Abstract Definitional work has authorized vaguely articulated, unending, US-led terror wars, constituting amorphous, violent, global terrain, spatially, temporally, and discursively. Mapping the terrain in which this violence is enacted helps us examine re-emergences of violence, including entangling Indigenous communities inside the United States—particularly as they engage acts of protest—within the same colonial machines of terror deployed in the name of war outside those boundaries. This essay maps these circulations as they coalesce at one point: the use of battle grade military equipment and former special operations teams against Indigenous protesters at the Standing Rock #NoDAPL resistance fight in 2016 and 2017. As Native protestors were transformed into jihadists and assaulted at Standing Rock, frames of savage indigeneity permeated boundaries from the terror wars’ battle sites of Pakistan and Afghanistan back to the United States. In this cartography, conditions of possibility for governing global communities are remapped. The inter/national crossroads expand and are weaponized into new necropolitical tools of colonization. Examining this violent landscape and engaging with histories of settler colonialism as well as the spatial, temporal, and discursive power of definition, this essay explores rhetorical cartography as the ground for mapping new rhetorical terrains and inter/national coalition against ongoing materializations of colonialism.

Using a mixed-methods, multi-institutional design of general education writing courses at four institutions, this study examined genre as a key factor for understanding and promoting writing development. It thus aims to provide empirical validation of decades of theoretical work on and qualitative studies of genre and the nature of genre knowledge. While showing that both simplistic and nuanced genre knowledge promote writing development, our findings suggest that nuanced genre knowledge correlates with writing development over the course of a semester. Based on these findings, we propose an expanded view of Tardy’s four genre knowledge components and argue for their explanatory power. We recognize these genre components can be cultivated by using three particular strategies: writing for nonclassroom audiences, using source texts explicitly to join existing disciplinary conversations, and cultivating two types of metacognitive awareness (awareness of the writing strategies used to complete specific tasks and awareness of one’s levels of proficiency in particular types of writing knowledge). Findings can be used to enrich first-year or upper-division writing curricula in the areas of genre knowledge, audience awareness, and source use.

In Words Are Weapons, Philippe-Joseph Salazar confronts ISIS's discourse and its persuasive effects, arguing the group reset the world order such that “youth run to them,” “cultures are annihilated,” and “energetic propaganda … has taken over our mental horizon and parasitized our language and our discourse.” This essay confronts Salazar's work, prompting consideration of his treatment, and mistreatment, of historical, colonial, and geopolitical dynamics of the terror wars. It draws specific attention to his work on the term “caliphate,” his discussion of terrorism and language, and his inattention to colonial histories affecting people throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It concludes by advocating for understanding Salazar's work in context of omittances of analysis around ongoing coalition building, movements, and protest within majority-Muslim communities around the world. Specifically, it points to ways those movements are building sustainable progress toward the aims Salazar identifies, including peace and antiauthoritarian leadership, while also working toward anticolonial frameworks.

Book Review| December 01 2018 Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method. Edited by Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016; pp. viii + 231. $34.95 paper. Heather Ashley Hayes Heather Ashley Hayes Whitman College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (4): 733–736. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0733 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 Heather Ashley Hayes; Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2018; 21 (4): 733–736. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.4.0733 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. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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The following is the text of Sandy Hayes’s presidential address, delivered at the NCTE Annual Convention in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 24, 2013.

In Section 1 of this article, the author discusses the succession of models of adult writing that he and his colleagues have proposed from 1980 to the present. He notes the most important changes that differentiate earlier and later models and discusses reasons for the changes. In Section 2, he describes his recent efforts to model young children’s expository writing. He proposes three models that constitute an elaboration of Bereiter and Scardamalia’s knowledge-telling model. In Section 3, he describes three running computer programs that simulate the action of the models described in Section 2.

This essay explores mainstream apprehensions against Appalachian dialect(s), arguing that these dialects/cultures have a misunderstood history and an important role to play in Appalachian composition classrooms.

