Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

The Diyinii Of Naachid: Diné Rhetoric As Ritual, Edward L. Karshner

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Rhetoric is far more than a theory of communication or the antiquated ancestor of freshman composition courses. As a system, rhetoric is the process that directs, on the one hand, individual experiences with the world and structures, and on the other, the stories cultures tell about themselves. These foundational narratives (myths) reveal a culture’s metaphysical understanding of the nature of reality, the psychological understanding of human nature, and the epistemological notion of what can be known. Using the Diné Bahané, this paper will explore Diné rhetoric as naachid, an inclusive, outward-directed communication model of problem solving which functions …

Pity The Poor Reader, Charles H. Haddad

School of Communication and Journalism Faculty Publications

I conceived my book “Pity the Poor Reader” as an un-textbook, an irreverent “Elements of style.” Like Elements, it’s designed to complement textbooks. Pity is concise, memorable and portable. Under 300 pages, Pity serves as an aspiring writer’s keepsake. Concision lies at the heart of Pity. The key concepts of writing well are distilled into irreverent, memorable lines and axioms. Many of them are organized as lists that are easily printed and taped to a wall or a computer. Indeed, in testing the book with my university students, I’ve found that many of them did print out its list of …

Pity The Poor Reader, Charles H. Haddad

School of Communication and Journalism Faculty Publications

I conceived my book “Pity the Poor Reader” as an un-textbook, an irreverent “Elements of style.” Like Elements, it’s designed to complement textbooks. Pity is concise, memorable and portable. Under 300 pages, Pity serves as an aspiring writer’s keepsake. Concision lies at the heart of Pity. The key concepts of writing well are distilled into irreverent, memorable lines and axioms. Many of them are organized as lists that are easily printed and taped to a wall or a computer. Indeed, in testing the book with my university students, I’ve found that many of them did print out its list of …

Chasing The Albino Pygmy Giraffe, Charles H. Haddad

School of Communication and Journalism Faculty Publications

It's never a good sign when someone is knocking on the door of your hotel room at seven in the morning. That's especially true if you have been schlepping eight college students across Western China, as I had been for the past week. I now heard in this soft rapping the death knell of my fledgling professorial career. Wrapping a ratty, threadbare pillow around my head, I tried to shut out the insistent rapping. Of course, that didn't work. Bad news has a way of butting in.

So begins my novel “Chasing the Albino Pygmy Giraffe.” It is a laugh-aloud …

Biden's Puppet And Mcconnell's Protege: Manipulative Political Communication Design In The 2023 Kentucky Govenors Race, Ryan Cheek, Samuel Allen

English and Technical Communication Faculty Research & Creative Works

Building on research identifying manipulative communication design (MCD) tactics, including clickbait and dark patterns, in the 2020 U.S. election, we analyzed the interface of political emails from the 2023 Kentucky gubernatorial contest between Andy Beshear (D) and Daniel Cameron (R). This extended abstract reports study results from a critical interface analysis of 291 emails to answer the question: How does political ideology influence the use of MCD tactics? Such tactics exploit cognitive biases to gain political advantage by maximizing the extraction of donations from supporters. Five MCD tactics were prominent in both campaigns (individualization and personalization, inverted authority appeals, political …

In The Eye Of Ai: Conspiracies Of Facial Recognition Software, Kira Courtois, Rachel M. Schneider, Carleigh J. Davis

English and Technical Communication Faculty Research & Creative Works

The intersections of power and conspiracy rhetorics represent complexities for scholars who seek to understand social engagement and its various discursive properties. Our study addresses these complexities through the lens of facial recognition technology (FRT), analyzing how conversations on the platform X (formerly Twitter) surrounding FRT mirror discourse in other places that have been called conspiracy theories. By gathering Tweets that contain discourse about FRT and coding them using features synthesized from previous literature, we work to understand the ways that populations express valid feelings of disenfranchisement through traditionally conspiratorial rhetorical tropes. Our results highlight the importance of traditionally conspiratorial …

