Teacher communication influences students’ cognitive and emotional well-being, yet mechanisms linking communication behaviors to learning outcomes remain underexplored. Grounded in the conservation of resources framework, this study tested an ecological model in which teacher clarity and rapport indirectly reduced writing apprehension through perceived immediacy, self-efficacy, and burnout. Undergraduate students ( N  = 389) in Business and Professional Communication courses completed validated measures. Structural equation modeling supported a serial mediation: clarity and rapport predicted immediacy and self-efficacy, which reduced burnout and, in turn, writing apprehension. Findings highlight burnout as a psychological conduit linking instructional communication to student anxiety.

This article explores factors influencing classroom assessment approaches by analyzing survey data from 326 U.S. college instructors teaching business, communication, and composition. Business and communication instructors adopt nontraditional grading methods far less than composition instructors. Departmental culture and disciplinary norms are major influences, along with constraints like class size, time, and technology. The article argues that instructors can and should question departmental grading norms to develop assessment methods that enhance learning in interdisciplinary courses like business communication.

This study explores educator attitudes, beliefs, and experiences regarding writing and writing instruction before and after participating in a week-long Summer Institute (SI) facilitated by leaders at one National Writing Project (NWP) site. Throughout the SI, the 12 educators (i.e., instructional coaches and classroom teachers) participated in personal, creative, and professional writing designed to support them as writers and writing instructors. Study participants completed a survey before the SI and at its conclusion, which captured their perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and experiences about writing and writing instruction, as well as the importance of writing in education. Findings demonstrated that many participants viewed themselves as writers prior to the SI with this amount increasing at the conclusion of the SI, and many reported increased writing confidence. There were inconsistencies in the ways participants defined what it means to “be a writer,” and findings suggest that writer identity is influenced by writing confidence and enjoyment, with some participants struggling to navigate the dual identities of writer and writing teacher. Study findings suggest that addressing the writer-teacher identity crisis is crucial for fostering effective writing instruction. Teachers need time, space, and opportunity to immerse themselves in their writing and practice different skills to then apply to their instruction. Buy-in from school districts to provide such opportunities and a willingness to support teacher autonomy will enable teachers to better support students as writers and engage them in meaningful writing instruction for authentic tasks and audiences.

Unexpected organizational crises require organizations and their members to enact specific communicative strategies to deal with the crisis. In 2020, the COVID-19 crisis impacted many individuals and businesses, including nonprofit organizations; however, some of the new strategies they enacted have been left uncelebrated. Twenty-two interviews with nonprofit workers revealed that humor was often used effectively by organizations and their members in COVID-19. Yet, consistency in communication style before and during the crisis is crucial for determining how members view organizational humor. Humor should be considered another organizational crisis communication strategy that can be highly effective, if used carefully and consistently.

Alongside the self-help industry, self-assessment in higher education and organizational training has blossomed, especially as digital tools have made it possible to provide immediate feedback. Both contexts lack validated tools for accomplishing their goals. This study created and validated a series of self-assessments for classroom and training use. Drawing on student self-report data, self-assessment items were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis to assess construct validity and correlational analysis with existing research instruments to assess convergent validity. A set of 19 self-assessments with their accompanying validity and reliability evidence correspond to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) career-readiness (2021) skills, including communication, leadership, teamwork, technology, inclusiveness, and critical thinking.

Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language, has attracted small pockets of learners in the U.S. This essay explores the complicated, contradictory, and affective reasons Scottish Gaelic learners in the US take up their learning practices, examining the love stories at the heart of learner’s accounts of learning activity. The author argues that cultural and community-based love stories have much to teach community literacy scholars as they help us to understand the deeply emotional bonds language learners build within the linguistic communities they seek to join. These stories traffic in the concept of the “New Gael” (Dunmore, 2025) a product of Gaelic diaspora, a figure that provides a road map for countering the effects of historical erasures in the U.S. as it foregrounds the post-vernacular and translingual realities of Indigenous language revitalization within global movements for cultural and linguistic sovereignty.

This paper investigates the multi-faceted and ambiguous metaphorical connotations of “risk” terminology in COVID-19 updates delivered by Canadian public health officers (PHOs) during the first year of the pandemic. Our study reveals diverse and conflicting configurations of risk as both a manageable and unmanageable entity, a personal possession and an external location, an attribute of people and of spaces and activities, and a spectrum of degrees that (dis)identified those at lower and higher levels of risk. We argue that this situated tangle of metaphorical meanings contributed to a broader Canadian politics of neoliberal-communitarian health governance which was premised simultaneously on the active citizen’s individual responsibility to manage risk for self and others and on the vulnerabilization of citizens designated “most at risk.” For the RHM field, our study suggests new ways of exploring the meanings and implications of “risk” language within diverse contexts of health and medical communication.

This paper recommends that explicit value be placed on promoting dialogue among staff and students with respect to academic integrity in higher education. A detailed literature review revealed a notable lack of literature on resources and practices for professional development of staff on academic integrity or the importance of engaging academic staff in such training. Through the authors’ experience in developing and facilitating workshops, they have designed a flexible approach to academic integrity professional development for academic staff that highlights the importance of discussion and communication. Throughout this workshop development, scenarios were created to prompt discussion on a wide range of academic integrity issues (including Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)). In total, 18 workshops addressing academic integrity have been run by the authors and attended by 180 staff and 85 students at local, national, and international levels. This experience-based paper situates the need for professional development on academic integrity within the current literature and shares the evolution of the authors’ training workshops and resource development. Readers are encouraged to use the resources in their own contexts to prompt dialogue within their institutions on academic integrity.

Self-efficacy is important for maintaining a person’s belief in their capacity to perform desired behaviours and achieve desired goals; without self-efficacy, in the context of academic writing, one may doubt their ability to achieve writing goals. Previous research showed that the Writing Meeting Framework (WMF) can enable desired changes in writing behaviours but did not consider the role of self-efficacy in this behaviour change. This UK-based study aimed to determine if the WMF could improve writing self-efficacy for postgraduate researchers (PGRs) and early career researchers (ECRs). Participants completed a baseline questionnaire to reflect on their writing experiences and then were randomly matched into 35 pairs. Each pair met online four times over eight weeks using the WMF and then completed a post-questionnaire, reflecting on their experiences. Analysis showed significant improvements in self-efficacy using the WMF: participants improved their ability to set realistic and achievable writing goals and increased their confidence in completing writing goals regularly. This study shows the WMF can develop PGRs’ and ECRs’ academic writing self-efficacy and suggests the WMF can develop writing attributes required to produce academic writing regularly and achieve individual writing goals. The WMF offers a mechanism for developing this important component of effective writing behaviour.

If we but listen, we can hear a voice from the grave—Jacques Derrida’s mournful lamentation: “There is no longer, there has never been a scholar capable of speaking of anything and everything while addressing himself to everyone and anyone, and especially to ghosts. There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts” (2006, 12), a scholar who “does not believe in the sharp distinction between . . . the living and the non-living” (12). But, then, as if in response, we witness the apparition of just such a scholar: Stuart J. Murray, the author of The Living from the Dead, who very much is dedicated to the ethical project of attending to those dead who continue to haunt the living. Indeed, the book’s cover features a spectral image, entitled “Ghost,” as it were, conjured by artist Si Lewen. As well, the very title of his work renders the “sharp distinction” between “The Living” and “The Dead” porous, quixotically indistinct, as signified by the unattached and unhinged preposition “from.” That is, the title does not announce that Murray intends to distinguish the living from the dead, nor separate the living from the dead, nor identify the living from the dead—in some categorical, decisive demarcation. Rather, Murray’s use of the preposition “from” might conjure—instead, a Derridean sense of a “borderline”—a relation marked by différance between the living and the dead. Etymologically derived from an Old English preposition, “denoting the distance, absence, or remoteness of a person or thing in fixed position” (OED)—in time or space, from evokes Derrida’s neologism. “Différance as temporization [time/deferral], différance as spacing [space/difference]. How are they [time/space],” Derrida queries, “to be joined?” (1991, 61). Murray’s syntactically incomplete phrase suggests that the living and the dead are conjoined in a relation of interminable deferral and indeterminable difference, entangled in a fluxed, symbiotic—parasitic, even—relation.Much more could be said on this t(r)opic of deferred presence (and much more, indeed, of parasitic consumption and carnophallogocentrism), but to our immediate point, as Murray’s work entreats us to consider, there is much to learn in conversation with the dead; and indeed, it is our ethical responsibility—burden, even, as he remarks—to “hearken” to their voices. Murray’s The Living from the Dead undertakes this burden, listening to “the dead, the dying, the dispossessed” (1), endeavoring to articulate “[u]nder what conditions might we hearken those dead who summon us, and exhort us, perhaps to reckon with our unspeakable complicity in their deaths” (1), while offering the following caveat: “These pages, which arise in care of such summons, exhortations, and calls to reckoning neither speak for nor as the dead, the dying, or lives lost” (1), for as he will reveal in his refrain, speaking for or as amounts to an unethical co-option, a resentencing to death of the dead and dying.Murray describes his work’s writing “something akin to thanatography” (1), which is through and through a rhetorical enterprise, necessitating an attunement to and with biopolitics’ “speech/acts and its tropological constitution of subjects, political identities, and lives lived” (10). That is, as Steven Mailloux has argued elsewhere, tropes are rotated in order to “rotate the troops” (1993, 299). Tropes, troops; life, death. Much is at stake.The subtitle of the book, Disaffirming Biopolitics, foregrounds Murray’s argument: that attending to these voices, to the dead, requires a certain disaffirmation of biopolitics, a disaffirmation of “a politics ostensibly devoted to life (bios)” (1), to the production of “life,” which is “governed by increasingly autonomous efficiencies and economies of scale, through techno-administrative mechanisms that include systems of surveillance, segregation, health and welfare regimes” (2), as well as “through education, . . . law, biomedicine, and popular culture, too” (2). The production of “life” instantiates itself by way of a “sacrificial economy” (5) that necessitates letting die (1), even “acceler[ating] or mand[ating]” (2) death. In short, “[b]iopolitics kills, albeit indirectly and in the passive voice. It lets die in the name of life. This book begins here in the care of deaths disavowed—rather than from life’s sacred vows and avowals” (1).Murray undertakes his thanatographical critique of biopolitics with an introduction, four chapters, and a concluding “refrain.” Through the use of case studies, examining sacrificial economies that mobilize tropes/troops, Murray listens to those—dead and dying—who are “let to die,” according to the rhetorics and logics of bioethics, as employed during the COVID-19 pandemic, by suicide terrorism, during the hunger strikes of California prisoners, during legal cases of “untimely” deaths of young children, and surrounding the technologically distributed, videotaped death of a disabled Black man. Each case study is situated within a rhetorical framework, and—as ever—critically foregrounds Murray’s own burden of “using,” for analysis, for his evidentiary purposes, these very “precious perilous bodies in sickness and suicide; in hunger, subjects of medico-legal power, of time and race and technology” (161). “My ‘uses’ are abuses,” he admits, “notwithstanding my intent” (161). This confession, which seeks no absolution, confirms, yet again, our/his irredeemable and “unspeakable complicity” in the violence of letting die (1).The stakes are grave, indeed, in Murray’s thanatographical critique—politically, ethically, and rhetorically, which remain, in refrain, indistinguishable, one from the other. In the face of “unconscionable state violence,” “the revivification of nativist nationalisms and racisms,” “merciless neoliberal governments and burgeoning authoritarianisms; and most recently, a deadly global pandemic”: “We live and die today on a knife’s edge of disaster” (1–2). Yet, the most devasting cut of his critique comes, on refrain, as an interrogation into his, my, our, individual and collective complicity in all. Once more, there is no option of good conscience, nor of absolution, although there remains “the future-to-come” (148). This should give us pause, to “wait abidingly” (148)—and should inspire a certain, disaffirming vigilance. At the gravest point, The Living from the Dead is a powerful, ethical invocation; a lyrical, performative provocation—and a promising, futural conjuration.Murray begins his rhetorical investigation citing Foucault’s halting attempt to “define” “biopolitics,” as worked through during a lecture at the College de France in 1976, where Foucault postulates that “one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century was precisely that, I wouldn’t say exactly that sovereignty’s old right—to take life or let live—was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it. . . . This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (qtd. in Murray 3).Murray astutely notes that Foucault’s description of this “epochal transformation” of power can be articulated only in the passive voice, and Murray argues that this is Foucault’s only grammatical recourse precisely because this new right somehow manifests “seemingly by no one, or nothing, and yet in the name of an incipient ‘life itself’” (3). However, Murray continues, although this new right is, in contrast to sovereignty’s supreme agency, “decentralized and reticulate” (4), the grammar of liberal humanism has “become a great biopolitical ruse” (4), propagating the continuing illusion “that I freely choose and choose the very conditions of my own choosing—a grammatical ‘I’ propped up in its delusional sense of rationality, autonomy, and enlightened agency. An entitled ‘I’ through which ‘life itself’ would speak” (4).This grammatical habit—like Nietzsche’s worn coin in “On Truth and Lying” (1989, 250)—remains, circulating in this sacrificial economy as zombie currency: the illusion of individual sovereignty. This “lie”—supported and reproduced by “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms” (250)—further belies that “the object of that [new] power, its site of application, is not a singular body to be disciplined or punished. Biopolitics makes live and lets die en masse. No longer concerned with given individuals, it is applied systemically on—and constitutes—particular ‘populations’” (Murray 2022, 4). Further, still, Murray maintains, not only is the grammatical “I” a rhetorical invention, but “life itself” is, also. That is, biopolitics mobilizes “a tropological regime that fabricates a vital ‘truth’ from which all else seems to follow” (3). This “truth” belies a so-called “concrete biological body,” which incarnates a trope of a “most disincarnate, sacred, or transcendental notion,” which is “neither given nor natural” (3). The Living from the Dead “surfaces” these mobilizations of metaphors—the tropes of “life itself” (14).Disaffirming biopolitics’ tropological moves is in response to scholars who advocate an “affirmative” or “democratic” biopolitics, who proffer a “kinder, gentler” biopolitics (12). Yet, as Murray convincingly argues, “to affirm is the performative speech/act of a (neo)liberal political subject and iteratively both relies on and shores up a problematic underlying ontology” (12). In this way, citing Nancy Fraser’s criticism, such affirmative attempts, therefore, do not “disturb,” but rather reify “the underlying social structures that generat[ed]” the very injustices, which we are interrogating and asking to be held accountable (12).Disaffirming, in contrast, is a thanatographical endeavor—a rhetorical one: “To critique is not to judge the truths or lies of biopolitics (it proclaims both), or whether it is good or evil (it can be both); rather, critique would pursue rhetorical questions concerning the conditions in and by which such statements could be voiced, circulate, and recruit desiring subjects as agents of the biopolitical apparatus” (13). In this way, “[t]o disaffirm is a devastating undertaking. It is not self-righteously censorious, neither a disapprobation nor a condemnation issued from a posture of moral superiority or a secure sense-of-self. . . . Instead, it would turn its gaze inward to reckon with my collusion and complicity in systems that let die in the name of my own livingness” (18). And, would amount to—if not a burial of the liberal, humanistic subject, certainly “a mortification of this subject, ‘I,’ who writes—here” (19).And then, what remains of The Living from the Dead is its refrain. After careful exegesis of the case studies, themes repeat. What remains, like a refrain, which repeats, remains. A refrain, etymologically, also carries the signifying saturation of the sense of “burden,” which Murray carries with him in his thanatographical study. As chorus or burden, Murray’s refrain through the book is to amplify, in its repetition, like a death dirge, the incalculable, immeasurable ethical burden that “we,” that “I,” that “he,” the author, carries as the ethical obligation in the face of the recognition of our own complicity in the letting die, in the knowledge that our, my, his, very living is at the purchase of the disavowal of so many deaths, the disavowal of all whom “we”/“I” have let die in this sacrificial economy (see also 171).Yet we must lend our ear. The responsibility to “hearken” to, address, and dialogue with “the dead, the dying, the dispossessed” (1) (“however fictively” [144]), however rhetorically, however lyrically, Murray argues, necessitates the use of apostrophe as a non-co-optive, non-cannibalizing trope. Through a careful explication of the distinction between the tropes of apostrophe and prosopopoeia, Murray makes clear that the latter, prosopopoeia, speaks for and as the dead—a making present, as a projection of the addressor, and, as such, is “the master trope of biopolitics,” “whether expressly in the service of making live or letting die. It is a voice that impatiently projects the response it wishes to hear. It refuses to wait; inattentive, it willfully mistakes the echo for origin” (145).In contradistinction, apostrophe attends to a nonpresent absence (144), and eternally awaits a response—an impossible response, because the “impossible possibility of the reply ontologically precedes the call, and calls-forth that call, hearkening in advance: the apostrophe is summoned (by the absent addressee), the apostrophe in turn summons, and we tarry in this space. The address is always in the eternal return of this refrain” (145).And the address, “if we seek possibilities for a critical response that might disaffirm biopolitics,” requires a different “rhetorical register” (145). Hence the apostrophic address, the address summoned by the absent addressee, requires the “mortification” of the liberal human subject, perhaps summoning a sort of sacrifice of “letting die.” In this impossible space, unmoored from “our liberal subjecthood” and the illusion of agentic sovereignty, Murray takes up the (un)timely question: How then? What now? How might “we” proceed ethically (19)? In this concluding chapter, Murray faces the impossible, ethical injunction: How, then, to “deal” with these ghosts—with all these dead and dying with whom I have some complicity—by my very “livingness”? He turns/tropes his thanatographical eye from other systems to himself—to the very act of writing about the dead, about those lives that have been allowed (accelerated or mandated) to “let die.” The repetition is palpable. The lament has a corporeal texture. One feels the weight of corpses; the burden is heavy. This grave acknowledgment, however, is not cause for despair—but rather hope; here for a future-to-come, for a new way of being—for a new relation between the living and the dead.Murray suggests that there is a rhetorical, ethical responsibility to hearken to, to address—in a mode of call-and-response. How, then? Murray, thus, queries: might “we” (as tentatively as he inscribes such a collective), alternately, “gather around the impossible possibility of death, rather than life itself—a thanatopolitics rather than a biopolitics” (170)? Murray explains (and I realize I am quoting him heavily, but his prose is so gorgeously citation-worthy): “We must not think that by saying yes to ‘life,’ one says no to power and to death; on the contrary (to continue borrowing on Foucault’s phraseology), one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of biopolitics. And yet, in the sanctimonious affirmation of my ‘life,’ biopolitics demands that I say No to death, that I possess my life by locating death elsewhere, producing it there clandestinely, outsourcing it, as the condition of my living-on” (171).Speaking yes to life or yes to death, indeed, presumes that one can address such, and—to our purposes—presumes that one can, in present circumstances, “own” one’s own death, where nothing could be further from the “truth.” To speak the “truth” would acknowledge that “we ourselves are stuck in the universal contexts of death and cooperate with the death industry” (Sloterdijk 1987, 203). And this is where Murray resurrects the ancient Cynics, who acknowledged “the death-warranting of our established order. They refuse[d] to uphold the broken liberal contract, its ‘free speech,’ its false equalities” (175). Rather, they called for a “life which is radically other” and which “itself responds to—perhaps it has hearkened—death’s address” (175).By way of explication, he conjures Foucault’s late work on Cynic philosophy, as “a sort of parallel history to Western philosophy” (165). That is, Foucault contrasts the philosophical impulses as advocated by Plato’s with that of Plato’s In the the to is with a much relation to the as articulated in the Murray explains the of the the on the of an ethical relation to as a the manifests itself a and of in to the body the that we Western philosophy, and liberal In the in contrast, “the relation to itself . . . not on the care of the . . . but on the care of life (bios)” within Cynic contrast to the and of life within biopolitics rhetorical the or by which I my life and to it rather as by of as by a reply to that It does not speak it lives it. . . . a new to the of to say the (Sloterdijk 1987, It responds to the with “a dialogue of and An disaffirming mode of a mode of of of that one’s life and one’s one is or has one is to live or let to or of the has been a by scholars in our as in a to on Foucault and the of the to speak to speak and to speak The has a and history within the rhetorical (see and but of is the to to as is on the and rhetorics have their to critical This is a by who Foucault’s of power, and who argues that that we will or those that do not sense within the of or is, then, not in the according to much as it is an a The mode of thus, this critical as that up the possibilities for or of the of the to that have in that him his life, but he articulated a of that could one’s mode of one’s mode of death. the of the no such are or even even if we this Murray, in refrain, Cynic philosophy, the no no of an no but it us to still, on refrain, are the remains, the of remains, and the “burden,” or ethical to to Derrida has the work of attending to remains, to remains that do not remain, as the the impossible nonpresent absence that renders all thus, the for what I the (qtd. in 1987, in order to acknowledge that which the How to the of How to the work of our complicity in the systems of How to to the remains, to our complicity with injustices, in order to into the of the to address—in Derrida’s a and of a responsibility for This is what Murray is a scholar who deals with who to address, who for a of “life” that in one’s relation with the living and the ethical relation that would disaffirm our biopolitical regime and would not just an other life, it is an other in which an other death will one be (175). This is his this is what remains.