Legos Build the Way to Successful Process Analysis Writing, Michelle Rhodes (New Voice) Native American Elder Stories Make Descriptive Essays Easier, Pamela Tambornino (New Voice) Teaching Writing Style and Revision, Eric Bateman Dialect and Language Analysis Assignment, Amanda Hayes (New Voice) A Scaffolded Essay Assignment on Poetry, Jane Arnold (New Voice)

To be effective, writers must understand what knowledge they share with the audience and what they do not. Achieving this understanding is made difficult by the knowledge effect—a tendency of individuals to assume that their own knowledge is shared by others. Understanding the knowledge effect and methods for reducing it is potentially useful for understanding and teaching writing. In Study 1, we explored the impact of an individual's knowledge of technical terms on that person's ability to estimate other people's understanding of those terms. We assessed how individuals' familiarity with technical terms influenced their predictions that college freshmen and college graduates would understand those terms. Results indicate that familiarity with the meaning of technical terms leads to substantial overestimation of others' knowledge. In Study 2, we evaluated an online tutor designed to improve writers' predictions of other's word knowledge by providing them with feedback on the accuracy of their judgments.

A number of studies have found that writers produce text in bursts of language. That is, when creating a text, writers produce a few words, pause, produce a few more words, pause, and so on. Chenoweth and Hayes (2003) hypothesized that language bursts occur when writers translate ideas in to new language. This study tested this hypothesis against the following two alternative hypotheses: (a) Language bursts are caused by proposing new ideas rather than by translating ideas in to written language and (b) language bursts depend on the form of the input to the writing process rather than on the translation process. The study employed an editing task in which participants were required to translate a written language input. The alternative hypotheses led to contradictory predictions about writers' performance in this task. The study also explored the impact of working memory restrictions on task performance.

Generally, researchers agree that that verbal working memory plays an important role in cognitive processes involved in writing. However, there is disagreement about which cognitive processes make use of working memory. Kellogg has proposed that verbal working memory is involved in translating but not in editing or producing (i.e., typing) text. In this study, the authors used articulatory suppression, a technique that reduces working memory to explore this question. Twenty participants transcribed six texts from one computer window to another, three of the texts with articulatory suppression and three without. When participants were in the articulatory suppression condition, they transcribed significantly more slowly and made significantly more errors than they did in the control condition. Implications for Kellogg’s proposal are discussed.

This study explores the connection between writing and working memory, specifically the role of the subvocal articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice). The authors asked the 18 participants to type sentences describing 24 multipanel cartoons. In some conditions, the participants were required to repeat a syllable continuously while writing. This activity, called articulatory suppression, interferes with the articulatory rehearsal process. Results indicated that interfering with the articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice) interferes with writing by slowing the rate of writing, increasing mechanical errors, changing the temporal microstructure of text production, and increasing the perceived difficulty of the writing task. The authors applied their model of written text production to provide a theoretical account for these results.

Presents a questionnaire that helps gather valuable information about students’ attitudes toward mandatory placement in basic writing courses. Concludes that with the kind of information gleaned from responses to questionnaires similar to this one, educators can better understand the strengths and weaknesses of basic writing programs and revise their curriculum and placement procedures as necessary.

This study explores the relation between fluency in writing and linguistic experience and provides information about the processes involved in written text composition. The authors conducted a think-aloud protocol study with native speakers of English who were learning French or German. Analysis reveals that as the writer's experience with the language increases, fluency (as measured by words written per minute) increases, the average length of strings of words proposed between pauses or revision episodes increases, the number of revision episodes decreases, and more of the words that are proposed as candidate text get accepted. To account for these results, the authors propose a model of written language production and hypothesize that the effect of linguistic experience on written fluency is mediated primarily by two internal processes called the translator and the reviser.

