The increasing adoption of automated essay scoring (AES) in high-stakes educational contexts necessitates careful examination of potential biases within the systems. This study investigates how the demographic composition of training data influences fairness in AES systems developed from finetuned large language models (LLMs). Using the PERSUADE corpus of 26,000 student essays, we conducted a systematic analysis using demographically restricted training sets to isolate the impact of training data demographics on LLM-AES performance. Each demographically restricted training set comprised essays written by one racial/ethnic group. Four variants of a Longformer-based AES were developed: one trained on demographically balanced data and three trained on demographically restricted datasets. An initial analysis of the human ratings indicated that demographic factors significantly predict human essay scores (marginal R² = 0.125), a pattern that is paralleled in national writing assessment data. LLM-AES systems trained on demographically restricted data exhibited small systematic biases (marginal R² = 0.043). However, the LLM trained on balanced data showed minimal demographic bias, suggesting that representative training data can effectively prevent amplification of demographic disparities beyond those present in human ratings. These results highlight both the importance and limitations of training data diversity in achieving fair assessment outcomes. • 12.5% of variance in human essay ratings was explained by demographics. • We construct demographically restricted training sets to isolate bias. • Balanced training data minimized LLM-AES bias across demographic groups. • LLM-AES trained on demographically restricted data showed more bias.

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Rhetoricians and bioethicists have analyzed medical assistance in dying (MAiD), sometimes referred to as physician assisted suicide or euthanasia, and suggested that it falls into predictable topoi. To deepen our understanding of public deliberation around medical assistance in dying, we propose a Multi-Methodological, Multiply Ontological (M3O) approach. M3O encourages phronesis through methodological and ontological pivots. Diverging findings from each pivot may surface complexities that only come from putting those findings into conversation. We analyzed public testimony about MAiD bills proposed in Connecticut and Nevada with both framegram and topoi analysis, to discern how pro and anti-MAiD rhetors conceptualized personhood in this discourse. We found that both sides build arguments around intersecting topoi of (1) personhood as a set of ontological traits, (2) personhood as a social practice, (3) questions of autonomy, and (4) issues of vulnerability to suffering. When placed into the context of existing data on MAiD discourse and policy, we found that questions of dignity and personhood may be placed into deeper conversation with an analysis of risk and autonomy to complicate our assumptions about the values implied in this discourse.

We invite readers to imagine Graphic RHM as more than a column but a growing community of practice (CoP) and offer two analogies for doing so: 1) a mycelial network with connections branching across the fields of rhetoric, health and medicine, and the graphic arts, and 2) a beehive, where sustained growth comes from intentional contributions and shared effort. The comics featured in Column 2 (https://medicalrhetoric .com /graphicRHM /home /archive/column -2/), including Ann E. Fink’s “The Work of Grief,” reflect the range and depth of work emerging from this CoP.

The phenomenon of selective dispute avoidance is that there are issues we debate and issues we recoil from debating, despite the fact that they are very similar in values at stake. What accounts for this variance? That some disagreements are deep and engagements on some deep issues yields meta-argumentatively bad results is a plausible explanation. However, practical second-order rebutting reasons to these considerations are proposed, essentially that not engaging has foreseeably worse consequences than engaging. What favors engagement, then, is that only when engaged can one address the negative second-order reasons one yields on either approach. What follows is a pragmatic meta-argument for engagement, even in cases of deep disagreement.

Many linguistic studies of writing assume a single linear relationship between linguistic features in the text and human judgments of writing quality. However, writing quality may be better understood as a complex latent construct that can be constructed in a number of different ways through different linguistic profiles of high-quality writing styles as shown in Crossley et al. (2014). This study builds on the exploratory study reported by Crossley et al. by analyzing a representational corpus of 4,170 highly rated persuasive essays written by secondary-school students. The study uses natural language processing tools to derive quantitative representations for the linguistic features found in the texts. These linguistic features inform a k-means cluster analysis which indicates that a four-cluster profile best fits the data. By examining the indices most and least distinctive of each cluster, the study identifies a structured writing style, a conversational writing style, a reportive writing style, and an academic writing style. The findings support the notion that writers can employ a variety of writing profiles to successfully write an argumentative essay.

Review of Postcomposition by Sidney I. Dobrin. Southern Illinois Press, 2011.

This paper introduces ASAP 2.0, a dataset of ∼25,000 source-based argumentative essays from U.S. secondary students. The corpus addresses the shortcomings of the original ASAP corpus by including demographic data, consistent scoring rubrics, and source texts. ASAP 2.0 aims to support the development of unbiased, sophisticated Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) systems that can foster improved educational practices by providing summative to students. The corpus is designed for broad accessibility with the hope of facilitating research into writing quality and AES system biases. • We introduce the ASAP 2.0 corpus. • The corpus contains over 25,000 source-based essays. • Each essay is scored for overall writing quality. • The corpus can be used to computationally and quantitatively model source-based writing quality.

Despite the growing interest in the dynamics of the writing process in writing research, publicly available large-scale corpora of keystroke logs have been rare. We introduce KLiCKe, a freely available collection of keystroke logs for around 5,000 argumentative texts written by adults in the United States. The KLiCKe corpus also includes human-rated holistic scores for the essays as well as writers' demographic details, their typing skills, and vocabulary knowledge. We describe our methods for constructing the corpus and present descriptives for different components of the corpus. To illustrate the use of the KLiCKe corpus, we report a study using a subset of the corpus to investigate whether keystroke features are associated with holistic writing quality for L1 and L2 writers. The study shows that higher writing scores are related to shorter pauses in general, shorter between-word pauses, lower proportion of deletions, higher proportion of insertions, and less process variance. The KLiCKe corpus provides a robust resource for researchers to study the dynamics of text production and revision that will help spur the development of process-oriented tools and methodologies in writing assessment and instruction.

Abstract This article presents a prereading activity for Shakespeare's history plays, 2 Henry VI in particular. The activity involves students in carefully studying an anonymized family tree extending from Edward III through Richard III, choosing whom they believe to be the rightful heir, and posing arguments in support of their claim. The exploration of rhetoric and rule introduces students to key figures in the plays as well as the central theme of right rule. This problem-solving approach to early modern matters of succession has the further effect of introducing students to the idea that all claims to rule should be subjected to careful scrutiny.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Professional communication researchers have engaged communities through community research and interventions, such as town halls, charettes, and participatory design work. Such interventions rely on community members who are willing to get involved, voicing their perspectives, and engaging in productive dialogue. Yet, some communities do not have these precursor conditions for intervention: they face significant social barriers that make such interventions unlikely to succeed. In an interview- and document-based study, we examine the social barriers described by interviewees in “Permia,” a small town in the Texas Permian Basin region. In contrast to the five other communities we studied, Permia participants demonstrate little readiness to engage in community dialogue. We explore how Permia interviewees made sense of unwillingness to participate in its public life, how their understandings contrasted with the other communities we investigated, and how this research might guide professional communicators as they plan future community-based interventions. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> We review the professional communication research on community interventions as well as relevant sociological literature on boomtowns. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How do community leaders understand their community heritage as constraining or enabling development? 2. Where do community leaders and members see potential for change and growth in community development? Where do they see barriers, threats, and hard choices? 3. How do community leaders describe the relations among community development stakeholders? How do they describe expectations and trust among them on interpersonal, intergroup, and interorganizational levels? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> We collected documents and statistics about six small Texas towns, then interviewed community leaders about the towns’ advantages and challenges. Based on those interviews, we collected further documents. We analyzed the data using deductive and inductive coding, as well as narrative analysis. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> Through coding, we determined that interviewees saw Permia's residents as unwilling to engage in deliberations in traditional forums such as city council meetings, and that their explanations for this unwillingness fell into three categories of barriers: distrust of institutions, dwindling personal ties, and lack of moral expectations for residents to engage in community dialogue. These three categories contrast with the other communities we studied. Through narrative analysis, we identify stories that were told by the interviewees to explain how these barriers developed in Permia. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> We conclude by discussing how professional communicators might survey barriers to community dialogue. Such surveys can help professional communicators choose a pathway for intervention in their community projects.

In their 2019 special issue for Technical Communication Quarterly , St. Amant and Graham enjoined science and technical communication researchers to consider more durable and portable methods. Such methods would be considered valid across disciplines and able to move knowledge to various stakeholders to demonstrate the contributions of scientific and technical communication research. We review a framework called knowledge translation to highlight its dependence on technical communication skills and then articulate it with science and technical communication epistemology to meet St. Amant and Graham's criteria for science and technical communication research to become more durable and portable.

Asynchronous workshops have potential as a flexible and accessible tool for instructor professional development. Translating synchronous workshops into asynchronous versions represents an opportunity to expand access to training materials, but translating across modalities is a challenge. As facilitators of the Colleges Online Learning Academy summer fellowship program, we outline our process for developing asynchronous workshops focused on pedagogy and digital learning for graduate student instructors. We evaluated participant engagement and accessibility based on survey responses (n=10) and workshop artifacts. Our four asynchronous workshops consisted of multimodal modules with video clips from the synchronous sessions and engagement opportunities on Jamboard. We found low Jamboard engagement from asynchronous participants, but high engagement in multimodal modules. Potential barriers to access included mental health, Wi-Fi access, English language comprehension, and a lack of discussion, but many participants (4 of 9) reported no access barriers. We provide recommendations for developing engaging, accessible, and content-rich asynchronous workshops from synchronous workshop materials.

ABSTRACT Despite Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s well-known influence on argumentation studies, it is striking that their theory of argumentation no longer stands out as a living project in the field. On the one hand, critics argue that their theory is inherently relativistic and therefore incapable of aiding argument evaluation. On the other hand, critics argue that, even as a descriptive theory, it fails to sufficiently justify its own systematic ambitions. This article addresses these dual concerns by returning to one of the most neglected yet most innovative aspects of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of argumentation—its rhetorical methodology. Reconstructing two key aspects of this methodology in phenomenological terms, the author discusses that the theory of argumentation found in The New Rhetoric is a philosophically neutral framework for describing the already norm-laden practice of argumentation.

This article explores cadaverous rhetorics with a focus on public displays of human remains at anatomical museums. The article has two primary components: First, it advances a theory of cadaverous rhetoric grounded in a blending of rhetorical, feminist, and psychological affect theory. The article argues that combining Casey Boyle's transductive rhetoric with Sara Ahmed's cultural politics of emotion and the psychology of extensive affective regulation offers a great deal of insight into the public display of human remains. Second, the article explores the cadaverous rhetorics at three museums: the Mütter Museum, Surgeon's Hall, and the Museo de la Medicina. The article traces how the practices of acquisition, preparation, preservation, display and contextualization aim to blunt negative affective responses and to catalyze positive visitor experiences. The article closes with a rumination on the limited success of cadaverous rhetorics in the face of visitor tendencies anchored in attachments to justice-oriented frameworks.

AbstractArgumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred normative framework, our main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of this theme.

Asynchronous workshops have potential as a flexible and accessible tool for instructor professional development. Translating synchronous workshops into asynchronous versions represents an opportunity to expand access to training materials, but translating across modalities is a challenge. As facilitators of the Colleges Online Learning Academy summer fellowship program, we outline our process for developing asynchronous workshops focused on pedagogy and digital learning for graduate student instructors. We evaluated participant engagement and accessibility based on survey responses (n=10) and workshop artifacts. Our four asynchronous workshops consisted of multimodal modules with video clips from the synchronous sessions and engagement opportunities on Jamboard. We found low Jamboard engagement from asynchronous participants, but high engagement in multimodal modules. Potential barriers to access included mental health, Wi-Fi access, English language comprehension, and a lack of discussion, but many participants (4 of 9) reported no access barriers. We provide recommendations for developing engaging, accessible, and content-rich asynchronous workshops from synchronous workshop materials.

Scale Theory embodies its title in every possible way. It offers both a deep dive into and a 10,000-foot view of scale, scalar thinking, and the role of scale in scientific inquiry. The subtitle, A Nondisciplinary Inquiry, is no less apt. Author Joshua DiCaglio blends insights from rhetoric, philosophy, literary studies, and mysticism to create a novel account of scalar thinking. In so doing, he weaves together detailed thought experiments, the work of Gregory Bateson, and Philip K. Dick’s account of an extraterrestrial communication he received while under the influence of anesthesia. Provocatively, Scale Theory treats these diverse intellectual resources as coequal contributors to an emerging theory of scale and scalar thinking. Within this nondisciplinary framework, the book is devoted to advancing two primary theses: (1) Notions of scale are undertheorized in science studies and related strands of new materialisms; and (2) Proper attention to questions of scale within these theoretical traditions should prompt a more thoughtful reconsideration of the merits of mystic holism. Ultimately, Scale Theory makes a compelling case for the first thesis and advances inquiry usefully in this area. With respect to the second thesis, DiCaglio refers to a certain academic “allergy” to holism (99), and I must confess I share this allergy. That said, I assume readers already predisposed favorably toward mystic holism are likely to find Scale Theory’s attention to the second thesis thoughtful and engaging.Scale Theory is organized into three distinct parts. Part 1, “Algorithms for a Theory of Scale,” presents three interrelated thought experiments that call upon readers to imagine themselves at various distances and vantage points with respect to several objects of interest. Part 1 is stylistically Wittgensteinian. Like the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 2013) or Latour’s “Irreductions,” (1993), the thought experiments unfold as a series of numbered and nested propositions, each postulating or interrogating an emerging concept in DiCaglio’s theory of scale. Part 2, “Configurations for a Theory of Scale,” returns the reader to more familiar styles of prose, providing a sort of review of the relevant literature and its relationship to the insights of the thought experiments. Finally, part 3, “Rhetorical Technologies for a Theory of Scale,” reflects on the twin marginalizations of rhetoric and mysticism in mainstream Western academia and argues for a new embrace of disembodied inquiry.The aforementioned thought experiments of part 1 outline DiCaglio’s theories of scale, scalar thinking, and scalar analysis. The discussion makes extensive use of visual and cinematic metaphors to aid the reader’s consideration of scalar questions. Ultimately, DiCaglio posits that scale is a function of the relationship between the “‘being’ of phenomena” and “the one who is measuring” (8). He argues, therefore, that “scale functions at a level above ontology and epistemology: scale is a means of orienting yourself both to experience and the being of things” (8). In making this argument, Scale Theory reflects on a range of scientific practices that require gradients of scale. Microscopy, telescopy, and simulations all provide scientists with tools to escape the mundane scales of embodied human experience. DiCaglio argues that “science must always find itself grouping things together, speaking of species, types, systems, and so on which exist on a different logical type than the individual encounters that make up these groups” (41). The taxonomic activities of scientific practice require shifts in scale to account for kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera, species, and all manner of nonbiological analogs.Within this framework, scale functions as a sort of meta-ontology that allows objects to be provisionally identified and delineated. Echoing Bateson, DiCaglio argues that In order for any thing to be said to exist whatsoever, a differential must exist out of which a difference can be discerned. Every differential occurs on some scale at which a fluctuation or movement is able to make a difference. If one goes to a smaller scale, any given differential is no longer able to be used to register a difference. (51)Thus, any given object only exists at certain scales where differences can be said to make a difference, and any given object also ceases to be an object at higher or lower orders where the differences no longer make differences. DiCaglio leverages the notion of “stability” or “stabilization” to refer to an object’s coming into being at any given scale. The metaphor of photographic or cinematographic “resolution” underwrites DiCaglio’s thinking in this area. Objects stabilize when they resolve relative to an observer’s perspective. While I find this account of stability thoughtful and compelling, it is somewhat unfortunate that it is so beholden to visual metaphors. Humans engage the world through many different senses, and not all humans engage the world with all senses.With his foundational ontology of scale established, DiCaglio proceeds to introduce “scalar analysis,” an approach to reckoning with objects, stability, and systems. The exploration of scalar analysis centers on a series of nested thought experiences and most prominently on a root cause analysis of a disease. Through oscillating our perspective between the whole human body and DNA mutations, DiCaglio shows how the dialectic of “zoom level” and “resolution” can further the analysis of complex systems. This analysis is engaging in many ways but suffers somewhat when addressing temporality. Scale analysis wants to “freeze time” (75) as an initial step, but then finds time “unwittingly introduced” (79) a few pages later. Ultimately, an analysis of causality in complex systems will probably require intentionally attending to the temporal dimensions. In fairness, at one point DiCaglio intentionally maps time to space (68) in an effort to maintain the visual metaphors of zoom and resolution. Indexing time to space is a common move, of course, and will likely only alienate a few passing Bergsonians.While the thought experiments in part 1 offer a number of interesting insights about scalar thinking, it is a bit troublesome that they exist almost exclusively in a vacuum. Aside from the occasional supportive reference to Bateson, part 1 is largely citation free. However, the insights provided seem linked in many important ways to prior efforts to understand complex systems and questions of scale. This includes both the work cited in part 2 and striking (albeit unexplored) parallels between scalar stability and accounts of stabilizing processes in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. The Whitehead parallel is, perhaps, not surprising given Bateson’s engagement with Whitehead and subsequent influence on Scale Theory. Nevertheless, this seems like an important connection and a missed opportunity. I would have very much enjoyed reading a discussion of this connection and/or an exploration of the potential synergies and disagreements between Scale Theory and Marilyn Cooper’s (2019) adaptation of Whitehead and Bateson for rhetorical new materialisms.That said, part 2 engages substantively with much of the related literature on new materialisms, actor-network theory, and cybernetics to explore previous attempts to grapple with many of the same issues of scale and complex systems. In so doing, Scale Theory argues that prior efforts to address these issues are hindered by undue focus on embodiment and embodied epistemology (in the case of feminist new materialisms), an inappropriate ontological flattening of scale (in actor-network theory), and lack of attention to holism (in cybernetics). With respect to feminist new materialisms, Scale Theory is particularly critical of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. While I agree with DiCaglio that too much reliance on epistemology is a problem for some areas of new materialism, I am not sure epistemology is as prevalent in Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad 2007) as DiCaglio suggests. Furthermore, I ultimately agree with Annmarie Mol who compellingly argues that the primarily problems of (post)modern epistemology come from the ways it is rooted in perspectivalism (2003). Thus, given the inherent perspectivism of scale theory, the approach may well replicate some of the issues new materialists most wish to avoid when avoiding epistemology in the first place.DiCaglio’s critique of embodied situated knowledges is ultimately anchored in his penchant for holism. He argues that bodies are properties of individuals, and that they situate perspective in that individual, atomistic perspective. In so doing, he critiques Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge for its overreliance on bodies that only exist at certain scales. As he writes, In scalar views there is something like a transcendent view that moves away from the body itself (2.10–12)1, zeros out the perspective as “mine” (2.9), and dislocates any single perspectival configuration. Thus, when Haraway declares that “feminists don’t need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence” (579), we ought to hesitate. (134)Thus, to understand the universe, as DiCaglio hopes you will, is to shed your corporeal form and embrace some transcendental perspective. Again, my response to this is something like “yes and no.” I am on record agreeing that it is possible for a theory to be too embodied, although I don’t think this applies to Haraway. I have previously criticized some strains of affect theory for their excessive embrace of embodied experience (Graham 2016). Specifically, I argue that affect theory duplicates the problems of epistemology by positing a more authentic infralevel of embodied engagement that replicates the problematic perspectivalism on which (post)modern epistemology is built. The subject-object binary is replaced by a more privileged body-world binary. If this critique is correct (and I think it is), Scale Theory makes a similar error. Specifically, it inverts affect theory’s normative orientation, privileging instead a putatively “higher” level of unembodied binary engagement, a mind-universe binary, if you will.Scale Theory’s rejections of actor-network theory and cybernetics are similar in both tone and content to its rejections of situated knowledges. ANT and related strands of sociology and geography do not account for scale in quite the same way as Scale Theory’s opening thought experiments. Thus “this inability to handle scale confuses the terms at the outset” (162). Similarly, while cybernetics and systems theory have much to offer scale theory, they are ultimately treated as lacking since they don’t provide appropriate tools for appreciating the aggregation to unity. Channeling Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, DiCaglio argues that while systems theory is useful for understanding bodies as ecologies, additional scalar (and perhaps mystical) elements are needed to pivot from bodies as ecologies to an apparently necessary identification of our equal oneness with bacteria and Gaia (173). Ultimately, part 2’s criticisms of prior efforts to address questions of scale proceed as though part 1 has successfully persuaded the reader on the merits of mystic holism. Part 2 takes the insights of the opening thought experiments as true, and recounts how feminist new materialisms, actor-network theory, and cybernetics fail to live up to the putative promises of scalar thinking. This is a risky rhetorical move, because for readers who are not entirely persuaded by the work of part 1, part 2 will come across as an exercise in somewhat uncharitable reading practices.Stepping away from the mysticism and my admitted allergies, Scale Theory also provides some thoughtful considerations on implications for rhetoric of science and science studies more broadly. As DiCaglio notes, “Because scale occurs outside of human experience, it must be re-presented at [human] scale. Inevitably, its representations will be partial and distorted” (183). Recognizing this fact points toward real challenges for scientific inquiry and scientific rhetoric which strives to account for notions of scale that cannot be contained at the scale of human representation. DiCaglio interrogates these challenges through an analysis of different modes of “specification” (193). When discussing specification, scholars of science studies most often consider what he dubs “ontological specifications”—that is, descriptions of objects, processes, and observed reality. We also (somewhat less regularly) attend to “epistemological specifications”—descriptions of knowing practices, sometimes methodology. But, since within scalar thinking, objects only exist at certain specific scales, neither ontological nor epistemological specification are sufficient to describe scientific activity. “Scalar specification” then becomes an essential additional rhetoric for both science and science studies. But scalar specifications are not without challenges.Here, DiCaglio draws our attention to “scale tricks” (228). Since scale must be re-presented, scalar thinking and scalar specifications may mislead readers through rendering scale invisible, presuming it infinite, or blending scales without acknowledging that they have been blended. For DiCaglio, transcending scale tricks is a question of accountability (231). Authors of re-presentations of experience have a duty to be consistent and precise in their scalar specifications. Precise specifications disrupt the potential confusions of scale tricks by making the scale intelligible, reminding readers or auditors that there is a scale, and preventing distortion through blending of scales. In some ways, DiCaglio’s theory of scalar specifications is a more encompassing version of the ethics of information design. Properly labeled x and y axes are critical to effective and ethical communication of charted data. Scale Theory reminds us that data need not be displayed graphically to be subject to scale and to require scalar specifications for interpretation.Part 3 of Scale Theory is devoted to the cosmos seeing itself. That is, it ruminates on possibilities for transcending corporality so as to achieve a perspective that all but transcends scale itself. DiCaglio does not precisely recommend specific techniques to achieve this transcendence, but he does point toward accounts of others that prominently feature hallucinogens, meditative practices, and methodical introspection. I will admit I find myself somewhat mystified by the mysticism that closes Scale Theory. Ultimately, I am pragmatic about theory. For me the utility of a theory lies in what work it does for inquiry, and that work needs to be indexed to a particular task at hand. Scale Theory might, perhaps, be considered pragmatic in this way, but the overriding task at hand is to understand the oneness of the universe. My scholarly aims are rather more modest. I put theory to work in an effort to address much more local tasks. As such, what I can take from Scale Theory for my own work may be more limited than what other readers can take. If you lack my allergy to holism and see the intersection of rhetoric, philosophy, and drug-assisted disembodied consciousness as a potential pathway to universal understanding, then this may well be the book for you. Even so, if your aims are somewhat more modest (like mine), then there is still much of interest in the pages of Scale Theory. DiCaglio adds important new dimensions of analysis to new materialisms and related science studies. Readers might take these dimensions as intended, but I would argue that they are also flexible enough to be read more synergistically alongside Cooper and Whitehead or Barad, Mol, and Haraway. And even if you reject new materialisms entirely, Scale Theory compellingly argues that rhetoricians of science would do well to attend, in more detail, to scalar specifications and the problem of scale tricks.

