This article uses a novel theoretical frame—materio-cognitivism—to explore how digital writing processes change with time and experience. Researchers observed 10 second langauge writers as they completed two research writing tasks—one at the start of their first year of university and one near the end of university. Interviews and screen recording were used to track writing activity. Five key writing strategies were identified. Among the most improved writers, researchers identified a set of shared changes in how writing strategies were deployed. In particular, the most improved writers showed increased ability to sequence subtasks, to arrange digital interfaces, and to combine internal cognitive functions with the affordances of digital tools. These findings suggest what the development of writing processes might look like in digital environments, potentially informing both writing pedagogy and assessment.

In this study, we examine the feasibility of augmenting student-written essays with those generated by large language models (LLMs) for scoring essays. We found that with correct instructions, generative AI systems such as GPT-4 and GPT-4o can generate essays similar to those written by students in terms of surface-level linguistic features, although material differences may still exist. Systematic analyses revealed that scoring models trained with synthetic data perform comparably to models trained using student essays, but the performance varies across prompts and the sizes of the model training sample. The augmented models could alleviate large discrepancies between human and AI scores on the subgroup level that may be introduced by a lack of training samples for a particular subgroup or due to inherent biases in LLMs. We also explored an established method – DecompX – on token importance to identify and explain AI predictions. Future research directions and limitations of this study are also discussed.

Introduction: The technical editing discipline stands in need of additional empirical research—particularly language-level research. However, the time- and resource-intensive nature of data collection and analysis may prevent some scholars from completing the needed research. Therefore, this tutorial introduces TrackEDT, a tool we have developed to ease the process of collecting and analyzing edits and comments from edited documents. Key concepts: TrackEDT extracts editors’ tracked insertions, deletions, moves, and comments from Microsoft (MS) Word documents—all elements of traditional editorial markup. It outputs the extracted data into an MS Excel format that affords easier analysis of the editors’ data than would be possible in the data’s original MS Word format. Key lessons: Researchers can download TrackEDT as an executable file at editingresearch.byu.edu/trackedt. To run the file, they select a folder containing edited MS Word documents that have tracked changes and comments. After TrackEDT processes the documents, the researchers can analyze the extracted tracked changes, comments, and metadata in the resulting Excel reports, which include information such as who made the edit, what type of edit was made, when the edit was made, how long the edit was, and what comments were appended. Implications for practice: Technical editing researchers can use TrackEDT and its reports to ease their collection and analysis of editing data, thereby answering important empirical research questions related to language-level editorial changes and processes.

Providing effective written feedback to ESL students poses a challenging yet crucial task for language teachers. While numerous studies have delved into critical feedback, few have explored students' perceptions of praise in written feedback. To gauge students’ view of praise, we analyzed responses to two types: person praise (e.g., "You are a good writer") and performance praise (e.g., "You used the past tense correctly"). Language proficiency levels (high and low) and cultural backgrounds (Asian and Romance) were also considered. ESL students ( n = 100) were given feedback on an essay they wrote and surveyed about praise comments. In addition, three focus groups were conducted. Quantitative data indicated a preference for both praise types, while focus groups revealed a preference for performance over person praise. Lower proficiency students valued and considered praise to be more change-invoking than high-proficiency peers. Additionally, students from Romance cultures favored praise more than Asian cultures. Interaction effects highlighted nuances, such as high-proficiency Asian students perceiving praise as less kind, valuable, positive, and clear than their Romance counterparts. These findings offer insights for teachers and administrators to develop an informed praise philosophy and recognize which praise type best meets their students’ needs.

Using eye-tracking and interview methods, this study investigates how business communication students and editing students attend to and evaluate writing. Participants reviewed blog posts embedded with errors and judged publication readiness. While both groups visually fixated longer on errors than non-errors, business communication students were more likely to approve error-containing texts for publication. Qualitative data revealed that business communication students prioritized content while editing students prioritized surface-level issues. These findings suggest that disciplinary background informs evaluative standards, even when error-detection behavior is similar. The results carry implications for instruction in business writing and editing, especially concerning collaborative, cross-disciplinary workplace writing.

Exploring multimodality and transfer from the perspective of transduction (a multidisciplinary term that describes a change in form as something moves from one state to another) reveals conceptual overlap between the two concepts. Transfer is fundamentally multimodal because anything moving from one “place” to the next must change its form (or modality) in some way. Multimodality also inherently involves a transfer from one context to another. Each concept requires that existing content or knowledge be changed in some way to account for new situations. Multimodality and transfer do not describe a one-to-one duplication, but a transduction, changing form from one context to the next.

ABSTRACTAs immersive technology grows in popularity, universities are developing academic innovation labs (AIL) that often introduce students to virtual reality (VR) and other emerging cross reality applications. Although these labs help educate students on emerging technology, a more critical eye is needed to examine user experience (UX). This article reports on a qualitative, multimethod study that employed a talk-aloud UX protocol to gather data on VR users' experience at the University of Connecticut's OPIM Research Lab. To fully define and contrast this data, we juxtapose these individual narratives with rhetorical analysis of marketing discourse, as presented by VR platform HTC Vive, Google's VR application Tilt Brush, and the Research Lab's promotional material. Based on our findings, we assert that sociotechnical imaginaries as constructed by promotional material often reduce the complexities of immersion in user experience. Such marketing rhetoric creates "top-down" imaginaries that contrast with "bottom-up" imaginaries generated in user experience, reinforcing the complex and fluid definitions of immersion. The resulting study has practical implications for stakeholders across higher education, especially in the context of innovation labs, as well as for technical and professional communication educators and practitioners.KEYWORDS: Immersive technologyinnovation labsvirtual realityimmersionuser experienceemerging technologyfuture imaginariessociotechnical imaginaries Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsBrent LuciaBrent Lucia is an Assistant Professor In-Residence at the University of Connecticut School of Business. He has a PhD in Composition and Applied Linguistics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His current research explores the rhetorics of technology and its relationship to the production of space. His recent scholarship can be found in Rhetoric Review, Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, and Enculturation.Matthew A. VetterMatthew A. Vetter is an Associate Professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Composition and Applied Linguistics PhD program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His research, which asks questions related to technology, rhetoric, and writing, has been published widely in venues such as Social Media and Society, Rhetoric Review, Studies in Higher Education, and Computers and Composition. His co-authored book, Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality, was published by Routledge in 2021.David A. SolbergDavid A. Solberg is a teaching assistant at the Holy Family Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his MA degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His master's thesis was entitled The Use of Parallelism in Poetry Writing for the Acquisition of English Grammar (available from ProQuest).

Directed self-placement (DSP) allows for student agency in writing placement. DSP has been implemented in many composition programs, although it has not been used as widely for L2 writers in higher education. This study investigates the relationship between student placement decisions and students’ prior educational backgrounds, particularly in relationship to whether they had attended an English-medium high school or an intensive English program (IEP). Actual placement results via an exam were compared to 804 students’ self-placement decisions and correlated with their prior educational backgrounds. Findings indicated that most students’ DSP decisions matched actual exam placement results. However, there was a large number of DSP decisions that were higher or lower than exam placement results. Additionally, the longer students studied at an English-medium instruction high school, the more likely they were to place themselves higher than their exam placement. We conclude that DSP can be used in L2 writing programs, but with careful attention to learners’ educational backgrounds, proficiency, and sense of identity.

Given Wikipedia’s breadth of coverage, social impact, and longevity as an impactful open knowledge resource, the encyclopedia has been the subject of considerable interdisciplinary research. Building on scholarship related to collaboration, authorship, ownership, and editing in Wikipedia, this study sought to better understand Wikipedians as writers, paying specific attention to their sense of ownership. While previous research has shown that editors engage in individualist editing practices at times, often ignoring community-mediated policy regarding ownership, findings from a mixed-method survey of 117 editors demonstrate the existence of both “individual” and “community” notions of ownership that often reinforce, or mutually inform, each other. This study adds clarity to these issues by demonstrating how feelings of individual ownership, voice, and pride in writing often occur in collaborative circumstances. This research ultimately extends our understanding of collaborative writing in what is one of the most well-known collaborative websites. Despite contemporary theoretical strides advocating for relinquishing ownership concepts in favor of distributed or ecological frameworks, the concept of ownership remains prevalent within digital writing communities, exemplified by Wikipedia.

Governments the world over require scientific knowledge to inform policy makers’ decision-making processes. The recontextualization of this information for nonscientific audiences has received much attention, though it has primarily focused on publicly available texts. Little is known about the discursive nature of how science is transformed and repurposed and the confidential writing performed by boundary organizations that are working between science and policy. This ethnographic study explores the collaborative discursive activity involved in efforts by a boundary organization—the Council of Canadian Academies—to recontextualize science for policy makers. The analysis opens the discursive black box of the genre system and intermediary genre sets involved in one project, which led to the publication and distribution of the boundary object of an advisory report, Older Canadians on the Move. I claim that the discursive boundary work involves a complex genre system containing several sequential genred activities through which science is transformed and a boundary object created.

The rise of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) threatens to upend traditional teaching and learning practices. Writing, speaking, and communication instruction will all need to evolve. This article presents a case study of one institution's efforts to design and implement a communication curriculum responsive to the unique demands of the EMI environment. The curriculum proposed enacts an interdisciplinary, multimodal approach to the teaching of communication. We discuss the specifics of the curriculum, the process of its creation, the principles underlying it, and how these principles play out in practice. In doing so, we hope to provide a model both for global communication instruction and future curricular design efforts.

This essay takes as its focus the everyday writing that people compose: the self-sponsored, nonobligatory texts that people write mainly outside of work and school. Through analysis of 713 survey responses and 27 interviews with accompanying writing samples, this study provides a panoramic view of the functions of self-sponsored writing and rhetorical activity for U.S. adults, ages 18 to 65+ years, from a range of geographic, cultural, and professional backgrounds. The Taxonomy of Life Writing presented in this essay demonstrates the range of ways that writing functions in people’s daily lives. It includes 19 key functions of life writing, organized into six metafunctions: Creativity and Expression, Identity and Relationships, Organization and Coordination, Preservation and Memory, Reflection and Emotion, and Teaching and Learning. Based on our findings, we affirm the important and diverse functions that life writing serves and propose expanding the threshold concepts of writing to include greater focus on nonobligatory, self-sponsored writing activity.

Within universities, writing centers are often seen as service providers that allow students to receive support and feedback on their writing.  The usefulness of writing centers has been evaluated by things such as total number of visits and return visits, students’ trust and comfort in asking tutors questions, and tutors’ overall knowledge of writing concepts. But few researchers have shone light on students’ own perceptions of the usefulness of a writing center, especially perceptions between native English (NES), non-native English (NNES), and Generation 1.5 students. We did just that by sending a usefulness survey to 800 universities across the U.S. We analyzed the data from 463 student responses to these surveys using non-parametric statistics and found that NNES and Generation 1.5 students reported more difficulty making an appointment than NES writers. They also reported being slightly less likely to ask their tutor questions, trust their tutors, and return to the writing center, which is perhaps the most important outcome of usefulness. This information can help writing center administrators better anticipate multilingual writers’ needs and take steps to improve informational materials and the writing center experience for these writers which may increase their overall attendance.

This article outlines the concept of readiness to learn (RTL) as a framework for explaining students’ differentiated engagement with the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) curriculum. As documented in student voices, RTL operates along a continuum ranging from preparing to engage, on one end, to enacting TFT, on the other, with beginning to engage in the middle.

Against the backdrop of White Christian nationalism, which fomented an intensifying atmosphere of religious marginalization and violence toward transnationals in the US between 2015 and 2020, and in the context of teachers responding to this atmosphere of marginalization and violence with their writing curriculum and pedagogies, this study compared how three transnational youth wrote to express religious being and belonging in secondary classrooms. Adapting portraiture research approaches in a narrative study, we explored the how, who, and why of transnational youth writing across three classrooms where teachers made room for their cultural identity meaning-making through composing in diverse modes, genres, and media. In dialogue with pluriversal theorizing about the religious, specifically individual experiences of religious being and collective experiences of belonging, the research composed and compared portraits across three different public school settings. Working with three previously generated data sets, we retroactively asked: How, for whom, and to what purposes did three transnational youth express religious being and belonging through writing in public US secondary classrooms? The portraits illuminate how these youth wrote to accurately portray Islam, to poetically express and analytically discuss the fears and vulnerabilities Muslim women experience in wearing the hijab, and to share and interpret Christian familial experiences with ethnoreligious violence. In conclusion, we highlight complexities and further questions facing literacy teachers seeking to cultivate curiosity about youths’ religious being and belonging and to make room for these aspects of students’ experience as part of cultural assets approaches to writing curriculum and pedagogy.

