic repetition in a social environment that constantly threatens difference with violence. Importantly, Crisp shows how, by doubling down on one’s own commitment to style as a habitualized mode of self-realization, consistent stylistic repetition builds and sustains a “queer utopia” premised in the infectious celebration, rather than the eradication, of stylized difference (40).As the second chapter begins, Black acquaints readers with Style’s topical promiscuity, a certainly queer stylistic choice that runs throughout the book. Black examines writings and other artistic productions by Flannery O’Connor, a twentieth-century writer from Georgia who acquired notoriety for short stories that stylized the U.S. South as a region of unbridled grotesquerie, and who—like Crisp—gained a queer sensibility by finding herself “in the wrong place at the wrong time” (62). Black charts how O’Connor, always well aware that her reading public was composed mostly of cosmopolitan northern audiences that imagined themselves as superior to the freakish southern characters she depicted, used style rhetorically to expose ironic similarities between the elitist gaze of northern readers and the myopic visions of those featured in her fiction. O’Connor’s application of style to draw out the fact that “everyone in the world is a freak” is an insight only the cleverest stylist could both ascertain and deploy artistically as social critique (90). For Black, this facet of O’Connor’s work is evidence of style’s elemental capacity to reveal foundational dynamics that shape the experience of existence (90).The next part of Style, “The Arrow of Time: Style and the Problems of Originality and History,” contains another preface and a pair of chapters centered around style’s temporality and its relationship to cosmology. In the third chapter, Black extends his focus on American literature by closely reading the works of Edgar Allan Poe, a stylist known for authoring works that explore connections between the macabre and the eschatological. Focusing on not only Poe’s signature style across his oeuvre but also the “whole network or infrastructure of the greater assemblage that we know now as ‘Poe,’” Black credits Poe’s enduring relevance as a figure in literary history to his ingenuity as a stylist, one that effectively alchemized his mysterious personality with that of the off-kilter content of his work to fabricate a legacy (98). Black challenges the doctrines of New Criticism, as well as postmodern declarations of “the death of the author,” by insisting that the meaning of Poe’s work and its ability to continually attract new generations of audiences depends on the imbrication of the author’s biography and the polysemy of the text itself (121). Like O’Connor, Poe creates highly stylized encounters between text and reader that permit the stylist to posthumously exert a presence on the world despite their body’s disappearance from it. And therein one can conceive of style’s indefinite effectivity as evidence of a lasting temporal futurity that is cosmic in the way it routes, shapes, and determines the direction of existence.Black nuances this perspective in the fourth chapter, which explores the folksongs of Bob Dylan. Black suggests that Dylan’s music reaches not toward a utopian future but “backward, into the graveyard of the national imagination” (128). Framing Dylan’s body as a vessel for the “ghosts” conjured by folk music, Black provides a description of the artist’s style as dynamically entangled with memories of the past, which he uses to convey his creativity and public-facing persona (132). As Dylan repetitively consults the past, he undergoes embodied, quasi-ritualistic processes of conversion that are “neither flat nor unidirectional (like the arrow of time); they are circular, recursive and prophetic” (143). Consequently, Dylan taps into the cosmological power of style, specifically its capability for transforming the direction of an in-progress history using the materials of seemingly bygone times.The last part of Style, “The Critic as Stylist: Toward a Theory of Attunement,” comprises a final preface and the book’s last three main chapters, all of which advocate for an understanding of style as an attunement to one’s most authentic version of self as it exists in relation to a broader, ever-changing universe of stylized beings. In the fifth chapter, Black insists on a notion of critical reading as an attunement to the sensate musicality of a textual artifact. “Criticism, in this sense, should seek to re-create the sensation of reading-feeling,” Black argues (162, emphasis original). Black points to Toni Morrison’s scholarship, specifically the author’s 2017 essay “Romancing Slavery,” as an exemplary study in how to self-consciously transform the act of critique into a stylistic endeavor, specifically one that is attuned to the vibratory resonance of the past’s impression on the present. Similarly, in Beloved, Morrison achieves a “sound” in the novel that is “sometimes cacophonous, sometimes harmonious” and, in effect, infuses “the text with a musical emphasis that words can do sometimes even better than music can” (175).Black carries his focus on style as an orientation toward criticism into the sixth chapter. He contends that reading and interpretation are active “practices of style” or ways of “attuning our instincts with knowledge” (179). In an impressive survey of numerous schools of thought, including pragmatism, new materialism, and object-oriented ontology, Black makes a case for the humanistic critic as fundamentally a stylist concerned with thinking about and expressing “things that are in their very nature unmeasurable” (179). While some scholars of humanities working in contemporary academic institutions may feel pressures to adopt methodologies of the social or hard sciences to prove their field’s validity and/or relevance, Black mounts a defense of close textual criticism as a method that is not replicable precisely because it entails critics who employ style to better understand their places in the universe while also attuning to cosmic questions and concerns that resist capture by positivist logics and protocols of measurement.In the seventh chapter, Black finalizes this idea by turning toward academic disciplines as sites of latent stylistic creativity. Throughout, Black laments how modern disciplinary contexts are delimited and contained by rigid conventions of professionalization, such as departmental silos in universities and conference presentations at scholarly meetings. A collective embrace of style, Black promises, is the surest path for deterritorializing established fields and nurturing their revitalization as they become something new in the future.Rather than a proper conclusion, Black ends Style with a short but substantive coda. In it, Black compares style to a religious practice: “[style] is a desire to know the universe and the mysteries of the universe . . . a way of searching out mystery and forging a path against the arrow of time” (249). “Style is,” Black continues, “like God, never totally achievable but always somehow still available” (249). With this statement, Black once again makes clear his understanding of style as a way of life through which the humanist can pursue big picture questions with no clear or easy answers. Style is a resource for becoming more like oneself and, in the process, broaching topics that elementally bind everyone together as a collective body in a shared universe.While there is much to appreciate about Style, the book is not without shortcomings. Two come to mind immediately. First, on multiple occasions, Black fails to fully acknowledge the complex existing power dynamics and structures of oppression that restrict and even make impossible certain enactments of style, particularly for people belonging to marginalized communities. For instance, Black spends a great deal of time studying Quentin Crisp as a stylist whose life work facilitated extraordinary examples of queer worldmaking. But Black does not mention Crisp’s late-in-life confession that he perhaps identified more as a trans woman than as a queer man. Crisp admitted that the lack of a widespread vocabulary for describing trans phenomena during his lifetime likely prevented him from ever seeing himself in terms of any other gender identity than the one assigned to him at birth. How would Black’s book have changed if the author had contextualized Crisp as a trans stylist whose style was temporally ahead of the available terminology for describing it? I doubt that posing such a question would have diminished Black’s analysis but would have provided only more nuance for complexifying some of its inferences and implications.Second, as a rhetorician, I do wish Black had acknowledged and taken seriously at least some of the many scholarly treatments of style that have emanated specifically from the field of rhetorical studies. Unfortunately, Black dedicates no space in Style to ancient or contemporary rhetoricians who have written at length on style’s innately rhetorical dimensions. So, we will never know how a rhetorical viewpoint could have enriched Black’s insights. Fortunately, this rather large omission leaves room for future rhetoricians to fill the gaps created by the release of the book.Despite the book’s weaknesses, rhetoricians can glean from Style a version of rhetorical analysis that never quite names itself as such, but nevertheless still inspires inquiries that are indelibly rhetorical. Style is a reminder of our tradition’s possession of theoretical tools that open existential inquiries about what it means to be a human living and seeking meaning in a world that often feels all too precarious. As I finished reading Black’s book for the second time, I began to understand it as a guide for how to alchemize one’s personality and creativity in the exertion of a stylized rhetorical agency ethically collaborated toward the building of a common future. Indeed, Style is a profound performance of intellectual labor that forgoes appeals to canonicality and, in doing so, opens new scholarly routes from which rhetoricians can draw inspiration for reimagining how they approach their own work. Personally, I was inspired to return to the field’s seemingly basic analytical touchstones and begin to reimagine how I convey their meaning in my scholarship and teaching. I believe other rhetoricians will come away from Style with similar impressions, and for this reason, I highly recommend it.

