Rhetoric Commons^™

Under The Influence, Seth Rosamilia

The Kabod

This is a true story about a ruffed grouse that became drunk on fermented berries and then ended his life by flying under the influence into a window. The author thinks that humans ought to have more intelligence than a grouse about drinking and driving.

Research Brief: "Examining The Lived Experience And Factors Influencing Education Of Two Student Veterans Using Photovoice Methodology", Institute For Veterans And Military Families At Syracuse University

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

This brief is about how student veterans' military experiences impact their social and higher education experiences. In policy and practice, student veterans should seek help from faculty and staff, and universities should be available to address the needs of student veterans; the VA should increase its partnerships with universities to allow for additional access to resources for student veterans, and policymakers should support universities in creating student veteran centers. Suggestions for future research include expanding the size and diversity of the sample, reducing constraints on participants, and allowing for group-sharing experiences within the study.

The Rhetoric Of Exile In The Preaching And Teaching Of The Anglo-Saxon Church: Glimpses Of The Cultural Ideology In Old English Homilies, Yi-Chin Huang

The Hilltop Review

Abstract.

This article explores how the early medieval vernacular homiletic discourse produced in Anglo-Saxon England strategically employs the rhetoric exile, a theme whose significance is also articulated widely in Old English poetry. As words denoting such similar ideas as exile, banishment, exclusion, casting/driving out, etc., recur significantly in the homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, including the homilies of Ælfric, Wulfstan, and the Blickling and Vercelli Codices, I propose an analysis of the instances in which the rhetoric about exile is used in preaching and theology in order to reveal not only the Church authors/teachers’ ability and effort to translate Latin …

Living Proof: Autobiographical Political Argument In We Are The 99 Percent And We Are The 53 Percent, Doron Taussig

Media and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

People often cite life experiences as evidence in political arguments, though personal experience is far from generalizable. How do these arguments work? In this paper, I consider the rhetorical dynamics of “autobiographical political argument” by examining We are the 99 Percent and We are the 53 Percent, two blogs that use autobiographical stories to make discursive points. I argue that these autobiographical appeals efficiently use all three of Aristotle’s persuasive “proofs”—logos (logic), ethos (credibility), and pathos (emotion). Then I show that many of the blogs’ stories focus on “redemption,” a theme personality psychologists have found emphasized in the narrative …

A Recursive Service Learning Program: Empowering Students Of Color Traveling Within Community Borders, Cindy Lynn Mooty-Hoffmann

Wayne State University Dissertations

tbd

Of Frogs & Rhetoric: The Atrazine Wars, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In a scientific dispute over the effects of atrazine on amphibians, chemical industry–funded and publically funded scientists present stunningly contrasting constructions of atrazine's environmental concentrations, persistence, and potential to harm. Considerable scientific uncertainties and variable ranges allow authors to construct preferred versions of the story of atrazine. These incommensurate rhetorical constructions, more the result of competing economic and environmental interests than of any paradigmatic misalignments, have prolonged the dispute not only over atrazine's effects but also over whether its sales should be banned.

Attitudes Toward Mental Illness And Mental Health In The Literature Classroom, Melissa B. Guadron

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The purpose of this study was to observe undergraduate students’ attitudes toward mental illness and mental health in the literature classroom. This was an observational, inductive study of Jeffrey Berman’s literature course, featuring books written by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This setting was chosen because of Berman’s unique pedagogy, which encourages self-disclosure and psychoanalytic readings. Three questionnaires and three introspective reader response diaries were collected from fifteen participants; text analyses were performed on diaries. Research inquiries questioned a participant’s interactions with the books: How did participants respond to the portrayals of characters with mental illness or mental health …

Characterization Of Prose By Rhetorical Structure For Machine Learning Classification, James Java

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Measures of classical rhetorical structure in text can improve accuracy in certain types of stylistic classification tasks such as authorship attribution. This research augments the relatively scarce work in the automated identification of rhetorical figures and uses the resulting statistics to characterize an author's rhetorical style. These characterizations of style can then become part of the feature set of various classification models.

Our Rhetorica software identifies 14 classical rhetorical figures in free English text, with generally good precision and recall, and provides summary measures to use in descriptive or classification tasks. Classification models trained on Rhetorica's rhetorical measures paired with …

Evidence Of Things Not Seen: A Semi-Automated Descriptive Phrase And Frame Analysis Of Texts About The Herbicide Agent Orange, Sarah Beth Hopton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From 1961 to 1971 the United States and the Republic of South Vietnam used chemicals to defoliate the coastal and upload forest areas of Viet Nam. The most notorious of these chemicals was named Agent Orange, a weaponized herbicide made up of two chemicals that, when combined, produced a toxic byproduct called TCDD-dioxin. Studied suggest that TCDD-dioxin causes significant human health problems in exposed American and Vietnamese veterans, and possibly their children (Agency, U.S. Environmental Protection, 2011). In the years since the end of the Vietnam War, volumes of discourse about Agent Orange has been generated, much of which is …

The Fanned Flames Of Discontent: A Solidarity-Inspired History Of The Identity/Ideology, Cultural History, And Rhetorical Strategies Of The Wobblies During The 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike, Gary Kaunonen

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

Rooted in critical scholarship this dissertation is an interdisciplinary study, which contends that having a history is a basic human right. Advocating a newly conceived and termed, Solidarity-inspired History framework/practice perspective, the dissertation argues for and then delivers a restorative voice to working-class historical actors during the 1916 Minnesota Iron Ore Strike. Utilizing an interdisciplinary methodological framework the dissertation combines research methods from the Humanities and the Social Sciences to form a working-class history that is a corrective to standardized studies of labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Oftentimes class interests and power relationships determine the dominant …

Scribblescholar Was Here: Confessional Notes Of A Vandal Academic, Clay Shields

Theses and Dissertations--English

As a (former) vandal-punk in the academy, I often fear succumbing to Ivory Tower Stockholm syndrome. The identities I perform, vandal-punk and scholar, ideologically clash to the point that they often feel irreconcilable. By codemeshing the high-low discourses associated with these adopted cultures, I attempt to disrupt any hierarchal privileging of either, instead searching for a way to live with and harness both.

