Marking the point of departure of the clause, Theme position is used to identify subject matter, the writer’s angle on that subject matter, and the direction of travel of the text. Learning to exploit this cohesive resource is essential to the learning-to-write process, becoming increasingly relevant in late childhood as children begin to write longer texts in a wider variety of registers. This research explores how children achieve this, by comparing texts written by 17 children aged 8-9 and 9-10 years, analyzing changes to thematization and identifying children’s “gateways” into new repertoires. Findings reveal that the writers’ choice of “macroTheme” (an overarching initial thesis statement) significantly influenced subsequent thematic choices. Furthermore, experimentation with new thematic resources reflected the writers’ adoption of a meta-perspective elicited by appropriation of modeled macroThemes, the integration of counterarguments, and recognition of the potential of abstract Themes to provide new insights into lived experience.

Abstract The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) opened the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History in Dallas, Texas in September 2019. Through immersive exhibits and advanced technology, the museum communicates what ICR purports to be the truth of creation science. Informed by the rhetorical concept of copia, I argue that the Discovery Center deploys sensory evidence to support creationism through the rhetorical strategies of rotation, immersion, and interruption. These material strategies use the senses as vehicles to communicate multiple arguments simultaneously, direct museumgoers’ attention, and amplify lived experiences as valid ways of knowing and evaluating the science of human origins. I conclude by noting the role of sensory rhetorical strategies in other scientific controversies and encouraging additional scholarship into how sensory evidence offers convincing challenges to scientific knowledge.

Using a multi-methodological approach, we analyze member comments in Watts Up With That (WUWT), a climate skeptical Facebook group. Quantitative topic modeling revealed that members claim hyperrationality to undermine climate science. Science-based terms were often connected to other topics, such as immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, creating rhetorical constellations that shifted rhetoric from technical spaces into political and ideological ones. These findings have implications for dealing with the challenge of misinformation’s circulation on social media.

Using weekly Writing Accountability Groups in intro-level writing courses provides benefits for both instructors and students without taking up synchronous class time.

This study surveyed and analyzed feminist methodologies in four composition journals across ten years. Our findings offer a number of important checks upon methodological and epistemological conversations in composition research, particularly how the methods we choose demonstrate our attention to social justice, the materialities of research practice, and the situatedness of knowledge claims.

Abstract In this conversation series, we discuss some of the enduring and evolving interests that the subfield of visual rhetoric provokes for us. We begin with how we found visual rhetoric; questions of disciplinarity and methodology; issues of archive and field; concerns about the objects and scenes for visual rhetoric; and conclude with a focus on the future, core and evolving concepts, and pedagogy.

Energy Darwinism is a metaphor used in economic discourse that proposes markets will naturally become greener and cleaner as fossil fuel costs increase. Influenced by Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, I perform a close reading of the metaphor to analyze its presence in two Citigroup reports. Based on this reading, I argue that the Energy Darwinism metaphor anthropomorphizes markets as acting subjects whose economic autonomy should not be violated and supports the cleansing of industry’s environmental sins. These features of Energy Darwinism construct what I call neoliberal piety, which frames environmental restoration not as inherently valuable but as a by-product of economic success and technological progress. The Energy Darwinism metaphor provides an important case study for analyzing contemporary energy discourse, the rhetorical obstacles that prevent imagining sustainable futures, and the ways we might rework neoliberal assumptions in service of those sustainable futures.

Book Review| June 01 2019 Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric In Situ Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric In Situ. By Michael Middleton, Aaron Hess, Danielle Endres, and Samantha Senda-Cook. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015; pp. xxix-210. $67.49 cloth; $44.99 paper. Caitlin Frances Bruce Caitlin Frances Bruce University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2019) 22 (2): 332–335. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.2.0332 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Caitlin Frances Bruce; Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric In Situ. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2019; 22 (2): 332–335. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.2.0332 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. © 2019 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Under the rapid advances of digital technology, traditional paper-based forms of reading and writing are steadily giving way to digital-based literacies, in theory as well as in application. Drawing on a study of literacy in a medical workplace context, this article examines critically the shift toward computer-mediated textual practices. While a considerable body of research has investigated benefits and issues associated with digital literacy tools in medicine, we consider the affordances of paper-based practices. Our analysis of verbal interaction and textual artifacts drawn from a qualitative study of oncology visits indicates that the uses of pen and paper are advantageous for both doctor and patient. Specifically, they allow doctors to process and package information in ways that are favorable to their personal modus operandi, and they enable patients to participate in the medical visit and take an active role in managing their medical treatment. Understanding the affordances of paper-based literacy provides insights for refining digital tools as well as for motivating the design of possible hybrid forms and digital-analog intersections that can best support medical practices.