Chemist Ethaline Cortelyou, a significant figure in the emerging profession of technical communication in the 1950s, became a national mentor to women in the sciences, first leading them into the practice of technical editing and then away from it. This article presents a case study of her awakening to the true nature and cost of the patriarchal workplace and her own complicity in actively supporting sexist assumptions and the status quo. During the Sputnik crisis, Cortelyou recognized and overcame her internalized sexism, revised her advice to young women in the sciences, and became a public advocate of workplace reform.

This article offers infrastructural storytelling as a methodological approach attuned to the emplaced dynamics of digital infrastructure. Countering the clean progress narratives of sustainability reports in the technology sector, this approach follows digital infrastructure to two locations: San Francisco, California (Google) and Toronto, Ontario (Digital Realty). Infrastructural storytelling explicates how physical infrastructures produce uneven social, political, and economic realities by investing in some ways of life over others.

This article will explore the potential of recent neuroscience to inform a writing pedagogy aimed at a habitus of plasticity and emotional intelligence. Arguing that our field has never fully realized the embodied pedagogy called for decades ago by compositionists such as Brand and McLeod, by placing affect theory in our field in conversation with neuroscience, the article theorizes the value of understanding the plasticity of embodied affects as meaningful in writing processes. It demonstrates that neuroscience offers advances in our understanding of the emotions involved in learning while providing practical resources to “recategorize” emotional experiences in ways that will enable students to persist in writing-related tasks and to better realize their rhetorical and social goals. Ultimately, addressing the limits of reason and metacognition, the article claims that our pedagogies must confront the new forms of woundedness and ossification that pose increasing challenges to learning today.

After #BlackLivesMatter protests in summer 2020, many leaders in the US South reevaluated monuments dedicated to the confederate and segregation eras. Black affiliates of the University of Arkansas used the Twitter hashtag #BlackatUARK to demand the removal of memorials commemorating a segregationist senator and share their experiences of anti-Black racism on campus. We argue that #BlackatUARK provides a counterpublic memorial of campus life that opposes and transforms dominant public memories, geographies, and subjectivities. Our analysis of the hashtag expands the conceptual boundaries of the kairos/metanoia partnership to show how digital counterpublic memories gain momentum and produce tangible rhetorical effects across both digital and nondigital contexts. During its circulation, the hashtag opens and sustains a kairotic moment fueled by the exigent flow of memories of anti-Black racism on campus. Simultaneously, the hashtag ignites a metanoic moment whereby allies mobilize their regret about a shameful past to plan a more just future.

In the summer of 1881, a group of Black women formed The Washing Society of Atlanta by deploying extraorganizational technical communication to collectively bargain for better working conditions and wages. In this article, we illuminate the ways that Black women operated in a world dominated by an established order of racial hierarchy. We argue that the Washerwomen manifested a particular form of Black technical communication rooted in agency and advocacy.

Abstract The authors present a lab-based research model that engages graduate students in undergraduate research mentorship positions that are mutually beneficial for graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty. They show how this model can be scaled up and adapted across the range of English disciplines. The authors share examples of the different types of research that they have engaged in for linguistics, literary archival studies, creative writing, and writing pedagogy. These examples illustrate how undergraduate research mentorship can prepare graduate students to teach and mentor students using effective methods in various institutional contexts.

In response to the numerous ethical issues involving big data, this article positions the infrastructural dynamics of big data storage and circulation as a concern for social and environmental justice. After identifying how big data accumulate in place-based ecologies that are made vulnerable to sustain ever-increasing quantities of data, the author explains how most, if not all, digital writing practices are relationally tethered to often distant places. In response, the author argues for developing and sustaining critical infrastructure literacies where big data infrastructures are not perceived as ethereal, cloud-like entities, but as materialities with relations to place, land, water, history, climate, culture, nation, and much else. Attending to infrastructure with a cultural rhetorics orientation attentive to relationality, accountability, and story, the article details four critical practices that place digital citizens within relational matrices where they are asked to account for how data practices affect a constellation of people, places, and environments.

Rhetorical studies scholars in both communication and writing and rhetorical studies (WRS) are currently investing in momentous discussions about social justice with the promise of material, consti...

