Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Continuing The Conversation "The Opportunity Of Adversity": A Neo-Aristotelian Rhetorical Analysis, Megan R. Ancheta

Communication 300 Papers

In 2009, Aimee Mullins delivered a speech at a TEDMED Conference, “The Opportunity of Adversity.” Her speech speaks to the unlimited possibilities and potential that a person has when boundaries of stigmas and preconceptions are dismantled. Mullins’ personal and professional experiences, along with her charisma and interrelatedness, has earned her a high regard in a diverse community. This article is an analysis of her speech in accordance to the Neo-Aristotelian approach and the five canons. This article supports the argument that, because of her genuine approach, Mullins has made an influential contribution the conversation of equal rights and a humble …

Effectiveness Of Stricter Vaccine Mandates In Public Schools And Childcare Centers, Anna Ferentinos

Emerging Writers

Vaccines have been a controversial and frequently discussed topic the last two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The amount of readily available information on the internet - accurate or not – has led to many theories and opinions on whether to vaccinate and why, or why not. This article discusses these theories, as well as the benefits and consequences of vaccine mandates, with the help of examples from other countries. The author argues that a federal vaccine mandate should be implemented in the United States of America so as to encourage parents to protect children through scheduled immunizations.

"Leaning Into The Wyrd: Confessions Of A Recovering Basic Writer", Cheryl Hogue Smith

Publications and Research

This essay examines the breakthrough one academic had in negotiating her fear of failure with writing and discusses how that breakthrough affected the way she teaches her community college composition courses.

“’We Know What We Are, But Not What We May Be’: Student Transformation Through Commentary Blogs", Cheryl Hogue Smith

Publications and Research

This chapter discusses how, when students follow the online discussion practices of Sheridan Blau's Commentary Project, they can learn to embrace confusion, value questions, recognize that uncertainty is part of the learning process, and accept that what they don’t understand is often more important for them as a learner than what they do.

Paternity Leave, Olivia Corey

Emerging Writers

Paternity leave in the United States is extremely lacking and undervalued. This paper seeks to evaluate paternity leave and its benefits as well as explore the reasons why it is so uncommon in our society. It argues that paternity leave should be federal law.

Standardized Tests: Do They Work Or Not?, Ari Emoghene

Emerging Writers

Standardized tests place pressure on students by determining their futures based on whether they perform well on a specific test, on a specific day, at a specific time. The influence of these standardized tests should be reduced in college admittance processes as they minimize any other effort students put in during their whole academic career.

Equity Achieved: What Cannot Be Said, Mari Lee Mifsud

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In contemporary U.S. public discourse, calls for achieving equity abound. Many metrics now measure equity being achieved. I inquire into whether equity can be said to be achieved and still be equity. Inquiring as such leads me to excavating the menacing and actual cultural violence of developing such achievement. Simultaneously, this excavation shows the rhetoric of equity qua equity as a means of abolishing the conditions for that violence to take hold. I put forward that equity cannot be said to be achieved without the conditions of possibility equity offers being colonized. If a commitment to antiviolence speaks, it cannot …

Beyond Transactional Narratives Of Agency: Peer Consultants’ Antiracist Professionalization, Amy T. Cicchino, Katharine H. Brown, Christopher Basgier, Megan Haskins

The Writing Center Journal

Social justice movements, especially Black Lives Matter, inspired many writing center administrators to reflect on their commitments to antiracism and engage with antiracist professional development with their staff. However, there is continued need to study the impact antiracist professional development has on writing center consultants’ ability to practice antiracism in sessions. This article presents a predominantly white institution (PWI) writing center’s attempt to do this work, with a particular emphasis on how antiracist professional development complicates portrayals of consultant agency within the writing center. The study analyzes qualitative data collected from consultants’ reflective writing, survey, and interview responses. Results illustrate …