"You Want Me To Teach What?!": Emerging Technologies, Required Knowledge, And Pedagogical Practice, Rachel Bryson, Ryan Cheek, Sam Clem, Hannah Stevens

English and Technical Communication Faculty Research & Creative Works

Being assigned to teach unfamiliar content is an experience that many technical communication (TC) instructors can relate to. In this experience report, four TC instructors describe their experiences teaching unfamiliar and emerging technology, providing takeaways for readers about how they might approach similar tasks, particularly when constrained by a lack of time and resources when teaching a class for the first time. The instructors had to adapt their pedagogical approaches to teach a range of technology and software. These approaches include building students' visual and rhetorical literacy, diving deep into ethics, explicitly teaching students how to learn, and humbly showing …

The Rhetoric Of Temporality In C.S. Lewis’S Works: A Study Of Time In Mere Christianity And The Chronicles Of Narnia, Lorraine Nasser

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This article explores the depiction of time in the works of C. S. Lewis, offering an analysis rooted in a reading of select passages that highlight issues of temporality in Lewis’ works. The select passages are from the following books: Mere Christianity; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Magician’s Nephew; and The Last Battle. The theoretical framework for this article is derived mainly from Aristotle’s perennial contribution to rhetoric, adopting his definition of rhetoric as: “The faculty of discovering, in the particular case, the available means of persuasion.” Moreover, this paper engages with published readership on Lewis’ …

Coltrane’S A Love Supreme: Mediations Of Immediacy In Jazz Ritual And Recitation, James R. W. Crockford

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This paper explores the ritualized performance ethic of John Coltrane’s later career, which is charged with a determined exploration of freedom and spiritual ascendance through participative and gestural immediacy. Conceiving of this music as a spiritual and political tool for embodied transformation, this paper traces this ethic at play in Coltrane’s iconic 1965 album A Love Supreme, identifying ways the work effects a mediation of immediacy. Through focus on the album’s closing “Psalm” recitation, its parallels in Coltrane’s other works, and their analogue in traditions of ecstatic liturgical and political oratory, this paper demonstrates the consistent priority Coltrane gives …

Cultivating Self-Knowledge In The Writing Classroom: A Study Of Contemplative Pedagogy, Jared Featherstone

English Theses & Dissertations

This pedagogical research study examines the effects of Understanding the Self Through Writing and Rhetoric, an undergraduate course designed by the researcher, on students. The course is an example of contemplative writing pedagogy, one that seeks to foreground first-person direct experience of the subject matter and integrates mindfulness meditation and journaling throughout. While writing and rhetoric are common undergraduate subjects to teach, the course focuses on particular, lesser-known aspects of them, internal rhetoric and self-making narrative. A third important part of the course is the examination of how communication technologies, especially social media and messaging applications, affect one’s internal rhetoric …

How Multilingual Writers Talk About, Write About, And Engage With Sources In First-Year Composition, Mary Ann Zehr

English Theses & Dissertations

This study makes a contribution to the rhetoric and composition field by documenting the research and writing processes of a diverse group of 15 multilingual writers in first-year composition (FYC) at a small private southeastern university. I collected and analyzed data from three assignments: 1) a video think-aloud capturing participants’ first online search for sources, 2) a two-page reflection on the use of sources in the first full draft of students’ research paper, and 3) their first full draft of the research paper. The study is the first to systematically examine how multilingual writers in FYC at a U.S. university …

Utopian Genderscapes, Michelle C. Smith

Rhetoric

No abstract provided.

Review: Higher Education Internationalization And English Language Instruction: Intersectionality Of Race And Language In Canadian Universities, Alicia Brienza

The Writing Center Journal

This review focuses on the main points, methodology, and contribution to writing center studies in Higher Education Internationalization and English Language Instruction: Intersectionality of Race and Language in English Language Instruction by Xiangying Huo. Contributions to the field include a critical perspective of a non-native speaker's experience as an English-language instructor across three research sites and an example of autoethnography as an effective methodology. The primary finding is that non-native students are less likely to initially perceive non-native English language instructors as legitimate.

