Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

The Evolution Of A Black Butterfly: A Journey From Loss To Salvation, Subrinia Marie Bogan

Theses and Dissertations

“Honor thy Mother and thy Father” are the words that I have built my entire life around. After losing my dad, my world revolved solely around my mother. When her health started failing, I became her caregiver. I was there for the good days and the very bad ones. March 20, 2014, Mama died after a lengthy illness. My entire life was turned upside down. I had to learn how to build a life without her. Our lives were so intertwined that I ceased to exist. I had sacrificed my physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being in order to take care …

A Mother's Madness: One Child's Journey Out Of Darkness, Wendy Kay Mccloud

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the story of a recalcitrant mother and me, her unwitting daughter, as I desperately tried to survive her insanity while growing up. It is a healing narrative, a therapeutic method accepted by mental health professionals around the world, allowing myself to express the rage and frustration towards a woman who should have been loving and nurturing instead was cold and neglectful. This healing narrative is one small step towards letting go of the years old anger and frustration inside me. It is a cathartic attempt to find internal peace and understanding for a woman who battled inner …

Multimodal Pedagogies, Processes And Projects: Writing Teachers Know More Than We May Think About Teaching Multimodal Composition, Jessica B. Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

Multimodal writing refers to texts that use more than one communicative mode to convey information. While there is much scholarship that examines the history of alphabetic writing instruction and the alphabetic composing processes of students, little research explores the historical origins of multimodal composition and the processes in which students engage as they compose multimodal texts. This two-part project takes a fresh approach to studying multimodal writing by exploring the multimodal pedagogies of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric and writing teachers, analyzing the role of mental and physical images in modern writers’ composing practices, and investigating contemporary students’ processes for …

Pick Me! Pick Me!: Using Aristotelian Rhetorical Persuasion And Advertising Appeals For Self-Promotion, Alexander M. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

This project combines contemporary and classical rhetorical persuasion and applies them to self-promotion. Aristotle’s triad of modes of persuasion, ethos, pathos, and logos, represents classical persuasion. Appeals from advertising, such as humor, fear, music, and argumentum ad populum, represent the contemporary, but also are modern extensions of Aristotle’s triad. These concepts are then applied in such a way that the reader can see how they could use them to their benefit in influencing others.

Each concept is defined and shown how it can be used in a spoken communicative way rather than a visual representation. Advertising appeals are typically put …

Wisdom After Foolishness, Clark Allen Harris

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project is a collection of nonfiction essays. The overall theme is rooted in my experience in public schools and my community. I made numerous mistakes during my years in grade and middle school. These issues eventually led me to dropping-out in the ninth-grade. But my problems in the public school system weren’t the only area that I struggled in. I also made reckless choices in my social life. Since drugs and alcohol were common entities in my community, I developed a habit of indulging in them. In spite of these habits and dropping out of school, I overcame. …

We Are What We Ate: Southern Food And Southern Cooking, Alyssa Rogers

Theses and Dissertations

Southern cooking is fluid–ever-changing, influential, and influenced by both Southerners and non-Southerners alike. In this thesis, I explore what constitutes Southern cooking. The foods, cooking methods, and acquisition of foodstuffs and ingredients influence Southerners as cooks and the communities we live in. In the following pages, I’ve connected primary research via interviews with existing literature about Southern foods, cooking, techniques, lifestyles, and cultures. My primary research is derived from authentic interviews with real Southerners. The results from my research are not groundbreaking, but they do serve to help Southerners understand their relationship to and with Southern food and Southern cooking.

Braving Shame: The Rhetoric Of Bravery In Contemporary Women's Memoir, Debra Gayle Parker

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation interrogates the rhetoric of bravery as a culturally-infused way of hearing certain kinds of personal narratives. As a cultural rhetoric, “bravery” has deep roots in masculine militaristic ideology in which cowardice, courage, and shame are conceptually linked to a sense of duty. The memoir industry represents one environment that archives what is valued as brave writing. As rhetoric precariously at work in the memoir industry, this dissertation investigates the cultural assumptions that drive literary bravery as it is used to assess contemporary memoirs, particularly memoirs written by women. Braving Shame invokes a new brand of bravery—one that de-emphasizes …

Systemic Noise: Investigating The Posthuman Rhetorical Movement Of"You Did N'T Build That", Maclain Bernabei Scott