Mitakuye Oyasin : Pedagogy And Design In Composition I, Jody Lee Rust

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mitakuye Oyasin, an Oceti Sakowin (Lakota/Nakota/Dakota) phrase that translates as “All My Relations,” is a philosophy that means all things created on earth and in the universe are related and inhabit a shared space. Because all things are related and share space, they all have a purpose and a responsibility to discover and serve that purpose to ensure all of our relatives thrive in our shared space. This relational thinking influences the way the Oceti Sakowin interact with the world, including the way they teach. In this thesis, I analyze the way composition theories shape the curriculum and pedagogy of …

The Window To The Soul, Erica Bolding

Emerging Writers

This essay surveys the idea of "tone" and all of its complexities, including a focus on its relations to mental health conditions such as depression. Intertwined with personal memoir, research, and examples from social media, the essay unravels a difficult and under-discussed issue that surrounds tone. The essay also asks unconventional questions that hope to stir readers' thinking, such as: Is raising one’s voice always bad? Are our screams telling us something else?

The Book I Never Got To Read: A Tale Of Book Censorship, Courtney Everett

Emerging Writers

From the expression of authors to sharing perceptions of the world, the use of literature has been one of the most common ways of teaching students for generations. However, with opposing viewpoints and conflicting ideas, literary censorship has continued to become an issue among communities for longer than people realize, and it brings harm to humanity over time. This essay discusses the recent conflict of banning books in communities and its affect on students.

The Loop Of Trauma, Jayden Miller-Jones

Emerging Writers

"The Loop of Trauma" is a piece that was written in response to the various BLM protests and police attacks that took place during 2020. The author responds to memories of being shrouded in a deep depression with no sense of how to escape. After entering their English 1101 class they were finally able to properly describe the feelings. This piece covers their beliefs on mental health in the black community and how it is often shelved for a later date, a date that more often than not, never comes.

Candles, Stoners, Emotions, Oh My!, Ashley Gruca

Emerging Writers

This paper focuses on the topic of our language constantly changing while using the word “lit” to show this. Analysis of examples from personal experience like yearbook signings as well as lyrics from Travis Scott songs demonstrate how a word's meaning can shift depending on its generational context.

Everyone's A Critic: My Review Of The Reviewer, Jessie Rigsbee

Emerging Writers

This article is an analysis of movie critic Oliver Jones’s Avengers Endgame film review. Through the inspection of rhetorical devices, the effectiveness of the review is assessed. The evaluation determines the faults of Jones’s argument for Endgame’s place with history’s greatest film sagas.

Marilynne Robinson’S Housekeeping Read Through The Conceptual Prism Of “Tethers”, Sarah Street

The Criterion

Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Housekeeping, follows her central protagonist, Ruth, her sister Lucille, and her aunt Sylvie as they work to establish their place up against a greater surround. This paper attempts to read the novel through the conceptual prism of the word “tethers.” I argue that the characters' relationships with the surround shifts as they work through their trauma and grapple with the notion of impermanence by reconciling with both those things that tether them, those tethers that do not exist or have been released, and the tethers from which they want to break free. Ultimately I argue that …

Shakespeare’S Staging And The Self In The Sonnets, Xiani Zhu

The Criterion

This essay examines the theatricality of Shakespeare’s young man sonnets and how he uses the “stage” as a shortcut to deliver abstract ideas such as the concept of beauty, time, and love that are otherwise difficult to express. On a micro level, he frames each individual sonnet as a stage, where each specific setting and scenario allows dramatic tension to arise between the characters on stage, and from there, abstract ideas and emotions are naturally presented without being directly stated. On a macro level, the entire young-man sonnet sub-sequence — being in love with a beautiful young man — itself …

“His Own Was Ampler:” Dickinson And Whitman’S Sunset Poetry, Devyn Forcina

The Criterion

Although they are utterly dissimilar poets, Dickinson and Whitman made sunsets frequent subjects of their work. Dickinsonian sunset poetry attempts to imitate the natural phenomena and evokes tension and competition. A kind of closure is forced upon her unwilling speaker, who struggles against the inevitable ending of the day. In contrast, Whitmanian sunset poetry sings and celebrates the finale of the setting sun and delights in the cyclical nature of time. While Dickinson acknowledges the temporary quality of a single sunset, Whitman rejoices in their immortal occurrence. Both poets preserve the imagery of sunsets as photographers would, while imbuing them …

