When profiling a place, students typically struggle to generate an effective thesis; a class session that includes carefully tailored prompts for invention can help.

This article describes a process of peer evaluation that is aimed at developing students’ sense of audience and at elevating the status of peer reviewers, whose opinions on successful writing are too often viewed as less trustworthy than those of their instructors.

Nineteenth-century orator Elizabeth Cady Stanton frequently spoke to groups of male legislators. In examining the ways in which she met this challenge, scholars have tended to focus on how she “argued like a man” via logical appeals. In this article, I discuss Stanton's equally strong reliance on an emotional appeal: namely, that of sympathy. The practices and theories of Stanton's peer, the well-known preacher Henry Ward Beecher, as well as the moral and rhetorical thought of eighteenth-century Scotsman Adam Smith illuminate Stanton's own practices of sympathy. This study yields both a fresh interpretation of Stanton's oratory and an expanded understanding of sympathy's role in the rhetoric of the marginalized.