This essay assesses W.E.B. Du Bois’s response to Booker T. Washington based on the economic principles structuring public-intellectual intervention in social crisis. Arguing that public-intellectual work relies on ethos-driven rhetorical engagement that conflates the public intellectual and his conceptual intervention as a single product to be marketed, I recontextualize the debate between the two thinkers in order to account for the intersection of their discursive activities in terms of competing public-intellectual models. While Washington relied on a closed-market model that situated him as the spokesperson for an otherwise silent black community, Du Bois worked to create opportunity for deliberation among a number of black publics, and Du Bois’s more democratically minded rhetorical modeling offers a version of public-intellectual work that resonates with the needs of the current moment.

Since the adoption and subsequent fade of the Wyoming Resolution, we have seen the political economy of writing instruction change remarkably. Certainly, composition studies’ disciplinary viability seems more solid, but the proportion of contingent writing teachers has increased to almost 70 percent. The authors of this article attribute these trends to “neoliberal creep” and attempt to think through their effects on our work and our students.

K6015, a South Korean firm seeking to commercialize its magnet technology in the US market, entered a technology commercialization training program structured as a competition. Through this program, K6015 (and others in the program) used several genres to progressively interest different sets of stakeholders. To understand how K6015 applied these genres, we analyze this case study in terms of interessement, a concept from actor-network theory, and standing sets of transformations, a related concept from workplace writing studies in which enacting a set of genres entails a controlled, progressive transformation of arguments. We examine the entire competition process, using K6015 and three other competitors to illustrate this process and to examine rhetorical transformations responding to different criteria. In enacting these standing sets of transformations, K6015 and other competitors transformed their innovations into commercialized technologies–and transformed themselves from innovators into entrepreneurs. Finally, we discuss implications for understanding entrepreneurship rhetorically.

Research Article| December 01 2014 Weapons and Words: Rhetorical Studies of the Gabrielle Giffords Shootings Thomas A. Hollihan; Thomas A. Hollihan Thomas A. Hollihan is Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Francesca Marie Smith Francesca Marie Smith Francesca Marie Smith is a doctoral candidate and Provost's Fellow at the USC Annenberg School. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2014) 17 (4): 577–584. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.4.0577 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Thomas A. Hollihan, Francesca Marie Smith; Weapons and Words: Rhetorical Studies of the Gabrielle Giffords Shootings. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2014; 17 (4): 577–584. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.4.0577 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. © 2014 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract In this essay, we examine public responses to Jared Lee Loughner’s attempted assassination of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, focusing in particular on the rhetorical strategies employed by political conservatives. We argue that the most prominent conservative reactions either undermined the potential for reasoned debate and a cohesive narrative regarding the causes of the attack or, by emphasizing Loughner’s agency as an individual, deranged actor, painted the event in a way that failed to provide transformative redemption, foreclosed even the possibility of a rhetorically satisfying sense of justice, and preempted what could otherwise have been a rich, deliberative deployment of civility. We utilize Kenneth Burke’s dramatism in speculating about possible alternative interpretations of the situation, hopeful that such an analysis might offer both the public and the government more effective rhetorical resources for dealing with and even preventing such increasingly common tragedies. In particular, we advocate the use of a hybrid, tragicomic frame—a sort of Burkean Serenity Prayer in which we accept the things we cannot change while still finding the inspiration, strength, and wisdom to respond productively—alongside a multifaceted set of pentadic ratios to address the complex demands created by mental illness.

Institutional ethnography seeks to uncover how things happen—how institutional discourse compels and shapes practice(s) and how norms of practice speak to, for, and overindividuals. The Faculty and Staff Standpoints project is shaped by this methodology, as it explores writing center staff and faculty relationships to their work.

‘Here’s a Chance to Dance our Way Out of our Constrictions’: P-Funk’s Black Masculinity and the Performance of Imaginative Freedom” considers the ways that George Clinton’s two funk projects, Parliament and Funkadelic, create new spaces for nonnormative heterosexuality and creative production. I explore issues of embodiment , sexual fluidity, and community in P-Funk’s iconography, lyrics and sound and then consider ways that black male fans have gained a sense of imaginative freedom from their music. P-Funk’s solidly funking music, hallucinatory and often politicized music, experimental cover art and wildly threatrical stage shows create a new a queer space for black heterosexual men. Most significantly, P-Funk’s music explores black experience, particularly bodily, sexual and sensual experience at points of ambiguity, vulnerability, pain, desire, and laughter, using tools of music that speak to their listeners individually and internally, as well as collectively. This power to harness emotionally strong and sometimes inchoate feeling had a powerful effect on its audience—prompting some to find unity and empathy with other black men.

This essay offers a chronology of over sixty works that have directly innovated, solidified, or critiqued feminist research methodologies in the study of historic rhetoric and composition over the past four decades. The ongoing conversation about feminist research in rhetoric and composition continues to raise questions about method, methodology, and canonicity just as the research itself continues to recover and re-vision a wealth of historic work. This essay, in its broad review, presents readers a panoramic snapshot of the major trends and methodological debates that have shaped feminist historic scholarship in our field.

