Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Motivation And Identification: A Burkean Rhetorical Analysis Of The Mission Statements Of A Class Of Higher Education Organizations, Mark Razor

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to understand higher education organizations as if they were texts and from that perspective to determine how motive was expressed and community was created through the mission statements of a class of higher education organizations. The mission statements of Carnegie comprehensive doctoral institutions of higher education with a medical and/or veterinary school were rhetorically analyzed and the results organized into groups much as chemists organized elements into the periodic table. In addition to rhetorical studies, organizational studies were employed, especially those that employed Identification Theory. This study provides a model for understanding complex institutions, …

Bias And The Teachable Moment: Revisiting A Teacher Narrative, Darren Crovitz

Faculty Articles

Such responsibility may be vital for English teachers, especially, as we strive to establish communities of writers and spaces for critical thinking and conversation. When I sat down to write about this experience, I saw it as an opportunity to discuss a taboo situation and its positive aftermath, with the aim of demonstrating how it might be possible to use such events as points of departure in creating engaging writing assignments.

Antipodean Inscapes: Reflection Of The Land As A Young Man, Michael Kantor

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The following paper contains a stand-alone piece of creative travel writing. ‘Cloud Juice’ is based on my interpretation of the experiences of the Fall 2006 Australia: Sustainability and the Environment semester. As it is my own personal interpretation it should not be placed in the category of non-fiction. Instead I have tried to write a story that presents the tone of my experience as honestly as possible, rather than simply telling the unbiased facts of the semester. My reason for writing this is to experiment with alternative methods of communicating the growth of an ecological ethic. By focusing on the …

Unlv Magazine, Cate Weeks, Shane Bevell, Erin O'Donnell, Eric Leake, Lori Bachand, David G. Schwartz, David Ashley

UNLV Magazine

No abstract provided.

The Concentration Of Carnivalesque Themes In The Shared Fabliaux Of The Decameron And The Canterbury Tales, Timothy R. Jordan

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Geoffrey Chaucer's interest in social interactions in The Canterbury Tales is easy to see through his pilgrims' estate-based conflicts with each other. In addition to the frame narrative, the interest in social interaction is also apparent in the characters of the individual tales and as a reflection of the conflict between the individual pilgrims. Most of these social interactions embody what is called the camivalesque: free, open, contact between people due to the suspension of social hierarchies. Mikhail Bakhtin has described the camivalesque as characteristic of medieval thought. In medieval literature, the genre of the fabliau, short bawdy stories that …

Lagu And Belu: The Semiotics Of Bottled Water Packaging, Daniel Fusch

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

There has been considerable recent criticism of the bottled water industry from professional and popular as well as scholarly sources. This criticism disputes the veracity of a brand's claim to a pure and natural source, as well as the standards for regulation. This paper adds another factor to the criticism of bottled "natural springs" water, emphasizing the magical operation implicit in the rhetoric for the packaging of bottled water. The paper examines the natural and supernatural semiotics of the commercial packaging for bottled "natural springs" water, and identifies a correlation between the semiotic function of the ancient Germanic rune lagu …

Introduction : Cross-Language Relations In Composition., Bruce Horner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Vengeance And The Crusades, Susanna A. Throop

History Faculty Publications

This article demonstrates that the popularity of the idea of crusading as vengeance was not limited to the laity, and, instead of fading away after 1099, the ideology grew more widespread as the twelfth century progressed. The primary aim here is to present the evidence alongside preliminary analysis, reserving further, more detailed interpretation for future publications.

Preliminary Report To The Purdue Writing Lab: Assessing Usability Of The "New" Online Writing Lab (Owl) Design And Contents, Michael Salvo, H. Allen Brizee, Dana Lynn Driscoll, Morgan Sousa

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Research Reports

This report is submitted June 16, 2006 to the Purdue University Writing Lab, specifically to Linda Bergmann, Director; Tammy Conard-Salvo, Associate Director; and Karl Stolley, Lead Web Designer. Intended to inform the ongoing redesign of the Online Writing Lab (OWL), it is written to maintain the highest level of usability and user-centered design of a unique, globally-utilized information resource. This document is a preliminary report limited to initial findings from a five-step usability testing protocol conducted February 25 through March 3, 2006. This testing plan was submitted to Purdue’s Institutional Review Board’s Committee on the Use of Human Subjects (IRB) …

Blessing And Sending The Church Into The World For The Sake Of The World, Using Congregational Blessings As A Missional Enterprise, Michael Harbour

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project equipped the elders to function as a community of men called and authorized by God to bless and send his people into the world for the sake of the world. They were equipped through seven sessions of theological reflection on Scripture and reflection on narratives of those who have offered pastoral blessings. The sessions also included an examination of templates and the opportunity to practice writing and speaking blessings. The elders have been speaking a shepherd’s blessing as the last liturgical act of the Sunday assembly. In this project, missional and textual focus was given to the …