Theses and Dissertations

While campaigning for reelection in 2012, President Barack Obama gave a speech in which he uttered the sentence “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” In the aftermath of the speech, the phrase “you didn’t build that” circulated widely in political discourse, generating a variety of responses from campaigns and commentators as to what the phrase means. This thesis uses a posthuman rhetorical framework to investigate how “you didn’t build that” influenced and was transformed by political discourse systems. Specifically, I synthesize scholarship on complex systems, enthymeme, and new materialism to argue that the ambiguity of the phrase …

Hillman College Is A Different World From Where You Come From: A Thematic Analysis Of Relationships In A Different World, Natilie Williams

Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the identity and relationships portrayed in the television series, A Different World. Although the popular series ended in 1993, this show continues to resonate with the African-American community. Specifically, Ron, D. Wayne, and Whitley are the primary characters of focus. Ron and D. Wayne maintain a brotherhood, while Whitley and D. Wayne maintain a romantic relationship. Both of these relationships include implicit expectations, illustrate varying levels of reciprocity, and provide identity-shaping communicative feedback.

Miracle: Surviving The Bataan Death March, Gail Y. Richard

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a portion of the experiences of Bataan Death March survivors including those of Eddie Graham, my uncle, and Tillman Rutledge, an acquaintance. The event consisted of walking sixty-five miles over a period of six to twelve days without food or water. Throughout the duration of the walk, the prisoners endured inhuman atrocities at the hands of Japanese soldiers. Section two of this document highlights Eddie Graham's experience seventy-one years later while on a Kansas Honor Flight trip to the WWII Memorial, where he and other WWII veterans were honored. Section three follows with a description of the …

Composing Across Genres: A Study Of Writing Expectations At The University Of Arkansas At Little Rock, Howard Bryant Lytle

Theses and Dissertations

Students are entering the first-year composition (FYC) classroom underexposed to multiple genres, multiple potential audiences, and a variety of modalities. Based on survey responses from faculty members across the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), this thesis project seeks to examine effective ways of teaching composition at the UALR to prepare students for upper-level coursework and for their future workplaces. Survey findings indicate that faculty members across the university ask students to respond to writing assignments in a variety of writing genres, address multiple audiences and purposes, and bring certain skill sets into their classrooms. As a result, this …

Magic At The Crossroads: The Rise Of The Video Essay, Morganne Tinsley August

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the birth, rise in popularity, and evolution of the video essay, a subgenre of the essay found recently in online literary journals. Chapter one provides a brief history of the alphabetic essay as it expands to include photo essays, audio essays, and essay-films. The second chapter outlines the history of the online literary journal and John Bresland’s role in the introduction of the video essay as it appears in online journals. Chapter three contains an examination of the way image, text, and sound function in video essays and the tools and strategies essayists are using to create …

The Learning Disabled Student In College Composition, Madison Leigh Hedrick

Theses and Dissertations

Colleges and universities are seeing an increase in students seeking accommodations for non-visible disabilities, like attention deficit disorder (ADD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and dyslexia. To better understand the expectations of learning disabled students, instructors of First Year Composition (FYC) courses as well as faculty and administrators are in need of information to help understand the problems affecting this population of students and the best way to teach them and know what to do. To better address this need, we designed a survey, distributed it to the learning disabled students on campus at the University of Arkansas at Little …

Kenneth Burke Meets The Apostle Paul On The Road To Damascus: Mysticism Through Rhetorical Identification, William S. Elkins

Theses and Dissertations

The term “in Christ” is widely recognized within the Christian Church as a signature term of the Apostle Paul. But while the term is recognized as fundamental to his theology, occurring 180 times specifically and 300 times generally, functional usage is minimal. However, when the origin of the term is seen in its original context of the Damascus Road Event Encounter, the unique mystical nature of the term begins to come into focus. At that event the Messiah introduces Paul to a concept that much later (twentieth century) Kenneth Burke labels “identification,” who explains at length identification’s operational dynamics. My …

Serial Obsession: Analyzing Media Fixation On Jack The Ripper, Rachell Nicole Hayes

Theses and Dissertations

There is psychological, historical, and scientific research into the social implications of media and the responsibility of audience. This thesis observed a rhetorical connection between media and the celebrity of high-profile serial killers. The research findings of this analysis began with the 1800s studying literature written in Victorian London with an appreciation for murder eventually leading into the high-profile coverage of the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 committed by history’s still most notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper. This analysis discovered a pattern of language usage in media depictions of serial killers found in the coverage of this case and multiple …