Mapping the Terrain of Feminist Cyberscapes, Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi Map of Location I: The Body in Virtual Space Technological Fronts: Lesbian Lives On the Joanne Addison and Susan Hilligoss Postmodernist Looks at the Body Electric: Email, Female and Hijra, Sarah Sloane Re-Membering Mama: The Female Body Embodied and Disembodied Communication, Barbara Monroe Making the Map: Interview with Helen Schwartz Map of Location II: Constructions of Online Identities Our Studnets, Our Selves I, A Mestiza, Continually Walk Out of One Culture Into Another: Alba's Story, Sibylle Gruber Pedagogy, Emotion and The Protocol of Care, Shannon Wilson. Writing (Without) The Body: Gender and Power in Networked Discussion Groups, Donna LeCourt Making the Map: Interview with Gail Hawisher Map of Location III: Discourse Communities Online and in Classrooms A Virtual Locker Room in Classroom Chat Spaces: The Politics of Men as Other, Christine Boese The Use of Electronic Communication in Facilitating Feminine Modes of Discourse: An Irigaraian Heuristic, Morgan Gresham and Cecilia Hartley Over the Line, Online, Gender Lines: Email and Women in the Classroom, Dene Grigar Maps of Location IV: Virtual Coalitions and Collaborations Designing Feminist Multimedia for The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Mary Hocks Voicing The Landscape: A Discourse of Their Own, Laura Julier, Paula Gillespie, And Kathleen Blake Yancey Thirteen Ways of Looking at an M-Word, Margaret Daisley and Susan Romano Making The Map: Interview With Mary Lay and Elizabeth Tebeaux Map of Location V: The Future: to be Mapped Later Feminist Research in Computers and Composition, Lisa Gerrard An Online Dialogue with the Contributors to Feminist Cyberscapes Mapping the Future: Interview with Cynthia Selfe

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Argues that both composition and literary studies have a common pedagogical vocation and that by harvesting some very general insights from two decades of cultural critique, English departments can develop curricula that will resolve a good deal of the conflict between literature and composition and improve instruction in both.

Argues that both composition and literary studies have a common pedagogical vocation and that by harvIndicates how current stylistic criticism might engage ideological issues by more fully developing M. Bakhtin’s ideas through an approach called cultural stylistics. Notes that Bakhtin’s own work was very much concerned with the divorce between ideological and formalist analysis, and his “sociological stylistics” was intended to synthesize the two.

Our current national policy regarding sexual harassment, expressed through legal, economic, and popular discourses, exemplifies the Foucauldian paradigm in its attempt to regulate sexuality through seemingly authorless texts. Arguing that regulation through such "discursive technologies"; need not lead to the effects of domination that Foucault recognized, I propose a user‐centered approach to policy drafting that values the knowledge of workers as users and makers of workplace policy.

Argues that a process-oriented nonjudgmental instructional approach can help English-as-a-Second-Language community college students become better writers. Discusses the principle of nonjudgmental awareness and its rationale, and describes five pedagogical techniques used in a nonjudgmental writing class.

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A discussion of the effect of writing on ESL students’ reading performance provides data to demonstrate that “formal,” analytical written response to text helps ESL students become more proficient readers of English.

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An aging technical writer finds that in his nomadic career the same coworkers seem to appear at each new facility. There's Faultless Flora, Hurricane Harry, Castin Bronze, Gertie Guardian, Alphabet Al, and Robbie Rembrant. In his latest job, the technical writer hears about a new character.

Described are techniques which relate to the impact of communications on the reader. An awareness by authors and editors of the techniques available through readability research studies leads to significant savings in time and effort, as well as increased benefits in comprehension and learning of the reader. Examples of use in technical publications show how exchanges between author and reader can be more effective and productive. The techniques have wide application also to publications of all kinds, and provide a valuable resource to achieve optimum results in communication or information products. The discussion is based on the knowledge and experience gained by the writer through academic and practical applications in editing and preparing a wide variety of general and technical communications.

Communication, as a basic process for exchanges between individuals or groups, involves the development and use of various systems. Focusing on fundamental elements of one system—speech (language) and its formalized extension, writing, the author describes instant techniques or processes for overcoming obstacles to effective communications. In particular, emphasis will be given to the role of the communicator-educator involved in the development and training efforts to improve day-to-day exchanges among working groups. Such efforts have been retarded through complicated language structures and an overconfident reliance on elaborate devices and myriads of machines and equipment. In addition, the escalating changes in many fields have contributed to frustrations and complexities in achieving goals. To overcome the problems, recommendations stress the importance of a recall of basic principles of communication in the language-writing system and an understanding of the processes involved. Techniques described represent simple practical solutions available for instant adoption by the educator in meeting current needs.