While Sada Harbarger is primarily known as the author of the first genre-based technical communication textbook, 1923's English For Engineers, I argue through extensive archival materials that her innovative conferencing with engineering students and interdisciplinary writing efforts, rather, drove her interwar success at Ohio State. Her rural agricultural background and acquaintance with the engineering faculty, combined with her literature training, led to OSU's engineering faculty demanding successfully that English promote her without reference to her textbook. Harbarger is also a notable early example of navigating being a female professor teaching engineering writing in a male-dominated English literature department.

Attention to the ethical dimension in technical and professional communication (TPC) is paramount, especially when dealing with new, emerging technologies. Such technologies frequently rest within corporate environments that may resist ethical gatekeeping. I suggest several methods by which TPC instructors can critically question the limits of corporate structure to show students that they have a variety of options for responding to assignments other than those their employers may offer them.

Current histories of rhetoric neglect the early Christian period (ca. 30–430 CE) in several crucial ways-Augustine is overemphasized and made to serve as a summary of Christian thought rather than an endpoint, the texts of church fathers before 300 CE are neglected or lumped together, and the texts of the New Testament are left unexamined. An alternative outline of early Christian rhetoric is offered, explored through the angles of political self-invention, doctrinal ghostwriting, apologetics, and fractured sermonization. Early Christianity was not a monolithic religion that eventually made peace with classical rhetoric, but as a rhetorical force in its own right, and comprised of more factions earlv on than just the apostolic church.

In this study, we examined 11 workplaces to determine how they handle termination documentation, an empirically unexplored area in technical communication and rhetoric. We found that the use of termination documentation is context dependent while following a basic pattern of infraction, investigation, intervention, and termination. Furthermore, the primary audience of the documentation is typically legal and regulatory bodies, not the employee. We also make observations about genre, collaboration, and authorship in these documents.

George W. Bush's September 20, 2001 address to Congress and the first-century CE early Christian text of 1 John both exhibit a form of rhetorical ambiguity, called here “polemical ambiguity,” that does not fit within Eisenberg's concept of strategic ambiguity, but rather serves as its argumentative doppelgänger. Polemical ambiguity allows a rhetor to leave real and potential allies in a composite audience in doubt as to the exact parameters of the rhetor's message, while an alienated section of the composite audience perceives a stark and wholly unambiguous message. The following analysis explores how Bush's speech and 1 John, faced with composite audiences, pursue similar goals through the use of polemical ambiguity, as well as how this particular maneuver is closely linked to religious rhetoric.

For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. Composition researchers should study the paragraph once again, this time forging connections with similar work in other disciplines.