Introduction: As a field, we have tended to look at user-experience design (UXD) as a data-driven design process, anchored by usability studies, and anchored in fulfilling user needs and expectations. How then might technical and professional communication (TPC) curricula respond to evolving trends in user-experience (UX) scholarship and pedagogy? About the case: Addressing this question, we share our programmatic journey, a teaching case that represents more than a decade of reflection and evolution, culminating in the launch of a redesigned major and a UXD minor in a stand-alone department at a regional, primarily undergraduate teaching-focused university. Situating the case: Our programmatic identity began to shift toward a designer mindset that embraced three core frames for professional action–information design, problem solving, and civic engagement—and three complementary design tenets—empathy, advocacy, and bricolage. Methods/approach: To better understand this shift, we recognized the need for a multimethod approach of data gathering. Beginning with an annual assessment of our introductory and capstone courses, we collected data through examination of key course artifacts, through department self-studies, which includes surveys, interviews, and focus groups with relevant stakeholders, and through an external review. Results/discussion: Our self-study data indicated that our students would benefit from stronger audience awareness and design competencies. From these data, we discuss curricular revisions, which include creating a UXD minor. Conclusions: We conclude this article by considering the following three questions: 1. What strategies might other programs consider if they want to design empathy-driven UX pedagogy that is responsive to prevailing scholarly and pedagogical trends? 2. Why might programs cultivate student-researchers as UX bricoleurs? 3. What might other programs expect from student-researcher UX bricoleurs?

ABSTRACTABSTRACTIn this essay, age is considered a relevant and significant subject position in which ecological advocates put forth ideologies and cultural constructions of youth to communicate about and for the environment. Young activists employ 'ephebic appeals' to raise awareness of certain issues, display public critical thinking, advocate for society-wide solutions, and empower audiences. The author analyzes the ephebic appeals Greta Thunberg, Autumn Peltier, and Mari Copeny to better understand how age operates rhetorically to justify youth's entrance and involvement in civic and political deliberations, render public judgments, and enable similar reflections and critiques in others. Overall, the essay considers how ephebic appeals expand disciplinary boundaries as they relate to rhetorical agency, protest and social change, and citizenship.KEYWORDS: Agencyenvironmental communicationsocial movementsyouth activism AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks Melanie Loehwig, Matthew Houdek, Alex McVey, Emma Frances Bloomfield, and the peer reviewers for their insightful feedback on this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

This study examines associations between writing behaviors manifested by keystroke analytics and the formulation of argument elements in L2 undergraduate writers' writing processes. Ninety-nine persuasive essays written by L2 undergraduate writers were human annotated for Toulmin argument elements. The corresponding keystroke logs were segmented and analyzed to characterize the dynamics of writing processes for different categories of the elements. A multinomial mixed-effects logistic regression model was built to predict argument categories using the keystroke analytics. The study reported that L2 undergraduate writers' text production for final claims and primary claims featured P-bursts (execution processes delimited by pauses exceeding 2 seconds) of longer spans but lower production fluency compared to that for data. In addition, fewer revisions were observed when L2 writers were constructing final claims than when they were formulating data. These findings shed light on the varying cognitive loads and activities L2 undergraduate writers may experience when building different argument elements in written argumentation.

This study investigated how common raters’ experiences of uncertainty in high-stakes testing are before, during, and after the rating of writing performances, what these feelings of uncertainty are, and what reasons might underlie such feelings. We also examined if uncertainty was related to raters’ rating experience or to the quality of their ratings. The data were gathered from the writing raters (n = 23) in the Finnish National Certificates of Proficiency, a standardized Finnish high-stakes language examination. The data comprise 12,118 ratings as well as raters’ survey responses and notes during rating sessions. The responses were analyzed by using thematic content analysis and the ratings by descriptive statistics and Many-Facets Rasch analyses. The results show that uncertainty is variable and individual, and that even highly experienced raters can feel unsure about (some of) their ratings. However, uncertainty was not related to rating quality (consistency or severity/leniency). Nor did uncertainty diminish with growing experience. Uncertainty during actual ratings was typically associated with the characteristics of the rated performances but also with other, more general and rater-related or situational factors. Other reasons external to the rating session were also identified for uncertainty, such as those related to the raters themselves. An analysis of the double-rated performances shows that although similar performance-related reasons seemed to cause uncertainty for different raters, their uncertainty was largely associated with different test-takers’ performances. While uncertainty can be seen as a natural part of holistic ratings in high-stakes tests, the study shows that even if uncertainty is not associated with the quality of ratings, we should constantly seek ways to address uncertainty in language testing, for example by developing rating scales and rater training. This may make raters’ work easier and less burdensome.

This issue centers the stories of people who (re)define what meaningful literacy practices are from such positions as an aging mother, women refugees, a returning student, and formerly incarcerated people.These articles explore how literacy practices shift and change over the life course and across contexts in ways that ask us to reorient our own understanding of the relationship between literate subjects and the knowledge they produce.In this issue's lead article, "Bouncing Back: Resilience and Its Limits in Late-Age Composing, " Louise Wetherbee Phelps undertakes the study and analysis of an unpublished body of lifespan writing by her late mother, Virginia Wetherbee, as part of her own contribution to retrospective lifespan studies and "literacy lives in relation" (2).Phelps begins by asking how to undertake the daunting task of a project that has challenged her in multiple ways: "challenges of methodof genre of grief, responsibility, and learning under the condition and unpredictable trajectory of [her] own aging" (ibid).One of the sayings Phelps inherited from Wetherbee, "proceed as way opens, " provides a framework for a series of articles in which Phelps considers the intersections of longitudinal and lifespan studies, late-age literacies, cross-generational literacies, slow composing, and ecosystemic and chronotopic approaches to literacy.In this article, Phelps charts the relationship between her own composing project on parenting and her aging literacy in figures that visualize a pattern of moments of disruption and resilience that Phelps terms "bouncing back." Ultimately, Phelps reminds us that our understanding of the intersections of literacy and aging are, to quote an embroidered saying that Wetherbee passed on to her and that hangs by her desk, "It's not as simple as you think."Katie Silvester examines how women refugees living in "protracted displacement" (39), or "decades-long displacement and massive refugee resettlement process" (ibid), use dialogue, narrative, and re-story to offer perspectives on literacy learning across their lifespans.In "At the 'Ends of Kinship': Women Re(kin)figuring Literacy Practices in Protracted Displacement, " Silvester draws from an ethnographic study of women's literacy learning experiences in the Bhutanese refugees resettlement process and considers the relationality they take up as they negotiate various people, places, and contexts.Specifically, she elaborates on "the ends of kinship" (40), which she defines as "a dialogic space of negotiating relational ties that have become stretched and transformed by localglobal forces" (ibid).This dialogic space allows women to "kin-script and (kin)figure their own ideas about and practices of literacy in relation to kin and friends as these relational ties stretch, contract, and become transformed throughout a protracted displacement and ongoing resettlement process" (42).In the process of kinship, friendship, and woman-centered community, these women were able to redefine their literate subjectivities, relationships, and practices through grounded, embodied, and imaginal means.Silverster argues for a dynamic methodological and theoretical approach to better understand adult literacy learning in migration through "the tensions and contradictions of everyday living in relation to others over time" (46).Maggie Shelledy's "Precarious Citizenship: Ambivalence, Literacy, and Prisoner Reentry" uses case studies to explore "the literacy myths that surround higher education in prison" by foregrounding formerly incarcerated people's experiences with and the effects of their participation

This article examines how “crisis” declarations resonate within and reinforce a national imaginary that commonly configures the U.S.-Mexico border as under threat by migrants. Drawing on Karen Barad, the author approaches crisis declarations as phenomena produced via their entanglement with, and exclusion of, particular configurations of the border, a process that contributes to the ongoing sedimentation of “crisis.” The article specifically analyzes how a mix of digital practices and dominant understandings articulate a 2019 USA Today online project as being about an immigration and border “crisis” despite attempts by people involved to complicate crisis narratives.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the theoretical concept of meta-argumentative fallacy is useful. The authors argue for this along two lines. The first is that with the concept, the authors may clarify the concept of meta-argumentation. That is, by theorizing where meta-argument goes wrong, the authors may capture the norms of this level of argumentation. The second is that the concept of meta-argumentative fallacies provides an explanatory model for a variety of errors in argument otherwise difficult to theorize. The authors take three as exemplary: the straw man, both sides, and free speech fallacies.

With this issue, we welcome you to nearly a decade of Literacy in Composition Studies!We plan to recount and honor the work that has brought us this far in our spring issue, but for now we are delighted to welcome Al Harahap to our Editorial Team, as well as to express our appreciation to Kara Poe Alexander for stepping into the role of Submissions Editor.We send our heartfelt thanks to Chris Warnick for his ten years (so far!) of partnership with LiCS and wish him productivity and rest on

This paper introduces the Persuasive Essays for Rating, Selecting, and Understanding Argumentative and Discourse Elements (PERSUADE) corpus.The PERSUADE corpus is large-scale corpus of writing with annotated discourse elements. The goal of the corpus is to spur the development of new, open-source scoring algorithms that identify discourse elements in argumentative writing to open new avenues for the development of automatic writing evaluation systems that focus more specifically on the semantic and organizational elements of student writing.

Rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) knowledge integrity is explored in the context of preparing RHM students, researchers, and practitioners to be careful curators and communicators of information from the medical literature. More specifically, the goal of this article is to provide a systematic framework for researching and citing claims, or “facts,” from the medical literature with transferrable skills beyond the academy. In this article, this framework is examined through the lens of science communication ethics and writer ethos to guide individuals while navigating between automation of literature databases and human agency. Furthermore, this article explores the proper citation of research claims from different genres that are published in the “medical literature” with attention to conserving the authors’ original voice. Collectively, this framework and discussion builds on prior scholarship on authorship and intellectual property in medicine.

This special issue contains articles, reflections, and discussions stemming from the 2021 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) Virtual Conference, which was themed “Language, Access, and Power in Technical Communication.” This theme was originally set for the 2020 ATTW Conference. When the conference co-chairs Ann Shivers-McNair and Laura Gonzales originally developed the theme for the 2020 ATTW conference, we drew inspiration from Dr. Cecilia Shelton’s (2020) call to “shift out of neutral” in our technical communication practices. At that time, we reflected on the ongoing racial violence perpetuated through police brutality across the world, on the border crisis that kept separate, and continues to separate children and families, and on a violent government administration that reflected the hatred too long ingrained in US nationalism. We knew that technical communicators could not and should not sit by idly and pretend to embrace a stance of neutrality amidst so much injustice.

This study examines links between human ratings of writing quality and the incidence of argumentative features (e.g., claims, data) in persuasive essays along with relationships among these features and their distance from one another within an essay. The goal is to better understand how argumentation elements in persuasive essays combine to model human ratings of essay quality. The study finds that, in most cases, it is not the presence of argumentation features that is predictive of writing quality but rather the relationships between superordinate and subordinate features, parallel features, and the distances between features. This finding has not only theoretical value but also practical value in terms of pedagogical approaches and automated writing feedback.

Editors' introduction to volume 4, issue 2.

Editors introduction to volume 4, issue 3 by J. Blake Scott, Cathryn Molloy, and Lisa Melonçon.

Recent research on reading in cognitive science disproves the Common Core’s central claim that reading skills are learned most effectively when students exclude their knowledge and experience from the reading process. The discussion here is focused on how this scientific research overlaps with the transaction theory of reading and writing, and the present opportunities for renewing it.

How do material and discursive arrangements, technologies and rhetoric, shape the subjects and objects of medical discourse (Scott & Melonçon, 2017; Selzer & Crowley, 1999)? How are the affordances of material and discursive arrangements seized by political actors? Tackling these and similar questions has been a growing preoccupation in the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine, where researchers have sought better ways of understanding the entanglements of the symbolic and material (Booher & Jung, 2018; Graham, 2009; Jack, 2019; Propen, 2018). A perspicuous case for this research is the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act (UICA), an amendment to the Public Health Service Act mandating that women receive an ultrasound and have its images described to them before having abortions. Three US states have a version of this law, with over twenty others having laws similar to the UICA (Guttmacher Institute, 2019, n.d.). Through this law, antiabortionists are able to construct a kairotic situation through the mediating capacity of ultrasound where they can use the actual state of affairs (a woman seeking an abortion) to argue through images for a possible future (a woman foregoing abortion). This article analyzes the UICA to understand how the political speech of antiabortionists enrolls the moralizing capacity of ultrasound to construct a kairotic situation to intervene in women’s pregnancies. Starting from studies of actor-networks (Latour, 1983;1999a) and technological mediation (Verbeek, 2011; 2015), and departing to feminist rhetorical science studies (Booher & Jung, 2018; Frost & Haas, 2017) and rhetorical approaches to imagery and visualization (Propen, 2018; Roby, 2016; Webb, 2009), I argue that not only do translation processes and technical mediation distribute agencies; they construct the very situations where agencies are constituted. This study can widen our understanding of how political entities appropriate the rhetorical capacities of technology and discourse to translate their politics into legislature.

This Methodologies and Approaches piece argues artificially intelligent machine learning systems can be used to effectively advance justice-oriented research in technical and professional communication (TPC). Using a preexisting dataset investigating patient marginalization in pharmaceuticals policy discourse, we built and tested 49 machine learning systems designed to identify and track rhetorical features of interest. Three popular and one new approach to feature engineering (text quantification) were evaluated. The results indicate that these systems have great potential for use in TPC research.

This article interrogates the concept of tactical technical communication specifically questioning the established understanding of de Certeau in the field of technical communication. It argues once readers move beyond the concepts of strategies and tactics, they will find a rich and nuanced explanation of how ordinary people “make do” in everyday life.

Using rhetorical genre theory, the authors theorize the engineering design process as a type of embodied genre enacted through typified performances of bodies engaged with discourses, texts, and objects in genre-rich spaces of design activity. The authors illustrate this through an analysis of ethnographic data from an engineering design course to show how a genred repertoire of embodied routines is demonstrated for students and later taken up as part of their design work. A greater appreciation of the interconnection between genre and design as well as the role of typification in producing embodied genres can potentially transform how writing studies conceives of and teaches both design processes and genres in technical and professional communication settings.

This article provides an overview of technical content marketing and examines the audiences and messaging for technical product messaging, which differ from general consumer products. Notably, technical products, particularly those in innovative categories, require a varying marketing strategy throughout the technology adoption lifecycle as products appeal to customers with different attitudes towards technologies. Especially, content marketing for innovative technologies requires an understanding of the technical consumers' (or audiences') psychological motivations and needs, which have yet to be reviewed in the technical communication literature. In this article, the foundations of marketing innovative technical products are explored, with a specific focus on the messaging strategies as it changes to educate and persuade different categories of technology consumers during different phases of the technology adoption lifecycle. For new technical products and categories of products, the messages and channels of information evolve as the technical innovation progresses from the early market to a mainstream market, with both requiring adaptation to different audience segments and in response to emerging competitive pressures. For the majority of technical innovations, the technical content marketing strategy and messaging is a long-term investment for change to reach different consumer groups at the appropriate stage of the technical product life cycle.

AbstractUsing the murder of Magdiel Sanchez as a case study, we argue that rhetoric’s future must embrace practices of situated listening. While much of the field’s work has focused on speakers and practices of invention, we argue that a more just study of public deliberation must position this approach in conversation with an acknowledgment of situated reception. We follow scholars of color, feminist theorists, and disability advocates who have long argued for the practices of ethical listening, adding that the imperative to listen extends beyond the listening ear, accounting for the totality of the body and its environmental and contextual positions. By reaching beyond the demands of race to consider the intersecting axis of (dis)ability, we push the fields of rhetoric, sound studies, and critical/cultural communication studies to consider embodiment as a whole condition of rhetorical reception.

As the introduction to this issue makes clear, the ethical exposure essays we include here are the start of an ongoing initiative in the journal—to include focused sections of shorter pieces on critical threads or matters of concern in ongoing RHM work, in this case ethical conundra encountered in practice-level enactments of methodologies. In setting the tone for this special section, we now attempt to parse an “ethics in praxis” that is characterized by situational, embodied, and reflexive orientations rather thanby attributes more common in virtue ethics. This emphasis on praxis allows us to put forward an idea of ethics in and for RHM that is responsive to critique as we articulate it in the overall introduction to this issue: as kairos-driven and attuned to crises as they unfold in the present and as they anticipate and offer opportunities to “play” at various imagined futures.

When we began drafting this issue introduction, extending from a previous introduction in which we committed “to do more and better in cultivating, sponsoring, publishing, and promoting scholarship that addresses racism and interlocking systems of oppression as public health (and/or other health or medical) issues,” we knew we wanted to continue to foster a space in which RHM scholars could ask new and newly exigent questions born out of the rupture of our current moment of swirling, interconnected crises, some longstanding and others novel.

Many expected federal public health agencies to provide timely and accurate information about the COVID-19 pandemic. That did not happen. In response, physicians and epidemiologists have explored new ways to educate the public about COVID-19 and protect against misinformation. One genre that has received significant uptake is the tweetorial, threaded tweets that educate followers on technical matters. This article builds on prior genre studies of the tweetorial to explore how #MedTwitter and #EpiTwitter communities have refashioned the emerging conventions of the tweetorial as part of efforts to protect the public from COVID-19 misinformation.

This article offers a longitudinal computational-rhetorical analysis of biomedical writing on opioids. Using a corpus of 1,467 articles and essays published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association between 1959 and May 2019, this study evaluates diachronic shifts in (a) the framing of opioid pharmacology, (b) the relative attention paid to pain management versus opioid dependence risks, and (c) the distribution of statements related to physicians’ primary ethical obligations. The results of these analyses largely disconfirm different current accounts of shifting physician rhetoric around opioids and pain management leading up to the recognition opioid epidemic. Most notably, the results also suggest that biomedical debates surrounding opioids are serving as proxy arguments for shifting primary bioethical obligations from individual patients to public health.

How have handbooks shaped-and been shaped by-the emerging discipline of writing studies in German-speaking countries, a region in Europe that is home to a rapidly growing community of writing center professionals? This article addresses this question through a translingual review This article illuminates the unique role of practice in forging a transatlantic identity for writing studies in German-speaking countries. It shows how the aforementioned volumes, all published in German, collectively invite us to revisit practice as a window onto the cultural and institutional contexts of diverse writing center communities around the globe.

Introduction to Volume 4, Number 1

Introduction to Volume 4, Number 1

Pandemics have a way of humbling those with recognized expertise for responding to them. The current COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into relief medical and other experts' uncertainties about models for predicting the spread of cases and deaths, patterns of symptoms and morbidities associated with the virus, the responses of various publics to official health directives and unofficial (in cases harmful) advice, the longer-term economic and political fallout of the ongoing pandemic, the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and so on. At the same time, pandemics like COVID-19 have a way of reminding us that expertise, like uncertainty, can be a fluid, distributed quality, as we have looked to and learned from the experiential knowledge of patients and their caregivers, the cultural insight and documentation of artists of various types, the ingenuity of fellow citizens in designing novel and work-around forms of protection, and other sources not typically associated with medical expertise. Indeed, we can readily point to the harms of authority figures or institutions assuming too much agency and failing to listen to, leverage the knowledge of, and coordinate responses with others.

Book Review| June 01 2020 A Way Forward: Reflections on the Presidency and Presidential Campaigns Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us about Donald J. Trump. Edited by Ryan Skinnell. Exeter, U.K.: Imprint Academic, 2018; pp. iii + 200. $29.90 paper.The Reinvention of Populist Rhetoric in the Digital Age: Insiders and Outsiders in Democratic Politics. By Mark Rolfe Singapore: Springer, 2016; pp. x + 259. $109.99 cloth; $109.99 paper.Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t: How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation (Without Even Knowing It). By Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-Hye Han. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018; pp. xi + 208. $79.95 cloth; $32.95 paper. Devin Scott Devin Scott Devin Scott is a Ph.D. student studying Rhetoric and Political Culture in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland, College Park. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2020) 23 (2): 367–379. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.2.0367 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Devin Scott; A Way Forward: Reflections on the Presidency and Presidential Campaigns. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2020; 23 (2): 367–379. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.2.0367 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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Part of learning a discipline’s genres is learning how one’s work must be presented. Students confronting this economy of genre sometimes chafe at its restrictions, and their apprehension reveals unsuspected stakes for technical communication. In interviews, students discuss how their final presentations fail to capture the sophistication and the nuances of their designs, suggesting that learning genres is not just about participation but also about letting go of competing ways of conceiving practice.

Our introductions across the first two volumes of RHM have consistently included reflections on our goals and journey as editors, and on the directions of the journal and growing field of RHM. As part of the issue that marks the journal’s third year of publication, and that also marks the start of our fifth year of developing the journal, this introduction affords an especially opportune occasion for reflection.

A Review of Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine J. Blake Scott Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine. By Colleen Derkatch. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 238 pages. $55 cloth; $10 e-book.

This paper provides an overview of how analyses of linguistic features in writing samples provide a greater understanding of predictions of both text quality and writer development and links between language features within texts. Specifically, this paper provides an overview of how language features found in text can predict human judgements of writing proficiency and changes in writing levels in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. The goal is to provide a better understanding of how language features in text produced by writers may influence writing quality and growth. The overview will focus on three main linguistic construct (lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and text cohesion) and their interactions with quality and growth in general. The paper will also problematize previous research in terms of context, individual differences, and reproducibility

Integrating design thinking methodology into writing courses can help students to develop creative approaches to problem definition and solution development. Tracing how students work with and through written genres common to design thinking reveals the possibilities and potential of learning new patterns of inquiry and argumentation. Developing these creative habits of mind empowers students to explore and invent solutions to complex, multidimensional problems across the broad range of their disciplinary, professional, and civic lives.

