Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Contentious Conversations, Missing Voices: The Ongoing Debate About Style, Megan Yates Grizzle

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As I began to investigate the concept of style in Composition curriculums, I quickly realized two things: style is difficult to define, and student input about style is virtually absent from the previous scholarship on style theory and pedagogy. This project, therefore, does not seek to end the debate about style. It seeks to do exactly the opposite. I want to extend the ongoing conversation about style even further, this time to include student voices. My project seeks to triangulate discussions about style to include voices from scholars, practitioners, and students. Students are too often an afterthought, receiving instruction based …

A Rhetorical Analysis Of Strategic Communication In The Amalga Barrens Wetlands Controversy, Laura Vernon

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Laura Vernon conducts a study to discover how, against the odds, the Bridgerland Audubon Society (BAS), located in Cache Valley, Utah, influenced a change in public policy regarding the Amalga Barrens reservoir proposal. In 1991, the state of Utah proposed developing the Bear River in northern Utah and constructing an off-stream storage facility (a reservoir) on the wetlands known as the Barrens near the town of Amalga. The Barrens served as a bird habitat for migrating shorebirds and waterfowl. In the late 1990s, BAS led a grassroots effort to remove the Barrens as a proposed site from the Bear River …

The Apprenticeship Of Laurell K. Hamilton: How Aspiring Writers Learn To Write, Chelsea Ann Pierce

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

How do aspiring writers learn to write? Laurell K. Hamilton’s blog records and presents her thorough apprenticeship to readers. This thesis is a case study of the writing process that she documents on her blog. The results reflect aspects of composition theory including formula deviation, character persona construction, audience function and awareness, diverse research possibilities, revision and motivation strategies, digital literacy and technology acquisition, and the blog as a genre. Hamilton also develops and contributes her own writing process theories. The study reveals that both aspiring and professional writers both adhere to common established composition theories and create their own …

Uncovering Multimodality In Composition, Kevin Jacob Kelley

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Moje points out that “scholars have argued that some media, texts, and literacy practices that get counted as new are actually old, but our attention to them is new” (352), and this is true of multimodality. We are being re-engaged with multimodality because of the rise of technologies that allow writers to blend media in seemingly new ways, but we have known before the digital turn that reading and writing are inherently multimodal processes, we just did not have a phrase to describe the multiple semiotic channels that are used to compose until “multimodality.” Early university compositionists conceptualized writing as …

Professional Writing In The English Classroom: Designing A High School Or Middle School Course (Or Unit) In Professional Writing, Jonathan Bush, Leah A. Zuidema

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

The article offers information on the development of professional writing course in English middle school or high school classroom. It mentions that a good syllabus not only provide answers to basic questions, but also to questions that Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins have pertained to as the essential questions. It notes that students learn from writing activities and assessments including how to write in genres, evaluate the settings of professional tools, and manage their writing processes.

'He Just Did Not Listen To Me': Authority And Resistance In Writing Tutors' Encounters With Prior Learning, Daniel P. Kenzie

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Graduate Student Presentations

No abstract provided.

Translingual Literacy, Language Difference, And Matters Of Agency., Min-Zhan Lu, Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

We argue that composition scholarship’s defenses of language differences in student writing reinforce dominant ideology’s spatial framework conceiving language difference as deviation from a norm of sameness. We argue instead for adopting a temporal-spatial framework defining difference as the norm of utterances, and defining languages, literacy practices, conventions, and contexts as always emergent, ongoing products of iterations, and thus manifestations of writer agency. Using the “White Shoes” essay from David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University,” we show how such a framework addresses the writer’s agency iterating the “same,” and how it resolves concerns to meet students’ need and right to learn …

The Residual Resistance Of The Individual Within The Rhizomatic Hegemony Of The Internet, Emma Katherine Wolfe

English Theses & Dissertations

Networked cyborgs that exist within the non-hierarchical rhizomatic network of the Internet risk losing the concept of their individuality as our identity becomes less important than the group. However, if the rhizomatic network is thought of as a hegemony that exists on the Internet, we can resist this through the residual notion of individual identity. Since cyborgs must perform in order to exist on the rhizomatic network, they can become aware of and perform their individuality through awareness of the computer medium. There are three methods for networked cyborgs to assert their individuality discussed in this thesis.

The first is …

Exploring Metaphor In The Great Gatsby, Dan Gleason

The Great Gatsby Unit

In this lesson, students engage with one approach to metaphor and then apply that learning to metaphors in Great Gatsby. To start, students learn about I. A. Richards’s definition of metaphor as the link between tenor (topic) and vehicle (way of thinking about it). They then generate some metaphors by randomly combining tenors and vehicles in order to understand how the parts interrelate. Finally, the class interacts with the messier, more beautiful face of metaphor by working through, in groups, some key metaphors from the novel. Students identify the components of each metaphor (tenor, vehicle) and also consider what subtle …

The Deadliest School Shooting In American History: A Dramatistic Analysis Of The Virginia Tech Massacre, Natalie Susanne Zafis

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

Flowing And Freestyling: Learning From Adult Students About Process Knowledge Transfer, Michelle Navarre Cleary

School of Continuing and Professional Studies Faculty and Staff Works

A study of twenty-five newly returned adult students finds that students with more process experience used more and more specific process analogies to construct their writing processes for school assignments than those with less process experience. Cues from peers and sense of academic identity also influenced transfer of process knowledge.

