Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Talking About How: Variation In The Use Of How And Its Definition, Maili Jonas

All Master's Theses

This study identified the patterns that represent the unconventional ways that students used how in academic essays, determined the frequency of each pattern, and for the sake of comparison, searched for those patterns in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), in both the spoken and academic written registers. The results showed that a sample of first-year students at Central Washington University (CWU) used the complementizer how as that in their essays, a usage more common in spoken registers. However, there was some evidence of how as that in academic COCA searches, showing that the usage may be in the …

Write A Manifesto [Composition], Caron Knauer

Open Educational Resources

This integrative learning writing assignment encourages students to develop a mission statement as they think about how we can all come together to make the world better. It asks them to research an issue to provide background, history, and contextual information; outline strategies and solutions for social change and/or justice; and organize a call to action. The focus of the assignment is interdisciplinary learning as well as for students to collaboratively reflect on how initiatives for change can directly affect their lives but to also be aware of resistance and potential obstacles in delivering change. This assignment was revised in …

Aspectos Formales De La Citación En El Discurso Científico Desde Una Perspectiva Diacrónica, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

La presente investigación hace una revisión histórica del tratamiento del elemento retórico-discursivo de la citación desde su primera aparición en el ámbito de la comunicación científica en la Philosophical Transaction de la Real Sociedad de Londres para el avance de la Ciencia Natural.

Afterword: Horizons Of Transformation: When Age, Literacy And Scholarship Meet, Louise Wetherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Spectators, Sponsors, Or World Travelers? Engaging With Personal Narratives Of Others Through The Afghan Women's Writing Project, Bethany Mannon

English Faculty Publications

This article studies the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and proposes three conceptual tools for examining the ways readers and editors of digital storytelling projects interact with writers and texts. The author advances discussions of personal narrative and the role this form of writing plays in transnational feminism and forms of humanitarian activism that increasingly take place online. Digital storytelling projects effectively circulate these personal accounts, but they benefit from scholarship that advises self-critical approaches to representing their subjects.

Literacies Of The Disaster Zone: New Media Genres And Participatory Rhetorics After The 2010 Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill, R. J. Lambert

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

On April 20, 2010, explosions at the British Petroleum (BP) Macondo Project in the Gulf of Mexico initiated what would become the world's largest accidental release of oil into the ocean. This ecological disaster, a unique combination of natural and human causes, is one of many significant traumas over approximately the last two decades that various stakeholders have documented, participated in, and responded to largely through the expanding and increasingly ubiquitous media of the internet, computers, cell phones, and other networked communicative technologies, which both enable and constrain the variety of responses to traumatic events.

This Dissertation improves our understanding …

Spatial Genres Of Revitalization: Desiring-Machines And The Production Of Public Subjects, Larry S. Morgan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This project, Spatial Genres of Revitalization: Desiring-Machines and the Production of Public Subjects, is guided by the need to understand how the recent changes in El Paso's gentrifying downtown are impacting the development of public subjectivities. This Thesis is concerned with how the formation of public subjectivities is occasioned by changes in a city undergoing "revitalization" in terms of how people move through urban space. At the same time it is also concerned with how the people moving these spaces imagine and configure it to different ends which surpass the intention and violence of gentrification.

To this end, Spatial Genres …

Re/Framing The Hispanic/Latino Nonprofit Identity, Jasmine Villa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The focus of my Dissertation is to examine how an organizational identity is constructed rhetorically by three Hispanic/Latino based non-profit organization. By looking at how a non-profit organization's online presence contributes to the transformation of the organization as a public, we are able to see rhetoric as a discursive and material practice taking place.

Rethinking Multimodality In First-Year Composition: Applying Theories Of Digital Rhetoric, Procedural Rhetoric, And Electracy To Multimodal Assignments, Jennifer Falcon

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

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Danse Macabre: Origins, Evolution, And Execution, Steven A. Bardon

Theses and Dissertations

The Danse Macabre is an allegory in which all living things -grand and otherwise -are equally escorted to death’s embrace. Most cultures, from ancient to contemporary, have a belief in an afterlife and interpreted death through funerary practices and religious artwork. Such spirituality associated with Danse Macabre is especially influential within the arts, such as visual storytelling. Two series in particular, FaustFall and Cardinal Junction, incorporate the Danse Macabre allegory through its implementation into accompanying concepts: like the Faustian archetype, the Gothic narrative, and the Byronic hero. Through exploring the Danse Macabre within their dystopian narratives, the notion of …

Constitutive Memories Of City Space: Rhetorics Of Civil Rights Memory In Detroit’S Urban Landscape, Scott Mitchell

