Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Moving Beyond The Written Comment: Narrowing The Gap Between Response Practice And Research, Jane Fife, Peggy O'Neill

English Faculty Publications

While our field’s response practices have changed dramatically over the past two decades to involve more student comments on their own texts, empirical studies have lagged far behind classroom practices, focusing almost exclusively on teachers’ written comments as texts. By broadening our notion of response—and acknowledging the many and varied ways that teachers respond to student writing as well as the many and varied ways that students influence and interpret those responses—we will be able to narrow the gap between our teaching practices and our research questions.

Human Research Participant Protections: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Two Key Documents, Lisa R. Ballance

English Theses & Dissertations

This case study explores the historical progress of written policy in the field of human research participant protections, leading up to the recent case of several influential suspensions of clinical research at several prestigious academic medical institutions. The IRB process is discussed, including the importance of documentation in the process of managing the board, and the case of suspension at Virginia Commonwealth University is reviewed with attention paid to the drafting of two key documents written for the purpose of reinstating the human subject research charter; (I) the Corrective Action Plan and (2) the Written Policies and Procedures. Each document …

The Politics Of The Personal : Storying Our Lives Against The Grain., Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, Anne Ruggles Gere, Anne Herrington, Richard E. Miller, Victor Villanueva, Min-Zhan Lu, Gesa Kirsch

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This symposium presents a written dialogue of scholars expressing not only excitement but also frustration over the ways in which current work in composition and literacy studies has explored the politics of the personal.

“Students’ Right,” English Only, And Re-Imagining The Politics Of Language., Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Argues that a lack of language legislation is indicative of a pervasive, tacit policy of "English Only" in composition and of a constellation of assumptions about languages, and language users that continues to cripple public debate on English Only and compositionists' approaches to matters of "error." Proposes an approach to language and "error" considering the relations of language to power.

Let's Space Out: Rethinking The Design Of Law School Texts, Janeen Kerper

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

The Undergraduate 2001, Saint Mary's College Of California

The Undergraduate Spectrum

No abstract provided.

Seeing The One-To-One Writing Conference Through Owl Eyes: Reimagining The Voice Of Tutor, Madeline Yonker

English Theses & Dissertations

The one-to-one, face-to-face writing conference has long been hailed a godsend for struggling writers. The traditional IRL ("in real life") tutorial takes many shapes: (professor and student in office, tutor and student in library, tutor and student in writing center, etc.). When this writing conference moves into the MOO (Multi-User Domain, Object-Oriented), how does the environment affect student-tutor interaction? More specifically, what sorts of adjustments from the "normal" writing conference must be made in order for an effective conversation to occur in the synchronous OWL?

This project brings the one-to-one writing tutorial to distance learning students at Old Dominion University …

Reinventing The University: Literacies And Legitimacy In The Postmodern Academy, Christopher L. Schroeder

All USU Press Publications

Schroeder argues that, for students, postmodern instability in literacy and meaning has become a question of the legitimacy of current discourse of education. Schroeder is committed, then, to constructing literacies jointly with students and by so doing to bringing students to engage more deeply with education and society. To accomplish this, of course, he must advocate rebalancing instruction to a more radically student-centered curriculum. This does not mean he abandons traditional discourse or traditional practice in the classroom; rather, tradition becomes only one voice among many in the classroom, instead of being the dominating one. ReInventing the University is an …

Saying And Silence: Listening To Composition With Bakhtin, Frank Farmer

All USU Press Publications

Farmer explores the relationship between the meaningful word and the meaningful pause, between saying and silence, especially as the relationship emerges in our classrooms, our disciplinary conversations, and encounters with publics beyond the academy. Each of his chapters here addresses some aspect of how we and our students, colleagues, and critics have our say and speak our piece, often under conditions where silence is the institutionally sanctioned and preferred alternative. He has enlisted a number of Bakhtinian ideas (the superaddressee, outsideness, voice in dialogue) to help in the project of interpreting the silences we hear, naming the silences we do …

Sokal’S Hermeneutic Hoax: Physics And The New Inquisition, Babette Babich

Research Resources

“The Hermeneutics of a Hoax: Physics and the New Inquisition” offers a rhetorical analysis and hermeneutics reading of the parodic character of Sokal's "hoax." From the perspective of a philosopher of science, it is argued that it is important to attend both to the rhetorical level of philosophy and science. In addition it is important to consider the culture of status (Bourdieu) as well as the self-reflective weaknesses of the culture of physics including those of (traditionally) physics-dominated philosophy of science. Echoing some of the criticisms and highlighting the points of social advocacy of the late Paul Feyerabend underscores the …

