Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

“Women Vs. Perfection:” A Pentadic Analysis Of Toxicity In Online Gaming, Niyayesh Arshadnia

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This thesis utilizes a mixed-methods approach to examine an online video game player community as a case study to diagnose the underlying reason for widespread hostile behavior, especially towards women, among players in the online gaming sphere. The application of dramatism, a rhetorical theory that breaks down human behavior into elements of drama, reveals that the gaming industry and gaming culture are the likely perpetuators of this issue due to the environments they create and the behaviors they reward. This project is a diagnostic step towards rhetorically alleviating the exclusionary attitude of users in online gaming spaces through further research.

Open Access Is Only The Beginning: Extending The Readership Of Human–Wildlife Interactions Research Through Inclusive Communication Design, Rosanna M. Vail

Human–Wildlife Interactions

Readers must be able to access, understand, and engage with published work, especially in an area like human–wildlife interactions, where viral coverage of altercations with wildlife sparks widespread interest in species or management issues. What should authors be doing to make their writing more inclusive and effective for as many readers as possible? In this article, the managing editor of Human-Wildlife Interactions integrates updated guidelines from the Council of Science Editors with communication frameworks to prioritize a reader-focused approach that extends the reach of article publication.

Falling Into The Rhetorical Black Hole: Navigating Language, Terms, And Rhetoricity In Madness And Disability, Taylor Wyatt

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Language enables communities to develop meaning and interpretations of words. Language practices and meanings can change through and with discourse among communities. This rhetorical thesis expands on Catherine Prendergast’s theory of the rhetorical black hole — a phenomenon where folks can find themselves without the means to operate rhetorically, as some audiences are unwilling to engage. I argue the rhetorical black hole is not a binary, and I call for further considerations of intersectionality in understanding the impacts of the rhetorical black hole. James A. Berlin’s New Rhetoric is used to demonstrate the meaning making power of terms and language …

Authorial Agency: Investigating Composition Pedagogies Under A New Lens, Tyler Hurst

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This essay considers the work of three prominent composition scholars through the lens of authorial agency, which I define as a form of agency that focuses on the individual voice and self-determination of students in the writing space. Though the concept of agency has been previously considered by composition scholars, this contribution might aid in understanding various pedagogical approaches by analyzing how authorial agency is already being engaged within composition pedagogies and investigating how authorial agency aids teachers in understanding their pedagogy so that students learn to take back control of their own authoritative voice and self-determination. By re-investigating …

Iluqata: All Of Us, Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The field of technical and professional communication (TPC) is solidly within the social justice turn that encourages TPC practitioners and scholars to consider how their work, if left unchecked, could perpetuate oppressive societal norms, such as racism. Increasing awareness of how technical communicators can combat oppression through coalitional action and through centering multiply marginalized and underrepresented (MMU) voices and experiences through inclusive research methodologies are important components towards equity in TPC. This dissertation presents five accepted publications that demonstrate how narrative methodologies and coalitional work function to enhance scholarly activism and work towards equity. These five publications are thoroughly introduced …

Friends Or Foes? Composition And Creative Writing, Christopher N. Davis

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In the current realm of collegiate English, there exists a polarized separation between two fields: composition and creative writing. Though there are a number of ways these two fields intersect, they are seen and taught as distinct entities, and have been so for much of the last three decades. Some scholars see the blending of the two fields as potentially hindering to students’ writing development in either field – the idea that attempting to do two things at once, rather than focusing on each one at a time, will inevitably result in less-effectiveness in both. Others see creative writing as …

Workplace Democracy And The Problem Of Equality, Jared Sterling Colton, Avery C. Edenfield, Steve Holmes

English Faculty Publications

Purpose: Professional communicators are becoming more invested in unique configurations of power in organizations, including non-hierarchical and democratic workplaces. While organizations dedicated to democratic processes may enact power differently than conventional organizations, they may fall short of practicing equality. This article explains the differences in non-hierarchical workplaces, considers businesses where democracy is a goal, and argues for considering equality as a habitual practice, particularly when writing regulatory documents.

