Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Possibilities Of Being: Black Women's Storytelling As Archival Undoing, Dasharah Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs a discursive genealogy of Black women’s storytelling, positioning its art and aesthetics as a form of colonial archival undoing. Each chapter explores how transmission and documentation can transform—and circumvent—traditional colonial archives. Beginning at the start of the twentieth-century to present, this project traces the discursive legacies of Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Michelle Cliff, and Staceyann Chin, examining each writer as a site of becoming as they individually (and collectively) seek to articulate an expansive idea of a Black world that constitutes a broader understanding of Black freedom. They each share a common goal of creating a …

La Citación En Educación: Funciones Retóricas En Textos Académicos Escritos Por Expertos Y Estudiantes Universitarios, David Sanchez-Jimenez, Juan Antonio Núñez Cortés, Enrique Alonso Sainz

Publications and Research

The present study aims to investigate the differences in citation usage and frequency among university students and expert writers in the field of Education. The analyzed corpus comprises 50 papers written in this discipline and is divided into two sub-corpora: one consisting of 25 TFGs and the other one formed by 25 articles published in specialized journals. To examine this phenomenon, a qualitative and quantitative methodology was employed, performing a textual analysis of the rhetorical functions of citations. This analysis is based in the typology proposed by Petrić in her 2007 article, slightly modified for the purpose of the present …

Syllabus: Engl 1010 English Composition I, Sarah C. Bonanno

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for English Composition I (ENGL 1010 FYSA) taught at Brooklyn College during the Fall 2026 semester. This course teaches students concrete and transferable writing skills through the genres of literacy narrative, argumentative essays, and comparative writing.

How To Pay Attention To Detail, Gregory Crosby

Open Educational Resources

This assignment examines how writing cultivates attention by asking students to describe their commute to campus, first from memory and later through deliberate observation. By comparing the two accounts, students reflect on the selective nature of perception and how conscious attention alters what they notice and record. A final rewriting exercise inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style demonstrates how language, perspective, and form shape the interpretation of experience, reinforcing the connection between observation and craft.

Propasafe-Hybrid: A Text-Based Hybrid Propaganda Detection Tool (Ila 2026 Presentation), Thomas Kimmeth, Avijit Roy, Vivek Sharma

Publications and Research

This presentation introduces Propasafe-Hybrid, a hybrid system for sentence-level propaganda detection that combines offline transformer-based classification with selective large language model (LLM) explainability. The system employs a two-stage pipeline in which a local BERT-based classifier evaluates all input text and filters non-propagandistic content, while only high-confidence candidates are forwarded to an LLM for rhetorical technique labeling and explanation. This design enables cost-aware, privacy-conscious, and scalable analysis by reducing unnecessary reliance on external models.

Propasafe-Hybrid identifies propagandistic techniques such as loaded language, obfuscation, and appeal to fear, and generates concise natural language rationales that make these techniques interpretable to users. By …

Esl 103 - Intermediate English As A Second Language, Maria L. Plochocki

Open Educational Resources

The enclosed is a sample syllabus for an intermediate ESL class, created with Open Educational Resources. It includes essential course information such as a schedule of meetings and assignments, as well as course and institutional policies and resources.

The Rhetorical Agency Of Student-Parents: Assembling, Archiving, And Naming Practices And Interpretations That Transform Worlds, Dhipinder Walia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that uses interview data collected from six student-parents attending Bronx Community College during 2024 to 2025. Using rhetorical and critical discourse analysis, this dissertation argues student-parents enact their rhetorical agency to transform their college experience. Specifically, student-parents use their rhetorical agency to interpret time and place in a way that centers their own wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of their children. This dissertation focuses on interpretations and ordinary practices that reimagine what time and place can look and feel like on a college campus. Additionally, student-parents enact their rhetorical agency through ordinary practices …