Through the guidance of social presence theory, this study sought to understand how instructors’ affirming messages and social presence behaviors affect students’ writing apprehension in online business communication courses. The data were consistent with two models, both of which indicate that instructor affirming messages indirectly affect students’ writing apprehension in the business communication classroom. Both models also indicate that students’ burnout mediates that indirect effect. The results show how important it is for instructors to take the time to leave affirming message feedback when teaching business communication online.

Fourteen years after the special issue on neuroscience and rhetoric in this journal (Neurorhetorics, vol. 40, no. 5), we turn back and look forward. We assess what has been accomplished in neurorhetorics in that time frame, examine what has changed in rhetorical studies and in the neurosciences, and offer suggestions for future research. Eight contributors detail the importance of neurorhetorics for their work and engage a range of topics. Those include neurodiversity, neuropolicy, neurogastronomy, and interdisciplinary collaborations, among others. Ultimately, the forum points toward the need for more critical cultural approaches in neurorhetorics, more policy discussions, new methodologies, and new philosophies that can stretch beyond the “neuro-” prefix and enroll insights from New Materialisms and Global Rhetorics.

Allison Rowland's Zoetropes and The Politics of Humanhood is about rhetorics of humanhood or how some come to be counted as human while others do not. It considers how hierarchies of humanhood are generated, sustained, and reordered, examining the discursive patterns by which movements along the scale of human valuation occur. The majority of the book is devoted to three case studies, each of which focuses on a distinct contemporary site: the American Gut Project's public information regarding the gut microbiome, the National Memorial for the Unborn's memorializations of aborted fetuses, and the gym scene in Boulder, Colorado. It is an eclectic set of cases, yet one that coheres in Rowland's conceptual framework and in its focus on health and body related issues: guts, abortion, and fitness.The book's title comes from the term “zoe,” which Rowland explains is “pronounced zoh-eh; rhymes with ‘no way’” (2). She gestures toward Giorgio Agamben in her use of the term but is clear that her usage is not the same as his notion of bare life. She appends “zoe” to “rhetorics” to identify the range of discursive moves by which life is valued and devalued across the spectrum of humanhood. As such, the book is very much about biopolitics and also, she takes care to emphasize, necropolitics. Citing Achille Mbembe's work, she stresses that when it comes to the hierarchies across which humanhood is ascribed, devaluations are an inevitable counterpart to elevations. She uses the term “transvaluation” to capture both forms of movement and their interconnectedness. And across case studies the book remains attentive to the dynamic by which humanhood's hierarchies produce both beneficiaries and casualties. As a whole, it convincingly illustrates the sort of insights that rhetoric, as field of study, brings to scholarly conversations around biopolitics and necropolitics.Rowland's book is firmly anchored in the rhetorical tradition. She aims to equip readers with a language for identifying and discussing the rhetorical patterns by which transvaluations occur. The term “zoerhetorics” is thematic, referencing modes of discursive transvaluation in general. But more specifically, Rowland is concerned with a specific iteration of zoerhetorics, zoetropes, or the figurative devices by which valuations along the hierarchy are enacted. For this, she draws from the deep well of rhetorical tropes, engaging long-standing—but now somewhat obscure—concepts like antonomasia and somatopeia to discern modes of figurative transvaluation. Her hope, she notes with a wry nod to its unlikely realization, is that even journalists or citizens might pick up this language and use it as a resource for naming and thereby more effectively addressing problematic zoerhetorics.It is fitting that Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood begins with the description of a classroom exercise the author uses to introduce students to some of the book's core ideas. Well-suited to adoption in an upper-level undergraduate or graduate course, the book explains key ideas and concepts in lucid and straightforward fashion and deploys specialized terminology judiciously. In addition, one of the book's notable strengths is its thoughtful self-reflexiveness. Rowland does not construe rhetorical analysis as a disembodied process but as one in which a positioned, sometimes personally-invested, self participates. For example, in a chapter on fitness culture in Boulder, Colorado that examines how certain privileged, fit bodies become valorized while others are cast as lesser-than, Rowland acknowledges her own participation in that culture. She describes some of her time at Boulder gyms, reflecting on the experience of complicity in that particular zoerhetoric. This is a candid illustration of what it looks like to critique rhetoric while not entirely exempt from that critique oneself.Perhaps the most compelling chapter is the one focused on pro-life fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn. Rowland examines the myriad ways the memorial ascribes human status to the fetus, through memorial plaques inscribed with individual names, for example. In doing so, she engages in highly positioned rhetorical analysis. For example, she describes first encountering the memorial via a weblink: “I remember sitting up a little at my desk . . . —how interesting, I thought; this fetal memorialization stuff is a bigger deal than I thought” (81). Later she recounts taking a research trip to the National Memorial on Mother's Day, only to be surprised to find no one else there. She also acknowledges the difficulties of doing research in the pro-life community as someone who is herself pro-choice. The chapter offers a lesson in how we might communicate about our research process in a way that acknowledges personal context. And for students, it is a helpful illustration of the messiness of academic work in which a researcher might at times be intrigued, conflicted, disappointed, etcetera and must grapple with various challenges while making adjustments during the unpredictable research process.The zoerhetorics that determine who gets counted as human and who doesn't underwrite much tragedy throughout human history, legacies of oppression and violence, and misery wrought against those deemed less than others. Rowland's arguments meaningfully intersect with long-standing scholarly conversations around the rhetorics of race, class, and gender concerned with the same. And while her case studies arguably avoid the most horrific sites of zoerhetorical consequence, she attends to their terrible potential throughout the book. In Chapter One, she elaborates at some length on the Great Chain of Being as a foundational zoerhetoric, one that still structures, often implicitly, assumptions about who counts as most and least human. As an enduring Western hierarchization, it has facilitated no small amount of subjection throughout history. Her case study on the American Gut Project addresses how communication around gut microbes sometimes draws on paternalistic and colonial rhetorics in which racial hierarchization is also involved. At the same time, one can imagine other case studies that grapple with even darker material, which dwell more fully on the horrific consequence of casting some out of the realm of perceived humanhood.Given Zoetropes’ self-reflexive approach to research questions, methods, and findings, it is no surprise that the book has a more narrative quality than many monographs in rhetorical studies. Rowland tells the stories of her research process, while also convincingly demonstrating its results. Consequently, the book is engaging to read, well-positioned to hold the interest of a broad readership. At the same time, the book also systematically details various discursive moves by which zoerhetorics are enacted. Rowland includes a mini-glossary of key terms at the end of the introductory chapter and, in the conclusion, outlines what she calls “zoerhetorical theory's propositions,” an encapsulation of the book's key arguments across case studies.Zoetropes equips its readers with tools with which to name, conceptualize, and potentially dismantle hierarchies of valuation. The stakes are high. As Rowland argues throughout the book, zoetropic hierarchies determine which lives come to matter or not, with life-or-death consequence. It is a sign of the book's merit that readers will want to take its productive conceptual frameworks elsewhere. The book effectively beckons past itself, inviting us to apply Rowland's critical tools to cases beyond her own. It is an invitation worth accepting.