Handling And Preventing Journalistic Fraud: Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Kenneth Munson

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Fraud is a growing concern in the news business, especially in recent years where numerous journalism scandals rock its foundation. This paper examines the most prominent cases: Stephen Glass, the reporter for The New Republic newsmagazine who completely or partially fabricated 27 stories in the late ‘90s; Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who was found to have plagiarized or made up his supposedly on-thescene reporting in 2003; and Janet Cooke, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for her Washington Post story about a child heroin addict who, in actuality, did not exist. This paper will examine flaws …

Found In Transition: Orality-Literacy Cues Discovered In A Rhetorical Examination Of Platonic Dialogues, Barbara Jane Clopton-Blackwell

English Theses & Dissertations

The shift from an oral society to a literate one occurred in Ancient Greece with the advent of the alphabet (Ong, Orality 90). The Greek culture is generally considered to be a unique example of a culture which developed literacy internally (Havelock Muse 1), Details of the cultural transformation remain unclear, just as the history of the development of the Greek alphabet is rife with rumors of foreign influence and predecessors. The shift was, nevertheless, a strongly internal process, an evolution of culture as much as of technology.

The transition from orality to literacy brought many conflicts. As a philosopher …

Complicating "Female Suicide Bombers" : Violence, Agency And Gender In The Rhetoric Of Shahida, Chelsea Rock

Honors Theses

Since 2002, popular Western news media has become fixated with the "advent" of the Palestinian female suicide bomber when a woman named Wafa Idris detonated herself on a busy Jaffa Road in Israel. Questions about gender, domesticity, violence, subjectivity, and technology arise as researchers, journalists and others confront culturally conceived notions about women and their roles in both Islamic and Western societies. Proposing a broader concept of violence that is cognizant of women's violent histories and struggles over agency, this essay suggests that analyses of women and violence are incomplete without critically thinking about the "female suicide bomber"--or shahida--within their …

Social Hierarchy In Leaderless Groups, Angie B. White

Honors Theses

The idea of social rank-ordering (indicative of status. dominance. or potential leadership capacity) was first extensively researched by Robert F. Bales in the early I 950's. Bales shaped group communication around the principle that groups inevitably evolve into unequal power structures and develop a hierarchy of participation and status (Bales et. al, 1951 ). This hierarchy is evident in many different areas of life, such as social interactions, socio-economic status, and task-related rank, and the idea of dominance is established early on in life. From 1961, when Gellert observed dyads of 4- to 6- year-old children and found that a …

A Joint Rolled In Toilet Paper: Funkadelic’S Funky Soul, Joseph T. Thomas Jr.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Through an examination of Parliament-Funkadelic’s lyrics and music, this paper explores shit, dirt, and the funk, investigating their relationship to George Clinton and his band’s desire to darken the Humanistic project of Enlightenment, their desire to soil language, and thereby question conventional, bourgeois values. The author argues that Funkadelic participate in what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the “peculiar logic” of the carnivalesque, detourning status quo notions of culture and society, creating complex contortions through the blurring of the good and the bad, the cerebral and the carnal, the sublime and the mundane. In essence, Funkadelic are a musical carnival that exists …

If Your God Has Really Spoken To You… Then All The World Must Hear It: The Discourses Of Revelation And Satire In Salman Rushdie’S The Satanic Verses, Conrad William

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In his essay, “Is Nothing Sacred?”, Salman Rushdie lays out a place for literature as an arena in which various perspectives may interact. He thereby provides a context for the controversy regarding his books, most particularly The Satanic Verses. Despite his claims, however, literature, as Rushdie conceives it, operates not simply as an arena for discourse but similarly as a rule-maker, controlling the discourse which operates within its bounds. The Satanic Verses, in particular, suggests that revelation as it passes through unstable and hybrid human language loses its authority and power to speak purely or dogmatically. In so …

Derrida’S Deconstruction Of Logocentrism: Implications For Trauma Studies, Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article examines Derrida’s conception of logocentrism as it is discussed throughout the entirety of his seminal work Of Grammatology, as well as in his collected interviews, Points...: 1974-1994. Systematically refuting logocentrism, Derrida’s deconstruction enables exposure of the mechanisms, such as binary constructions, that exert a dominant—and domineering—influence over marginalized people, places, and concepts. Specifically, presence and the (falsehood of the) totality of the sign define logocentrism, and these terms cannot productively contribute to trauma studies because it is precisely in texts and textuality that embodied states can be studied. Texts are themselves material embodiments that display …

Understanding Powerpoint Through Rhetoric, Andrea K. Murphy

English Theses & Dissertations

PowerPoint has been described by critics and proponents alike as ubiquitous. This tool, created primarily for the business world, is now found everywhere from elementary school classes to the highest levels of government. Critics of PowerPoint, like Edward Tufte, charge the software with such crimes as the corruption of data and changing the way that people think. Meanwhile, PowerPoint proponents such as Cliff Atkinson and Richard E. Mayer assert PowerPoint's value as an excellent tool that, if designed properly, can take advantage of the promise of research into multimedia theory.