With the goal of increasing interdisciplinary dialogue, the authors engage Dr. O’Connell’s response to “Terminal node problems: ANT 2.0 and prescription drug labels.” Specifically, the authors aim to address the questions and concerns raised by Dr. O’Connell as well as offer suggestions for future research that builds on the insights that emerge from this interdisciplinary dialectic.

In this program profile, we describe how the FYC program at Texas A&M University-San Antonio is working towards developing an antiracist and decolonial program in response to our recognition of the racialized violence and injustice the program was unintentionally inflicting on our student population. We structure this profile using comadrismo, a conversation between two Latina faculty, to describe their experiences around five themes: labor division and equity, assessment and social justice, revising programmatic documents, professional development, and constraints and shortcomings. Furthermore, we discuss the most salient aspects of this work for programs that may also be interested in seeking social justice through antiracism and decolonization. Specifically, we work through and identify three forms of labor we have learned are necessary to engaging in this work: honest and critical self-interrogation, faculty buy-in and community building, and an understanding that this kind of work is an ongoing process.

On the Focus and Scope page of the journal’s website, we describe RHM as a “multidisciplinary” journal that publishes rhetorical studies, and then go on to reference publishing “interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research” that “can combine rhetorical analysis with any number of otherhumanistic or social scientific methodologies.” We still think, in some ways, that both the journal and field of RHM can be described as multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary at the same time; beyond drawing from a number of scholarly areas, for example, our collective research often synthesizes and integrates (in a holistic way) concepts, methods, and findings from these areas, creating new hybrid forms of scholarship that are not fixed within disciplinary boundaries.

Climate change, the obesity epidemic, plastic pollution, the opioid crisis—for the last several decades, there has been a growing awareness of the chal­lenges posed by what are sometimes called “wicked problems” (Rittel & Webber, 1973). These problems—marked by complex intersecting socioeconomic and/or biogeophysical causes—constitute real and immediate threats to humans, nonhumans, societies, and ecologies. What’s more—given their scale and multicausal nature, so-called wicked problems resist most of the options available in our standard repertoires of tech fixes and social programs. The very nature of wicked problems requires the develop­ment of mitigation strategies that integrate human and nonhuman agen­cies. Identifying effective strategies is, of course, no easy task. As a bare minimum first step, doing so requires bringing together the kinds of experts, policymakers, stakeholders, and citizens who are well-suited to address the particulars of the wicked problem at hand.

Designing for Life offers a thorough background in advances in technology that have improved the human condition. The book details the history of technological development as well as recent advancements and their implications for the future. The authors want designers to think about human perception and experience as the foundation of design best practices, and they achieve this goal by including multiple citations to help designers and researchers follow up with additional reading.

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.

Pragmatism's star in the field of rhetorical studies continues to rise, with more and more scholars mining the depths of figures such as Dewey, James, Addams, and beyond for rhetorically useful material. Part of the challenge comes from the complex historical context that such thinkers are embedded in; another challenge stems from pragmatism's own commitment to praxis over the production of abstract—and all too often academic—theories divorced from the historical-material conditions of their emergence. Often, its best thinkers are those who both engage in political practice and guide criticism instead of those who exclusively write scholarly books removed from the world of praxis. Steven Mailloux is one of the current group of scholars attempting to recover and promote this pragmatist tradition, both in his activities as a theorist and as a critical practitioner, especially as it affects rhetorical studies and implicates allied disciplines. Rhetoric's Pragmatism is his latest attempt to flesh out what pragmatism means for those thinking about, and often practicing, the transdisciplinary arts of rhetoric and criticism, and how we are to make sense of pragmatism in its theoretical guises and in concrete practices of interpretation and sense making. Mailloux's book is a wonderful new entry in the growing body of work that explores what pragmatism means for rhetoric, and what rhetoric means for those who study pragmatism.Rhetoric's Pragmatism collects fifteen of Mailloux's previously published essays, largely focused on the interplay between rhetoric and interpretation, and forms a new exploration of “rhetorical pragmatism.” This becomes a “rhetoricized form of neo-pragmatism” that extends the philosophical thought of figures such as Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and others (1). In the introduction he indicates that the work as a whole explicates the idea of “rhetorical hermeneutics,” or the orientation that “claims that all interpretation involves rhetoric (we make our interpretations through figure and argument) and all rhetoric involves politics (power relations both condition and are affected by our arguments)” (18). The complexity and methodological diversity of the chapters that follow are explained in short order by Mailloux in the following catchy, but perhaps perplexing, slogan—“rhetorical hermeneutics often uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history” (1). What this maxim gets at is Mailloux's engagement with history, a history of thinkers and theories and practices of communication, all of which require his interpretive activity and that putatively shed light on larger and more abstract questions about the nature of interpretation in general. Both the compact statement and his explorations in this book reveal the various integrations that Mailloux strives to present his readers with, many of which involve interpretative maneuvers such as reception studies and close readings of specific texts, as well as more abstract philosophical theorizing. This transdisciplinary and diverse approach makes the book both a challenging and a rewarding read.The book is divided into four main sections dealing with a range of topics that include rhetoric and ontology, rhetoric and interpretation in global contexts, comparative rhetoric and Jesuit “theorhetoric,” and rhetorical pragmatism's connection to reception history. The first section is loosely defined by the intersecting concerns of human ontology, rhetoric, and interpretation. The first chapter investigates the challenges of interpretation and hermeneutic activity (taken to be largely the same sort of activity for Mailloux) from the complementary realms of rhetorical action and legal judgment. Mailloux's approach in this chapter employs his strategy of engaging specific texts and practices to both use interpretative frameworks and to theorize such frameworks (and their entailments) in a more abstract sense. This explains why he explicates the theoretical dividends of rhetorical pragmatism by turning toward the historical events that form a line from Huckleberry Finn, and its reception history, to influential court decisions on equal rights. Mailloux insists that our theoretical claims and interpretative judgments recognize the dependence of our claims on historical contexts: “Rhetorical hermeneutics claims that all interpretation involves rhetoric … and all rhetoric involves politics” (18). We run into trouble “only when these rhetorical moments get extracted from their historical context of persuasive activity and become the basis of foundationalist theorizing” (19).The next three chapters comprising this section expand on this commitment to the humanistic contexts that rhetoric so often inhabits. What does it mean to be human and to be implicated in contexts that are based upon and demand interpretation? What does it mean to consider—and to be affected by—reception histories, or the account of the rhetorical consequences of various interpretations of specific texts over some historical time period, of communicative objects and practices? Chapter 2 engages the neo-pragmatist movement, featuring figures such as Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and Stanley Fish, and attempts to find room for rhetorical pragmatism in its confines. Mailloux ranges from the early pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller to Stout's work on religious communities and communication to posit his own version of pragmatism as a “mediating rhetoric” that finds the middle ground “between pessimism and optimism, between idealism and realism” (31). Chapter 3 continues the explication of Mailloux's theory of rhetorical pragmatism by engaging Heidegger's anti-humanist strains from Ernesto Grassi's revisionist interpretation of humanism. Showing his facility with a range of theoretical orientations, Mailloux deftly moves his discussion of Grassi's humanism to include Michael Leff's rhetorically sophisticated “Ciceronian humanism” and its critics. Chapter 4 shows the contemporaneous and constructive value of his approach to doing history through engaging histories of rhetorical effects. Here Mailloux uses Hubert Dreyfus's creative Kierkegaardian critique of the internet—and its critical reception by neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty—as a means to delineate his own rhetorical pragmatism. A new approach that builds upon Dreyfus's critique, Mailloux argues, prioritizes calls for self-reflection about our own vocabularies of self-creation as well as our own “passionate commitments” as online agents (51).The second part of the book is comprised of three chapters, each expanding the discussion of rhetorical pragmatism to more global and intercultural contexts. Chapter 5 explores the vexing question of whether cross-cultural communication is possible without traces of ethnocentrism. Unlike Rorty who quickly accepts the supposed inevitability of ethnocentrism in interpretative matters, Mailloux searches for a version of pragmatism that can escape significant and harmful strains of ethnocentrism in contexts of cross-cultural interpretation. He explores the challenges of different power dynamics and the question of interpretative standards in cross-cultural situations by interpreting these questions through the example of a Star Trek episode, and eventually concludes that “ethnocentrism is unavoidable in cross-cultural comparisons. Practically, the particular shape that any comparison takes in a specific case depends on the particulars of that case” (70). While the Star Trek episode served as a useful thought experiment, some may wish for actual instances of cross-cultural interpretation to serve as a way to explicate the pathways of cross-cultural interpretative activity. The next two chapters do just this, featuring Jesuit missionaries and their interpretative practices as a case of cross-cultural rhetoric. Chapter 6 presents Jesuit “eloquentia perfecta” as a rhetorical encounter with guiding themes for encounters with other cultures, balancing appropriation with concerns about missionary hermeneutic metapractice. Chapter 7 provides a brief commentary on this Jesuit rhetoric as an example of “theorhetoric” that foregrounds “rhetorical accommodationism” (87)—it utilized the arts of rhetoric in an attempt to account for local practices of interpretation and to assert various meanings and conceptions of the good to local audiences in turn.In the third section of this book, Mailloux further explores the orientation to comparative rhetoric he extracts from the Jesuit theorhetoric that aims to accommodate indigenous cultures as it understands and persuades. Chapters 8 and 9 serve as an extension of this project, ruminating on hermeneutics, allegory, and deconstruction in thinkers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul de Man, and Kenneth Burke. Chapter 10 returns to the Jesuit-inspired inflection of rhetorical pragmatism in the context of the challenges posed by rhetorical education. According to Mailloux, rhetorical education “has been portrayed in contradictory ways, sometimes as conservative defender of tradition and at other times as progressive advocate of change” (115). Mailloux indicates that this is a false dichotomy for the educational approach of rhetorical pragmatism—“‘what works’ must be defined to encompass not simply what is procedurally effective in a specific rhetorical context, but also what is consistent with great educational purposes across multiple contexts” (115). In other words, certain strategies or approaches might seem to work fine, but become increasingly problematic when viewed from other contexts; alternatively, some approaches can be limited to just those arenas in which they work, with no promise that they hold across multiple other contexts or areas of application. Burke's “theotropic logology” is then employed to highlight the promise of the approach taken by the Society of Jesus over its complex history. Jesuit pedagogy and spiritual exercises are rendered rhetorical on Mailloux's reading, a gain in itself outside of the conversations over pragmatism and rhetoric. Chapter 11 explicates the modern adaptions of Jesuit rhetoric in American colleges, including the educative texts and novels produced by Jesuit thinkers that aimed to inculcate the skills of eloquentia perfecta in young pupils.The fourth part of Rhetoric's Pragmatism explores the act of reception, a topic not unremoved from Mailloux's past scholarship on reception histories. In the act of reading, we interpret and practice rhetoric; the theory of rhetorical pragmatism must provide some guidance in this enacted interpretative realm if it is to be a reliable guide to the vicissitudes of meaningful practice. In chapter 12, Mailloux explores “the rhetorical effects of reading about reading in a globalized culture” (138). Using Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran as its globalized artifact, Mailloux explores the political situatedness of our interpretative judgments, and the extent to which they can transcend ideological entanglements in diverse cultures and contexts. Chapter 13 further investigates the process of reading and interpreting by looking at the embodied intensities available in nineteenth-century travel narratives of visitors to Rome. Using these “walking narratives” alongside modern narrative theory, Mailloux interrogates the travel memoires of Herman Melville, Orville Dewey, and Frederick Douglass as attempts to produce a “composition of place” (156) among their interested readers back home. Chapter 14 marks a break with the format of the rest of the book, being composed of an interview Keith Gilyard conducted with Mailloux. The informal and dialogic tone of this exchange is helpful, especially as it serves to flesh out the “idea of cultural rhetoric” (158) in Mailloux's rhetorical pragmatism. The discussion ranges over a variety of topics, but one interesting part concerns whether or not “pragmatism” taken in its most general meaning entails specific political commitments. After indicating some putative ways that it may not be determined politically, Mailloux concludes that pragmatism lines up with “radical democracy,” since both “share tropes of conversation and dialogue; they share arguments about the primacy of empowerment and protection of minority rights; and they share narratives about the way that you come up with knowledge of truth: through deliberation” (165). The final chapter returns to Mailloux's exploration of reception, reading, and interpretation, and explores the political theologies resident in textual attempts to come to terms with slavery and abolitionist narratives. Here Mailloux's approach is showcased in its rich contextual detail and attentiveness to close reading of texts when he investigates how Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and others received the burden and vocabulary of abolition in their own writings.Mailloux's Rhetoric's Pragmatism is a grand addition to the growing wave of research that explores the value of the pragmatist tradition for those in rhetorical studies. It deftly combines theorizing, close reading, and reception histories to make its case that rhetorical pragmatism is a valuable way to engage the promises of rhetorical action among critics and practitioners alike. Like any project, it makes strategic decisions that garner some gains, but that inevitably entail some lacunae. For instance, the collated nature of this work—along with the lack of a synoptic conclusion—sometimes leaves the reader wondering how all of these parts and episodes fit together in a way that provides general guidance for the next instance of interpretation, be it the reader's or Mailloux's. But perhaps this is Mailloux's point in leaving rhetorical pragmatism an open narrative. As I read through this book, I also found myself wondering how this story might have went if Mailloux had engaged the extensive range of us working in and through the separate areas of pragmatist rhetoric and comparative rhetoric. Of course, some of the pieces collected here predate much of the current work in these areas, and Mailloux's approach has a reason for prioritizing the displaying of the value of his application of rhetorical pragmatism to specific lines of inquiry over engaging the full range of past work of others. Still, as the areas of pragmatist rhetoric and comparative or intercultural rhetoric fill with more and more studies, as well as theoretical disputes over the best methods for such work, our accounts of rhetorical pragmatism must grow to fully engage this diversity of readings and readers. Even the guiding term of “pragmatism” demands interrogation and a pluralistic approach to unpacking it: pragmatism is not one thing or theory, of course (as Mailloux acknowledges with his diverse operationalizations of “rhetorical pragmatism”), and versions of it have spread to (and evolved in) cultural contexts as different as Italy, China, and India over the past century. Current scholarship is recognizing this pluralism and global diversity of pragmatism more and more. All of these challenges, however, can be left for future explorations of rhetorical pragmatism. With its rich diversity of topics and playful approaches to reading and theorizing, Rhetoric's Pragmatism does an admirable job of collecting Mailloux's past and present thoughts on and applications of the complex pragmatist tradition to the ephemeral realms of rhetorical practice.

editors intro

This study introduces GAMET, which was developed to help writing researchers examine the types and percentages of structural and mechanical errors in texts. GAMET is a desktop application that expands LanguageTool v3.2 through a user-friendly, graphic user interface that affords the automatic assessment of writing samples for structural and mechanical errors. GAMET is freely available, works on a variety of operating systems, affords document batch processing, and groups errors into a number of structural and mechanical error categories. This study also tests LanguageTool’s validity using hand-coded assessment for accuracy and meaningfulness on first language (L1) and second language (L2) writing corpora. The study also examines how well LanguageTool replicates human coding of structural and mechanical errors in an L1 corpus as well as assesses associations between GAMET and human ratings of essay quality. Results indicate that LanguageTool can be used to successful locate errors within text. However, while the accuracy of LanguageTool is high, the recall of errors is low, especially in terms of punctuation errors. Nevertheless, the errors coded by LanguageTool show significant correlations with human ratings of writing and grammar and mechanics errors. Overall, the results indicate that while LanguageTool fails to flag a number of errors, the errors flagged provide an accurate profile of the structural and mechanical errors made by writers.

The literature review presents the work of Kees Dorst as a framework for design thinking. The review covers three areas: Dorst’s conception of design problems and how it differs from traditional design paradigms, Dorst’s approach to design thinking and his problem-framing method, and the availability of Dorst’s method for technical communication work.

We examine 81 rhetoric and technical communication studies of “scientific controversy.” Our praxiographic analysis reveals that “scientific controversy” is not one thing but three, each staged according to a radically different ontology; yet the literature continues to handle these ontologies the same and to privilege scientists’ demarcation claims in their analysis. We conclude the modifier scientific should be abandoned entirely in controversy studies and recommend an antilogical rather than dialectical approach to controversy.

Introduction: ABET has approved changes to the EAC's Criterion 3 that will take effect for the 2019-2020 accreditation cycle. Among many changes and rearrangements is the introduction of the term “engineering judgment” as one of the competencies that students must develop to prepare for professional engineering. Literature review: However, engineering judgment is not defined in the criterion, and although it is a ubiquitous concept in the philosophy of engineering and engineering education, little empirical investigation has been undertaken into the practice of engineering judgment. And there is even less conceptual or empirical investigation into communication's role in the practice of engineering judgment. Research questions: 1. What does engineering judgment look like in practice? 2. How does the sociotechnical situation affect engineering judgment? 3. What role does rhetoric have, not only in communicating judgments, but informing them as well? 4. How can teachers and practitioners in engineering and technical communication use these findings to facilitate better judgment in the classroom and at work? Methods: Using videotape and fieldnotes, the author examines the two sequences of decision-making from a student engineering design project. An ethnomethodologically inspired framework is used to exhibit the phenomenal details of “doing” engineering judgment. Discussion/conclusion: Data reveal that engineering judgment may be fruitfully understood by educators as not just a cognitive and individual ability to apply technical knowledge, but instead a capacity of participants to rhetorically establish common cause to interrogate and reflect on the relations between technical data and situations.

Rhetoric often serves as a way to bridge important differences in the act of persuasion. As a field, rhetoric has worked to include more and more diverse voices. Much more is left to be written, however, on how this admittedly important concept of diversity affects the study and practice of rhetoric. This volume of Advances in the History of Rhetoric serves as a material trace of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric’s recent attempts to highlight diversity in and among rhetorical traditions. It collects essays from those presented at the 2018 symposium on the theme of “Diversity and Rhetorical Traditions.” All of these essays were subjected to additional review to fine-tune their arguments for this special journal issue. Each displays the perils and promises of engaging diversity as a topic within – and among – rhetorical traditions. Part of the challenge of coming to terms with difference is the confrontation with something, be it a tradition, a thinker, or a text, that challenges one’s own way of understanding the world, possible accounts of it, and our structures of reasoning and justification. Marking something as “different” is better than marking that person, text, or tradition as “wrong” or “misguided.” Coming to terms with – and even simply recognizing – difference is an accomplishment, especially when it’s not followed by dismissal or rejection. We too often default to the familiar – familiar texts and standards of judgment.These tensions over engaging differences in texts and people are the classical challenges facing comparative endeavors and the field that explores diversity among rhetorical traditions–known as comparative rhetoric – has made progress in navigating these demands. Early studies in the rhetorical practices of “non-western cultures” (a term that highlights the normative challenges of difference in naming objects of study) served as important, but imperfect, starting points. For instance, Robert T. Oliver’s 1971 book, Communication and Culture in Ancient India and China, represents one of the first sustained enquiries into the rhetoric of China and India, putatively on their own terms. It was a grand project, ambitious in its aims. Yet in his pursuit of respecting difference in these traditions from the familiar Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition, some have argued that Oliver emphasized a “deficiency model” that emphasized Chinese or Indian rhetorics’ lack of some key characteristic (according to Western models of thought) such as logic or rational argument (Lu “Studies and Development” 112). George Kennedy’s ambitious book, Comparative Rhetoric, is a useful entry in bringing a global and systematic sense to the idea of comparative rhetoric, but it could also be faulted by its placement of the Greco-Roman tradition as a normative telos lying at the end of the rhetorical progression chartered over the course of its chapters.Building on the approach enshrined in these important endeavors, other scholars continued to interrogate difference among and between rhetorical traditions by focusing on similarities among different cultural practices. There is tension, however, over how much difference scholars attribute to different rhetorical traditions situated in radically different cultural contexts in the act of comparison. Are they commensurable? Do they both practice and theorize the same thing denoted by the term “rhetoric?” Another question arises as to the difference in epistemic access to these different traditions: who has the best access to unpack what a tradition means or implies about rhetoric? Some scholars give contemporary “natives” a special value as epistemically privileged resources in understanding long-rooted traditions of thought (Lu “Studies and Development” 113–114; Mao “Studying the Chinese”). Contrary to these positions which respect the rhetorical traditions of other cultures by walling them off (to some extent) from access by outsiders, other approaches deemphasize ideas of privileged access and focus on the method of appropriating resources and concepts from one tradition for the use in or by another tradition. Underlying all of these efforts and decision points are ontological assumptions about the objects of study (Is a tradition one thing or a diverse and conflicting set of texts, ideas, and authors?) and ethical entailments about the method of reconciling difference to one’s own tradition (How much creative rereading do we allow of another tradition?). Some have argued for – or at least asserted – that traditions can be “captured” in acts of scholarly inquiry more or less accurately, and we should thereby discount scholarship that fails some criterion of accuracy (Mao “Doing Comparative Rhetoric”; Hum and Lyon). Appealing to accuracy, even if it is possible to find a way to compare one’s attempts at descriptions to the “thing” that is being described, seems to overly limit how we might creatively engage, use, and understand diverse and different traditions (Stroud “Pragmatism,” “‘Useful Irresponsibility”). These debates about respect, accuracy, and appropriation intersect in complex ways with the previously mentioned tensions over whether “rhetoric” points to the same things and practices in diverse traditions. One point of agreement among many in these debates, however, remains: the reduction of traditions – or their “rhetoric” – to essential similarities or the reading of diverse traditions as absolutely (and incommensurately) different are less-than-useful orientations to engaging difference in rhetorical traditions. Both would paralyze us, perhaps in the service of cherished values (protecting or respecting the diverse Other), and they seem to preclude a full engagement with that which differs from our ordinary traditions, concepts, and practices. Beyond these extremes lies a middle path of creative and unique approaches to how we learn from, respect, and engage others. Difference is the problematic that drives the challenges to such an endeavor, as well as the ground for what we might construct in our contemporary accounts once we submit to listening to another tradition, speaker, or text outside of our habitual haunts.In their own ways, each of the studies collected here engage and respect difference within rhetorical traditions, even though there is a radical diversity in the traditions analyzed for this endeavor. This issue has a loose organizational pattern necessitated by this energetic but sometimes frenetic frame-shifting inherent in comparative rhetoric. The first two articles explore sources of diversity and difference within the Chinese tradition. Xing Lu’s keynote address extends her previous work on classical and contemporary Chinese rhetorical practices and highlights the ways that the Chinese tradition encompassed a radical diversity of thought, from Confucian views of benevolent rhetorical practice to the Daoists’ transcendental rhetoric. As she highlights, there was a remarkable amount of diversity within each “school” of Chinese rhetorical thought, and there was much conflict among and between these schools as they sought to come to terms with difference in accounts of moral cultivation, rhetorical practice, and the normative uses of language. The second article, authored by Rya Butterfield, also explores the differences in the Chinese tradition, albeit as viewed from a contemporary thinker who was pragmatically oriented toward making sense of conflicting classical schools of thought. Hu Shih, a student of John Dewey’s at Columbia University, sought in his recovery of the classical traditions of Chinese thought resources to solve pressing Chinese and international exigencies. As Butterfield discusses, Hu is modern in his engagement with Chinese classical sources, and he draws upon or uses resources from the west (including Greece) in how he rereads classical Chinese culture in light of China’s contemporary needs. In many ways, Hu’s rhetoric represents a pragmatist approach to striking (and constructing) a balance between modernization and preservation of China’s past schools of thought and habits of living.There are good reasons for diversifying our canon of rhetoric, as well as our methods and objects of study, by reaching out to other traditions around the globe, but there is also a value to recovering sources of differences in a tradition that our histories might overlook. The next three articles explore the problematic of difference within the Greco-Roman tradition, highlighting sources of overlooked diversity within a dominant tradition in western rhetorical studies. Kathleen S. Lamp’s keynote address engages various types of public epideictic artifacts in Augustan Rome and illustrates how they function as propagandistic and educational efforts to reconcile differences within the Roman populace. Lamp does an admirable job showing the needs of rhetoric in light of the diversity of the Roman public, as well as the rich functioning of public artworks and monuments that can also shed light on how American monuments might serve similar goals. In a related spirit, Robert E. Terrill’s article appropriates a vital concept for Greek and Roman rhetoricians, imitatio, and engages modern concerns with inclusion in rhetorical pedagogy and argument among a diverse public. Terrill’s piece shows that creative engagement with traditions and their resources can add nuance to our understanding, as well as amplify their relevance to contemporary concerns in our pluralistic communities. By reimagining mimetic pedagogy within a context of diversity, Terrill shows how Greco-Roman rhetorical sources allow room for inventive encounters with diverse publics. The third piece engaging diversity within the western tradition is authored by Janet M. Atwill and Josie Portz. Their study challenges contemporary extensions – and critiques – of the western tradition that assume its relative homogeneity. By exploring in more detail Aelius Aristides’ “Regarding Sarapis,” Atwill and Portz challenge simplistic readings of the western tradition by highlighting sources of difference, diversity, tension, and intercultural encounter within its supposedly straightforward history. By “unwriting” the narrative of Western civilization with an attention to tensions and differences within Aristides as received and as could be read, the authors illustrate how the thematic of difference can yield new insights into enduring traditions in the history of rhetoric.The final two articles in this issue emphasize rhetoric’s diverse history in traditions and genres that often escape our attention. Elif Guler and Iklim Goksel make important first steps in a project that should receive more attention in our field – that of explicating Turkish rhetoric. By focusing on two key rhetorical moments in the history of Turkish rhetoric, the Orkhon inscriptions (8th century) and Atatürk’s Nutuk (1927), they mark a valuable beginning to studying the rhetoric of this complex culture. These two texts are important, as the Orkhon inscriptions date from the pre-Islamic period and Atatürk is considered the founder and first president of modern Turkey. Guler and Goksel creatively show how these different texts from historically distinct times are made to speak to common and divergent interests in Turkish history, showing the promise of studying traditions different from the standard Greco-Roman one. The final article continues this engagement with long-standing traditions outside of those in many standard histories of rhetoric: that of the Hindu tradition. Elizabeth Thornton examines important hymns within the Rigveda, in light of concepts and tools taken from later sources in Indian traditions, and finds that there is a unique rhetorical use of form and voice in this foundational Hindu text. Thornton’s piece is also of interest to those attuned to the methodological challenges of engaging texts outside of the western tradition, since she offers an interesting discussion of how decolonializing rhetorical history will commit us to (sometimes) using native theoretical resources.What all of these pieces highlight is the promise of thinking of rhetoric’s history with an emphasis on divergences, tensions caused by differences, and spaces that lie between our accustomed answers and intellectual habits. Rhetoric has always been diverse and has always had to bridge over differences in the act of persuasion; our contemporary history of rhetoric and its traditions must mirror this diversity in scholarly practices. Many talk highly of inclusion and multiculturalism, but few of us read or speak of Confucius, the Bhagavad Gita, or Bhimrao Ambedkar as rhetorically interesting parts in our histories of rhetoric’s past. There is no principled reason for this oversight, and it may be rectified slowly as the world becomes more globalized and as Asian nations such as China and India gain in economic, military, and political importance. But valuing and emphasizing diversity could lead us to pay more attention to divergences both within the rhetorical tradition many of us were trained in, as well as between this tradition and the range of other grand traditions animating other regions of the globe for millennia, well in advance of such geopolitical and economic shifts. Through resisting the urge for simplistic stories and one-dimensional critiques of cultures and their values, diversifying our histories of rhetoric promises to yield new narratives and inventive readings of well-known sources that will invigorate rhetoric as a discipline.No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