She’S Forever Present, Marina Abramović: An Artist, An Innovator, And The Grandmother Of Performance Art, Jessica Volmer

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

Ironic Appropriation Of Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls In Bulosan's The Cry And The Dedication, Robert Brown

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Ironic Appropriation of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls in Bulosan's The Cry and the Dedication" Robert Brown discusses Carlos Bulosan's The Cry and the Dedication and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Brown claims that Bulosan's appropriation of For Whom borders on plagiarism and that this in part defines The Cry as a postcolonial text. Brown maintains that E. San Juan Jr.'s otherwise comprehensive introduction to The Cry ignores Hemingway's text in favor of a Filipino author, Luis Taruc, with an implicit argument that Bulosan used Taruc to make his novel a more …

The Myth Of Nothing In Classics And Asian Indigenous Films, Sheng-Mei Ma

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Myth of Nothing in Classics and Asian Indigenous Films" Sheng-mei Ma discusses how the desert and the permafrost region are terra incognita, except nomads and Indigenous peoples. Given the extreme conditions of these forbidding places, Western modernity sees its own shadow cast on such black holes on earth. Since the 1960s, classic Hollywood or art house films by David Lean, Akira Kurosawa, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Anthony Minghella, and Sergei Bodrov romanticize and/or mythologize what is perceived as modernity's mirror image. Indie films in recent decades, particularly by Asian Indigenous filmmakers Byambasuren Davaa, Zacharias Kunuk, and Khyentse …

Us-American Protestant Missionaries And Translation In China 1894-1911, Mingyu Lu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "US-American Protestant Missionaries and Translation in China 1894-1911" Mingyu Lu discusses impact of and surrounding atmosphere between Protestant missionaries and Chinese intellectuals in translating Western texts. During the national crisis in 1894-1911, Protestant missionaries and Chinese intellectuals co-translated a large number of Western texts and adjusted their translations with regard to content and objectives. While the missionaries and their Chinese co-translators held different views towards the mapping of learning specifically towards Western learning, Chinese learning, and Christian messages, the translations were of significant impact in the period discussed. Lu argues that under the appeal of national renewal, …

Shimoda's Program For Japanese And Chinese Women's Education, Mamiko Suzuki

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Shimoda Program for Japanese and Chinese Women's Education" Mamiko Suzuki discusses Western developments as a facet of educational curricula in Japan in the early twentieth century. When in the early 1900s a number of elite Chinese women traveled to Tokyo — for most, their first time abroad — to receive a modern education, it was at Jissen Women's Academy, which was the first to enroll female Chinese students in Tokyo and thus a crucial site for the development of a modern pan-Asian female identity. A central figure in the popularization of women's education and household and hygiene …

Rethinking Theatrical Images Of The New Woman In China's Republican Era, Li Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Rethinking Theatrical Images of the New Woman in China's Republican Era" Li Guo analyses the multivalent representations of the New Woman and posits that they encompass a broad array of blended feminine identities following the introduction of Western literary and cultural trends into Chinese culture. The tensions between ideological discourses about nation, gender, and politics as revealed in the plays of the republican period reveal the many underlying cultural paradigms and the processes in which dramatists Sinicized foreign models of the New Woman to appeal to their domestic audiences. Guo explores how the playwrights' gendered viewpoints contribute …

Introduction To Asian Culture(S) And Globalization, I-Chun Wang, Li Guo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Sinologism, The Western World View, And The Chinese Perspective, Ming Dong Gu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Sinologism, the Western World View, and the Chinese Perspective" Ming Dong Gu discusses how the West formulated its ways of observing China and how the rest of the world and the Chinese themselves view Chinese culture through the Western lens. Gu discusses the thought of selected scholars in Western history who have contributed to the formation of Sinologism and explores the motivation, logic, rationale, epistemology, methodology, and characteristics of the West's long-term endeavor to incorporate China into the Western-centered world system.

Shen And Cinema In 1930s Shanghai, Ling Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Shen and Cinema in 1930s Shanghai" Ling Zhang analyzes the film十字街頭 (1937) (Crossroads) in relation to the influence from foreign film practice and concepts from Hollywood and Soviet cinema in 1930s Shanghai. By an analysis of the film's cinematic style, Zhang explores the transcultural and transmedial possibilities and potentials in the context of film and film culture in the 1930s and the unruly energy and unique aesthetic characteristics embedded in the process of creative mimesis and transplantation. While in the 1930s Chinese cinema had an ambivalent and paradoxical attitude to US-American and Soviet films, Chinese filmmaker …