Rhetoric Commons^™

The Effect Of Argumentative Task Goal On The Quality Of Argumentative Discourse, Merce Garcia-Mila, Sandra Gilabert, Sibel Erduran, Mark Felton

Faculty Publications

In argumentative discourse, there are two kinds of activity-dispute and deliberation-that depend on the argumentative task goal. In dispute the goal is to defend a conclusion by undermining alternatives, whereas in deliberation the goal is to arrive at a conclusion by contrasting alternatives. In this study, we examine the impact of these tasks goals on the quality of argumentative discourse. Sixty-five junior high school students were organized into dyads to discuss sources of energy. Dyads were formed by members who had differing viewpoints and were distributed to one of two conditions: 31 dyads were asked to discuss with the goal …

A Cognitively Enabling Approach: Cognitive Diversity In Composition Studies, Crystal June Starkey

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

A COGNITIVELY ENABLING APPROACH: COGNITIVE DIVERSITY IN COMPOSITION STUDIES.

by

CRYSTAL STARKEY

August 2013

Advisor: Dr. Jeff Pruchnic

Major: English (Composition Studies)

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

My dissertation project investigates the rhetoric of cognitive disability in relation to the theory and teaching of rhetoric and composition in entry-level writing courses. Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), who frequently struggle with generalizing as well as feeling and expressing emotions, are often perceived to have a decreased intellectual ability and thus not often considered part of the traditional student body of higher education classrooms. Yet, as ASD diagnostic criteria has changed …

Approaches To Life Narrative: A Scholarly And Creative Thesis, Tanya Bomsta

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This thesis includes both scholarly and creative approaches to women’s life narrative and rhetoric. The author first analyzes Terry Tempest Williams’ recently published memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, through the lenses of writing and rhetorical theory. She examines how Williams’ hybrid genre negotiates the boundaries between journaling and autobiographical writing and between silence and voice. She argues that Williams employs a feminist rhetoric in her writing in order to negotiate these boundaries.

The second and third works are personal essays in which the author examines her journals and her marriage. These creative works meditate on the …

Hybrid Identities In Radio Discourse, Francisco Javier Aguirre

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this thesis was to conduct a discourse analysis of conversational data from a radio station program in Southern California to see if the speakers' language displays hybridity theory. The radio program in question is unique because all speakers including the deejays and call in listeners do not exclusively speak English or Spanish but codemix or alternate between English and Spanish (Spanglish hereafter) during on-air conversations.

Performing Hegemonic Masculinity: The Rhetorical Spectacle Of Mixed Martial Arts, Allison Marie Mark

Theses Digitization Project

This project explains the sport of mixed martial arts and provides a theoretical foundation for rhetorical analysis of hegemonic masculinity in the sport. The influence of mixed martial arts on society is pervasive. Any values produced by the sport echo in the community, which crosses into the rest of society.

Resisting The "Sound Of Muzak": Alienating Effects In Conceptual Progressive Music, Bryan Michael Mcculley-Mendoza

Theses Digitization Project

This study was to showed how popular music is used to create passive consumers driven by a need for instant gratification, rather than objective, active listeners. It then discusses how "conceptual progressive music", demonstrated my Porcupine Tree and Pink Floyd rebels against this mass culture nature.

The Internet, Anonymous, And Our Public Identities Recreating Democracy, Leslie Anne Hutchinson

Theses Digitization Project

This study discusses the pursuit of understanding how the discursive construction of the internet affects individuals, identities, and democracy. it also discusses the internet within theoretical positions on its history, the public sphere, and revolutionary politics. Western governments have created legislation regulating the internet for democratic purposes, and this study examines how different and often contrasting views of democracy have shaped the way those of us connected to the internet can speak about it. The Anonymous identity, articulates one such contrast. Anonymous constructs an alternative, Internet identity-one stemming from the identity of the hacker. Policies targeted at stopping hackers and …

Galton To Himmler: An Archeology Of Eugenics Discourse, Jeffery Logan Clark

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project is to trace interdiscursive and intertextual relations between ancient and modern social discourses that allow and constitute Francis Galton's eugenics discourse, and how Francis Galton's eugenics discourse effects change in other social discourses of the twentieth century.

The Rhetorical Oracle: A Fun Introduction To Rhetoric, Dan Gleason

Rhetoric Unit

In this lesson students meet three key rhetorical schemes – anaphora, antithesis, and chiasmus – in a fun, engaging way. The students share some common concerns related to school (e.g., too much homework, not enough time with friends, bad grades on essays); after a student raises an issue, that student is given a slip of paper with a relevant (and rhetorical!) sentence or two to read aloud. With these rhetorical pronouncements, students hear the patterns of the three schemes in an engaging and personal way. The teacher can then follow up with a more detailed account of the rhetorical patterns.

Bureauspeak: Discovering How Elected Officials Perceive Municipal Employees' Dis/Respectful Rhetorical Practices, Teresa Quezada

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Bureauspeak analyzes bureaucrats' rhetorical practices within municipal governments. This project asserts that respectful rhetorical practices have always been implicit in traditional notions of rhetoric, but have not been explicitly addressed. This project describes the political epistemic field (PEF), formed by discourse, audience, reality and rhetor, that is created within a municipal environment where policy deliberations occur. The PEF allows for interactions among the four elements and results in changes to all the elements as the interactions occur. The policy-making audience in the PEF expects their bureaucrat-rhetor to enact respectful rhetorical practices, but in many instances those expectations are also implicit …

Potpourri, Jasmin Sanchez, Jessica Swaney

Women’s Studies, Feminist Zine Archive

Writings, artwork, and activities addressing rape culture and victim blaming, a feminist perspective of crocheting, gendered titles for women professionals, reclaiming language (particularly the word bitch), and the music of Claire Boucher (a.k.a. Grimes). Original zine contents include a CD and crocheted "FemPower" bookmark.