With RHM’s first publication year in the books, we stopped for a moment to consider how far we’ve come. In our first two double issues, our editors’ introductions reflected on creating a scholarly dwelling place and shaping the field’s social identity. As we were simultaneously working on this second double issue and our first special issue on Rhetoric of Public Health, forthcoming April of 2019, we were struck by the expansiveness of RHM.

The current U.S. political climate has catalyzed intense public conversations about our relationship with facts and the truth. Declarations we have entered a Post-Truth Era vie with demands for ren...

This case examines how functionalist approaches manifest culturally based on users’ contexts. The authors conduct a critical visual semiotic analysis of the race and Hispanic origin questions on the 2010 U.S. Census form, demonstrating how incongruities in design potentially harm people. This demonstrates a need for adding critical analyses to design and research and it refocuses the Society for Technical Communication’s value of promoting the public good on to design and documentation in order to fight injustice.

In the introduction to the inaugural double issue, we presented our vision for RHM’s ethos as a dwelling place (Hyde, 2004) for those doing rhetorically oriented work in health and medicine, and as an ambassadorial site for demonstrating how rhetorical study in all of its forms can inform the work of health and medicine’s wider stakeholders and practices. In this introduction, we aim to extend this call by imagining the journal as a site for building a community of practice, which, according to Etienne Wenger and Beverly Wenger-Trayner (2015), can be defined as “a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (para 1). This theory of social learning includes the three “modes of identification”1 (Wenger, 2010)—namely engagement, alignment, and imagination—through which the journal helps shape the identity of the now-emerged community of RHM scholars.

ABSTRACT Intercultural contexts introduce unique sources of complexity into our theories of rhetoric and persuasion. This study examines one of the most successful cases of intercultural rhetoric concerning religion: the case of Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk from India who came to the United States in 1893 for the World’s Parliament of Religions. He arrived as an unknown monk, but he left America years later as the nationally known face of Hinduism. Facing a tense scene in 1893 that featured a plurality of religions and American organizers and audiences who judged Hinduism as inferior to Christianity, Vivekananda enacted a unique rhetoric of pluralism to assert the value of his form of Hinduism while simultaneously respecting other religions. This study extracts from Vivekananda’s popular performance at the parliament a pluralistic style of rhetorical advocacy, one that builds upon his unique reading of Hindu religious-philosophical traditions. This pluralistic style can be used to unravel some of the theoretical issues created by invitational rhetoric’s reading of persuasion as inherently violent to disagreeing others.

ABSTRACTBy way of generative critique, this article considers the premises, potential, and consequences of object-oriented ontology (OOO) and object-oriented rhetoric (OOR). To do this, it moves through four progressive and accumulative sections: first, the primacy and necessity of meaning-formation (signification) in any meaningful ontology, and thus the rhetorical exigency of any ontology in the first place; second, the potential and pitfalls of any specifically object-oriented rhetoric; third, the function of doxa (and episteme / logos) as means to recalibrate OOO and bridge it to a proper OOR; and fourth, extending from such a doxical approach, the ethical and political consequences of OOO/OOR, which we mark as a “dark politics” for two reasons—(1) the appropriately withdrawn, but nonetheless actual, politics of OOO/OOR, and (2) how such an ontological politics, whether intended or not, has “dark” (destructive) potential for bodies and lives.

With joy and gratitude, we present the first double issue of Rhetoric of Health & Medicine (RHM), the new scholarly home for the emergent multi-and inter-disciplinary field of the same name. For us, this journal’s manifestation has been a labor of love, borne out of a commitment to advance this field for its pioneers, newcomers, members-to-be, and our various (potential) interlocutors and stakeholders. Although the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) has been recognized and named as a field relatively recently (for the most comprehensive accounts of its emergence, see Meloncon & Frost, 2015; Malkowski, Scott, & Keränen, 2016), threads of its scholarship began appearing at least as early as the 1980s (see Reynolds, this volume). Further, the field’s growth has been fueled by the coalescence of community through scholarly meetings (e.g., pre-conferences, conference panels and workshops, RHM Symposium) and special interest groups (e.g., CCCC Medical Rhetoric Standing Group, ARSTM); online forums (e.g., medicalrhetoric.com; Flux Facebook group); and a surprisingly expansive network of scholars and scholarship connected through publication venues (e.g., journal special issues, edited collections, scholarly encyclopedias). RHM is truly a crowd-sourced endeavor, and we are thankful to have been entrusted with it.

Recent research in rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) has worked to evaluate the effectiveness of patient inclusion initiatives in health policy decision-making. Extending this line of research, this article evaluates the extent to which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) patient and consumer representative programs meaningfully engage patient experiences. In so doing, this study provides directed and summative content analyses of pharmaceuticals policy deliberation at 163 FDA drug advisory committee meetings. The results indicate that the current implementation of the patient and consumer representative programs do not adequately ensure that patient experiences are being included as a part of advisory committee deliberation or subsequent pharmaceuticals policy. Additionally, the results presented support the growing concern that attempts to include patient perspectives in health policy may actually further marginalize patient populations.

Graduate programs in the sciences offer minimal support for writing, yet there is an increasing need for scientists to engage with the public and policy makers. To address this need, the authors describe an innovative, cross-disciplinary, National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded training program in rhetoric and writing for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduate students and faculty at the University of Rhode Island. The program offers a theory-driven, flexible, scalable model that could be adopted in a variety of institutional contexts.

This article examines prescription drug labels (PDLs) via an actor-network theory analysis to demonstrate current challenges with technical communication (TC) scholars’ appropriation of actor-network theory. The authors demonstrate that the complexity of the PDL network requires a more nuanced deployment of actor-network theory notions of durability and synchronicity. Specifically, the authors suggest that diachronic approaches to networks enable a more comprehensive understanding in ways that synchronic approaches cannot.

Drawing on research in systems theory and their own programmatic efforts to recognize, value, and integrate language differences in first-year composition, the authors argue for a multilevel approach for sustainable and systemic change to occur. Multilevel work functions to identify points of leverage for enacting language rights in institutional settings.

Review Article| March 01 2018 Materialism(s) in Recent Visual Rhetorical Histories: A Commentary Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression. By Cara A. Finnegan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015; pp. xiii + 240. $50.00 cloth.Posters for Peace: Visual Rhetoric and Civic Action. By Thomas W. Benson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015; pp. viii + 214. $29.95 paper.Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. By Laurie E. Gries. Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2015; pp. xxiii +311. $27.95 paper. Eric Scott Jenkins Eric Scott Jenkins Eric Scott Jenkins is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2018) 21 (1): 157–174. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0157 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Eric Scott Jenkins; Materialism(s) in Recent Visual Rhetorical Histories: A Commentary. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2018; 21 (1): 157–174. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.21.1.0157 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2018 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: REVIEW ESSAY You do not currently have access to this content.

In this article, we explore connections among rhetoric, usability studies, user-centered design, and civic engagement as core concepts for developing a systemically aware Rhetoric of Advocacy for technical communicators. We propose a model for visualizing scenarios and stakeholders that is based on the structure of atoms. The Atomic Model for Technical Communication provides a visual model for mapping projects and for framing the kind of dialog that we associate with a Rhetoric of Advocacy.

This article presents a case study using ethnographic and visual methods to investigate the framing activity of engineering students. Findings suggest students use the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis to produce the vivid images needed to frame engineering constraints. Data reveal students multimodally inducing collaboration between group members to construct images as ways to configure engineering constraints. The author argues for the usefulness of hypotyposis for understanding the framing of engineers, technical communicators, and other designers.

At a historical moment when both violence and its mass mediation proliferate, this essay takes as its exigence the reinforcing and troubling relationships uniting violence, image, and vision. It offers rhetorical looking as a pedagogical strategy designed to undermine violence through visual engagement, and it focuses on the atrocity image—a photographic depiction of human-on-human violence—as both a site of violence and a site for intervening in violence. Comprising four interlocking and reciprocal tactics that operate nonlinearly, rhetorical looking performs slow looking, a mode of perception that moves beyond reception and critique to attend to a photograph’s image content and to the perceptual habits by which that content is evoked. By reflecting on its own processes—revealing agency and answerability in looking—rhetorically looking potentially fosters actions that respond to rather than dismiss violence.

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Bhimrao Ambedkar, famous for being a political ally to the “untouchable” castes and a political sparring partner to Gandhi in India’ss struggle for independence, is also well-known for his public advocacy for Buddhism. Starting in the 1930s, Ambedkar began arguing that he and his fellow untouchables should convert from Hinduism to escape caste oppression. Ambedkar was also influenced by his teacher at Columbia University, John Dewey. Religious conversion transformed in Ambedkar’s rhetorical strategy to a meliorative program. His rhetoric of conversion operated in three stages: reflection on one’s religious orientation, renunciation of a problematic orientation, and conversion to a more useful orientation. This study explicates the final phase of Ambedkar’s conversion rhetoric, the stage he only expands upon in his oratorical activity during his last decade of life. His rhetorical appeals to convert to Buddhism are found to be performative in nature and to be imbued with a Deweyan ethos of religious rhetoric as an emancipatory device for individuals and communities.

Book Review| June 01 2017 Signs of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s Signs of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s. By Nathan Stormer. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014; pp. 256. $69.95 cloth. S. Scott Graham S. Scott Graham University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (2): 372–380. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0372 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation S. Scott Graham; Signs of Pathology: U.S. Medical Rhetoric on Abortion, 1800s–1960s. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2017; 20 (2): 372–380. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.2.0372 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

As a scholar who works at the intersections of technical communication and rhetoric of science, I like to think I know a little bit about effective approaches to communicating technical information. For over a decade, I've been a happy member of a seemingly productive research discipline devoted to understanding how best to communicate scientific and technical information to clients, stakeholders, employers, funders, and the general public. I am, of course, not alone in these endeavors and my work benefits substantially from the efforts of my many colleagues in the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing and the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine. Now, given this background, imagine my surprise when one of my colleagues forwarded me a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine decrying the state of science communication research in America. Indeed, I was shocked and saddened to see the report call for "building a coherent science communication research enterprise" with the obvious implication that no such enterprise currently exists (p. 74).

This article reports the background, methods, and results of a 7-year project (2007–2013) that assessed the writing of undergraduate business majors at a business college. It describes specific issues with writing assessment and how this study attempted to overcome them, largely through a situated assessment approach. The authors provide the results of more than 3,700 assessments of nearly 2,000 documents during the course of the study, reporting on scores overall and for each rubric criterion and comparing the scores of English and business assessors. They also investigate how two curricular interventions were evaluated through this assessment project. Although overall, the writing of these business majors was assessed as good, results showed noteworthy differences between the scores of English and business assessors and a noteworthy impact for one of the curricular interventions, an effort to improve the material conditions of writing instruction. The authors conclude by discussing some next steps and implications of this project.

Although writing centers in Germany are among the oldest and fastest growing outside of North America, scholarship produced within them remains largely unknown outside national borders due to challenges inherent in translingual research. This article helps remedy this gap by rendering accessible debates in ‘writing studies’ (‘Schreibwissenschaft’) in German-speaking countries, where a number of projects are underway to define the field at this moment of its maturation. By focusing on one such initiative in Germany, Stephanie Dreyfürst and Nadja Sennewald’s edited collection Schreiben: Grundlagentexte zur Theorie, Didaktik und Beratung (Writing: Foundational Texts on Theory, Pedagogy, and Consultations) (2014), I use the monograph as a case study for investigating larger scholarly conversations about the state of writing studies in the region. In doing so, I propose a new genre for transnational research—the translingual review. More thickly descriptive than the book review, the translingual review situates the edited or authored monograph within local disciplinary and institutional contexts. This particular translingual review adopts a comparative framework, examining how German-language scholarship extends Anglo-American research in innovative ways, particularly in its uses of writing process research.

• Background: Researchers have been working towards better understanding differences in professional disciplinary writing (e.g., Ewer & Latorre, 1969; Hu & Cao, 2015; Hyland, 2002; Hyland & Tse, 2007) for decades. Recently, research has taken important steps towards understanding disciplinary variation in student writing. Much of this research is corpus-based and focuses on lexico-grammatical features in student writing as captured in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus and the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). The present study extends this work by analyzing lexical and cohesion differences among disciplines in MICUSP. Critically, we analyze not only linguistic differences in macro-disciplines (science and engineering), but also in micro-disciplines within these macro-disciplines (biology, physics, industrial engineering, and mechanical engineering).\n• Literature Review: Hardy and Römer (2013) used a multidimensional analysis to investigate linguistic differences across four macro-disciplines represented in MICUSP. Durrant (2014, in press) analyzed vocabulary in texts produced by student writers in the BAWE corpus by discipline and level (year) and disciplinary differences in lexical bundles. Ward (2007) examined lexical differences within micro-disciplines of a single discipline.\n• Research Questions: The research questions that guide this study are as follows:\n1. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between science and engineering student writing? 2. Are there significant lexical and cohesive differences between micro-disciplines within science and engineering student writing?\n• Research Methodology: To address the research questions, student-produced science and engineering texts from MICUSP were analyzed with regard to lexical sophistication and textual features of cohesion. Specifically, 22 indices of lexical sophistication calculated by the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (TAALES; Kyle & Crossley, 2015) and 38 cohesion indices calculated by the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (TAACO; Crossley, Kyle, & McNamara, 2016) were used. These features were then compared both across science and engineering texts (addressing Research Question 1) and across micro-disciplines within science and engineering (biology and physics, industrial and mechanical engineering) using discriminate function analyses (DFA).\n• Results: The DFAs revealed significant linguistic differences, not only between student writing in the two macro-disciplines but also between the micro-disciplines. Differences in classification accuracy based on students’ years of study hovered at about 10%. An analysis of accuracies of classification by paper type found they were similar for larger and smaller sample sizes, providing some indication that paper type was not a confounding variable in classification accuracy.\n• Discussion: The findings provide strong support that macro-disciplinary and micro-disciplinary differences exist in student writing in these MICUSP samples and that these differences are likely not related to student level or paper type. These findings have important implications for understanding disciplinary differences. First, they confirm previous research that found the vocabulary used by different macro-disciplines to be “strikingly diverse” (Durrant, 2015), but they also show a remarkable diversity of cohesion features. The findings suggest that the common understanding of the STEM disciplines as “close” bears reconsideration in linguistic terms. Second, the lexical and cohesion differences between micro-disciplines are large enough and consistent enough to suggest that each micro-discipline can be thought of as containing a unique linguistic profile of features. Third, the differences discerned in the NLP analysis are evident at least as early as the final year of undergraduate study, suggesting that students at this level already have a solid understanding of the conventions of the disciplines of which they are aspiring to be members. Moreover, the differences are relatively homogeneous across levels, which confirms findings by Durrant (2015) but, importantly, extends these findings to include cohesion markers.\n• Conclusions: The findings from this study provide evidence that macro-disciplinary and micro-disciplinary differences at the linguistic level exist in student writing, not only in lexical use but also in text cohesion. A number of pedagogical applications of writing analytics are proposed based on the reported findings from TAALES and TAACO. Further studies using different corpora (e.g., BAWE) or purpose assembled corpora are suggested to address limitations in the size and range of text types found within MICUSP. This study also points the way toward studies of disciplinary differences using NLP approaches that capture data which goes beyond the lexical and cohesive features of text, including the use of part-of-speech tags, syntactic parsing, indices related to syntactic complexity and similarity, rhetorical features, or more advanced cohesion metrics (latent semantic analysis, latent Dirichlet allocation, Word2Vec approaches).

How we argue for, create, and mobilize around writing and rhetoric majors will continue to shape our field’s disciplinarity in crucial ways, including our recognition, resources, and relationships. The range of such majors and their institutional contexts, and the disparate field-level efforts to track and build consensus around them, generate more questions than answers, leaving the turn to disciplinarity an open question. This article proposes techne —rhetoric as the productive art of enacting knowledge—as a conceptual tool for identifying connections across writing and rhetoric majors. Such points of connection can, in turn, serve to guide efforts for supporting and building shared resources for majors, and to enable a contingent and adaptive understanding of our field’s identity and (potential) disciplinarity.

Drawing from their experiences teaching two different activism-focused writing courses, the authors consider the benefits, pitfalls, and potential dangers of activist writing pedagogy. Scott provides a retrospective on a rhetoric and writing course focused on the employment of digital rhetoric, while Katherine reflects on an activist-rhetoric course that culminated in the execution of an annual Take Back the Night rally. Despite the risk of “politicizing the classroom,” the authors argue that activist pedagogy, when thoughtfully implemented, can help students (no matter their political leanings) learn how to write, act, and think—necessary skills for a democratic society. Yet, while both authors support activist-focused rhetoric and writing courses, they also examine the ethical, pedagogical, occupational, and even legal issues that might arise from teaching such courses.

In an era of normative austerity in US higher education, composition is being transformed by budget cuts, retrenchment, and marketization. Nevertheless, the field’s scholarship continues to compartmentalize questions concerning the material terms of practice away from questions of curricular philosophy. Because composition has not developed a deliberate, sustained inquiry into how scholarship and teaching are being shaped by the perpetual crisis of austerity economics, we are compelled to adopt myopic and reactionary stances toward our work. As a means of subverting composition’s perpetual crisis, Scott advocates disciplinary work that not only imagines new, globally focused, and politically conscious curricula but also actively pursues the creation of the work and learning environments that are necessary for their successful realization.

The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, by Deborah Brandt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 196 pages. $29.99 (paper).Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in Ameri...

Idea generation is an important component of most major theories of writing. However, few studies have linked idea generation in writing samples to assessments of writing quality or examined links between linguistic features in a text and idea generation. This study uses human ratings of idea generation, such as idea fluency, idea flexibility, idea originality, and idea elaboration, to analyze the extent to which idea generation relates to human judgments of essay quality in a corpus of college student essays. In conjunction with this analysis, linguistic features extracted from the essays are used to develop a predictive model of idea generation to further understand relations between the language features in an essay and the idea generation scores assigned to that essay. The results indicate that essays rated as containing a greater number of ideas that were flexible, original, and elaborated were judged to be of higher quality. Two of these features (elaboration and originality) were significant predictors of essay quality scores in a regression analysis that explained 33% of the variance in human scores. The results also indicate that idea generation is strongly linked to language features in essays. Specifically, the use of unique multiword units, more difficult words, semantic but not lexical similarities between paragraphs, and fewer word repetitions explained 80% of the variance in human scores of idea generation. These results have implications for writing theories and writing practice.