Letting The Cat Out Of The Wall: Irrepressible Perversity In Poe, Kelly Gallagher

The Criterion

This paper examines several short stories by Edgar Allan Poe that feature the motif of immurement, the practice of imprisoning a victim within walls. Poe uses immurement in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” to suggest psychological suppression as the narrators physically hide their victims while simultaneously hiding their own self-destructive natures, which he refers to as “perversity.” His stories “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Cask of Amontillado” convey that attempting to suppress one’s capacity for self-destruction only guarantees self-destruction. Poe’s motif of immurement demonstrates how human beings tend to ignore their inherent perversity, but his stories …

Injustice In Childhood: Jane Eyre And The Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, Christian Barkman

The Criterion

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, are autobiographical novels narrated by the fictional Jane Eyre and the real Frederick Douglass. Both stories evoke an outpouring of pity for their respective narrator: Jane, for the unmerited abuses dealt against her by family and school administrators, but most of all Douglass, who reserves the greater portion of lament on account of his dreadful persecution under the evil of slavery. The environments Jane and Douglass inhabit throughout their childhood inflict an immense burden on their physical body and psyche. This essay specially examines the …

Femininity As Disability In Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar., Shae Kirkus, Monika Shehi Herr

University of South Carolina Upstate Student Research Journal

Disability studies is often associated with the treatment of people with physical disabilities, which are defined as features of non-normative human bodies. However, analyzed through the lens of the classical idea of the ideal body, which was first and foremost male, femininity itself is also atypical and therefore confines women to the realm of being disabled.

Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar shows how the feminine is a disability in and of itself. As Plath’s main character and narrator, Esther Greenwood, spirals into her own madness, her condition is only worsened by societal reactions to her declining mental health. …

The Boy From 6b: How Only Murders In The Building Created Groundbreaking Television, Lauren E. Reitz, Monika Shehi Herr

University of South Carolina Upstate Student Research Journal

Non-disabled actors continue to be cast over disabled actors to portray disabled characters, and disabled storylines are told from an able-bodied perspective. This paper explores how Only Murders in the Building set an example for approaching projects featuring disabled actors and roles while maintaining a complex storyline in the episode titled "The Boy from 6B" (2021).

Analyzing this episode through the lens of the classical idea of anmut shows how it subverted the typical viewing experience of watching a storyline that features disabled characters from an able-bodied perspective. Anmut, as a rhetorical concept, recognizes that the value of physical …

Disablist Propaganda: Evil On One Hand, And A Hook For The Other, Lauren Reitz, Richard Murphy

University of South Carolina Upstate Student Research Journal

Despite its publication by J.M. Barrie in 1904, Peter and Wendy has attracted very little critical attention. Perhaps the story is so beloved for its adventure-packed plot, and sweet message about a boy who never grows old, that even scholars have trouble criticizing it—despite its obvious calls for analysis as film and literary adaptations continue to appear.

However, most concerning is an apparent gap in the analysis of the story’s disabled villain, Captain Hook, through a modern Disability Studies lens. The following textual analysis of Captain Hook will serve to call attention to the way his disability plays into his …

The Impact Of Freewriting On Writing Teachers' Self-Perceptions, Katherine A. Busch

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

I present a study of eight graduate assistants who teach introductory composition courses as part of their graduate assistantships. Each participant was asked to freewrite for ten minutes a day, five days a week, for ten weeks. Participants were interviewed about their teacher and writer identities prior to the freewriting, at week five, and at week ten. Graduate assistants offer a unique perspective, as many of them are neither professional writers nor trained teachers, yet they are hired to teach writing. Using Peter Elbow’s Embracing Contraries (1986) as a theoretical framework, I determine that freewriting offered the participants a space …