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines public memories of civil rights injustice and resistance as constitutive rhetorics of urban culture and spatiality for the city of Detroit. By studying the city of Detroit as it navigates an ongoing period of dramatic change and redevelopment, this study demonstrates how material manifestations of memory become the constitutive forces that define what many describe as “Detroit’s heart and soul.” This project illustrates the embedded cultural logics produced from sites of public memory, thereby arguing city spaces as locations bound to their legacies and beholden to material and symbolic consequences of their past. This dissertation proceeds through …

Snowden Is (Not) A Whistleblower: An Analysis Of Ideographs And Anti-Democratic Rhetorical Strategies Within The U.S. Government’S Response To Edward Snowden, Joshua Guitar

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is a rhetorical criticism of the U.S. government’s response to Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed illegal and unethical surveillance tactics of the National Security Agency and U.S. government. Informed by contemporary theories of democracy, this synchronic ideographic analysis examines the rhetorical strategies of U.S. government officials following Snowden’s disclosures. This dissertation contends that in laboring to absolve themselves of culpability, U.S. officials obfuscated Snowden and operationalized as an ideograph. This reification provides methodological development to ideographic analysis as it demonstrates how a political figure can become a rhetorical abstraction used for ideological purposes. The rhetorical interplay between …

Democratic Communication: Lessons From The Flint Water Crisis, Mindy Myers

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation develops an approach to institutional critique that re-works Porter, Sullivan, Blythe, Grabill, and Miles’ foundational configuration. This project argues that John Dewey’s concept of democratic communication articulated in his debate with Walter Lippmann provides a useful heuristic for developing democratic communicative practices that allow citizens and experts to communicate with one another about technical issues such as water quality and safety. Through an analysis of Michigan’s emergency manager law, the relationship between citizens and experts that exposed the crisis, and the Flint Water Advisory Task Force’s Final Report, this dissertation establishes that citizens must participate in technical decision-making …

Articulating Digital Archival Practice Within Writing Program Administration: A Theoretical Framework, Amanda Girard

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Throughout Writing Program Administration scholarship there has been a clear call for archivization and archival work. This dissertation project takes an interdisciplinary approach to digital archival practices for Writing Program Administrators to consider and employ in their home institutions. While I recognize that WPAs are not typically identified as “archivists,” I situate the digital archive within the digital humanities as an interdisciplinary, collaborative project and offer suggestions that lead to recommendations for making an institutional archive. I review archival practice in order to justify the digital archive as an appropriate vehicle for WPAs’ work. Further, I argue that the digital …

Ecologies Of Sponsorship: What Fitbit Users Can Teach Us About Digital Literacy, Kimberly Tweedale

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

As digital technologies have expanded, so have the literacy sponsors that support and shape how those technologies are used. This project focuses on one of these growing sites of sponsorship surrounding a specific health-tracking technology: wearable Fitbit devices. While much of the work on literacy sponsorship has focused on institutional sponsors as agents, I argue that the picture becomes more complicated and interesting when we place our focus on how users—often considered the sponsored—can become agents in a system that may have marginalized, excluded, or used them.

Using a combination of qualitative methods, this dissertation highlights how various literacy sponsors …

Spectrum 2018, Saint Mary's College Of California

The Undergraduate Spectrum

No abstract provided.

The Undergraduate 2018, Saint Mary's College Of California

The Undergraduate Spectrum

No abstract provided.

Touching The Unreal: The Definition, Narrative Strategies, And Aesthetics Of 3d Cartoon Narratives., Nathan Snow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Touching the Unreal" follows the structure set out by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics to argue that understanding cartoons is serious business and requires that we define the art form, outline its basic tenets, and theorize how the mind understands it. The dissertation argues for a new definition of 3D computer generated cartoons, beginning with the most basic definition applicable to all forms of animation and taking into account new technological developments before arriving at the 3D cartoon narratives of today. The dissertation outlines the basic facets of 3D cartoon narratives in terms of narrative and aesthetics, arguing that, in …

Celebrities, Fans, And Queering Gender Norms: A Critical Examination Of Lady Gaga's, Nicki Minaj's, And Fans' Use Of Instagram, Brandy Dieterle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation used queer rhetoric as a lens for studying queering gender norms on Instagram by using Lady Gaga's, Nicki Minaj's, and fan posts as case studies. The research considers how celebrities may use social media, like Instagram, for queering gender norms, and what this might look like. This research also aimed to better understand if and how fans may take up celebrities' efforts at queering gender norms and, in turn, queer gender norms in their own Instagram posts where they tag Gaga or Minaj. To conduct this research, I took a multimodal methodological approach and collected and coded 1,000 …

Book Review: Information Literacy And Writing Studies In Conversation: Reenvisioning Library-Writing Program Connections, Jacqulyn Ann Williams

Communications in Information Literacy

No abstract provided.