This article examines how digital rhetoric in a big data age affects human and more-than-human life (lands, waters, energies, and so forth) in places beyond immediate rhetorical encounters. By putting particular pressure on what the author calls digital damage, the article draws out the material, ecological, and infrastructural dimensions of Facebook’s New Mexico data center. Coupling Donna Haraway’s methodological tactic of “staying with the trouble” with cultural rhetorics perspectives on story, accountability, and relationality, the essay shows how digital damage can be expressed through a series of interruptive stories. Ultimately, the article intervenes in debates on the Anthropocene, arguing that attending to digital damage through story is one way to register the sensitivities, urgencies, and accountabilities needed to respond to worlds of entangled damage.

It is by now not news that our new geological epoch is here. The Anthropocene, the much-contested name used to describe an age of human-influenced change, proclaims a new way for stratigraphers to ...

When two transgender teenagers posted eerily similar suicide letters to public Tumblr accounts in late 2014 and early 2015, they inspired a viral memorialization effort across the website. In this article, I argue the widespread circulation of transgender suicide rhetoric facilitates the possibility for queer rhetors to provoke collective enactments of rhetorical agency even after their deaths. I identify the suicide letters as an emergent rhetorical form, which on its dissemination and due to its intelligibility, incites a kairotic moment. The kairotic moment may be protracted by a network of bodies who feel and collectively reproduce its sensate exigence. As it becomes viral, the kairotic moment acts as the queer futurity of ecological rhetorical agency because it stretches the visceral pressure of exigence beyond its original spatiotemporal emergence, draws bodies into collaborative networks, and orients invention toward the dismantling of normative rhetorical constructs and the composition of alternative worlds.

Rhetoric and composition, as an academic discipline, argues for a strong link between scholarship and practice. However, restrictive publisher agreements, limited distribution channels, and perceptions about the value of open access among gatekeepers can limit access to scholarship and its potential for application. This study, through analysis of publishing policies and practices for rhetoric and composition journals as well as surveys and interviews with journal editors, examines the current state of open access in the field. Findings reveal the need for more consistent and widespread adoption of more open policies for publishing to extend the impact and value of scholarship in the field.

Although various types of documents are called white papers, in technical marketing communication the white paper is usually a document that describes a new or improved technology in order to generate interest in—and promote sales of—that technology. Most sources discussing the history of the white paper assume that marketing white papers evolved from government white papers. They conflate genre history with etymology. At some point in the mid-20th century, the term white paper—denoting a type of government policy document—began being applied to other types of documents, including eventually a particular form of technical marketing communication. This article proposes a revised history of the marketing white paper as a genre. By examining the formal features and characteristic substance of white papers through the lens of their pragmatic value as social action, we show that the marketing white paper of today has much in common with documents from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.

ABSTRACT This article begins by revisiting the Greek origins of the terms “rhetoric” and “philosophy” from a nominalist and antiessentialist perspective. Though both terms were given early shape by Plato, Isocrates offered a different take on philosophia that arguably is equally legitimate, even if largely neglected historically. In contemporary scholarship, the question is not what is rhetoric or what is philosophy, but what can be gained by deploying rhetorical and philosophical vocabularies to describe and understand the world. Given the problems facing us today, philosophers and rhetoric scholars should engage each other to address challenges where our interests converge.

On November 2, 2016, Theresa Jarnagin Enos unexpectedly passed away at her home in Tucson, Arizona, leaving behind a trailblazing legacy of work in writing, teaching, scholarly editing, (wo)mentori...

The controversy surrounding the ending of Mass Effect 3 serves as a case study of a company’s rejection of cocreation with customers. The game designers and players battled for control of the aesthetic space of the game. The company failed to resolve their conflict effectively, allowing players to use social media to transform tactical action into strategic action. This case study has implications for technical communicators who increasingly are collaborating with users in cocreative relationships.

As rhetoricians combine antiracist and postmodern discourses to compose a hybrid critical discourse on whiteness, they fail to consider the contradictory attitudes toward historical knowledge embodied by the two original discourses. Repressed from the hybrid discourse’s content, the contradictory attitudes nonetheless surface in its style. On one hand, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by active sentences that strive to represent historical dynamics, following the antiracist imperative to ameliorate historical amnesia. On the other, the hybrid discourse’s style is characterized by abstractions and vague actions, which reflect postmodernist skepticism of historical knowledge. Abstract nouns replace specific agents and social groups, while weak verbs gesture toward unspecified practices and processes. These stylistic elements constitute “stactive” sentences that substitute a feeling of historicity for concrete historical dynamics. Uncritical immersion in the stactive style can limit the field’s and the public’s ability to develop a much-needed historically rich discourse on whiteness.

This article shares our experience designing and deploying writing assessment in English Composition I: Achieving Expertise, the first-ever first-year writing Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). We argue that writing assessment can be effectively adapted to the MOOC environment and that doing so reaffirms the importance of mixed-methods approaches to writing assessment and drives writing assessment toward a more individualized,learner-driven, and learner-autonomous paradigm.

Explore the appendixes to Comer and White’s article.

Edward Schiappa published a series of articles and a book in 1990 and 1991 that, collectively, challenged the dominant narrative concerning the Older Sophists and early Greek Rhetorical Theory as well as calling into question certain revisionist historical accounts. In this essay the author provides a narrative about those projects and the responses they elicited in the hope that it provides insights about the production of those publications, as well as an opportunity to revisit certain theoretical and methodological concerns that continue to be relevant to historians of rhetoric and philosophy.

Recent arguments against today's digital reading practices rely on contradictory implicit claims: that digital technologies harm the way we read, and that reading is a set of monolithic and unchanging practices. Both claims are mistaken. Digital reading practices illuminate the diverse forms of value in the labor and capital associated with textual work.

Women technical communicators helped to organize many of the first professional associations for technical communicators in the 1940s and 1950s. For some of these women, organizing was an occupational closure strategy of revolutionary usurpation: They may have hoped to position themselves favorably to shape a future profession that was not predicated on hidden forms of their inclusion. Exclusionary and demarcationary forces, however, seem to have ultimately undermined their efforts, alienating some of them and inducing others to adopt a strategy of inclusionary usurpation. In addition to using gender-sensitive revisions of occupational closure theory to explain the phenomenon of the woman organizer, the author chronicles the emergence of 8 professional associations for technical communicators and identifies the women technical communicators who helped to organize them.