(First Person)2: A Study Of Co-Authoring In The Academy, Kami Day, Michele Eodice

All USU Press Publications

In (First Person)2, Day and Eodice offer one of the few book-length studies of co-authoring in academic fields since Lunsford and Ede published theirs over a decade ago. The central research here involves in-depth interviews with ten successful academic collaborators from a range of disciplines and settings. The interviews explore the narratives of these informants' experience—what brought them to collaborate, what cognitive and logistical processes were involved as they worked together, what is the status of collaborated work in their field, and so on—and situate these informants within the broader discussion of collaboration theory and research as it has been …

English Writing Placement Assessment: Implications For At-Risk Learners, Janis Linch Banks Fisher

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis reviews literature regarding English writing placement assessment and its impact on at-risk (under-prepared) college students.

Constructing Critical Readers And Writers Through The Teaching Of Irony In The Composition Classroom, Bruce Stephen Wolcott

Theses Digitization Project

The construction of critically literate students must be paramount among goals in the freshman composition classroom. The approach for constructing critical readers positioned in this thesis employs conceptualizing both the complexity of a text and the importance of comprehending the context within which a text is both read and written. It utilizes the rhetorical feature of irony.

Teaching The Reading/Writing Connection In The Diverse Community College Classroom, Claudia Eleanore Wissbeck-Kittel

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis argues that with the racial and ethnic diversity becoming more pronounced in the diverse disciplines of the two year college we are going to need to adapt a cultural studies pedagogy in the writing class.

New Formalist Poets Of The American West, April Linder

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

In the late 1970s and early eighties, when most American poets were writing autobiographical free-verse lyrics, a handful of mavericks flouted literary fashion. They used rhyme, meter, and regular form—both traditional and innovative—and tried narrative, satire, and light verse. In an essay entitled “Can Poetry Matter?” (1991) one of these poets, Dana Gioia, accused contemporary poets of writing mostly for each other. “The poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon,” he wrote. “Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, …

Constructing Experiential Learning In The Language Arts Classroom, Terrylee Hutton Marzell

Theses Digitization Project

Recent research in educational practice has identified and emphasized the value of connecting school curriculum to the personal experiences of the students; but to be effective, learners must possess a collection of baseline experiences the teacher can connect new learnings to. If the baseline experiences are lacking, the instructor could choose to create a classroom experience upon which to build additional learnings.

Alternative Pedagogies For College Composition, Diana Marie Ramseyer

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis attempts to determine if the acquisition of rhetorical and grammatical skills such as a sense of audience and organization are best attained through an alternate pedagogy based on a methodology from Wendy Bishop or if they are better attained through a traditional approach.

A Rhetorical Study Of Edward Abbey's Picaresque Novel The Fool's Progress, Kent Murray Rogers

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis addresses this question of why Abbey employed such rhetoric and what resulting effects he hoped to achieve. Examining Abbey's rhetoric in terms of classical Western rhetorical traditions, the genre of the picaresque, and his own ideological stance can aid in understanding what his intentions are in this controversial work.

Composition And Technology: Examining Liminal Spaces Online, Carmen Michelle Fye

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis examines how composition studies have been, and continue to be, shaped by the cultural values of exclusion; this field is "continually magnif[ied] and reproduc[ed] in the complex social conditions connected with those values in fundamental ways much like educational systems in general."

Personal Effects: The Social Character Of Scholarly Writing, Deborah H. Holdstein, David Bleich

All USU Press Publications

In Personal Effects, Holdstein and Bleich compile a volume that cuts across the grain of current orthodoxy. These editors and contributors argue that it is fundamental in humanistic scholarship to take account of the personal and collective experiences of scholars, researchers, critics, and teachers. They contend that humanistic inquiry cannot develop successfully at this time without reference to the varieties of subjective, intersubjective, and collective experience of teachers and researchers. In composition studies, they point out, an important strand of theory has continuously mined the personal experience of individual writers ("where they stand" even in a destabilized sense of that …