When we enter an empty classroom, what do we see? Desks, a board, and, if we're lucky, some collection of functional technology (and if we're luckier, windows). The classroom space operates through standardization, each element of the classroom designed to regulate the transfer of knowledge. When we enter a classroom full of students, what we see might subordinate to another question: what do we feel? Those quiet moments before class begins, as we mentally prepare, are ones dominated by feeling. (In my case, these are often the most uncomfortable moments of my teaching days.) They are moments of affective uncertainty in which a variety of feelings—chief among them, anxiety—enter the classroom along with us, through the many operating screens, and even as we look through doors and windows.1We may find ourselves at odds with the space's arrangement. Often to the criticism of contemporary pedagogical theory, the traditional classroom installs clear hierarchies of power that teachers decide either to work within or, in a now well-established attempt to subvert these hierarchies, to “flip.” Placing students in a circle, grouping them into pods, inviting them to the front of the room—these are all practices that defamiliarize what can become a practiced (and tired) method of knowledge transfer for students and teachers alike and engender a more dynamic and fruitful experience for all. Rather than allowing students to sit back and receive knowledge that they will apply somewhere else, flipping the classroom originated to encourage students to apply concepts immediately and see teaching and learning as reciprocal activities that require their participation on both sides (Brewer, McCook, and Halasek 2018: 484). If classroom structures exist to make learning more predictable, then flipping the classroom is an action that allows us to remain open to surprises.What is affect if not something that arrives to our surprise and, potentially, our transformation? Affect “arises in the midst of in between-ness,” demanding of us that we remain open to its grip and potentially allow it to “drive us toward movement . . . that can likewise suspend us” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1). Understanding affective meaning is curious in that it requires us to be attuned to the background of experience. While it might seem strange to suggest that the classroom should be remade through the affects that undergird our experience, it is just as strange to turn to models that presuppose that we are never surprised, interrupted, or moved by affect.The humanities classroom, furthermore, is a space particularly well suited to unpack moments of affective rupture because our pedagogical goals—to reshape students’ understanding of the textual, political, and mental worlds through which they move—depend on being moved in unexpected ways. Noticing and reading the affective material of the classroom pushes us down fascinating paths, and it can dramatically and helpfully expand our pedagogical methods. Indeed, deriving meaning from the seeming interruption of affect allows us to reassess the very foundations of what Lynn Worsham (1998) calls “dominant pedagogy,” or the structures of the classroom setting that themselves produce the very notion of a “legitimate point of view” (221). Worsham's definition of legitimacy evinces how dominant pedagogy is inseparable from hegemonic structures of power, and she proposes that we turn to what she suspects “we already know but have learned to forget”: that our pedagogical commitments to social change “must occur at the affective level” (216). To fail to recognize our affective experience in the classroom is to prohibit the project of social change. Recognizing the place of “the tight braid of affect and judgement” places teacher and student in a collaborative project of reimagining social relations (216).In an effort to examine what it looks like to teach through feeling, we seek to better understand how affect shapes our encounters with not only our students but also our objects of inquiry. While there is a large and diverse body of work examining how affect relates to reading practices (Sedgwick 2002; Felski 2008, 2015; Anker and Felski 2017; Best and Marcus 2009; Love 2010) as well as how the act of reading might buttress empathetic feelings (Keen 2007; Hogan 2016), we redirect these differing but linked conversations toward different inquiries. Some essays in this cluster explore how our embodiment in the classroom creates moments of rupture that reshape our textual encounters and methodologies. Embodiment is a capacious concept, and we consider what it means when we and our students cannot find a full reckoning with our own embodiment in critical theory. Other essays explore how nonhuman beings and objects themselves shape our affective experience in the classroom. In both cases, the intersection of affect and embodiment raises questions about how we see and treat one another. Likewise, some contributors examine how the political worlds that surround the classroom shift the affective direction of our teaching by putting undue pressure on students and teachers, a lesson that has only become clearer since the spread of COVID-19. Increasingly, those political worlds enforce censorship and surveillance, influencing what students and teachers can do in classroom spaces that are either entirely virtual or shaped by their potential digital afterlives. As pedagogy continues to shift toward digital models that archive and preserve the classroom far beyond the ephemerality of class discussion, we must begin addressing how those models shape our pedagogic affects. Finally, while scholarship on the affective displacements of critique is well underway, some of the essays here help bridge the divide between critique and postcritique by locating the compatibility of affect and critical reading in our pedagogy. Across these varied approaches and inquiries, essays frequently return to a tension that emerges as a guiding thesis: the seeming disruption of affect is a productive site of learning for faculty and students alike.The concept of affective rupture is central to the work that follows. Even though we do not take rupture as an intrinsically good pedagogical event, we do hold it as one that reveals much about both the conditions in which we teach and learn and the methods of humanistic inquiry on which we most frequently rely. Much has been written about affective rupture by critics in affect studies. Rarely has this work been more compelling and urgent than in Lauren Berlant's (2011) analysis of an untitled John Ashbery poem. Berlant seizes on a moment of rupture to examine how it makes us feel “lost but alive and unvanquished” (25). “Life has been seized . . . by an event that demands fidelity” (25). Anna Ioanes picks up on nonliterary ruptures in the classroom, exploring the importance of other moments of interruption—when a bug floats through the room, a student drops a book, or the weather changes suddenly. Particularly when such moments involve nonhuman things, they offer ways to answer questions about how we treat others, both human and nonhuman, while also bringing into focus the affects circulating in the classroom all the time. In this way, Ioanes reminds us that affect is not merely bound up in interactions between people but also a dynamic part of how we see the nonhuman things that populate the classroom. She argues that we must resituate external forces—a pandemic and political protest, most recently—as sites of learning, action, and civic responsibility.Just as Ioanes insists that we should focus on the affects produced through interruptions, Lauren Silber takes seriously her students’ feelings of discomfort that emerged when discussing affect theory alongside race. Silber examines how the presence of affect theory itself can produce an interruption that shifts our inquiry away from our material and toward institutional structures and even the whiteness of critical theory. Silber explains that, somewhat paradoxically, it is in becoming better interpreters of affect that students were able to critique the limiting structures of education and their discipline, which frequently enjoins them to focus (only) on the text. Just as Silber asserts that the study of affect interrupts models for knowledge production in the humanities, Aaron Colton examines how attention to sincerity helps bridge a similar divide between critique and postcritique. If proponents of postcritical reading hold that a critical hermeneutics obscures superficial or literal readings, others argue that critique might help render “feelings as objective structures (rather) than subjective dispositions” (Rasmussen and Sharma 2017: n.p.). Colton explores how a course examining the New Sincerity movement—a post-1980 amalgam of realist fiction, sentimental film, and indie music emphasizing themes of authenticity, enthusiasm, and vulnerability—primed students to regard texts not only as subjects for suspicious interrogation but also as historical and structural catalysts for affective response. Colton argues that prompting students to identify and interpret the mechanisms by which texts might speak sincerely can help them discern the compatibility of affective and critical reading practices.Silber and Colton explore whether pedagogical models organized around feelings such as empathy and sincerity are suited to break down colonial, heteronormative, neoliberal frameworks in the classroom or whether these feelings might themselves collapse important differences into sameness (Palumbo-Liu 2012; Dischinger 2018). Likewise, Tiffany Diana Ball explores the limits and uses of other structuring feelings—namely, paranoia—when teaching queer theory in China in front of a state-required classroom camera. Ball argues that, strange as it may seem, even paranoia can produce an affective community, however tenuous that practice might feel. Teaching and learning under clear surveillance opened the space for deep investigation into how paranoia feels without placing it into clear opposition with alternative reading practices.The contributors to this cluster represent different segments of an increasingly contingent profession. The teaching of humanities courses has long been shifting toward contingent labor, hybrid teaching, split administrative-faculty positions, and interdisciplinarity—itself an imperative, albeit one that many scholars embrace, to cover ever more terrain. The casualization of labor began long before Marc Bousquet's (2008) landmark book described it through the notion of organizational flexibility or the institution's preference to hire part-time to tenure-track labor. That preference led to a situation in which “the holders of a doctoral degree are not so much the products of the graduate-employee labor system as its byproducts” (21). In the thirteen years since Bousquet wrote those words, conditions have consistently worsened. While the contributors to this essay cluster represent far from every type of labor model in the profession, they come from a variety of institutional settings: an assistant professor teaching interdisciplinary writing and literature courses, a scholar-administrator teaching literature and writing at a liberal arts institution, a lecturer teaching multimodal communication at a research institution, and a postdoctoral scholar teaching queer theory in China. These settings help us illustrate how the position in which we teach shapes our pedagogical practices.Different as these essays are, they work backward from the same question: when we encounter affect in the classroom, will we avoid that encounter or be changed by it? While nearly everyone who has taught has had the experience of what they might call an affective interruption, we sometimes think of these moments as obstacles that must be worked around with quick solutions. When we think of affective rupture as an unwelcome and momentary distraction from the task of teaching and learning, that is, we are ill prepared to think through the felt conditions of pedagogy and labor.Having moved through over a year of teaching fully online during a pandemic, we now realize that the affective obstacles of the digital classroom are legion. Far from these ruptures being limited to moments when technology fails us, we spend much of our time lamenting the unrelenting reliability of the digital classroom. As we begin to realize how exhausting it can be to work in exclusively online spaces, the questions of this essay cluster—how we interact with nonhuman elements, how we come up against institutional and disciplinary structures, how paranoia and suspicion can be worked with or against—are more urgent now than ever. If we teach students to interpret the affective materials of the classroom and remain open to working through them ourselves, we preserve the opportunity to teach with humanity and generosity. In doing so, we gain access to an important path for our students, and we redirect our pedagogy as the foundations of higher education continue to shift.

This essay analyzes excessively long speeches in order to argue that circulation naturalizes rhetorical processes that govern meaning within texts. In our view, abundant acts of address unsettle dominant models of speech and circulation, presenting an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between rhetorical forms and circulatory transfigurations. We focus on Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s 1927 speech to the Turkish Parliament, which lasted thirty-six hours over six days. We bring together these otherwise unrelated long speeches to outline three fictions of text and circulation: textual unity, speaker persona, and implied audience. We argue that these fictions stand in for the excessive address in circulation and, in turn, forms of circulatory abbreviation naturalize rhetorical constructions internal to the speech. In this way, we offer a rhetorical account of circulation that connects textual processes to circulatory forms.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> Engineering students benefit from understanding the role of technical communication in the professional workplace. This article examines the communication coefficient (CC), a new method for grading student technical communication intended to help students better understand this role. Its goal is to encourage students to treat their communication with the same importance that it has in the professional workplace. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> The core philosophy of the CC method is that audiences perceive technical work more positively when it is communicated well and more negatively when it is not. The method captures this philosophy mathematically: students’ grades result from multiplying the points earned for technical content by a number—the coefficient—representing how well they communicated that content. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> The CC method is rooted in established principles, such as holistic grading and the separate yet simultaneous consideration of content and communication. It is novel in how it combines these principles into a grading technique. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Approach:</b> The CC method was employed in three undergraduate engineering classes at the United States Military Academy during the spring 2020 semester. Student and instructor feedback were collected to gauge the pros and cons of the method and whether it is worth fielding on a larger scale. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Discussion:</b> The CC method was found to encourage better student communication, although mixed student and instructor opinion suggest that changes to the method and the way that it is messaged are necessary. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> The CC method warrants further study and consideration of its usefulness in other departments and institutions.

This essay places rhetorical theories of publicity and the common in conversation around the concept of intimacy. Defined as a felt sense of proximity or closeness, intimacy is a form of affective relation that underlies both private and public worldmaking practices, and that produces investments in certain forms of life and community. Considering the relationship between publicity and the common in terms of intimacy makes clear that dominant forms of contemporary publicity are predicated on racialized and gendered enclosures of intimacy that have dispossessed noncapitalist relationships to land and community and instead fostered intimacies conducive to capital accumulation. Our argument suggests that critical scholars who are concerned with contemporary capitalism’s subjection of life to the market have a common interest in attending to the ways these histories of enclosure shape the horizons of modern publicity. Our argument also suggests further attention be directed to forms of counterintimacy aimed at producing anticapitalist coalition.

To survive the unfolding civilizational crisis will require thinking/feeling (sentipensar) across discordant struggles and systems of thought and breaking the repetitions of diagnostic criticism. To these ends/beginnings, I offer a Counterallegory of the Cave to revision The World by listening to those “strange prisoners” Plato stripped of voice/agency. What might The World, or discipline, look like if its origin stories were grounded in the cave’s pluriversal shadows rather than in the light/dark, master/slave, reason/emotion, and other/ing dualisms of Plato’s allegorical cosmovisión? I follow the cave dwellers into the shadows through a rhetorical slipstream—a speculative “weird rhetoric” where genres, temporalities, epistemologies, peoples, cultures, struggles, histories, contexts, and ontologies overlap, collide, and collude with one another—and move horizontally across the radical space-times where the undercommons of Black Study meet the epistemic south. I perform this rhetorical slipstream in the spirt of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call for refusing the order of discipline and Louis Maraj’s Black Feminist-inspired undisciplined scholarship, Katherine McKittrick’s “method-making” approach to Black Studies and her subversive/nonlinear use of Footnotes, and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Raka Shome, and others’ demand for delinking from the modern/colonial episteme.

This essay develops a rhetorical theory of the commons that accounts for both its ontological and political dimensions and contributes to conversations between new materialist rhetorical scholarship and critical rhetorical theories of human power relations. We develop such a theory by considering how the dimension of ontological entanglement that Ralph Cintron describes as the “deep commons” materializes through systemic organizations of affect that foster some relational capacities at the expense of others. This framing allows us to study capitalism and commoning as affective-rhetorical systems that capacitate the deep commons through distinct practices of boundary-making. Whereas capitalism produces boundaries that treat the deep commons as a source of tendentially limitless growth and enact a split between nonhuman nature and human society, commoning practices draw boundaries aimed at plural and interdependent relation between commons systems and their constitutive outsides, enabling more robust expressions of the deep commons to emerge.

Previous studies compare quantitative feedback ratings of student peers and instructors, but new presentation-feedback technologies enable qualitative-feedback comparison. This study extends previous research by comparing qualitative feedback and business professionals’ feedback. Compared to the professionals, the instructors provided similar feedback types and sentiment; students, however, de-emphasized message delivery and made fewer suggestions for improvement. The results suggest that students may need additional practice in critiquing message delivery and in suggesting needed improvements in their peers’ oral presentations. The study also provides a methodology using the new technologies for instructors to calibrate their own and their students’ feedback with professionals’ feedback.

In a writing center, we often hear about the relief a student feels following their session. However, there is little empirical data to support this claim. To address this gap, we conducted a survey in the Brigham Young University Family, Home, and Social Sciences Writing Lab (BYU FHSS Writing Lab). The survey was completed by undergraduate students who brought their writing to our writing center, both before and after a writing center tutoring session to measure the effects of writing tutoring on the highly applicable and relatable emotion that college students experience: stress. More specifically, we wanted to better understand perceived stress in conjunction with other variables, such as year in school, familiarity with the assigned citation style, whether the student had a plan for their paper, and whether they had visited the BYU FHSS Writing Lab in the past. We wanted to see how each of these variables were affected by a visit to the writing lab and particularly how students’ perceived stress levels were affected in turn. We discovered that visiting the BYU FHSS Writing Lab did significantly reduce perceived stress levels, and that many other factors play into this such as a student having a plan after their writing session or what year the student was in school. This research is important to writing labs across the country because by implementing our findings, writing centers may be able to maximize the help they provide to students and contribute to their stress relief.

What do tutors think they teach in a given writing center session? What do the writers they work with claim they learned? This IRB-approved study looks at responses from 74 pairs of surveys completed by tutors and writers about what they taught and learned in particular writing center tutorials. Drawing on the distinctions variation theory makes between intended and lived objects of learning, this study analyzes the general response trends evident across these surveys by coordinating tutors’ and writers’ separate perceptions. The results suggest that writers identify learning as having taken place much more frequently and across a wider range of writing-related topics than tutors claim to have taught. While short-answer responses reveal occasional overlap between writer’s perceived learning and tutor’s intended teaching, the marked discrepancy between the two suggests that a teaching/learning causality does not accurately represent much of the instructive effort and outcome occurring through writing center tutorials. Knowing that writers claim to be learning even when the tutors they meet with don’t think they are teaching informs how tutors can perceive their effectiveness and how writing centers  can position themselves as alternative educational spaces.

Despite a wealth of research on feedback practices in synchronous and asynchronous courses, little has been done to investigate such practices in hybrid writing pedagogy. How do instructors make choices about providing feedback when both instructional modes are operating in a course? A qualitative study conducted with fourteen instructors who teach hybrid writing courses at a large state university reveals how they navigate a series of choices about providing feedback on student writing. This study shows that instructional modality, use of the LMS, and labor conditions influence the decisions instructors make about how and when to provide feedback, especially on low-stakes work. While there is an emerging sense of thoughtful and critical decision-making around types of feedback and modality, this study finds that instructors do not yet have an integrated strategy when using the LMS to provide feedback in hybrid courses.

In his Caricature and National Character, Christopher J. Gilbert contends that caricature can help us understand, address, or, at least, observe the tension between a national character defined by the promise of democratic peace and by the stubborn persistence of war. Through the comic looking glass, caricature reveals American national character both for what it is and for what it could be. Reveling in the ugly realities of xenophobic, uber-masculine warrism, racism, and the sometimes demagogic impulses on which American national character rests, caricature refuses the mythologies of American exceptionalism, righteousness, and democratic idealism. Caricature asks audiences to see the imperfections of the American experiment not as abhorrent accidents of democracy gone occasionally wrong but as essential features of our national character. Caricature reminds us that war is who we are.Gilbert's book is divided into four case studies, each taking an individual caricature artist's work in turn. In the first analysis, Gilbert considers perhaps the most iconic representation of American identity, Uncle Sam. In the second, he turns to the work of Theodore Geisel and his strange animals compelling Americans to support involvement in WWII. In the third, Gilbert analyzes Ollie Harrington's use of images of Black children to reframe and refocus conversations about Vietnam through the lens of racism at home. And, in the final case, he turns a critical eye to Ann Telnaes's comic critiques of the War on Terror and the self-professed war presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.In his first analysis, Gilbert engages with historical representations of American identity vis-à-vis the oft caricatured figure of Uncle Sam. In particular, he focuses on James Montgomery Flagg's famous “I Want You” poster as a cultural touchstone connecting American national character to war. As “a rhetorical vessel for the body politic” and the “face of [American] militarism,” Uncle Sam projects a version of American identity that is paternal, white, and decidedly pro-war (46, 38). What is more, the image of Uncle Sam demanding (commanding) democratic citizens to join the US war effort flies in the face of a national character built around individual liberties and democratic ideals.From the nation's cartoon uncle to its cartooning doctor, Gilbert's second case study takes up the remarkably xenophobic, misogynistic, and patently racist WWII-era caricature of Theodore Geisel. As with Flagg's Uncle Sam, Geisel's caricatures featuring awkwardly proportioned animals, insects, and machinery ask readers to embrace the necessity, perhaps even the allure, of war. Although better remembered as the author and illustrator of beloved children's books and graduation presents (Dr. Seuss), Geisel's caricatures, goading the nation into joining the war effort while shaming isolationists and politicians, present readers with a national character caught between the absurd reality of war and the banality of its centrality to the American experience.In the third chapter, Gilbert considers the cartoons of Oliver “Ollie” Harrington. Harrington's caricatures, in addition to his popular character Bootsie, prominently feature Black children, recasting American war culture as a racist war on American culture and Black Americans in particular. Emphasizing the innocence and naïve wisdom of children, Harrington's drawings reveal the limits of the democratic promise for Black GIs returning from war abroad to find their children at war at home. Further, relying on children as focal points, and Black children in particular, Harrington's art dances along the insider/outsider divide offering a powerful self-critique that emphasizes the all too real consequences of American warrism for Black children who are otherwise excluded from the iconography of national character and from the demos in general. As Gilbert explains, such caricatures expose the whiteness of American war culture and national character while reminding audiences that “all war is cultural war” (135).In the final case study, Gilbert focuses his attention on Ann Telnaes's caricatures of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the self-professed “war presidents” of the War on Terror. Drawing “the people” through the person of the president, Telnaes's images emphasize the egoism and self-interest of the “American Idiot” that contrasts the collectivist impulses of democracy. Her renderings of Bush and Trump as would-be despots bedecked in jewels, capes, and crowns surrounded by adoring courtier toadies represent the president as an appropriately naked emperor king or, in the case of Trump, the Queen of Hearts. Relying on farce, Gilbert argues that these metonymic critiques of national character through the lens of the national leader highlight the false greatness, the inflated ego, and the self-proclaimed exceptionalism on which American national character rests and which cannot hold up to the scrutiny of war.Readers—especially those interested in editorial cartoons and comedy—will find Gilbert's critiques of Flagg, Geisel, Harrington, and Telnaes productive extensions of any number of conversations about visual rhetoric and visual metaphor. His critiques model the utility of tracing a particular artist's sense of humor and approach to a subject over the course of its historical arc. Together, they make a strong case for the utility of caricature as a funhouse mirror amplifying the particular absurdities of American democracy and identity that otherwise can be obscured by the lens of political discourse and public address. For comedy scholars, Gilbert's critique offers ample evidence for arguments regarding laughter's capacity to disrupt the established expectations of dominant discourses rendering them rigid, mechanical, or fixed in place. Such comic disruptions create opportunities for critique by asking audiences to consider both how things appear to be on the surface and what they conceal from view simultaneously.1 Critics of war rhetoric, too, will find Gilbert's book useful. His argument that caricature reveals the United States for the war culture that it (always) is, and that war functions conceptually as a caricature of democratic peace, are likely worthy of connecting to even non-comedic texts.In terms of shortcomings, Caricature and National Character almost certainly leaves someone's favorite caricaturist on the cutting room floor. Readers might expect to find more about Herb Block, Thomas Nast, and Gary Trudeau, for instance, than they will in these pages.2 This is an all-too-common problem for any book that takes an historical approach to popular culture; for the most part, Gilbert gestures towards these and other artists in contextualizing his criticisms. Perhaps more importantly for this reader, the omission of the Obama era of the War on Terror feels like a missed opportunity. Framed by Telnaes's caricatures, which featured Bush and Trump much more prominently than Obama, Gilbert's case study works as a critique of the presidency and, by extension, the people it represents. As a treatment of the War on Terror, however, addressing Obama's role as merely an extension of the Bush doctrine leaves open questions about the rise of drone warfare, partisanship and the presidency, and, perhaps more importantly, war's capacity as caricature to cut through the contradictions of a presidential discourse that professed a desire for the end of war and policy that perpetuated it. Obama's War on Terror, in this way, might be read as a caricature of his war rhetoric and, in so doing, offer evidence of caricature's critical utility for scholars of rhetoric and war beyond the context of comedy.In total, Gilbert's book offers a particularly powerful argument for the utility of caricature as a way of peeling back the mythological layers of national character to reveal more clearly the lived realities of a nation and its character. Caricature, like comedy generally, exists alongside dominant narratives and mythologies as a ready critique of the excesses of nationalism and exceptionalism. In particular, caricatures of war remind audiences that war both is and is not a caricature of culture. War is at once the worst possible expression of democratic cooperation but also, at least in the case of the United States, part and parcel of the national character—an exceptional and yet unremarkable feature of what it is to be American. Reveling in the ugliness of war so often veiled by discourses that encourage audiences to overlook or all together ignore the gruesome realities of war and national character, caricature challenges audiences to look at war, to look at culture, to look at the nation—especially when the looking is hard to do.

