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Selected Works

2018

Brian Larson

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Research And Rhetorical Purpose: Using Genre Analysis To Understand Source Use In Technical And Professional Writing, Lee-Ann K. Breuch, Brian N. Larson Oct 2018

Research And Rhetorical Purpose: Using Genre Analysis To Understand Source Use In Technical And Professional Writing, Lee-Ann K. Breuch, Brian N. Larson

Brian Larson

This chapter describes a pilot study of student research-based writing in a technical and professional writing course designed for college-level juniors and seniors across the curriculum; fifteen analytical research papers are coded based on the rhetorical move John Swales (1990) calls "reference to previous research" to increase our understanding of how students use sources to introduce, support, or compare/ contrast ideas and previous research. Student papers in this study overwhelmingly used sources to support main ideas, occasionally used sources to introduce ideas, often in the form of topic sentences, but rarely used sources to compare/ contrast ideas. The frequency of …

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How We Built A Scholarly Working Group Devoted To Classical Legal Rhetoric (And How You Can Do The Same Thing With Other Legal Writing Subjects), Brian Larson, Kirsten K. Davis, Lori D. Johnson, Ted Becker, Susan E. Provenzano Jul 2018

How We Built A Scholarly Working Group Devoted To Classical Legal Rhetoric (And How You Can Do The Same Thing With Other Legal Writing Subjects), Brian Larson, Kirsten K. Davis, Lori D. Johnson, Ted Becker, Susan E. Provenzano

Brian Larson

As academic disciplines mature, professors with specialized interests within their field often gravitate toward each other to pursue their interests collectively. Eventually, members of a group might find themselves collaborating on presentations, articles, or similar endeavors, with the goal of advancing an academic specialty.

To our knowledge, however, few such groups appear to exist in the LRW community (notable exceptions: applied legal storytelling; LWI’s Discipline-Building Working Group’s bibliography program). Our presentation hopes to model how LRW professors can come together to explore a single aspect of the legal writing field. We’ll discuss how we brought together over two dozen professors …

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Flag-Waving: Visual Arguments, Verbal Reconstruction, And Speaker Intentions, Brian Larson Jul 2018

Flag-Waving: Visual Arguments, Verbal Reconstruction, And Speaker Intentions, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

This study extends previous work in visual argumentation by studying speakers’ own verbal reconstructions of their visual communicative acts. The researcher interviewed 70 persons wearing or carrying American flags at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia in July 2016, to determine whether “speakers” make arguments by wearing or carrying it. For more than 20 years, theorists have debated whether it is meaningful to speak of "visual arguments," whether they can be purely visual, non-verbal communication, and whether and how they can be reconstructed in the form of the conclusion-support structure of an argument. This analysis provides …

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Celebrating Classical Rhetoric & Building Contemporary Law, Brian Larson Jun 2018

Celebrating Classical Rhetoric & Building Contemporary Law, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

Classical rhetoric and the western legal tradition were born together in the Greek city-states of the 5th century BCE. Yet little is said about Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian (for example) in contemporary law schools, and lawyers know little about the classical rhetorical foundations of their practice. Beginning in 2017, a group of two dozen scholars (mostly teachers of communication and legal theory in law schools) began a distance reading-group to examine the intersections between classical rhetorical theory and contemporary legal theory, practice, and education. This special-format session will present some of the group’s findings in the form of a …

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Medico-Legal Collaboration Regarding The Sex Offender: Othering And Resistance, Mary Lay Schuster, Brian Larson, Amy D. Propen Apr 2018

Medico-Legal Collaboration Regarding The Sex Offender: Othering And Resistance, Mary Lay Schuster, Brian Larson, Amy D. Propen

Brian Larson

We examined medico-legal collaboration regarding dangerous sex offenders where state legislators have adopted statutes that determine the criteria for commitment to and discharge from civil commitment programs. The application of these statutes relies on medical diagnoses of pathologies such as paraphilia, anti-social personality disorder, and pedophilia along with prognoses for cure or recidivism. In our study, we examined court opinions from commitment hearings and observed a trial in federal court on the constitutionality of these commitments. We found that one result of this medico-legal collaboration is the marginalization or othering of sex offenders by essentializing, dividing, shaming, and impeaching them. …

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Hand Annotation And Reliability: Corpus Linguistic Approaches To Teaching And Studying Writing, Brian Larson Mar 2018

Hand Annotation And Reliability: Corpus Linguistic Approaches To Teaching And Studying Writing, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

If I say “He’s an eligible BLANK,” you’re likely to complete the sentence with “bachelor.” The fact that “eligible” and “bachelor” often appear together--in corpus-linguistic terms, they are collocated--tells us something about the meaning of “bachelor” that is not in its dictionary definition and related social values (e.g., gendered ones, in this example). This workshop, sponsored by the Linguistics, Language, and Writing (LLW) Standing Group, used hands-on activities to introduce theories and methods of corpus-linguistic analysis for various purposes, genres, and sub-fields within writing studies. Facilitators guided attendees through examples of the use of corpus methods in FYC, writing center …

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By Reading This Title, You Have Agreed To Our Terms Of Service, Brian Larson Feb 2018

By Reading This Title, You Have Agreed To Our Terms Of Service, Brian Larson

Brian Larson

By June of 2017, Facebook had two billion (that’s billion, with a ‘b’) users accessing it per month (Balakrishnan 2017). Facebook believes that each of those consumer end-users is bound by its end-user license agreement (EULA), which Facebook calls a “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” available to end-users from a small link in light gray text called “Terms” on every Facebook page. EULAs like this, associated with websites, mobile apps, and consumer goods with embedded software, and styled “terms of service,” “terms of use,” etc., may purport to impose a wide variety of contractual obligations on consumers, for example depriving …

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