This article examines the historical professional project that created the Institute of Radio Engineers’ Professional Group on Engineering Writing an Speech (IRE PGEWS)—now called the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Professional Communication Society (IEEE PCS)—and recounts the group’s early history in detail. It also traces the career and recovers the professional contributions of the main organizer of PGEWS: Eleanor M. McElwee (1924–2008). The formation of PGEWS in 1957 was an intraoccupational strategy of inclusionary usurpation by “publications people” seeking to elevate their status within the engineering profession rather than attempting to build a separate profession of technical communication.

Abstract Christian fundamentalism is a doctrinal system and an argumentative frame, but it also functions as a “countermovement” whose members advocate resistance from a purported place of ecclesial and political marginalization. This article explores the roots of early fundamentalist resistance rhetoric as it manifested through a series of “countersymbols”—oppositional condensation symbols that invoke the corruption of an idealized community by its other to rhetorically justify resistance as necessary response.

Composition studies has recently increasingly engaged with economic concerns, as evidenced by the 2012 Watson Conference on “Economies of Writing” and a corresponding special issue of JAC. However, that increased engagement has not reflected an increased engagement with economic scholarship, resulting in a rhetoric that represents economy as either beyond intervention or a metaphor for non-economic phenomenon. Attention to economic scholarship can provide composition studies with a rhetoric that opens possibilities for economic agency.

Abstract Rhetoric-composition's turn toward posthumanism and complexity theory promises to help the field grasp contemporary writing. However, the turn's promise is undermined by its disregard for history, overvaluation of complexity, and unwillingness to engage the field's common sense. Giambattista Vico's theories of rhetoric and human development not only challenge the turn's representation of Enlightenment humanism but also point to the turn's inability to help writers participate in today's complex institutions. Vichian ingenium can serve as a touchstone for critical humanist scholarship and pedagogies that seek to chart a course between a bourgeois humanism and a barbaric posthumanism. Notes 1For the helpful comments and criticisms, many thanks go out to the two RR peer reviewers, Louise Phelps and Jeremy Engels, and Timothy Brennan.

Elsie Ray, a research librarian at Anaconda Copper Mining Company, was the prime mover in the effort to organize the Association of Technical Writers and Editors (TWE), one of the organizations that eventually became the Society for Technical Communication (STC). This article seeks to recover Ray's professional contributions and memorialize her as a significant figure in the history of the technical communication profession.

This symposium explores the role(s) College English has (or has not) had in the scholarly work of four scholars. Lynn Bloom explores the many ways College English influenced her work and the work of others throughout their scholarly lives. Edward M. White examines four articles he has published in College English and draws connections between these and the development of college English over the past fifty years. Jessica Enoch studies College English as an archive whose meaning is developed both on and off its pages. And, finally, Byron Hawk troubles the ideas raised in previous essays, drawing attention to how a flagship journal such as College English can operate within the broader network of scholars in the field. Taken together, these perspectives draw attention to how College English connects to the field at large and how authors and readers may see the potential role(s) the journal plays in scholarly publishing in English studies today.

Research Article| December 01 2012 Native Authenticity, Rhetorical Circulation, and Neocolonial Decay: The Case of Chief Seattle’s Controversial Speech Jason Edward Black Jason Edward Black Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (4): 635–645. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940626 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jason Edward Black; Native Authenticity, Rhetorical Circulation, and Neocolonial Decay: The Case of Chief Seattle’s Controversial Speech. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2012; 15 (4): 635–645. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940626 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| June 01 2012 An Exceptional Debate: The Championing of and Challenge to American Exceptionalism American Exceptionalisms: From Winthrop to Winfrey. Sylvia Söderlind and James Taylor Carson.The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. Andrew Bacevich.The Myth of American Exceptionalism. Geoffrey Hodgson.The New American Exceptionalism. Donald E. Pease.A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters. Newt Gingrich. Jason A. Edwards Jason A. Edwards Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (2): 351–367. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940576 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jason A. Edwards; An Exceptional Debate: The Championing of and Challenge to American Exceptionalism. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2012; 15 (2): 351–367. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940576 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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Abstract Since the 1950s, technical communicators have been trying to predict future developments in technology, economics, pedagogy, and workplace roles. Prognosticators have included founders of the profession, academics, business leaders, and practitioners. This article examines their predictions to determine what they reveal about technical communication as a discipline. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank the following people for their assistance: Xiaoyan Huang, Jie Chen, Prasad Patankar, and the interlibrary loan staff at Missouri S&T. These people assisted by requesting, downloading, and photocopying articles and (in a few cases) correcting citations. The authors would also like to thank the journal's editors and copy editors for their contributions. Notes Full citations for in-text source references are either within the text as part of the annotated bibliographies (divided by publication years: 1952–1990, 1991–2000, or 2001–2010) or within the end-of-text list titled "Additional References." Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid Wright David Wright has a PhD in Technical Communication from Oklahoma State University. He is currently Assistant Professor of Technical Communication in the Department of English and Technical Communication at Missouri S&T. Edward A. Malone Edward A. Malone is Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Director of Online Graduate Programs in the Department of English and Technical Communication at Missouri S&T. Gowri G. Saraf Gowri G. Saraf has a BE in Instrumentation Technology from R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore, India, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Tessa B. Long Tessa B. Long has a BA in Spanish from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Irangi K. Egodapitiya Irangi K. Egodapitiya has a BA with majors in English, sociology, and management from the University of Peradeniya, near Kandy, Sri Lanka, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Elizabeth M. Roberson Elizabeth M. Roberson has an AS in Business Administration, a BS in English, and a BS in Writing from Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T.