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Abstract In this essay, we attend to the rhetorical and spatio-temporal contours of how the urgency to recognize Black life and aid in struggle is detached from a recognition of the deep structural and ontological nature of antiblackness. We center on two seemingly disparate case studies to unpack these phenomena. First, we look at the state lynching of Breonna Taylor and the multiracial coalition that emerged around #sayhername, and second, we turn to the politics and rhetorics of DEI initiatives on college campuses. Guided by scholars writing on Black life, our project asks how we imagine the physicality of violence in this moment in ways that interrupt common frames of both the physical and the moment. We write at the intersection of two larger rhetorical conversations on racialized violence: stoppage and suffocation, and their respective interests in theories of racialized time. We argue that the variants of anti-Black stoppage and suffocation operate on multiple temporal registers of recognition that perform recognition even as they profit from antiblackness. For rhetorical scholars invested in studies of racial violence, the urgency of the moment should serve as a reminder that possibility lies in the inventional, an inventional that requires a disciplined, intentional, and persistent practice and commitment.

Hugh Latimer's 1548 “Sermon of the Plough” is well-known as an example of early English evangelical rhetoric. However, the sermon has often been considered as an effect of, rather than a participant in, evangelical theology. This article reads Latimer's rhetoric, especially his creation of a persona, as fully theological, using Melanchthon's valorization of rhetoric over logic as a model. Latimer's sermon produces an authority that is not limited to Latimer himself, but serves as a reformation of Catholic notions of the authoritative role of the Church, a role based upon the rhetorically effective presentation of the Bible.

Hugh Latimer’s 1548 “Sermon of the Plough” is well-known as an example of early English evangelical rhetoric. However, the sermon has often been considered as an effect of, rather than a participant in, evangelical theology. This article reads Latimer’s rhetoric, especially his creation of a persona, as fully theological, using Melanchthon’s valorization of rhetoric over logic as a model. Latimer’s sermon produces an authority that is not limited to Latimer himself, but serves as a reformation of Catholic notions of the authoritative role of the Church, a role based upon the rhetorically effective presentation of the Bible.

Writing center literature often notes the stress and anxiety of students as a special concern for peer writing tutors, and tutor training manuals offer advice for tutors on how to manage student writers’ anxiety and stress in sessions. Few writing center sources, however, examine the stress/anxiety tutors may experience as a result of their work in the writing center, despite increasing interest in emotions and emotional labor in writing centers. This multi-institutional study examines whether peer writing tutors experience increased stress/anxiety while tutoring. Using a mixed-methods approach combining both surveys and physiological data (salivary cortisol levels controlled against days when they did not tutor), this study investigates the stress/anxiety of 21 tutors across 63 tutoring appointments. The data suggest that peer tutors who enter tutoring sessions in stressed or anxious states are potentially prone to increased stress or anxiety from tutoring. Moreover, they exhibited an inhibited awareness of both student writers’ stress and the potential impact of that stress on tutoring sessions. Results suggest that writing centers should increase their focus on tutor well-being, most crucially on emotional labor and its impacts for peer writing tutors.

ABSTRACT In order to explore the possibilities of affirmative ethics and algorithmic judgment, this article puts machinic rhetoric in conversation with classical imitation pedagogy. Taking a machine-learning chatbot as my example, I examine how imitation and repetition in a restrictive economy of rhetorical models produces a limited affirmative ethics through dialectical relations. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's concept of representative thinking to theorize a procedure for algorithmic judgment, I argue that rhetorical training requires the affirmation of a plurality of models if it is to generate not only versatility but also ethical repetitions.

Introduction: In the US, hundreds of thousands of individuals with visual disabilities work in occupations that typically entail editing text. Editing technologies for blind or visually impaired people have been analyzed by researchers for usability, accessibility, and feasibility. However, a tutorial is needed to provide blind or visually impaired workers with information on how to use these technologies. Key concepts: Technologies that blind or visually impaired individuals can use for editing text present challenges. Such challenges include the lack of usability in word processors' text-editing features, navigational and sense-making issues with screen readers, limited text displayed by refreshable braille displays, and extensive commands needed to operate braille notetakers. Key lessons: The study's blind coauthor (who prefers this terminology) draws on her academic and professional experience to provide procedural information for blind or visually impaired practitioners and students who need to open email attachments, navigate files, select text, navigate the Review tab of Microsoft Word, add comments, and use Nav Quick Keys. Implications for practice: This tutorial indicates that word processors, screen readers, refreshable braille displays, and braille notetakers provide ways for blind or visually impaired practitioners and students to edit text. The tutorial also provides insight into one blind editor's editing process and provides instructions for duplicating this process. This information can increase the awareness of sighted practitioners and teachers who seek to make workplaces more accessible for blind or visually impaired colleagues.

This video essay offers and holistically analyzes the lived experiences of undergraduate writing center consultants during the COVID-19 pandemic from the minds and mouths of the consultants themselves. It situates the consultants’ reflections among current literature on consultant mental health and wellness and suggests we “fill the gap” in this literature by continuing research on consultants’ well-being. Consultants reflect on a specific intervention assignment they engaged with in an ongoing consultant education course at a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest during Fall 2020: the Pandemic Wellness Project. They conclude that writing centers should: offer more opportunities for processing cognitive load; make space for consultant mental health and wellness as a regular—and significant —part of consultant education theory and practice; and create new avenues for meaningful dialogue between consultant and director, consultant and consultant, and, especially, consultant and self.

This article describes a technical writing assignment that requires students to use Minecraft to design and document interactive learning environments. In this project, students balance a critical awareness of this game's technical features with a rhetorical understanding of how those features impact the audience’s experiences and actions. This article demonstrates how video game-based writing projects can help students understand the role of an audience's agency in technical communication.

This study builds on research of multimodal storytelling in educational settings by presenting a study of a youth-produced documentary on immigration. Drawing from a video documentary project in a high school class, we examine students’ representational processes of scaling in documentary storytelling, and the kinds of resources they use to construct multiple spatiotemporal contexts for understanding their experience of immigration and immigration policy. Our theoretical framework relates the concept of scale to the Bakhtinian concept of voice to consider the semiotic resources that are used to index and connect multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in storytelling. Focusing on a documentary produced by some students in the class, we analyze how the young filmmakers used particular speaker voices (characters) and their social positioning to invoke and construct relevant scales for understanding the problem of deportation. Our analysis extends the study of scaling to multimodal texts, and the strategies that people use to represent and configure relationships among different socially stratified spaces. By conceptualizing the relations between voice and scale, this work aims to contribute to literacy learning and teaching that support young people in bringing their knowledge, experiences, and narrative resources to engage with societal structures.

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Colleges and universities across the United States are recognizing the public memory function of their campus spaces and facing difficult decisions about how to represent the ugly sides of their histories within their landscapes of remembrance. Official administrative responses to demands for greater inclusiveness are often slow and conservative in nature. Using our own institution and our work with local Indigenous community members as a case study, we argue that students and faculty can employ community-engaged, public-facing, digital composing projects to effectively challenge entrenched institutional interests that may elide or even misrepresent difficult histories in public memory works. Such projects are a nimble and accessible means of creating counter-narratives to intervene in public memory discourses. Additionally, by engaging in public discourses, such work helps promote meaningful student rhetorical learning in courses across disciplines.

AbstractRhetorical studies as a discipline relies on a set of theories and a geography of case studies that circularly reinforce one another to authorize white-Euro-American traditions of knowledge beholden to colonial ways of knowing the world. Calls to “internationalize” the cases and topics of rhetorical studies are easily subsumed by the self-authorizing racist epistemology of the discipline, since additive models of “diverse” cases repurpose diversity to reinforce the authority of the discipline as it already exists. How should the globalization of rhetorical studies address the disciplinary logic of white, colonial, U.S. normativity? Studying non-U.S., non-Western rhetorical practice must be an anticolonial political intervention to fundamentally reimagine the discipline or it will risk reproducing a racist disciplinary structure.This essay maps three ways that scholars studying “international” cases have led a restructuring of the discipline by challenging the presumptions of universality that creep into scholarship. Anticolonial rhetorical scholars challenge processes of universalization as method, as rhetorical practice, and as ontology. When these processes of universalization become the object of study for rhetorical scholars, there is a possibility that rhetorical studies can develop the reflexivity to challenge its own circularly reinforcing, exclusionary disciplinary logic of white-U.S. normativity.

AbstractDecolonial smuggling is a practice that falls at the intersections of fugitivity (Moten) and delinking (Mignolo, Wanzer-Serrano). It is geared toward disrupting rhetorical studies’ zero-point epistemology to open space to marshal alternative epistemologies—of Black being, Indigeneities, and their relational formations—against the canon to enable more radical, decolonial disciplinary futures. Building on the work of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) scholars, this essay details the forms of whiteness and knowledge production that reproduce epistemic violence, performs metaphoric (meta)criticism across various strands of race scholarship, and comments on white scholars’ role in these conversations. This essay seeks to add clarity to what decolonization looks like for rhetoricians with respect to the epistemologies and ontologies embedded within the metaphors that, for many, are matters of life and death.

This article examines textual artifacts surrounding Google Lens, an image recognition application, to reveal how it forwards reductive representations of the complex sets of relations constituted through locative media and augmented reality. Working across textual and posthumanist traditions, this article introduces a theoretical approach for investigating the rhetoric of technology, termed the postsymbolic. In acknowledging the formative and ontological role discursive rhetoric plays in the spatial operations and user experiences of and through locative media, the postsymbolic asserts the need for an integrated approach in which symbolic artifacts might be examined through the lens of both discursive rhetorical theory and posthumanism.

Bernard Malamud’s novel A New Life and its attention to midcentury writing instruction illuminates the emergence of rhetoric and composition. Malamud’s novel is what microhistorians describe as “exceptional typical” evidence, where exceptional status and typical topics combine to showcase power formations in historical context. The novel describes shifts in textbooks and writing curricula, identifies the emergence of process-oriented assessment practices, and witnesses the institutional and disciplinary marginalization of female instructors. As such, Malamud could be described as a proto-composition scholar. Reflecting upon his legacy at their institution, the authors consider the re-naming of a student lounge named after Malamud.

This article examines how online writing projects can provide students an opportunity to critically reflect upon their literal and conceptual position within university spaces. We begin by discussing the underlying connection between classical notions of ethos and spatial dwelling before considering how writing in online environments provides new opportunities for students to engage in a dynamic form of ethos-building. We then discuss two different online writing projects wherein students narrated the strategies they used to negotiate a variety of institutional environments and the learning experiences that happen therein. In doing so, these projects demonstrate how online writing assignments can reinforce students’ confidence in their ability to traverse a variety of educational scenarios which, in turn, can help them chart a path for achieving their own academic, professional, and personal goals.

In 2018, as part of an EU COST Action (COST Action 15221 – www.werelate.eu), 43 academics, based at various higher education institutions in Europe, were asked about existing and desirable centralised support for writing, research, teaching and learning. This article draws on the academics’ responses. It uses that data to demonstrate the ways in which the learner-centred approach, typically adopted by writing centres, might function as a blueprint for a blended centralised support model for these four strands of higher education. In order to explore this idea, the article examines the reported support for research, as the data suggest that the majority of the centralised supports that currently exist at these institutions are designed primarily to support research. The study unpicks the mechanisms and approaches that are designed to ensure that research can be supported; it identifies what is effective in terms of supporting staff as researchers. From there, turning to the existing and desirable supports for writing, teaching and learning, I argue that, using a learner-centred writing centre model as inspiration, the structures which are currently in place to effectively support research can be modified and repurposed to more effectively support writing, teaching, and learning in higher education.      

Background: College and university science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students in Japan, who hope for careers in science and technology fields, lack the motivation to learn English as a second language (L2), impairing their current capacities to learn the L2 and their future abilities to communicate globally once employed. Literature review: Although these students' motivation to learn English seems strongly linked to the external pressure to do well on a standardized English test, gain employment, and progress up the career ladder, this extrinsic motivation may not be as beneficial for their L2 learning as positive images of themselves using English in future situations. Three types of future career-related self images-an Ideal L2 Self, a Probable L2 Self, and an Ought-to L2 Self-are hypothesized to promote L2 achievement. Research methodology: Data from questionnaires examining psycholinguistic variables for 1013 Japanese STEM students of English were subjected to ANOVA and multiple regression analysis with three L2 Self variables as predictor variables and scores from the TOEIC standardized English exam as the outcome variable. Results/discussion: ANOVA results showed that students had a strong image of themselves as needing English for future career goals, as measured by the Ought-to L2 Self, but had lower levels of Ideal L2 Self, the variable measuring a future image as a fluent user of English. In the regression analysis, the Ought-to L2 Self predicted lower TOEIC exam scores; conversely, the Ideal L2 Self predicted greater TOEIC scores. These paradoxical results indicate that Japanese STEM students struggle motivationally to improve English skills needed for future STEM job-related communication, despite feeling pressured to do so. Conclusions: To encourage the formation of students' images of Ideal L2 selves or stronger Probable L2 selves, STEM teachers and language teachers of Japanese STEM students could introduce motivational interventions. For example, positive role models of English language learners could visit classes and demonstrate how they have applied their English as a foreign language (EFL) learning experiences to future careers.

This article examines Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story “Wilshire Bus” in light of its pedagogical effectiveness in the contemporary cultural moment. The author argues that “Wilshire Bus,” published in 1950, resonates with many students today by evoking issues such as bullying, racist stereotyping, bystander responsibility, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Our patterns of connection shape how we think, write, read and relate. In response, scholars have begun to understand and teach literacy as a networked phenomenon. This essay contributes to that effort. I argue that in an age of media convergence, to think networked literacy is to think everyday digital media literacy habits, particularly as they relate to the design and maintenance of information ecosystems. Combining new materialist writing studies scholarship with design thinking and media theory, I propose and model a materialist approach to literacy analysis that respects both the human and non-human elements in such systems. I then discuss how this approach might inform writing pedagogy.

This study introduces social question-and-answer (SQA) documentation to technical and professional communication scholarship. It conceptualizes SQA as interactive, user-generated documentation and describes contextual information types within social how-to questions that initiate documentation. It also explores whether contextual information associates with answers that complete the interactive documentation. Results reliably describe 15 information types based on content analysis of 3,529 contextual information types from 500 questions. Exploratory statistical analysis suggests that askers may increase answerability by including less speculative thought, more error messages, and less general situation information. To facilitate complete SQA documentation, the study calls for additional research into question content and answerability.