While writing studies and linguistic scholarship has interrogated race and college writing instruction over the last fifty years, we contend that explicit, actionable, and supportive guidance on giving feedback to Black students’ writing is still needed. Building on the legacy of work visible in the Students’ Right to Their Own Language original (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1974) and updated (2006) annotated bibliography, as well as the crucial work done since then, our interdisciplinary team of linguists and writing studies scholars and students constructed the Students’ Right to Their Own Writing website. We describe the research-based design of the website and share evaluations of the website from focus group sessions. Acknowledging the contingent and overburdened nature of the labor force in most writing programs, the focus group participants particularly appreciated the infographics, how-tos and how-not-tos, and samples of feedback. The result is a demonstration of how to actually take up the call to enact Black Linguistic Justice (Baker-Bell et al., “This Ain’t Another Statement”).

In our information age, written communication has become increasingly important in many professions. As a result, university faculty and administrators need to develop specific curricula and pedagogies that will facilitate the process of equipping students with the required writing knowledge and skills to meet the demands of their workplace environments. In this article, we argue that Writing Across the Professions (WAP) as a curricular model meets that requirement, particularly in Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) contexts, which we believe are conducive to fostering writing transfer in university students. WAP foregrounds the importance of writing in workplace contexts and aims to facilitate the transfer of students’ knowledge and practices by focusing on rhetorical genre theory and analysis, discourse community theory and analysis, providing engaged feedback on students’ writing, and inviting students to critically reflect on their previous and current writing knowledge and practices. In this article, we propose four conceptual foundations that university faculty and administrators can utilize to implement WAP programs at their institutions. The first concept is that professional (writing) knowledge and practices are contextual and require lifelong learning; WIL faculty and students thus need to be informed about what is involved in learning to write across professions. Secondly, as the transfer of professional (writing) knowledge and practices goes beyond disciplinary boundaries, both faculty and students need to build contextual awareness. Thirdly, as problem-solving is an integral part of writing in the professions, faculty and students need to engage in critical reflection. Finally, professional (writing) knowledge and practices impact identities and therefore require mentoring. In outlining these shared concepts from WIL and writing transfer research, this article offers examples of how they can inform curricular approaches and pedagogical practices in WAP.

Lay summaries are commonly written by researchers in many disciplines to translate technical scientific concepts into language that can be understood by general audiences. In our first-year introductory biology course, we employed a write-to-learn pedagogy by incorporating a lay summary-style writing assignment that encouraged students to explain the major results of a journal article in their own words, a format we referred to as “blog-style” for our students. We chose to use this format to allow students to focus on understanding, defining and explaining key scientific terminology, without regurgitating technical jargon. Students selected and read a scientific journal article connected to a biotechnology topic at the start of the semester and were given worksheets to complete throughout the semester that guided them in the reading of their article. We also offered in-class workshops that focused on best practices for reading journal articles, how to write for a general audience, and how to avoid plagiarism. Students then composed two-page, lay style summaries highlighting some of the key findings of the articles that they read. This assignment resulted in many students producing engaging, well-written papers that allowed them to demonstrate meaningful understanding of some of the technical terminology and concepts in their articles.

We use a continuous improvement model to evaluate an information design assignment by analyzing 120 student drafts and finals alongside instructor feedback. Using data from across sections ( N = 118), we illustrate a process focused on improving student learning that other technical and professional communication program administrators and faculty can follow, while also offering insights into ways programs can assist a contingent labor force with improving pedagogical practice. This study provides insights into assignment design through data-driven evidence and reflective work that is necessary to help continuously improve a service course and to assist students in meeting learning outcomes.

This qualitative case study explores the experience of three first-year English language arts educators within a small community of practice designed to provide personal and professional support for beginning teachers. The participants engaged in a 6-week session where weekly meetings focused on participant experiences and English language arts pedagogy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article applies Kenneth Burke’s concept of piety to an evaluation of nine recovery stories from members of four different 12-step fellowships. In this theoretical context, recovery can be explained as a process of adopting and remaking pious systems. All nine recovery stories follow a similar pattern: (1) identifying difference and similarity in the community; (2) letting go of old pieties; (3) adopting group piety; and (4) inventing and remaking individual systems of piety. This analysis investigates how individual and group pieties interact to strengthen or threaten individual recovery and group cohesion.

This article raises awareness of how “we” language in writing centers can be both helpful and oppressive. Specifically, I consider ways that “we” language has the potential to perpetuate oppression by excluding individuals from writing center “we” statements.Using Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s 2011 “Two-List Heuristic” as a theoretical framework for understanding and responding to oppressive language, I analyze research on the inclusive and exclusive linguistic characteristics of plural pronouns, including “we,” “our,” and “ourselves,” as they relate to writing center work. I then propose ways in which writing center members may construct responses to “we” language that challenges their values, beliefs, and experiences. This article intends to interrogate a common linguistic feature of writing center culture that can prevent its members from “talking back” to the center. Three semesters ago, I began my position as the Associate Director of a writing center in a mid-sized, religiously-affiliated university in the Midwestern region of the United States. Like many spaces in the Midwest, my university is characterized by politeness, whiteness, and football fanaticism—qualities that have been familiar to me since childhood. Although I am 500 miles from my hometown, I am comfortable in this environment where I easily blend in with the crowd: I am a white heterosexual cis-woman of European descent in my late thirties with a Ph.D. I share this information because my background, context, and positionality have certainly shaped the following analysis. On a cold and gloomy afternoon in mid-November of 2021, I held one-on-one meetings in my office with our new writing center tutors to discuss their research paper topics. Naya (pseudonym), a historically underserved undergraduate student tutor, sat across the table from me and began to share the framework of her research interests. She had prepared a proposal to improve our writing center’s tutor training module for working with multilingual students. As a multilingual student herself, Naya’s proposal was exciting and bold: she was interested in studying multilingual tutoring theories in order to create new pedagogical practices for our writing center. I understood Naya’s concern to stem from the myopic generalization of international students by writing center staff that she witnessed during her training. Yet when I asked her about the direction in which she wanted to take her research, her sentiments surprised me. She remarked, “I just don’t know who I am; am I the international student or the tutor? It’s really confusing.” As she went on to explain, her confusion was rooted in the “we” language used by experienced tutors during the tutor training module. When experienced tutors stood at the front of the classroom describing the ways “we work with international students,” Naya felt like she had to choose an identity. As a new tutor, she was supposed to identify with the tutoring “we”: those who work with international students. Yet, she was also the international student “we”: a group external to the tutors who were, at times, problematic for the tutoring “we.” After talking to Naya, I felt certain that although the language of “we” is supposed to create a sense of community and belonging in the writing center, this plural pronoun also has the power to exclude, confuse, and silence voices. As I began to reflect on this conversation, I realized that the language of “we,” “us,” and “our” is everywhere in writing center rhetoric. Our writing center’s mission statement, appointment confirmation notices, and first-time tutor meetings invariably include descriptions of how “we” do things in the writing center. Furthermore, the word “we” is ubiquitous in writing center discourse throughout the United States; language in daily emails on the [wcenter] listserv and publications in writing center journals demonstrate the prevalence of writing center “we” language. Yet this prevalence does not indicate a corresponding predominance of exclusionary plural pronoun use. Likewise, I am not suggesting the impossible or undesirable task of avoiding plural pronoun use. Rather, I want to argue that writing center “we” language is not always comfortable, inclusive, and welcoming. Naya’s confusion over writing center “we” language suggests that the plural pronoun “we” can function as a privileging and excluding language structure in the writing center environment. Thus, practitioners in the field need to be vigilant about examining and adjusting plural pronoun use, and this article will offer ways forward for becoming more vigilant. After Naya and I conversed, she began to pursue research on multilingual tutoring theories, and I began to listen closely for “we” language in our writing center’s discourse. My listening turned into writing when the call for this special issue was announced. The Peer Review editors of this special issue asked: “as writing centers embrace liberatory political stances, and as their users become more diverse and more aware of identity…do consultants, writers, and administrators with minoritized identities have opportunities to talk candidly back to the center?” (Natarajan et al., 2022, para. 5). Naya had taken the step of “talk[ing] candidly back to the center” in proposing improvements to the pedagogy of our writing center’s training course, and she did so as an international student of color at a predominantly white institution (PWI). While talking back to the center requires time, support, a dialogue partner, and disciplinary knowledge, it also fundamentally requires language. It is this linguistic dimension that may provide an obstacle for historically underserved tutors, writers, and administrators to talk back to the center. If individuals with minoritized identities want to identify as the “we” of the writing center and also as the “we” that has been othered, what language is available to the author without making the problem sound self-focused? This analysis of “we” language may provide a window into why some writing center members feel prohibited from talking back to the center. This is not the first time “we” and “them” language has been problematized in writing center scholarship. Denny (2010) describes the pervasive tendency for writing center discussions to use “we” language to subtly dehumanize groups of people by sorting individuals into subjects and objects. He writes that writing center “talks, presentations, and keynotes index Others as objects for whom practical and instrumental learning applies, not figures for whom learning is necessarily transactional and collaborative (“we” can learn from “them,” “they” from “us”)” (p. 5). When “we” language is used to describe the subjective experience of writing center members in contrast with an objective “them,” the “them” group implicitly seems lesser than the “we” group because they are not afforded the same subjectivity of the “we.” For example, if tutors present a training module on working with international students and the tutors say, “we work with them,” this language implies a power dynamic where knowledge is held by tutors and less knowledge is held by international students. However, if the tutors say, “we work together,” the power dynamic shifts to one of equal knowledge or benefit. The “we” language in the latter example does not imply a lesser-than dynamic because the subjectivity of the “we” is afforded to both tutors and international students. Yet the tendency to use “we” and “them” language is more common than shared “we” language, both in speech and in writing. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown (2011) reflect on this phenomenon in the instructional context, where students use exclusive pronouns in papers and class discussions. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown note that students often assume “readers will be from ‘their culture’ when they use pronouns like ‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘our’” (p. 26). Such assumptions occur in writing because they are part of thought and speech patterns conditioned by social and cultural interactions. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown remark that breaking these problematic plural pronoun habits is difficult. One of the ways to make it less difficult is to understand the difference between problematic and helpful pronoun use. The use of plural pronoun language in the writing center context is not surprising given the widely discussed adaptation of “we” language to corporate and business settings over the past few decades. This phenomenon has been reviewed and discussed in articles by Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company. Because many writing centers share characteristics in common with the business world, analyses of plural pronoun language from business management and leadership resources have value in the writing center context. For example, scholars such as Kacewicz et al. (2014) have argued that using “we” language in a collaborative working environment demonstrates an outward focus and concern for others. This research suggests that individuals whose language reflects a group-oriented rather than self-focused tendency are more likely to attain leadership roles in the group and direct their group toward successful outcomes. Further, according to a study by Anchimbe (2016), a leader who has established rapport with other members of the group can use “we” language to “encourage or reprimand … [to help] members reassert their identity, solidarity, and prowess, restate their mission and determination to achieve it, and also bemoan and caution against [an] unfortunate predicament” (p. 516). Thus, “we” language can create group uplift and positive momentum towards pre-established goals and values. In the writing center, an example of “we” language as a leadership tool would be when a tutor suggests to their peers before the start of a shift: “let’s keep our earbuds out. That way, we can make sure to welcome tutees when they walk in.” Such “we” language directs tutors toward shared values of attention and hospitality. The tutor using the “we” language demonstrates an outward-focused attitude, showing concern for the values of their writing center and for the well-being of tutees who walk in the door. Hence, “we” language can act as a communication tool for group perspective-taking in the writing center. Yet corporate and business literature also warns against the potentially coercive nature of “we” language. For example, in his critique of the Harvard Business Review’s push for “we” language, Walpole (2018) argues that “we” language is used to “manipulate reality” (Improving Communication and Community section, para. 2). Its most offensive manipulation, according to Walpole, is that “we” language creates a false sense of team. Suggesting that “we” landed a deal or “we” gave a fantastic presentation when only one person acted sets up a disingenuous sense of team where no interpersonal bonding is expected. Likewise, “we” language allows a group to take credit when the credit is really due to an individual. Such behavior hearkens back to harrowed days of group work in high school when one person completed the brunt of the work on behalf of the rest of the group. Walpole argues, “did *you* really have much to do with landing the deal? If not, trying to share in the credit isn’t so noble” (Saying “We” is a Poor Substitute section, para. 6). In the business setting, this misuse of “we” language can be used to inflate a leader’s accomplishments while diminishing the success of those under the leader’s purview. When a leader shares collective credit for the success of an individual’s work under the guise of “we” language, the leader becomes a gatekeeper for the growth and promotion of their direct reports. Similarly, in the writing center, an administrative team needs to be discerning about its use of “we” language in creating a sense of team and in acknowledging individual accomplishments. I have briefly shared the surface-level arguments about the benefits and drawbacks of “we” language in the writing center. In the rest of the article, I consider ways that “we” language has the potential to perpetuate oppression by excluding individuals from writing center “we” statements. At stake in this article’s examination of “we” language is an understanding of the potential impact of plural pronoun use on tutoring pedagogy in two sets of relationships: administrators → tutors, and tutors → tutees. The theoretical framework I use for analyzing plural pronoun language in the writing center is guided by four principles from Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s (2011) “Two-List Heuristic for Addressing Everyday Language of Oppression” (p. 22). While “we” language is not necessarily always oppressive, Suhr-Sytsma and Brown contend that “an individual’s uses of oppressive language are often both unintentional and inseparable from broader discourses that reinforce oppression” (p. 14). As I discovered in conversation with Naya, the “we” language used during our writing center’s training module was unintentionally oppressive and nearly invisible because it was so ingrained in the regular discourse of the writing center. In light of this focus on commonplace discourse, I find four of the eighteen items in Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s two-list heuristic particularly relevant for analyzing “we” language. To assist in clarity during analysis, I have added (a) and (b) notations after the original numbers in the two lists so that when the heuristic numbers are indicated later in this article, it will be easier to remember from which list the item came. Thus, this article will examine “we” language in relation to the following elements of the heuristic:

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This article reports findings from a qualitative study in a third-grade classroom in the Southwest in the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration. In response to students’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric around immigration and border-wall construction, the teacher provided curricular space for students to study immigration policy and write letters to their congressional representative expressing their positions. Drawing on field notes, interviews, and student writing, this study asks, (a) What sources of knowledge did students draw on in their talk and writing? and (b) How did students respond to such curricular design? Analysis suggests that students drew on border thinking () and politicized funds of knowledge (), positioned themselves as change agents, and developed and displayed knowledge of academic genres and conventions.