Method: We conduct a review of the literature on non-hierarchical workplaces and organizational democracy, applying Jacques Rancière’s concept of equality to two examples (one using primary data collection and one using secondary …

Trail Guide For New Teachers: Working With Graduate Teaching Practicum Students In First-Year Writing, Sara M. Whitver

Library Instruction West 2016

Come hear how one instruction coordinator librarian used the writing across the disciplines tradition to move beyond inviting new writing teachers to participate in one-shot library instruction to developing deep and lasting teaching collaborations. By assigning reading homework and conducting freewriting exercises during visits to the practicum class, librarians can engage new teachers in critically examining the crossover between writing and information literacy during their first-year as writing instructors. By assuming this role of co-educator, librarians have the opportunity to help first-time writing teachers develop collaborative relationships with librarians early in their teaching experience in order to lay the groundwork …

Sounding The Horn: Howling About The Moral Outrage Of The Politics Of The Gray Wolf, Paul H. Veridian

Browse All Undergraduate research

In this paper I will show how through the use of a moral argument, the article titled “OR-7’s Sister Dies Grisly Death…..” is used to persuade the audience about the moral outrage being perpetrated upon the gray wolf population by the state of Idaho. I will show how the author uses the tactics of vilify and ennoble, melodrama, naming, god and devil terms, and the tragic frame to get this done. The use of the moral argument creates moral outrage in the audience, which polarizes the issue.

The International Writing Centers Association At 30: Community, Advocacy, And Professionalism, Joyce Kinkead

English Faculty Publications

At the 2014 IWCA/NCPTW Conference, founders of the National Writing Centers Association (now International Writing Centers Association) came together to reflect on the organization’s beginnings, its strategies for institutionalization, and challenges that may still exist. A significant anniversary such as the 30th provides the opportunity for reflection. Additionally, a timeline of the organization’s history is included, which provides important information for historical research.

A Rhetorical Analysis Of Strategic Communication In The Amalga Barrens Wetlands Controversy, Laura Vernon

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Laura Vernon conducts a study to discover how, against the odds, the Bridgerland Audubon Society (BAS), located in Cache Valley, Utah, influenced a change in public policy regarding the Amalga Barrens reservoir proposal. In 1991, the state of Utah proposed developing the Bear River in northern Utah and constructing an off-stream storage facility (a reservoir) on the wetlands known as the Barrens near the town of Amalga. The Barrens served as a bird habitat for migrating shorebirds and waterfowl. In the late 1990s, BAS led a grassroots effort to remove the Barrens as a proposed site from the Bear River …

"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 …

The Rhetoric Of Space In The Design Of Academic Writing Locations, Amanda Nicole Metz Bemer

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation explores the rhetoric of space as it relates to academic computer writing locations--specifically, computer labs, computer classrooms, and writing centers. Using observation, surveys, interviews, and textual analysis, the author discusses seven rhetorical principles of design for these spaces, including designing for specific audiences, attention, clarity, enthymematic flexibility, identification, pathos, and shared ethos. Ultimately, applying a rhetorical gaze to these areas can help us to design more effective computer spaces in academia.

Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn From Engagement, Shirley K. Rose, Irwin Weiser

All USU Press Publications

An important new resource for WPA preparation courses. In Going Public, Rose and Weiser moderate a discussion of the role of the writing program vis-a-vis the engagement movement, the service learning movement, and the current interest in public discourse/civic rhetoric among scholars of rhetoric and composition. While there have been a number of publications describing service-learning and community leadership programs, most of these focus on curricular elements and address administrative issues primarily from a curricular perspective. The emphasis of Going Public is on the ways that engagement-focused programs change conceptions of WPA identity. Writing programs are typically situated at points …

Mule Deer: A Handbook For Utah Hunters And Landowners, Dennis D. Austin

All USU Press Publications

Mule deer are a familiar sight to residents of Utah and the Intermountain West. Sportsmen hunt them, others seek a glimpse of them while hiking or camping, drivers dodge them, and homeowners sometimes delight, sometimes fret as deer visit backyards and gardens. Deer, many of which live in the towns, cities, and farms that sprawl over their historical habitat, sometimes seem ubiquitous. Useful information about them, either scientific or practical, is less widespread. In this handbook, Dennis Austin fills that need for information, offering a one-stop reference packed with up-to-date knowledge and practical advice on mule deer. Data on deer …