Long: I do have a quarrel with what McCloskey's chapter says about Plato's Gorgias, one of my favorite Platonic dialogues.One of the aims of that dialogue is to distinguish between two modes of speech -one that aims at truth and one that aims at power.Plato identifies the former with philosophy and the latter with rhetoric, thus drawing McCloskey's ire because she is a longtime defender of the importance of rhetoric.McCloskey: Yes, Plato is charming, and Gorgias most of all.But we must not, I am sure you agree, love his eloquence so much that we fall for his authoritarian tastes, the tastes of an aristocrat hostile to democracy.I do defend rhetoric, and long have.My reasons are two: (1) It is the basis of a free society, as its inventors in Sicily understood, and, as the essay argues, (2) There is no "dialectic" that can yield Truth, capital T, only an honest rhetorical discourse getting agreed truth for the nonce.Both of these reasons are assaulted by Plato, everywhere in the writings we have.Roderick Tracy Long: But in her critique of Gorgias she says that Plato is defending a state-imposed standard of truth.I don't see that in Gorgias at all.Maybe

This article examines the modern foster care system through its intersections with rhetorical theories of care and rhetorical practices of hospitality and provision. At the beginning of the twentieth century, policy makers and activists promoted different rhetorics of fostering as they debated ways to care for America’s vulnerable and dependent children. From this national crisis of child welfare, the modern foster care system emerged. Revisiting the rhetorical struggle over foster care reopens the question of what it means to foster and brings into focus practices of family-making, parenting, child-rearing, and basic hospitality that are implicated in the response.

This article examines data from an ethnographic study of an online Mormon women’s discussion board to argue that enclaves can be places for important critical and civic work. These women’s common religious identity and shared experiences of intolerance on a public board led them to adopt discursive conventions that included intimate literacy. These discursive conventions allowed for disruption of ideological feedback loops and development of responsible rhetorical agency. This article argues that an enclave’s capacity for generating openness to difference depends on the strength of the ideologies espoused and on the values and discursive conventions that guide the enclave.

A synthesis of converging and contrasting perspectives on ways of knowing and doing in digital rhetoric pedagogy among 25 teacher-scholars that provides a rough sketch of the state of digital rhetoric pedagogy as it is understood and practiced in the second decade of the 21st century and as it is told by a range of voices, including leading voices, in the subfield of Digital Rhetoric and identifies and highlights areas of productive tension among interviewees’ responses.

Wikipedia’s gender gaps are both well-established and well-challenged, and while Wikipedia-based assignments have become more common in composition, teacher-scholars have not fully explored the opportunities for feminist pedagogy offered by the encyclopedia. This article reports on a teacher research study designed to examine the efficacy of the feminist rhetorical approach for understanding critical literacy learning through Wikipedia-based assignments in First-Year Composition (FYC). Findings from student forum posts, surveys, and reflection essays suggest that, despite its benefits, the Wikipedia assignment has been met with challenges that hinder students from making contributions critically and effectively, especially as they struggle to assume agency and criticality in the FYC classroom. By identifying and addressing these challenges, we seek to offer alternative approaches to teaching feminist rhetorical inquiries in FYC, and to expand the current critical practices in Wikipedia-based writing instruction.

Drawing on the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) writing curriculum, this study documents how students in writing courses at four different institutions transferred writing knowledge and practice concurrently into other sites of writing, including other courses, co-curriculars, and workplaces. This research demonstrates that when students, supported by the TFT curriculum, understood that appropriate transfer of writing knowledge and practice is both possible and desirable, (1) they engaged in writing transfer during the TFT course into other sites of writing; (2) they transferred from in-school contexts into out-of-school contexts with facility; and (3) in both cases, they engaged in a just-in-time transfer.

This study investigates how students perceive the outlining process. Students in two business communication sections completed a survey regarding outlining perceptions and reasons for outlining or not. Using qualitative content analysis and qualitative coding, the researcher and an independent coder analyzed 34 students’ responses regarding outlining process, use, and reasons for outlining or not. Results indicate that students perceive outlining as more useful if their outlining process includes both organization and content exploration and less useful if it excludes organization or content exploration. Notable reasons for not outlining include concern for outlining time and difficulty generating content for the outline.

Engineering laboratory courses often contain laboratory reports as writing assignments to be used as an assessment and grading tool for the course. While laboratory report writing is a useful skill, this article discusses an assignment which was used as an alternative to a traditional laboratory report within a dynamic systems laboratory course. This writing assignment is framed within the context of a hypothetical scenario involving a supervisor requesting a laboratory experiment to compare the effectiveness of two different designs for controlling the speed of a gearbox unit. Performance goals are specified by the ``customer'' so that students have a reference with which to frame their responses. Despite the shortened length of the writing assignment, students are forced to apply critical thinking and use evidence from their experiments to answer the posed question with a clear conclusion.

By analyzing a case study of organizational decision making at a large research university, this article argues that the agency to make a difference within organizations—to effect organizational change—is not exclusive to those in positions of authority. This case study demonstrates how subordinate members of a university affected management’s decision-making process through their use of rhetorical identification. Specifically, these organizational members gained this agency by reproducing certain values and identities through epideictic rhetoric in order to encourage collective action and effect organizational change from the bottom up.

Introduction: Technical and professional communication (TPC) instructors value audience awareness, using peer- and client-based projects to facilitate it. We explore how students' audience awareness is facilitated by the case method, which presents students with a professional communication task within a workplace scenario. Situating the case: Case-method research suggests including a detailed audience and situation, multiple genres, and multimedia. Few studies have explored how case materials facilitate students' audience awareness. About the case: A 12-week case that was consistent with case-method research asked students to respond to an engineering firm's internal problem with a proposal and report. How the case was studied: Students from two sections of a genre-based course completed reflections about their audience awareness after the proposal and report. We qualitatively analyzed 51 reflections. Results/discussion: Students stated they could understand the facts about their primary audience but couldn't identify secondary and tertiary audiences. Students stated they could identify audience needs, but they disagreed about the amount of detail to understand those needs. Also, students stated they could respond to the audience using appropriate evidence and writing style. Conclusions: When using the case method, instructors should know that students may need varying levels of detail to interpret their audience's needs. Also, including data and conflicting needs gives students opportunities to make strategic decisions about content.

This article reconstructs the concept of rhetorical action to excavate its original, recurrent, and—for many—discomforting links to constitutive politics. By examining the history of rhetorical action through the ancient period to the mid-17th century, I will argue that that relationship between rhetorical action and constitutive politics is a powerful prism for understanding actio. The article’s contributions are twofold and compounding. The first is the establishment of a positive account of the relation between actio and constitutive rhetoric for the ancient politicians and early modern dramatists, which pushes the usual bookends of actio’s history both backward and forward, providing analytical leverage to critically reflect on its standard history. The second contribution is a demonstration that much of the confusion and discomfort surrounding actio results from formulating actio negatively against its constitutive political threat. In sum, this article contributes to both the theoretical and historical understanding of rhetorical action.

Over the past decade, compositionists have made a number of claims about opportunities presented by Wikipedia for teaching writing. The encyclopedia allows for transparent observation of concepts and skills related to process, research, collaboration, and rhetoric. Beyond observation, Wikipedia allows for public writing with an authentic audience, which often results in increased motivation. Much of this early research has dealt in opportunities and possibilities: speculation about how Wikipedia sponsors particular pedagogies and learning outcomes, and there remains a need for more empirical evidence. This article presents select data from a recent large-scale study conducted by the Wiki Education Foundation that begins to meet this need, and that confirms and extends research from the computers and writing community. Key findings from this research include positive evaluations of Wikipedia-based assignments in general, as well as positive evaluations concerning the capacity of Wikipedia-based assignments to teach critical thinking skills, source evaluation and research, public writing, literature review and synthesis, and peer review. This study also adds significantly to our field's knowledge of how contextual factors related to the course and assignment affect students’ evaluation of a Wikipedia-based assignment. Finally, this article suggests key recommendations for teaching with Wikipedia based on these findings.

Review of Don’t Shake the Spoon by By Exchange for Change (Ben Bogart, editor).

The value of higher education in the United States tends to be addressed in terms of the postmodern commodification of knowledge.As Lyotard (1984) reported, the grand narratives of modernity, which had unified knowledge and legitimated it as Truth or Emancipation, have disintegrated into incommensurate language games, fragmenting knowledge, which is now legitimated by performativity.According to Lyotard, each game consists of rules that form among its players a consensus on which utterances, or moves, are meaningful, with the objective of the game being to produce, with maximum efficiency, knowledge as a commodity: a game is legitimated when investment in it is exceeded by the economic value of the knowledge it produces; conversely, a game is delegitimated when investment in it exceeds the economic value of the knowledge it produces.As college tuition costs continue to outpace median income, with student loan debt having collectively surpassed a staggering $1.5 trillion, what return on an investment in the game of higher education can be expected by graduates entering a highly competitive global economy?It seems uncertain.Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Schlueter (2016) argued that with digital technology making information widely available, the purpose of colleges and universities must be to teach the critical thinking skills necessary to process that information.Having surveyed a number of university mission statements, Schlueter observed that higher education has indeed come to widely promote critical thinking as its central learning outcome.But at the same time, he contended, there exists as yet no consensus on what critical thinking is, whether it exists, and whether it can be taught.Given the stakes involved, it is clear, according to Schlueter, that "higher education has gambled on critical thinking" (para.7) and that it needs to secure a consensus on it "if we are not to lose our shirts on this bet" (para.22). 1 Schlueter's (2016) discussion of critical thinking suggests a conflict within performativity between how this knowledge operates and its legitimation in economic terms.As a gamble on what students will be able to do by graduation, critical thinking has essentially become a commodity in the futures market.The uncertainty of its value is, however, due not to the vicissitudes of the market but to an instability of the rules needed to produce critical thinking as a clear and coherent product, which can thereby be assigned a value.Consider that, beginning in 1981, when college tuition costs began to increase sharply, 2 so did the frequency of the phrase "critical thinking" appearing in American English books. 3It seems that as investment in the game of higher education has grown, it has been played more often.And yet, despite the stakes having been raised over these last four decades, research over this period has shown a range of critical thinking definitions, theories, and test results, reflecting, both implicitly and explicitly, variations in the rules of the game.So if higher education has gambled on critical thinking, it is a wager in which final gains or losses seem to be deferred indefinitely and can, therefore, be neither legitimated nor delegitimated by performativity.

This article examines the importance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rhetorical approaches in professional communication theory, introducing the theory of working closets as central to understanding how LGBT professionals navigate and succeed. The author presents case studies of LGBT professionals at the headquarters of a national discount retail company as examples of working closets and asks what the implications are for professional communication studies. He also looks at the need to learn from and through queer rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, and social justice frameworks, especially given the cultural turn of professional communication studies in the early 21st century.

This essay reads The Civil War in France, Karl Marx’s account of the 1871 Paris Commune, as an example of revolutionary epideictic rhetoric that takes debt as a central unifying trope. Marx deploys the rhetoric of debt as a synecdoche to unify diverse French and international political constituencies around the political project of the Paris Commune. Simultaneously, in the wake of the Commune’s destruction, the trope of debt allows Marx to signal the political potential of the Commune outside its immediate context, inviting thinkers and activists after Marx’s time to invest in the Commune’s project in new and creative ways. I argue that this reading of The Civil War in France contributes to conversations about revolutionary community within Marxian rhetorical studies, as well as furthering discussions of the links between epideictic rhetoric and social change.

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes Heidegger's rhetoric in his most famous political address, the Rektoratsrede, which he delivered at the University of Freiburg on 27 May 1933. After I set out the political and philosophical kairos of the Rektoratsrede by drawing on Heidegger's contemporary lectures, letters, and Ponderings, in part 2 I use classical rhetorical resources and Heidegger's philosophy of temporality in Sein und Zeit (1927) to analyze the arrangement of his speech. In part 3, I examine two key National Socialist terms in the speech's climax. In part 4, I consider Heidegger's elocutio—his artful use of charged figures of speech and thought in the Rektoratsrede—in more detail. Concluding remarks reflect on the value and limits of the analysis in the context of debates about Heidegger's politics and its imbrication with his thought.

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Multimajor professional writing courses are becoming extremely common in English departments, which presents specific challenges for curricular design because of the diversity of the majors and professional goals of students. This article describes the theoretical, programmatic, and curricular details of a multimajor professional writing course. We argue that the design of a course that places a central focus on writing theory and writing knowledge can encourage learning transfer. Such an approach helps to overcome the challenges of a multimajor course by allowing the study of a common subject among students hoping to enter a number of different professions after college. Our design leans heavily on concrete knowledge domains—genre knowledge, social knowledge, procedural knowledge—and their application to specific disciplinary or professional contexts. The article’s discussion of course assignments and contexts demonstrates how these domains are applied and provides detailed information on our experiences teaching the course.

Book Review| June 01 2017 Old Rhetoric and New Media Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice. By Douglas Eyman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015; pp. 1 + 162. $75.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. By John Durham Peters. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015; pp. 1 + 409. $30.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere. By Damien Smith Pfister. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014; pp. ix + 272. $69.95 cloth.Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities. Edited by Jim Rodolfo and William Hart-Davidson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015; pp. v + 330. $90.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. Katie P. Bruner; Katie P. Bruner Katie P. Bruner and Paul R. McKean are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Paul R. McKean; Paul R. McKean Katie P. Bruner and Paul R. McKean are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ned O’Gorman; Ned O’Gorman Ned O’Gorman is Associate Professor of Communication at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Matthew C. Pitchford; Matthew C. Pitchford Matthew C. Pitchford and Nikki R.Weickum are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nikki R. Weickum Nikki R. Weickum Matthew C. Pitchford and Nikki R.Weickum are doctoral students at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 339–356. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0339 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Katie P. Bruner, Paul R. McKean, Ned O’Gorman, Matthew C. Pitchford, Nikki R. Weickum; Old Rhetoric and New Media. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 339–356. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0339 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. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Kant’s Philosophy of Communication provides a valuable and thought-provoking reassessment of Kant’s place in the rhetorical tradition. Complementing recent work by Scott Stroud, Pat Gehrke, and others who have essayed an expanded role for rhetoric in Kant’s critical works, Ercolini focuses on texts at the edges of the Kantian canon to produce an account of an “‘other’ Kant” (7) who provides a counter-narrative to caricatures of enlightenment thought as being dismissive of rhetoric (220). Ercolini frames Kant’s enlightenment as a practice: a process of embodied, collective knowledge production and critique with a robust role for rhetoric, communication, and social exchange (220). In addition to contributing to rhetorical studies of Kant, this account of Kant as an explorer of the social, embodied, and affective dimensions of thought takes a place beside the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault to Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas, who have explored Kant’s continued relevance for contemporary philosophical and political concerns.The first two chapters of Ercolini’s book address Kant’s relationship to rhetoric in conversation with existing rhetorical scholarship on Kant. Ercolini sums up rhetorical engagement with Kant’s most direct discussions of rhetoric, arguing that, while Kant disparages a narrow vision of oratorical practice, his work accords a wide role to “communication, reasoned public discourse, deliberation, critique and other elements” (6) of the broad intellectual projects associated with contemporary rhetorical studies. These chapters also push back against the austere image of Kant’s life that modern philosophy has inherited, discussing Kant’s interest in billiards and gambling, the vibrancy of his lectures, and his lively social milieu (7–8), all of which attest to an interest in discussion and public engagement. Ercolini’s observations in these chapters complicate Kant’s attitude toward rhetoric rather than establishing him as its champion, but this approach is an asset: Kant is set on philosophical common ground with rhetoric without underplaying the tensions and complexity found in his thought.In an elegant compositional gesture, the following chapters mirror each major aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy, treating the metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic facets of the “other” Kant. In Chapter 2, Ercolini examines the tepid response that initially greeted the Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on Kant’s reply to a critical review by Christian Garve that set much of the tone for the Critique’s initial reception. Working through Kant’s exchanges with Garve, as well as the polemic against Garve’s review in the Appendix to the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Ercolini argues that the failure of other philosophers to effectively popularize the insights of the first Critique prompted Kant to reflect on the need for popular philosophical work. Kant distinguishes “alleged popularity’” (78) that renders philosophical insight in buzzwords and slogans without intellectual rigor from true popularity: writing that places critical philosophy in conversation with public concerns in order to prompt collective debate and advance the task of thought beyond the musings of the lone philosopher (64). In this sense, “the monument of Western intellectual history known as the first Critique actually serves as a propaedeutic to the Prolegomena” (66) and its popular articulation of critical philosophy.In its inversion of the status of Kant’s Critiques relative to his more avowedly popular philosophy, Chapter 2 serves as the fulcrum of the book’s argument, providing a clear rationale for the ethical and aesthetic discussions in the rest of Ercolini’s book. Chapter 3 extends the idea of popularity to develop an “embodied ethics” (91) out of Kant’s anthropological texts and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, arguing that even as Kant insists on the purity of the categorical imperative, he cannot escape the impurity of empirical examples and the ethical vertigo they create. Kant’s anthropological texts offer a parallel ethics focused on the “dynamic between discipline and enjoyment” (129) that characterizes sociability and conversation in public, and emphasize the body and its pleasures, offering insights for communication ethics centered on alterity and the care of the self.Chapters 4 and 5 mirror the later critical philosophy’s discussion of aesthetic judgment. Chapter 4 introduces the Critique of Judgment’s key concepts, and frames Kant’s turn to aesthetics as both a primary site of concern about rhetoric and an account that, rather than dismissing rhetoric, “infuses [it] with a capacity and power that certainly deserves attention and respect,” even if it remains a worry for Kant (163). Chapter 5 engages Kant’s writings on tone and style. Ercolini argues that Kant’s explicit reflections on style provide a set of strategies for effective popular scholarship, as well as a guide to ethical rhetoric that emphasizes liveliness, perspicuity, a balance between logical and aesthetic perfection, and a style that is “communicable and intelligible to all who have functioning faculties in common” (174). Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of tone, Kant’s term for the affective dimension of language. Beyond augmenting the observations about style from earlier in the chapter, the discussion of tone affirms that style and rhetoric for Kant are more than merely ornamental: they affectively dispose the listener in accordance with a given message (190). While more work remains to expand this connection, Ercolini’s discussion of tone sets up the basics of a materialist theory of rhetorical style that merits future expansion.Beyond the contributions it makes to rhetorical studies of Kant, Ercolini’s book is important to scholars of rhetorical history for the way it brings the world of eighteenth-century German philosophy to life. The book places many of Kant’s occasional essays in context as engagements in the public debates of Kant’s time (201), and uses that context to make a powerful case for those essays’ significance as public scholarship. Ercolini also fleshes out Kant’s role in the German enlightenment, particularly with respect to rhetoric’s place in the academic system in which Kant taught (48–57), and deftly treats Kant’s debates with other scholars and his participation in Königsberg’s social circles. These discussions generate the book’s most significant claims about the history of rhetoric—against the thesis that the enlightenment heralded a denigration of rhetoric, Ercolini argues that scholars need only look in the right places to find evidence of a vibrant rhetorical culture of which Kant was a part.Kant’s Philosophy of Communication is an enjoyable read that will provide substantial food for thought to philosophers of communication, historians of rhetoric and philosophy, theorists of public scholarship, and anyone familiar with the basics of Kant’s critical philosophy. The primary place the book could do more (and its biggest opening for future work) is in the implications it outlines for rhetoric’s discussions of contemporary philosophy. Ercolini places her reading in conversation with a number of more contemporary uptakes of Kant’s work (14), and engages at length with Deleuze’s work on Kant (in Chapter 4) and Foucault’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” (in the introduction and conclusion). These readings work well as written, but the short circuit they make between Kantian enlightenment and the concerns of contemporary materialist and poststructuralist theories of rhetoric remains to be explored. Moreover, some of the traveling companions Ercolini selects for Kant sit uneasily together—Foucault’s and Habermas’s versions of enlightenment would hardly agree, and while that tension is highlighted (212-–13), the implications of the “other” Kant for the relationship between these thinkers are not fully explored. If taken at their full value, Ercolini’s claims about Kant might productively trouble many of rhetoric’s narratives about modernity and its afterlives. Such troubling deserves to be further pursued, in this work or future projects.