Spirits Of The Cold War: Contesting Worldviews In The Classical Age Of American Security Strategy. By Ned O’Gorman, Timothy Barney

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In February 1952, Congressman O. K. Armstrong of Missouri was invited to give a keynote speech at a convention called the Conference on Psychological Strategy in the Cold War, where he declared a maxim that, by that time, likely did not raise many eyebrows: “Our primary weapons will not be guns, but ideas . . . and truth itself.” Rep. Armstrong spoke from experience—a few months before, he had made national headlines at a peace treaty signing in San Francisco by blindsiding Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko with a map locating every secret Gulag prison camp. Calling the Soviet …

Upvoting The Audience: A Burkean Analysis Of Reddit, Doug Urbanski

Masters Theses

My thesis examines the Internet community Reddit through the rhetorical framework of Kenneth Burke, specifically his work with identification between individuals and how identification shapes communities. I focused on three sections of Reddit: World News, Ask Reddit, and Politics, and analyzed the best-voted comments of top posts from each section, focusing on how anonymous users communicate with one another and how their anonymity might influence the ways they interact. Additionally, I propose a method for instructors to use Reddit in the classroom, taking advantage of the medium's systematic anonymity.

The Structure Of Narratives In Political Theories, Wesley Dan Nishiyama

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In this dissertation, I use the ideas of Kenneth Burke and Wolfgang Iser to understand how narrative types, including: novelistic, historical, biographical, and hypothetical, are used as rhetorical devices to persuade the reader of the theory at hand. I will begin by

Witnessing The Web: The Rhetoric Of American E-Vangelism And Persuasion Online, Amber M. Stamper

Theses and Dissertations--English

From the distribution of religious tracts at Ellis Island and Billy Sunday’s radio messages to televised recordings of the Billy Graham Crusade and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, American evangelicals have long made a practice of utilizing mass media to spread the Gospel. Most recently, these Christian evangelists have gone online. As a contribution to scholarship in religious rhetoric and media studies, this dissertation offers evangelistic websites as a case study into the ways persuasion is carried out on the Internet. Through an analysis of digital texts—including several evangelical home pages, a chat room, discussion forums, and a virtual church—I investigate …

Rhetorical Spirits: Spirituality As Rhetorical Device In New Age Womanist Of Color Texts, Ronisha Witlee Browdy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Throughout history African–American women have struggled against oppressions that have stereotyped their identities, scrutinized their character, and ultimately labeled their bodies inferior and inhuman. Despite the debilitating ideologies and barriers African–American women have been forced to operate within, they have fought against these racist, sexist, classist, homophobic environments, crafting their own “new” ethos through writing, as well as entertainment and popular culture. Although Black women remain plagued by history, the New Age of the 1980s as discussed by Akasha Gloria Hull in Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African–American Women seemed to spark a new spirituality amongst African–American women. During …

Disciplinarity, Crisis, And Opportunity In Technical Communication, Jason Robert Carabelli

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis I argue that technical communication as an academic curricular entity has struggled to define itself as either a humanities or scientific discipline. I argue that this crisis of identity is due to a larger, institutional flaw first identified by the science studies scholar Bruno Latour as the problem of the "modern constitution." Latour's argument, often referred to as Actor-Network Theory (ANT), suggests that the epistemological arguments about scientific certainty are built on a contradiction. In viewing the problem of technical communication's disciplinarity through the lens of ANT, I argue that technical communication can never be productive if …

Unbearable Weight, Unbearable Witness: The (Im)Possibility Of Witnessing Eating Disorders In Cyberspace, Kristen Nicole Gay

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the recent erasure of digital pro-anorexia ("pro-ana") narratives by websites such as Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram represents an attempt to silence female self-starvers and reify the authority of medical associations to speak for female bodies. I draw parallels between these attempts and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's theory of epistemic violence, since the experiences of women are effectively discredited, through metaphors that render the thin body dangerous, to shore up professional medical authority. As an attempt to privilege the experiences of the self-starvers, I analyze one Tumblr blog with eating disorder content to listen to the letters users …

An(Other) Rhetoric: Rhetoric, Ethics, And The Rhetorical Tradition, Kathleen Sandell Hardesty

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rhetoric as a discipline is still touched by the shadow of ancient Greece. Rhetoric was defined famously by Aristotle as the "available means of persuasion," codified into five canons in classical Rome, and has since been a central part of Western education to train speakers and writers to effectively move their audiences. However, particularly beginning in the mid-20th Century, the discipline's understanding of rhetoric as a means of persuasion (or even manipulation) passed down from our ancient roots began to shift to a sense of rhetoric as matters of ethics and a concern for the other. It begs the question: …

Eco-Terrorism Or Eco-Tage: An Argument For The Proper Frame, David Thomas Sumner, Lisa M. Weidman

Faculty Publications

What does the term “terrorism” mean? Is it accurate to lump illegal acts that destroy property but carefully avoid harming people into the same category as acts clearly intended to kill? Is this a difference of kind or just of degree? While we (the authors) don't generally endorse the destruction of property as a method of generating social change, we believe that the destruction of property is fundamentally different from the intentional killing of people; therefore, to label acts of obstruction, trespassing, vandalism, sabotage, or arson as “terrorism” is inaccurate and has the potential to damage one's understanding of real …