Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Introduction To Suffering, Endurance, Understanding: New Discourses Within Philosophy And Literature, Douglas S. Berman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Literature is generally seen as depicting the lives of human subjects through their unique narratives. And that, while its endpoint may be universal, it is typically grounded in the specificity of a human being (or, occasionally, an animal). Philosophy is tasked with providing the foundational cognitive tools to grasp the meaning of experience for the whole. In Hegelian terms, it unfolds the history of the concept. Yet, as George Steiner, Jacques Derrida, and other recent authors have shown, both philosophy – along with its agonistic cousin, religion -- evoke literary themes, rhetorics, and struggles. Over the past fifty years, Continental …

Rhetorical Genre Theory And Whiteness, Greg W. Childs

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

No abstract provided.

True Injustice: Cultures Of Violence And Stories Of Resistance In The New True Crime, Marcos A. Hernandez

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

No abstract provided.

Review Of The Textbook And The Lecture: Education In The Age Of New Media By Norm Friesen, Anish Dave

The Liminal: Interdisciplinary Journal of Technology in Education

No abstract provided.

Algorithms Of Oppression: Safiya Umoja Noble’S Powerful Exploration Of Search Engines’ Underlying Hegemony And Their Racist, Sexist Practices., Shelly A. Galliah

The Liminal: Interdisciplinary Journal of Technology in Education

No abstract provided.

Engagement Beyond Fact-Checking: Ciceronian Stasis Theory As A Response To Fake News, David Charles Maynard

The Liminal: Interdisciplinary Journal of Technology in Education

In this paper, I suggest that the phenomenon of fake news may be more productively understood if considered within the context of Ciceronian stasis theory. Whereas much of rhetoric and writing’s response to fake news consists of appeals to fact-checking, it is by engaging fake news stories as arguments of quality rather than fact or definition that we may develop a more productive understanding of the relationship between fake news and personal belief. Taking the case of Edgar Maddison Welch and the fake news story Pizzagate as illustrative examples, I conclude that, by more seriously attending to the thoughts and …

Teaching Rhetorical Segmentation As A Countermeasure To Post-Truth In The Composition Classroom, John Gagnon

The Liminal: Interdisciplinary Journal of Technology in Education

This paper responds to the call for rhetoric and composition instructors to engage with post-truth and fake news in the composition classroom. Pulling from personal experiences with post-truth in the composition classroom, the author leverages recent scholarship to develop a multi-phasic, objective analytical approach – rhetorical segmentation – that students can use to identify the purposes and motivations of a particular text. The approach of rhetorical segmentation relies on three primary steps: measuring rhetorical velocity, evaluating ideological modality, and identifying public harm. By combining these steps in a coherent method of analysis, the author argues that students are better equipped …

Freshman Composition, Aquilah Jourdain

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Technical Communication: More Than Writing Or Speech, Laura M. Dannebohm

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio fulfills the requirements for a Master of Arts degree in English with a specialization in Professional Writing and Rhetoric. Following an analytical narrative about the collection, the first selection in the portfolio begins as a book analysis and ends with an examination of research on the effects of texting on student grammar. The second selection addresses a scholarly resource gap in technical writing and fills that gap with a review of the Backward Design model for curriculum construction and learning theory that supports the model, and further provides a sample lesson showcasing how to apply the model to …

Hamlet: The Grim Reaper, J. L. Williams

WRIT: Journal of First-Year Writing

Right versus wrong when battling grief under God can evoke in one a very strong argument, the pain at times can be too much to bear but we must go on. The soliloquy “To Be or Not to Be” is arguably the most famous from Shakespeare’s prominent play Hamlet; the piece displaying themes of logos and pathos throughout. The young prince’s speech reflects upon the tragedy of his father’s passing and logically debates the value of his own existence in comparison; accompanied by the presence of his true love Ophelia, and unknowingly to the eavesdropping ears of the new king …