The Spokane Community College English Department received the 2015 Diana Hacker Award for Fostering Student Success. In this report, the authors describe the features of their award-winning program.

On October 22, 2012, six scientists and one civil servant were convicted of manslaughter for failing to properly warn the people of L’Aquila, Italy, of an impending earthquake that resulted in over 300 deaths and 1,500 injuries. This article investigates a key event leading up to this conviction: An emergency meeting of scientists, civil servants, and politicians to determine whether or not an advanced warning should be issued to the residents of L’Aquila. The following investigation of this emergency meeting uses functional stasis analysis to identify the primary breakdown in deliberation that ultimately led to a message of calm and reassurance immediately prior to the devastating earthquake. The results provide insights into not only the events in L’Aquila but also broader issues of risk, uncertainty, fact, and value in science-policy deliberation.

This study examines links between essay quality and text elaboration and text cohesion. For this study, 35 students wrote two essays (on two different prompts) and for each, were given 15 minutes to elaborate on their original text. An expert in discourse comprehension then modified the original and elaborated essays to increase cohesion, resulting in a 2 (prompt) x 2 (original content, elaborated content) x 2 (original cohesion, improved cohesion) design. Expert raters scored the essays for overall quality and text coherence. In terms of overall essay quality, increasing text content (i.e., elaboration) and improving cohesion both led to significant gains in expert judgments of writing quality, and a combination of both elaboration and improved cohesion led to increased scores over increased cohesion alone. Judgments of text coherence were increased by improved cohesion (but not elaboration); and a combination of both elaboration and improved cohesion led to higher human ratings of coherence in comparison to the original and elaborated versions. The results have important implications for writing theories, writing success, writing pedagogy, and standardized testing.

The controversy about vaccines and autism presents an opportunity to explore how science is constructed in public debates about health and medicine. Rhetors who argue against a connection between vaccines and autism insist that their opponents are irrational, while rhetors arguing for a link insist that their fears are rational indeed. This analysis poses an alternative way of understanding the vaccines-autism controversy, suggesting that it is partly fueled by differing perceptions of the boundary between science and non-science. Using the concept of boundary work as a lens, this article uses generative rhetorical criticism to examine artifacts within the controversy and explores rhetorical constructions of scientific evidence, the forum of scientific discourse, scientific expertise, and the scientific capability. The findings suggest that rhetors’ awareness of disciplinary boundaries is just as important in the construction and reception of their arguments as their knowledge of scientific facts and principles.

This essay engages the understudied Indian reformer, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), in order to explicate pragmatism’s influence in non-Western rhetorical situations. By charting the influence of John Dewey on Ambedkar as a student at Columbia University, this study explores Ambedkar’s translation of pragmatism into an Indian context filled with religiously underwritten injustice. His form of pragmatist rhetoric focuses on conversion as a solution to the problems of untouchables in India, and represents a version of pragmatist rhetoric that is revolutionary in form and effect. Expanding our knowledge of how persuasion relates to religious conversion, I argue that Ambedkar constructs and employs a pragmatist rhetoric of reorientation. Honed by Ambedkar in the pluralistic context of India, this process is composed of three distinct steps: evaluation of existing religious commitments, renunciation of harmful worldviews, and conversion to beneficial alternative religious orientations.

K6015, a South Korean firm seeking to commercialize its magnet technology in the US market, entered a technology commercialization training program structured as a competition. Through this program, K6015 (and others in the program) used several genres to progressively interest different sets of stakeholders. To understand how K6015 applied these genres, we analyze this case study in terms of interessement, a concept from actor-network theory, and standing sets of transformations, a related concept from workplace writing studies in which enacting a set of genres entails a controlled, progressive transformation of arguments. We examine the entire competition process, using K6015 and three other competitors to illustrate this process and to examine rhetorical transformations responding to different criteria. In enacting these standing sets of transformations, K6015 and other competitors transformed their innovations into commercialized technologies–and transformed themselves from innovators into entrepreneurs. Finally, we discuss implications for understanding entrepreneurship rhetorically.

This study builds on extant replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) research to posit and examine correlations between writing center intervention and improved student writing. The authors review three decades of quantitative writing center scholarship and provide data resulting from four writing center assessments. These assessments include two pre-and post-intervention studies and two intervention/ non-intervention studies. Results are mixed. The pre-and post-intervention studies show statistically significant improvements in student writing. The intervention/non-intervention studies show considerable to limited improvements in student writing. Possible reasons for these results are discussed, including study protocols, self-selection bias, and the difficulty of imposing controls. Impacts on the practice of one writing center are shared, and suggestions for further research are provided.

Five scholars who study the rhetoric of health and medicine share our diverse perspectives on the Ebola outbreak that began in West Africa in March 2014. Using a unique multi-vocal approach, we raise questions for future research on the rhetoric of vaccines and vaccination, such as the role of visualizations in risk perception, the individuation of blame, the role of genres in vaccine development, and the rhetorical presence of material conditions that promote disease transmission. Our overall goal is to initiate scholarly conversation about Ebola specifically and about outbreaks and vaccine development generally. Through our conversation, we explore subjects such as risk perception and data visualization, individuation of blame, genre systems, and the materiality of outbreaks. Together, our analyses suggest that vaccines, while a highly effective means of disease prevention, can also function rhetorically to draw attention away from the broad array of material and socioeconomic conditions that lead from a single infection to an outbreak. But by investigating what is revealed, what is concealed, who is blamed, and who is exonerated in discourses about vaccines and outbreaks, rhetoricians can contribute to the development of effective—and ethical—medical and communicative interventions.

The gendered rhetorical constraints imposed on female writers in mid-nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals are challenged by the representations of letter writing in Susan Warner’s  The Wide, Wide World and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, popular mid-century novels. By investigating imaginative literature by women as a site of women’s rhetoric, feminist historians of rhetoric can recognize that the battlefield for expanding women’s rhetorical agency in the mid-nineteenth century is not primarily located at the division between domestic and public realms—the site emphasized in current histories of women’s rhetoric—but is interior, where letter-writing rhetorics seek to police habits of mind.

In this rhetorical analysis based on the Foucaultian constructs of power in medicine, specifically the docile body, the medical gaze, and health consumerism, the authors examine ways the pharmaceutical industry used web-based direct-to-consumer advertising, from 2007-2010, to craft interactions between U.S. consumers and physicians in ways that changed the traditional patient-physician relationship in order to drive sales of brand-name therapeutic drugs. We demonstrate how the pharmaceutical industry uses its websites to script power relationships between patients and physicians in order to undermined physician authority and empower patients to become healthcare consumers. We speculate that this shift minimizes or even erases dialogue, diagnosis, and consideration of medical expertise. We suggest that if it is important to uphold values of the modern version of the hippocratic oath, it may be necessary to provide physicians and patients additional parts in the script so that medical decisions are made based on sound science, knowledge, and experience.

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the ongoing debate between pluralistic and monistic approaches to dealing with critical disagreement. I return to the theory of world hypotheses advanced by Stephen C. Pepper, an understudied figure in aesthetics and pragmatism, to enunciate a version of pluralism that centers on the nature of critical evidence and its functioning in social settings of argument. I argue that Pepper's expansive philosophy holds interesting implications for what can be called the metaphysics of criticism, a point missed by partisans of standard views of pluralism and monism. Building on his analysis of equally autonomous (but noncommensurable) world hypotheses, this study enunciates an explicit notion of rhetorical pluralism that goes beyond simple relativism. This account can be labeled “evidentiary pluralism,” since it internalizes standards for evaluation to specific worldviews and recognizes their changeable nature in the context of critical disagreement.

ABSTRACT Kant clearly valued freedom in his moral philosophy, but he also seemed to distance the moral realm from the activities of rhetoric. This article challenges the long-standing concept of Kant as anti-rhetoric, complicating the view that rhetoric had no place in Kant’s philosophy. After examining the centrality of freedom as autonomy in Kant’s moral and political philosophy, this article carefully dissects Kant’s pronouncements on rhetoric in his various works. The conclusion reached is that Kant advances a bifurcated notion of rhetoric, with some uses of communicative means being characterized by freedom-restricting features and other employments foregrounding autonomy-enhancing aspects. This latter sense of communication is what can be identified as Kant’s educative rhetoric given its focus on preserving and promoting the freedom of both rhetor and audience.

The design of interactive applications for online communication is an ongoing area of research within technical communication. This study reports on the development of an interactive sea-level rise (SLR) viewer, a data visualization tool that communicates about the potential effects of SLR along coastlines. It describes the formative evaluation of a location-specific SLR viewer created via integral stakeholder engagement. Participants performed a series of tasks, answered questions about the tool's usability and communicative effectiveness, and made suggestions for ways to improve its application to desired tasks. The authors discuss the implications of this study for visual risk communication and make recommendations for others developing similar interactive data visualization tools with audience input.

At the 2014 Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Tech pre-conference at the National Communication Association, the "Expertise and Data in the Articulation of Risk several papers concerned with how risk is and how publics respond to those articulations of risk.E provided different perspectives and cases that concerned why communication of complex scientific and medical information about risks seems to fail and some insights into how to better communicate risks.Here we provide a short overview of each paper's argument, central findings, and recommendations.We then

Research problem: As a follow up to an earlier article, this study compares Fortune 500 website homepage design in 2013 with the results of a similar study in 2008, providing an updated overview of homepage design practice that reflects the many technological advances that have influenced web design during the intervening period. The findings are useful for those wanting to know the state of homepage design in 2013, whether as current practitioners or researchers. Research questions: (1) What are the current homepage design practices of Fortune 500 companies? (2) What are the current Web 2.0 technology practices of Fortune 500 companies? (3) What changes in homepage design have occurred for Fortune 500 companies? (4) What are the differences in homepage design and Web 2.0 technology practices between the 100 largest and 100 smallest Fortune 500 companies? and (5) Is homogeneity in design increasing amongst Fortune 500 homepages? Literature review: Three key areas guided my analysis of homepages. (1) Usability research, which suggests guidelines for design based on aggregated performance of users, such as locating the search box in the upper right and for directing mobile users to an alternate site designed for mobile access. (2) Design practice studies, which suggest guidelines for design based on aggregated analyses of websites, such as having links to employment information and investor information on the homepage. (3) Design patterns: libraries of patterns to provide designers with responses to design problems, such as using collapsible panels or module tabs to reveal and conceal content on a page. These libraries also provide guidelines for design, such as using fat menus or sitemap footers to structure navigation. Methodology: Using content analysis, every Fortune 500 homepage in 2013 was analyzed for 68 major design elements in these categories--navigation, content links, support for specific types of users, visual design, multimedia, and web 2.0-and the results were analyzed. Results and conclusions: The homepages displayed greater homogeneity in design than a similar study in 2008. Overall, 12 elements-(1) corporate logo in the top left of the page; (2) link to an “about us” section containing company information; (3) link to information for those seeking employment; (4) horizontally oriented main navigation; (5) link for contacting the company; (6) link for information for investors; (7) link for terms of use or legal disclaimers; (8) link to privacy information; (9) link for news or a press room; (10) multimedia use; (11) links that do not appear on the page initially, requiring interaction; (12) search box, located in the upper right of page-were present on 80% or more homepages, and 6 elements-(1) web 2.0 features; (2) an image that can be clicked on as a focal point; (3) link to a sitemap; (4) link to Twitter; (5) link to Facebook; and (6) dropdown or pulldown menu-were present on 50% to 79% of pages. Between 2008 and 2013, many practices have changed, such as increases in page length, the overall number of links, the number of links to social media sites, and the number of sites with search boxes. Certain design choices-such as mobile options for sites, links to social media sites, and links to site maps-were more prevalent in the largest 100 companies than the smallest 100 companies.

Research problem: Examines how Korean entrepreneurs in an entrepreneurship program revised their English-language slide decks for their competitive presentations (“pitches”) by reusing content from professional communication genres, including their own documents and feedback from potential stakeholders in their target markets. Research question: As entrepreneurs learn to pitch ideas to unfamiliar markets, how do they revise their slide decks by reusing content from other professional communication genres? Specifically, what strategies do they follow when reusing content? Literature review: The professional communication literature demonstrates that reuse tends to take place in documentation cycles where documents are set in interaction with each other and that reuse itself involves rhetorical choices. Yet such reuse strategies have not been examined in existing studies of entrepreneurial pitches in marketing and technology commercialization. Methodology: In an exploratory qualitative study, researchers textually analyzed 14 sets of five related document genres in the archives of an entrepreneurship program. These genres represented a full cycle of activity: application to the program, initial pitches, initial feedback from program personnel, detailed feedback from representative stakeholders in the target market, and revised pitches. Interviews and surveys of program personnel further contextualize the data. Results and conclusions: Entrepreneurs reused content from professional communication genres, including those that they had generated as well as those generated by market stakeholders. However, reuse went simply beyond accepting and copying feedback; as they learned to make their pitch arguments, these entrepreneurs had to weigh this feedback and engage with it critically. This reuse can be characterized as Accepting (repeating verbatim or in close paraphrase); Continuing (extending lines of argument); and Resisting (rebutting lines of argument). These findings suggest that entrepreneurs need all three strategies as they refine their pitches for their target markets.

This article pilots a study in statistical genre analysis, a mixed-method approach for (a) identifying conventional responses as a statistical distribution within a big data set and (b) assessing which deviations from the conventional might be more effective for changes in audience, purpose, or context. The study assesses pharmaceutical sponsor presentations at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug advisory committee meetings. Preliminary findings indicate the need for changes to FDA conflict-of-interest policies.

Faculty and writing center tutors bring expertise to writing as practice and process. Yet at many institutions, the two groups work in relative isolation, missing opportunities to learn from each other. In this article, I describe a faculty development initiative in a multidisciplinary writing program that brings together new faculty and experienced undergraduate tutors to workshop instructors’ comments on first-year writing. The purpose of these workshops is to assist faculty in crafting inquiry-driven written responses that pave the way for collaborative faculty-student conferences. By bringing together scholarly conversations on tutor expertise and the role of faculty comments in student learning, I argue for the value of extending partnerships between writing centers and programs. Such accounts are important to the field for challenging what Grutsch McKinney (2013) calls the “writing center grand narrative,” which limits the scope of writing center work by imagining centers primarily as “comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” to the exclusion of lived realities (p. 3). In this case, I describe a writing center where tutors bring their expertise outside the center and into the faculty office, consulting in small groups with faculty with the aim of enriching the quality of instructor feedback in first-year seminars.

To write on William James, you must become like William James. By this, I mean that one must embody his sort of pluralistic attitude and literary artfulness to do justice to this pragmatist thinker...

Background: Online, informative videos are a popular genre of technical communication but little information is available for instructors to integrate the genre into technical communication courses. Research questions: (1) What are the logistics, considerations, and problems encountered when assigning authentic informative videos in introductory technical writing service courses? (2) Is an authentic informative video project in introductory technical writing service courses an effective learning assignment from the students' perspectives? Situating the case: Video has been discussed in technical communication literature since the 1970s and our discussion of video parallels technology development making video production and viewing possible for mainstream consumers. Recently, a revitalization of interest in video (particularly since 2012) reflects widespread adoption of smart phones with video recording capabilities, preinstalled and relatively simple video production applications on computers, video-sharing websites (YouTube), and high-speed internet connections enabling rapid video downloads by viewers. Yet, low-cost and easy-to-use communication technologies are often associated with the idiosyncratic application of design features and often do not transfer into effective communication. We often claim that technical communication programs are well situated to take a “leadership role” in mastering a new communication technology but our instruction of video has not kept pace with the rapidly evolving technology nor is it necessarily consistent with our own research findings. How this case was studied: In this experience report, I took a teacher-researcher role and triangulated my personal observations with a student-perception questionnaire and other student reflections on the assignment. About the case: The informative video project was used in a junior-level, introductory technical communication service course. The informative video assignment was an experiential learning assignment in which students worked in small teams to develop “real-world” communications for a peer audience. The learning objectives emphasized in the project include genre analysis, audience analysis, scriptwriting, visual-verbal communication, video production and technology, and project management and teamwork. Results: The logistics and considerations for developing informative videos in technical communication courses are discussed and student feedback reveals that this assignment was particularly useful for teaching audience analysis, technology skills, verbal-visual synergy of communication channels, and teamwork. Conclusions: Informative videos are a challenging project but offer a unique opportunity to examine audience analysis and teach verbal-visual parallelism. Furthermore, the equipment and production software are no longer barriers to assigning the project in technical communication courses.

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Research problem: The question: How Korean entrepreneurs in an entrepreneurship program revised their slide decks for their presentations (“pitches”) in response to professional communication genres representing feedback from potential stakeholders in their target markets is examined. Research questions: As entrepreneurs learn to pitch ideas to unfamiliar markets, how do they revise their slide decks for their pitches when interacting with other professional communication genres that represent the concerns of market stakeholders? Specifically, what changes do entrepreneurs make to the claims, evidence, and complexity of arguments in their pitches? Literature review: The professional communication literature demonstrates that the revision process tends to take place in documentation cycles where documents are set in interaction with each other. Yet such revision processes are not studied in detail in existing studies of entrepreneurial pitches in marketing and technology commercialization. Methodology: In this exploratory qualitative study, researchers textually analyzed 14 sets of five related document genres in the archives of an entrepreneurship program. These genres represented a full cycle of activity: application to the program, initial pitches, initial feedback from program personnel, detailed feedback from representative stakeholders in the target market, and revised pitches. Interviews and surveys of program personnel further contextualize the data. Results and conclusions: Entrepreneurs revised their claims and evidence based on their dialogue with their target market. Some of the entrepreneurs altered their slides to make more complex arguments rebutting stakeholders' concerns. These findings suggest that entrepreneurs engage in dialogue with their target markets, but their engagement tends to be guided by tacit, situated experience rather than through an explicit, systematized approach.

AbstractHow we interact with others is a vital part of the rhetorical practices of the sort of democracy the pragmatists hoped to create. This article examines growing evidence of the threat posed by partisanship to our attempts to critically analyze the claims of others, represented by “partisan perfect reasoning”—the habit of analyzing the claims of others in a fashion that preserves the presupposed reasonableness of our original positions. One path for dealing with the risk of such truncated habits of reasoning is the path of skepticism, represented by the “ironism” of Richard Rorty. This article constructs another possible path, the path of affirming all claims as a starting point for respectful dialogue and argument. Using the concepts of anekāntavāda and syādvāda from the Jaina tradition, this article argues that we can mitigate partisan perfect reasoning and foster respect for our conversational others through a novel orientation to rhetorical activity.

ABSTRACTThis study represents a detailed inquiry into the rhetoric of Jainism, an understudied religious-philosophical tradition that arose among Hinduism and Buddhism on the Indian subcontinent. Exploring the unique use of pluralism in Jaina authors such as Mahāvīra and Haribhadra, I advance the concept of engaged rhetorical pluralism to account for the argumentative use of pluralism to promote Jaina views. This concept is linked to Jainism’s theory of multiperspectivism (anekāntavāda) as an orientation toward one’s rhetorical activities in contexts of disagreement. Highlighting the controversies surrounding the relationship between Jaina tolerance and intellectual nonviolence, this study uses the concept of anekāntavāda to ground a pluralism of often contradictory critical claims made by those studying rhetorical phenomena from other cultures. Thus, anekāntavāda both describes the engaged pluralism evident in important Jaina rhetors and serves as a source of methodological guidance for scholars involved in comparative rhetoric and its inevitable situations of interpretative disagreement.

The viral video Kony 2012 is the point of departure for our argument that composition’s public turn is marked by a concern with discursive features and digitized forms at the expense of attention to historical context and human consequences. The alternative we propose, critical materialist pedagogy, reconnects discursive and digitized arguments to the extradiscursive interests they serve. By urging teachers and students to “think through the body,” this critical materialist pedagogy tests fetishized appearances against lived reality—and reconnects public rhetoric to embodied examples of struggle and material potential for creative action.

Book Review| June 01 2014 Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming. By Nathan Crick. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010; pp. xii + 224. $49.95 cloth. Scott Welsh Scott Welsh Appalachian State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2014) 17 (2): 361–363. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.2.0361 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 Scott Welsh; Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 June 2014; 17 (2): 361–363. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.2.0361 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This study identifies multiple profiles of successful essays via a cluster analysis approach using linguistic features reported by a variety of natural language processing tools. The findings from the study indicate that there are four profiles of successful writers for the samples analyzed. These four profiles are linguistically distinct from one another and demonstrate that expert human raters examine a number of different linguistic features in a variety of combinations when assessing writing proficiency and assigning high scores to independent essays (regardless of the scoring rubric considered). The writing styles in the four clusters can be described as action and depiction style, academic style, accessible style, and lexical style. The study provides empirical evidence that successful writing cannot be defined simply through a single set of predefined features, but that, rather, successful writing has multiple profiles. While these profiles may overlap, each profile is distinct.

This study examines students’ use of pseudonymous writing on blogs as a means of engaging with course material in college-level courses. The authors analyse qualitative data from course evaluations from over 40 sections of 13 different courses (N = 1011 students), which were offered between 2005 and 2010 on two different campuses in the northeastern United States. Findings reveal that students perceive improvement in their peer interactions and class participation when provided with the opportunity to further class discussions on class blogs under the guise of a pseudonym. The authors contend that using semi-public blogs as an alternative forum for discussion encourages students to read actively, improve their written communication skills, and engage in dialogue and meaning-making.

Research problem: The project management of virtual teams differs from that of traditional ones. Traditional project risks, such as complexity, the uncertainty of factors influencing the project, and the high interdependency of project tasks must be managed alongside changed temporal, geographic, and cultural dimensions. Only a few studies have investigated the effect of critical technological issues, such as wrong tool selection or limited internet access on performance as well as team and team member satisfaction in virtual work settings. Research questions: How do critical technology-related issues concerning the selection and use of web-based tools influence the performance and satisfaction of virtual project teams? Literature review: Instead of categorizing virtual teams as a type of team that contrasts with traditional or face-to-face teams, the focus has shifted to virtualness as a characteristic present in all teams. Project teamwork is often integrated in university degree programs in order to prepare students appropriately for real-life projects. While these student teams are often not geographically spread across countries, they have a high degree of virtualness because of their diverse team composition, the necessity for working at different places, and the limited face-to-face meeting opportunities. Performance, effectiveness, and satisfaction are central issues in the evaluation and measurement of project teams: Team performance is often evaluated on the basis of acceptance of a specified output by a customer. Through specific mediating processes, team performance can alternatively be assessed by inquiring the team's perception on their performance. Effectiveness can be defined as the achievement of clear goals and objectives and it is often related to the team's performance. Finally, satisfaction can be defined as having three dimensions-satisfaction with the team, the satisfaction of meeting customer needs, and general satisfaction with extrinsic rewards and work. Technology use is substantial for distributed teamwork and can be assessed by the extent to which it supports communication, collaboration, and project-management tasks. Methodology: Fifteen teams were observed and interviewed over a two-year period. The resulting data were analyzed using a Grounded Theory approach, which revealed how the selection and use of tools for communication, collaboration, and project management in the different project activities influenced the team's performance. Results and conclusions: Our results contribute to practice by providing a number of guidelines for the management of virtual teams as well as knowledge required by companies wishing to launch projects with virtual teams. Differing performances of teams can, in many cases, be attributed to such conditions as: internet availability and bandwidth; lack of training for certain tools; the selection and appropriate use of tools; integrated tool support for task management; as well as the promotion of transparency about progress made. It was found that restrictions in internet access of even a single member within a team limited the team's technological choices, which affected the team's performance.

