Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Notes From An Eighteenth Century Courtship, Cynthia Booth Ricciardi

Bridgewater Review

No abstract provided.

Discourse Of Evil: Speaking Terrorism To Silence, Galip Isen

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

That the impact of terrorism is equal to the reaction it elicits may be a truism, but one that deserves further probing as demonstrated by the way that reaction is put to use politically. Whichever of 150-strong definitions [1] is accepted, the consequential aspect of terrorism is ideational: the assault targets the concept and experience of normal in the lives and minds of ordinary people. Several writers argue that terrorism is generally inefficacious, strategically counterproductive and mostly unsuccessful as a method of attaining socio-political objectives [2]. However, overall public response to 11 September 2001 has been so profound …

Auto-Ethnography As A Communicative And Therapeutic Means Of Addressing Eating Disorders, Julie Irvin

Honors Theses

Under the premise that human beings are natural storytellers, narratives are an essential part of our lives and the way we shape and form our stories impacts our daily activities. When life struggles transpire, we typically make sense of our world through narratives, which is why therapists sometimes draw upon narrative therapy. By exploring different types of narratives-the basic genre of a life-story, testimonio, literary narrative, ethnography, and auto-ethnography-the mode that presents itself as a viable means of intrapersonal communication, possibly producing change, is auto-ethnography. Examining the need for narrative within the conditions of eating disorders, the question arises as …

Review Of Burger With The Works, Please! A Webjournal For Students Of The Humanities, Alexandra Ganser

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Role Of Explicit Teaching Of Cognitive/Metacognitive Reading Strategies To Improve Reading Comprehension At The Elementary Level, Sheila R. Deboer

Master of Education Program Theses

This paper presents a summary of selected research on teaching cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies and their correlation to improved reading comprehension at the elementary level. It also reviews instructional programs, and describes implications for teaching. Study findings indicate that explicit teaching of cognitive/metacognitive reading strategies are effective in improving reading comprehension for students at the elementary level.

Bryson’S Dictionary Of Troublesome Words, Priscilla Finley

Library Faculty Research

Travel writer and humorist Bryson has revised, adapted, and updated his style guide, first published in 1984 in Britain as Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words and in the US as Facts on File Dictionary of Troublesome Words, to appeal to contemporary American book buyers. Presenting itself as a "compilation of suggestions, observations, and treasured prejudices," the work compiles and comments on commonly misspelled words and proper nouns and other conundrums of usage scrupulous writers or copy editors may face.

What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics In Teaching And Assessing Writing, Bob Broad

All USU Press Publications

The result of a long-term study of one university's introductory composition program, Broad's approach to mapping the values that inform writing evaluation is empirically grounded, painstakingly analyzed, yet flexible, human, and pedagogically wise. Not simple, but surely practical, his method yields a more satisfactory process of exploration and a more useful representation of the values by which compositionists actually evaluate their students. With this important study, Broad moves the field far beyond rubrics in teaching and assessing writing. What We Really Value traces the origins of traditional rubrics within the theoretical and historical circumstances out of which they emerged, then …

Genre And The Invention Of The Writer: Reconsidering The Place Of Invention In Composition, Anis S. Bawarshi

All USU Press Publications

In a focused and compelling discussion, Anis Bawarshi looks to genre theory for what it can contribute to a refined understanding of invention. In describing what he calls "the genre function," he explores what is at stake for the study and teaching of writing to imagine invention as a way that writers locate themselves, via genres, within various positions and activities. He argues, in fact, that invention is a process in which writers are acted upon by genres as much as they act themselves. Such an approach naturally requires the composition scholar to re-place invention from the writer to the …

Blurred Relationships: The Factual Fiction Of John Edgar Wideman, Melissa Bakeman Hartmann

Theses Digitization Project

Control is a central issue in any text: does the author's intention or the reader's interpretation better explain the resulting meaning of the text? This question has long been the subject of debate among textual theorists; this essay proposes a middle ground, namely that the author and the reader engage in a collaborative effort to make meaning in a text.

Implicature And Argumentation, Jon Nelsen Preacher

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis explores the role, if any, that implicature plays as a strategy in informal debate. Transcripts of spontaneous debates from television and radio public affairs talk shows were analyzed with a focus on the use of implicature as a strategic rhetorical tool employed to gain advantage in an argument.