My Theory Of Writing, Fernanda Lima Duarte

WRIT: Journal of First-Year Writing

The research is based on analysis of the writing produced throughout the GSW 1110 class. Students were asked to evaluate the writing through reflection of ideas supported and making connections to key rhetorical terms to create our own theory of writing. To start with, in the article “Shitty First Drafts,” Anne Lamott supports the idea of the importance on shaping the writing and self-assurance according to the audience’s demands. Secondly, writing process and revision strategies are approached, reinforced by Nancy Sommers in her article “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” The final aspect addressed is critical thinking, …

Philosophy And Actions For Authentic, Meaningful, And Lifelong Learning, Anthony Klever

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

This portfolio explores several major areas of education related to English teaching. A major research essay, “Incomplete Instructions: Building the Future of Technical Writing in Ohio Education”, explores the current situation and prospective future of technical writing in the state of Ohio’s education system. Also, a reflective essay, “Reflective Narrative: My Journey as a Student and My Map for Teaching”, explores the many elements of teaching philosophy with particular attention to English teaching. Another research essay, “Meaningful Revision: Revise for a Day, Teach Revision for a Lifetime”, explores the function of revision and offers suggestions for increasing the meaningfulness …

Setting The Stage And Building Homes: Architecture Metaphors And Space In Donne's First Caroline Sermon, Alexander S. Laws

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through his use of "foundation" and "house" metaphors in his "First Sermon Preached to King Charles at St. James, 3 April 1625," John Donne discreetly presents his ideologies and principles before the new king, while simultaneously criticizing his contemporaries' misguided bickering over religio-political factions. This essay seeks to unpack the history surrounding, as well as the casuistical logic found within Donne's first sermon preached during the Caroline period, which both explicitly and implicitly addresses the foremost anxieties of the people of the changing age.

Language: A Bridge Or Barrier To Social Groups, Adina Corke

English (MA) Theses

Language acts as either a bridge or a barrier to social groups dependent upon the individual’s effective use of a social group’s language. The individual uses the language of the group in order to join the group and to be understood by the group. This suggests that language is behavioral in part and can be treated as a form of social norms which delegate who is a part of the group and who is not. By utilizing the language of the group effectively, an individual is able to join the group. This group language may be temporary, and the dynamics …

Reframing Writing Instruction In Physical Learning Environments: Making Connections Between Digital And Nondigital Technologies, André C. Buchenot, Tiffany Roman

Faculty Articles

Physical learning environments offer many affordances that one can choose from when designing instruction. For courses where student writing is central to course learning outcomes, a challenge exists in that innovative digital technologies may take precedence over nondigital tools, such as paper-based student writing. We argue that treating student writing as a technology can increase opportunities for active learning within physical learning environments. In this article, we describe an approach to writing instruction that builds intentional connections between paper-based texts and digital technologies to increase opportunities for active learning. We explain the rationale for the design decisions in an introductory …

Mapping Rural Literacy Sponsorship Networks : Literacy Infrastructures And Perceptions In Abbyville., Amy Mccleese Nichols

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recently, the academy has become aware that rural students are choosing to attend institutions of higher education less often than their urban counterparts. Rationalizing why this particular population remains underserved by institutions of higher learning is a new conversation for higher education. And yet, in literacy studies, the perceived urban/rural divide in terms of national politics sometimes seeps into conversations about the perceived “literacy” or culture of rural peoples. This polarization, unaccompanied by detailed portraits of rural community literacy sponsorship, means that rural areas do not benefit from the consistent attention paid to their urban counterparts in New Literacy Studies. …

Subversive Sponsorship : Organized Literacy Education And The Long Civil Rights Movement., Jaclyn Hilberg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents literacy sponsorship as a narrative framework that complicates the history of black struggles surrounding educational equity as a civil rights issue. While that history has traditionally been framed as a fight for black access to and participation in white-sponsored institutions, this dissertation demonstrates that a number of prominent black intellectuals and activists instead argued for black sponsorship of black literacy and pursued such sponsorship as a political strategy to advance the goals of the civil rights movement. As such, this project contributes to the body of alternative historiography in rhetoric and composition that examines sites of literacy …