This article draws on qualitative research conducted as a part of a writing program assessment to examine the relationship between assessment, valuation, and the economics of first-year writing. It argues that the terms of labor in first-year writing complicate practices of valuation and the processes of consensus building that have become common in assessment models. It explains that if assessment is to be situated at a site and represent the work that happens there faithfully, it needs to account for how power, the economics of staffing, and differing ways of thinking about writing education necessitate struggle and the acknowledgment and representation of dissonance.

Book Review| September 01 2013 No Citizen Left Behind No Citizen Left Behind. By Meira Levinson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012; pp. 388. $29.95 cloth. Brian Scott Amsden Brian Scott Amsden Indiana University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2013) 16 (3): 603–607. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.3.0603 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Brian Scott Amsden; No Citizen Left Behind. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2013; 16 (3): 603–607. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.3.0603 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Computer-assisted translation (aka machine translation) is on the fast track to becoming a utility. Translation will automatically become part of everything we do. Computers, websites, touch screen devices, in-car navigation systems, kiosks in public places, ATMs, airline self-service terminals -- basically any consumer-facing graphic user interface -- will include a "translate" button. In fact, the beta version of the Android operating system includes just that in the latest rendition of the Chrome browser. That's just the start of things to come. Machine translation will soon be ubiquitous!

Battle Linesoffers a compelling game experience that allows student-players to develop rhetorical, community-building, and digital literacies, crossing boundaries between academic and ludic practices. The game was test-run for the first time in a class of undergraduate students at UT Austin over the course of four weeks early in the spring semester of 2012.

This essay argues that rhetoricians of health of medicine should continue to carve out an expansive focus on the exigencies, functions, and impacts of health-related discourse; attend to the movement, surrounding networks, and ecologies of this discourse; and work with other scholars/researchers, both inside and outside disciplinary rhetorical studies, toward a variety of goals.

This article uses data obtained from a 2-year study—observation, survey, written- and verbal-artifact analysis, and interviews—of an interdisciplinary organization of pain management professionals to illustrate the analytic advantages of Mol and Latour's multiple-ontologies theories over incommensurability theory in understanding interdisciplinary practice. We demonstrate that pain science and medicine encompass a variety of practices that transcend disciplinary boundaries in ways not accounted for with incommensurability theory. After explicating multiple ontology theory and illustrating its analytic potential, we conclude by recommending a postplural model for inquiry into rhetoric of science.

Stories That Speak to Us —a digital collection of scholarly, curated exhibits—is designed to investigate literacy narratives from a number of perspectives: to explore why they are important, what information they carry about reading and composing, why they might be valuable, not only for scholars and teachers, but also for librarians, community literacy workers, individual citizens and groups of people. As the editors and authors collectively suggest, literacy narratives are powerfully rhetorical linguistic accounts through which people fashion their lives; make sense of their world, indeed construct the realities in which they live.

As a composition historian working with nineteenth-century American literacy artifacts, I have become increasingly aware of how particular keywords have come to dominate our histories. Specifically, I have noticed how the keyword that most resonates with my research—literacy—has been eclipsed and to some extent erased by the dominance of the keyword “rhetoric” in our history writing over the last decade. Why has this happened? How does this trend affect the materials historians look for and the questions they ask? How do our keywords modulate the voices of our artifacts? How do our keywords determine the uses we claim for history?I have surveyed book-length American composition histories published between 1999 and 2010 in order to describe the major trends shaping the kinds of histories we are producing to see if we can identify gaps and fissures, the roads not taken, in relation to these major trends. The preliminary thesis I put before you is that we are in danger of closing off certain types of materials and questions because our histories are increasingly dominated by the keyword “rhetoric.”

Abstract This study examines the case of the American philosopher John Dewey as rhetor and public intellectual in China in 1919–1921 to elucidate the lived rhetoric of pragmatism. In China, Dewey gave more than 200 lectures to large academic and general audiences on topics such as education, philosophy, and science. This lecturing activity represents a remarkable and complex rhetorical situation as it involves Dewey addressing an audience not familiar with his ideas and potentially open to persuasion. Using recently discovered lecture notes written by Dewey and translations from the Chinese interpretations of his lectures, I argue that his lectures evinced a pragmatist rhetorical style that attempted to reconstruct dominant habits of thought and communication among his Chinese audiences. In so doing, this study advances our understanding of Dewey as rhetor and the theoretical grounds of the pragmatist rhetoric of experience and synthetic conflict.

In my article, “Coming to Terms with the Antagonism Between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency,” I argue that academic desire is inherently frustrated by motives in tension with each other (2012). As rhetoric scholars, we are supposed to explore what we find politically interesting or important by isolating a chosen element of the political in order to perform a systematic study of that element and generate some insight about it. Yet graduate students quickly learn that moral fervor and political commitment are not the same thing as studying something that they care about. And this moment of revelation is no less true for a partisan in the throws of a political campaign than it is for an academic shut away in an archive. For example, political campaign operatives charged with polling a subset of the electorate are not, in the act of designing and performing the poll, acting as political operatives. Rather, in their role as pollsters, they must resist their own wishes or expectations or they will not actually be of any service to their campaign or party. Instead, to be of service, they must apply methods that are intended to return results that would be valuable to anyone who might have access to them. This is why campaigns hide their internal polls from both the public and competing campaigns. They do not want either the public or competing campaigns to know what they have learned precisely because such malleable knowledge could be applied by others in ways that might thwart their own campaign's strategy.Nevertheless, the difference between a political campaign's internal polling operation and an academic should be clear. Like internal pollsters, academics engage in systematic study in order to produce results that anyone could potentially use. However, unlike pollsters, academics do not keep the results of their research hidden away for partisan advantage but rather make those results public because their research is intended to serve the interests of anyone who might engage the products of their analysis. Like internal pollsters, however, academics also do not need to be understood as “value-neutral.” Of course they aren't. They will have chosen what they want to study because they suspect that an inadequate understanding of some element of reality may be the cause of problems that they hope improved understanding might somehow contribute to ameliorating. Now, if an academic fails to deliver a product that is of use to anyone because it takes a form that no one can figure out how to use, and use in a relatively sophisticated way, then the academic might be considered to have failed. She will have failed insofar as she had hoped that improved understanding might potentially aid those directly involved in addressing the problem.Might we say that academics work amid a broader competition to enact particular policies, just as internal campaign pollsters work amid those directly competing to win elections? Hence, are not both academics and internal campaign pollsters “in” the contest but not “of” the contest? Might we say that faithful service to either of the two demands it? In Slavoj Žižek's language (following Lacan), attempting to cut the corner, to directly engage in the contest, would be an example of what he calls “giving way” on one's “desire” (1989, 117–18). In the language of my prior article, it is an example of refusing the challenge that constitutes the antagonism, in this case, the antagonism between reflection and action that constitutes the academic subject position. Recall, however, that antagonism does not mean simple opposition. Rather, it points to a state of affairs in which an ideology or subject position unavoidably contains elements that are in tension. And “tension” is the right word because it can mean both pressing together and pulling apart. Antagonism, in Žižek's sense, means inseparability paired with incommensurability (to be a politically effective internal campaign pollster one must forswear politics). At his most esoteric, Žižek writes that antagonisms do not exist in what he calls “the real” (which can mean something like reality in the absence of symbols), because antagonisms are products of language (2005, 249–54). No word or set of words can say everything, and what is left unsaid in any moment will continue to torment what is said, creating the experience of antagonism—or an anxiety-producing need to say two different things at the same time (1991, 154; 1989, 21, 43, 49; 1994, 21, 26). Yet, while both things must be said, those two things, within language, always manifest as in tension with each other (in the world but not of the world, wholly God and wholly man, the mysteries of the sublime).Effacing an antagonism by reducing the saying of one thing to the saying of another—and acting as if it “resolves” the antagonism—entails giving way on one's desire. It is the construction of a cheap substitute when what is needed is not exactly the real thing itself, but the pursuit of the real thing. Hence, the pursuit of the real thing entails refusing to take a shortcut to one's desire (1989, 117–18; 1993, 60). The very idea of an “academic as public intellectual” is just such a shortcut. In it's material manifestation, it is an unstable, unsatisfying compromise that is wholly committed to neither reflection nor action. And, because it is neither one nor the other, it also cannot be both.For example, consider Fuller's account of the plight of the public intellectual. First, he explains that the “rhetorical challenge for academics seeking a public voice has been to reestablish their elite status in forums.” In order to reclaim their allegedly rightful place in public discourse, Fuller argues that academics need to more carefully consider what it takes “to compete with such ‘media elites’ as professional writers, journalists, and other ‘celebrities’ for prime-time television exposure.” And what it takes, he says, is the careful cultivation of a persona that keeps some of the affectations of the academic yet is entertaining enough to attract a wide audience. Walter Lippmann, Fuller argues, is an especially good model for aspiring academics as public intellectuals because, even though he was not primarily an academic in the institutional sense of the word, he nevertheless played the part. He cultivated the public persona of “the calming presence of an all-knowing insider” as his authorizing—and entertaining—hook or gimmick, which permitted him to exercise a high degree of individual political agency. In contrast, John Dewey's problem, according to Fuller, was that he remained too singularly focused on maximizing effective citizen political participation, through various forum movements and improved public education, to the detriment of maximizing the reach of his own political voice. Thus, while Dewey may have thought of himself as something like what we call a public intellectual, he actually was not one in Fuller's sense of the word because either Dewey refused to perform a broadly entertaining persona or was simply, as a matter of temperament, not amusing or entertaining enough to effectively playact the role of the wise, trustworthy, plain-spoken professor for a mass audience.This is the same advice Stephen Hartnett gives academics who aspire to be public intellectuals. They must, as I noted in the prior article, learn to “speak clearly and look authoritative” while offering “mass-media-shaped tidbits” (2010, 81–83). The academic as public intellectual must look authoritative (play the part of an academic) while saying things that could just as well be said by a celebrity guest. The bait-and-switch quality of the academic playing the role of an academic on TV is apparent in a number of those whom Fuller identifies as public intellectual “exemplars,” particularly Noam Chomsky, Niall Ferguson, and Cornel West. Chomsky's “public intellectual” work, for example, bears only a passing resemblance to the academic research for which he is known. Hence, whatever a public audience might get from Chomsky's books about whatever the current outrage is, they should not be afforded special attention due to his renown as a professor of linguistics. Ferguson's August 2012 cover story in Newsweek arguing against the reelection of Barack Obama is a particularly egregious example of this bait-and-switch technique: he lures the audience in with the promise of rigorous academic intelligence but instead writes a deceptive account of the Affordable Care Act; no one expects the Harvard professor to be plainly dishonest (Ferguson 2012; Krugman 2012). Cornel West, the former Harvard professor who has cultivated what Fuller calls a “righteous politicized persona,” has definitely been adept at competing for the media spotlight, but it is not at all clear that his current persona promotes anything resembling what an academic is supposedly uniquely equipped to offer public discourse—namely, some sort of intellectual contribution. Together, all three become caricatures in line with the worst of what the public believes about academics—that they are unstable ideologues who pursue political agendas under the auspices of higher education.Each of them also fulfills Fuller's academic-as-public-intellectual obligation “to exploit the distinctive communicative resources afforded by all the media.” What he means by this, here and elsewhere, is that academics who want to be public intellectuals have to not only be ready with but must also promote the nickel, fifty-cent, and ten-dollar version of their “ideas” in order to maximize each idea's public reach, appeal, and effectiveness. Yet how different is the nickel version of any intellectual idea from what many other similarly minded commentators, politicians, or protestors are already saying? Is the nickel version of Chomsky much different than what is printed on T-shirts outside of World Trade Organization meetings? And, in the case of Chomsky, does his actual academic expertise intellectually ground those slogans? And how is the talk radio or morning television version of any idea ever an “intellectual” contribution to public discourse? All that is left of the intellectual is the wise or iconoclastic professor persona cultivated by the professor doing the speaking; recall the number of conservative “thinkers” on television who enact their thoughtfulness by their choice in neckwear (always a bowtie).Is Fuller not recommending something like an ironic inversion of the classic advertising line “I'm not really a doctor, but I play one on TV,” except now the professor says, “I am really a professor but, until the next commercial break, I'm just going to play one on TV”? Just as celebrities trade on their stardom to play the game of political winning and losing, academics as public intellectuals ought to trade on their scholarly persona. In other words, one plays the part of the academic intellectual but must not supply what the persona promises to deliver. And this, Fuller says, is what it means for academics as public intellectuals to adopt a style in the tradition of Voltaire and Sartre, “marked” as “thinking things through for themselves—not as if from a script largely written by others”? And it therefore follows, then, in a line Fuller likes to repeat, that it is the traditional academic who is little more than “a proud ventriloquist's dummy” (2005, 100)?Yet perhaps the deeper problem is bound up with idea that the spirit of broader academic arguments or intellectual syntheses continues to live inside their stripped-down nickel versions. However, as I argued in the earlier article, every academic conclusion drawn from however rigorous or voluminous the research will necessarily (should it ever come into contact with public discourse) be reduced to a simplified metaphor or simplifying shorthand term (Welsh 2012, 17). Still, in its simplified form, it is never simply a short or a nutshell version. Rather, it is a discursive resource in its own right that becomes immediately detachable (and is detached) from its origins and takes on new and unanticipated forms, which is to say that it immediately becomes available for diverse, often opposing forms of appropriation.Consider, for example, the term “social capital” that emerged among Dewey and his followers at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly as discussed by the political scientist James Farr (2004). “Social capital,” a term that continues to be used today among certain liberals as well as conservatives, tends to be understood as a call to look for cultural, educational, institutional, and economic “investments” that might support integrated and healthy communities. At its best, it frames social life in morally rich terms of connectedness and interdependence, taking the place of morally debilitating visions of “survival of the fittest” or “winner take all.” Farr argues that that the term's continued resonance has to do with the artistic twist it gives to common words and meanings. Yet it offers more than momentary delight. It invokes a revised world with modified priorities. It is morally suggestive and a richly heuristic play on words.Hence, people can do with it something very much like what Robert Putnam (1995) suggested in his widely read article “Bowling Alone” and invest in community groups and gatherings, treating social connections as a form of capital requiring steady investment. And certain kinds of conservatives can also use the term to rationalize cohesive communities—built on the exclusion of outsiders. At the same time, opponents of social capital in either of these senses could reframe the term in order to recommend forms of community ruled by the demands of capital accumulation. Efforts at building social capital in either of the two prior senses could be cast as impeding the production of the “real” social capital, which such opponents might argue is the economic output of the members of a society. Time spent at “social clubs” and “off the job” could be presented in terms of lost economic growth or diminished hard capital, the same capital needed to pay for the social “get-togethers.” Money doesn't grow on trees, you get what you pay for, there is no such thing as a free lunch.More economically progressive uses of the term “social capital,” others could say, is just code for “socialism” (a word that has a constant presence in American political discourse, complete with images of Stalin), a tactic designed to scare citizens away from progressive reforms. All of these arguments are already in place, ready to be marshaled into service should the term “social capital” begin to seriously challenge prevailing ways of speaking in any particular way. It could even be that those most sympathetic to the diverse uses to which the term can be put should argue for setting it aside because it is simply too fraught with difficulty. Is there any other two-word combination that draws attention to the dominant political and economic tension of the twentieth century more than “social capital”? Could there be?Fuller's argument, however, is that academics can, and must try to, actively “control the public reception” of their messages. Yet once an academic's “message” is reduced to a central metaphor, control is already lost. And, in addition to it no longer being in any respect a complicating “intellectual” message or discourse, in that same moment everyone is granted the freedom to pick it up and use it quite differently than intended—all the while continuing to tout the authority of its academic provenance. Thus, once one moves from academic discourse to public discourse, the scholarly product becomes a rhetoric, and once it becomes a rhetoric it becomes just one more rhetorical pivot point susceptible to leveraging competing policies. It becomes what C. Wright Mills called a part of the sociological imagination (2000, 4–5, 48, 71).However, is this not precisely the place where rhetorical scholarship becomes most relevant to public affairs? Any rhetorical analysis or critique worthy of the name must be rooted in the recognition that private terms are more likely to become public rhetorics when diverse groups of people can imagine using them in pursuit of a wide variety of goals. Hence, there is no teacher of rhetoric that has ever claimed to have found the political message that needed to get out. Rather, as Fuller himself argues in The Intellectual, the earliest teachers of what we tend to think of as rhetoric, the Sophists (whom Fuller also refers to as the first public intellectuals), did not advance particular ideas but, instead, offered training in using ideas as rhetorical instruments in light of a student's aims (2005, 7). Fuller argues that “the sophists never understood themselves as ‘idea merchants,’ as one might characterize think-tank dwellers today or, in more elevated tones[,] … Voltaire.” “No,” Fuller clarifies, “the sophists were purveyors of certain skills and perhaps even tools” (2005, 9). Moreover, Fuller explains how “the sophists mainly wanted to help clients win lawsuits and sway public opinion, to take greater control of their fate, as befits citizens in a democracy” (2005, 9). My argument is that rhetoric scholars should see themselves in just this way—as devoted to understanding public discourse, which entails weighing the shifting and unpredictable assets and liabilities of the wide range of rhetorical resources. By seeing themselves in such a light, they provide a service to all citizens, activists, and politicians engaged in unpredictable and constantly evolving rhetorical contests for power (Welsh 2013).Perhaps the key distinction here concerns whose agency academics should be interested in promoting. Fuller says that we are doing a bad job if we are not constantly thinking about how to win support for our own particular visions of what is good or just—the academic thus needs to be a political campaign's internal pollster, strategist, and messenger all in one. Hence, Fuller is arguing that Dewey's problem was that Dewey did not see his role as either or for inherently malleable and a quality of that Dewey clearly Rather, like the Dewey remained as a and to the political agency of even if that not maximizing his Yet, the that the Dewey had on and I think we can say he also did well for he refused to the antagonism that academic desire did not way on it.

Beyond mechanics and spelling conventions, academic writing requires progressive mastery of advanced language forms and functions. Pedagogically useful tools to assess such language features in adolescents’ writing, however, are not yet available. This study examines language predictors of writing quality in 51 persuasive essays produced by high school students attending a linguistically and ethnically diverse inner-city school in the Northeastern United States. Essays were scored for writing quality by a group of teachers, transcribed and analyzed to generate automated lexical and grammatical measures, and coded for discourse-level elements by researchers who were blind to essays’ writing quality scores. Regression analyses revealed that beyond the contribution of length and lexico-grammatical intricacy, the frequency of organizational markers and one particular type of epistemic stance marker (i.e., epistemic hedges) significantly predicted persuasive essays’ writing quality. Findings shed light on discourse elements relevant for the design of pedagogically informative assessment tools.

Abstract The relationship between William James and the stoics remains an enigma. He was clearly influenced by reading Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus throughout his career. Some work has been done on the thematic convergences between Jamesian pragmatism and stoic thought, but this study takes a different path. I argue that the rhetorical style that James uses in arguing for his moral claims in front of popular audiences can be better understood if we see it in light of the stoic style of argumentation. I look at a text James read closely and recommended to close acquaintances—Marcus Aurelius's Meditations—to extract a sense of stoic rhetorical style. James's use of the stoic's tactics of vivid examples and rhetorical questions to shape the rhetorical experience of his audience and to thereby make his points becomes understandable as a possible extension of the stoic style of persuasion.

AbstractWhat does it mean to say rhetoric scholarship should be relevant to democratic practice? A prevailing answer to this question insists that rhetoric scholars are participants in the democratic contest for power just like all other citizens, no more and no less. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, the argument of this essay is that reducing scholarship to a mode of political agency not only produces an increasingly uninhabitable academic identity but also draws our attention away from producing results of rhetorical inquiry designed to be useful to citizens in democracy. Clinging to the idea that academic practice is a mode of political action produces a fantastic blindness to the antagonism between scholarly reflection and political agency that structures academic purpose. While empirical barriers to the production of rhetorical resources suitable for democratic appropriation undoubtedly exist, ignoring the self-frustrating character of academic desire is no less of an impediment to the production of democratically consequential rhetoric scholarship.

This study examines the potential for computational tools and human raters to classify paragraphs based on positioning. In this study, a corpus of 182 paragraphs was collected from student, argumentative essays. The paragraphs selected were initial, middle, and final paragraphs and their positioning related to introductory, body, and concluding paragraphs. The paragraphs were analyzed by the computational tool Coh-Metrix on a variety of linguistic features with correlates to textual cohesion and lexical sophistication and then modeled using statistical techniques. The paragraphs were also classified by human raters based on paragraph positioning. The performance of the reported model was well above chance and reported an accuracy of classification that was similar to human judgments of paragraph type (66% accuracy for human versus 65% accuracy for our model). The model’s accuracy increased when longer paragraphs that provided more linguistic coverage and paragraphs judged by human raters to be of higher quality were examined. The findings support the notions that paragraph types contain specific linguistic features that allow them to be distinguished from one another. The finding reported in this study should prove beneficial in classroom writing instruction and in automated writing assessment.

Many continue to note Kant's hostility to rhetoric. This view is far from unfounded, as Kant often voiced a particularly limited and negative view of the art of rhetoric. Yet it seems to limit explorations into any sort of Kantian form of rhetoric. If one approaches the connection of Kant's thought and rhetoric from the perspective provided by his under-studied work on education, one can extract a defendable notion of educative rhetoric in Kant. This present study will attempt to do just this, as well as show how such a use of communicative means plays a vital role in Kant's scheme of moral cultivation. The connecting point between education, practical reasoning, and moral cultivation is shown to be the important communicative device of example. An analysis of Kant's educative rhetoric can provide a useful extension of the rhetoric of example.