This essay argues for embodied dialog among scholars from different global situations as an academic practice crucial to anticolonial transformation. The essay illustrates this practice by recounting the critical interpretations of two differently situated anticolonial persons and the changes in interpretations wrought by our dialog. We draw on postcolonial and dialogic orientations and recent materialist theories that envision rhetorical scholarship as "making" in order to encourage expansion of the range of depictions of Muslims in literature. The analysis employs a persona theory revised through Burkean dramatism and the anticolonial perspective. The transformative potential of the approach is illustrated by a dialogically executed analysis of the Pakistan-focused novel, The Spinner's Tale, by Omar Shahid Hamid.

Building sustainable infrastructure is a core principle of Constructive Distributed Work (CDW), an integrated approach to project management and team building. In this article, we explain the origins of CDW and describe the theory of sustainable infrastructure that underpins our approach to training, supporting, and coordinating work across a diverse and distributed team. We illustrate how mapping strategies can help us make infrastructure more visible, and therefore more available for reflection and iteration, and demonstrate how a participatory approach to developing and sustaining infrastructure helps our team maintain its commitment to more ethical and inclusive research practices.

This article explores ways that the field of rhetoric and writing studies can benefit from intentional engagement with work-integrated learning (WIL) research and pedagogy in the context of transfer research. Specifically, the article discusses: (1) redesigning writing internship pedagogies to align with WIL learning and curriculum theories and practices; (2) revisiting threshold concepts of writing by accounting for knowledge, theories, and practices that are central to epistemological participation in a variety of professional writing careers; (3) reconsidering notions of vocation to emphasize the ways writers’ personal epistemologies and social trajectories interact with the purposes, aims, and values of academic and workplace contexts; and (4) reconceptualizing writing major curricula in relation to the conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and dispositions of expert writers in a range of professional contexts. In short, we argue that intentional engagement with WIL can enrich work on writing transfer and the field of rhetoric and writing studies as a whole. In addition to our theoretical discussion of the value of engaging with WIL frameworks in writing studies, we introduce our multi-institutional, transnational study of how WIL affects diverse populations of undergraduate students’ recursive transfer of writing knowledge and practices as an example of the kind of generative research on writing transfer and WIL that we are encouraging writing transfer researchers to take up.

Academic work increasingly involves creating digital tools with interdisciplinary teams distributed across institutions and roles. The negative impacts of distributed work are described at length in technical communication scholarship, but such impacts have not yet been realized in collaborative practices. By integrating attention to their core ethical principles, best practices, and work patterns, the authors are developing an ethical, sustainable approach to team building that they call constructive distributed work. This article describes their integrated approach, documents the best practices that guide their research team, and models the three-dimensional thinking that helps them develop sustainable digital tools and ensure the consistent professional development of all team members.

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

Existing writing self-efficacy instruments have assessed the concept through mechanical and process features of writing to the neglect of the influence of situated context. The purpose of this study was to develop and test the Situated Academic Writing Self-Efficacy Scale (SAWSES) based on Bandura’s self-efficacy theory and a model of socially constructed writing. A sequential multimethod approach constituted the methods. A Delphi panel of 15 expert scholars conducted a theoretical evaluation of the scale and the items were piloted with 20 nursing undergraduate students using cognitive interviews. The scale was validated in two studies with independent samples of 255 nursing students (Study 1), and in an interdisciplinary sample of undergraduate (N = 543) and graduate students (N = 264) (Study 2). The three identified factors present a structure to the questionnaire which is developmental and has the potential to detect gaps in student self-assessed ability to master various facets of disciplinary writing: 1) Writing-Essentials – synthesis, emotional control, language; 2) Relational-Reflective – relationship building with writing facilitators (teachers, academic sources) and the self through reflection; and 3) Creative Identity – exploring gaps in student achievement of transformative writing (creativity, voice, and disciplinary identity), where confidence can help identify the most engaged writers.

Abstract Graduate students must learn to read as professionals who move their reading work into spoken and written discourse. This study borrows Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton's description of transcontextualizing moves to examine how graduate students use social annotation to develop as readers. Specifically, the study examines graduate reading practices through think-aloud protocols and archived annotations of three readers enrolled in a doctoral literacy seminar. Findings suggest that graduate readers may benefit from opportunities to reflect on how the technologies of annotation contribute to the transcontextualization of their reading across time and space.

In public discourse, lay cognitive precepts are invoked at every turn. People regularly speak of believing, thinking, knowing, and so forth, ascribing those states to themselves and others alike. This essay identifies the cognitive vernacular as a discernible dimension of public discourse, one that includes such regularly deployed lay precepts as well as popularized psychological and neuroscientific ideas. The cognitive vernacular may find expression in focal texts (e.g., a self-help book on positive thinking), but also pervasively, and somewhat elusively, takes shape in discussions that are otherwise overtly concerned. This essay takes the public discussion regarding the discovery of a teenage heroin ring in Centreville, Virginia, in 2008, a single episode within the large-scale and enduring American opioid crisis, as a focal site to investigate the cognitive vernacular. In doing so, it discerns how lay precepts concerning choice and knowledge are wielded as rhetorical resources to both cast and mitigate blame.

Through an analysis of over 40 writing center blogs, this webtext offers an overview of the current status of blog use in writing centers, and a guide to best practices that incorporates survey responses from the writing center professionals who maintain exemplary blogs.

ABSTRACTThis study explores the influence of the French Symbolist poet, novelist, and literary critic Remy de Gourmont on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's conception of dissociation. It proposes translatio—the medieval trope describing a transfer of ideas—as a lens through which to read the significance of Gourmont's thought on the New Rhetoric Project (NRP). Thus forgoing more traditional comparative approaches such as intertextuality, this study argues that translatio serves here as a particularly valuable conceptual tool: it unveils the evolution of Perelman's thought over time, and Olbrechts-Tyteca's significant contribution to it; it also provides a clearer understanding of the relationship between association (in the guise of analogy) and dissociation in the NRP than what is generally understood by scholars of the Traité. More importantly, translatio unveils the features that make their conception of dissociation one of the truly innovative aspects of the NRP.

An Annotated Bibliography on Rhetorics of Reproductive Justice is a project motivated by several overlapping exigencies. When we began our collaborative research and writing for this project in the fall of 2019, we were unaware that in the months to follow we would face a global health pandemic, accompanied by the reignition of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Effective organizational socialization demands soft skill competence. This article advances two goals: (a) explore the inclusion of undergraduate researchers in the scholarship of teaching and learning research and (b) present research findings on employer perceptions of new college graduates’ communication skills. The research team used a rules approach to explore employer perceptions of nonverbal communication skills for new college graduates, such as commonly violated rules. Four key findings relating to rule violations in unspoken communication include displaying a lack of interest, inappropriate attire, body art, and writing deficiencies. Suggestions are offered for including undergraduates in this kind of research.

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This qualitative study reviewed student application of self-regulated learning (SRL) processes in self-paced graduate business communication courses. It was preceded by a quantitative analysis of the same courses. In both studies, researchers sought to understand student experience in a self-paced learning environment, and how this experience demonstrated SRL and increased student performance. Neither study established a clear connection between a self-paced learning environment, SRL, and student performance. However, both studies confirmed the importance of student predisposition for the cyclical phases of preparation, performance, and appraisal and highlighted the critical role of support in readying students for learning strategy changes.

"Function" is a vitally important concept in the scientific community. Scientists use it to describe and address a wide variety of research problems. In publications, however, scientists within and across disciplines interpret function differently. For example, intense debate surrounds what percentage of the human genome should be deemed "functional" rather than "junk DNA." In this essay, we analyze the use of function in the research of de novo gene birth, a budding scientific field that studies how novel genes can emerge in non-genic sequences. Our research team, composed of a rhetorical scholar, philosopher, structural biologist and systems biologist, crafts a taxonomy of how "function" is variously constituted in de novo gene birth publications, including as expressions, capacities, interactions, physiological implications and evolutionary implications. We argue function is shaped by the diverse onto-epistemological perspectives of scientists and is both a recalcitrant and resilient concept of scientific practice. Informed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's writings on a scientific mode of thinking, functions are time-space scales of objects under investigation that make possible references to scientific measurements.

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For decades, scholars have considered the construct of voice in student writing, and although defining the term remains difficult (see Jeffery; Tardy, Current ; Yancey), the metaphor of voice is still useful and popular in discussions about student writing (see Bryant; Elbow, Voice ). In this article, we first explore the field’s use of the term “voice” as describing writers’ subject positions within the texts and contexts in which they compose. In doing so, we represent the tensions that prior work has identified within the construct of voice. While prior empirical work explored faculty members’ identification of student writers’ voice, it has not used writing by faculty members’ own students. We then report on our study, which was designed to elicit two teachers’ identification of their own students’ voice in their writing. Findings suggest that instructors’ knowledge about their students and classroom contexts contributed to their understanding of voice in their students’ papers. The piece concludes with implications for how teachers can bring critical discussions of voice into the classroom and use our study results to inform their teaching students to attend to ideas of voice in writing.

In this paper, we investigated a model of academic development based upon a recurring residential academic writing retreat combining individual writing times, workshops, work-in-progress groups and one-on-one consultations with shared meals and informal gatherings in a natural environment. Using a case study research approach, we analysed data accumulated from seven annual residential writing retreats for education scholars. Participants included 39 academics, administrative staff, senior doctoral students and community partners from multiple institutions. We found evidence that the retreats enhanced participants’ knowledge of writing and publishing processes, advanced their academic careers, built scholarly capacity at their institutions and strengthened writing pedagogy. The data indicated that the presence of writing and writers at the residential academic writing retreats generated presents (i.e., gifts) for the participants. The presence of writing time, writing goals and writing activities in the company of other writers were key to the retreat pedagogy. Participants appreciated gifts of time and physical space and described giving and receiving peer feedback and emotional support as forms of gift exchange within the community. The resulting writing strategies, competencies and identities provided the gift of sustainability. The analysis confirmed that this ongoing, immersive, cross-institutional, cross-rank, institutionally funded model of academic development was effective and responsive to the needs of individual scholars.

ABSTRACT This article, an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, traces the surprising role of translation and of translatio (the medieval trope referring to the transfer of knowledge across time and space) in the story of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s turn to rhetoric. Neither Perelman nor Olbrechts-Tyteca were well versed in the French tradition of rhetoric as poetics. However, in two lectures Perelman gave late in his life, he offered a surprising description of the influence of Jean Paulhan, the French literary critic and long-time director of the Nouvelle Revue française, and of thirteenth-century Italian author and notary Brunetto Latini, on the turn to rhetoric. In addition, this essay situates these lectures as a critical response to the claim made by three important French thinkers, Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette, that they had recovered rhetoric for the study of expression and thus as poetics.

ABSTRACT This is an introduction to and translation of Chaïm Perelman’s “De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance” published in 1933 by Maurice Lambertin publishing house. De l’arbitraire dans la connaissance has important implications for an understanding of Perelman’s intellectual development generally and specifically for an understanding the evolution of his New Rhetoric Project.

In The Working Lives of New Writing Center Directors, Nicole Caswell, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, and Rebecca Jackson explore the implications of writing center directors’ hybrid day-to-day labor and ...

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This article extends new materialist theorizing on the constructive role played by the physical stuff of the world. Specifically, it draws on Kenneth Burke’s writings on recalcitrance to theorize the materialities of rhetorical invention. It takes X-rays as a case study in recalcitrance-driven invention, focusing on two particular applications, traditional medical X-rays, a pervasive category of contemporary technical communication, and backscatter X-ray airport security scans, a controversial and short-lived one. Its analysis shows how recalcitrance (1) is harnessed as means of technical invention and (2) is key to invention’s bidirectionality, by which our material interventions, in turn, work upon us.

This article is about combining career exploration with composition and creative writing to engage students with relevance and motivation as they explore their future careers.

This essay examines intersectional discourses of race and disability as they emerge in a 2014 wrongful birth lawsuit. Jennifer Cramblett filed the lawsuit after she discovered she was given sperm from the wrong donor resulting in the birth of her biracial daughter. The filing provides an opportunity to understand how rhetorics of identity are intersectional; in this case, how a legal filing for disability structures public arguments about race. Taking a critical intersectional rhetorical perspective, this essay analyzes the case and resultant public discourse to demonstrate how Cramblett enacts a mourning of her whiteness structured by already circulating disability rhetorics.

Technical and professional communication instruction is well suited to helping students develop digital literacy but must be informed by research regarding how students are using specific social media platforms, particularly the propensity to post content that could damage their career capital. This study examined this question for students in Austria, Australia, and the United States. In Austria and Australia, this behavior was found to be no greater for Twitter than it was for Facebook. Conversely, for the United States, the behavior was found to be more pronounced. These and additional results regarding attitudes toward information privacy are reported.

The book succeeds in informing its audience about how poorly designed products can anger, sadden, exclude, and even kill those who use them. The authors also effectively explain what designers can do to avoid and fix these mistakes. Includes concrete, compelling, real-world stories and testimonials as evidence of how tragic design directly impacts people’s lives, and it offers practical recommendations for altering tragic design practices.