Internal Dialogues: Construction Of The Self In The Woman Warrior, Ann Shirley Modzelewski

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis considers past autobiographical theory and questions whether it addresses the autobiography of the female writer. Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Margaret Sanger, and Maxine Hong Kingston are examined to reveal their polyvocality, use of the autobiographical "I", and rhetorical strategies maintained in order to create a close relationship with the reader. Particular attention is paid to Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and Sidonie Smith's autobiographical "I."

Exploring Visual Learning In The Basic Writing Classroom, Prince Michael Ferguson

Theses Digitization Project

For many students in basic writing classrooms the language of writing assignments, essay prompts and required reading is especially difficult. Therefore, some teachers are using approaches other than logical or linguistic methods to assist these students. This thesis details some of the methods teachers and researchers are using. Most significant is a case study that explores the use of visuals in a basic writing classroom. The results of the case study and a survey instrument suggest that there is a niche for alternative methods and the use of visuals in the basic writing classroom.

Home And Who: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Rudyard Kipling's "Tiger! Tiger!' And "Letting In The Jungle", Steven Clark Estus

Theses Digitization Project

These stories are representative of an idea that is repeatedly expressed both in the concrete details of Kipling's stories and in the way he uses language. It is possible to see that Kipling, the archetypical man of the empire, may not always have been the empire's man in his work; and causes for that may be found in the alluring, very non-English place he lived in for several years of his youth: India.

The Knowledge And Skills Of Freshman Writers, Aram Paul Sarkisian

Theses Digitization Project

This research identifies what proficient writers know and do by the end of their freshman year in college and raises the kind of questions that improve the articulation of English instruction.

Re-Examining The Personal Narrative In First Year Composition, Kathryn Marie Hansler

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis explores the current theories on the personal narrative (as a tool in teaching freshman composition) and examines the ways that this essay is now being used in first year courses at California State University, San Bernardino.

The Working Hour: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Lyrics Of Tears For Fears, Jennifer Anne Gross-Mejía

Theses Digitization Project

Childhood friends Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal founded the band Tears for Fears, and were the two primary members from 1982-1990. Their songs describe the struggle of coping with childhood abuse. This thesis analyzes the rhetorical aspects of their lyrics, emphasizing how the words of their songs express the fundamental human response to abuse, and the painful process of recovery. It explores how the songwriters use the psychological theories of Arthur Janov and Carl Jung to scaffold their experience of working through emotional trauma; and how they combine those theories with astrological symbolism to explore the idea of destiny. This …

Landscape Of Desire: Identity And Nature In Utah's Canyon Country, Greg Gordon

All USU Press Publications

Landscape of Desire powerfully documents and celebrates a place and the evolutions that occur when human beings are intimately connected to their surroundings. Greg Gordon accomplishes this with a tapestry of writing that interweaves land use history, natural history, experiential education, and personal reflection. He tracks the geomorphology of southern Utah as well as the creatures and plants his student group encounters, the history lessons (planned and unplanned), the trials and joys of gathering so many individuals into a cohesive will, and his own personal epiphanies, restraints, insights, and disillusionments.

The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives On Writing Center Scholarship, Michael A. Pemberton, Joyce Kinkead

All USU Press Publications

In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges. Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops …

Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Holliday

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

On February 19, 1942, approximately ten weeks after Japanese fighter planes attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt approved Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of all people of Japanese descent from vulnerable areas of the United States’ west coast. Meant as a security measure to protect the dams, power plants, harbors, railroads, and airports from spies who would attempt to compromise America’s vulnerable infrastructure, this order eventually led to the complete removal of all Japanese from Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, relocating 120,000 people by mid-1942 (Only What xi-xii). Such actions …

Michael Mcclure, Rod Phillips

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The author of more than twenty volumes of poetry, over twenty plays, two novels, and three collections of essays, Michael McClure is one of the most prolific and enduring figures to emerge from the Beat movement. As one of the five poets to begin his career at the Six Gallery reading in 1955, the reading which launched the Beat movement, he shares a long and rich history with Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, and many other writers of San Francisco’s Beat period.

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, James H. Maguire

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“Marilynne Robinson has written a first novel that one reads as slowly as poetry—and for the same reason: The language is so precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn’t want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience” (Schreiber 14). Many other reviewers, critics, and general readers agree with reviewer Le Anne Schreiber that Robinson’s novel is beautifully written. And since Housekeeping’s virtual poetry echoes the beauty of the language found in works of nineteenth-century American writers such as Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, it comes as no surprise that Robinson’s favorite authors are the American Romantics.