Kenneth Burke's dramatistic theory of rhetoric presents a significant tension between an “Iron Law of History” and a “comic” attitude. Comic framing in ironic awareness of one's own shortcomings in a conflict, as well as those of one's opponent, moderates aggression but also appears to dissolve the ground for the identification and censure of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, this did not prevent Burke from engaging in the censure of wrongdoing. Although Burke does not explicitly and adequately counter the apparent inconsistency, he implicitly provides a meta-perspective advancing a possible resolution. Forceful scapegoating of scapegoating itself, through comic irony and double-visioned analysis, can guide, in serial progression, warfare and redemptive reunion. Wartime speeches of Franklin D. Roosevelt illustrate the larger comic framing inherent in a rhetorical movement from “factional tragedy” to “comic” regard and reconciliation.

Book Review| March 01 2011 Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric. Michael P. Graves. Jonathan J. Edwards Jonathan J. Edwards Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2011) 14 (1): 180–182. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940532 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan J. Edwards; Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2011; 14 (1): 180–182. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940532 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

AbstractTo the ancient mind, magic was a powerful force to be subjected to or to control. Egypt, more than any other early culture, stressed the importance of intellectual agency as the antidote to the imperfection perceived between foundational thinking and anti-foundational speaking. Just as rhetoric seeks to express the conceptual ideal pursued by philosophical inquiry, these earlier thinkers stressed magical language as the key to unlocking the power of the cosmos. This article will explore the Ancient Egyptian concept of rhetorical magic as a practical wisdom that allows an individual to function fully within the boundaries established by a perceived cosmic order. The Ancient Egyptians applied rhetorical magic to ease the dissonance felt between intellectual engagement and the semiotically saturated cosmology in which they dwelt. These same ancient rhetorical practices hold promise in assisting our own attempts to navigate a world inundated with information.

Recalling moments when he appeared in court or participated in similar proceedings, the author argues that English professors must be ready to defend the values they represent.

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The case of Lucille Pieti, a technical writer at Chrysler, serves as a discipline-specific illustration of some of Rossiter's (1995) generalizations about women scientists and engineers after World War II. Like other women with engineering degrees, Pieti emerged from college with high hopes, only to find herself consigned to one of the traditional ghettos for women scientists and engineers: technical communication. Her case is unusual, however, because she became a national celebrity.

Research Article| January 01 2009 Calvin and Hobbes: Trinity, Authority, and Community Jonathan J. Edwards Jonathan J. Edwards Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2009) 42 (2): 115–133. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655346 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan J. Edwards; Calvin and Hobbes: Trinity, Authority, and Community. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2009; 42 (2): 115–133. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655346 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2009 The Pennsylvania State University2009The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The technology of movable type in early modern Europe created new communication challenges (e.g., typographical errors) for book producers. These challenges were greater with books written in learned or foreign languages or about scientific or technical subjects. Printers experimented with different strategies to ensure correctness, but the best solution came from delegating jobs to specialists. Freelance scholars were employed by authors, printers, and booksellers to correct books before publication, and some of these learned correctors were early versions of technical editors. Their history may offer insight into current communication concerns, such as the role of learned correctors in our present technological age.

Review Article| April 01 2006 Ethics, Motives, and Character in Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Rhetoric Mike Edwards Mike Edwards Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2006) 6 (2): 353–358. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2005-009 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mike Edwards; Ethics, Motives, and Character in Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. Pedagogy 1 April 2006; 6 (2): 353–358. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2005-009 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Roundtable: Reviews of the Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication You do not currently have access to this content.

Although most portfolio evaluation currently uses some adaptation of holistic scoring, the problems with scoring portfolios holistically are many, much more than for essays, and the problems are not readily resolvable. Indeed, many aspects of holistic scoring work against the principles behind portfolio assessment. We have from the start needed a scoring methodology that responds to and reflects the nature of portfolios, not merely an adaptation of essay scoring. I here propose a means for scoring portfolios that allows for relatively efficient grading where portfolio scores are needed and where time and money are in short supply. It is derived conceptually from portfolio theory rather than essay-testing theory and supports the key principle behind portfolios, that students should be involved with reflection about and assessment of their own work. It is time for the central role that reflective writing can play in portfolio scoring to be put into practice.

(2002). Sentences in Harry Potter, Students in Future Writing Classes. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 170-187.

Abstract Educational settings tend to provide highly specialized contexts for learning. In contrast, workplaces are increasingly multidisciplinary, presenting challenges often not considered in the technical communication curriculum. Our technical communication program is addressing this issue by building partnerships with programs in mechanical engineering and industrial engineering. In this article, we discuss a study of our initial semester matching technical communication students with teams of engineers in a capstone, client-based design course. We focus on challenges the students faced in the multidisciplinary, client-based experience. Based on our initial results, we suggest that academic and professional settings could do more to address the types of challenges identified. We call for a more inclusive pedagogy, one that expands the boundaries of technical communication and welcomes multidisciplinary experience in shared contexts.

ssessment is a peculiar field within college English studies. In one sense, every faculty member is engaged directly in it, assigning, responding to, and grading student papers; many members of English departments also participate in one way or another in placement testing for entering students or in mid-career or exit writing assessments for more advanced students. In another sense, external assessment of our work is always there in subtle and unacknowledged ways, defining what we do and how well we do it, how much power we can exert in controlling our curriculum, and how our scholarly work is valued. In this second sense, even more than in the first, assessment affects the way our work is perceived by others inside and outside the academy and hence helps determine the resources we receive for everything from duplicating to new faculty positions. The common misperceptions of our fieldthat as writing teachers we are picky grammarians and value flowery prose or as literature teachers we are irresponsible revolutionaries, for instance-are damaging cliches that arise in large part from assessment gone awry. Once we are evaluated as unable to fulfill our roles, no one in a position of power need take seriously our claims, and our discipline becomes easy to dismiss as an expensive frill. We will defend our private world of assessment as a matter between our students and us, at most a matter to be shared with our colleagues. But that public world of external assessment seems beyond our reach, if-not our ken, and our instincts are always to withdraw, to claim professional privilege. Yet with so much at stake, no English faculty member can avoid involvement in assessment, although many of us would prefer to see our work in other terms. In yet another sense, writing assessment has become an important specialty

Notes that writing assessment has become an important specialty within composition studies with links to such “suspicious partners” as educational research, statistics, and politics and with profound effects on public policy and educational funding. Discusses the modern era of writing assessment beginning during the fall of 1971 an its implications. Considers assessment as a site of conflict.