Even as we reconcile these diverse views within a larger …

Multimedia In The Writing Center: Visual Rhetoric And Tutor Training, Tammy Conard-Salvo

Purdue Writing Lab/Purdue OWL Presentations

This presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) discusses the impact that multimedia projects have on writing centers and offers one model for integrating a visual rhetoric unit in an undergraduate tutor training course.

Biblical Truth And Theological Education: A Rhetorical Strategy., Patrick R. Keifert

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Silent Outsiders: Searching For Queer Identity In Composition Readers, Travis Duncan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study searches twenty composition readers' table of contents for the degree of inclusivity of queer people and issues. Four means of erasure are labeled as possible erasing of queer identity: presuming heteronormativity, overt homophobia, perpetuating tokenism, and pathologizing queer identity. The presence of other differences are compared to the number of times that queer identity is referenced in the table of contents. The final portion of the analysis examines the two most inclusive composition readers to understand more clearly how the readers present queer individuals and issues. In a sense, I want to explore the question of how often …

Nietzsche’S “Gay” Science, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Offers a reading of the allusion to the 'Provencal' in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, including the troubadour’s art (or 'technic') of poetic song, an art at once secret, anonymous and thus nonsubjective, but also including logical disputation, for which it is the model, and comprising, perhaps above all, the important ideal of action (and pathos) at a distance: l’amour lointain. But beyond the Provençal character and atmosphere of the troubadour, Nietzsche’s conception of a joyful science, Nietzsche's 'gay' science also adumbrates a critique of science understood as the collective ideal of scholarship, and including classical philology as much as logic, …

Evolving Outcomes Of The Outcomes Statement, Judith Miriam Holiday

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis rhetorically analyzes the Outcomes Statement (OS) developed by "The Outcomes Collective" (a group of writing program administrators) for First-Year Composition. The OS was designed to create curricular consensus with regard to First-Year Composition both within and across postsecondary institutions. Though postmodern undertones permeate the OS, it can be interpreted from a purely modernist perspective. The thesis includes a chapter with suggestions on revising the OS to control this ambiguity.

Lessons Learned As Author And Editor, Connie Foster

DLTS Faculty Publications

Writing and editing are dynamic, creative processes. At some point both author and editor must release the finished product and submit to the production process (more copy editing, proofing and queries). To offer the best manuscript possible, some tips are presented.

The Writing Center As A Burkean Parlor: The Influence Of Gender And The Dual Engines Of Power: Collaboration And Conflict, Clara Louise Enoch

Theses Digitization Project

This thesis examines writing centers and offers suggestions for tutor training that might help realize the ideal of the writing center as a Burkean parlor, a place where collaboration via continuous meetings and conversations between tutors and participants take place. Conflict can surface because of different cultural backgrounds and world views, particularly in terms of gender issues.

Stimulating Intrinsic Motivation: Brain-Based Pedagogy For The Second-Language Writing Classroom, Kristin Marie Kucia-Stauder

Theses Digitization Project

Examines how the cognitive and biological perspectives of Intrinsic Motivation (IM) could collaboratively engage second language (L2) students in the university writing classroom. Brain-structures and body systems specifically associated with intrinsic motivation are detailed, and brain-based learning strategies are outlined. Concludes with a sample application for the university writing classroom that reflects a brain-based approach to L2 learning.

Writing And Metacognition: Empowering Young Authors In The Writing Workshop, Suzanne Gagne Cooke

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study is to find out if teaching the students how to use the writing process will improve the content of their work.

A Comparative Study Of Editorials In Chinese And English, Meiyen Huang

Theses Digitization Project

The study reveals national cultures may influence the use of politeness strategies and organizational patterns in editorials written in the two languages, English and Chinese. Due to a newspaper's political orientation and its regional and national background, the rhetorical form of linguistic features in editorials might vary among cultures.

Bubbling Vs. Writing: Bridging The Gap Between Fourth Grade Writing Standards And Composition Theory, Pamela Lynn Dobbins

Theses Digitization Project

Currently, fourth grade writing curricula in California public schools are dictated by California State English Language Arts standards, which are measured by the California Achievement Test. In this thesis, I explore the relationship between state standards and what compositionists identify as "meaningful" writing and learning.

Narratives In A Drug Court Setting, Anna Catherina Maria Keller

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of the project is to develop and evaluate a writing unit that could be used to teach adult students in a drug court program. The project is based on theories behind narrative therapy, its use in the treatment of persons with addiction problems, and how the reframing of students' own life stories through writing can bring about change. By using writing prompts as both therapeutic and educational tools, the author hoped to improve the students' life-coping skills and their writing abilities. The unit consists of paragraph writing, essay writing, reflective writing that focused on past events, and using …