Facing The Center: Toward An Identity Poltiics Of One-To-One Mentoring, Harry C. Denny

All USU Press Publications

In the diversity of their clients as well as their professional and student staff, writing centers present a complicated set of relationships that inevitably affect the instruction they offer. In Facing the Center, Harry Denny unpacks the identity matrices that enrich teachable moments, and he explores the pedagogical dynamics and implications of identity within the writing center. The face of the writing center, be it mainstream or marginal, majority or miority, orthodox or subversive, always has implications for teaching and learning. Facing the Center will extend current research in writing center theory to bring it in touch with theories now …

Dangerous Writing: Understanding And Political Economy Of Composition, Tony Scott

All USU Press Publications

Building on recent work in rhetoric and composition that takes an historical materialist approach, Dangerous Writing outlines a political economic theory of composition. In addition to work by others, Tony Scott also draws from two of his own studies--a classroom ethnography of an upper division writing class that was focused on labor and institutionality, and a qualitative study of the function of textbooks within a writing program. The book connects pedagogical practices in writing classes to their broader political economic contexts, and argues that the power of students' writing is prevented from reaching its potential by pressures within the academy …

Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping In Action, Bob Broad, Linda Adler-Kassner, Barry Alford, Jane Detweiler

All USU Press Publications

Educators appropriately strive to create "assessment cultures" (Huot 2002) in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators establish the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad's 2003 volume, What We Really Value, introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on writing assessment practice is just beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches. For the authors of Organic Writing Assessment, the DCM …

Teaching Creativity In Technical Communication Curricula, Curtis Robert Newbold

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis addresses the need to claim creativity as an essential component to our technical communication curricula as we prepare students for what their managers want. While many technical communication programs at universities across the country have recognized a need to teach skills beyond "writing technically," few, if any, have addressed or "claimed" a concept such as creativity that helps build these skills. I argue that creativity is what managers are looking for and what technical communication programs are already implementing. Claiming this concept will help us further define a discipline that is becoming much richer and help students develop …

Out Of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study In Composition And Rhetoric, Paul Butler

All USU Press Publications

Paul Butler applauds the emerging interest in the study of style among compositionists, arguing that the loss of stylistics from composition in recent decades left it alive only in the popular imagination as a set of grammar conventions. Butler's goal in Out of Style is to articulate style as a vital and productive source of invention, and to redefine its importance for current research, theory, and pedagogy. In so doing, he offers an important revisionist history of the field by reading it specifically through the canon of style. In addition, Butler argues that it is through style that scholars in …

Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, Luming Mao, Morris Young

All USU Press Publications

Despite tremendous growth in attention to and scholarship about Asian Americans and their cultural work, little research has emerged that focuses directly on Asian American rhetoric. Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric addresses this need by examining the systematic, effective use of symbolic resources by Asians and Asian Americans in social, cultural, and political contexts. Such rhetoric challenges, disrupts, and transforms the dominant European American rhetoric and it commands a sense of unity or collective identity. However, such rhetoric also embodies internal differences and even contradictions, as each specific communicative situation is informed and inflected by particularizing contexts, by different relations …

Placing The Academy: Essays On Landscape, Work, And Identity, Jennifer Sinor, Rona Kaufman

All USU Press Publications

Twenty-one writers answer the call for literature that addresses who we are by understanding where we are--where, for each of them, being in some way part of academia. In personal essays, they imaginatively delineate and engage the diverse, occasionally unexpected play of place in shaping them, writers and teachers in varied environments, with unique experiences and distinctive world views, and reconfiguring for them conjunctions of identity and setting, here, there, everywhere, and in between.