To make technical communication scholarship more reflective of the complexity of work done by such communicators, a new concept that marries recent parallel turns to ethics and invention is needed. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a stranger to the field, offers such a concept: responsibility. It covers more explanatory ground than the most cited of ethical concepts, deliberation, and most importantly, centers ethics and invention squarely within the technical communicator’s relationship to language.

This article argues for using rhetorical quandaries as a basis for composition courses. Following work in composition that considers the notion of “problem,” the article explores constraints as a way to determine main difficulties in writing situations. Course examples indicate connections between difficult writing moments and larger societal dilemmas.

More than four generations ago, Nancy Coryell’s (1927) study revealed that an extensive approach to reading instruction is more effective than an intensive approach, yet the reading establishment then continued to promote intensive, close reading methods. Recently, the writers of the Common Core State Standards renewed this debate by advocating that teachers implement more intensive, close reading strategies. I replicated a portion of Coryell’s (1927) study to determine the effectiveness of intensive and extensive reading instruction; to do so, I examined the impact each method had on students’ comprehension and analysis of literature. The study used a quasi-experimental, nonrandomized, pretest-post test comparison group research design. I used test procedures to measure the difference in pretest-to-post test scores within and between both groups for both comprehension and analysis. No statistically significant differences existed in the gains on the subtest measuring reading comprehension; however, statistically significant differences in gains on the subtest measuring analysis of literature were found within both instructional methods. At a time when policy seems to drive English instruction toward an intensive approach, this study suggests that we need more research before the field of English education can properly debate the issue.

This study investigates the meaning of communication skills from employers’ perspectives. Students enrolled in a business communication course were asked to contact potential employers in their fields of interest, requesting information about important communication skills in those fields. Using content analysis, two coders familiar with business communication analyzed 52 of the resulting open-ended responses. The analysis of 165 skills suggests employers recall oral communication more frequently than written, visual, or electronic communication skills. Of oral communication subskills, interpersonal communication was mentioned more than other workplace communication skills.

This symposium brings together a range of scholars to consider what economic forces have driven the development of independent writing programs, and how such programs are susceptible to economic conditions and pressures, perhaps even more so than neighboring disciplines in the humanities.

By returning to the controversy created by the publication in 2002 of Marc Bousquet’s JAC article (“Composition as a Management Science”), focusing on the labor issues attending composition teaching and the prospects of institutional critique, I examine how the conceptual indeterminacy of many of the field’s key terms in actuality undergo (and perform) a political-economic function. This exploration forms the basis for an analysis of how the knowledge domains of the field can be more clearly defined through an effort to reframe the field as “writing studies,” for the purpose of moving beyond the worn out commonplaces and labor exploitation associated with first-year composition.

This article uses genre-field analysis (GFA) to examine Minecraft griefing guides: user-generated documentation that operationalizes destructive approaches to gameplay. Griefing guides promote subversive praxis while forwarding a utilitarian ethical system that alues hedonistic schadenfreude, running counter to morals of cooperation championed by most Minecraft players. Published in online forums where debates over conflicting praxis continue, these guides explicitly address, rather than mask, the negotiation of ideological values and ethical systems within a community.

Deep Rhetoric is addressed to philosophy and rhetoric. And, like the journal, its questions emerge from the problem of a long-standing and uncomfortable conjunction, the “and” that divides and joins in one stroke. Over the course of eight chapters or a “series of closely related essays” (8), Crosswhite argues for a redefinition of rhetoric's place within our society's ethical imagination (giving it new “rights” to reason, justice, and wisdom, rights usually given to philosophy) and thereby returns rhetoric firmly to its original arena, the human condition. Such a recovery of rhetoric, if not its empowerment, grounds Crosswhite's concern for questions that philosophy shares with rhetoric only in a kind of grudging détente. It also says a great deal about his claim that rhetoric may be (or perhaps was all along) philosophy's best critic, offering us other ways way of loving wisdom, seeking justice, and contending with violence.A note on “deep:” Crosswhite's “deep” is both a move against philosophy and a gesture toward going “beyond” rhetoric as an academic discipline. Rhetoric began—like philosophy—amid the conditions of humanity: our questions of virtue, community, and communication of both. Rhetoric's migration into a university setting says less about its essences (one being its connection to teaching) and more about how education has shifted away from a concern with those conditions (3). Moreover, as Crosswhite notes, rhetoric has not been treated well in American higher education; it has been especially damaged by “destructive elitist” attitudes that simplify the complex “communication capabilities” needed for social life (3). Yet if rhetoric can go or become “deep” enough, Crosswhite argues, if it can do what it has always done all those times institutions have tried to kill it off—respond to controversies “for a specific time and in a specific place,” ‘hosting’ them as honest and useful (6)—then it will thrive. In the end, Crosswhite is after this fully “critical, creative, and truthful” rhetoric (177).Crosswhite solidifies rhetoric's “rapprochement” with philosophy (177) in chapters 5 and 6, an extensive and productive reading of Heidegger. The work of that German philosopher/rhetorician is one of many shared substances between the two schools of thought that Crosswhite gives attention to throughout the book. A typical review would summarize those substances and their attendant chapters, moving toward an analytical climax. Yet a fair reviewer knows such a limited space cannot do justice to Crosswhite's dense arguments, especially about Heidegger. And also Crosswhite covers some old ground. I will not rehearse his expansion on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1969 work (chapter 7). Readers of this journal know that Crosswhite organized and oversaw a special issue in 2010 about the legacy of The New Rhetoric.Crosswhite's individual chapters are not as important as his work on concepts that bring rhetoric into its “deeper” self. Crosswhite argues for a retrieval of four concepts “from millennia of philosophical and theological reifications” (79).1 It is these concepts—transcendence, psychagōgia, logos, and humanism—that deserve a reviewer's (and reader's) attention. Their development throughout the essays shows in a more direct way how this book situates itself within rhetorical theory and the history of rhetoric and in relation to the progress that has been made in both of those arenas in the second half of the twentieth century. These concepts are not new to philosophy or rhetoric, but taken as a whole they define the “deepest” rhetoric.Crosswhite's rhetorical attention to these concepts highlights a significant difference between philosophy and rhetoric: he insists that rhetoric resist the urge for an epistemological telos, prominent in philosophy. Thus a “deep” rhetoric pursues a direction but acknowledges that such a pursuit consistently destabilizes any actual arriving. In that frame, Crosswhite expends the first one hundred pages or so (chapters 1 and 2) trying to name but not terminally define “deep rhetoric” through these concepts; the rescued concepts become mines in which Crosswhite repeatedly enters, not because he is looking for “gold” but because he wants to describe rhetoric as the work of mining. And so he claims rhetoric as a “way of being.” This claim is not new to rhetorical theory, but what makes Crosswhite's attempt so persuasive is the ambitiousness of the book as evidenced in the depth of the mining, which extends past the first two chapters, the concepts aiding his analysis of justice, violence, and wisdom. Along with this depth, the book's breadth also argues forcefully that one does not “study” rhetoric so much as live it, because its influence is felt across the human condition. That is what makes rhetoric philosophical or, better, what makes philosophy rhetorical. And the living is an entangled, material existence. Mixing humor and serious scholarship, for example, Crosswhite couples his close reading of Heidegger with an explanation of how silence and logos inhabit the manner in which he and his wife share a bed.Living amid others requires the practice of transcendence, the first of the key concepts. Crosswhite writes that rhetoric as transcendence is “a way we open ourselves to the influence of what is beyond ourselves and become receptive, a way we participate in a larger world and become open to the lives of others, a way we learn and change” (17). This participation is a meeting with each other “in language of some kind” (61), equal to “our being-in-logos” (56). In the eternal battle between rhetoric and philosophy, rhetoric's practice in the mundane (as opposed to philosophy's attachment to the ideal seen in Plato's heavenly visions) has been seen as a weakness. In Crosswhite's estimation this lack of heavenly transcendence is not a negative when seen through a different frame. Crosswhite argues that rhetoric is “something we are, not something we have” (61). This implies a different relationship to philosophy, one hidden by “knowledge” as a having. In addition, rhetorical transcendence has an “ethical force” because ethics is “constitutive of rhetoric” (107). That force certainly has something to do with “the good,” but it does not entail imposing that “good” on others through violence, physical or rhetorical. For Crosswhite the difference between an ethical transcendence and what he calls a “warrior theory of transcendence” is the latter's lack of restraint (117). This lack is best seen in Plato's description of Gorgias: he is a man who seeks “conquest and domination” along with wealth for himself (117), but ironically his rhetoric is not rhetorical enough. “Socrates' real charge against Gorgias's rhetoric is that it does not go deep enough” (124, emphasis his). In other words, rhetoric may have been a skill or “discipline” for the Sophist but not a manner of life and so less than ethical. That ethical manner of life is a constant communicative examination, a questioning of what we claim to know and put “under” our power. This opens us to something or someone else.This communicative examination is part of the second concept, psychagōgia. Translated as “leading the soul,” this Platonic notion is a “special power” of logos (different than its usual association with sophistic magic or spellbinding) that Crosswhite draws out from the gospel of John, known for its description of Logos as the Word of God. “Pros ton theon” (“toward the god”) becomes the lack of “possession or knowledge of an ultimate being” or “definite, certain, foreseeable, outcomes” (31) or a “not-having, a way of comporting oneself toward but not a way of actually knowing or grasping or achieving the goal” (30). This restraint is what makes this concept a rhetorical one rather than a philosophical one. Psychagōgia as a practice of “deep rhetoric” is “a life of pursuing and loving that stretches out toward wisdom but never arrives at it” (253). This “limited” power is a power “to which one must yield and not simply a power that one attempts to master and use for oneself” (133). Such a limitation makes rhetoric more ethical than its more end-orientated sister, philosophy. And a “deep rhetoric” internalizes this limitation on a primal level. One might suggest that what keeps philosophy grounded—that is, what prevents its heavenly transcendence—is its rhetorical “leading.”Psychagōgia is something “which we can never completely objectify” (131). This is because of its relation to logos, the third concept. Logos “moves in and against the semiotic languages of human beings; it makes them possible, but it works strongly against their certainties and ideologies” (79). Yet this “it” is not “a thing but a direction” (79). In terms of the gospel of John it is “the dynamic movement toward and into G-d,” and it must continue moving toward that which “will always exceed the forms of comprehension that lead toward it” (34). In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, rhetoric's “essence [as logos] is its onwardness” (79) or its experiencing of psychagōgia. This particular formation has implications for rhetoric as it continues its ethical turn. Rhetorical scholars have struggled indirectly with the content of rhetoric and so also with the content of its ethic. But if it is toward a good, if it is a leading toward, then rhetoric is not suspicious but in line with the w/Word as a calling toward. Such a leading toward enhances the power of language, a win for rhetoric.Or in Heidegger's thinking, rhetoric “is an awareness of” a logos, an awareness “deeper” that extends beyond the discipline, a “more original” logos of “communication, controversy, deliberation, and being-with-one-another—the essential sociality of Dasein” (195). This “ungrounded” logos (197) appears as Crosswhite pushes past what he sees as Heidegger's self-centered “authenticity” toward “a richer conception of logos and a more complex vision of sociality” (198). Conceptualizing “sociality” as that which is human, Crosswhite argues that human “beings” are not “simple entities, enclosed in themselves, but are movements toward and away from each other,” the world, themselves, and “whatever else their transcendence reveals” (174). These movements are both inherently rhetorical and ethical, movements toward a good.It is the movement of logos—the quintessence of rhetoric in a way—that violence puts to an end. And yet, in Crosswhite's opinion, rhetorical violence is often the response to physical violence. Here he contends with Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” suggesting that as much as it offers productive paths, it also is “intellectually traumatized” by the wars of the twentieth century and so is “an extreme example” of this tendency toward violence in response to violence (Benjamin argues for a divine violence that would overwhelm a mythic violence) (168–69). Crosswhite refuses any solution to violence (ontotheological or otherwise) and argues for a “suffering” rhetoric, one that experiences and endures violence (166). The best response to violence is a “deep rhetoric” that both prevents “overarching” theories and that is “carefully attuned” to a form of the human as sociality amid transcendence. Yet Crosswhite stumbles a bit here. At times his own analysis is as abstract as Benjamin's. More profoundly, although Crosswhite suggests that Benjamin needs a type of violence, many readers of Benjamin might disagree. Even if one accepts that Benjamin does indeed have such a need, the argument between the two is a larger one concerning rhetoric and religion. One cannot easily dismiss Benjamin's theological adherence to some form of messianic glory, Jewish or otherwise, merely because of the effects of war. And perhaps our lack of intellectual traumatization due to the wars of the twenty-first century says more than we let on. In the end, many religions answer violence with a “suffering” savior. Ironically, Crosswhite describes his response to violence as a more human, “less ultimate” work of justice and peace, a kenosis ironically not unlike that of the primary character in the gospel of John.On the other hand, Crosswhite's argument against violence certainly has value and legitimacy, and it grounds his central claim on a related subject: humans need to do more work (rhetorical and otherwise) to effect justice. However, when Crosswhite dabbles in religious rhetoric (along with the gospel on John, he draws on Augustine, Buddhist meditation, and the Hebraic tradition to develop his idea of rhetorical wisdom in the last chapter), he does not go deep enough. He draws from these rhetorical depths, but he seems to stop at moments when they could offer more. Ironically, as Crosswhite shows in his interaction with wisdom in the last chapter, it is religion in part that makes possible his most substantial critique of Heidegger, namely, that Heidegger does not go deep enough into human sociality. In fairness Crosswhite notes that he has worked to show the “formal similarities” of explicit religious rhetoric to his own “deep rhetoric” (366) but also admits he could only give a “preliminary account” of this relationship (367). In a less than generous reading, the whole book itself is only a “preliminary account” of a deep rhetoric, leaving readers wanting more. In a generous reading, this is exactly what a philosophical rhetoric is supposed to do: keep the conversation moving. In other words, as with most of our best scholarship, its strength is also its weakness.The last of Crosswhite's four concepts—humanism—certainly poses the questions that religion does but does not define the human exclusively in religious terms. Like a rhetorical justice, the “human” and its attendant wisdom is “for a time” (54). For Crosswhite, humanism is not about “realizing a specifically human essence,” such as rationality, but about “struggling for human dignity,” dignity here being understood as a freedom to develop (46). Deep rhetoric thus must “prevent its own humanism from congealing into something reified and dogmatic” (56). Humanism is not just dynamic but also ethical, limiting itself, and thereby making itself accountable to others. This is the human condition to which a deep rhetoric “aspires” (222), a condition achievable, yet always achieved kairotically, within time, space, and logos. Many rhetorical scholars could enthusiastically embrace this definition, mainly because it emphasizes both a looking back and a future orientation.In the end Deep Rhetoric is certainly a virtuous keystone (perhaps not yet a capstone) to the long process of “mining” within Crosswhite's thinking that began with his own dissertation on Heidegger nearly thirty years ago. It is also a broad survey of the ways in which rhetoric can and should become a different kind of philosophy, its own kind. The book is both deep and wide, and its movement steers us toward something that can be called good. If indeed this is a sustained direction for rhetorical theory in the future (and I hope it is), Crosswhite's book will be read for a long time.

