Women continue to be underrepresented at the highest academic rank of full professor. Studies show that once women earn tenure, they are inundated with teaching, service, and administrative responsibilities, which take time away from research and publication—the primary criteria for promotion. We believe that rhetoric and writing studies (RWS) faculty are uniquely situated to confront this challenge because of our disciplinary expertise, our experience administering writing programs, and our interest in equity. With the goal to increase the number of women full professors at our university, we created a year-long writing program for women associate professors. Based on results from this pilot study, we argue that RWS faculty can use their expertise to decrease the disparity at the highest academic rank and make the university more diverse and equitable. Moreover, we believe that RWS scholars can use their disciplinary expertise to address a range of other institutional and systemic challenges.

In the nineteenth century, religious tract distribution was a popular form of evangelism. Drawing on evidence from the American Tract Society’s periodical, American Tract Magazine, and tract society reports, this essay claims tract distribution as an early site for women’s rhetorical education. While distributing tracts, women received a door-to-door rhetorical education where they acquired and honed skills including canvassing, establishing ethos, and adapting appeals and evidence to different audiences and rhetorical situations. Ultimately, this essay contributes to a broader understanding of what counts as rhetorical education and how and where that education takes place.

In 1837, Margaret Prior became the first female missionary for the American Female Moral Reform Society. She traveled throughout the poorest neighborhoods in New York City’ entering barrooms, brothels, and sickrooms. Based on an analysis of Prior’s missionary reports, published in the society’s periodical and included in her memoir, this essay shows how Prior exerted an ethos of presence. Her willingness to traverse the seediest sections of the city, call on any person, and address any need exerted a powerful ethos in the communities she served and among the audiences who read and heard about her efforts.

This article introduces an assignment that uses key messages to introduce students to the different ways that rhetoric is used in professional writing. In particular, this article discusses how analyzing and writing reports about organizational web sites can help students perceive the rhetorical nature of professional communication, gain familiarity with several professional writing genres and writing conventions, become more critical readers, and recognize the relationship between an initial study and a report that communicates the findings from that study.

Abstract The following essay delineates an “evangelical rhetoric of rage” used by antebellum female moral reformers in their campaign against licentiousness. Highlighting their assertion of moral authority, their use of scripture to justify actions, their confrontational tone, their candid, unapologetic discussions of sexual immorality, and their creation of a public forum for women, this essay claims that female moral reformers represent an important turning point in women's rhetoric. While moral reform has garnered less attention than abolition or temperance, female moral reformers forged an early feminist consciousness and employed methods and messages women reformers would use throughout the nineteenth century. Notes 1In 1839 the New York Female Moral Reform Society changed its name to American Female Moral Reform Society to better reflect the national reach of the organization. Throughout this article I refer this organization as the FMRS. 2I thank Rhetoric Review peer reviewers C. Jan Swearingen and Nan Johnson for their valuable suggestions. 3Although auxiliary societies were concentrated in New York, Boston, and New England, they extended west as far as Michigan and south as far as Alabama (Whitetaker 124).

Based on the experiences of three graduate assistant directors working in the Howe Writing Initiative, a joint WAC effort between Miami University's business school and English department, this essay introduces entrepreneurial consulting as a model for implementing WAC initiatives in different disciplines. The entrepreneurial consulting model emphasizes the need to establish an ongoing presence within a discourse community, to continually “sell” writing and rhetoric to both faculty and students, and to strategically use rhetoric to promote rhetoric.

Study of the weekly Methodist newspaper "Christian Advocate", from its inception in 1826 to 1832, reveals that Methodist women came to assume important, public, and rarely acknowledged rhetorical roles. More precisely, women moved beyond the confines of the newspaper’s “Ladies’ Department,” the back-page space to which “women’s concerns” were initially consigned.

Abstract This essay identifies memoirs (obituaries) as the primary space women initially occupy in Methodist Magazine, the church's first successful periodical. Based on a study of 154 memoirs published in Methodist Magazine from 1818–25, this essay explores how memoirs operated as rhetorical composition intended to motivate and instruct the living as much as to elegize the dead. By exposing rhetorical strategies used in depictions of persons "dying well," specifically the roles assigned to women, this essay claims that women's memoirs transformed their deathbeds into pulpits, elevating them to ministers in death—positions they were precluded from holding in life. Notes 1I thank RR peer reviewers Vicki Tolar Burton and Jan Schuetz for their valuable feedback, and Kate Ronald, Sarah Robbins, and Connie Mick for helpful responses to drafts of this essay. 2Sarah Tomlinson's memoir was written by her sister. 3Gregory Schneider describes a dialectic of social religion with both iconic and instrumental moments (151). 4Collins's later publications appear under the name Vicki Tolar Burton. 5These calculations include those memoirs extracted from British periodicals. Going forward, I have limited my examination to memoirs written by and about American Methodists with the exception of two Canadians. In the Northeast some Methodist ministers' circuits crossed the border into Canada. 6It is important to note that authors and editors still controlled which extracts were included in memoirs; thus they could use these selections to construct individuals in certain ways. 7Methodists in good standing were invited to participate in quarterly, circuit-wide love feasts. These love feasts brought together all the congregants from the different churches on a minister's circuit to address business matters and share worship. During these gatherings members were encouraged to share their testimonies and discuss their spiritual failures and triumphs. Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Vol. I, 1796–1836. New York: Carlton and Phillips, 1855. Methodist Magazine, (New York), 1818–1828. From American Periodical Series Online. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2000.

This article demonstrates how students in a disciplinary writing study conducted at Miami University's business school failed to understand writing assignments based on the names of the assignments. It proposes effective writing-assignment names as prompts to connect students to previous writing experience and reinforce students' acquisition of disciplinary writing skills and genres. In addition, the article suggests that writing-assignment names offer a pedagogical tool for integrating learning across a discipline; that is, naming writing assignments encourages faculty to identify and define the types of disciplinary writing and critical-thinking skills that students should learn.