Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Donald Trump Did A “Very Good” Job: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Candidate Trump’S Campaign Speeches, Caroline Mohan

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Since mid-2015, Donald Trump has shaken the political arena with an unprecedented yet effective public rhetorical repertoire. Regardless of alleged scandals, frequent social media usage, and extemporaneous and fiery rally speeches, the president’s approval ratings remain steady and he continues to move forward in his international and local political endeavors. Though these factors often posed large obstacles for past presidents, Trump has overcome them by use of audience identification, transparency, honorific pandering, and shrewd control of a vulnerable political sphere. In this study, rhetorician Kenneth Burke’s fantasy-theme and cluster criticisms are used to analyze Trump’s overall rhetorical themes, in social …

A Rhetoric Of Coupons: Analyzing Fsis And Fsi Coupons Through Rhetorical Lenses, Blake Lubinski

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

This thesis consists of two journal articles that examine newspaper coupon booklets called free-standing inserts (FSIs) through feminist and visual rhetoric lenses. The first article attempts to identify the “ideal couponer,” or the audience suggested by the product categories, visuals, and language appearing in FSIs. Through content and textual analyses using a feminist rhetoric lens, the article argues that FSIs evoke the idea of an audience of mothers who conform to gendered cultural assumptions about womanhood and parenthood. The article concludes with theoretical and business implications of these findings, contending that more rhetorical research is necessary to understand how FSIs …

Crm Software Interface Use In Mba Program Email Recruitment Messaging, Tracie Esmaili

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Competition for university applicants has pushed MBA programs to recruit broadly by taking a more marketing focused self-promotional approach. To grow their applicant pool, many turn to customer relationship management (CRM) systems to manage email recruitment campaigns. CRM systems are efficient communication managers that consistently deliver promotional email content to vast online audiences. However, writing and rhetoric scholarship promote the idea that interfaces, such as CRM systems, are more than mere tools; instead, they impact the purpose, content, and form of communications. This study explores a CRM software interface along with the emails generated from such systems. The first part …

Power And Vulnerability: How We Can Be Influenced, Christopher Fohl

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

I watched the ballet and started thinking of parallels I could connect with historical events.

Editor's note: This paper received third prize ($25).

Power And Vulnerability: Basis For Revolution?, Katlin Pistone

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

Throughout the semester, our history class explored the differences in relationships including political, economical, and social aspects. I found one of the most compelling comparisons to be how people of vulnerability have historically suffered because of their circumstances yet are able to learn that within their vulnerability comes strength and change. After the themes of power and vulnerability were presented to us in preparation for our trip to the ballet, I was able, during the production, to draw many similarities. After narrowing my topic to a certain event in history that explored these ideas, the Haitian revolution, I began to …

'Dracula: Bloodlines' And The Role Of Women, Audrey Binzer

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

The writing process began after attending the Dracula Bloodlines ballet. While watching the performance, the integral role of women stood out to me and I decided it would be a good topic to write about. From there, it was a pretty easy process. I used the program to help support my ideas and make the essay complete.

Editor's note: This paper received first prize ($100).

Reconstruction's First Election: Various Interpretations Of The Lasting Significance Of A Grant Victory, Shannon M. Stanforth

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

This paper was completed during the Spring of 2018 for my ASI 120 course. The assignment was a multi-phased historiography paper centering around the topic of Reconstruction. To begin preparing for the writing of the historiography and to gain a better understanding of the historical context and political unrest surrounding the task of Reconstruction, I read Eric Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction. Foner’s book provided me with the knowledge to begin writing my topic proposal and introduced me to the influential event of the Election of 1868. I was interested in exploring the consequences and effects of the …

The One, But Not The Only, Lauren Durham

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

For this particular assignment, we had to reconstruct the main points that Plotinus, an ancient philosopher and educator, presents in his work titled the Enneads. In order to reorganize and retell his elaborate ideas appropriately, we had to come to understand the text in a way that would make our own interpretations easy to convey to audiences. In addition to reconstructing the Enneads, a comparison between a previously read creation story and Plotinus's ideas had to be made. After numerous in-class discussions, I established a logical order to present Plotinus's various cosmological entities. I felt that beginning with the …

The Body And Blood: What Was And Is At Stake In The Protestant Reformation, Anna L. Biesecker-Mast