Finding Luis: A Creative Nonfiction Account Of Law & Society, Jason M. Leggett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This essay explores the contradictions in legal theory and human experience through creative nonfiction. Its main purpose is to argue that a truly just society requires acknowledging the profound influence of individual narratives on the law. This is supported by blending personal narratives, critical analysis, and philosophical inquiry to reveal the gap between codified law and lived realities for marginalized individuals. This unique Legal Poetics methodology employs a series of six vignettes, such as the author's and Luis's shared experiences with traumatic brain injury and the denial of justice, as data. By integrating autoethnography, law as narrative, and performativity theories, …

Formulating Research Question With Chat Gpt, Nicholas Malkov

Open Educational Resources

This assignment guides students through the process of developing strong, focused, and measurable research questions while critically engaging with ChatGPT as a collaborative tool. Students begin by identifying a broad topic, narrowing it to a specific and feasible area of inquiry, and determining the purpose and type of research question (descriptive, explanatory, comparative, or evaluative). After drafting their own question, they use ChatGPT to generate feedback and suggested refinements, which they must evaluate critically using the FINER criteria (Feasible, Interesting, Novel, Ethical, Relevant). Through comparison of AI-generated and human-generated revisions, students assess the strengths, limitations, and ethical considerations of AI …

A Low-Stakes Assignment That Introduces Ai Technology Into The Analysis And Writing Process, Tim Mccormack

Open Educational Resources

In this ENG 225 assignment, students use AI (ChatGPT) to perform tasks related to summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, and responding to a text, then compare the AI-generated work to their own. Using Blitzer’s article “The Rhetorical Situation”, students create APA citations, summaries, paraphrases, key quotes, and personal responses with AI guidance. The assignment emphasizes critical evaluation by having students analyze the accuracy, effectiveness, and differences between human and AI-generated work. This exercise develops skills in rhetorical analysis, source engagement, and reflective assessment of AI as a tool for writing and research.

Baking In The Disposition: The Wac/Wid World Through Translational Lenses, Joseph Franklin

Publications and Research

In a global perspective for WAC and other writing programs, the singular identifier of the nation still holds a dominance in articles, books, and conference presentations. But, how we understand relationships between different programs on the global writing studies map often demands a more nuanced unpacking than stable nation-markers can offer. Jonathan Hall (2023) calls us to take up “thinking with trans-” in WAC (p. 13). This chapter answers this call first by locating different pieces of global writing program scholarship along a spectrum from those that aim to establish a single, stable identity for a particular (often national) writing …

Reclaiming Agency: Ai Hallucinations And Translingual Interrogations In The City Tech Writing Center,, Joseph Franklin, Anna Laura Falvey

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Writing Workshop Journal: A Student-Centered Guide For College Composition, Tanya Zhelezcheva

Open Educational Resources

This comprehensive OER workbook supports ENGL 101 (Composition) students through a structured journal-based writing system. The resource combines Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles with post-process pedagogy to offer diverse pathways for student learning and writing development.

The workbook features:

- 4-component journal entry structure (exercises, reflection, next steps)

- 40+ writing exercises across four categories (Foundation Skills, Reading Logs, Drafting, Growth Mindset)

- Extensive planning and organizational tools (weekly/monthly calendars, goal-setting frameworks)

- Metacognitive reflection exercises that build writing awareness - Backward planning and time management strategies

- Evidence-based approaches to developing thesis statements, integrating sources, and crafting arguments …

Eng 110 Rhetorical Situation Worksheet, Catrina E. Vininski, Missy Watson

Open Educational Resources

This rhetorical situation worksheet asks students to analyze a text based on the rhetorical situation. Students must identify the significance of the context for which the text was published, the author of the text, the genre, the audience, the purpose, the argument, and the evidence that the author uses to support their claims. This can be used for course readings, films, or other types of texts that you assign over the course of the semester.

Freshman Comp Ii Eng 24xx, Joao M. Da Silva

Open Educational Resources

This course uses a memoir to elicit themes related to addiction, family and interpersonal relationships. Additionally, it invites students to develop their own voices as they engage with academic discourse in the disciplines of psychology and addiction studies.

