Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Metaphoric Competence As A Means To Meta-Cognitive Awareness In First-Year Composition, David T. Dadurka

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A growing body of writing research suggests college students’ and teachers’ conceptualizations of writing play an important role in learning to write and making the transition from secondary to post-secondary academic composition. First-year college writers are not blank slates; rather, they bring many assumptions and beliefs about academic writing to the first-year writing classroom from exposure to a wide range of literate practices throughout their lives. Metaphor acts as a way for scholars to trace students’ as well as their instructors’ assumptions and beliefs about writing. In this study, I contend that metaphor is a pathway to meta-cognitive awareness, mindfulness, …

Examining Gender In Pharmaceutical Rhetoric Through A Cultural Studies Lens: A Case Study On The Gardasil Vaccine, Jennifer Fickley-Baker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

On June 8, 2006, Merck announced the debut of Gardasil, the world's first vaccine found successful in preventing human papillomavirus (HPV) infections, a sexually transmitted infection that is one of the main causes of certain cancers in men and women, including cervical, vulvar, penile and anal cancers. To promote the vaccine's release, Merck launched Gardasil's "One Less" advertising campaign that included television commercials, print ads and a consumerfocused website (www.Gardasil.com), each promoting the message that "you" could now be "one less woman" affected by cervical cancer ("One Less" campaign). The vaccine, tested and approved only for females age 9-26, was …

Governmentality In Higher Education : A Critical Analysis Of The National Survey Of Student Engagement (Nsse), Bonnie B. Gorman

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

In this dissertation, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) serves as a nodal point through which to examine the power relations shaping the direction and practices of higher education in the twenty-first century. Theoretically, my analysis is informed by Foucault’s concept of governmentality, briefly defined as a technology of power that influences or shapes behavior from a distance. This form of governance operates through apparatuses of security, which include higher education. Foucault identified three essential characteristics of an apparatus—the market, the milieu, and the processes of normalization—through which administrative mechanisms and practices operate and govern populations. In this project, …

Life-Patterns On The Periphery : A Humanities Base For Development Imperatives And Their Application In The Chicago City-Region, Kevin Hodur

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Life-Patterns on the Periphery: A Humanities Base for Development Imperatives and their Application in the Chicago City-Region is informed by the need to bring diverse fields together in order to tackle issues related to the contemporary city-region. By honouring the long-term economic, social, political, and ecological imperatives that form the fabric of healthy, productive, sustainable communities, it becomes possible to setup political structures and citizen will to develop distinct places that result in the overlapping of citizen life patterns, setting the stage for citizen action and interaction.

Based in humanities scholarship, the four imperatives act as checks on each other …

Composing In Words And Images : A Proposal For A Tandem Approach To Written And Visual Composition Pedagogy, Brian Dean Parmeter

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

This project proposes a module for teaching visual composition within the context of a written composition course. Drawing from process writing theory, critical pedagogy, and photo-elicitation, “Composing In Words And Images” gives composition teachers a module and direct instruction for the incorporation of critical visual composition studies in their writing classes.

The Rhetoric Of Evidence In Recent Documentary Film And Video, Steven W. Schoen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Documentary is a genre of film that portrays "real" events using depictions that connote the objectivity and facticity implied by the processes of photorealism. Many contemporary documentary theorists and critics observe a constitutive problem in this ethos: despite the apparent constructions and agendas of documentary filmmaking, the framing and assumption of documentary as a window on the world tend to naturalize its own constructions as "real." Critics who engage documentary trace the multitude of ways this problem plays out in particular films. These projects yield many important insights, but they most often approach documentary as a form of inherently deficient …

Musical Rhetoric And Sonic Composing Processes, Kyle D. Stedman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project is a study of musical rhetoric and music composition processes. It asks the questions, "How does the nature of music as sound-in-time affect its rhetorical functions, production, and delivery?" and "How do composers approach the task of communicating with audiences through instrumental music?" I answer these questions by turning to the history of musical rhetoric as practiced in the field of musicology and by interviewing composers themselves about their composition practices--approaches that are both underused in the rhetoric and composition community.

I frame my research participants' responses with a discussion of the different degrees to which composers try …

Talking About Talk: The Problem Of Communication As An Object Of Study In Public Participation Research, Lauren Leigh Cutlip

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

When citizens participate in risk assessment and decision-making for environmental and other issues that affect members of the public, more robust decisions may be made. Public participation in policy decisions is not only more democratic, but it also enables members of the public to contribute valuable expertise to the decision-making process. However, the development of an effective forum for such participatory projects has been difficult. Participation mechanisms that foster dialogue and interactive exchange between participants have been regarded as the most beneficial, but the practical application of these mechanisms has been observed to be problematic. The goal of this study …

Tracing Boundaries, Effacing Boundaries: Information Literacy As An Academic Discipline, Grace L. Veach

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Both librarianship and composition have been shaken by recent developments in higher education. In libraries ebooks and online databases threaten the traditional "library as warehouse model," while in composition, studies like The Citation Project show that students are not learning how to incorporate sources into their own writing effectively. This dissertation examines the disciplinary origins and current status of information literacy and makes a case for increased collaboration between Writing Studies and librarians and the eventual emergence of information literacy as a discipline in its own right. Chapter One introduces the near-total failure of information literacy pedagogy and the lack …

What's In A Coauthor?: (Re)Locating Joseph Denney In Composition History, Ivan Davis

Faculty Publications

This article reassesses the Fred Newton Scott and Joseph Villiers Denney collaborative textbook authorship by emphasizing Denney’s generally overlooked contributions to that coauthorship and to the field of composition generally. Through an examination of Denney’s scholarly work and his personal correspondence with Scott during the period marking their collaborative textbook writing, this article asserts that Denney, like Scott, was an innovative theorist and practitioner in his own right, and that the effectiveness of the Scott-Denney textbooks owes much to Denney’s role as coauthor.