Gretel Ehrlich, Gregory L. Morris

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

As a Western writer, Gretel Ehrlich is something of a curious case. By birth a Californian, Ehrlich has nevertheless shaped her identity as a Western writer by experience gathered elsewhere in the West. At the same time, while Ehrlich has lived and written extensively about her life in north-central Wyoming—and built her considerable reputation upon that work—the arc of her experience has carried her for the moment back to her native California. This movement from place to place (Ehrlich has been a writer of many places in her career) suggests a dominant tension in her life and work: that of …

Special Focus: Personal Writing, Jane E. Hindman

Publications and Research

This introduction to a special section of College English treats the nature, role, and problematics of personal academic discourse and professional work. It address the place of personal writing in professional contexts and aims to clarify the myriad denotations of "the personal" in academic discourse and to suggest viable criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of personal writing's contributions to knowledge-making in English studies.

Desert Literature: The Early Period, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Although not entirely free, ours is a fairly easy ride when it comes to living on deserts. Today, in order to survive, few people out in the lands of the giant cactus and the Gila monster eat grasshoppers or spend day after day hoeing beans in the punishing 110° heat. Instead, today’s residents enjoy a created world of air-conditioned homes, schools, and shopping malls. The point is that few people live in the desert anymore. They live on it. Theirs is a colonial society, imposed on the land, fed from the outside, and infused with the life-giving juice of energy …

Reading Wallace Stegner's Angle Of Repose, Russell Burrows

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Wallace Stegner must have felt he was gambling as he settled on Angle of Repose (1971) as the title for his most important novel—the one that would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize (1972). “Angle of repose” happens to be a bit of technical jargon from mining, and Stegner meant to extend it to marriage. This unlikely metaphor begins with the practical understanding that mine debris will tumble downhill only so far, because as a slope levels out, the rocks and the gravels and the like will start to pile up at their respective “angles of repose.” And so, …

Explorations Into Cohesive Conjunctions In Political Speeches, Chithra Palaniandy

Student Works (2000-2009)

The present research is a study of the discourse semantic stratum within the systemic functional theory of language. It focuses on cohesion in written discourse and more specifically, on conjunctions in authentic texts. Five written­ to-be-read speech texts delivered by the then Minister of Education Dato' Sri Najib Tun Abdul Razak were chosen for the analysis of the cohesive conjunctions present in them. These texts belong to the genre of political discourse, which fall under the factual expositions of the hortatory type. Besides identifying a range of conjunctions used, and establishing the categories they belonged to, - additive, adversative, causal …

Wedge And Bridge: A Note On The Rhetoric Of Distinction And Identification, Henry W. Johnstone, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Henry Johnstone (1970 p. 124, 1990) has advanced the slogan "Rhetoric is a wedge" to suggest the ways in which rhetoric calls attention to hitherto unnoticed consequences or assumptions, or even to features of the physical world that have escaped an audience's attention. Here, however, we intend to supplement the notion of rhetoric as "wedge" by suggesting the ways in which it is, and also must be, a "bridge."

Revision And Immortality In Philosophical Argumentation: Reconsidering The Rhetorical Wedge, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This essay explores Johnstone's idea that "rhetoric is a wedge." In particular, it explores the place of this idea in Johnstone's philosophy of argument, the need to confront this idea with argument, and ways of confronting it with ad rem and ad hominem arguments.

The Association Between The Scores Of Students In High Performing Schools And Instruction In Computer-Based Word Processing, Roger Theodore Sauer

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Women Writing Auto/Biography: Anna Banti’S Artemisia And Eunice Lipton’S Alias Olympia, Claire Marrone

Languages Faculty Publications

Neat definitions of biographical and autobiographical writing have been challenged in the twentieth century. This essay offers a comparative study of two texts which may be classified as autobiography or biography or both, and which, because of their blurred generic boundaries, bring to light several theoretical questions about life writing.

African-American Life Writing: Harriet Jacobs And Bell Hooks, Luo Yi

Masters Theses

Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and bell hooks' Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood share a common concern with emancipation and employ complementary rhetorical strategies. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl presents Harriet Jacobs' journey of personal self-discovery through various relationships with others, and her personal narrative finally serves the larger goal of emancipation for her people. Jacobs' narrative is full of other voices, or personae. Even the narrator, Linda Brent, is pseudonymous, or "other," in this sense. Jacobs invokes these personae in her autobiography; she explores her experiences as a web of …