Character Arcs: Mapping Creative Writers' Trajectories Into The Composition Classroom., Jon Udelson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation develops a theoretical and empirical approach to the study of professional creative writers and teachers. Specifically, it examines how these writers developed their knowledge of creative writing and writing pedagogy and how that knowledge informs their work as instructors of composition. Despite the common practice across writing programs of hiring formally-trained creative writers (M.A., M.F.A, Ph.D.) to teach first-year composition and related courses, little scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition or writing studies more broadly specifically focuses on the disciplinary and professional development of these writer-teachers. Through case studies of graduate students, contingent faculty, lecturers, and …

Is This What You Wanted?: Expectations, Choice, And Rhetorical Agency In Composition, Caitlin C. Leibman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Choices are a given in rhetorical education, but composition has not given enough attention to the relationship between choices and students’ experiences of rhetorical agency. This dissertation uses expectations as an entry point and choices as a unit of analysis to explore how students navigate and understand their decision-making processes during a single composition project. Drawing from activity theory, this study analyzes classroom data including drafts, author’s notes, and peer response materials as well as student interview data and writing center consultation transcripts. This dynamic approach allows for an exploration of the messiness of the process, creating a portrait of …

Toward A Theory Of Procedural Rhetorical Systems: Demonstrations Of Player Agency In Uptake Of Rules In Video Games, Sydney A. Klem

Theses and Dissertations

This paper expands Ian Bogost’s (2007) procedural rhetoric by broadening the rhetorical view of games to encompass the arguments that they make not just about the material, but about themselves. The theory of procedural rhetorical systems (PRSes) views game systems as arguing toward how players should be following their rules, and like in any form of rhetoric, players possess agency in how they take up these arguments and how closely they follow rules. To demonstrate this, this paper analyzes a specific game, the 1996 platformer Super Mario 64, alongside various digital artifacts demonstrating how players have taken it up, including …

Gatekeeping Remix: Fandom Spaces And Identity Politics, Brittany Larsen

Theses and Dissertations

As people today spend more time online than ever, the question of how identities are constructed in different online spaces has become a critical question. One means of identity building is through remix, specifically when marginalized groups in particular insert themselves into exclusive spaces by reinterpreting existing work. One online space that engages in this work frequently is fandom, where fans excluded from larger narratives use fanfiction and fanart to create a space for themselves. Fandom provides an opportunity to see how an existing online culture navigates questions of conflicting identities through remix.

No One Wants To Read What You Write: A Contextualized Analysis Of Service Course Assignments, Tanya P. Zarlengo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation takes a systematic approach to answering the question of what services course assignment should accomplish in curricula by looking at the assignment from a contextual perspective that takes into consideration the programmatic factors in which the assignment circulates. The dissertation accomplishes this work by studying curricular artifacts, to include course syllabi and assignment descriptions, as well as textbooks. Additionally, interviews with program administrators and textbook authors are analyzed. The results of this analysis posit a programmatic network that visualizes connections between program, course, and staffing administrative factors with assignments as the nexus of the network. This dissertation illustrates …

Overlapping Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature As A Global Assemblage, Wai-Chew Sim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Overlappinig Scriptworlds: Chinese Literature as a Global Assemblage,” Wai-Chew Sim offers a globalist vision or understanding of Chinese literary studies/Sinophone studies. Deploying the notion of scriptworld (Damrosch), he examines how the Chinese, English, and Malay-language scriptworlds interact in the Southeast Asian context. He traces the rhizomatic connections between Joo Ming Chia’s Exile or Pursuit, a Singapore Sinophone text that explores multiple belongings, and two novels: M. L. Mohamed’s Confrontation (originally published as Batas Langit), and T.H. Kwee’s The Rose of Cikembang (originally published as Bunga Roos dari Cikembang). Tracing the sinophonicity of the latter …

Urban Landscape In Mcewan's Narrative Representation Of Berlin, Barbara J. Puschmann-Nalenz

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Urban Landscape in McEwan's Narrative Representation of Berlin," Barbara J. Puschmann-Nalenz discusses the image of Berlin created in Ian McEwanﹸs novel The Innocent (1990) and the chapter titled "Berlin" in Black Dogs (1992). It starts from the hypothetical statement that while British literary fiction set in Berlin is rare after 1970 the genres of spy and detective novel, where crime and violence take center stage, shape the image of the city in highbrow narratives as well. The perspectivization of the cityscape, including its monuments, through the protagonists fundamentally influences its image. In The Innocent the limited view …