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

This paper is an explanation of Robert A. Orsi's concept of presence from the introduction and first chapter of his book titled, History and Presence. Before writing any paper for a class, I thoroughly review the syllabus for the assignment. Based on the requirements listed in the syllabus, and on the discussion we had in seminar about the Orsi text and Dr. Smith's lecture on the religious origins of modernity, I drafted an outline of my paper. Throughout the process of creating my outline, I considered various organizations for my explanation as well as a few different arguments I …

Coaching Styles For Boys’ And Girls’ Sports Teams, Jack Murphy

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

The writing process for this article began when my English 198 teacher assigned our third major essay, instructing that it was to be on the topic of gender and include original research. Being a lifelong athlete, I decided to investigate how coaching styles might differ depending upon whether one is coaching boys or girls. With this in mind, I set out to interview the coaches that I know so as to gain their insights and approaches to coaching. I developed a set of questions and interviewed four coaches of varying ages who had coached girls and/or boys at different levels. …

Sustainability Education At The University Of Dayton, Olivia M. Leblanc

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

To prepare for this Researched Argument writing assignment, I completed a research proposal that involved drafting a research question and creating a general timeline for conducting reseach leading up to this project's final submission. I then analyzed ten different sources through creating an annotated bibliography that examined the credibility, content, and relevance of each resource in relation to my paper's topic. In addition to collecting resouces, I personally attended SAP events and interviewed the SAP student leader in order to understand the innerworkings of sustainability education at the University of Dayton. I then composed a draft that was analyzed by …

Insight On Female Genital Mutilation, Kara Shunnarah

Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing

This assignment was our third and final essay for this course; however, this essay is a continuation from my second essay in this class. Dr. Vorachek allowed us to pick any topic we felt we wanted to write about as long as it directly or indirectly related to gender. I had difficulty choosing at first, but then I began thinking about issues in our world and FGM stuck out to me. I first learned about FGM in high school, but never had the time for extensive research. I saw this assignment as an opportunity. Thus, I researched FGM, gathering information …

Serious Interactive Fiction: Constraints, Interfaces, And Creative Writing Pedagogy, Robert Terry, Lisa Dusenberry

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

To better understand how serious interactive fiction (IF) fits into creative writing pedagogy, we first consider how interface offers both affordances and constraints to the writer. Second, we discuss the ways teaching serious IF foregrounds the benefit of digital tools for creative writing. Third, we examine the interrelationship among research, interface, and procedural rhetoric. Fourth, we present findings from our research study by summarizing and discussing examples from roundtable feedback. We focus on students’ perception of serious IF’s affordances, concluding with how serious IF provides productive constraints for creative writing practice.

Fanfiction Reviews And Academic Literacy: Potential Impacts And Implications, Regina Weiler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study is meant to elucidate how fanfiction-related activities can incorporate many types of critical review, to call attention to what has been overlooked as significant forms of learning, and to understand and take advantage of the opportunities fanfiction's unconventional writing affords in lieu of more deliberate learning environments. This thesis was undertaken due to the significant gap in work done by aca-fan — a portmanteau of academic and fan— scholars who have strong links to the fanfiction community and culture. The aspects explored are the technical writing skills and techniques demonstrated in fanfiction reviews, the influence of the nontraditional …

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 …

Religion And Language: The Two Tactics Used By The British To Colonize Kenya, Hannah Farley

Emerging Writers

Second-place winner in the Academic Category of the 2019 Emerging Writers Contest. The essay examines how religion and language were used as colonial practices by the British empire broadly in Africa and specifically in Kenya.

Rhetorical Analysis, Colton Clanton

Emerging Writers

Third-place winner in the Short Essay category of the 2019 Emerging Writers Contest. This essay is a rhetorical analysis of Barbara Kingsolver's essay "You Can't Run Away on Harvest Day."

Introduction And Acknowledgments

Emerging Writers

Introductions and acknowledgments for the 2019 Emerging Writers Journal.

Gender And Language: Half Of The Workforce Is Stereotyped, Bailey Shatney

Emerging Writers

Finalist in the Academic Category of the 2019 Emerging Writers Contest. The essay examines the use of gendered language in the workplace.

Big Brother, Erm Data Is Watching And We Don’T Seem To Care., Gary Hopkins

Emerging Writers

First-place winner in the Academic Category of the 2019 Emerging Writers Contest. The essay examines the problems of data collection and privacy.