Ideographs And American Mass Media: Understanding The Narrative On The Israel-Palestine Conflict And Its Influence On Publics, Savanna Lynn Fowler

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the American mass media's narrative on the Israel-Palestine conflict to understand the power of ideographs and their influence on specific publics. I focus on two popular ideographs in mass media reporting,and, in order to examine how these ideographs are utilized to construct a narrative for the media's publics, the political ideologies they represent, the agendas they further, and the consequences their narrow use has on developing counterpublics and emerging alternative narratives around the conflict. I focus my attention on the mass media's coverage of a sixteen day Israeli shelling in Gaza and how public consent is acquired …

Rhetoric And Paradigm Change In Science: Three Case Studies, John B. Eichler

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates, as case studies, three little-known scientific concepts, each put forth by a well-known, respected scientist. In each case the concept suggested challenges an established scientific paradigm and, if correct, would significantly alter our current view of the universe. All three concepts seem to be ripe to invoke a paradigm shift yet none has yet occurred. This study looks at these cases through the lens of (1) the rhetorical arguments used by these scientists and their followers to advance their proposed concepts, and (2) the paradigm shift model as put forth by Thomas Kuhn. A detailed, largely non-technical, …

Car Therapy: An Exploration Of Automotive Culture Through Essays Inspired And Guided By Oral Interviews, Gabriel Decker

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis contains several stories of different car enthusiasts and the history behind the car(s) they work on and cherish. My son’s story is included, which details how he became a car enthusiast. The stories will show the influences cars have had over families through time. The stories bring the cars to life. The questions I will answer are: Why this car? and What does it mean to the family that owns it? The stories about the cars and why so much time and effort is being put into them can be inspiring to readers, and I have captured a …

The Newbie Technical Writer: A Metacognitive Exploration Into Discovering And Writing For The Workplace Genre Of An Archive, Lydia Perry

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how I learned the workplace genre and environment of the UALR Center for Arkansas History and Culture in order to write documentation, user guides, and policies and procedures as a technical writing graduate assistant. I examine my experience by using genre theory, genre ecology, and activity theory.

My Family Breast Cancer Story: The Power Of Personal Narratives Over Cause Marketing, Jennifer Stanley

Theses and Dissertations

Breast cancer is everywhere. The disease has touched the lives of most people. This thesis includes a description of my family's personal breast cancer journey, my grandmother died of the disease at age 42, and my mother was diagnosed at age 53. By sharing our personal story, I hope to provide my children with our history. Another goal in sharing is adding to the public breast cancer narrative. This thesis also discusses the use of breast cancer in cause marketing campaigns and the lack of advancements in screening technologies. I link my views with those who feel frustration with the …

Rhetorics Of Engagement Across And About Faith And Worldview Difference, John Maclean

Theses and Dissertations

Interactions across faith and worldview difference are becoming increasingly common in many communities and around the world. These interactions can be verbally or physically violent, and even deadly, or they can be beautiful and enriching, or they can be ignored, resisted or refused. In this dissertation I put scholarship that endorses a broader conception of rhetoric in conversation with my personal experience in interfaith relations and dialogue in order to discover better ways to study these interactions. I propose and develop two constructs, "rhetorical space" and "rhetorical stance", that I use to explore and analyze people's attitudes toward and experiences …

The Editorial Double Vision Of Maxwell Perkins: How The Editor Of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, And Wolfe Plied His Craft, Rachel F. Van Hart

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars and literary enthusiasts have struggled for decades to account for editor Maxwell Perkins’s unparalleled success in facilitating the careers of many of the early twentieth century’s most enduring and profitable writers, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. This study seeks to penetrate that mystery by dissecting Perkins’s editorial practice and examining how he navigated the competing tensions between commercial success and aesthetic integrity in various circumstances. At play in the construction of his literary legacy are prevailing perceptions of authorship, complex interpersonal relationships, and the inherent battle between art and commerce. Focusing on his day-to-day …

Unraveling Cultural Knots: Exploring Narratives Of Intercultural Marriages Between Mexicans And Americans, Adrianna Renata Valenzuela