Richard Marback. Plato's Dream of Sophistry. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. xii + 163 pages. Gregory Crane. Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii + 348 pages. Josiah Ober. Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. xiv + 417 pages. Harvey Yunis. Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. xv + 316 pages. Christine Farris and Chris M. Anson, eds. Under Construction: Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice. Logan: Utah State UP, 1998. 332 pages. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994. Pages viii + 452. $29.95 paper. Tharon Howard. A Rhetoric of Electronic Communities. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1997. Pages xii + 203. $24.95 paper. James Porter. Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998. Pages xiv + 203. $24.95 paper. Russel K. Durst. Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1999. 189 pages. $22.95 paper. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. New York: Guilford Press, 1999. Pages, xl + 627. Richard E. Miller. As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. 249 pages. Lynn Z. Bloom. Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration. Logan: Utah UP, 1998. 288 pages. $19.95 paper. Duane H. Roen, Stuart C. Brown, and Theresa Enos, eds. Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. 233 pages. $22.50 paper. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, ed. Women/Writing/Teaching. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. 294 pages. $19.95 paper. Peter Dimock. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. 118 pages. $12.95 paper.

This article examines the behavioral differences of essay scorers who demonstrate different levels of proficiency for a psychometric scoring task. The authors compare three proficiency groups to identify differences in (a) essay features they consider, (b) their understanding of the scoring rubric, and (c) their decision-making procedures. Results indicate scorers with different levels of proficiency do not focus on different essay features when making evaluative decisions but their understandings of the scoring criteria may vary. Proficient scores are more likely to focus on general features of an essay when making evaluative decisions and to adopt values espoused by the scoring rubric than are less proficient scorers. Also, proficient scorers make evaluations by reading the entire essay and then reviewing its content, whereas less proficient scorers may interrupt the reading process to monitor how well the essay satisfies the scoring criteria. Finally, the authors discuss implications for scorer selection and training.

(1997). The classical tradition: Rhetoric and oratory. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 7-38.

The essays in this book, stemming from a national conference of the same name, focus on the single subject required of nearly all college studentscomposition.Despite its pervasiveness and its significance, composition has an unstable status within the curriculum. Writing programs and writing faculty are besieged by academic, political, and financial concerns that have not been well understood or addressed.At many institutions, composition functions paradoxically as both the gateway to academic success and as the gatekeeper, reducing access to academic work and opportunity for those with limited facility in English. Although writing programs are expected to provide services that range from instruction in correct grammar to assistingor resistingpolitical correctness, expanding programs and shrinking faculty get caught in the crossfire. The bottom line becomes the firing line as forces outside the classroom determine funding and seek to define what composition should do.In search of that definition, the contributors ask and answer a series of specific and salient questions: What implicationsintellectual, political, and institutionalwill forces outside the classroom have on the quality and delivery of composition in the twenty-first century? How will faculty and administrators identify and address these issues? What policies and practices ought we propose for the century to come?This book features sixteen position papers by distinguished scholars and researchers in composition and rhetoric; most of the papers are followed by invited responses by other notable compositionists. In all, twenty-five contributors approach composition from a wide variety of contemporary perspectives: rhetorical, historical, social, cultural, political, intellectual, economic, structural, administrative, and developmental. They propose solutions applicable to pedagogy, research, graduate training of composition teachers, academic administration, and public and social policy. In a very real sense, then, this is the only book to offer a map to the future of composition.

has misunderstood me, I shall maintain, and the misunderstanding matters for our collective understanding of antifoundationalism and the genre of writing known as history. In this reply I begin with claims that are intended to challenge SC's reading of my work: First, I am an antifoundationalist. Second, I do not oppose neosophistic scholarship. Third, SC's reading of my work is overly reductionist. Then, in conclusion, I want to suggest that SC's account of antifoundationalism is problematic and that a more pragmatic version of antifoundationalism would be more consistent with SC's presuppositions and politically more useful.1 I do not understand why SC believes I am a foundationalist, since I have identified repeatedly my theoretical preferences for antifoundationalist social constructionism. SC simply proclaims, ex cathedra, that Poulakos, Crowley, Vitanza, Welch, and Jarratt are antifoundationalists, and Havelock, Kerferd, de Romilly, Cole, and I are foundationalists. Though I would be honored to be counted as part of either group, I do not understand why I am in the group that is supposed to move to the back of the bus. Why are these scholars (all of whom have published in classics journals) to be branded foundationalist? Just because they do history and work with original Greek texts? And, even if these scholars are (gasp!) foundationalists, precisely how does that make their work any less valuable?

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Edward A. Kearns, Michael Walker, Kathleen McCoy, Mark Balhorn, Four Comments on "The Politics of Grammar Handbooks: Generic He and Singular They", College English, Vol. 56, No. 4 (Apr., 1994), pp. 471-475

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Part 1 Perspectives: education by engagement and construction - a strategic education initiative for a multimedia renewal of American education, Ben Shneiderman is there a class in this text? creating knowledge in the electronic classroom, John M. Slatin varieties of virtual - expanded metaphors for computer-mediated learning, Patricia Ann Carlson cognitive architecture in hypermedia instruction, Henrietta Nickels Shirk multimedia - informational alchemy or conceptual typography?, Evelyn Schlusselberg and V. Judson Harward dimensions, context, and freedom - the library in the social creation of knowledge, Gregory T. Anderson multimedia and the library and information studies curriculum, Kathleen Burnett the virtual museum and related epistemological concerns, Glen Hoptman an epistemic analysis of the interaction between knowledge, education, and technology, David Chen the many faces of multimedia - how new technologies might change the nature of the academic endeavour, Alison Hartman, et al. Part 2 . . . and practices: bootstrapping hypertext - student-created documents, intermedia, and the social construction of knowledge, George P. Landow the CUPLE project - a hyper- and multimedia approach to restructuring physics education, E.F. Redish, et al collaborative virtual communities - using Learning Constellations, a multimedia ethnographic research tool, Ricki Goldman-Segall the crisis management game of Three Mile Island - using multimedia simulation in management education, Thomas M. Fletcher restructuring space, time, story, and text in advanced multimedia learning environments, Janet H. Murray the virtual classroom - software for collaborative learning, Starr Roxanne Hiltz medical centre - a modular hypermedia approach to programme design, Nels Anderson prototyping multimedia - lessons from the visual computing group at project Athena Centre for educational computing initative, Ben Davis Engineering-Design Instructional Computer System (EDICS), David Gordon Wilson computers and design activities - their mediating role in engineering education, Shahaf Gal the need for negotiation in cooperative work, Beth Adelson and Troy Jordan teaching hypermedia concepts using hypermedia techniques, Peter A. Gloor computer integrated documentation, Guy Boy the Worcester State College Elder Connection - using multimedia and information technology to promote intergenerational education, Virginia Z. Ogozalek, et al paradoxical reactions and powerful ideas - educational computing in a Department of Physics, Sherry Turkle.