Facebook And Its Users: Using Grounded Theory To Understand Perceived Interactivity As A Constraint In The Rhetorical Situation, Katie Lee Retzinger Pruitt

English Theses & Dissertations

The general term interactivity has been used in a variety of disciplines to describe phenomena that occur in website interfaces; however, definitions and explanations about what constitutes interactivity and how it functions do not consider the specific ways in which interactivity can function and be perceived by users in specific rhetorical situations. In this study, I address the problems with the literature about general interactivity in writing studies and in other disciplines such as computer science, advertising, marketing, and communication studies by distinguishing between two types of interactivity—functional and perceived. I situate the different types of interactivity rhetorically, which can …

Everything That Rises Must Converge: A Chinese-English Contrastive Rhetoric Case Study, Shuwen Li

Theses and Dissertations

The traditional definition of contrastive rhetoric (CR) emphasizes prescribing and teaching differences in rhetorical patterns. This paper raises questions about traditional CR and analyzes recent developments, which move from differences to similarities in rhetorical patterns, within the context of increasing globalization. Through surveying Chinese-English CR, China's New Culture Movement, and China's New Concept Writing Competition, this paper proposes seven hypotheses with an emphasis on exploring the commonly accepted themes and the possibility of reaching convergence in cross-cultural communication. Using Burke's definition of rhetoric as the theoretical framework, this paper conducts a case study on Chinese and English movie reviews. Tagmemic …

Peer Review Writing Workshops, Nicole Trackman

Writing Bootcamp Unit

This lesson takes students through the writing workshop process in preparation for revision. This lesson requires students to prepare constructive feedback for three authors in their class and reflect on their own work.

Writing A Professional Email: Netiquette, Adam Kotlarczyk

Writing Bootcamp Unit

This lesson instructs students on the basic of Internet etiquette, and allows them to practice writing a professional email, such as the type they would send to teachers, professors, or employers.

This lesson can take 40-70 minutes, depending on the size of your class.

Composing The Working Thesis, Nicole Trackman

Writing Bootcamp Unit

This lesson will review the proper format of effective thesis statements. Students will review sample thesis statements, reflect on their own work and revise.

Claims And Enthymemes: The Rudiments Of Argument, Adam Kotlarczyk

Writing Bootcamp Unit

In Rhetoric, Aristotle called the enthymeme the syllogism of persuasion. More recently, philosopher Stephen Toulmin used a similar structure to form “practical arguments” in his Model of Argument in The Uses of Argument (1958). Essentially, such an argument consists of three components: claim, evidence, warrant. The claim is an arguable conclusion, for example “Edward Hopper is a famous painter.” The evidence provides a reason to support this claim, for example “because his work is at the Art Institute in Chicago.” The warrant is an assumption inherent in an argument, usually unstated, in this case, that famous artists have work …

Legal Discourse, Conceptual Metaphors, And Basic Writing Programming: A Study Of Ayers V. Fordice, Joyce Olewski Inman

Dissertations

In what ways does legal discourse influence our perceptions of students labeled as basic writers and these students’ perceptions of themselves? How does standards-based discourse affect student writers’ abilities to define themselves in academe? This dissertation involves an examination of legal and public discourse surrounding Ayers v. Fordice, one of the most prominent desegregation cases in higher education, in an attempt to answer these questions. Its intent is to explore how conceptual metaphors prevalent in these discourses affect our understandings of basic writing programming in the state of Mississippi but also in the field of composition more globally.

My …

Creating A "Mock Essay" To Teach Mla Format, Erin Micklo

Writing Bootcamp Unit

This lesson requires students to write a “mock essay” using fictional sources and a creative, entertaining topic to demonstrate MLA proficiency.

One Quotation, Two Meanings: Quotation Analysis Exercise, Dan Gleason

Writing Bootcamp Unit

This challenging lesson gives students practice in analyzing quotations very closely. The exercise begins with the premise that quotations never “speak for themselves,” and that writers need to explain what quotations mean. To prove this point, this lesson shows students that specific quotations can in fact “mean” (or support) very different claims; in fact, students use a single quotation to advance almost opposite arguments. The goal of the lesson is for students to understand that quotations may be very malleable, and thus they always need clear framing and explanation. This lesson uses a short essay, “What is an American?” as …

Mapping Injustice: The World Is Witness, Place-Framing, And The Politics Of Viewing On Google Earth, Joshua P. Ewalt

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Working from assumptions that inequality is often spatially informed, a set of interactive cartographies has recently proliferated on Google Earth. In this essay, I analyze one of those interactive cartographies: The World is Witness produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). I read the map as an organizational rhetoric that frames place as "embedded injustice." I also argue that thorough analysis of the framing of local place on Google Earth must inherently question whether the map can create a disruption in the viewing subject. While the map presents vital information on excruciatingly despicable acts of injustice, and the …