Detroit's Sport Spaces And The Rhetoric Of Consumption, Anthony C. Cavaiani

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation argues how Detroit’s spaces of sport consumption rhetorically configure the city’s identity. Specifically, this project interrogates the city’s sports spaces and argues how they anchor identity in the following ways: through the production of accessible discourses, through the emphasis on certain discourses and the de-emphasis of other discourses, through the regulation, control and biopower of the city’s sports spaces and their rhetorical effect on Detroit’s identity, and through the creation of distinct public memories produced from these discourses.

Origin Of The Term "Jazz", Gerald Leonard Cohen

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

The book (193 pages, soft-covered) is intended as a scholarly study and therefore contains more detail than would appear in a book intended for a broad readership.

Building A Discourse: Bridging The Gap Between New Media's Convergence And Rhetoric And Composition's Multimodality, Katherine G. Aho

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

My dissertation emphasizes the use of narrative structuralism and narrative theories about storytelling in order to build a discourse between the fields of New Media and Rhetoric and Composition. Propp's morphological analysis and the breaking down of stories into component pieces aides in the discussion of storytelling as it appears in and is mediated by digital and computer technologies. New Media and Rhetoric and Composition are aided by shared concerns for textual production and consumption.

In using the notion of "kairotic reading" (KR), I show the interconnectedness and interdisciplinarity required in the development of pedagogy utilized to teach students to …

Constructing Negotiated Meaning And Knowledge For The Sol Y Agua Project's Role-Playing Adventure Game Focused On Sustainability Problems In The El Paso-Rio Grande Area, Claudia Chihiro Santiago

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Video games that address environmental sustainability issues could engage students. However, video games make simplifications and establish idealistic expectations that do not resemble real life sustainability challenges and settings. Game developers and scholars believe that depicting the complexity of the real world could help video games become effective educational tools. They call for additional procedures that incorporate information from actual settings and real life situations. Furthermore, scholars have argued that video games addressing sustainability issues can be improved or made more meaningful with the participation of youth from underrepresented populations, e.g., Latinos. The Sol y Agua project at The University …

Peer Review In A Graduate Writing Class: Case Studies Of First-And Second- Language Students, Petcharat Saenpoch

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This research explored peer review strategies of L1 (native speakers of English) and L2 (non-native speakers of English) graduate student writers from different disciplines. The focus was on how they revised their writing and which strategies they used. The study was conducted in a Graduate Writing Workshop class at a public university on the U.S. - Mexican border in the United States of America. Five participants were selected as case studies. The researcher collected data by recording face-to-face peer review sessions, observing the class, interviewing the instructor and students, collecting the students' reflections, and gathering the students' writing drafts. The …

Relational Agency, Networked Technology, And The Social Media Aftermath Of The Boston Marathon Bombing, Megan M. Mcintyre

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Agency is a foundational and ongoing concern for the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Long thought to be a product and possession of human action, rhetorical agency represents the most obvious connection between the educational and theoretical work of the field and the civic project of liberal arts and humanities education. Existing theories of anthropocentric rhetorical agency are insufficient, however, to account for the complex technological work of digitally enmeshed networks of humans and nonhumans. To better account for these complex networks, this project argues for the introduction of new materialist theories of distributed agency into conversations about agency within …

Rhetoric Of Young Non-Regular Workers In Post-Bubble Japan: A Genealogical Analysis, Noriaki Tajima

Wayne State University Dissertations

This work explores the development and struggle of a rhetorical subject of Japanese young non-regular workers against the recent slow economic trend. In Japan, the bubble-burst in 1991 invited a long economic recession, and companies started to adopt non-regular—low-wage, short-term and insecure—contracts from quintessential Fordist full-time seishain regular contract; yet, a large body of older seishain workers has retained this stable and affordable status. As a result, the vast majority of working forces enrolled in the job market since then has suffered from a low living standard, many on the verge of survival, while domestic mass media discourses have legitimated …

The Rhetorical Roots Of Communication Centers, Linda B. Hobgood

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter traces the rich rhetorical roots of the creation of the modern communication center, following the lead of Sproule and Farrell as well as the postcard author. Placing this contemporary learning enhancement in the context of that abundant history reminds us that the precepts associated with the discipline of rhetoric and shared in communication center consultations are as classic as they are classical, and the questions deliberated by scholars and practitioners of this ancient art are timeless. The postcard's photo of the venerated Athenian ruins offers both a symbolic and explicit link between the legacy of the paideia of …

Beyond Syntax And Cities At War: Doing Rhetoric's History And Theory Alloiostrophically, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

How does one make contact with difference when doing rhetoric's history and theory? Rather than being afflicted with an anxiety that John Schilb once termed heterophobia, what if doing the history and theory of rhetoric were healthy about heteros? Heteros means "difference" but visually the word shows more than this, namely "eros" in "heteros" - love in difference.

In this chapter, I explore a love of difference in the history and theory of rhetoric. Starting from my own love of Homer that I dare express, I tum to a peculiar text about Homeric rhetoric, …