Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

"Struggling" Adolescent Writers Describe Their Writing Experience: A Descriptive Case Study, F. Jean Mcpherron

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Four adolescents identified as struggling writers in an English language arts classroom were interviewed about their perceptions of a writing task--how they judged their capability to succeed, how they ranked their passion, persistence, and confidence about writing, and how they responded to classroom activity. Student perceptions of self-efficacy and the related self-beliefs of motivation and interest as well as self-regulation were stated and implied as students described a planning worksheet, instructional scaffolding, peer interactions, and ownership of their writing. Wersch's view of mediated action and Engestrom's model of activity systems were the lens through which the students' descriptions were analyzed. …

Understanding The National Science Foundation Career Award Proposal Genre: A Rhetorical, Ethnographic, And System Perspective, David M. Christensen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

With tightening university budgets, never before has the activity level of research grant proposal writing been more intense. With increased proposal numbers, including for the National Science Foundation's (NSF) prestigious CAREER award, has also come increased competition and decreased funding rates. This dissertation has searched for successful and unsuccessful characteristics from funded and unfunded CAREER proposals.

The research focused on a study of two key subjects: 1) a corpus of 20 texts that included 12 funded proposals and 8 unfunded proposals from across NSF programs, and 2) an ethnographic analysis comprised from interviews with 14 NSF program officers (PO) from …

Comments And The Classroom Context: Investigating Students’ Rhetorical Relationships To Instructor Response, Jeremy C. Branstad

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Jane Mathison-Fife and Peggy O'Neill, along with Nancy Summers, have decried the lack of student voices in composition studies' literature on teacher response. Responding to these researchers' concerns, I present three exploratory case studies of student readers of commentary within their classroom contexts. Using reading theory's insight that the interpretive act is always both subjective and socially situated, these case studies demonstrate that a richer literature on written feedback is possible through a consideration for student perspectives and for the cultural, institutional, and instructional factors that influence their understandings. At the same time, these case studies also illuminate the complexity …

“The Skunk At The Garden Party Of The Language Arts”: Students Weigh In On What Grammar Means To Them, Sarah Caroline Olson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I work to add new voices to an old conversation. While instructors and scholars alike have argued about the efficacy of various methods of grammar instruction, about whether grammar instruction should even be included in the English composition classroom, and about how to define grammar for more than a century, student voices have rarely entered this discussion. For this reason, I conducted a survey of student grammar conceptions within the First Year Writing Program at Boise State University, as well as follow-up focus groups. From these findings, I work to construct a denotative and connotative definition of …

Early Modern Evil Genius: Hyperconformity And Objectivity In Sixteenth And Seventeenth-Century English Literature, Christine Hoffmann

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies the response among early modern and postmodern audiences to the experience of information overload, and suggests that the most appealing response to living in a communications network that appears both systematic and random is to use a rhetoric of struggle that is ambiguous in the same way. >The reasons for this appeal are twofold: firstly, the rhetoric of struggle is a way to cope with the difficulty of situating oneself within a system of circulating information that operates according to its own arbitrary rules. Mimicking that arbitrariness is a way of finding aesthetic synchronicity between how one's …

What Is Conservatism?, Heidi Peters

Graduate Research Symposium (2010 - 2017)

The re-branding of the right manifested itself in conservative movements and gatherings across the country in-between 2008 & 2010. One of those events included Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor Rally on August 28, 2010. This research project is a case study that illustrates how the conservative political ideology is defined and rejuvenated after massive defeat.

Mothers And Teen Daughters: Make Room For The Internet, Jaqueline Mcleod Rogers

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

When the internet steals our daughters, mothers turn cyborg.

Things Dad: The Kansas Years, Sue Webb

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

When recipes help tell the story.

In Defense Of The Unmother: Rhetoric, Motherhood, And Social Networking, Rebecca Ingalls

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Wanted: kind, nurturing, compassionate females. Childless women need not apply. Link to video: Rhetoric, Christmas Cards, and Infertility: A Season of Silence

Worlds Collide! Facebook, Family & George Costanza, Amy L. Spears, Julie Driscoll

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

If facebook and social media have wrecked our ability to sustain lengthy treatises on topics, well then, by George, we'll make the blurb our convention and still tell you what we think.