Ztc Eng 151 Syllabus: College Writing, Nicolette Guida

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus provides a curriculum for an introduction to research writing. In this course, students develop introductory skills for academic research writing, work on critical thinking and analysis skills, and build an awareness of the rhetorical situation both in texts read in class and in their own writing. This course focuses on the impact that culture has in shaping behavior and life experiences. Included course texts are centered on the exploration of the different cultural groups that people occupy and the specific cultural norms, values and beliefs for each of these groups. This is zero textbook cost (ZTC) course, so …

Textual Transformations: An Introduction To Ai For Composition 101, J. Elizabeth Clark

Open Educational Resources

This curriculum unit is a critical literacy unit about AI designed for first-year writing. The introductory composition course prepares students for academic writing with a heavy emphasis on writing-as-process, critical reading, gathering information, inquiry-based writing, and taking research notes. This curriculum unit pairs the writing portion of the course with an AI critical literacy framework for students.

This is a 20-hour, 9 lesson unit designed for an introductory composition course:

• Prepwork: Preliminary Assessment and AI Policies

• Lesson 1: What is AI?

• Lesson 2: The History of AI

• Lesson 3: How Does AI Work?

• Lesson 4: AI in Action

• Lesson 5: …

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La Intensificación En Los Comentarios De Noticias: La Prensa Deportiva Digital, David Sanchez-Jimenez

Publications and Research

Las plataformas digitales de los periódicos permiten una comunicación más fluida y dinámica con y entre la audiencia, que refleja algunos patrones de la comunicación oral (Briz, 1997, 1998; Yus, 2001, 2010; Albelda, 2004; Albelda y Estellés, 2021). Entre ellos, se encuentran los recursos lingüísticos de intensificación que refuerzan la fuerza ilocutiva de los comentarios emitidos, en una clara apuesta por dotar al texto de una mayor interactividad con sus potenciales receptores. El objetivo de esta investigación consiste en conocer cómo se relacionan entre sí los participantes de estas plataformas en la prensa deportiva. En particular, se prestó especial atención …

Back To The Margins: The Re-Marginalization Of Feedback Research In Composition And Rhetoric, Robert A. Greco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation applies content analysis, both quantitative and thematic, to publications exploring feedback on student writing by analyzing two corpora of texts published from 2000 to 2019: a systematic sample of 114 articles from 5 journals and excerpts from 5 guides for new instructors. For the journals’ corpus, the most significant emergent themes included error; affect, both instructors’ and students’; and technology. In the guides’ corpus, this study focused on guides’ assumptions about their audiences and discussed the “cycle of correction”—a pattern where guides have focused on cultivating and reinforcing core field values about feedback established between the mid-1980s and …

The Art Of Masking And Performing For The Perfect Marriage In William Shakespeare’S The Taming Of The Shrew, Rita Oliva

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores how William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew exaggerates the art of masking and performing as necessary social techniques for women surviving the patriarchal culture of Padua. Through close analysis of Katherine and Bianca Minola, both sisters adopt performative identities, the “shrew” and the “ideal woman,” that reflect, resist, and expose the restrictive gender norms governing female behavior, qualifications for marriage, and worth. While Bianca’s apparent passivity and rhetorical femininity promote her to manipulate societal expectations to her advantage, Katherine’s refusal to submit to the societal and cultural standards of Padua results in her categorization of a …

Eng 110 Language And Literacy Narrative And Rhetorical Analysis, Catrina E. Vininski, Missy Watson

Open Educational Resources

The assignment gives students the option to either write a narrative based on their own experience with language and literacy, utilizing aspects of the rhetorical situation, or write a rhetorical analysis based on a text of their choice while applying the rhetorical situation. Both options include an overview of the assignment, along with requirements and a rubric. This is intended to be taught in the middle of the semester, after the instructor has already thoroughly explained the rhetorical situation and students have been given the opportunity to apply their learning.

Mapping Rhetoric: Cross-Analyzing Protest Movements, Eva Dunsky

Open Educational Resources

This teaching material was developed as a result of the CUNY 1969 Teach-in that took place in Summer 2025. The assignment prompts students to consider how the history of past college protests affects us now and will continue to have an impact in the future by playing the role of figures within these movements, close reading primary texts, and eventually researching a campus protest of their own.