“When you find yourself neck deep in shit, start making bricks,” or so I was advised by Luanne T. Frank, a faculty member during my graduate days, who was deftly “translating” Heidegger for us during one class session. And now, decades later, I look around and think, “I'd better get busy, really busy.”With that prelude, and apologies to those weak of stomach or imagination—but this is not the time to be queasy—I approach Barbara Cassin's Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism. Indeed, the paperback cover image is of a man knee deep in water, at the least, and he looks down reflectively, somberly, as if to ask: “Really? What to do?”When I first read Cassin's volume—a collection of (mostly) previously published essays on the sophists, on philosophy's systematic repression of their thought, and on the pragmatic and political value of sophistic “relativism,” I was struck by the volume's lack of engagement with similar scholarship that has been undertaken in the United States. Except for two references, one to the work of John Poulakos and the other to that of Ed Schiappa, the collection of essays does not otherwise engage with rhetoric studies that “we,” and I use this collective pronoun with increasing discomfort as I write this, have published in English. My first impulse, thus, after reading, was to react: but why recuperate the sophists now? Didn't “we” vociferously and variously praise, resurrect, refigure, and bury them several decades ago?My subsequent impulse was to acknowledge the very antisophistic drive at work in my own reception of a foreign scholarship (Oh, how easy it is to feel “at home” in one's disciplinary comfort zone, to circle the wagons around a constitutive “we”). I recognized, clearly, that now, right now is precisely the right time to readdress the sophists. Irrepressible, the sophists haunt us, no matter how hard we try to bury them (see the work of Victor J. Vitanza and Jane Sutton, for example), and in times of rampant bigotry, xenophobia, and fundamentalism, the sophists return to remind us that now will always already be the right time to rethink, revisit, and retheorize the sophists. As scholars in rhetoric and as Cassin, here, argue, the sophists represent the power to challenge totalizing beliefs and their oppressive effects.I acknowledge the argument that it is a totalizing move itself to group all the various rhetors and philosophers under one homogenizing category of “the sophists” (see the work of Schiappa, for example). By doing so, we risk dehistoricizing them, anachronistically reviving them, and compelling them to speak from their ancient graves according to a contemporary script. Yet as John Poulakos, Victor J. Vitanza, and others have previously argued—and as Cassin does here—“the sophist” serves as a productive, as Vitanza would say, representative anecdote/antidote, a way both to explore “neglected and repressed traditions, of alternative paths” (1) and to counteract the philosophical demand for homology. Cassin writes: “Sophistic texts are the paradigm of what was not only left to one side but transformed and made unintelligible by their enemies” (2). These neglected, repressed, and alternative texts—these “others,” she further argues, “have in common another way of speaking, even another conception of logos” (2).Contrary to the ontologists, the philosophers, who worship at the altar of the law of noncontradiction, of homogenization and the “one,” the sophists, as “logologists,” inhabit the unholy space of the many, “outside of the regime of meaning as univocity” (4). The philosophical tradition has embraced this law, Aristotle's “principle of all principles,” and its attendant communicational presumption and demand and thus, by structural necessity (just as structurally necessary as the prohibition of incest, she notes), excluded sophists and their language games (4-5). Cassin's methodological interest—and the interest for our future methodological muscle, then—is to query how and why the philosopher demands such prohibitions and, further, needs or feels the “right to say that people need punishment” for violations of the “one” and is thus compelled to violence (4).In a world forged across simultaneous intimacy (where the proverbial “seven degrees of separation” appears mistaken: it is always One degree of separation) and strangeness (where the One appears forever separated from the one), Cassin invites us to see the sophist as the figure who acknowledges us—all of us; every one of us—as a stranger, fundamentally, essentially, even when we feel most “at home.” Cassin's essays thus press us to welcome the stranger, the foreign other, to theorize a political system and a way of being that recognizes the complexity of our world, in its strangeness, to encounter the powerful strangeness that characterizes language, and to attend to the untranslatable quality that is world, that is being, that is being in the world.This is the theoretical impulse of the book—the recognition of the sophist as the “stranger,” inhabiting the unreadable if not inhabitable characteristics of the other—which comprises seventeen chapters, again mostly of previously published work, sectioned in five emphases: “Unusual Presocratics”; “Sophistics, Rhetorics, Politics”; “Sophistical Trends in Political Philosophy”; “Performance and Performative”; and “Enough of the Truth For….” The volume's emphasis is, thus, on the political implications for sophistical theories of language, as performative, of not describing a preexistent reality but of bringing worlds into being. Cassin's engagement with political philosophy leads her to propose what she calls a “consistent” relativism as a certain response to criticisms of “contingent” relativism as advanced by Richard Rorty, for example, as perpetuating opinions as the wind favors.I'll leave Cassin to argue with Rorty and others, as she does in a variety of chapters on the value(s) of political relativism (and I'll leave Steven Mailloux to meditate on sophistic pragmatism); I want to direct my brief comments here to the complicated relation between the impossibility of possibly living with others (consistently or contingently) possibly or impossibly.I want to focus on chapter 13, which is titled: “Philosophizing in Tongues,” which could be retitled as “How to Live Hospitably in an Inhospitable World When There is No One Language” (a mouthful of tongues to be sure), or more simply “Living Rhetorically in/with Tongues.” Obviously, the author nor the editors sought my opinion before selecting the chapter's title. But my point: we're “translating” Cassin's philosophical disciplinary focus/home into a more rhetorical one and hopefully a more unhomely one. She writes: “It is from the basis of the deeply nonviolent premise of this sentence—‘a language is not something that belongs’—that I would like to lay out what we attempted to achieve with the Dictionary of Untranslatables” (247). What I want to suggest is that the work of Cassin presses us—as a discipline—to think of the rhetorical as outside the simplistic hail of the “triangle,” of the presumption that a rhetorical agent “knows what he knows and knows what he speaks” and that audiences and messages are uncomplicated and dissociable entities. I further want to suggest that the work of Cassin presses rhetorical studies to think of communication as an “untranslatable” event.In service of this provocation is Cassin's edited, masterful Dictionary of Untranslatables, published by Princeton University Press in 2014. This hefty volume of approximately thirteen hundred pages celebrates the “cartography of language” (vii), of the various journeys of the word—and the singularity of each journey. The dictionary is a rich resource, reminding me of an expansive version of Michel Foucault's description of Borges's “certain Chinese encyclopedia” that instantiated The Order of Things. Do yourself the favor: buy this dictionary.In a world that trades in “untranslatable” values from continent to continent and in “untranslatable” words, such as “covfefe,” and when consequences, politically and ethically and mortally, are so dear, the field of rhetoric studies needs to take very seriously the “play of signification,” to refigure its theorization and praxis of attending to the “untranslatable.” Cassin invokes this refiguration, this revisitation of sophistry, not “as a destinal challenge to Babel but as an obviously deceptive and ironic commitment. The Dictionary of Untranslatables does not pretend to offer ‘the’ perfect translation to any untranslatable; rather, it clarifies the contradictions and places them face to face and in reflection; it is a pluralist and comparative work in its nonenclosing gesture” (247, emphasis mine). What a beautiful way to describe a sophistic enterprise: to work without destination and with some shot of irony in the face of the impossible, to reflect on contradictions face to face, in a “nonenclosing gesture.”Cassin historicizes this early acknowledgment of the plurality of languages and the impossibility of rendering the same—between the divide of “hellenizein” (“to speak Greek”; “to speak correctly”; “to think and act as a civilized man” [248]) and “barbarizein” (“which violently conflates the stranger, the unintelligible, and the inhuman” [248]). Not much has changed, it appears, from the first sophistic to our current rhetorical landscape, as Cassin acknowledges that this tension between what can be said “correctly” by the “civilized” and what can be said “otherwise” by the Other is indicative of the performative characteristic of language. Rhetoric is not governed by an “onto-logy” or a “phenomeno-logy,” “which must tell us what is and how it is” (249): the world is created by words (and by the relations that such words solidify, politically) that have no trans-signification guarantor. Cassin's deep scrutiny of the political and ethical ramifications of an impossible rhetoric hails what she calls a sophistic understanding of rhetoric studies as an impossible yet absolutely ethical endeavor that acknowledges that “different languages produce different worlds” (249) and that further acknowledges that any attempt to make “these worlds communicate” is a rhetorical process that “enabl[es] languages to trouble each other in such a way that the reader's language reaches out to the writer's language.” For “our common world is at most a regulating principle, an aim, and not a starting point” (249).That is, we cannot begin to realize justice or peace, for example, with any expectation of a “common” or translatable language. Yet it is this precise recognition (of the impossibility) that allows for the possibility of justice or peace. Citing Walter Benjamin—who describes the unsettling in every language due to the aftershocks of the “tremor of other languages”—Cassin writes: “This ‘wavering equivocity of the world,’ linked to the plurality of languages inasmuch as it is possible for us to learn them, seems to me to be the least violent of human conditions. A plurality of languages of culture that astound each other, this is what I wish for Europe. To be uncertain of the essence of things, uncertain of the essence of Europe, would be the best outcome for Europe and for us all” (258).Uncertainty is, granted, not a comforting political or ethical state of being. Yet we are here; we are always already here, neck deep in the “wavering equivocity of the world”—and word. The sophists (with all the scholarly caveats acknowledged) invite us to work with the impossibility presented by the plurality of languages—to embrace uncertainty and to view it precisely as our way forward. I acknowledge that this provides no satisfactory answer to uncertain times, but certainty is surely (I say with irony) the problem. It is time, the kairotic time, to start making bricks to build a less violent future.

Raymond Williams’s Keywords was first born in the form of an appendage to his book manuscript Culture and Society, but—although it showed no signs of rupturing or of sepsis—the publisher snipped th...

As a conceptual resource for rhetoric, contemporary neuroscience has considerable potential. Yet how exactly rhetoricians should deploy it as such requires careful consideration. While some engage neuroscience in a foundationalist fashion, using it to ground rhetoric in empirically tested claims, I make the case for a non-foundationalist approach, arguing that neuroscience can serve as a resource for rhetoric on the basis of epistemologies that value the speculative, indeterminate, and contingent. That is, we can use neuroscience to achieve perspective rather than proof and continued conversation rather than resolution. More specifically, I suggest placing neuroscience in incongruous contact with rhetoric, using it to achieve Burkean perspective by incongruity. I then do so in an extended example that puts Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis in incongruous contact with ancient accounts of eikos, thereby offering a fresh angle from which to view enduring discussions anew.

Resources developed with traditional students in mind rarely work as well for adult learners. Starting with the understanding that every writer struggles, we developed five non-course-based initiatives to support our adult student writers. As we describe and assess the impact of these initiatives, we also demonstrate the need for writing support focused on adult learners.

Documentation for consumers is frequently complex, convoluted, and hard to follow. Bureaucratic organizations such as insurance companies, government agencies, hospitals, and law firms often have reputations for communicating poorly. Such poorly prepared documents diminish consumers’ abilities to make informed decisions about their health, rights, and finances. When these documents leave consumers with more questions than answers, organizations must try again (and again) to communicate more clearly. With the ease of accessing documents online, organizations face increasing pressure to create effective content appropriate for broad audiences. Plain language offers an approach to language and design for producing accessible and readable public documents. This movement, which gained traction in several countries in the 1970s, has regained its momentum with recent legislation and new public and private sector initiatives. Then-US-President Barack Obama signed the Plain Writing Act in 2010 and Executive Order 13563 in 2011, requiring clear communication in plain writing from US government agencies. Other sectors have responded as well. Practitioners use plain language in a range of other areas such as healthcare, business, science, engineering, and law. In keeping with these developments, we provide this special issue to reintroduce the discussion of plain language in professional and technical communication research and practice.

This essay examines the teaching of composition at Harvard University alongside the teaching of rhetoric at Boston College by returning to a published debate over education reform between Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, and Timothy Brosnahan, SJ, president of Boston College. The debate, contextualized alongside each school’s curriculum, captures the religious tension at the heart of the turn from rhetoric to composition during the end of the nineteenth century. A reprise for understanding education as religious and rhetorical, Brosnahan's resistance to Eliot’s narrative of “the new education” exposes the unseen religious assumptions behind Eliot's attempt at secularizing the American university.

Chapter 1 be especially important to undergraduate science students, whose confidence in their own abilities as writers may have been damaged by experiences with writing in the classroom during their schooling (Choi et al., 2010;Shanahan, 2004).Several of the scientists and mathematicians in this study discuss damaging experiences with school and English teachers in particular.The anxious mathematics student, sitting in a writing class, who reads this comment by a successful applied mathematician, What's interesting is I did mathematics, I think, because I found English so difficult . . .I failed . . . on English and I was fine on mathematics.I was top in maths but I was desperate in English.I can remember the essay.The title was "Your House."Now as a mathematician . . .I've got to write about my house.What is my house?And I went to numbers straight away.It's got five windows, it's got one door-this is age 10 or 11.I knew it was a disaster when I wrote it.But I was incapable of doing anything better-Timothy, Chapter 3. may recognise a similar incident of their own, and may never have realised that the successful science or mathematics professor in their writing classroom may have experienced this kind of setback.Reading of

Entering jail is an assault on the senses. Thick recirculated air feels either drafty or stuffy, never comfortable. The walls protrude with a stark, dingy white, bare of character or care. The smell is sterile, some unidentifiable cleanser stinging the tongue and nostrils. Doors clang shut and open via invisible mechanics. The wall-mounted eye of the panopticon is omnipresent.

What does composing look like in and across digital, networked spaces and the physical spaces our bodies inhabit as we compose? What does multimodal composing look like as we choreograph alphabetic text, images, sound, video, and more? In this project, the authors take on these questions as they capture and share their composing processes across mediums, platforms, localities, and languages.

An experimental study shows that integrating instruction in writing strategies with support for self-regulation strategies in basic writing classes results in significant gains in both the quality of student writing and in student motivation.

This article examines the metaphorical confluence between notions of ecology and economy to argue that there is a deep connection between taking care of our spheres of belonging (ecology) and organizing our resources for our spheres of belonging (economy). Invoking the principles of gift-giving economy, this article offers this story of Writing Across Communities as a representative anecdote toward reconsidering the cultural and economic arrangements by which we instantiate community writing programs.

This article presents findings of a 2014 survey of 72 U.S. employers asking: Which oral communication skills are most utilized daily by new hires? Which oral skills are most important to company success? The study utilized Qualtrics to administer a mixed-methods, 12-question survey to employers of various sizes and across various industries. Findings show that employers rank (a) proper grammar use, (b) team communication, (c) ability to engage in conversation, (d) meeting participation, and (e) ability to speak well using the telephone as the most valued oral competencies for new hires as a factor in company success.

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

Because of its temporal and vibrational qualities, sound is a particularly useful rhetorical resource for communicating our currently volatile experiences of climate change and extinction. A critical sonic rhetoric moves us from a disembodied marketplace of ideas to an immersive, interdependent soundscape. This move is exemplified in the work of sound artists Susan Philipsz and Bernie Krause, which provides experiences of surface time (sounds arising and decaying) and what climate change scholars call “deep time” (species coming and going from the earth), along with the affective dimensions of nostalgia and grief that saturate these experiences with individual and cultural meaning.