Sixteenth-century English humanist educators claimed that their educational programs prepared students for civic life by providing not just technical training in language use, but a more important ethical and moral training. The present discussion is to examine this claim, particularly as it applies to the question of what might have been the role of imitation exercises informing students' ethical character. When one considers imitation pedagogy in the general context of humanist education and in the particular context of the reading method prescribed by Erasmus, one finds that such exercises served not only as means by which student writers might assimilate the characteristic style and habits of thinking of the models they choose, but, in fact, such exercises were tools for students' ethical indoctrination. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine question whether humanist educators actually could have made good their claim to provide moral training or preparation for civic life (122). Examining the evidence available for the practices of humanist teachers, Grafton and Jardine contend that humanist education at its best was little more than training in Latin language skills. In support of their contention, Grafton and Jardine discuss the early fifteenth-century teaching practices of Guarino Guarini of Verona and the lectures of later Roman and Florentine rhetoricians, such as Buonaccorso Massari. By examining students' notes from such lectures, Grafton and Jardine conclude that the approach of these humanists to the classical texts was so unstructured and fraught with philological detail that students could not have been prepared by such education to confront larger questions concerning the attitudes and beliefs [which inform an entire text] either to endorse them, or to challenge them (58-67). To consider Grafton and Jardine's question as it applies to sixteenth-century English humanist educators' use of imitation pedagogy, one must first recall how the political conditions and religious strife of the English Renaissance affected the sort of education the English humanists advocated. Political and religious indoctrination became important aspects of sixteenth-century English humanist education even while such education retained the characteristic rhetorical nature of earlier Renaissance humanist education. According to William Bouwsma, early Renaissance Italian humanism was characterized by an emphasis on rhetoric, a cultural relativism, and an intellectual rejection of older conceptions of order, or cosmos. But northern European Renaissance culture of 1450 onwards was characteristically inclined to reassert intellectual order and authority as political, religious, and cultural forces of order (particularly the monarchies and the papacy) reasserted their power (422-431). In England, the Tudor monarchy began to assert first its political authority and later, with Henry VIII's break with Rome, its religious authority. Grafton and Jardine explain that at the same time it was left for northern European humanist educators, particularly Erasmus, to make humanism practicable in the classroom, to change philological method into pedagogical method. Fifteenth-century Italian humanists at Rome and Florence had lectured brilliantly, elucidating by philological method obscure classical texts

This book, the first to focus exclusively on portfolio assessment, is practical, theoretical, and broad in scope, offering places to start rather than claiming to be definitive. The articles, all by teachers with considerable experience in using portfolio grading, are free of jargon, making sound composition and assessment theory available to every reader, regardless of the level of writing taught.

George A. Kennedy, trans. Aristotle: On Rhetoric (subtitled A Theory of Civic Discourse). Oxford University Press, 1991. 335 + xiii pages. The Importance of George A. Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric as a Pedagogical Tool Kennedy's Rhetoric as a Contribution to Rhetorical Theory Kennedy's Aristotle: on Rhetoric as a Work of Translation∗ James J. Murphy, ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth‐Century America. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1990. 241 + v pages. Teaching the History of Writing Instruction Thomas Miller. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 318 + viii pages. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb, eds. Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in the Postmodern Age. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. iv + 242 pages. Sandra Stotsky, ed. Connecting Civic Education and Language Education: The Contemporary Challenge. New York: Teachers College Press of Columbia University, 1991. Janis Forman, ed. New Visions of Collaborative Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1992. 200 pages. $23.50.

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Patricia P. Matsen, Philip Rollinson, Marion Sousa, eds. Readings from Classical Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. viii + 382 pages. Roderick P. Hart. Modern Rhetorical Criticism. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman/Little Brown, 1990. iv + 542 pages. Susan Miller. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 267 pages. Bruce Lincoln. Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 238 pages. Gregory Clark. Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation: A Social Perspective on the Function of Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. xix + 93 pages. Lawrence J. Prelli. A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. xi + 320 pages. Kathleen E. Welch. The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990. 186 pages.

We have been trained to think of patterns, with the exception of those in music, as fixed affairs. It is easier and lazier that way but, of course, all nonsense. In truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts, and only secondarily pegged down by various sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms characteristically impose. --Gregory Bateson

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A standard in its field, this new edition provides the most up-to-date current thinking on rhetoric.

This book is a major breakthrough for developers of writing assessment programs who must certify the writing competency of undergraduate students. Legislators and accreditation boards across the nation have called for and implemented large scale projects to measure educational outcomes. This single source provides comprehensive information on the history, underlying concepts, and process of conducting a large scale writing assessment program at a specific institution of higher education. The handbook opens with an analysis of the rationale for the assessment of writing during the junior year of the undergraduate curriculum. The authors then turn to a case study of the success of their own institutional wide assessment program. A history is provided of 20th century writing assessment practices; as well, attention is given to defining levels of literacy. After describing an assessment process model, discussion turns to the design of questions, the administration of the assessment, the rating of papers, and the statistical analysis of data. Attention is also given to the design of a course for those who are unsuccessful on the assessment. The study closes with directions for further research and over 200 references in the bibliography.