Presents and describes a narrative writing assignment used by the author in a developmental writing course that helps to demonstrate to students how and why sexist language usage can limit thinking, sometimes injuriously, and that concretely illustrates how language and gender stereotyping interact causally. Describes the assignment, how it is used in class, and class discussions resulting.

This study addressed the question, “How consistently do students perform on holistically scored writing assignments?” Instructors from 13 introductory writing classes at two colleges were asked to provide essay sets written by their students in response to the three to five most important writing assignments in their classes. In all, 796 essays were collected from 241 students. The study drew on a pool of 15 experienced judges to evaluate the essays. Each essay set was scored holistically and independently by 6 of the judges who either ranked or graded the essays in the set. All papers written by a particular student were scored by the same judges. Pairwise correlations of the scores assigned to each essay set were computed for each judge and then averaged across judges. The average of these correlations was 0.16, indicating very low consistency of holistically scored student performance from essay to essay. This result suggests that drawing conclusions from one or even a few writing samples is problematic.

In many literacy studies, it is important to establish the reliability of independent observers' judgments. Reliability most commonly is measured either by the percentage of agreement or the correlation between the observers' judgments. This article argues that the percentage of agreement measure is more difficult to interpret than are correlation measures because of the following: (a) the effects of chance agreement are not accounted for automatically by the percentage of agreement measure; and (b) rates of chance agreement are strongly influenced by the variability of the data, by “ceiling” and “floor” effects, and by the scoring of near agreement as perfect agreement. For these reasons, the authors recommend that the field of literacy research adopt correlation as the standard method for estimating the reliability of observers' judgments.

This article describes an assessment carried out in collaboration with the administrators of a large freshman English course. The assessment team worked with instructors to identify course goals and to design tasks that the instructors felt would fairly assess the extent to which the students achieved the goals. Students who did and did not take the course were both pre- and posttested on five central goals: critical reading, argument identification, differentiation of summary and paraphrase, understanding of key terms used in the course, and practical strategies for writing academic papers. Results of the assessment failed to indicate any substantial improvement on any of the five course goals for students who took the course. These results contrasted with positive outcomes obtained by the same assessment team with introductory history and statistics courses. The article concludes with reflections on why instructors may fail to recognize that their courses are not working.

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Although social psychologists have studied how people form impressions of others either through viewing them, listening to them speak, or reading written descriptions of them, researchers have not looked extensively at the ways in which readers form impressions of writers' personalities while reading their texts. This article reports on a series of studies in which different groups of readers were asked to respond to essays written by high school students applying for college admission. Our findings suggest that independent readers' impressions of writers' personalities overlap far more than would be expected by chance, that readers' impressions of writers' personalities can have practical consequences for writers, and that texts can be revised so as to influence, in predicted ways, the types of personality traits that readers are likely to infer.

Rhétoriques de la modernité by Manuel Maria Carrilho. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992; pp. 170. The Place of Emotion in Argument by Douglas Walton. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, xiv; 294 pp. Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898 by Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner, with an introduction by Kenneth Laine Keiner and Hilary Putnam. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992; xiv; 297pp. Criteria of Certainty: Truth and Judgment in the English Enlightenment by Kevin L. Cope. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 1990; viii; 224. Writing Ourselves Into the Story: Unheard Voices from Composition Studies by Sheryl I. Fontaine and Susan Hunter. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993; pp. 383. Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science in the Copernican Controversy, by Jean Dietz Moss. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1993. Preface xiv, 353 pp. The Book of Memory by Mary Carruthers.Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1992; 393 pp.

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This study investigates the impact of task definition on students’ revising strategies. Our primary aim was to determine if freshman students could revise globally if instructed to do so and if those global revisions would result in improved texts. We asked two groups of freshmen to revise a text provided by the experimenters; one group was given eight minutes of instruction on how to revise globally, and the other was simply asked to make the text better. The texts written by students who received the instruction were judged both to be of significantly better quality and to have included significantly more global revision. Further, the improvement appears to affect the treated population generally rather than just a small part of that population.

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