The following set of three papers, ‘University Literacies: French Students at a Disciplinary “Threshold”?’ by Isabelle Delcambre and Christiane Donahue, ‘Modeling Multivocality in a U.S.-Mexican Collaboration in Writing across the Curriculum’, by Mya Poe and Jennifer Craig, and ‘Perceptions and Anticipation of Academic Literacy: “Finding Your Own Voice”’, by Claire Woods and Paul Skrebels, represents some of the ongoing practice-oriented research of the ‘Antwerp Group’, so called because the members came together as teacher-researchers with shared interests in student writing in Antwerp in 2006.

Research Article| September 01 2011 A Defense of War and Sport Metaphors in Argument Scott Aikin Scott Aikin Philosophy Department, Vanderbilt University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2011) 44 (3): 250–272. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.44.3.0250 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Scott Aikin; A Defense of War and Sport Metaphors in Argument. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 September 2011; 44 (3): 250–272. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.44.3.0250 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2011The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Contributors: Amanda Booher, Cate Blouke, Will Burdette, Anthony Collamati, D. Diane Davis, Marjorie Foley, Sean McCarthy, Lauren Nahas, Justin Tremel, Tekla Schell, & Victor J. Vitanza

In this study, a corpus of essays stratified by level (9th grade, 11th grade, and college freshman) are analyzed computationally to discriminate differences between the linguistic features produced in essays by adolescents and young adults. The automated tool Coh-Metrix is used to examine to what degree essays written at various grade levels can be distinguished from one another using a number of linguistic features related to lexical sophistication (i.e., word frequency, word concreteness), syntactic complexity (i.e., the number of modifiers per noun phrase), and cohesion (i.e., word overlap, incidence of connectives). The analysis demonstrates that high school and college writers develop linguistic strategies as a function of grade level. Primarily, these writers produce more sophisticated words and more complex sentence structure as grade level increases. In contrast, these writers produce fewer cohesive features in text as a function of grade level. This analysis supports the notion that linguistic development occurs in the later stages of writing development and that this development is primarily related to producing texts that are less cohesive and more elaborate.

This article uses Foucault's enunciative analysis and stasis theory to explore the rhetorical work of the Midwest Pain Group (MPG) as its members struggle to collaborate across disciplinary difference to transform the discourse and practice of pain science. Foucault's enunciative analysis explains how discourse formations regulate statements, but not how formations can be transformed. We argue that stases can be thought of as nodes in the networks of statements Foucault describes and that stasis theory explains the rhetorical means through which members of the MPG work to transform the discourse of pain science. As the members of the MPG confront the epistemological incommensurability that exists between their individual disciplines, they establish a meta-discourse in which the definitional and jurisdictional stases help them invent a new definitional topos. We describe the way this rhetorical work occurs “off- label” in violation of the discursive restrictions of scientific disciplines, regulatory agencies, and insurance institutions.

This study is a comprehensive census of the homepage design practices of Fortune 500 companies, analyzing 46 elements of homepage design. The analysis establishes recent design trends of Fortune 500 homepages. In addition, it provides a snapshot of recent homepage design practices of the Fortune 500 that can be used for comparison with other populations and for future research and longitudinal studies of web design.

AbstractJohn Dewey's work on aesthetics, community, and art holds many untapped resources for the study and melioration of communicative practices. This article explores Dewey's distinctive and pluralistic idea of criticism and argues that such a notion can be used to elaborate pragmatist rhetoric. To lend contrast to this endeavor, I develop the concept of the “implied critic,” and compare the sort of critic assumed by Deweyan pragmatism to the critic implied by Raymie McKerrow's critical rhetoric. What a pragmatist approach to rhetorical criticism entails will be detailed by examining the variety of purposes that can be pursued by an individual in reflecting on rhetorical artifacts. Such a pragmatist rhetoric explains the notion of artful criticism that Dewey features so prominently in his analysis of ideal forms of community.

The 2010 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s award recipient, Elizabeth Dutro. Her article, “What ‘Hard Times’ Means: Mandated Curricula, Class-Privileged Assumptions, and the Lives of Poor Children” (RTE Vol. 44, No. 3, February 2010), is an exemplary source of thorough research and much-needed pedagogical strategy encouraging the creation of curricula grounded in students’ lived realities.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsScott R. StroudScott R. Stroud is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A1105, Austin, TX 78712-0115, USA.

Why, if service learning has “come a long way,” has it not had the impact on the university or on the community that proponents expected? This article details interviews with eight teachers at Virginia Tech who use service learning in their classrooms, with particular attention to the convergence of literacies that occurs when teachers, communities, and students all attempt to work together. While these eight teachers seemed to have a good grasp of the expectations faculty and communities bring to this three-way relationship, they seemed unable to define the expectations students bring to the experience. This mirrors the current scholarship on service learning, which highlights faculty and communities but downplays the role of students. As we continue to work toward sustainable, reflective community partnerships, literacy studies like Barton and Hamilton’s Local Literacies can help us further examine the expectations students bring to service learning projects.

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> This paper evaluates the role of reprocessability and symbol sets, two of the media capabilities identified in Media Synchronicity Theory, and different recipient characteristics on knowledge transfer. An experimental study manipulating the two specific channel interface characteristics was conducted to test the proposed model. Results indicate that symbol sets have a positive effect on knowledge possessed and knowledge applied. Motivation to learn significantly affected knowledge possessed and knowledge applied, while absorptive capacity was found to only influence knowledge possessed. The hypothesized relationships between reprocessability and knowledge internalization were marginally supported, and future research is suggested to address this issue. </para>

An (Em)bodied Workshop: When Service Learning Gets Bawdy explores the ways a student's perception about which bodies are and are not sexualized creates problems for that student when she attempts to run a writing group for senior citizens with Alzheimer's disease. This essay suggests that students engaging in service learning may import constructions of a mind/body split common in school settings to service learning sites as a way to authorize their presence in these sites. Students engaged in service learning need to be pushed to examine the ways their constructions of their work may erase the body.

Meaning is the product of dialectical negotiations of competing meanings that have their origins in cultural, subcultural, and idiosyncratic differences. Below obvious, surface, or dominant understandings, latent meanings wait to bubble up. This dynamic process of meaning-making suggests that language is, to a certain degree, uncontainable and very lively. Donna Haraway's work can be characterized by an attention to this 'latency' in language. I argue that Haraway’s use of language is not merely a way of communicating ideas, but constitutes a methodology, theory and praxis all at once, because she obtains “data” by mining latency, because she theorizes the significance of undercurrents and assumptions in phenomena, and because her writing itself demonstrates the very latency she is keen to explore. Here, language demonstrates an immensely generative capacity, such that we can understand language as being “living” – perhaps a companion species, and not merely dead “meat.” Through an analysis of American meat culture and what I call “meat heroism," I mime the infinite recursion in Haraway’s work, adopting her praxis in order to illuminate her praxis in order to illuminate her method which illuminates her theory. This paper is about language, failure, humour, cowboys, hero sandwiches, Martin Luther King Jr., and protein.

In this study, a corpus of expert-graded essays, based on a standardized scoring rubric, is computationally evaluated so as to distinguish the differences between those essays that were rated as high and those rated as low. The automated tool, Coh-Metrix, is used to examine the degree to which high- and low-proficiency essays can be predicted by linguistic indices of cohesion (i.e., coreference and connectives), syntactic complexity (e.g., number of words before the main verb, sentence structure overlap), the diversity of words used by the writer, and characteristics of words (e.g., frequency, concreteness, imagability). The three most predictive indices of essay quality in this study were syntactic complexity (as measured by number of words before the main verb), lexical diversity (as measured by the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity), and word frequency (as measured by Celex, logarithm for all words). Using 26 validated indices of cohesion from Coh-Metrix, none showed differences between high- and low-proficiency essays and no indices of cohesion correlated with essay ratings. These results indicate that the textual features that characterize good student writing are not aligned with those features that facilitate reading comprehension. Rather, essays judged to be of higher quality were more likely to contain linguistic features associated with text difficulty and sophisticated language.

The pharmaceutical industry’s corporate responsibility reports illustrate how the liberal rhetoric of civic engagement can be reappropriated to serve the market-driven aims of risk management and public relations. Tracing the ideologic linkage of corporate responsibility and service-learning versions of civic engagement, and contextualizing postsecondary service-learning along a larger neoliberal trajectory, should prompt us to reconsider basic questions about the means and ends of our institutional and pedagogical work.

As rhetorical scholars increasingly investigate traditions and texts from other cultures, new challenges arise as to what method one ought to follow when practicing what is called comparative rhetoric. In this article, I argue that pragmatism offers a framework for a methodology of comparative rhetoric that allows for the plurality of purposes involved on all sides of the encounter between a critic and a text. I will explore how pragmatism gives primacy to the plurality of purposes in human communicative endeavors, as well as what this means for how one can practice comparative rhetoric. I conclude by analyzing a case study in comparative rhetoric involving experiential rhetorical tactics in classical Indian and European philosophical texts.

The pages of Technical Communication Quarterly are devoted to exploring literacy activities and knowledge production in 21st-century organizations and to suggesting what technical communication edu...

Recent agency scholarship has provided compelling accounts of how individuals can strategically occupy authoritative positions, in order to instantiate change. This article explores the discursive mechanisms of this type of agency in the legitimization of disease. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article investigates how a non-human agent (brain scans) contributed to fibromyalgia's acceptance within the highly regulated discourses of western biomedicine.

This is a text in which scholars discuss some of the issues associated with conducting qualitative research via the internet. The editors address six broad questions, one per chapter. The book would be a useful addition to a graduate course on qualitative internet research.

President Bush’s National Security Language Initiative focuses narrowly on gearing language education to security and military needs. English educators should work with their counterparts in foreign language departments to promote a broader view, one that encourages study of the multiple language groups that currently exist within the United States.

Book Review| January 01 2009 Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of RhetoricDanisch, Robert Scott R. Stroud Scott R. Stroud Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2009) 42 (1): 96–101. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655341 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Scott R. Stroud; Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2009; 42 (1): 96–101. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655341 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 © 2009 The Pennsylvania State University2009The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article describes a pilot effort for an accreditation-driven writing assessment in a business college, detailing the pilot's logistics and methods. Supported by rubric software and a philosophy of “real readers, real documents,” the assessment was piloted in summer 2006 with five evaluators who were English instructors and four who worked or taught in business environments. The nine evaluators were each given 10 reports that were drawn from a sample of 50 reports completed in a writing-intensive course. They created 88 individual assessments using a 10-category rubric. While the overarching purpose of the pilot was to determine the effectiveness of the methods used, the results may also be of interest to those involved with the assessment of writing.

Pedagogical and scholarly discussions of the process of usability tend to focus more on methods than on practices, or specific, tactical performances of and adjustments to these methods. Yet such practices shape students' learning and determine the success of their usability efforts. A teacher research study tracking students' understanding and enactment of usability and user-centered design over the course of a service-learning project illustrates the importance of practice-level struggles—and the thoughtful preparation for and facilitation of these struggles—to the development of students' flexible intelligence (metis) and rhetorical translation skills. © 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Kenneth Burke claimed in 1952 that he viewed his rhetorical theory and critical method as a "Bennington Project," a sign that he attributed a measure of his intellectual success to teaching at pragmatist-inspired Bennington College. Studying Burke's teaching at Bennington can help scholars to better understand his theory and method because Burke taught undergraduates his own critical reading practices, ones that he believed heightened students' awareness of terministic screens and deepened their appreciation for the consequences of human symbol-use. Burke's teaching practices and his comments on student essays reveal that he taught indexing and charting to his undergraduates because he believed everyone can and should use them throughout their lives to examine—and, when necessary, revise—the often unexpressed assumptions that propel so much human activity toward competition and, ultimately, physical and social destruction.

Whether they use the term or not, rhetoricians have been known to approach the concept of incommensurability with some reluctance. This reluctance has manifested itself in a variety of ways from Gr...

"And what a congress of stinks! . . . Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath." —Theodore Roethke, "Root Cellar"

In this article, an English education professor, a university writing center administrator, and a recent graduate of an undergraduate English education program discuss the role peer tutoring might play in enhancing the education of preservice teachers of writing. The authors argue that by providing additional, authentic field experiences which reflect constructivist, student-centered philosophies often adhered to in English education programs, university peer tutoring can provide undergraduate students with authentic experience in learning collaboratively, developing rapport with students, and conducting student-centered, one-to-one writing conferences.

Research Article| January 01 2008 John Dewey and the Question of Artful Communication Scott R. Stroud Scott R. Stroud Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2008) 41 (2): 153–183. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655307 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Scott R. Stroud; John Dewey and the Question of Artful Communication. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2008; 41 (2): 153–183. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655307 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 © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University2008The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2008 Perelmanian Universal Audience and the Epistemic Aspirations of Argument Scott F. Aikin Scott F. Aikin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2008) 41 (3): 238–259. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655315 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Scott F. Aikin; Perelmanian Universal Audience and the Epistemic Aspirations of Argument. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2008; 41 (3): 238–259. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655315 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 © 2008 The Pennsylvania State University2008The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Recently, scholars of new media have been exploring the relationships between genre theory and new media. While these scholars have provided a great deal of insight into the nature of e-genres and how they function in professional contexts, few address the relationship between genre and new-media theories from a designer's perspective. This article presents the results of an ethnographic-style case study exploring the practice of a professional new-media designer. These results (a) confirm the role of dynamic rhetorical situations and hybridity during the new-media design process; (b) suggest that current genre and new-media theories underestimate the complexity of the relationships between mode, medium, genre, and rhetorical exigencies; and (c) indicate that a previously unrecognized form of hybridity exists in contemporary e-genres.

Abstract This paper analyzes four popular essays on punctuated equilibrium by the late paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould, who coauthored the evolutionary theory with Niles Eldredge in 1972. It begins with a survey of Gould's disparate reception among scientific amateurs and professionals. Main concerns include the role of accommodated science in the public perception of truth and whether Gould was able to manipulate popular views through his talent for writing vivid prose, the validity of metaphor for constructing our understanding of scientific theory, and the degree to which the disciplines (literature, rhetoric, economics, biology) can usefully interact in the elucidation of scientific ideas.

Research Article| April 01 2007 Learning Unbound: Using Moos for Classroom Collaboration Jason B. Jones; Jason B. Jones Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scott Ellis Scott Ellis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2007) 7 (2): 258–264. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2006-034 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jason B. Jones, Scott Ellis; Learning Unbound: Using Moos for Classroom Collaboration. Pedagogy 1 April 2007; 7 (2): 258–264. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2006-034 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

While the importance of “expressive writing,” or informal, self-directed writing, has been well established, teachers underutilize it, particularly in technical writing courses. We introduce the term expressive/exploratory technical writing (XTW), which is the use of informal, self-directed writing to problem-solve in technical fields. We describe how engineering students resist writing, despite decades of research showing its importance to their careers, and we suggest that such resistance may be because most students only see writing as an audience-driven performance and thus incompletely understand the link between writing and thinking. The treatment of invention in rhetorical history supports their view. We describe two examples of using XTW in software engineering to plan programming tasks. We conclude by discussing how a systematic use of XTW could shift the technical writing curriculum, imbuing the curriculum with writing and helping students see how to problem-solve using natural language.

This essay examines a Brooklyn College–based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC’s 1974 “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday practices and politics of the composition classroom.

Research Article| January 01 2006 Kant on Community: A Reply to Gehrke Scott R. Stroud Scott R. Stroud Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2006) 39 (2): 157–165. https://doi.org/10.2307/20697144 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Scott R. Stroud; Kant on Community: A Reply to Gehrke. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2006; 39 (2): 157–165. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20697144 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 © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University2006The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract In a comment on the age in which he was writing, Seneca the Elder states inSuas. 2.19 that anyone can plagiarize Cicero's Verrines with impunity. Critics have taken Seneca's assertion as a sign of diminished familiarity with the In Verrem and of Cicero's diminished popularity. This article offers a different interpretation. Seneca assails the inattentiveness of contemporary audiences as they listen to declamations in the rhetorical schools, not their ignorance of theVerrines or aversion to Cicero. Seneca incorporates the In Verrem into that critique due to its emblematic length in order to satirize the audiences' carelessness. The use of theVerrines as a symbol relies for its effect on the easy identification of the text and its size, and consequently points to the fame of that title and its length, as well as of its author Cicero, in the 30s CE.

Using a previous study at the same site for comparison, this study examines how recent adoptions of intranet and improved mail technologies have altered the collaborative practices of corporate communication writers at an insurance company. A systematic analysis of collaborative activities using a newly developed continuum shows that the writers’ jobs were significantly transformed by the company’s transition to a digital concept of writing. In particular, writers focused less on producing text and more on developing, coordinating, and structuring the newly adopted corporate intranet.

In a comment on the age in which he was writing, Seneca the Elder states in Suas. 2.19 that anyone can plagiarize Cicero’s Verrines with impunity. Critics have taken Seneca’s assertion as a sign of audiences’ diminished familiarity with the In Verrem and of Cicero’s diminished popularity. This article offers a different interpretation. Seneca assails the inattentiveness of contemporary audiences as they listen to declamations in the rhetorical schools, not their ignorance of the Verrines or aversion to Cicero. Seneca incorporates the In Verrem into that critique due to its emblematic length in order to satirize the audiences’ carelessness. The use of the Verrines as a symbol relies for its effect on the easy identification of the text, and consequently points to the renown of that title and its length, as well as of its author Cicero, in the 30s ce.

Over the last several years, service-learning has become a burgeoning area in technical and professional communication studies. In addition to offering pedagogical strategies and theoretical approaches, the scholarship in this area to date points to several concerns for the continuing growth of high-quality service-learning in our field: 1) building reciprocal, sustained community partnerships, 2) developing robust approaches to reflection, and 3) assessing how well models of service-learning achieve their objectives.

Empathy is a relatively new term in English. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first attested in 1904. This is worth pondering.

Research Article| January 01 2005 Tutor Taxonomy Scott L. Miller Scott L. Miller Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2005) 5 (1): 102–104. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-1-102 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Scott L. Miller; Tutor Taxonomy. Pedagogy 1 January 2005; 5 (1): 102–104. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-1-102 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2005 Duke University Press2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: From the Classroom You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2005 Rhetoric and Moral Progress in Kant’s Ethical Community Scott R. Stroud Scott R. Stroud Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2005) 38 (4): 328–354. https://doi.org/10.2307/40238272 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Scott R. Stroud; Rhetoric and Moral Progress in Kant’s Ethical Community. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2005; 38 (4): 328–354. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/40238272 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 © 2005 The Pennsylvania State University2005The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article presents research from a qualitative study of the way that reflective writing is solicited, taught, composed, and assessed within a state-mandated portfolio curriculum. The research situates reflective texts generated by participating students within the larger goals and bureaucratic processes of the school system. The study finds that reflective letters are a genre within the state curriculum that regulates the substance and tone of students’ reflections. At the classroom level, the genre provides a mode that students adopt with the assurance that their reflections will meet state evaluators’ expectations. At the bureaucratic level, the genre helps to continually validate the state’s portfolio curriculum through its strong encouragement of stylized narratives of progress. The study demonstrates the importance of understanding how large-scale assessments shape pedagogy and students’ writing.

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Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University exposes the poor working conditions of contingent composition faculty and explores practical alternatives to the unfair labor practices that are all too common on campuses today. Editors Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, and Leo Parascondola bring together diverse perspectives from pragmatism to historical materialism to provide a perceptive and engaging examination of the nature, extent, and economics of the managed labor problem in composition instructiona field in which as much as ninety-three percent of all classes are taught by graduate students, adjuncts, and other disposable teachers. These instructors enjoy few benefits, meager wages, little or no participation in departmental governance, and none of the rewards and protections that encourage innovation and research. And it is from this disenfranchised position that literacy workers are expected to provide some of the core instruction in nearly everyone's higher education experience. Twenty-six contributors explore a range of real-world solutions to managerial domination of the composition workplace, from traditional academic unionism to ensemble movement activism and the pragmatic rhetoric, accommodations, and resistances practiced by teachers in their daily lives.Contributors are Leann Bertoncini, Marc Bousquet, Christopher Carter, Christopher Ferry, David Downing, Amanda Godley, Robin Truth Goodman, Bill Hendricks, Walter Jacobsohn, Ruth Kiefson, Paul Lauter, Donald Lazere, Eric Marshall, Randy Martin, Richard Ohmann, Leo Parascondola, Steve Parks, Gary Rhoades, Eileen Schell, Tony Scott, William Thelin, Jennifer Seibel Trainor, Donna Strickland, William Vaughn, Ray Watkins, and Katherine Wills.

Although service-learning has the potential to infuse technical communication pedagogy with civic goals, it can easily be co-opted by a hyperpragmatism that limits ethical critique and civic engagement. Service-learning's component of reflection, in particular, can become an uncritical, narrow invention or project management tool. Integrating cultural studies and service-learning can help position students as critical citizens who produce effective and ethical discourse and who create more inclusive forms of power. Rather than being tacked on, cultural studies approaches should be incorporated into core service-learning assignments.

The cultural studies model of the cultural circuit can help students track the larger circulation and transformation of technical communication in order to ethically critique and respond to it. Applying the model to specific cases of technology and its accompanying documentation (in this case the OraQuick rapid HIV test) can illustrate for students the ethical necessity of extending the usual focus on production to distribution, marketing, interpretation, and use. Students can then channel this awareness to their own writing projects, taking action to ensure that these projects are responsive and empowering to those whom they affect.

Research Article| April 01 2003 Early American Print Culture in a Digital Age: Pedagogical Possibilities Scott Ellis Scott Ellis Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (2): 288–292. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-2-288 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Scott Ellis; Early American Print Culture in a Digital Age: Pedagogical Possibilities. Pedagogy 1 April 2003; 3 (2): 288–292. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-2-288 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2003 Duke University Press2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: From the Classroom You do not currently have access to this content.

Seeks to extend the work of Rosteck, Bazerman, Condit, and others by further elaborating what a hybrid rhetorical cultural study might look like. Studies the rhetorics surrounding HIV and AIDS, particularly home HIV testing. Focuses on the rhetoric of science and technology because of its cross-disciplinary nature and its potential to contribute to high-stakes enterprises, such as HIV testing.

n his 1992 Society of America keynote address titled Rhetoric in the Vortex of Cultural Studies, Walter Beale proposed that rhetoric and cultural engage in a mutually beneficial dialectic. The point of such a dialectic, Beale clarified, would not be to absorb rhetoric into cultural or vice versa, but to invent ways to fruitfully combine the two sets of approaches. A few years later, Thomas Rosteck similarly called on rhetoricians to advance the project of rhetorical by bringing together the rhetorical tradition and contemporary cultural studies (297). With the rising stock of cultural in the disciplines of English and communication studies, rhetoricians have begun to take up these invitations, as Rosteck's collectionAt the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies attests. Some rheto-

Abstract This essay analyzes the web of persuasion named the “knowledge enthymeme”; in the public policy debate over mandatory newborn HIV testing in the United States and especially New York. Bringing together classical rhetorical theory and Foucault's theory of the knowledge‐power loop, the essay explains how the conceptual/argumentative frame of the knowledge enthymeme helped shape the knowledge‐power relations of mandatory newborn testing in dangerous ways. Ultimately, the knowledge enthymeme blocked more responsive approaches to testing by exaggerating the beneficial effects of testing and its knowledge, ignoring the contingenices of this knowledge, and bypassing the “situated knowledges “ of the women it targets.