To understand the ways that teachers adapt writing instruction to a microcomputer classroom, the researchers observed and recorded activities minute-by-minute in four classes for a full semester of introductory composition. Two experienced teachers each taught two classes: one traditional class and one class that met for half of its time in a microcomputer classroom. This report contrasts their classes, calling attention to (a) the time pressures created by teaching with computers, (b) issues in training students to be proficient at word processing and revising, (c) ways a microcomputer classroom can foster workshop approaches to teaching writing, (d) the need for carefully structured classroom activities, and (e) the importance of teachers sharing with students common values for learning with computers in a group setting.

I recently attended a conference previously unknown to me and to most college English faculty: The Assessment Forum of American Association for Higher Education (AAHE). (I was there to give a paper on measurement of writing ability and on evaluation of writing programs.) The experience of that conference ought to have been routine; after all, I have directed a variety of large-scale writing programs and I have been speaking and publishing on writing assessment for over fifteen years; I have also spent many years as chair of an English department and as a writing program administrator. But experience of hearing papers and discussions at that conference was not at all routine; it was both troubling and enlightening, as well as quite new in unexpected ways. My first reaction to sessions on writing measurement at AAHE was that I had entered a new world. The papers not only made different assumptions about writing than I, as a writing teacher, writer, and researcher, normally make, but came out of a wholly different scholarly community of discourse, one that calls itself the assessment movement. The references were entirely unfamiliar, procedures were different, and approach to subject struck me as insensitive to what writing is all about. But all of these differences seemed to center on way people spoke (and hence thought) about measurement: I was in a foreign country, language was different, and that difference changed everything. I had entered a new discourse community in a field in which I was a well-published specialist, and none of my knowledge or experience seemed to matter. And yet discourse was about measuring writing ability and evaluating writing programs, that is, about what has (however accidentally) become my specialty. I felt disoriented. When I returned home from AAHE I found a flier from Jossey-Bass, publisher of my 1985 book, Teaching and Assessing Writing. I don't expect book to appear on every flier marketing division puts out, but this little

George Kimball Plochmann & Franklin E. Robinson, A Friendly Companion to Plato's GORGIAS. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 415 pp. Perspectives on Literacy. Edited by Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. Pp. xix + 476.

This monograph is designed to help English teachers see what it is that the literary theory of deconstruction has to offer them as they pursue their work. The monograph focuses on the implications of deconstruction for the English classroom in American schools. It includes a discussion of Jacques Derrida's philosophy of reading and writing a review of some American critics' reactions to deconstruction and responses made by English teachers to the theory; and an examination of a deconstructive reading of writing pedagogy as it underscores the appropriateness of much of the lore connected with process pedagogy. The monograph also contains an appendix on How to Read Derrida, three pages of endnotes, a brief glossary of deconstructionist terminology, a 70-item list of references, an 11-item list of Derrida works not cited in the text, a 38-item bibliography of works on Derrida and deconstruction, and a 9-item list of exemplary readings on deconstruction. (RAE) *********************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * ******,,,,,..********************************************************,,,,,,,,,,,,

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Richard Leo Enos, The Literate Mode of Cicero's Legal Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. xii + 127 pages. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Ixxvi + 415 pages. Jasper Neel, Plato, Derrida, and Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 252 pages. William A. Covino, The Art of Wondering: A Revisionist Return to the History of Rhetoric. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook; Heinemann, I988. 141 pages. Bruce A: Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education. Foreword by Joseph L. Featherstone. Columbia University: Teachers College Press, 1986. 293 pages. Jean‐François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Frederick Jameson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 110 pages.

This program evaluation was undertaken to assess the broad, measurable effects of using computers to teach introductory college composition. In total, 24 classes were studied—12 control classes and 12 experimental—with the experimental computer classes meeting in the lab for half of their instructional time. Data on the success of the program were collected from a range of sources: pre- and posttests of student writing under both impromptu and take-home conditions; pre- and posttests of writing anxiety; records on attendance, tardiness, withdrawals, and homework and essay assignment completion; end-of-term course evaluation by both teachers and students; and self-report data collected from teacher meetings and teacher logs. Results favored the use of computers, with computer students revising and improving their posttest essays (especially discourse-level features) at levels significantly better than those of regular students. Those students in experimental sections who chose to compose on computers at the end of the term outperformed the group as a whole and performed significantly better than those experimental students who chose to compose with pen and paper. Attitudinal data from both students and teachers also favored the use of computers.

To get a clear view of any scene or activity, one needs a room with a view. It is helpful if the room commands an expansive view-at least on three sides. (The blindside provides a convenient excuse if the viewer fails to note some important feature of the scene.) And if the view is to be truly retrospective and prospective, one cannot be stiff-necked. It takes an ounce of temerity and a pound of arrogance for me to do a survey of the composition scene, because I am not at all confident that I am any more qualified than the next teacher of English to explore the territory. My room with a view has been paid for, as yours has, with a lot of toil and trouble: teaching composition for several years at one or more schools; talking shop with colleagues; listening in on the grapevine; reading the journals and the pertinent books; attending conferences and conventions. But maybe the one experience I have had that most teachers have not had was a six-year tour as the editor of a major composition journal. An editorship sets up a marvelous vantage point from which the view can be as expansive as the one that a forest ranger gets from his mountain-top tower. Even if my eyesight is not 20/20, I can still point out salient features of the landscape to the interested spectator. Despite the myopia of the guide, the survey of the scene, whether retrospective or prospective, can be both fascinating and instructive for the spectator.

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Edward B. Versluis, Response to Bruce T. Petersen, et alia, "Computer-Assisted Instruction and the Writing Process: Questions for Research and Evaluation,", College Composition and Communication, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Oct., 1985), pp. 346-347

Prepared for engineering and science students, this article stresses the preparation for the talk, the judicious use of notes, and the effective use of visual aids. To deliver a talk effectively, students must know the elements of delivery: ample projection of the voice, natural movements, relevant gestures, and eye contact. Furthermore, students should be aware of such errors as the following: poor board work, lack of movement and enthusiasm, overuse of notes, monotonous voice, poor eye contact, repetition, and the use of slang and colloquialisms. To make effective oral presentations, one should develop an extensive vocabulary and should evaluate his delivery.