Okonkwo’S Reincarnation: A Comparison Of Achebe’S Things Fall Apart And No Longer At Ease, Mary J. N. Okolie, Ginikachi C. Uzoma

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Abstract: The reincarnation myth is a global concept, founded basically in religion and tradition. It was especially vibrant in the ancient times in places like Egypt, Greece, and in continents like Asia and Africa, which possess varying understandings of the myth. In Igbo tradition, for example, it is believed that reincarnation occurs within a family. And that some of the marks of reincarnation are usually the possession of the birthmark or certain other physical features and the exhibition of character and behavioral traits of a deceased person by a living member of his/her immediate or extended family. Thus, reincarnation entails …

The Role Of Refugee Women Narratives In The U.S. Resettlement Process, Alys Sink

VA Engage Journal

Within resettlement scholarship, there exists a distinct absence of direct narratives by refugee women about their resettlement experiences within the United States. This study delves into this absence of voice, investigating the ways in which refugee women’s narratives are received and utilized within a refugee resettlement agency. This ethnographic study includes independent interviews with refugee women and resettlement staff. Utilizing Ernest Stringer’s method of action research and Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric of Silence, I argue that refugee women’s narratives are not wholly absent or silent, but rather that they are rarely acknowledged, often devalued, or inadvertently made a non-priority within larger …

Re-Visioning Ralph Ellison’S Invisible Man For A Class Of Urban Immigrant Youth, Camille Goodison

Publications and Research

In this essay, I will explore Ralph Ellison’s 1952 classic novel, Invisible Man, as a text that has contemporary and relatable themes for a modern-day classroom of mostly urban youth. This essay is also a personal journey into how Ellison’s inventive approaches to form helped create a work that lends itself to contemporary reimagining. It asks the question, can Ellison’s interest in creating a living Afro-American literary tradition rooted in the lore of the ‘peasant’ or common folk have contemporary applications? How does Ellison’s belief that everyday folk expression has value hold up for today’s readers? I try to …

Crafting A Pedagogical Identity: A Multiple-Method Examination Of An English Department’S Writing Pedagogy, Nathan Alan Serfling

English Theses & Dissertations

This study developed after a program review of my current English department. The review pointed to a lack of coherence within our required writing curriculum. To learn more about my colleagues’ practices and values in writing instruction and to discover similarities and strengths that might guide our curricular revisions, I devised a multiple method, descriptive study of my colleagues’ pedagogies. I initially distributed surveys and used four key pedagogical taxonomies from writing studies scholarship (current-traditional rhetoric, expressivism, cultural studies and critical pedagogy, and rhetoric and argumentation) to analyze the survey data. Finding these taxonomies to be inadequate frameworks for understanding …

Rhetorical Agency In Algorithm-Centered Digital Activity: Methods For Tracing Agency In Online Research, Daniel L. Hocutt

English Theses & Dissertations

Contemporary scholars in rhetoric studies and technical communication have theorized rhetorical agency as engaging human and nonhuman actors in online spaces. One such space, where the work of scholarship, teaching, and technical communication practice intersect, is online research. In online research interfaces, scholars and students alike conduct research; scholars teach and students learn the online research process toward contributing knowledge; and technical communicators design and test meaningful user experiences in these interfaces.

However, the field offers few comprehensive methodologies for studying the emergence of rhetorical agency in online search environments, where the activities of technologies, humans, corporations, and environments coalesce. …

Understanding "A Common Word Between Us And You" Through I.A. Richards' New Rhetoric, Jonathan Gamble

Augsburg Honors Review

I.A. Richards defines rhetoric as the study of misunderstandings and their remedies. I argue in this paper that "A Common Word Between Us and You" (ACW) - a rhetorical letter coauthored by H.R.H Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad and 38 Muslim scholars - shares Richards' definition as its end and anchors his theory in practice. ACW is an attempt to avoid misunderstandings and to allow for understandings between Christians and Muslims about two of their common Scriptural commandments: love of God and love of neighbor. In Richards' call for a new rhetoric, he asserts that the core of rhetoric must be …