AbstractThis article stages a new encounter between rhetorical studies and the thought of Karl Marx. We examine one of Marx's central writings on French history, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, arguing that Marx's text enacts a philosophy of rhetorical trope that facilitates new and productive connections between philosophy, rhetoric, and theories of social change. Focusing on Marx's use of metonymy and chiasmus to structure his narrative, we argue that these figures function as rhetorical machines—textual devices that render legible the causal logics which led to Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew Louis being crowned emperor of France following an 1851 coup d'état. In addition, our diagram of Marx's tropological machines highlight points of unspent potential for resistance within and against such causal logics. We thus establish Marx as a resource for materialist theories of rhetorical trope, demonstrating the value of his concepts for accessing the political surplus of the present.

Eight English graduate students and a professor reflect on their semesterlong exploration of community literacy studies. The students, some in a MFA Creative Writing program and some doing doctoral work in literature, rhetoric, or English Education, discuss how the community literacies lens unsettled their relationship to English Studies.

English professors from Atlantic Cape Community College describe the triad model of their Accelerated Learning Program, an adaptation of Community College of Baltimore County’s program.  In the triad model, ALP students from two different sections of college-level composition meet in a single support class.  Through a discussion of the benefits and challenges of this model, an overview of a typical class, and a presentation of effective practices, the authors explore the process of adapting the ALP program and creating an award-winning model that has improved the success rates for upper-level developmental students at their institution.

Henri Dunant visited Italy to find Napoleon III in order to make a financial appeal. Shortly after Dunant’s arrival, he witnessed the 1859 Battle of Solferino, a particularly brutal moment in the attempts to unify Italy. From witnessing the battle and the care for the wounded, Dunant wrote A Memory of Solferino to call for a peacetime organization that would better administer care for the wounded. In his appeal Dunant counts on significant affective responses from his audience, yet he emphasizes administration and planning as the way to manage and channel the overwhelming affective responses that come from war.

Greater attention to methods and methodologies when studying writing in religious contexts is needed to help researchers navigate ethical issues specific to faith communities and religious practices; to improve knowledge regarding the relationships among writing, religion, and faith; and to encourage respect for religious and nonreligious beliefs. To that end, I present findings from a study based on interviews of 14 scholars who have published results from their empirical studies on writing and religion or faith. Specifically, interview data show, first, researchers’ religious positionalities acting as terministic screens and promoting identification with participants, and, second, researchers’ efforts to fairly represent participants’ beliefs and the methods they use to do so. The article also offers a heuristic, based on findings from the interviews, for maintaining a reflective position when conducting research on writing and religious contexts.

Background: The diffusion of component content management and structured authoring workflows and technologies in technical communication requires that instructors of documentation courses determine effective ways to teach component content management to students who may initially be intimidated by authoring environments and structures, such as the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). This teaching case describes how component content management and DITA were integrated into the Creating User Documentation course of an undergraduate professional writing program. Research questions: How can instructors of technical and professional writing best teach English and humanities students to operate within a structured authoring workflow? How can computational abstraction be combined with students' previously acquired genre knowledge to ease their adoption of the DITA to create technical documentation? Situating the case: The development of this course was informed by literature from a variety of scholarly and industry sources, which reveal connections between DITA, computational thinking, and Rhetorical Genre theory. Specifically, the concept of “layers of abstraction” guides the development of the course's structure, allowing students to separate and independently process the various aspects of a structured authoring workflow. How the case was studied: The case was studied informally through the experience of the authors as they developed and taught the course, through informal discussions and structured interviews with industry professionals, and through student reflections from discussion forum posts from Fall 2012 through Fall 2013. About the case: Initially developed with a focus on print manuals and online help, the course began teaching topic-based authoring in the mid-2000s; however, most enterprise-level editors and tools were cost-prohibitive for students and faculty. Furthermore, many computing concepts associated with structured authoring were intimidating for an audience of students in an English department. An affordable solution was adopting the open-source DITA standard, using free trials or open-source editors. The intimidation factor was minimized by designing the course around five layers of abstraction that draw on students' previous rhetorical knowledge: Layer 1: Developing quality documentation, Layer 2: Separating content from design, Layer 3: Authoring granular content with XML, Layer 4: Authoring and linking Component Content Management modules with DITA, and Layer 5: Single-sourcing and content reuse. This case discusses each layer of abstraction, the associated assignments for each layer, and the results of each layer based on student feedback. Results and conclusions: Although the course is not universally loved by students, it has seen many successes and provides a much-needed foundation in component content management and structured authoring for students who might become technical communicators. The teaching team has learned to avoid overemphasizing coding and automation in structured authoring, maintain a solid grounding on writing principles and good technical communication requirements, and draw upon students' existing knowledge of genres and their constraints.

Ethics and technical communication have a long history. Much of the discussion has ignored, though, the evil in language—overnaming. We see clearest this evil in what some have called “administrative evil.” Technical communicators, like all good rhetoricians, need to understand how to respond to it. Overnaming as part of “administrative evil” is that evil which grounds all other evils. It is a certain understanding of language and what naming can do. When we overname, we try to control words to mean one thing eternally. Rhetoric is a move of renaming those words that have been overnamed. Such invention is needed as part of any rhetorical education for technical communicators.

A recent trend in communication studies has seen increased attention to delineating the rhetorical dimensions of publics, public spheres, and public opinions, a project largely inaugurated by Gerard Hauser's (1999)Vernacular Voices. This intervention has shifted the focus from elite discourses of public officials in institutional spaces to everyday acts of discursive engagement in more quotidian and diverse public fora. Meanwhile, theories of “deliberative democracy” have come to be a dominant strand of democratic theory among political scientists and political philosophers. Proponents of the deliberative turn consider deliberation, plurality, and public participation essential to a healthy democratic polity and argue that “consensus based on reason-giving” should be the goal (Dryzek 2010, 322). As such, and continuing a long line of criticism that runs from Plato to Kant, Rawls, Habermas and others, rhetoric is often treated in deliberative democratic theory as the opposite of rational deliberation and as a tool to be used merely to persuade rather than to prove (Dryzek 2010, 322–23).More recently, however, there has been an upsurge of deliberative democratic theory that employs a rhetorical lens or rhetorical concepts and that seeks to emancipate rhetoric from its Platonic and Kantian shackles, such as Bryan Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) and Robert Ivie's “Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now” (2002). Seeing see deliberation as necessarily rhetorical, these theorists shed light on the essentially controversial and agonistic nature of political debate, dialogue, and decision making. They view rhetoric not as merely monodirectional or a form of deceit but instead recognize that rhetoric occurs across multiple public settings and circulates throughout various publics.Continuing to push this dialogue further, Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation, a collection of essays edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen, adopts a rhetorical lens to consider public deliberation, political discourse, and democratic society. In a well-crafted introduction, the editors advance the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a unifying perspective for developing a cross-disciplinary “understanding of citizenship as a discursive phenomenon.” In this connection, they argue that “discourse is not prefatory to real action but in many ways is constitutive of civic engagement” (1). Through eighteen chapters divided into three sections, the contributing authors use rhetorical citizenship as an umbrella term to engage a number of discursive sites, citizen actors, and various publics and public controversies in both theoretical musings and practical, international case studies on deliberative democracy. Overall, the essays marshal “a diversity of actual deliberative practices” in considering “how everyday people participate in and practice citizenship, and how everyday practices might be enhanced” (8).The authors proffer citizenship as a mode of political activity and as a discursive and deliberative process that requires public reflection and entails a rhetorical orientation to the arguments and debates that take place in democratic society. Enacting rhetorical citizenship is thus not merely constituted by “deliberative exchange among representatives and citizens across multiple sites” (4). It also requires “internal deliberation” by citizen actors with regard to the public arguments put forth by their political representatives and other public officials. Rhetorical citizenship is a process that requires both citizens' rhetorical output and their discursive, critical engagement with political discourses. To these ends, the individual authors consider “actual civic discourse” that occurs across multiple sites and through a multiplicity of actors at the same time that they interrogate notions of rhetorical agency and issues of “voice, power, and rights” (7). Further, although proponents of deliberative democracy take consensus and the elimination of conflict as their end goal in public debates and controversies, this collection affords a space for considering the productive and emancipatory nature of conflict, contention, and agon in the public sphere and within public spheres—while also looking ahead to rethink consensus and deliberative norms in general.Throughout the collection, the authors draw heavily on rhetoricians and political philosophers, including Gerard Hauser, Robert Asen, Robert Hariman, Kenneth Burke, Jürgen Habermas, and John Dryzek, among others. While the overall themes of the book are centered on deliberation and rhetoric, scholars from communication studies, discourse analysis, and political philosophy, along with fields outside the humanities such as political science and sociology, all contribute to the dialogue. Developed initially for the 2008 “Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation” conference in Copenhagen, the individual chapters in this collection represent this disciplinary diversity while bringing together academic voices from throughout the international community as well. Each chapter is prefaced by a brief introduction written by the editors, effectively organizing and clarifying the objectives that tie the essays together. As a brief review does not afford space to consider each of the eighteen individual chapters in this collection, my aim here is to reflect on several essays from each section, all of which serve to illuminate the book's broader themes and contributions.The book's first section provides the historical precedents for deliberative democracy, rhetorical citizenship, and the idea of the public forum. Kasper Møller Hansen, a political scientist, traces the origins of deliberative democracy through political thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey. While contemporary theories of deliberative democracy are often regarded as constituting a new scholarly trend, such dialogues have their roots with these historical political thinkers and with earlier conceptions of the republican tradition. While Hansen provides a historical background for deliberative democratic theory, Manfred Kraus traces the origins of rhetorical citizenship to ancient Greece. Kraus persuasively argues that the Sophists' “analysis of operational truth with respect to the contingencies of human life,” along with their belief in the “constant negotiation between contradictory points of view as observed in the Athenian practice of political assemblies and law courts, laid the ground for the concept of citizenship” (40). Kraus argues that there was never a Sophist philosophy of rhetoric per se, but when brought together the individuals who identified with sophistry constituted an intellectual movement that presaged Aristotle's later inauguration of rhetorical theory. Finally, tracking and comparing the development and ultimate failure of forums, town halls, and public meetings in France and the United States, William Keith and Paula Cossart tease out some of the fundamental tensions that complicate the ability of citizens to enact their rhetorical citizenship in various discursive contexts. Together, the essays in this section productively set the stage for the remainder of the collection, offering a historical grounding for the main themes of the book as a whole: deliberative democracy and its republican roots; citizenship as a fundamentally rhetorical, discursive, and agonistic practice; and the need to identify alternative discursive sites where citizens can and do participate in political discussions and perform strategies that mitigate the problems and pitfalls of the formal political sphere.Broken up into three parts, the twelve essays in section 2 break some new ground in terms of theory building and for considering non-discursive norms for engaging in political action and public deliberation. Part 1 of section 2 is perhaps best represented by Marie Lund Klujeff's essay and case study on what she calls provocative style. Political debate can be messy. It does not often live up to the ideals or follow the conventions espoused by political theorists and academics. In the political arena, participants may meet discursive challenges that limit or diminish their ability to effectively contribute to debate and thus must adopt unconventional rhetorical strategies that afford an agentive capacity. Klujeff argues that employing a provocative style in public debate can serve as a “deliberate violation of the norms of official communication and communicative action,” instantiating a “stylistic parody [that] functions as refutation by mockery” (105–7). In the internet debate that Klujeff tracks in her case study, the use of such a non-normative stylistic tactic indeed resulted in “offense and irritation.” However, it simultaneously gave “rhetorical salience to the conflict” for a much wider audience that would have otherwise not been engaged. It also allowed for the citizen provocateur to participate and contribute to the deliberative process. Similarly, in “Virtual Deliberations” Ildiko Kaposi also looks to an online forum to argue that “the criteria for judging deliberative talk need to be treated and interpreted flexibly, and modified according to the circumstances in which deliberation and discussion occur” (119). In all, the four essays in part 1 of section 2 argue that breaking the rules of decorum in public deliberations can serve important rhetorical functions. Such non-normative, provocative strategies do not necessarily seek consensus but instead aim to further community building, help circulate political discourse, and foster moral respect between both debaters and broader publics.The four essays in part 2 examine elite discourse in order to “study how notions of citizenship are portrayed and realized by agents in positions of power and influence” (63). The authors look across multiple public settings and interrogate political subject matter from the literary public sphere to gendered war rhetoric and from political statements concerning a terrorist attack against the Danish embassy to a case study of constitutional law and political philosophy. Challenging the discursive and deliberative norms of the formal political sphere, the elite citizens (including Barbara Bush and Tony Blair) discussed in part 2 are seen to undertake disruptive discursive acts in the midst of formal political settings. The authors demonstrate that while one is able to exercise one's rhetorical agency through such destabilizing acts, the norms in such institutionalized settings are not so easily challenged or subverted. As Lisa Villadsen writes in her exemplary essay “Speaking of Terror: Norms of Rhetorical Citizenship in Danish Public Debate Culture,” in such an “a-rhetorical debate culture” as the formal political sphere, the rules of deliberative conduct determine the standards of “proper” rhetorical citizenship (179). Any deviation from these norms is considered a breach of one's citizenship status. Given this, Villadsen calls for the need to “continue questioning the norms—spoken or unspoken—that underlie notions of rhetorical citizenship in a given national or cultural setting” (179). Using a rhetorical lens to examine why modes of communicative action may succeed or fail allows for greater opportunities to understand citizenship across multiple settings. Part 3 of section 2 continues the collection's broader goals of examining rhetorical citizenship, deliberative practices, and rhetorical agency across a variety of public contexts. From public hearings held in Quebec, Canada, to grassroots groups in New York and Washington, DC, online debates over Danish real estate economic issues, and public engagement with a song from a popular Danish revue, the four essays extend and add to the diversity of sites in which public deliberation occurs and to what effect.The final section offers a set of future-oriented proposals for how rhetorical citizenship and deliberation can be productive for democratic society in ways that are not agonistic or confrontational. Effectively bookending the collection, the three chapters advance strategies and conceptualizations for reducing contentious debate and transforming competing political arguments in such as way as to encourage a more dynamic and constructive public sphere. As an exemplar, Christian Kock's, “A Tool for Rhetorical Citizenship: Generalizing the Status System” reappropriates and reformulates status theories with the aim of identifying how “present-day debaters” and “observers of debate” may find new grounds for building consensus or mutual understanding between otherwise opposing viewpoints (279). In deliberative contexts where “partisanship and polarization rule,” Kock provides a tool for fostering “normative metaconsensus” through narrowing down party-line disagreements to “more specific points—in which either side might have a better chance of persuading people unsympathetic to their positions” (294). This is not only a tool for debaters and the elite, Kock argues, but also a means of building awareness of the nuances of political disagreements among both citizens who consume these discourses as well as the media that represents them.On the whole, the notion of rhetorical citizenship is a timely intervention that aims to rethink the standards and practices of public deliberation and thereby contribute to a healthier pluralistic democratic polity. Perhaps especially in the context of U.S. politics, where the vitriolic bifurcation of present-day partisan lines leaves little to no room for rhetoric and deliberation in the formal political sphere, such a discussion is not only warranted but necessary, providing a way to think through this antagonistic gridlock. Rhetorical citizenship affords a critical space in which to theorize new practices of public engagement and deliberation and to move beyond deliberative democratic theory's insistence on rigid discursive norms and consensus building. We should attend to and take seriously agon, agitation, destabilization, and other nonnormative dissentious acts in order to better understand alternative sites of democratic instantiation. The nature of conflict, contention, and competition is not always derisive and dividing. Instead, as many of the essays in this collection argue, agonistic enactments can be productive and provocative, building communities, circulating discourse to multiple publics, and affording an agentive modality for civic engagement and citizenship. At other times, as the essays in the concluding section argue, there is an evident need to rethink the meaning of consensus in itself and consider rhetorical strategies for orienting oneself to oppositional positions. Across multiple sites, from online fora, grassroots enclaves, and more formal institutional settings, the international case studies taken up in Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation speak to the broad applicability of rhetorical citizenship as a concept.This variety in case studies is indeed one of the strengths of the collection, especially when paired with the disciplinary diversity represented by the individual authors. A concept like rhetorical citizenship, as demonstrated by this diverse collection, produces an opening for various other academic traditions to look to the tools and theories cultivated within rhetorical theory and apply them to cases across cultural and political settings. While the concept of rhetorical citizenship in itself requires the reader to extrapolate in order to see how it might be defined across these ostensibly disparate applications, the editors' introductory chapter and prefatory remarks at the start of each section strategically orient the essays to this larger theme. Moreover, as this disciplinary promiscuity speaks to the broad appeal of rhetorical citizenship, Kock and Villadsen do not provide a justification for why these various fields are represented and what this contributes to the overall dialogue. Interdisciplinarity should not be taken as an end in itself, although that is not necessarily to say that is the case with this collection. The diversity of the authors is likely symptomatic of this being a conference proceedings rather than the editors' attempt at diversity for diversity's sake. Given that the topic of the collection is deliberation and democratic society, however, it seems fitting that a range of disciplinary voices would be represented in this dialogue, especially when humanistic disciplines, while sharing much in common, often are insular and speak in their own respective vacuums.Finally, the collection attends to a wide spectrum of public and political sites where deliberation actually takes place. As the editors state in the introduction, “Focusing on how citizens deliberate allows us to consider both macro and micro politics, but always with an eye to the significance for the individuals involved” (6). In this regard, the editors advance a set of research questions that speak to the larger themes of the book, such as “What forms of participation does a particular discursive phenomenon encourage—and by whom? How are speaking positions allotted and organized? … What possibilities are there for ‘ordinary’ citizens to engage in public discourse?” (6–7). Despite the repeated insistence on the collection's commitment to “vernacular rhetoric,” the public settings and political fora addressed in the individual case studies are not quite as representative of a pluralistic democracy as one would hope. The issue of gender is only explicitly taken up in one essay, while questions of how and where racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ minorities are able to perform their rhetorical citizenship are not addressed.The four essays that engage online deliberation are perhaps the closest the volume comes to exploring vernacular discursive contexts, and indeed these critical engagements are valuable. Participation in such online dialogues, on the other hand, still requires an availability that allows for free time to deliberate as well as the economic security that affords ready access to the internet. The editors assert that “a rhetorical focus has a special regard for individual actors in the public arena, not just the eloquent politician or NGO representative but also the person watching an election debate on TV, chiming in with a point of view through a blog on civic issues, collecting signatures from passerby on a windy street to stop municipal budget cuts, or deciding to join a local interest group” (6). And while each of these sites and settings are addressed, the rhetoric and deliberation that is endemic to the streets, down on the corner, in the market, and even in the local pub are left out of this discussion. The reader is left to wonder who we should and should not consider a citizen, what publics the concept of rhetorical citizenship includes and excludes, who has the capacity to enact their rhetorical agency, and more pointedly, whether access to the public arena and the deliberative process necessarily entails a relative position of privilege. As such, while the disciplinary diversity may be one of the strong points of this collection, this openness is contained by a mostly straight, white, male representation of deliberative democratic society.Despite these omissions, however, Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen's Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation offers an excellent portfolio of case studies and theoretical insights that will surely contribute to future discussions across a range of disciplinary sites. The bridging of rhetorical studies and deliberative democratic theory is an important intervention that is promising for future cross-disciplinary scholarship and for extending the scope of the discourses and deliberative practices that actually do outside more formal political settings. As such, this collection would be well for that focus on rhetorical theory, civic and the public sphere, or as for scholarship that aims to on discursive theories of citizenship across multiple public and international contexts. It also well for scholarship that aims to the between political science and rhetorical studies, a that offers many opportunities for theories of contemporary democratic society.