Rhetoric, Christmas Cards, And Infertility: A Season Of Silence, Kristin L. Arola

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Revising notions of family. One card at a time.

When I first saw the call for the special issue on family rhetoric, I found myself feeling left out. While I am a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, an aunt, a niece, a cousin, and a wife, in spite of many years and dollars spent trying to be a mother, I am unable to do so. I do not have my own family. As I contemplated my own rhetoric of “the family,” holiday cards began to pile up. Card after card, letter after letter, all about kids—kids I do not have. …

Harlot Runs In The Family, Paul Muhlhauser, Kelly Bradbury

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Much to our delight, our call for this special issue on family rhetoric attracted a record number of submissions. For some, the connection was deeply personal; for others, cultural representations of family and/or the role of various communities on family drew shrewd attention. Ultimately, the pieces in this issue were selected not only for their brilliant and creative insights about family rhetoric (how family members communicate with each other) and the rhetoric of family (how culture and society inform us about the meaning of family), but also because they represent an array of perspectives, experiences, and forms of expressing our …

Sexual Disorientation, Anne Balay

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

She used to wish for a lesbian daughter. Predictably, the joke's on her.

A Name On The Tree, Laura J. Davies

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

What's in a name? For some, family history, arguments, and identity.

Of Peerenting, Trophy Wives, And Effeminate Men: Modern Family's Surprisingly Conservative Remediation Of The Family Sitcom Genre, Christina M. Lavecchia

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Just because the family is modern doesn't mean the family is new.

There Are Two Parts To My Life, Danielle Hunt

Harlot: A Revealing Look at the Arts of Persuasion

Often, there are tunnels and holes and shovels for fingers. This poem is about the digging process.

Defining And Addressing Expectations For L2 Writers Across Disciplines, Lindsey Ives, Tom Pierce, Michael Schwartz

Publications

A presentation divided into three sections: Student Perspectives given by Michael Schwartz, Teacher Perspectives given by Lindsey Ives, and Administrator Perspectives given by Tom Pierce.

Crafting A Congregational Narrative For The College Church Of Christ In Fresno, California, Jason W. Locke

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes a ministry project in the College Church of Christ in Fresno, California. In this project I led the congregation through a narrative crafting process in order to clarify the church’s identity and increase its capacity for mission. In recent decades, the College Church moved away from some of its founding characteristics yet failed to clarify a new sense of identity. It subsequently had difficulty acting with a unified sense of purpose and instead moved increasingly toward fragmentation.

Data for crafting the new narrative came from three weeks of group interviews. My research team conducted these interviews in …

Discerning A Vocational Theology Of Marriage For The Smyrna Church Of Christ, Daniel F. Camp

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this project was to discern a vocational theology of marriage for the Smyrna Church of Christ in Smyrna, Tennessee. Through a group discernment process, the participants studied Genesis 1-3 and 2 Corinthians 5 as a basis for understanding God’s design for marriage at creation, the effects of sin on the vocational aspect of the marriage relationship, and the call of Christ for husbands and wives to participate in the resurrection life through the ministry of reconciliation. At the end of the discernment process, the participants articulated a theology statement for the church that examined our current context …

Writing Program Design For Esl Writers, Kacie M. Kiser

English Theses & Dissertations

Research and scholarship in the field of second-language writing have suggested that English as second language students (ESLs) require different modes of instruction than their native English speaking peers within the composition classroom (Matsuda, 1996; Silva, 1994). Yet ESL students are commonly marginalized in institutions' writing programs due to several commonplace beliefs shared by administrators that ESL students can be taught according to the same standards as mainstream students. Therefore, writing program administrators and instructors often do not have specific knowledge of ESL writing issues and, thus, do not know how to pedagogically accommodate these students or design a program …