The Evolution Of Frederick Douglass’ Slavery Debate: An Examination Of His Rhetoric, Jacquelyn Torres

Political Science & International Studies | Senior Theses

From leading the Abolitionist movement to holding a lecture tour abroad, Frederick Douglass is well known for championing racial justice and leaving a legacy of exposing the evils of slavery. Scholars have primarily focused on Douglass’ actions as an abolitionist but not on the evolution of his thinking about slavery. While Douglass’ actions, such as in the Abolitionist movement, are discussed in-depth amongst academic circles, there is oversight regarding looking at his arguments about slavery. Douglass’ rhetoric was impacted by his experiences traveling abroad when he gave lectures in the British Isles between 1845-1847. This thesis examines speeches given by …

Workin' Languages: Who We Are Matters In Our Writing, Sara P. Alvarez, Amy J. Wan, Eunjeong Lee

Publications and Research

The steady increase of movements of people around the world has transformed the face, potential, and expectations of the US writing classroom. These intersecting shifts have also contributed to critical discussions about how writing educators should integrate students’ linguistic diversity and ways of knowing into literacy instruction. This chapter’s central premise is to share with students how the work that they already do with languages has great value. Specifically, the chapter introduces terms, concepts, and strategies to support students in identifying how their own multilingual workin’ of languages contribute to the making of academic writing. Our goal is to support …

Generation(Al) Matters: Story, Lens, And Tone, Louise Weatherbee Phelps

English Faculty Publications

This essay tells a story of how “generation” came to matter in rhetoric and composition/writing studies; analyzes and advocates for “generation” as a lens through which to examine disciplinary studies and activities; and considers how we can productively engage in generational relations between individuals and groups. It adopts a framework of “hospitality” (adapted from Richard and Janis Haswell) to develop a concept of “cross-generational relations” as an aspirational category. An ethic of hospitality is proposed to facilitate respectful, productive relations among generational groups, which recognize and enact interdependence but allow for a wide range of stances and strategies of interaction …

Rethinking Data: Algorithms, Black Boxes, And Bias Through The Data Atm, Joshua Nieubuurt

English Faculty Publications

For nearly all of history things, creatures, and people came and went; leaving little, if anything, behind in their wake. Life in the 21st century has changed this natural pattern of existence, blurring the lines of what it is (and what it means) to dwell within the world. Physical things and people are now existing simultaneously in the digital realms as doppelgängers composed of coded data. Now, things and people are both embodied and disembodied: simultaneously. Data, individual and collective, pours into the digital oceans; a tumultuous sea of [dis]embodied-being translated into the language of electricity and silicon. The forms …

Place-Based Podcasting: From Orality To Electracy In Norfolk, Virginia, Daniel P. Richards, Michael J. Faris (Ed.), Courtney S. Danforth (Ed.), Kyle D. Stedman (Ed.)

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Disabling Citizenship: Rhetorical Practices Of Disabled World-Making At The 1977 504 Sit-In, Ruth Osario

Women's & Gender Studies Faculty Publications

The article analyzes the importance of a citizenship approach to disability rights. Integrating disabled world-making in the writing classroom can transform thinking of people about the teaching of public writing. It is noted that disabled world-making can help English studies ensure professional organizations go beyond the legal requirements and ensure the full participation of disabled scholar-teachers.

Labor Logs In A Multimodal Curriculum: Revealing Valuable Assessment Practices In Technical Communication And First-Year Writing Courses, Suzette Bristol

Wayne State University Dissertations

This project discusses the creation and implementation of labor logs in multimodal curricula in two levels of writing courses and how these labor logs support students’ development of meta-awareness through reflection-in-action (Yancey, 1998). Labor logs create a space for students to focus on in the moment recognition, or monitoring, of what takes place as they work through a project (VanKooten, 2016; Trimble and Jankens, 2019). By turning the focus of labor-based assessment (Inoue, 2019) to multimodal projects, this project clarifies the work that labor logs and multimodal pedagogies do in first-year writing and technical communication courses: indicating for students a …