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the development of national identity and political ideology in Hungary’s Szoborpark (Statue Park), where resides a collection of Soviet-era statues relocated from the city streets and public squares of Budapest in 1993. Although a narrative of the Cold War and the theory of postcommunism enable understandings of the park as a decisive break with the past, this article argues that Statue Park constructs a more ambivalent sense of politics, identity, and history in Hungary. By showing that the park represents a number of conflicting and unresolved features of Hungarian national identity and politics, the article helps demonstrate the way that a sweeping historical narrative like the Cold War can produce inaccurate understandings of local political developments in post-Soviet countries.

research-article Share on Review of "Playful Design: Creating Game Experiences in Everyday Interfaces. John Ferrara", Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media. 2012. ISBN: 978-1933820149 Author: Matthew Beale Old Dominion University Old Dominion UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communication Design QuarterlyVolume 3Issue 2February 2015 pp 100–103https://doi.org/10.1145/2752853.2752864Published:27 March 2015Publication History 0citation41DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads41Last 12 Months15Last 6 weeks4 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

In his 1959 Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," C. P. Snow warned of a gulf that had opened between literary intellectuals and natural scientists, across which existed a mutual incomprehension that threatened to undermine the university's ability to solve the world's most pressing problems.Reflecting on his experience as both a novelist and a research scientist, Snow appealed for a greater understanding between what he saw as two distinct cultures, yet he also asserted the importance of the sciences over literature for securing humanity's future prosperity.According to Snow, literary intellectuals were natural Luddites, and the university needed to prioritize the training of scientists and engineers in order to accelerate global industrialization and thereby raise standards of living.His privileging of the sciences drew a scathing rebuke from the literary critic F. R. Leavis, who pilloried Snow's understanding of literature and his faith in technological progress.For Leavis, bringing the Industrial Revolution to impoverished areas of the globe could indeed improve the material conditions of humankind, but such a project ungoverned by the values conveyed through literature, especially those insights of D. H. Lawrence and other novelists into the dehumanizing effects of industrial labor, would lead to a future divested of any real quality of life.Leavis insisted, therefore, that the university revolve around English studies as its "centre of human consciousness" (2013, p. 75).This dispute between Snow and Leavis touched off "the two cultures controversy," which has been an important point of reference amid the shifting terrain of higher education.The phrase has come to denote a gulf that opens between any disciplines bound to "common attitudes, common standards and patterns of behavior, common approaches and assumptions" (Snow, 1998, p. 9) that divide them into opposing cultures and inhibit crossdisciplinary understanding.Buller (2014), for example, described the two cultures in terms of those who believe the purpose of colleges and universities is to educate "the whole person" versus those who believe it is to train students for the workforce.The latter culture, according to Buller, tends to include governors, legislators, and trustees who are inclined to divert resources away from the social sciences, arts, and humanities to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.Their assumption is that the STEM disciplines will best prepare students for careers offering the greatest return on their investment in a college education.The opposing culture, most often composed of faculty and administrators, argues that a well-rounded education produces graduates who are better informed, challenge assumptions more readily, participate more fully in society and civil discourse, and in general live healthier and more productive lives.Buller observed that "the two sides are not so much talking to one another as shouting past one another, each contingent building its case on a set of assumptions that it regards as universally true and that is dismissed by its opponents as the result of blindness, hypocrisy, or both" (p.2).This situation stands in contrast to the lack of engagement Halsted (2015) observed between the culture of academia and that of the tech industry.He pointed out that although a number of the most significant

Book Review| December 01 2014 After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War. By Douglas L. Kriner. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2010; pp. 322. $97.00 cloth; $32.00 paper. Matthew C. Pitchford Matthew C. Pitchford University of Illinois, Urbana Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2014) 17 (4): 757–760. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.4.0757 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Matthew C. Pitchford; After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2014; 17 (4): 757–760. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.4.0757 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter 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.

Within English studies, curriculum design has typically been restricted to conversations about instructor education, where design is treated as a process of applying existing disciplinary knowledge to traditional assignments and practices. This article argues that scholars can extend the scope and value of instructor education by repositioning design as an act of inventive potential, one that invites new instructors to understand disciplinary knowledge and also to participate in the expansion of disciplinary values and practices. When fostered as an inventive act, curriculum design offers a space of welcome where new members of English studies are encouraged to contribute to the central questions and values of the field.

A man sets himself on fire in Tunisia. His self-immolation sparks a wildfire that transforms the Middle East and the world. What just happened? How are we to think and talk about these days of rage and hope, these potentially epoch-defining events? News cycles, with their commitment to reducing the most important events to little more than banal commodities, provide little help in the matter. Academics too often fail us, offering theoretical and methodological devotion at the expense of a commitment to the realities of emergent resistance. French philosopher Alain Badiou proves an exception, bringing equal parts rage and insight to his thinking of the events transforming our world.In The Rebirth of History, Badiou provides a provocative and illuminating engagement with the events of the Arab Spring while also offering an accessible and relatively concise introduction to his larger political and philosophical project. In it, Badiou steps away from his more commonly used anecdotes—particularly that of May 1968. Paying particular attention to the 2011 Egyptian protest in Tahrir Square that would ultimately lead to the resignation of the country's president, Badiou contends that these movements represent “a time of riots wherein a rebirth of History, as opposed to the pure and simple repetition of the worst, is signaled and takes shape” (5). In his typically provocative, polemical, and often humorous style, Badiou seizes his opportunity to dress his theoretical commitments in new clothes and in the process, unwittingly, highlights various links to the field of rhetoric and the material implications of his most abstract theorizations.Among Badiou's crucial theoretical concepts articulated here is the event. Events are foundational breaks with the repetition and order of the world. They affirm profound political change and the unfolding of a new potential course of action. The event is something that appears but immediately disappears, supplementing the world with a new way of thinking and acting. The early twenty-first century is a time of great potential in this regard. The increase in riots around the world, both ones that are highly visible and ones that are relatively invisible, constitutes a phenomenon that does not properly have a name in the existing order of the world. This phenomenon lacks a name because the current configuration of epistemology fails to recognize its potential. This potential implicates the riot's relationship to events.While many of Badiou's contemporaries have discussed the event or analogous concepts, none of them have fully developed a formalized theory of the event in quite the same way Badiou has. In most cases, Badiou discusses events in abstract theoretical terms (2002; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2009; 2000), depending heavily on his mathematical take regarding ontology. At other times the event is applied specifically to a given truth process or field of possible evental emergence (2012; 2004) or case study as in the Rebirth of History and Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Herein lies the value of The Rebirth of History: its ability to link the event to action and meaning in more tangible and digestible ways by using contemporary objects of analysis.In The Rebirth of History, Badiou posits the event in relationship to three types of riot: immanent, latent, and, most importantly to this text, historical. Each type of riot is discussed in terms of its potential to produce new political order and lasting material change. By articulating the event in relationship to riots that have immediate resonance, Badiou demonstrates how actions, resistance, and social unrest can produce the conditions of an event, extrapolating the relationship between communicative or rhetorical practice and his brand of thinking about change.1Early in the text, Badiou simultaneously establishes two key constructs, communism and capitalism. His undeniable Marxism is pronounced, but he distances himself from some of his Marxist contemporaries, such as Antonio Negri. For Badiou, Marxism is “the organized knowledge of the political means required to undo existing society and fully realize an egalitarian rational figure of collective organization for which the name is ‘communism’” (8). In other words, communism is the organized, proper name of the disruption of the structures, assumptions, and dynamics that create the world as it is (see Badiou 2010). Furthermore, capitalism is, in short, the name for the world as it is. It is the condition of our world, what dominates ideas and practices. Various mutations of capitalism have emerged that have led some to identify a postmodern capitalism. Postmodern capitalism, for Badiou, can be summed up as the contention that capitalism is ever changing, ever progressing, and potentially changing and progressing in ways that create spaces for new ways of living and distributing power. However, Badiou rejects this notion: “Contemporary capitalism possesses all the features of classical capitalism. It is strictly in keeping with what is to be expected of it when its logic is not counteracted by resolute, locally victorious class action” (11). In other words, our time is marked by the same principles of governance and action that Marx foretold. What some herald as the emergence of a postmodern capitalism is, for Badiou, no more than the “unfolding of the irrational and, in truth, monstrous potentialities of capitalism” (12). Only the disruptive force of an idea that achieves organized, continued enaction can interrupt capitalism; such was and is Badiou's hope for communism.The Rebirth of History demonstrates how riots, given the right circumstances, can constitute a break in the system and lead to the subsequent organization of alternative ways of being. Chapters 2 and 3 outline immanent riots and latent riots, respectively. Badiou first details how riots are positioned by the state according to the narratives that are designed to maintain state and global capitalist concerns, narratives that criminalize riots and undermine their potential to account for the majority of the world's population. This allows the state to reinforce police authority and its own criminal justice system. Badiou implicitly contends that the state's response to riots both materially and discursively positions collective resistance as a crime by creating double standards with regards to visibility and agency. To use an example from the text, “zero-tolerance” policies are applied differently to poor communities than they are to wealthy bankers or politicians, demonstrating a double standard with regard to criminality. In The Rebirth of History, Badiou is concerned with the double standards of justice and leniency that manifest themselves in response to riots as criminal acts and that simultaneously perpetuate a particular configuration of power. Badiou's term for the lack of agency that such a configuration of power imposes on certain populations is “inexistence.” Inexistent populations are those populations that lack the ability to determine the course of politics in the world or to determine their own material or political subjectivity. Immediate riots are a response to inexistence and to the exercise of state authority against inexistent populations “An immediate riot is unrest among a section of population, nearly always in the wake of a violent episode of state coercion” (22). This type of riot, which can give birth to a historical riot, has three important qualities: they are spearheaded by the youth of a given population, take place in the territory inhabited and controlled by those who are rioting, and do not distinguish the subject types they invite to rebel, because rebellion is the sole defining characteristic of the subject type involved.2Latent riots are the product of unrest emerging within a configuration of power that effectively disciplines outbursts. The flexibility of “democratic” systems of governance lends itself to peaceful coexistence and has suppressed such rebellious vigor in many cases. This creates latency in unrest that runs parallel across various contexts, creating the conditions under which immediate riots can be disseminated without the local character of such acts having to be sacrificed. Latent riots are those acts of peaceful unrest that signal a novel form of unity among marginalized groups, traversing conventional borders and seemingly distinct populations. In other words, latent riots are the quiet conditions of possibility that have not yet overtly manifested as unrest, linking disparate groups.The primary characteristic of a historical riot is the transition from the undirected nihilism of the immediate riot to what Badiou calls prepolitical conditions that create the grounds for new ways of being or acting as a subject to emerge. Riots no longer rely on reactionary localization but control an enduring, secure site of protest and reappropriate that site and its significant symbols. The “Arab Spring” protests are an example of a historical riot. These protests did not spread from a central location but derived, by imitation, from latent discontent across a number of significant cities and sites, demonstrating an analogous dissatisfaction with the world in its current state.For Badiou, this constitutes the rebirth of history because historical riots introduce a new sequence of possibility into an otherwise redundant cycle of political and social conditions. Thus, Badiou dubs the historical riot as an intervallic period, that period during which an alternative and revolutionary political character has been defined but has yet to take a formalized structure. This character is “explicitly presented as an alternative to the dominant world, and on this basis has secured massive, disciplined support” (39). What is still lacking is the powerful synthesizing hypothesis that move riots from the idea and its immanent manifestation of new political subjects to organized politics, that is, novel, creative, organized, and structured ways of distributing power.It is important to realize that the achievement of a historical riot does not guarantee that political action or political organization will follow. To put it in terms more common to Badiou's work, the opening of an event or of new potential configurations for action does not predetermine fidelity to the event itself. The leap to such a different, alternative form of political thought is difficult. Most riots are considered failures in their aftermath because it is easy to return to the already established, former structures and thus to the very relationships the riots resisted. Western countries and media outlets use the dogmatic categories of good and bad riots as a way of judging resistance under standards against which the resistance is opposed, thus encouraging a falling in line of rioters and observers. Good riots happen at a distance, away from the Western world. They are framed as eruptions of desire for a Western lifestyle rather than an act of dissent against its influence. This power to name “the Good is nothing but the modernized name for imperial interventionism” (49), because it perpetuates an adherence to the old way of thinking, being, speaking, and acting in the world by framing the riot as a manifestation of desire for Western systems. Bad riots are deemed irrational and are suppressed quickly because they rise up within overt Western configurations of power and thus violate the sensibilities that normalize and valorize that system. The value of the riot is its ability to manifest the ability to overcome such obstacles.Events and what they produce are not mere abstract desires to change; they are primarily material phenomena. Events create an opening for the emergence of what Badiou calls truth, that which is manifest in the immediate and productive being of the people. That is, Badiou presents truth as the process by which the idea (the kernels of aforementioned organizing principles) emerges and provides a new configuration of contingency. This configuration is derived from the universal imperative that is always present in localized resistance. The assumption here is that universals exist at the core of all ideological, political, or social programs. This new material manifestation of existence replaces inexistence. If inexistent populations “count for nothing” (55), to change the world is to make the inexistent exist. Such was the case in Tahrir Square when Egyptians demanded political existence and seized control of Egyptian political identity on their own terms. As the inexistent comes to exist, the arrangement of power and possibility, at least temporarily, is altered and any program that emerges from it may manifest this new arrangement. To deny a program its core imperative is to declaw it in the material and ideological struggle it must take part in. Badiou's call for the universal and for truth, as a form of justice, is a call for the core principles of material resistance to be maintained and not reappropriated and pacified by neoliberal commitments. This is imperative if a riot is to enact long-term, meaningful change rather than taking part in the repetition of world as it is.The emergence of existence from inexistence depends on two important, observable phenomena, both of which could be considered rhetorical. First, protestors must determine the meaning of a given site and important artifacts. For example, Egyptian protestors in Tahrir Square established the meaning of the square, the Egyptian flag, and “Egyptianness,” each of which was an important symbolic transgression against the state. Second, the minority in the street must undeniably come to represent an intense manifestation of the larger population and its discontents. This creates what Badiou calls a popular dictatorship. A popular dictatorship is “an authority that is legitimized precisely because its truth derives from the fact that it legitimizes itself” (59), expressing the general will of the people. This is accomplished through the construction of a will that is manifest directly in the site and that transgresses the given order of the world. The historical riots that may arise from such transgressions create the potential for a wide and organized political movement against the existing order, but do not—obviously—guarantee it.Ultimately, the emergence of a new political order is the logical extension of a historical riot. Three conditions must be satisfied for a historical riot to create the conditions for sustained political organization: the population must be contracted into a representative form of unrest, that unrest must be intensified in the form of political action, and a specific site and its transformation must be emphasized. If political organization emerges from an event, it faces the difficult imperative of remaining a student of this material process of the event itself. Failure to do so results in the betrayal of the creative character that ignited the movement and prevents politics from maintaining its novel character. This produces the ethical imperative in Badiou's theory, to remain faithful to the event (see Badiou 2002). Truly political organizations remain loyal to the material process that breaks with the world as it is and with its order. In this way it becomes a subject in the Badiouian sense of the word. That is, it becomes “a mediation between the world and changing the world” (66). The political organization is a subject of the event insofar as it maintains this mediation through its fidelity to the material emergence of a truth.After articulating the material process of the political organization as it emerges from an event, Badiou clarifies the role of identity and existence as imperatives to disruption. One of the primary mechanisms by which the state and the various mechanisms of global capitalism determine degrees of existence is the process of naming. Naming creates ideals by normalizing bonds between names and characteristics. The less symmetry between a given subject and the ideal—be it “French,” “American,” and so forth—the greater the possibility of inexistence marking the subject's being in the world. Varying degrees of inexistence are marked by what Badiou calls “separating names.” Separating names are those that discern and socially position subjects and/or groups whose being is marked by inexistence.Justice, for Badiou, is the eradication of separating names as relevant and effective terms. By eradicating them the political burden is placed squarely on individual citizens to demonstrate their own political and social relevance and commitments. Badiou calls this process “political truth,” the organized product of an event that restricts the power of the state and its reliance on constructions of identity and replaces it with the material practices of immanent, enacted subjectivity. To put it another way, political truth takes from the state the function of determining existence and places it in the hands of subjects themselves; political organizations formalize the results over time.This function of political truth is vital in The Rebirth of History. To suggest its importance, Badiou dedicates the closing chapters of the book to explicating his definition of it: “A political truth is a series of consequences, organized on the condition of an idea, a massive popular event, in which intensification, contraction, and localization replace an identitarian object, and the separating names bound up with it, with a real presentation of generic power of the multiple” (85). In Badiou this definition and each as a way of the to our of knowledge about resistance. In the closing of the Badiou an important assumption that lies his the for the the ability to manifest existence and the of separating names and other mechanisms that create is a by most people. For Badiou, a desire for justice is a desire for a unfolding of the world. This the emergence of a universal from a universal that a new way of being and thinking in the riots, insofar as they are events that could potentially produce political must be They from the of the immediate riot to the creative politics for sustained resistance to the world as it is. of is material and demonstrates that what is visible or in a given not be at The Rebirth of History with two popular by Badiou on the subject of resistance, the first of which with and the of which the and of in the contemporary world. Each of Badiou's theory in applied and digestible Rebirth of History is a but of Badiou's larger of a for those who have the of his thought in the field of Badiou's of his theory of change here for rhetorical as he it to contemporary popular Badiou his with The Rebirth of History by the book so quickly the in and thus his own ability to the political of the riots, are at least three specific of the theoretical Badiou that rhetorical may on and and Badiou's commitments have up the relationship to Badiou's materially and materially unfolding truth may to think in new ways about what constitutes a rhetorical act and how it may to change or subjectivity. Second, Badiou's on the of the site is with rhetorical character. How does the site help the of populations into a minority of What are the by which protestors can and do the meaning of a What such so The idea of the site and localization has been and remain an important for rhetorical and these may the field in Badiou's use of existence and inexistence highlights in the world as it is and in a way that may be more digestible and for than his former is a theoretical The universal or generic not be to a but be as the proper name of that which is productive and in a given For the becomes how we can use this of the universal and the local to and our of local political theory of social and political change is often as and The Rebirth of History provides a of this theory in a contemporary and political This book will relevance with political and rhetorical in social change and and creative ways of thinking In the of the various the grounds for a new world, Badiou's that the between and control and profound to think about resistance and the of its