This article enacts the transgenre resources of the personal academic essay to examine the politics of gender and questions of privilege across academic and public spheres. The author interweaves prose, poetry, criticism, and argument to interrogate the practice of transcultural citizenship and the transdisciplinary project of Writing Across Communities.

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We're celebrating. Historically, WCJ published only two issues per year. But right now, you're holding issue 35.3 in your hands. We are delighted to see so many manuscripts -and so many strong manuscripts -arriving in our inbox. This "extra" issue is our attempt to make as much space as possible available for as many important articles as possible. To that end, we'll cut

Multimodal pedagogy is increasingly accepted among composition scholars. However, putting such pedagogy into practice presents significant challenges. In this profile of Washington State University’s first-year composition program, we suggest a multi-vocal and multi-theoretical approach to addressing the challenges of multimodal pedagogy. Patricia Ericsson, the director of composition, illustrates how theories of agency are central to the integration of multimodality. Elizabeth Sue Edwards, a graduate teaching assistant, explores negotiating departmental standards and implementing multimodal assignments. Tialitha Michelle Macklin, also a graduate teaching assistant, discusses her journey from rejecting multimodal assignments to embracing them as an integral element of her pedagogy. And Leeann Downing Hunter, a non-tenure-track faculty member, approaches the challenge through the lens of adaptability. We believe that this multi-vocal approach to building a multimodal composition program offers: (1) a foundation for other writing programs to adapt and build upon; (2) an alternative to traditional approaches that rely on single theories and single leaders; and (3) a reconstitution of how the university works, integrating stakeholder voices from administrators to students themselves.

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

This study examined the impact of using a multiliteracies pedagogy and the social networking site (SNS), Ning, to help 6th grade English language learners (ELLs) develop their writer identities, with the purpose of increasing the students’ confidence, sense of self, and language and literacy skills. To this end, we were interested in whether and how the development of a writer identity and an increase in social presence on the Ning would translate into face-to-face connections in the physical classroom and an induction into the academic learning community – a space in which the students may have previously felt intimidated. In doing this, we employed a qualitative case study analysis to investigate the experiences of two ELLs at an elementary school in Toronto, Canada. Our study found that incorporating multimodal tools and an SNS allowed the students to more freely express themselves; to share their work and their personalities with peers, which made the writing assignments more meaningful and engaging; and provided a platform for students to negotiate their values and beliefs. Ultimately, the increased interactions with peers online and the development of this new English-language literate identity translated into the development of students’ individual voices, a sense of ownership of English, and an increased social presence in the classroom.

PhotoVoice is a community and participatory action research method based in grassroots empowerment education, critical feminist theory, and documentary photography which enables people with little money, power, or status to communicate needed changes to policymakers. Prior to this in-school research project, studies of PhotoVoice in the United States focused on adolescents in out-of-school educational settings (Chio and Fandt, 2007; Strack, Magill, and McDonagh, 2004; Wilson et al., 2007; Zenkov and Harmon, 2009; The Viewfinder Project, 2010). In this study, teacher participants found that English language learners and resistant writers were motivated to identify the impact of personal and political realities in their lives in order to question existing structures and to imagine alternative futures. The use of PhotoVoice in K–12 classrooms offers an accessible, motivating, and technologically rich entry point and an authentic forum for emerging young writers to share their photos, their writing, and their stories with others to create powerful visual representations to transform existing conditions in their communities.

Traditionally, rhetorical theory has been defined as the study of human symbol use, which posits at the center of “the rhetorical situation” a knowing subject who understands himself (traditionally, it is a he), his audience, and what he means to communicate; indeed, this capacity to mean what he says and say what he means is, putatively, what distinguishes him as human. According to this very traditional approach, each of the elements in the rhetorical situation remain discrete—rhetor, audience, exigency, constraints, purpose, context, and message—and a successful outcome depends on the capacity of the rhetor to invent, organize, style, and deliver a message that will move this particular audience at this particular moment to some sort of action or attitude. Over the last several decades, the profoundly humanist and foundationalist (not to mention sexist) presumptions of this perspective have been challenged in various ways and to various ends by both continental philosophers and rhetorical theorists and practitioners.Decades of feminist scholarship has challenged the deeply sexist assumption that the rhetor is male, noting rhetoric's collusion with patriarchal and phallic modes, in addition to its accompanying complicity with racist and classist institutional privileges. That is, scholars have questioned the fundamental assumption that the rhetor is granted rhetorical agency precisely because of his humanity, which traditionally is associated with being a white, male property owner.1 Building on this critique, subsequent scholars have further challenged the humanist foundation of rhetoric by inviting our attention to the various ecologies that instantiate any so-called rhetorical situation, including material geologies as well as networked relations.2 Acknowledging how “the human” is indelibly networked in its relations to place, space, matter, and especially to technology and various media, many have theorized a notion of the “posthuman,” of a human that is fundamentally a technological construction or prosthesis.3This focus on the technological, on the networked, on that part of the so-called human that is arguably ahuman, has challenged us to consider in what ways human being is networked with “things,” with objects or technologies that are theorized to have their own rhetorical agency, their own ontological existence. The ensuing proliferation of “object-oriented ontologies” and rhetorics has proved a rich challenge to human-centric ontologies and rhetorics, inviting human beings once again to rethink the world and our supposed central relation to it.4Other scholars have asked us to think about the presumptive category of “the human” as the primal rhetorical being, investigating rhetorical practices of divination and prayer in relation to the dead and the divine.5 And still others have addressed the conscientious practices of forests, for example, as well as the communicative practices of the so-called nonhuman animal, including the intricate messages of chimpanzees and the mourning practices of elephants, to reveal the deeply humanistic assumptions that we hold, as rhetorical scholars, about communication and identification.6This special issue on extrahuman rhetorical relations aims to further a thinking of rhetoric beyond human symbol use. In the invitation we sent to potential contributors, we requested pieces examining how “the human” is produced through anahuman communications, but we left entirely open the range of potential approaches to our prompt; as a result, the responses published here are quite diverse. We did not, for obvious reasons, invite contributors who would simply challenge this prompt in an attempt to return to humanist notions of rhetorical exchange; therefore, you will note in each of these articles, despite their great diversity, an unapologetic push for us to move beyond traditional, humanist presumptions.We reproduce here a section from our letter of invitation (August 2012), which describes the general goals of the issue: The focus of this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is extrahuman rhetorical relations, including any aspect of the scene of responsive engagement with or among nonhuman others. It's true that traditionally rhetoric names a specifically human art or science, requiring at least one discrete human subject at the center of its operations. Even what the discipline of communication studies calls “extrapersonal communication,” which involves communication with a nonhuman other (an animal, a plant, a deity, a ghost, an object, a machine, etc.), presumes first of all a preexisting human subject who uses rhetoric to establish the connection. However, we aim to honor this weighty inheritance in the tradition of what Avital Ronell has called the noble traitor, inviting essays that take it up in order to expose its limits and presumptions.We invite, for example, essays that examine the ways in which “the human” is produced through ahuman or inhuman communications very broadly conceived; essays that attend to a generalized notion of rhetoricity—a fundamental affectability, persuadability, or responsivity—that remains irreducible to “speech” and symbolic exchange more generally; essays that interrogate the predicament of addressivity or responsivity in the face of (or among) animals, objects, deities, and the dead—but also essays that deconstruct the clean distinctions implied in such designations as “the animal,” “the object,” “the dead,” and “the divine,” that expose the ways in which these dangerous supplements are mobilized in the name of the collective noun “the human.”Our aim is to open a space for provocative reflection on extrahuman—rhetorical—relations, on what takes place at the dimly lit intersections of these three terms. We welcome a diverse range of theoretical and methodological lenses, from deconstructive, psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to more familiar philosophical, rhetorical, literary, and historical methods of inquiry.It was not our intention to produce a volume that systematically covered every angle of our theme, leaving no remainder. We were not interested, that is, in finally wrapping up the nagging question of extrahuman rhetorics but in holding it open, in probing and pushing the limits of the anthropos, in part by zooming in on the relations that constitute the conditions for the appearance of the figure of “the human” itself.In the interview that opens the issue, Avital Ronell contemplates “places where there's contamination, where there are installations of the nonhuman, the machinic, the theological trace, the stall in, or even the stated impossibility of, constituting what counts as ‘the natural,’ ‘the human.’” She ponders the “equip-mentality of the anthropos,” the fact that “we're already equipped with receptors for drugs,” that “we're already made up of all sorts of apps and calling instruments and all manner of technological ciphers and chemical command centers,” all of which “require us somehow to break out of the humanist presumption.” This paradox of the living machine, what Elissa Marder describes in her contribution as the human's “primal relation to artifice, imitation, technology, rhetoric, and death” is taken up in various ways by each of the contributors here. The very notion of a living machine challenges the putatively clean distinctions between life and death, human being and technology, and—given the typical alignment of “the animal” with “the machine”—human and animal. If life itself is already machinic and vice versa, a host of prized presumptions are called into question, including those that situate an indivisible line between mortal and immortal life, the human and the divine.Marder offers Pandora, “first woman and first android,” as “a prehuman figuration for a nonanthropomorphic and nonnatural concept of the human that is, perhaps, still to come.” This extrahuman character, Marder proposes, becomes a figure “for what, within the human, challenges the possibility of defining the limits of the human.” An “animated artificial entity” bestowed “with special, technological powers,” Pandora is “not modeled after life but rather is the very model for life itself.” She both simulates divine life “(through language and representation)” and remains “inextricably bound up with sexuality, temporality, technicity, and alterity,” making it “difficult to decide whether she herself is alive or … merely an imitation of life, like an android, a robot or automaton.” Either way, after her “human life can no longer be simply opposed to death or figured exclusively as human.” Michael Bernard-Donals and Steven Mailloux describe the technics of a primal relation with the divine in terms of an unavoidable call (to or from the divine) that operates as limit structure, separating what it also joins. Mailloux offers a rhetoric of prayer, defining “angels” as the “finite, contingent conditions” in which it takes place, and Bernard-Donals explicates the ways in which the call from or of the divine initiates a violence that is constitutive of the human. Thomas Rickert also contemplates a divine call, linking Parmenides's sophisticated logical techniques not to reason but to revelation by examining this historical figure's dedication to incubation, an ancient Greek practice in which one sleeps (usually in caves, sometimes with the help of pharmaceuticals) on the ground in hopes of receiving divine inspiration through dreams.Laurence Rickels demonstrates in what he calls the “psy-fi” genre an allegorical link between standards of “normal” human behavior and “the maimed animal test subject” discussed by Adorno and Horkheimer. Allegory, by identifying or filling in the blanks “that disclose the ‘other story,’” turns “significance out of the blank itself,” Rickels suggests, “working the blank as a turning point for drawing the reading onward.” But “allegorical legibility,” he adds, “would appear to require the broken-down psychotic state for discerning what goes into the norms into which we are plugged.” Indeed, he shows that psy-fi presents test situations in which “blanks secure the last or new step, which ultimately is taken toward mourning, the final frontier.” Michelle Ballif, on the other hand, zooms in on an “originary mourning,” which she situates as the very condition for any rhetorical address. The relation between the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible (specter) constitutes, she argues, the “ethical relation between the self and the other, the otherness of the self, and the otherness of the other.” Writing is, for her as for Derrida, “the very graphic scene of mourning,” a mourning “of the self as other and the other as other” that overflows the traditional limits of “the rhetorical situation.”Cary Wolfe describes two types of finitude at the heart of the extrahuman relation: the finitude of embodiment that we share with all other living beings and the (also shared) finitude of our prosthetic subjection to language or to any semiotic system from which concepts and modes of communication are drawn, and so through which “extrahuman relations” are recognized and articulated to begin with. These relations involve a scene of address in which all the possible modes of comprehension and expression were “on the scene” well before the interlocutors showed up. In the case of relations with extrahumans, this “iterative language” or “meaning,” Wolfe notes, is required to “form a recursive loop that can braid together different life worlds in a third space reducible to neither—the very space of ‘relation.’” James Brown, Joshua Gunn, and Diane Davis also take up, in distinct ways, this shared finitude of prosthetic subjection. Brown exposes some of the “machinic roots of the rhetorical tradition,” suggesting that “rhetoric is a collection of machines (‘whatsits,’ ‘gadgets’) for generating interpretive arguments.” Tracing what he calls the “robot rhetor,” which would be any “entity that ‘machines language,’” he calls into question the clear distinction between human and robot.Gunn runs Henri Bergson's formula for laughter (“something mechanical encrusted upon the living”) through Jacques Lacan's subversion of the subject to suggest that laughter names “something lawful encrusted upon the living.” Language here aligns with the lawful or the mechanical (the “Symbolic”), and Gunn examines the way it “comes to bear on that nominal domain of human spirit that Bergson dubbed the ‘life impulse,’ and that Sigmund Freud referenced as ‘the drive.’” Davis describes this prosthetic subjection as a kind of “preoriginary rhetoricity” through which every being, to be what it is, marks itself off from the other in a gesture of self-reference, repeating itself to gather itself and therefore to relate both to itself and to the other. At least since Descartes, self-referentiality has been taken as the putatively indivisible line distinguishing “the human” from “the animal,” but Davis proposes that self-reference or autodeixis is not a specifically human power to disclose an ontological “as such” (as Heidegger wanted) but the extrahuman operations of an allegorical “as if,” which names the already relational condition for the singularity and functioning of any living being.We would like to express our deep gratitude to each of the contributors in this issue, for their willing participation, their thoughtful and envelope-pushing essays, and their patience as we pulled it all together. Thanks especially to Cary Wolfe for so swiftly accepting our invitation to write the response piece that closes the issue. We are profoundly grateful to Avital Ronell, who graciously agreed to sit down with Diane for two hours on a Saturday morning in New York City for the interview that opens the volume; as always, her insights are both provocative and far reaching. We want to thank those colleagues who generously agreed to review the contributions published here: Janet Atwill, Erik Doxtader, Daniel Gross, Debbie Hawhee, John Muckelbauer, Jenny Rice, Greg Ulmer, and Victor J. Vitanza. We are grateful to each of you for your time and for your immensely helpful feedback and suggestions. Thanks also to Sam Baroody, a graduate student in the Department of Classics at the University of Georgia, for checking Greek translations in two of the contributions published here, and to Eric Detweiler, a graduate student at the University of Texas, for transcribing the interview with Avital Ronell. And finally, we want to thank Jerry Hauser for inviting us to edit this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric—we are extremely grateful for your guidance, your trust, and your inspiration.