Underdevelopment And Philanthrocapitalism: A Nepalese Context, Audrina Rucker

Emerging Writers

Third-place winner in the Academic Category for the 2019 Emerging Writers Contest. The essay examines the problems of Corporate Social Responsibility as philanthrocapitalism and how it effects Nepal.

Rhetorical Analysis: George Wallace, Andrew Wittmayer

Emerging Writers

First-place winner in the Short Essay category of the 2019 Emerging Writers Contest. This essay is a rhetorical analysis of George Wallace's speech "Segregation Today, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever."

Can One Small Word Change It All?, Alexis Ronco

Emerging Writers

Finalist in the Short Essay category of the 2019 Emerging Writers Contest. This essay analyzes Erica Strauss's essay "Zombies vs. the Joy of Canning: Motivation in the Productive Home."

Humanity In A World Of Machines, Bryanna Walker

Emerging Writers

Second-place winner in the Short Essay category of the 2019 Emerging Writers Contest. This essay analyzes Tom Chatfield's article "What does it mean to be human in the age of technology?"

The Criterion (2019)

The Criterion

No abstract provided.

A Critical Race Analysis Of Transition Level Writing Curriculum To Support The Racially Diverse Two-Year College, Jamila M. Kareem

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article applies critical race theory to an institutional analysis of writing curricular outcomes to assist two-year college writing program administrators, curriculum coordinators, and instructors with examining the racist implications of writing curriculum outcomes and to develop antiracist curricula that support the academic, professional, and civic success of the majority of their students.

Remaking Identities, Reworking Graduate Study : Stories From First-Generation-To-College Rhetoric And Composition Phd Students On Navigating The Doctorate., Ashanka Kumari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation responds to the decreasing number of first-generation-to-college doctorates in the humanities and the limited scholarship on graduate students in Rhetoric and Composition. Scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have long been invested in discussions of academic and/or disciplinary enculturation, yet these discussions primarily focus on undergraduate students, with few studies on graduate students and far fewer on the doctoral students training to become the next wave of a profession. In this dissertation, I argue that if we engage intersectional identities as assets in the design of doctoral programs, access to higher education and academic enculturation can become more manageable …

Learning And Laboring : Student-Workers’ Networked Experiences Of Literacy, Agency, And Mobility In The Neoliberal University., Layne Porta Gordon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Rhetoric and composition has a well-established tradition of considering the connections between literacy education and the discourses and structures of political-economic institutions. This dissertation builds from this work and foregrounds the experiences of student-workers in the UPS Metropolitan College program through a qualitative study that is informed by institutional ethnography (Smith, 1987, 1999, 2002, 2005, 2006). Institutional ethnography examines institutional texts and text-mediated discourses as coordinators of individual action. Therefore, I draw on primary data gathered from individual interviews with nine student-workers and one Metropolitan College administrator as well as supplemental data gathered from a survey administered to composition instructors, …

The Emergent Matter Of Archives : A Rhetorical Investigation Of The Queer Formation Of The Williams-Nichols Archive., Richard Wysocki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Scholarly conversations across disciplines have asked researchers to consider archive as a site of power—often framed in terms of archives’ potential impact on history and practices of knowledge making more generally. This dissertation contributes to such conversations as they relate to queer archives and material rhetoric, exploring the Williams-Nichols Archive, an LGBTQ archive housed at the University of Louisville. I extend interdisciplinary scholarship to argue for approaching archives as rhetorical emergences rather than as containers or locations for discovery, a perspective that foregrounds the archive and archival practices as the subject of research. Drawing on archival research and oral history …

Tracing Sehnsucht To Place: Mythopoeia, Visions, Transcendence, And The Journey Of The Rhetorical Refugee, G. Brandon Knight

Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to explicate a rhetorical conceptualization from C. S. Lewis’s notion of longing, or sehnsucht, in hopes of extending its employment to two other contemporary contexts—Christian Hedonism and American Humanism. To do so, I utilize the method of rhetorical criticism to analyze Lewis’s most famous sermon entitled The Weight of Glory. Following this paradigm chapter, I then compare uses of longing within the contemporary evangelical philosophy called Christian Hedonism initiated during the eighties through the seminal text entitled Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. In doing so, I uncover distinct aspects of longing within …