Addresses And Speeches By Alabamians: Finding Aid, Bethany Latham

Finding Aids

This collection is comprised of printed copies of speeches and addresses given by Alabamians. The collection was put together by Dr. Alta Millican, Dean of Library Science, Communication and Instructional Media (retired 1986), most probably at the behest of Dr. Ernest Stone, University President at the time, and contains speeches sent to her by Dr. Stone as well as those she collected herself. She labeled them “Important Speeches of Alabamians” and stored them in a vertical file. Dr. Stone referred to them as “Great Speeches by Great Alabamians” and noted in correspondence that the original idea was to laminate or …

Review Of Emily Sun’S On The Horizon Of World Literature, Jing Yang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

All Men Are Brothers: Pearl S. Buck’S Translation Of Shui Hu Zhuan And Its Effects On Her Writing Career, Zhihui Sophia Geng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “All Men Are Brothers: Pearl S. Buck’s Translation of Shui Hu Zhuan and its Effects on Her Writing Career,” Zhihui Sophia Geng focuses on Pulitzer Prize winner and Noble Laureate Pearl Sydenstricker Buck’s All Men Are Brothers, her translation of the classical Chinese novel Shui Hu Zhuan. She examines the reception of her translation and analyzes the significance of All Men Are Brothers to Buck’s literary career. By providing the first complete translation of Shui Hu Zhuan to an English-speaking audience, Buck made a significant cultural contribution to the United States and English-speaking cultural spheres. The …

Engaging China: Beckett’S Debt To Pound, Giles, And Laloy, Lidan Lin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Engaging China: Beckett’s Debt to Pound, Giles, and Laloy," Lidan Lin examines Ezra Pound’s influence on Samuel Beckett. In their dealings with China, Pound and Beckett are both indebted to such sinologists and cultural transmitters as Ernest Fenollosa, H. A. Giles, Louis Laloy, and Laurence Binyon who introduced Chinese culture, literature, and arts to the Western world through translation and their writings about China. Lin situates the Pound-Beckett connection in the broad cultural context of the early 20^th century. She argues that while modernism’s turn to China as a cultural paradigm was collectively brought about by …

Translation As Creative Writing: Rewriting The Chinese Maze Murders In Contemporary China, Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Translation as Creative Writing: Rewriting The Chinese Maze Murders in Contemporary China,” Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang examines four groups of selected writings centered on one of Robert van Gulik’s more well-known Judge Dee novels, The Chinese Maze Murders (written first in English but not published until 1956). Different from most publications on van Gulik and his novels, Zhang examines the impact of censorship and self-censorship on the writing, rewriting, and (re)adapting, “literal” and “liberal/free” translation of the Judge Dee stories traveling between Chinese and English, between China and the West, for Chinese and non-Chinese audiences. Focus is given …

Exotic Construction Of An Ancient Oriental Sappho: On Rexroth’S Creative Translation Of Li Ch’Ing-Chao’S Ci-Poems And Its Influences, Yuqun Fu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Exotic Construction of an Ancient Oriental Sappho: On Rexroth’s Creative Translation of Li Ch’ing-Chao’s Ci-Poems and its Influences,” Yuqun Fu discusses Li Ch’ing-Chao’s Ci-poems and her identity as a woman intellect in the patriarchal and feudal Song Dynasty of China. Due to Kenneth Rexroth’s feminist perspective and Sappho complex as well as his own pursuit to excel in the hipster stylistics of the newly prospering Beat writers, Rexroth turns to the Eastern women poets to fuel his own cause, especially in his idiosyncratic way of interpreting and translating Li Ch’ing-Chao. His translation focuses on gender identity and …