“Sharing” is a ubiquitous yet largely unexamined term in composition scholarship and practice. Scholars and teachers use the term widely to talk about practices such as peer review, collaboration, and student-teacher conferences, all of which have been used to support the relevance of composition as a social and communal act. Yet, as this article demonstrates, sharing has been aligned historically with assumptions and values that emphasize individual productivity at the cost of exploring the affective and ethical costs of social engagement and interaction. This article investigates tensions in the historical practices of sharing that create openings for alternative ways to understand and value the complex encounters writers undergo when they interact in the space of the writing classroom. Specifically, the article explores how sharing might be revised in composition studies to draw attention to the affective, corporeal, and ethical consequences of interpersonal contact.

Symposium response.

Abstract This essay traces the origins of the five-paragraph essay to a form of theme-writing that has deep roots in English education and classical rhetoric, long before the current-traditional period that has been commonly assumed to be the origin. The five-paragraph essay's history and evolution can inform our understanding of its role in writing instruction and why it has persisted for so long. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Lynée Gaillet and Janice Lauer Rice for their helpful recommendations. I am also indebted to Mara Holt for her help and encouragement, as well as Carol Mattingly, Amanda Hayes, Andrea Venn, Bryan Lutz, Matt Vetter, and Emily Nunes. 2Part I was published in 1851. 3Walker's textbook was first published in the United States in 1808. 4Walker did not create the term theme or the rules for writing them. While themes were used for writing in Latin, students probably also composed themes in English (the vulgar tongue) long before Walker. 5Many compositionists, seeing some classical roots to the five-paragraph essay, might assume that Aristotle's Rhetoric may have been an influence on the formation of the five-paragraph essay, perhaps citing the five canons of rhetoric (which he does not explicitly outline) and his treatment of argumentation and arrangement. However, there is no evidence that indicates that Aristotle's Rhetoric had any direct influence on the five-paragraph essay's formation.

ABSTRACT This article focuses on attunement as a concept that intervenes in the question of how we learn to act ethically in the face of radical alterity. I use Jacques Derrida's concept of a “contraband” tonality and Gilles Deleuze's discussion of “haptic” tone to argue that tonality resonates with dimensions of affect and desire that cannot be accommodated through familiar interpretive acts of listening, hearing, and seeing. Because we are unable to fully understand and account for the tonality of others, the article suggests, we need to approach attunement as a disposition or ethos that prolongs our engagement with the alterity of others' marks and noises. Repositioned as living practice, attunement can redefine ethical action by drawing attention to the material, physical, and emotional challenges of preserving what Diane Davis calls a “radically hospitable opening to alterity.”

AbstractOratorical practice may be viewed as the material enactment of a philosophy of class struggle. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I propose “orator-machine” as a concept-term to describe speech making in the context of the open exterior of interconnected human and nonhuman machinic assemblages in capitalist modernity. My argument is based on a reconsideration of a single address, delivered by William D. “Big Bill” Haywood in 1911 at the Cooper Union in New York City. Reading Haywood against the grain—as a conceptual innovator—allows me to demonstrate a mode of analysis that affirms the philosophical quality and ontological politics of oratorical performance.

Design is a rhetorical activity that requires creative thinking in response to difficult situations. That creative work ultimately builds new relationships and new contexts. Sustainable design can become an approach to composition that alters ways of thinking about writing situations, keeping ethical and contextual factors in focus, and encouraging students to develop habits of situational creativity.

Wikis enable large, diverse groups of writers to effectively collaborate online. Although Wikipedia is the best-known wiki, businesses are increasingly using wikis to build documents and resources for internal use. Although many teachers of technical communication are interested in integrating wikis into their syllabi, assessment is difficult. Assessments based on traditional assignments fail because they do not focus on the social nature of wikis. This article introduces an “archaeological” assessment framework focused on this discourse.

Book Review| September 01 2011 Refiguring Mass Communication: A History Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. Peter Simonson. Matthew B. Morris Matthew B. Morris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2011) 14 (3): 566–568. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940559 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Matthew B. Morris; Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2011; 14 (3): 566–568. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940559 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.

This essay discloses distinctive but overlapping realist, communicative, and critical dimensions of Burke's concept of recalcitrance. Previous scholarly uses of the concept have tended to yield only partial understandings of one or another of these three distinctive dimensions. Moreover, that previous work overlooked some of Burke's pivotal and revealing writings on the term when elaborating its meaning, including his designation of the term's application to factors that substantiate, incite, and correct statements. This essay offers the term's first comprehensive account that integrates overlooked writings and yields its full range of conceptual dimensions and applications as Burke had envisioned them.

Few popular science news articles today attract as much attention or are communicated with as much flamboyance as those involving the neurosciences. Catchy but charged headlines such as "Obese Teens May Be Lacking in Brain Size, Not Willpower" These popular accounts present rhetoric scholars with numerous opportunities for interrogating scientific understandings of the brain and their development through the discourses, practices, and materials of neuroscience. However, a strictly deconstructive approach, as Bruno Latour (2004) notes, can be viewed as intellectually hostile to the efforts of scientific researchers (p. 225-228). Because neuroscience is a relatively new and diverse field, it is important to

This article describes a service-learning program for undergraduate Shakespeare courses and the project's learning outcomes. The project enables significant ownership of Shakespeare, demonstration and engagement of students' multiple intelligences, and a re-valuation of the useful role of literature in everyday life.

We evaluate 45 jobs professional communicators might occupy. Specifically, we examine the impact of creativity on careers that may become more or less easily outsourced domestically or offshore in the future. We are unable to find any particular relationship between creativity, per se, and job security. Instead, we find that people with knowledge of the processes required for innovation are more valued by industry than those recognized as creative. We suggest that to be prepared for the evolution of the global economy, technical communicators and their educators should understand “innovation” in its formal context and be able to apply that knowledge in their workplaces and classrooms.

As part of an on-going ethnographic study of the role language plays in the construction of ecological relationships to Narragansett Bay, the major estuary and defining feature of the State of Rhode Island, this article explores the transformational moments when body and place connect and the literate acts that result from this connection. The participants in this study share stories of profound loss, unwavering advocacy, and ecological consciousness that reflect an understanding of what it means to be part of an ecological community and advocate for healthy, just, and sustainable communities across Earth’s entire biosphere. Moreover, the participants in this study demonstrate that biospheric literacies begin at the level of the body, extend outward through an understanding of the interconnectedness of living systems, and are reflected in the way we care for our own immediate ecological communities.

Little helps students see that the vitality of the first chapter of Thoreau's Walden inheres not in a suggestion that people live in the woods by subsistence farming and occasional wage labor, but rather in a challenge to readers to perform cost-benefit evaluations of their modes of living. Central to this effort is a writing assignment that asks students to (1) offer a research-based description of the economics of their postgraduation lives, assess on the basis of evidence drawn from Walden what Thoreau might think of their plans, then respond to Thoreau's probable views, or (2) explain and respond to what Thoreau might say about the U.S. Department of Labor's most recent table of average annual expenditures and characteristics from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This assignment trades away one of the few opportunities that many students have to engage in literary criticism at a level beyond what is typical in freshman English, but an advantage is that students with a wide range of academic interests can produce competent discussions.

This article argues that the ideas of “play” and “abduction” in Charles Peirce’s work represent an inventive theory of argument that opens up the kinds of activities that can be called “arguments” and avoids some of the struggles over imposed beliefs with which recent argument theory has grappled.

Historians give John Pym due credit as a successful Parliamentarian; rhetorical critics examine Pym's prowess as an orator. Both perspectives focus on Pym's management of issues of the day and do not account for his masterful appropriation of political language. We conduct an ideographic analysis of twelve of his addresses to Parliament between 1640 and 1643. His discourse reveals a crucial reformulation of <law> in relation to subsidiary ideographs, including <religion>, <justice>, and <Parliamentary privilege>. These ideological innovations were instrumental in building Parliamentary opposition to Charles I and allowed for advances in democratic ideas made manifest in Anglo-American liberalism.

This article argues that introducing undergraduates to literary criticism and theory can be most effectively accomplished through the teaching of children's literature, fantasy literature, and Disney films alongside traditional literary criticism. We discuss a series of assignments we use in Pursuits of English, our department's introductory theory and criticism course.

We enter this review as collaborators from the same institution, a four-year medium-sized private university. Additionally, some of us bring our collective experiences as teachers from small, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and large research universities across the U.S. Our levels of teaching experience range from first-year PhD students to an associate professor, with scholarly interests from Renaissance literature to new media theory.

The question guiding “What Should We Do with Postprocess Theory?” is one of praxis: postprocess theory has articulated an advanced and promising theory of rhetoric in action, but few attempts have been made to develop a postprocess pedagogy. This article suggests several ways that postprocess ideals can be adapted to existing teaching strategies.

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Like many writing centers, ours trained us to respond to writers whose papers might involve plagiarism; we learned to show students

This study investigated the effects of two different computer texts on readers' recall with three different content types (Blocked Constructs, Ordered Constructs, and Detail Layered Constructs) based on individuals' different working memory capacities. The findings indicated that the format and content types influenced how well information was remembered among readers. Participants with low working memory who read traditional scrolling text produced better recall scores than those who read the paged hypertext in two of the three content types. However, for those with high working memory capacity, all results came out differently depending on the content types.

Review of The Measure of Service Learning: Research Scales to Assess Student Experience, Edited by Robert G. Bringle, Mindy A. Phillips, and Michael Hudson. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association (APA), 2003

Suggests that students need to learn to "read" the cultural texts surrounding them. Argues that there is great need for including analyses of popular culture in the college curriculum. Presents a unit to help students gain a greater appreciation for the influence that advertising has upon them and the subtlety with which it manipulates people, mainly to their detriment.

This article shows how user-centered design can be applied to documentation and reports the results of a two-year contextual design study. The article (1) demonstrates how contextual design can be applied to information and (2) reports some of the study's results, outlining key insights gleaned about users. The study found that users vary widely in their information needs and preferences. Users employ a variety of learning strategies in learning new software and in overcoming problems encountered within applications. Documentation can better meet variances in learning styles and user preferences when tightly integrated into applications, accessible in the user's own language. Additionally, documentation is most beneficial when several assistance options exist for users to choose among, varying according to context, task, and user need. Finally, the article discusses the constraints that affect the implementation of design ideas and explores implications for practice and additional research.

Offers an interview with Robert Wylie, a distinguished two-year college English teacher for almost 50 years. Discusses how important it is for an English teacher to write, important issues in the profession, his views on the best ways to help students improve as writers, his observations about writing assignments, liking students, teaching standards, and his observations as a writer.

Our ethnographic study of a service‐learning class revealed some students benefited in developing civic values, improving academic learning, and accepting responsibility for their own education. Other students struggled to see the connection between technical communication and service learning, felt frustrated with nonacademic writing, and experienced team conflict. We must redefine both technical communication and service learning, help students make the transition to the workplace, and educate community organizations about the role of technical communicators.

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What Is Composition and Why Do We Teach It? A Review Essay; Teachers, Discourses, and Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom; When Writing Teachers Teach Literature: Bringing Writing to Reading; Science and Technology Today: Readings for Writers; Writing Off Center: An American Issues Reader for Composition; The Shape of Ideas; Border Talk: Writing and Knowing in the Two-Year College.

Review of three titles: William Charvat. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Foreword by Howard Mumford Jones. 1968. Reprint, with a new postscript to the preface. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 327 pages. $42.50 and $15.00. John Dolis. The Style of Hawthorne's Gaze: Regarding Subjectivity. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1993. 271 pages. $42.95. G. R. Thompson. The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne's Provincial Tales. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 319 pages. $49.95 and $19.95.

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Effective multi-language service literature depends on accurate conversion of thought and meaning-not direct translation of individual words. Such conversion is best accomplished by those who speak the customer's language as their native tongue and whose educational background encompasses the scope of the subject matter. In addition, the publication format, e.g., parallel or sequential arrangements of translated units of text, may be usefully varied according to the information content. The result is a more direct and understandable communication between the manufacturer and the user of his product.

L. J. Morrissey, William M. Jones, Charles A. Pennel, R. E. K., Robert D. Stevick, Tom Hatton, George Doskow, Richard Henze, Ralph M. Wardle, Edward P. J. Corbett, Robert L. Hough, Frederick M. Link, John Unterecker, Frank W. Bliss, Donna Gerstenberger, Ted E. Boyle, Merlene A. Ogden, Joseph Satin, Dale B. J. Randall, Harold R. Hungerford, Wayne C. Booth, Gerald L. Gullickson, Charles Kaplan, John H. Matthews, Book Reviews, College English, Vol. 27, No. 7 (Apr., 1966), pp. 577-585

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