Machine Scoring Of Student Essays: Truth And Consequences, Patricia Freitag Ericsson, Richard H. Haswell

All USU Press Publications

The current trend toward machine-scoring of student work, Ericsson and Haswell argue, has created an emerging issue with implications for higher education across the disciplines, but with particular importance for those in English departments and in administration. The academic community has been silent on the issue—some would say excluded from it—while the commercial entities who develop essay-scoring software have been very active. Machine Scoring of Student Essays is the first volume to seriously consider the educational mechanisms and consequences of this trend, and it offers important discussions from some of the leading scholars in writing assessment.

Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie: The Making Of Chinese American Rhetoric, Luming Mao

All USU Press Publications

LuMing Mao offers an important discussion of the rhetoric of Chinese American speakers, which has wide implications for the teaching of writing in English and for our understanding of cross-cultural influences in discourse. Recent scholarship tends to explain such influences as contributing to language hybridity—an advance over the traditional "deficit model." But Mao suggests that the "hybridity" approach is perhaps too arid or sanitized, missing rich nuances of mutual exchange, resistance, or even subversion. Through his concept of "togetherness in difference, Mao suggests that speakers of hybrid discourse may not be attempting the standard (and failing), but instead may be …

Keywords In Creative Writing, Wendy Bishop, David Starkey

All USU Press Publications

Wendy Bishop and David Starkey have created a remarkable resource volume for creative writing students and other writers just getting started. In two- to ten-page discussions, these authors introduce forty-one central concepts in the fields of creative writing and writing instruction, with discussions that are accessible yet grounded in scholarship and years of experience. Keywords in Creative Writing provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the field of creative writing through its landmark terms, exploring concerns as abstract as postmodernism and identity politics alongside very practical interests of beginning writers, like contests, agents, and royalties. This approach makes the book …

Identity Papers: Literacy And Power In Higher Education, Bronwyn T. Williams

All USU Press Publications

How do definitions of literacy in the academy, and the pedagogies that reinforce such definitions, influence and shape our identities as teachers, scholars, and students? The contributors gathered here reflect on those moments when the dominant cultural and institutional definitions of our identities conflict with our other identities, shaped by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, location, or other cultural factors. These writers explore the struggle, identify the sources of conflict, and discuss how they respond personally to such tensions in their scholarship, teaching, and administration. They also illustrate how writing helps them and their students compose alternative identities that may …

The Outcomes Book: Debate And Consensus After The Wpa Outcomes Statement, Susanmarie Harrington, Keith Rhodes, Ruth Fischer, Rita Malenczyk

All USU Press Publications

The WPA Outcomes Statement represents a working consensus among composition scholars about what college students should learn and do in a composition program. But as a single-page document, the statement cannot convey the kind of reflective process that a writing program must undertake to address the learning outcomes described. The Outcomes Book relates the fuller process by exploring the matrix of concerns that surrounded the developing statement itself, and by presenting the experience of many who have since employed it in their own settings. For departments, programs, and individuals, this collection levers the Outcomes Statement in all its simplicity and …

Discord And Direction: The Postmodern Writing Program Administrator, Sharon James Mcgee, Carolyn Handa

All USU Press Publications

Postmodernism's central moves include questioning hierarchy, valuing paratactic associations, and rejecting grand narratives, and the work of a Writing Program Administrator, most days, includes those moves as well. The argument of this collection is that the cultural and intellectual legacies of postmodernism impinge, significantly and daily, on the practice of the Writing Program Administrator. WPAs work in spaces where they must assume responsibility for a multifaceted program, a diverse curriculum, instructors with varying pedagogies and technological expertise—and where they must position their program in relation to a university with its own conflicted mission, and a state with its unpredictable views …

Refiguring Prose Style: Possibilities For Writing Pedagogy, T. R. Johnson, Thomas Pace

All USU Press Publications

For about two decades, say Johnson and Pace, the discussion of how to address prose style in teaching college writing has been stuck, with style standing in as a proxy for other stakes in the theory wars. The traditional argument is evidently still quite persuasive to some—that teaching style is mostly a matter of teaching generic conventions through repetition and practice. Such a position usually presumes the traditional view of composition as essentially a service course, one without content of its own. On the other side, the shortcomings of this argument have been much discussed—that it neglects invention, revision, context, …