Scientific Authorial Voice: Incorporating Explicit Instruction In Undergraduate Chemistry Courses, Emma L. Becker

Masters Theses

The effective development of undergraduate chemistry students for success in professional and academic careers involves emphases on content knowledge and on writing and authorial voice. Unfortunately, most undergraduate chemistry instruction wholly neglects writing and authorial voice instruction in favor of content knowledge instruction. This results in the development of chemistry students who know the content of their field but not how to communicate that knowledge or how to enter the chemistry discourse with their own research. This integrative review identified 71 pieces of scholarly literature and synthesized these sources to reconceptualize writing instruction in undergraduate chemistry and propose explicit instruction …

Pulling Up The Tangled Roots Of Rural Nostalgia: A Rhetorical Study Of Story And Space, Nature And Nation, Emily Pifer

Dissertations - ALL

Drawing from queer and feminist methodologies, Pulling Up the Tangled Roots of Rural Nostalgia engages rhetorical analysis of popular culture texts, specifically the film The Power of the Dog (2021) and television shows Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020) and Reservation Dogs (2021- ), and material spaces, specifically Yellowstone National Park, to develop a framework for tracing how particular constructions of rural nostalgia (such as “the small town,” “the frontier,” “the cowboy,” “the Indian Other,” “the wilderness”) circulate back and forth across widely consumed digital texts, collective imaginaries, political structures, and material spaces. As my dissertation pulls up and examines the tangled roots …

(Re)Imagining Decolonial Cookbooks After Deforestation, Kamran Shams

Theses and Dissertations

Food, like most else, is fundamentally changed by colonization. It is not just the aftermath of colonization, the settlement, that changes food—it is the act of colonial infiltrating itself. Such is the case made by Fernando Ismael Quiñones Valdivia in “Colonial Imaginations: Solitude in the Cartas y Relaciones of Hernán Cortés”—though not for food but for colonized societies broadly. More specifically, he contends that a new epistemological possibility arises when colonizer regards land as an object to be conquered, which precedes the epistemological articulation of subject/object divide. His article supplies a framework for thinking about coloniality so that a close …

The Use Of Space And Place In The Civil Rights Discourse Of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Pamelia Adams

Communication Theses

This thesis, The Use of Space and Place in the Civil Rights Discourse of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., analyzes the academic literature on the social change agent. The study provides a deeper understanding of the relevance of place/location, where Dr. King delivered his civil rights message nationally and internationally. Three historically significant sites and the events impacting the civil rights movement, in the cities of Washington, D.C. and Birmingham, Alabama, are examined. The three sites included in Chapter 2: The Jail Site, Chapter 3: The Bombing Site, and Chapter 4: The March Sites as examples. The main findings of …

Placebos, Rhetoric, And The Power Of Expectation, Jennifer M. Reeher

Theses and Dissertations

Placebos, Rhetoric, and the Power of Expectation examines the relationship between persuasion and health to determine what interventions rhetoric could make in the interdisciplinary field of placebo studies. This exploration of the relationship between rhetoric and placebo responses relies on non-anthropocentric definitions and theories of rhetoric as well as a multifaceted archive that includes patient narratives, clinical intake forms, and peer-reviewed scientific studies of condition-specific placebo responses. The impact of this investigation spans the practical and the theoretical. First, rhetorical study highlights the importance of a patient’s perception of care in patient recovery. To this end, rhetoric offers audience-focused methods …

Recuperative Rhetorics: A Novel Framework For Rhetorical Analysis, Nicolas Palumbo

Masters Theses (Archived)

This thesis details the creation of the Recuperative Rhetorics analytical framework, which is a scalable, transdisciplinary framework for analyzing rhetorical texts, from individual speeches to societal understandings of legacy and history. It discusses the framework’s theoretical underpinnings, explains how to utilize it in analyzing rhetoric and rhetorical works, and provides examples of the framework in action across multiple mediums. The framework takes inspiration from the theories and praxes of Situationist International, primarily those of the spectacle, ready-made objects, détournement, and recuperation. The framework uses these ideas, and then builds upon more established analytical frameworks to establish a base from which …