AbstractArguing that the foundational relation that constitutes the (rhetorical) address is that between the living and the dead, this article calls on rhetorical studies to reconceive rhetoric as a (non)visual relation between the “invisible” (specter) and the “visible” (living). I then complicate this relation—and the easy distinction between the two—and argue that regarding the dead, guarding them, mourning them, is the ethical relation that makes any rhetorical address possible.

Commonsense beliefs about the mind are routinely operative in human discourse, where they serve as prolific resources from which to generate discourse/understanding while often remaining in what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the realm of the undiscussed.” As a study of how mind-related beliefs serve as a resource for rhetorical invention, this essay (1) provides insight into an important and pervasive category of doxastic beliefs and (2) brings into focus the powerful undertow of doxa’s routine discursive work. It does so, in part, by analyzing Dr. Benjamin Spock’s best-selling child-rearing manual, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, together with reactions it elicited from readers. These show how mind-related beliefs can generate discourse while being suppressed in the discursive iteration, resulting in fragments, enthymemes, implications, and presences/absences. Moreover, published in multiple editions over many years, Spock’s book demonstrates the inventional implications of historical changes in widely shared beliefs about the mind.

This essay argues that traditional historical methods elide the radical singularity of the event by subjecting the event to meaning by way of categorical norms that cannot—by definition—include the radical singularity of “what happened.” Such historiographical methods render every event significant only insofar as it becomes evidentiary to and subservient to a satisfying narrative with a proper beginning, middle, and end—all of which follow, chronologically, in a linear, logic of time. Relying on Jacques Derrida’s theorization of the event, specifically in “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” this essay will address the impossible possibility of writing the event by way of a hospitable historiography—beyond the representational demand, appropriative impulse, and temporal mandate of traditional historical methods.

Building on the authors' prior studies that investigate uses and perceptions of online social networks, this study critically explores the emerging social networking culture. In doing so, the research seeks to identify possible constructs that can be used to predict social networking behavior that may then be tested in a future study. The study relies on multiple user perspectives, drawing its participants from international students at two universities, one in Australia and one in the United States. Throughout this process, the utility of using the lens of national culture versus using other lenses is also examined. While the qualitative data suggests somewhat divergent approaches to social networking in different countries, a number of common themes were also identified. Two themes which appeared across national boundaries were changes in use over time and privacy and trust.

A study of twenty-five newly returned adult students finds that students with more process experience used more and more specific process analogies to construct their writing processes for school assignments than those with less process experience. Cues from peers and sense of academic identity also influenced transfer of process knowledge.

In this paper, we discuss the use of visual representations to assist people in understanding complex information about sea level rise and climate change. We report on the results of a 2011 study in which we conducted plus-minus document usability evaluations of documents describing the mechanisms and consequences of sea-level rise in coastal areas. The protocol included 40 participant interviews and post interview quizzes. We tested with three documents, one that presented information for the U.S. southeastern coastal region and two that presented information "localized" for the two areas in which we conducted the research. Findings indicate that participants had difficulty with information presented in graphs and maps and that, while they indicated preferences for localized information, localized images did not improve understanding of complex information.

This interpretive study provides a cross-case analysis of the literacy instruction of two first-grade teachers, with a particular focus on their grouping practices. One key finding was the way in which these teachers drew upon a district-advocated approach for instruction—an approach to guided reading articulated by Fountas and Pinnell (1996) in which students are instructed in small groups based on reading level—as a resource for their sense-making. Analysis indicated that the two teachers enacted the practice in distinct ways based on their experiences and personal characteristics. Findings further suggested that, reminiscent of research on ability groups conducted mainly in the 1970s and 1980s, instruction and materials in both classrooms were qualitatively different between lower groups and higher groups. Although we do not implicate the practice of guided reading per se, we call for closer examinations of modern manifestations of ability-grouped practices and explorations of alternatives to such practices.

The 2012 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s award recipient,Mary Christianakis. Her article, “Children’s Text Development: Drawing, Pictures, and Writing”(RTE Vol. 46, No. 1, August 2011), offers a compelling case for the acceptance and utilization of multiple semiotic tools (i.e., drawings, cartoons, sketches, diagrams) by older students in their writing, challenging those who consider these forms of writing development immature or inappropriate beyond the early childhood and primary classroom.

Survey courses on the history of rhetoric, especially as taught in American universities, often concentrate on classical and modern rhetoric, neglecting the way in which rhetoric was understood during the Middle Ages. This essay offers the teacher of the history of rhetoric a pedagogical answer to the question of how to incorporate medieval rhetoric within courses on the history of rhetoric, by providing a close reading of three symmetrical cantos of Dante’s Commedia that are specifically concerned with the ethics of persuasive discourse.

Considering veterans in the context of research on adult and nontraditional students in college writing classes, this article proposes Malcolm Knowles’s six principles for adult learning as an asset-based heuristic for investigating how writing programs and writing teachers might build upon existing resources to support veteran students.

This November issue of RTE once again contains the Annual Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English, available only here, on the NCTE website.

This article examines what a pedagogy of public rhetoric and community literacy might look like based on an understanding of twentieth century Mexican American civil rights rhetoric. The inductive process of examining archival materials and conducting oral histories informs this discussion on the processes and challenges of gaining civic inclusion. I argue that writing can be both a healing process and an occasion for exercising agency in a world of contingency and uncertainty. To illustrate, I describe several key events shaping the evolution of the post-World War II Mexican American civil rights movement in New Mexico. Taking a case study approach, I begin this chapter by examining the civic discourses of one prominent New Mexico leader in the post-World War II civil rights movement: Vicente Ximenes. As a leader, Ximenes confronted critical civil rights issues about culture and belonging for over fifty years beginning in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is a historical moment worth revisiting. First, I set the stage for this examination about writing, citizenship, and civic literacy by analyzing two critical rhetorical moments in the life of this post World War II civil rights activist. Secondly, I connect the Ximenes legacy to a growing movement at the University of New Mexico and the ways that we are making critical responses to current issues facing our local communities in New Mexico. By triangulating social acts of literacy, currently and historically, this article offers organizing principles for Composition teachers and advocates of community literacy serving vulnerable communities in their various spheres of practice.

This article chronicles an English for Academic Purposes curriculum development experience of a grant-funded project to create an Accelerated Content-Based English curriculum for intermediate- and advanced-level English Language Learners.

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

Based on interviews with students who had recently returned to school, this essay demonstrates the need for, challenges of, and ways to respond to the writing anxiety many adults bring with them back to school.

The 2011 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s award recipient, Ramón Antonio Martínez.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) create new common ground for high school – college collaborations through emphasis on expository writing in English language arts (ELA) and writing in content areas across the curriculum. This article, written collaboratively by a composition-rhetoric scholar and a secondary education leadership scholar who together directed Bridgewater State University’s WAC program, further explores the CCSS in relation to WAC, discusses why WAC programs in higher education should seek to create venues for conversation among secondary teachers and college faculty, and shares several programs facilitated by the WAC program at Bridgewater State University that seek to open and sustain such conversations.

Writing program administrators need to be as concerned about sustaining the cultural ecologies of our communities as we are about the material economies of our institutions—we need to attend to the diverse linguistic and rhetorical ecologies within which twenty-first century student writers are exercising agency. In order to respond productively, ethically, and appropriately to the increasingly diverse language and literacy practices of 21st century college writers, this profile will focus on a program that reconfigures the intellectual operating spaces of Composition Studies by training junior writing program administrators in how to promote rhetorical action alongside the study of composition pedagogy and praxis and by advocating on behalf of ethno-linguistically diverse communities within and beyond the university.

This article traces the history of the five-paragraph theme and the views about it, along with arguing for its elimination in writing instruction in favor of problem-based, “rich-task” writing experiences for students.

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

Abstract Although hailed by historians and political scientists as a pivotal moment in the reestablishment of U.S.-Sino relations, President Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to China has received little attention from rhetoricians. The toasts and speeches Nixon presented during his trip are important rhetorical artifacts as they illustrate the intricate relationship between diplomatic and epideictic rhetoric. Nixon adroitly employed epideictic diplomatic rhetoric during his 1972 trip to convey diplomatic aims and accomplish deliberative objectives. In so doing, he created a new, positive definition of U.S.-Sino relations, which rhetorically bridged the ideological differences that had separated the nations for more than two decades.

What does it mean to teach civic engagement in the 21st Century writing classroom? In our digital and networked and globalized world, college composition instructors need to redefine literacy in ways that reflect the actual communication practices we and our students engage in. To this end, many compositionists are now integrating multimodal projects (that is, “texts” composed with digital/new media technologies so as to include images, video, audio, and alphabetical writing) into their classroom designs. These multimodal projects provide new opportunities for students to communicate with and for a public audience outside the classroom, and to foster community connections and engagement. In Spring 2010, I taught my first multimodal civic engagement class, an upper division writing and rhetoric course that included a community-based experiential learning project in partnership with a campus organization. I hoped that a project using a variety of media, technologies and modalities with a purpose and audience beyond the classroom would foster in students a sense of connection to their campus and teach them that they can use composition, rhetoric, and design skills to participate in public conversations around issues that matter to them and their community.

Nineteenth-century presses delighted in reporting on the “spectacle” of the Amana Society, playing up the contrast between this pious communistic community of German immigrants and its “ambitious” individualistic American counterparts. These accounts employed a rhetoric of containment, a form of rhetorical imagining that contains the threat of a non-normative community. Three characteristics of this rhetoric are evident in the Amana descriptions: (1) a particular gaze that views the community as a picture; (2) a degree of praise that is simultaneously undermined by a nostalgic attitude toward the community; and (3) an assertion that the benefits of this lifestyle require an unthinkable sacrifice incompatible with the imagining audience's nature or values. Containment rhetoric neutralizes the threat of the imagined group—often by circulating its tropes and images to more public, powerful venues—and implicitly defines the group as peripheral to the larger public.

Research Article| January 01 2010 Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “On Temporality as a Characteristic of Argumentation”:Commentary and Translation Michelle K. Bolduc; Michelle K. Bolduc Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google David A. Frank David A. Frank Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2010) 43 (4): 308–336. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.43.4.0308 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michelle K. Bolduc, David A. Frank; Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “On Temporality as a Characteristic of Argumentation”:Commentary and Translation. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2010; 43 (4): 308–336. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.43.4.0308 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2010 The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2010The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay argues that only by sharing our mistakes and uncertainty can we fully reflect on our own process as teachers, only by understanding our process can we begin to identify the many factors that contribute to classroom messes in the first place, and only by acknowledging the perpetual messiness of our practice can we fully engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

This paper, presented at the CCCC 2008 Senior Citizens Writing session, draws upon my experiences as a senior workshop member and past teacher. Addressing workshop leaders, it emphasizes the need for the many-faceted seniors’ voices to be “translated” and tested within a workshop’s microcosm before entering the outside world’s macrocosm.

This article analyzes the Web interfaces of two well-known national civic action groups, both related to genetics research: the Genetic Alliance and the Innocence Project. These two sites are excellent examples of interface design and information retrieval, and they also attempt to translate complex science to the general public, even those traditionally most underrepresented and marginalized by the complexities of science and technology. The Genetic Alliance and Innocence Project provide excellent case studies for technical communication courses about the necessity to marry factual scientific knowledge with cultural and emotional rhetorics while providing an interface for multiple stakeholders in public policy change.

Writing in the Health Professions is one of the latest books in the very popular Allyn and Bacon Series in Technical Communication published by Pearson/Longman and is the first one in the series to...

With the importance of online research, writing, and communication, computers are increasingly vital to instruction within the humanities. To help prepare teachers and administrators who engage with computerized instruction, this article examines faculty development through the lens of technology training by reporting on issues and concerns expressed by twelve technology trainers in a series of interviews. The interviewees provided their experiences and advice, including ways to approach institutional challenges, faculty participation, and pedagogical integrity. Most importantly, the author argues that technology training is a complex rhetorical activity involving a strong sense of kairos, context, and audience.

This article explores publicly active graduate work that engages with survivors of violence as they become testimonial narrators. Drawing on challenges I faced in transcribing and contextualizing the testimonio of Jorge Velásquez, who narrates his experience with injustice in post-war Guatemala, this analysis addresses some of the tensions that emerge during textual interactions with violence narratives. I explore second-hand trauma, notions of pornography of violence, and the role of accountability in scholarly and public representations. Paralleling Jorge’s testimonial performance, I offer narrative strategies I employed in the process of transcription and ethnographic contextualization into a larger narrative about the lived experience of violence within a culture of impunity.

This essay examines the impact of difference in the service-learning classroom and offers an overview of three approaches to creating community while engaging students in dialogues on difference. The authors reflect on the local pedagogies they create in response to the anger, tensions, and challenges that arise In the classroom and at the service learning site. By composing this essay together, the authors hope to embody the collaborative nature of service learning courses.

This article argues that traditional models of WAC too narrowly privilege academic discourse over other discourses and communities shaping the worlds in which our students live and work. Writing Across Communities represents a shift in paradigm informed by Ecocomposition, New Literacy Studies, and Sociolinguistics. A Writing Across Communities approach to writing program reform foregrounds dimensions of ethnolinguistic diversity and civic engagement in contrast to other models or WAC currently institutionalized across the nation. Writing Across Communities, as a resistance discourse, calls for transdisciplinary dialogue that demystifies the ways we make and use knowledge across communities of practice.

Abstract Altough little known in medieval history, the Breviari d'Amor of Matfre Ermengaud was deeply influenced by medieval preaching. An Occitan encyclopaedia, the Breviari includes a short guide to preaching, entitled “De predicacio et en quel manieira deu hom predicar” which derives from the Cura pastoralis of Gregory the Great. “De predicacio” is no mere translation, but a subtle adaptation: it indicates not only how the Breviari is aimed toward lay education in the popular language, but also to what point it responds to its historic and religious context. This study, therefore, considers the Breviari as a text deeply engaged in the matter of preaching in Languedoc at the end of the thirteenth century.