J. Ross Brown, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Caught by his own whimsical pen often used to illustrate his books, the writer sits on a log with sketch pad in hand. He’s in the midst of a vast, wild country. Behind him are mountains and, closer, an apparently abandoned adobe. Beneath a sans-souci floppy hat, he gazes over spectacles comically slid down his nose with that look of the artist in the intense act of considering a scene or of a schoolmarm about to scold. Yet there’s also a different kind of tension to his body. One eyebrow is raised, almost as if he’s listening for something behind …

Reading Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, P. Jane Hafen

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The writings of Louise Erdrich not only reflect their author’s multilayered, complex background but they also confound a variety of literary genre and cultural categories. Although Erdrich is known primarily as a successful contemporary Native American writer, her finely polished writing reveals both her Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Euroamerican heritages. Nevertheless, her diverse imageries, subjects, and textual strategies reaffirm imperatives of American Indian survival. She prescribes the literary challenge for herself and other contemporary Native writers in her essay “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place”: “In the light of enormous loss, [contemporary Native writers] must tell …

Not Mere Rhetoric: On Wasting Or Claiming Your Legacy, Justice Scalia, Marie Failinger

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of the article is that the Court’s enterprise is centered on preserving community through an ethics of warranted trust, and that Scalia’s rhetoric often rejects such an ethic. A modern democratic citizen, along with his whole community, instead finds himself in the situation of necessary trust in democratic institutions like the Supreme Court. The willingness of a political community ultimately to place its trust in authority is partially dependent on that authority’s commitment to, and skill at, creating a convincing argument. The practice of rhetoric recognizes the dynamics of a relation of trust: the rhetor must put his …

Wpas And/Versus Administrators: Using Multimedia Rhetoric To Promote Shared Premises For Writing Instruction, Rebecca Moore Howard

Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Writing The Lives Of Others: The Veterans Project, Sandra Young

English Faculty Publications

This essay describes an advanced composition course in which the students studied the ethics, politics, history, and rhetorical strategies involved in writing the lives of others. The heart of the course was a service-learning project that introduced college juniors and seniors to veterans of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The students interviewed, wrote brief biographies, and transcribed the wartime stories of a group of veterans from a local American Legion post and its women’s auxiliary. The stories were collected in a volume made available to local American Legion posts, veterans hospitals, and libraries in Connecticut.

Pruning Mr. Wilson's Hedges: The Link Between Woodrow Wilson And George W. Bush, Joseph P. Richards

The Corinthian

This paper seeks to show that a connection exists between President George W. Bush's rhetoric sending America into war with Iraq and the rhetoric used by President Woodrow Wilson which led to America's entrance into World War I. The paper is broken into two major sections: the first is an analysis of Woodrow Wilson's 1917 address to Congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany. The remainder of the paper is dedicated to beginning the establishment of a link between Wilson's rhetoric during World War I and President Bush's rhetoric which drew America into war with Iraq.

In The Person Of Mankind Attempting To Depict Womanhood, Jessica Sedor

The Corinthian

Ben Jonson was by no means a minor character of the early seventeenth century. His writings ranged from plays like Sejanus and Every Man in His Humor to poems like "Song: To Celia" and "To the Memory of My Beloved", "The Author", "Mr. William Shakespeare", and "What He Hath Left Us." He was bold in his attempts. As a result, while many of his works are extremely popular, there are several that proved to be not so successful. Jonson's attempt at speaking as a woman in his "In the Person of Womankind (In Defense of their Inconstancy)" is one example. …

Prophecy And Anti-Popery In Victorian London: John Cumming Reconsidered, Robert Ellison, Carol Herringer

English Faculty Research

John Cumming (1807-1881) was the popular minister of the Crown Court Church of Scotland in London's Covent Garden. This article examines his views on the end times and the Roman Catholic Church, two of the favorite subjects of his preaching.

Rogerian Rhetoric As Negotiation: Does Its Dependence On Game Theory Pose Ethical Problems?, Stacy Fussell Thorne

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In the war game Diplomacy, players win by gaining control of Europe. In order to win, however, players must successfully negotiate with other players, make alliances with them, and sometimes gain the support of their ally's military resources, their armies or fleets. In the rules of the game, Diplomacy is described as

a game of negotiations, alliances, promises kept, and promises broken. In order to survive, a player needs help from others. In order to win the game, a player must eventually stand alone. Knowing whom to trust, when to trust them, what to promise, and when …