Teachers’ Self-Reported Practices Of Teaching Academic Writing In Pakistani Universities, Hafiz Yar

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

This study has explored teachers’ self-reported practices of teaching academic writing in Pakistani universities. The English language based developmental literacy courses in Pakistani undergraduate degrees are offered as part of the curricula rather than through specialized language centers. The three-course progression of developmental English literacy in Pakistani undergraduate curricula aims to develop academic writing proficiency besides effective business communication and technical report writing skills.

This study has used generic qualitative research methodology (Caelli et al., 2003; Kahlke, 2014; Kostere & Kostere, 2021), snowball sampling for participant recruitment, and a combination of survey and one-to-one semi structured interviews for data collection. …

On Counter-Memes: A Rhetorical Study Of Allyship In Social Media Memetics From 2015-2024, Kaitlyn Samons

All Dissertations

This dissertation examines the importance of Online allyship through a newly coined term in Memetics and Mis- and Disinformation: “Counter-Memeship.” This work combines previous contributing works on “memes,” “counter-memes,” “counter-stories,” and “allyship” through the lens of feminist, white, and communication theories. Internet memes and studies are explored by looking at how Online participants in internet spaces interact with each other in modern-day protests in memetic ways. The researcher utilizes descriptive and exploratory methods to articulate better how internet memes work between 2015 and 2024. The primary purpose of this research is to see whether Online protests can be considered non-performative …

(Dis)Connecting Incommensurable Relationalities: Aesthetics Of Desirable Citizenship & Interethnic Solidarity In Vietnamese/American Diasporic Media, Anh A. T. Nguyen

Communication ETDs

Employing critical diasporic rhetoric to articulate the pull and push glimmer of essentialist and nationalistic agendas of constructing Vietnamese diasporic subjectivities, I elucidate the complicated structure of diasporic nationalism that gives shape to ambiguities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Vietnamese diasporic withdrawal and regroupment in interethnic politics. Through three case studies explicating Vietnamese diasporic responses to the Chinese virus rhetorics, the appearance of the South Vietnamese flag on January 6 Capitol grounds, and the Atlanta shootings in Saigon Broadcasting Television Networks (SBTN), I highlight how Vietnamese diasporic authorities perform and enact citizenships of becoming desirable, which elevates oppressive forces of ideological …

Looking To The Past And Abroad To Enhance U.S. Presidential Debates, Jacob W. Justice, Talya P. Slaw, John Koch

Studies in Debate and Oratory

Presidential debates are a valuable, but flawed, method of educating voters about policy issues and candidates. Growing dissatisfaction with presidential debates, and polling evidence suggesting they are failing to inform audiences, creates exigence to reconsider the format of future debates. In this essay, we propose modifications to the format of United States presidential debates, in the interest of facilitating greater clash and audience education. To improve U.S. presidential debates, we draw upon two sources of inspiration: the history of U.S. presidential debates and international experiences with political debates. We recommend exploration of new debate formats that include (1) a narrow …

Will I Even Teach Writing Anymore? An Examination Of First-Year Writing Faculty’S Responsibility To Teach About Or With Chatgpt, Danielle Derise

International Journal on Responsibility

In late November of 2022, faculty continuing to navigate the considerable teaching and research challenges posed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic were confronted with another existential problem: the juggernaut known as ChatGPT. This article will examine the academy’s response to this sudden intrusion of Large Language Models (LLMs) into classrooms, workplaces, and daily life, with a focus on interrogating the responsibility of and to instructors of first-year composition. I argue that the breathless calls to reinvent courses, assignments, and syllabus policies to “accommodate” LLMs play into a normative system and may pose additional barriers to success for students, including those …