Peu connu dans l’histoire de la rhétorique médiévale, le Breviari d’Amor de Matfre Ermengaud est pourtant très influencée par la prédication médiévale. Une encyclopédie occitane, le Breviari comprend un court guide de prédication entitulé “De predicacio et en quel manieira deu hom predicar” provenant du Cura pastoralis de Grégoire le Grand. “De predicacio” n’est guère de traduction, mais une adaptation subtile: il indique non seulement comment le Breviari est généralement visé à l’éducation laïque en langue vulgaire, mais aussi à quel point il répond à son contexte historique et réligieux. Cette étude considère le Breviari donc comme un texte profondément engagé dans la prédication au Languedoc à la fin du treizième siècle.

This research analyzed the composing processes of one high school student as she designed the interiors of homes for a course in interior design. Data included field notes, an interview with the teacher, artifacts from the class, and the focal student’s concurrent and retrospective protocols in relation to her design of home interiors. The analysis revealed that the object of activity in this setting included aspects of the motive (including the teacher’s constructed environment and attendant expectations, the teacher’s governing logic and common sense with respect to interior design, and the broader field of interior design as interpreted and implemented in the class) and both fixed and emergent goals. The student’s object-related problem-solving involved a hierarchy of problem-solving decisions and employed a variety of tools in solving these problems, particularly those derived from culture, reliant on knowledge from a discipline or field, and following from images such as narratives.

Recent discussions of metaphor illuminate its function as a paradigm-building trope with significant rhetorical and epistemological power. Historical and current discourse within biological science provide a complex and poignant example of metaphor's influence: Throughout much of the twentieth century, the field operated under a deterministic assumption that DNA is the "genetic code." Though this reductionist association still shapes biological research, postgenomic discoveries are now reconceiving the connection between DNA and cells in more complex ways. The ensuing scientific debate demonstrates that rhetoric and language have primary roles in the discourse of contemporary biology, creating a rhetoric of cells.

This essay discusses the emergence of whiteness studies in the study of English rhetoric and composition in the U.S. History of whiteness studies; Function and definition of whiteness in the U.S.; Role of race in different U.S. cultural logics; Relationship of whiteness studies with teaching composition.

I haven't had much luck on my own. . . . Maybe television can help me find the love of my life.

“The first thing I want to say to you who are students is that you cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education: you will do much better to think of being here to claim one. ” —Adrienne Rich (1979, p. 231) It may seem odd to begin a discussion of academic research by quoting Adrienne Rich’s well-known 1977 speech, “Claiming an Education. ” But, if one substitutes “research ” for “an education, ” the sentiment more or less de-scribes the situation faced by most first-year students assigned research in com-position. Completing the monumental academic “Research Paper ” in first-year writing courses is considered a rite of passage for students in many universities (including my own, Auburn University), and is one often performed with grim resignation and uncertain purpose by many of those involved (Schwegler & Shamoon, 1982). Such was the case when I began teaching English Composi-tion II, a second-semester, first-year writing course that makes up one of sev-eral humanities core courses within Auburn’s curriculum. These core courses, including a two-semester sequence of composition, are mandated by our state articulation agreement, and many curricular guidelines are predetermined by that agreement. Our department has molded this curriculum somewhat, but any innovations must be implemented cautiously and creatively. Drawing on previous WAC research about disciplinary writing as well as classical rhetoric and critical pedagogy, I will describe my response to this mandate, theorizing a new critical space for WAC, one that promotes students ’ civic engagement while they are researching an academic discipline. Operating at the nexus of rhetoric, critical theory, and WAC scholarship, I will discuss ways that a criti-cal WAC pedagogy encourages students ’ investment in their own research and encourages students to become responsible “citizen-experts ” within their com-munities. Though the purpose of Auburn’s research paper in English Composi-tion II is to prepare students for academic research, I also strive to include a strong critical component, highlighting moral and ethical concerns within academic discourse much like that described by John Pennington and Robert Boyer (2003), wherein students are conscious of the responsibility they have

Abstract This essay suggests that the Platonic question “Is Rhetoric a technê?” aims to interrogate rhetoric as a re‐productive “art,” specifically by inquiring whether rhetoric engenders anything and, if so, by what reproductive methodology. Further, this infamous question aims to identify the legitimacy of rhetorical intercourse and its resulting offspring, by subjecting rhetorical practices to genealogical scrutiny for eugenic purposes: to produce “words of the right sort"—those which establish a proper social and symbolic order.

This article encourages technical and professional communication programs to take on the challenge of educating students to become "community intellectuals." The notion of educating future professionals for a career needs to be reconsidered in light of both current research concerning civic rhetoric and past practices in moral humanism courses. The triumvirate of rhetoric, ethics, and moral philosophy provides an effective foundation for reconfiguring existing pedagogy in the field and offers insights for nurturing community intellectuals.

Machiavelli’s advocacy of force and fraud in the conduct of politics is the key teaching that has secured his reputation as “Machiavellian” and that has led to the conception of The Prince as the first document in the Western tradition to lay bare the dark, demonic underside of civic humanism. But this interpretation overlooks the degree to which a politics of intense competition and personal rivalry inhabits the humanist vision from antiquity, producing an ethics of expediency and a rhetoric of imposture that seeks to mask its alertness to advantage behind the guise of integrity and service. This vision is nowhere more apparent than in Cicero’s De Oratore, which exerted a powerful influence on the Italian humanists of the quattrocentro in whose direct descent Machiavelli stands. Deception, to put it simply, is an acknowledged and vital element in civic humanism long before The Prince. The difference is that Cicero typically couches it in a sacrificial rhetoric that is euphemistically inflected while Machiavelli opts for a hard-edged rhetoric of administrative efficiency to make his case. But the stylistic differences, important as they are, should not mask the essential affinity between the Machiavellian doctrine of princely fraud and the Ciceronian ethics of gentlemanly dissimulation.

Abstract Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's Traité de Vargumentation: la nouvelle rhétorique marked a revolution in twentieth-century rhetorical theory. In this essay, we trace Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's turn from logical positivism and the accepted belief that reason's domain was the vita contemplativa to rhetoric and its use as a reason designed for the vita activa. Our effort to tell the story of their rhetorical turn, which took place between 1944 and 1950, is informed by an account of the context in which they considered questions of reason, responsibility, and action in the wake of World War II.

Is service-learning of value for community college students who have very limited time and who do not need to “be exposed” to the neighborhoods in which they live? Yes. Service-learning can be a vital bridge connecting community and college for students who frequently are the first of their family or friends to go to college, who have more confidence in their street skills than in their academic skills, and who see real needs in their communities. However, service learning will only benefit these students if it evolves from and responds to the realities of their lives.

Reviews 301 tions, and its clear articulation of the antifoundationalist position, will make this book a valuable resource for scholars and students alike. Bruce McComiskey The University ofAlabama at Birmingham Bruce McComiskey, Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric, (Carbon­ dale:, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), xiii + 156 pp. Contributing to the conversation about rereading/rewriting the his­ tory of rhetoric, Bruce McComiskey's Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric clearly summarizes the raging and wide-ranging debates regarding the use value of revisiting the Sophists; compellingly argues for a historiographical methodology, which he terms "neosophistic appropriation"; re-reads Gor­ gias on his own terms, rather than Plato's; and, finally, attempts to realize his own methodology by rethinking Gorgias's (potential) contribution to "contemporary pedagogical and political ends" (p. 1). Recapping the seminal arguments of the past several decades regarding scholarly attempts to redeem the Sophists from their Platonic condemna­ tion and to reclaim their practices and theories, McComiskey's summary will surely find an appropriate home in graduate seminars on the history of rhetoric. Working with and against Edward Schiappa's criticism of particu­ lar neosophistic research (but curiously neglecting John Poulakos's response to same), McComiskey offers "neosophistic appropriation" as a corrective to Schiappa's (via Richard Rorty) methodological taxonomy of "histori­ cal reconstruction" and "rational reconstruction." Although McComiskey agrees with Schiappa that we "must maintain a clear distinction between the goals and methods of historical scholarship that interprets ancient doc­ trines and 'neo'historical scholarship that appropriates ancient doctrines for contemporary purposes" (p. 8), he argues, in contrast, that "neosophistic appropriation" is methodologically distinct from rational reconstructive ap­ proaches insofar as "neosophistic appropriation" writers "search the past for contributions to modern theoretical problems and problematics" (p. 10). "Although," McComiskey further argues, "all neosophists engage in the critical act of appropriation, not all neosophists appropriate ancient doctrines in the same way" (p. 11). Identifying three different approaches, McComiskey ultimately values and identifies with the third. The first approach "appropriate [s] Plato's characterization...either valuing Plato's misrepresentations or disparaging them" (p. 11). The second approach "put[s] aside Plato's mis­ representations of sophistic doctrines, appropriating doctrines instead from actual sophistic texts and historical interpretations of them in order to find common threads among the 'older sophists' and contemporary composition and rhetorical theorists" (p. 11). And the third approach, although similar to the second in purpose, attempts to "understand the unique contributions 302 RHETORICA of individual sophists...to contemporary rhetorical theory and composition, (p. 11, emphasis added). Claiming that the "more specific the appropria­ tion, the stronger the resulting neosophistic rhetoric," McComiskey turns his attention to a reappropriation of the Sophist Gorgias. Part One of Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric provides a provoca­ tive rereading of Gorgias's On Non-Existence, the Encomium ofHelen, and the Defense of Palamedes, arguing that, read together, they constitute a "holis­ tic statement about communal and ethical uses of logos, a statement that runs counter to Plato's (mis)representation of it in his dialogue the Gor­ gias" (p. 12). Chapter 1, then, argues compellingly that Plato misrepresents Gorgias's theory of rhetoric as foundational, specifically as based on a foun­ dational epistemology. For example, as McComiskey points out, Gorgias, in the Palemedes, uses a form of the Greek eido to express the concept of knowl­ edge, which "implies an understanding that is derived empirically from a situation"; whereas Plato's use of episteme "implies an understanding that exists prior to any given situation in which it might be applied" (pp. 24-5). Hence, McComiskey's rereading of the specific Sophist, Gorgias, and the specific sophistic text, exemplifies a "strong," neosophistic approach. This rereading allows us to see how Plato's misappropriation of Gorgias serves to make "Gorgias's rhetorical method based on kairos, or the right moment, seem absurd" (p. 12). McComiskey's similar approaches to the Helen and the Palemedes "provide the epistemological, rather than foundational, grounding for a nascent theory of rhetoric, complete with its negative and positive uses" (p. 12). That is, we, appropriating Gorgias, do not need an epistemological foundation to practice rhetoric. We can read/reappropriate, he argues, the Helen to see where rhetoric...

In this examination of Mexican-American bilingual college writers, it is argued that implicit language ideologies, common misconceptions about bidialectalism/bilingualism, and the classroom attitudinal domain subvert the success of ethnolinguistic minority students. The author designed and conducted a randomized language attitude survey (N = 195) of 1st-year composition students on the assumption that language attitudes, reflective of the social/ethnic/linguistic polarization of south Texas, exist inside the English classroom. Findings correlate the multiple ethnolinguistic identities of this student population with language myth adherence. Results reveal the tendency among college writers for subscription to various language myths: dialect misconception, English bias, language purity myth, literacy myth, misconception of oral performance.

Current theories of radical pedagogy stress the constant undermining, on the part of both professors and students, of fixed essential identities. This article examines the way three feminist, queer teachers of writing experience and perform their gender, class, and sexual identities. We critique both the academy’s tendency to neutralize the political aspects of identity performance and the essentialist identity politics that still inform many academic discussions.

Analyzing Media: Communication Technologies as Symbolic and Cognitive Systems. James W. Chesebro and Dale A. Bertelsen. New York: Guilford, 1996. 228 pages. Constructionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking, and Learning in a Digital World. Ed. Yasmin Kafai and Mitchel Resnick. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996. 339 pages. Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture. David E. Nye. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 224 pages. More Speech, Not Less: Communications Law in the Information Age. Mark Sableman. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1997. 277 pages.

(1998). Writing the third‐sophistic Cyborg: Periphrasis on an [in]tense rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 51-72.

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Women! This coin which men find counterfeit! laments Euripedes' Hippolytus.' Why, why, Lord Zeus, did you put them in the world, in the light of the sun? If you were so determined to breed the race of man, the source of it should not have been (11.616-20). Phaedra is, as all women, the counterfeit coin. Her exchange rate is never quite legitimate. She is never quite legitimate. As the gold standard is Man, is Truth, Woman never measures up. She is always found lacking Truth-the Truth that is man-and is thus, like Phaedra, a counterfeit coin. But she is a coin imprinted with His signature, bearing His name, nevertheless. With his imprint, Woman's exchange rate is secured. Like a coin, she changes hands-from father to husband.2 Woman, the counterfeit coin, the site of false words and deeds, is inscribed with guilt; indicted with deception, penned as the Unspeakable and Undiscernible Lie, sentenced to silence. Woman is the text that paradoxically cannot speak but nevertheless speaks in its silence. Her silence is the message; it desires to be read. And now we-as historiographers of maleauthored texts concerning women, as feminists, as proponents of the Discourses of the Other-desire to (re)cover and (re)read Phaedra's, Diotima's, Aspasia's silent message.3 But why? What motivates our desire to read these women? What propels our desire to make these women readable? Are we not, perhaps, attempting to reinvest these women with value? Are we not trying to redeem them from charges of counterfeit? Are we not, then, merely making Woman into a legitimate coin, a proper currency, a respectable asset? Are we not, then, merely increasing her exchange rate, but without questioning the very standard-the phallogocentric standard of Truth-that finds her lacking, that is responsible for her devaluation? It is my argument that our attempts to (re)read women, to (re)cover women, to (re)present women, and to therefore (re)cast history, are insidious acts of (re)appropriation. Everyone knows that the exchange rate of a dog of papered lineage-of legitimate birth-is exponentially greater than that of a mongrel. To provide