Theses and Dissertations

Narratives function to help us make decisions about what we do in our lives and in the lives of others. This study focuses on the intercultural marriages of three women who share Mexican and American cultures. Being a wife of a native Mexican, I proceed to examine the stories of how these three women were able to preserve or merge their cultural identity in the marriage and how they coped with the differences based on the following themes: culture, religion, and traditions. I composed three narratives based on the experiences of these women and incorporated an analysis of my findings …

Visual Fantasy Themes In The Ebony Fashion Fair (1963-1965): An Interdisciplinary Study, Brittany Estoria Blanton

Theses and Dissertations

Ernest G. Bormann's fantasy theme criticism and the media studies analysis were used to analyze and critique images from the Ebony Fashion Fair from 1963 - 1965. The importance of this fashion show was revealed during a time when the Civil Rights Movement was at its climax. The results concluded that John H. Johnson and Eunice Johnson, founders of Ebony magazine and the , challenged the prevailing social situation with their actions by showcasing positive images and experiences in Black and European communities.

Reduction Vs. Expansion: The Conflicting Projects Of Kenneth Burke And Michel Foucault, Michael David Measel

Theses and Dissertations

This project is an intertextual study of the theoretical projects of Kenneth Burke and Michel Foucault. It outlines their relationship in terms of points of cohesion and points of departure in their works. The similarities and differences between the projects of Burke and Foucault is described in terms of the relationship between language, knowledge, power, and society, then described in terms of the dichotomy of Reduction and Expansion. This dichotomy gives us a starting point from which to outline the commonalities and differences between these authors' projects. It also gives us a tool for other types of investigations concerning language …

The Legacy Of Alexander Bain, Stephen Lindsay Satterfield

Theses and Dissertations

Alexander Bain's key works are reviewed once again from a rhetorical and historical perspective. Bain was a Scottish empiricist who lived during the Industrial Revolution and contributed to rhetoric, psychology, education, and logic. Bain's emphasis on contiguity, modes of discourse, and grammar are explained. A brief Bain biography is provided along with Bain's interactions with notable friends. Researching Bain again from an interdisciplinary perspective is undertaken to avoid the usual problems with simply repeating prior academic findings and set opinions. However, the way in which Bain was accepted and then discredited is also discussed.

Using Writing Studio Pedagogy To Help Students Reclaim Their Disabilities And Sexualities In A High School Writers' Workshop, Matthew Kim

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an exploration into what students stand to gain from being mentored in terms of reclaiming their disabilities and sexualities. Writing studio pedagogy supports the following ideas: an understanding that composition is a social process and, therefore, must take place in a social environment, an acceptance of multiple composing tools, multiple problem-solving strategies, an acceptance that students possess many and different creative thinking processes, an awareness that spatial design matters for successful teaching and learning, and, finally, an understanding of writing as play. My primary research question is how can practicing writing studio pedagogy transform the writing classroom …

Assignment Design: Developing Writing Projects Using Open Access Www Tools To Increase Student Engagement And Learning, Joshua R. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Assignment Design: Developing Writing Projects using Open Access WWW Tools to Increase Student Engagement and Learning is a thesis that began with the research question of how can first-year composition instructors use free online tech tools to create effective writing assignments, which are based on and assessed using the Writing Program Administrators' Outcome Statements (WPA OS)(1999)? To answer the question, I researched pairing effective educational technology tools with the WPA OS, in order to engage student writers and enhance learning. I developed three writing projects, included as appendices, incorporating technology tools as scaffolding tasks and containing multiple writing genres. The …

Hammered, Framed, And Raised By A Woman, Rhonda M. Conner

Theses and Dissertations

Hammered, Framed, and Raised by a Woman is a memoir of Rhonda M. Conner's life as she was building her own home. It tells how she got the inspiration, got started, hardships, milestones, and when she plans on finishing her project. She has land in the country in the small town of Jefferson, Arkansas and got tired of trying to get a house by other methods. So, she went through several floor plans that she created, bought blocks, piers, and other foundation material, and got started building her home. Her project began in 1999, and many have enjoyed the journey …

Political Third Parties' Representation In"The Big Three": 24-Hour Cable News Networks' Ideological Construction Of The American Political Duopoly, William Breault

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis conducts content and functional analyses to investigate the amount and functions of third-party mentions in 24-hour cable news networks. Additionally, this thesis applies framing tactics, ideographs, and other rhetorical theory to examine strategies utilized to ideologically construct cognitions regarding the current American political duopoly.