Research Article| April 01 2001 The Better Part of Pedagogy Scott Stevens Scott Stevens Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (2): 373–386. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-2-373 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 Scott Stevens; The Better Part of Pedagogy. Pedagogy 1 April 2001; 1 (2): 373–386. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-2-373 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

After years of colonization, oppression, and resistance, American Indians are making clear what they want from the heretofore compromised technology of writing. Rhetorical sovereignty, a people’s control of its meaning, is found in sites legal, aesthetic, and pedagogical, and composition studies can both contribute to and learn from this work.

In this article, we analyze a two‐semester effort to integrate writing instruction into a multi‐disciplinary sophomore engineering design course in Northern Arizona University's College of Engineering and Technology. Specifically, we describe the programmatic implementation and assessment approach to evaluate whether student writing improved over the course of the semester. After discussing the reasons for taking a writing‐intensive approach to engineering, we analyze the results of a pre‐and post‐test administered over the span of an academic semester. Although the outcome of our assessment did not show significant improvement, we argue that writing instruction is important for increasing students’ overall learning skills. We conclude by pointing out several benefits and disadvantages of trying to assess writing improvement over two one‐semester periods.

Despite the prevailing assumption that narrative and scientific discourse are incompatible genres, in this article the authors show that scientific texts typically follow a narrative pattern. This simple observation that narrative and scientific texts are similar is not all that surprising when we recognize that scientific discourse, like all narratives, describes what happened and what it meant. Indeed, scientific texts are almost always accounts of scientists' experiences in reality. After developing a vocabulary of narrative, the authors analyze the works of Newton and Einstein, using narrative analysis to illuminate scientific texts as stories.

Assessing the efficacy of technical communication service courses is a complex task, yet it is a task that service course providers should embrace as an opportunity to learn more about student and faculty needs and to update and improve curricula. This assessment has become more immediate for many educators because of ABET 2000 (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology), a comprehensive revamping of the way engineering programs are accredited. ABET 2000 criteria require that engineering programs provide evidence of the efficacy of all instruction, including communication. When the new ABET criteria were released, we had already begun a comprehensive evaluation of not only our service courses but also the total writing experience of engineering students at the University of Washington. This paper gives a theoretical rationale for a portfolio evaluation project and describes a directly applicable structure and procedure for such a project.

Although over 11 million virtual workers in the USA are classified as teleworkers, we know relatively little about them. Drawing on the construct of telepresence, the relationships among four sets of variables seem especially important: actual communication technology use, identifications with aspects of work, degree of virtuality, and various teleworker demographic characteristics. A survey of 86 teleworkers in a wide range of organizations revealed that basic telephone and voicemail are the most frequently used and most vital communication technologies. However, several differences in technology use based on message content and interaction partners also exist. Additionally, moderately virtual teleworkers are more identified with their work team, organization, and occupation than are those who telework small or large portions of their work week. Also, use of advanced phone technologies is most predictive of organizational and occupational identification. Among the implications discussed are: equipping teleworkers with appropriate communication technologies and establishing telework programs where workers are only virtual for a portion of the working week.

I have tried to achieve a comfort zone with this project. Ithappened in 1997, on one of those days before a staff meeting when wewere tired and cynical, feeling used by the society of writing that exists inthe college. We began to kid around about the students who wanted us topunish them, the students who wanted a quick fix, those who wanted topunish us. That is when the idea of Madam Barnett’s Writing Emporiumwas born. It started as a joke, the idea that we in the University ofMichigan-Flint Writing Center were like hookers. Perhaps it should haveended there, but with my affection for odd comparisons, and VinceLocke’s (Vince is another tutor) idea for a paper on writing center myths,the idea just wouldn’t go away.During the summer, I checked out books, social and psychologi-cal studies of prostitution, to see if the similarities were mere jokes, or ifthere was something important in the idea that tutoring and prostitutionwere partially alike. I thought the exploration would be amusing. I did notknow that I would discover things that disturbed me about myself and howtutoring has affected me.

Ttives of the teaching of writing in United States colleges have inevitably excluded or simplified moments and facets of history in the service of asserting order within their comprehensiveness. While no curricular history means to include references to all the composition activity going on in the country, their representational figures, both professors and colleges, often present cases which ought to be understood as demographically, ethnically, or racially limiting. One striking absence from the broad histories of writing instruction in English and across the curriculum in American colleges is the composition instruction done at historically black colleges and universities (HBCU). On the other hand, the history of African American higher education has itself generated a vast literature, including chronicles of Howard University, Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, and Atlanta University, many journals, including the Journal of Negro Education, as well as countless articles, scholarly books, and textbooks written by HBCU faculties, students, and alumni. This literature and its sources demonstrate that from the late

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(1997). John Witherspoon's normalizing pedagogy of ethos. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 58-75.

J. Blake Scott describes a method and outlines the procedures, including a heuristic, for having students write literacy narratives about their history as writers. Scott argues that writing and sharing these narratives brings the students closer into community with one another and helps them produce better writing.

Using diverse texts to critically examine America’s melting pot ideal supports basic writing students’ successful matriculation through rhetorically and socially challenging locations.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I would like to thank Kathleen Welch and Richard Leo Enos, RR peer revieweis for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

This article reports the results of survey research designed to determine how students feel about peer assistance and group writing. In general, the results are quite favorable, although more problems surface regarding fully collaborative projects than peer criticism. Statistical analysis of both objective and open-ended items yields suggestions for design and management of collaborative projects in technical communication classes.

Drawing on arguments by Carolyn Miller, Steven Katz, and others, this essay claims that teaching ethics is particularly important to technical writing. Next, the essay outlines a classical, sophistic approach to ethics based on the theories and pedagogies of Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates. This sophistic approach emphasizes the Greek concept of nomos, internal and external deliberation, and responsible action or articulation. The final section of the essay discusses possible problems and pedagogical applications of sophistic ethics in the contemporary technical writing classroom.

Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise: Reading, Writing, and Knowing in Academic Philosophy. Cheryl Geisler. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994. 354 pp. Computer Ethics: Cautionary Tales and Ethical Dilemmas in Computing. 2nd ed. Tom Forester and Perry Morrison. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. 347 pp. A Practical Guide to Usability Testing. Joseph S. Dumas and Janice C. Redish. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993. 412 pp. Managing Your Documentation Projects. JoAnn T. Hackos. New York: Wiley, 1994. 629 pp. Hypertext in Hypertext. George P. Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 242 pp. Available in either MS Windows or Apple Macintosh versions on two 3.5 inch diskettes.

Scott Cosigny on protagoras and logos: A study in Greek philosophy and rhetoric. by Edward Schiappa. University of South Carolina press, 1991. Pp. xvii & 239.

Until recently, scholars have tended to credit two nineteenth-century thinkers, G. F. Hegel and George Grote, for initiating the modem rehabilitation of the sophists.2 But in the past several years, an increasing number of scholars have begun to draw inspiration from the writings of another nineteenth-century figure, Friedrich Nietzsche. Among those taking this Nietzschean turn, Mario Untersteiner utilizes Nietzsche's conception of the tragic in his account of Gorgias's epistemology (101-205), a reading Eric White supplements with Nietzsche's notion of the (38). Victor Vitanza, characterizing Nietzsche as a dionysian Sophist, draws from Nietzsche's tropological model of language to illuminate the sophists' own rhetoric (Sub/Versions 112; Notes 131); and David Roochnik contends that Nietzsche's critique of reason illuminates the sophists' own misology (Tragedy 50, 155, 162). In the sphere of ethics, E. R. Dodds maintains that Nietzsche's immoralism is similar to the egoism of Gorgias's student Callicles (387-91), and Daniel Shaw contends that Nietzsche's critique of morality iterates the sophists' notion that moral valuations remain matters of opinion (339). Concerning methodology, John Poulakos argues that Nietzsche's genealogical approach is most suited for interpreting the sophists (Interpreting 219-21); and Susan Jarratt credits Nietzsche's method as authorizing her own re-reading of the sophists (xix). But whereas they have drawn on a variety of Nietzsche's ideas and interpretive strategies to advance what Jacqueline dc Romilly characterizes as a Nietzschean interpretation of the sophists (Sophists xi), none of these scholars has systematically examined Nietzsche's own quite specific and extensive writings about the sophists. The untoward result is that we possess a variety of Nietzschean readings of the sophists that tend to silence Nietzsche's own distinctive voice. This tendency to overlook Nietzsche's own specific remarks about the sophists is quite understandable, for Nietzsche never wrote a systematic treatise on the sophists and instead discussed them in a rather fragmentary manner in a variety of texts over a period of almost two decades. Further, with the exception of three quite brief passages-in Human, All-Too-Human 221, Dawn 168, and the Ancients, Twilight of the Idols 2-Nietzsche did not publish any of his remarks about the sophists, confining his discussions to his 1872-1873 lecture notes in the history of Greek rhetoric (Description of Ancient Rhetoric and

Understanding Scientific Prose. Jack Selzer, ed. Wisconsin UP, 1993, 388 pp. A History of Professional Writing Instruction in American Colleges: Years of Acceptance, Growth, and Doubt. Katherine H. Adams. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1993. xi + 192 pp. Technical Writing: Contexts, Audiences, and Communities. Carolyn R. Boiarsky. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1993. 652 pp. Technical Communication. 3rd ed. Rebecca E. Burnett. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1994. 742 pp. Technical Communication: Problems and Solutions. Roy F. Fox. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. 610 pp. Communicating Technical Information: A Guide for the Electronic Age. Donald Pattow and William Wresch. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993. 600 pp.

Public policy issues in professional writing may be understood, in part, by revisiting our understanding of the writing process and of the way character, or ethos, is shaped in the writing and reading of a text. This paper suggests a method for modeling the characters of writers, readers, and sponsoring organizations as they are shaped in the process of writing about public policy issues. The model is then used to examine the classroom oral presentations of four professionals who were involved in different ways with the same controversial public policy issue. The goal is to integrate classroom considerations of the writing process and of audience analysis, of personal and professional ethics, and of relevant workplace controversies.

Communication at a Distance: The Influence of Print on Sociological Organization and Change1y. David S. Kaufer and Kathleen M. Carley. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993. 474 pp. Writing and Reading Mental Health Records. John F. Reynolds, David C. Mair, and Pamela C. Fischer. Newbury Park, London, New Delhi: Sage, 1992. 109 pp. Designing, Writing, and Producing Computer Documentation. Lynn Denton and Jody Kelly. New York: McGraw, 1992. 258 pp. Writing in the Workplace: New Research Perspectives. Rachel Spilka, ed. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. 332 pp. *

Metaphor and Reason in Judicial Opinions by Haig Bosmajian. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992, 205 pp. The Context of Human Discourse: A Configurational Criticism of Rhetoric by Eugene E. White. Columbia, SC, University of South Carolina Press, 1992, vii‐ix, 307pp. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts by Rita Copeland.Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991; 295pp. Terms of Response: Language and Audience in Seventeenth‐ and Eighteenth‐Century Theory by Robert L. Montgomery. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1992; 216. The Discipline of Taste and Feeling by Charles Wegener. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Robert M. La Follette Sr., The Voice of Conscience by Carl R. Burgchardt. New York, Greenwood Press, 1992, viii + 243 pp.

An interpretive strategy used in several recent studies of Gorgias involves attending to his style as a means of understanding his substantive ideas. This hermeneutic approach is not confined to studies of Gorgias, of course, for critics have frequently explored the ways in which a philosopher's manner of writinghis or her use of the aphorism, meditation, dialogue, philosophical poem, or remark, for example-may elucidate the content of his or her thinking. But the strategy has proved especially inviting for interpreting Gorgias for two reasons. First, the substance of Gorgias's thought is particularly elusive, not only because much of his writing is lost and his few extant texts are frequently fragmentary and corrupt, but because he leaves many key terms undefined and ambiguous, and he appears to make contradictory assertions and claims. In this context, a strategy of reading that purports to clarify and render coherent his enigmatic thought is understandably appealing. Second, the hermeneutic strategy is particularly inviting because Gorgias himself seems to have attached enormous importance to his style, one often associated with such figures of speech as antithesis, anadiplosis (repetition of words), homoeoteleuton (likeness of sound in final syllables of successive words or clauses) and parisosis (arrangement of words in nearly equal periods). Given Gorgias's attention to matters of style, it is not unreasonable to presume that they may offer a clue to understanding his enigmatic In this essay, I will examine two prominent schools of critics who employ this hermeneutic strategy, and who arrive at conflicting interpretations of Gorgias's overall philosophy. I then argue that each of these readings misconstrues the nature of Gorgias's writing, and I present an alternative reading of his style. I conclude by suggesting that given his stylistic practice, Gorgias may possess a different conception of philosophy than that presumed by many of his interpreters. Before examining these two schools of interpretation, it is useful to place them in respect to what may be termed the traditional construal of Gorgias's style and its implications about his putative For traditionally, most critics have seen Gorgias's style as poetic, and have viewed his apparent preoccupation with style as an indication that he not a serious philosopher at all, but rather a mere stylist, an orator who deploys poetic devices to embellish his speeches. This view is first suggested by Plato, who describes Gorgias's style as an elegant feast designed to please an audience rather than explore philosophical issues (Gorgias 447a). Aristotle echoes this portrayal of Gorgias as a poetic stylist lacking serious ideas, asserting that:

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Research Article| November 01 1991 Avez-vous lu Saint Luc? R. Meynet, Avez-vous lu Saint Luc?, Paris, Editions du Cerf, 1990. Franca Parodi Scotti Franca Parodi Scotti Università Degli Studi di Torino, Departimento de Filologia, Linguistica e Tradizione Classica, Via S. Ottavio, 20, 10124, Torino, Italy. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1991) 9 (4): 370–371. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.4.370 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Franca Parodi Scotti; Avez-vous lu Saint Luc?. Rhetorica 1 November 1991; 9 (4): 370–371. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.4.370 Download citation file: Ris (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 ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1991, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1991 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Nineteenth‐Century Rhetoric in North America by Nan Johnson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 313. Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric by Edward Schiappa. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. xvii + 239. Rhetoric and Irony, Western Literacy and Western Lies by C. Jan Swearingen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991; xiv + 323. Democracy and the Mass Media: A Collection of Essays ed. Judith Lichtenberg. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990; 410. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy by Albert O. Hirschman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. xi+197.

Harris argues that linguistic theory is useful for solving certain problems encountered in technical writing theory and pedagogy [1]. However, he undermines his purpose by introducing irrelevant distinctions between competing syntactic theories (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar and Transformational Grammar) and by failing to exploit the full potential of the few applications he mentions. The passive rule is a case in point. It not only constitutes an operational test for identifying passive sentences, it also contributes to the flow of discourse by rearranging both thematic roles (e.g. agent and patient) and given/new information. The passive rule is only one of a class of noun phrase-moving operations that technical writing specialists may find useful.

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The research on the cognitive processes in writing has led to models of the writing process such as that of Flower and Hayes. The work underlying these models has been carried out on relatively unconstrained writing genres. The purpose of this study was to investigate the types of processes used by journalistic writers when producing texts of varying constraints. A three tier methodology was used to offset certain methodological difficulties. Journalism students wrote either a news story or an editorial under either a pausal procedure, a pausal interview, or a protocol. It was found that news story writers paused more often and carried out more activities per writing session than did editorial writers suggesting greater monitoring activity by news story writers. In addition, news story writers were extensively concerned with accuracy and appeared to use a preorganized structure to guide writing and a priorities list to determine order of mention. Editorial writers paused less often and somewhat longer indicating a more open ended task. They appeared to adopt one of two strategies—treat the editorial as a news story with an opinion paragraph or search for a personal viewpoint. The results indicated that the Flower and Hayes model is applicable in a limited manner to journalistic writing.

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EDUCATION and training. Scholarly and vocational. Theoretical and practical. These terms describe traditionally divergent points of view that converge in technical communication curricula and courses. The directors of those programs and the teachers of those courses perform often delicate balancing acts to encourage that convergence. Creating and maintaining a balanced point of view is the theme for the two essays in this issue's Education and Training department.

The syllabus for a course in teaching technical writing is presented. The course is intended for graduate students, who will in turn use the course material to teach technical writing to college undergraduates.

Writing last year in a Carnegie Foundation special Report, Nell Eurich reported that “more and more companies are teaching analytical skills and critical thinking” in corporate training classrooms (Corporate Classrooms, p. 77). A recent Associated Press story tells of Xerox Corporation's decision to spend $5 million to start a nonprofit institute at its Palo Alto Research Center that will “study how people think and learn and … try to develop new, more effective ways of teaching.” David Kearns, Xerox chairman and chief executive officer, is quoted as saying that “one of every three major corporations now is teaching new workers basic reading, writing, and mathematics.”

The question of what makes technical communication a profession and its practitioners professionals is discussed. Technical communicators as professionals are urged to replace practices and standards of proficiency influenced by the technical aspect of the profession with a concept of professionalism based on elegance, as derived from the humanities.

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The last twenty years have seen a great expansion, as well as considerable shift of emphasis and focus, in publication about English composition. On even a cursory count, there are now over two dozen journals regularly publishing material in the field, not to mention books, course texts, research reports, or ERIC documents. However, as active composition researchers well know, there is no single bibliographic resource giving both full and focussed annual coverage of this output, nor any very certain means of identifying and retrieving the items previously published on a given composition topic.' There are available, of course, many orientatory bibliographies and research guides to composition, and these have real usefulness, but one needs to make a clear conceptual distinction between the selective or interpretive bibliographical guidance such guides offer and the more basic bibliographical control we increasingly need-on-going, systematic, non-judgmental coverage of activity in the field. Part of the problem with orientatory guides is their rapid obsolescence: as Edward Corbett has noted, Nothing-not even last year's hemline-dates as quickly as a published bibliography.2 But in addition to being dated, discursive and orientatory guides pose other problems: nearly all the existing guides are avowedly selective in their coverage, most of them are silent about the kinds of searching from which they were compiled, they are often biased one way or another in their selection of material, and, most fundamental of all, there are disturbing gaps in the chronological coverage they provide. The research consequences of current problems in composition bibliography have not been widely understood, and in this paper I want to explore four special features of the composition field that have made bibliographic control difficult. It is only when researchers, teachers, graduate students, librarians, and bibliographers recognize the special nature of composition re-

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The lack of a scientific background of many of our technical writing students and the continual amalgamation of the sciences make a technical terminology course an important adjunct to the technical writing curriculum. This course consists of three distinct phases: a compilation of terms already known by the students, an expansion of that list into a comprehensive list of the major technical terms in approximately fifteen scientific fields, and an indepth study by each student into a particular field. This course would help to create scholars who were conversant in most major fields of study. This would make the students more flexible in their job searches. What is more important, it would help them understand the forces that shape our civilization and thereby broaden their control over those forces.

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Formats to teach procedures were developed to incorporate appropriate learning strategies. The formats contain a preponderance of graphics with supporting text and include a foldout, or paper mock-up, showing the face of the equipment. Exercises are provided for recalling individual steps and for chaining steps. These materials, called learning aids, were developed and field-tested on two pieces of complex equipment: tuning an oscilloscope probe and starting a helicopter engine. Results showed the learning aids reduce errors and produce quicker learning compared with narrative manuals commonly used to teach procedures.

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A rational and popular viewpoint is that the function of scientific writing is to communicate knowledge. A study of prominent journals, however, suggests that clear communication is not appreciated within the reading-writing-refereeing community. If clarity is a goal for a journal, the editor must take action.

A technical writer who wants to become a supervisor or manager needs to know technical editing. A technical editor is an accomplished technical writer whose language skills are augmented by a thorough knowledge of formats, graphics, layout and design methods, and the mechanics of publications production. Any course in technical editing should cover these five distinct areas. Language studies in technical editing require a special emphasis in proofreading and technical abridgment. The study of formats goes beyond rote memorization. Technical editing students study the logic behind established formats and learn how to improve them and develop new ones. The production and editing of graphics require artistic—and even theatrical—judgments. And the planning, preparation, and printing of newsletters, journals, and books require a special combination of verbal, visual, and manual skills. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of technical editing and the variety of technologies in which advanced technical editing skills may be acquired, the technical editor never stops being a student.

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MY PURPOSE IN THIS PAPER IS THREEFOLD-hiStoriCal, descriptive, and also, alas, nowadays contentious. After a brief historical excursus on the changed relation between composition and literature teaching, I want to describe what is, for the 1980s, a rather unusual kind of freshman writing program, one that combines intensive work in composition with an old-fashioned literary survey. Through this description I shall argue that modern, professionalized writing specialists have become unnecessarily suspicious of traditional literary reading assignments; that the educational functions of reading assignments have often been misunderstood; and that those functions can, at least for some students, better be fulfilled by traditional, substantive literary texts, than by the more commonly used collections of modern controversial, expressive, and affective prose. Finally, I hope to suggest, from our experience at the University of South Carolina with a special traditionally-oriented freshman program, that the ideas of freshman rhetoric can help in designing useful reading and writing assignments in other undergraduate literature courses. When the first-ever professorship of English was established, by the patronage of

Technical writing students need information about writing for the government: one out of every eight technical writers works in some level of government. Those who do not might become involved in writing for the government in some other capacity, such as writing industrial proposals to obtain grants and contracts, or preparing scientific reports or technical manuals to fulfill the requirements of those grants or contracts. Such writing requires a familiarity with government specifications and standards. Some colleges offer courses in government writing. Those schools that cannot might consider incorporating information about government specifications and standards into their basic technical writing course.

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John B. Bender, Bliss Carnochan, John Felstiner, Kenneth W. Fields, Albert J. Guerard, N. Scott Momaday, Robert M. Polhemus, Lucio P. Ruotolo, Ronald A. Rebholz, Wilfred Stone, David W. Williams, Elizabeth Traugott, About Bruce Franklin: A Letter from Stanford, College English, Vol. 35, No. 6 (Mar., 1974), p. 733

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John Loftis, J. W. Robinson, Edward Partridge, Jay L. Halio, R. E. K., R. W. Dent, Robert Etheridge Moore, Louis Crompton, Richard M. Eastman, John J. Enck, R. M. Lumiansky, Scott Elledge, C. E. Pulos, B. D. S., John Unterecker, Allen B. Brown, James T. Nardin, Edward P. J. Corbett, William Coyle, Archibald A. Hill, Book Reviews, College English, Vol. 23, No. 7 (Apr., 1962), pp. 595-608

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