Public Writing As Open Pedagogy, Rachael Nevins

Open Educational Resources

This guide to inviting students to share their writing publicly was developed for faculty participating in seminars on open pedagogy at BMCC. It discusses public writing as a way to engage in open pedagogy, outlines the types of writing that students may engage in publicly, and presents the relevant pedagogical, technical, and ethical considerations.

“The New Illiteracy”: “Why Johnny Can’T Write” At 50, Carl Schlachte

Publications and Research

This article is a retrospective history on Newsweek magazine's December 8, 1975 cover story "Why Johnny Can't Write" by Merrill Sheils. Based on interviews with Sheils and her researcher Frederick V. Boyd, I detail the context from which this article emerged, and the role that the two employment and gender discrimination lawsuits at Newsweek in the early 1970s played in shaping this article's publication. I also examine the legacy of "Why Johnny Can't Write" within the field of writing studies.

Caracterización Lingüístico-Discursiva De Los Mecanismos De Despersonalización Y Posicionamiento Del Autor En El Género Médico Ficha Clínica, David Sanchez-Jimenez, Paulina Meza

Publications and Research

El dominio de géneros especializados es una competencia que representa gran dificultad para los estudiantes en formación. Su falta de dominio puede impedir o retrasar el proceso de enculturación de un individuo en una comunidad. Para formar adecuadamente a los estudiantes en las prácticas discursivas disciplinares, son necesarios datos empíricos sobre las características lingüístico-discursivas de los textos que deben producir. El objetivo de esta investigación cualitativa es describir los recursos lingüístico-discursivos de despersonalización y posicionamiento del autor en el género médico Ficha clínica. El corpus está constituido por 52 Fichas clínicas producidas por estudiantes de medicina de una universidad chilena. …

Defying Normativity: Reclaiming A Narrative Of Queer Resistance In Young Adult Literature, Christopher Morabito

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the heart of this dissertation lies a single question: how Queer is Queer Young Adult Literature? As many scholars have argued, Queerness is, in many ways, a literacy, and literature is one of the greatest sponsors of Queer Literacy. While there is certainly no one comprehensive definition of what it means to be queer, it is also true that the general understanding of queerness has changed quite drastically in the last few decades. What was once used as a term to describe someone who is outside of social conventions has slowly begun to lose its sense of “otherness,” and …

Beyond Me: Class, Sexuality, And The Work Of The Autobiographical Fragments Of Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, And Eileen Myles, Erin E. Heiser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at what I am calling the “autobiographical fragments” of three working-class, lesbian (or queer) authors: Audre Lorde, Dorothy Allison, and Eileen Myles whose writing is stylistically quite different from one another’s, but who nonetheless have all produced bodies of work that represent bits of their lives over and over and in different ways, sometimes overlapping in time and narrative detail. While there are certainly other writers whose work shares many of the same characteristics, I argue that the autobiographical fragment has special significance for marginalized subjects. Woven throughout the dissertation are many of my own autobiographical fragments …

Oer Presentation To Kcc English Department, Rachel Ihara

Publications and Research

This was for a short presentation to the KCC English Department intended as an overview of the various open access resources in use currently.

Ztc English 111: Introduction To College Writing Syllabus, Nicolette Guida

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for a first year college writing course. This is also ZTC course (or "zero textbook cost" course). Course texts are only open-access materials and texts that are readily accessible online.

This course focuses on the power of language in our society. Students analyze the importance of rhetoric for both writers of language and consumers of language. They consider how language can be used to make meaning of the world, construct and express identity, persuade or manipulate others, and how language has evolved with technology. Students develop critical reading and academic writing skills through workshops and writing …

Persuasive Essay Assignment For Freshman Composition, Danny Katch

Open Educational Resources

A persuasive essay is a piece of writing that aims to get people to agree with your point of view. Your task for this assignment is to write an essay of 500-750 words that aims to convince others to change a policy or take an action around an issue related to the politics of language.