Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Civilian And Veteran Perceptions Of Communicated Stigma About Veterans With Ptsd, Rikki Roscoe, Jenn Anderson

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

Mental health problems are considered some of the most common and disabling medical conditions that affect military service members. Veterans with PTSD need mental health services but are often reluctant to seek them due to perceived stigma. In this study, we used Smith’s (2007) stigma communication framework to analyze veterans’ and civilians’ perceptions of combat-related PTSD. Findings from our study indicate that, although participants were exposed to stigma communication about veterans with PTSD, most stigmatizing labels were considered inaccurate. Further, participants perceived that discourse about veterans infrequently implied that veterans were personally responsible for developing and overcoming PTSD. These findings …

The Divine Double Voice: How Female Christian Rhetors Found Rhetorical Agency Through The Voice Of God, Cara Ryfun

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This piece discusses the ways in which three specific Christian female rhetors--Teresa de Avila, Frances Willard, and Maria W. Stewart--utilized the voice of God through biblical scriptures and divine revelations in order to empower themselves. Through the voice of God, these women found agency for their own beliefs and messages, and utilized a variety of rhetorical maneuvers in order to share their messages and quietly subvert patriarchal constructs within the church. These women found agency for their feminist messages within their Christian patriarchal constructs, and they set precedents for Christian feminist rhetors to follow.

Buying A Better World: Students As Conscious Consumers, Sean Murray

Journal of Vincentian Social Action

Conscious consumer movements have given people opportunities to “vote with their dollars” – that is, buy from companies with values matching their own, and forgo products from businesses with questionable policies and practices. After providing brief context about consumerism and conscious consumption, I focus on a Conscious Consumer Project that I teach in my First Year Writing courses at St. John’s University. Excerpts of student writing emphasizing labor issues, as well as student reflections on the project, are shared as I discuss possibilities for revising and improving the assignment. The possibilities discussed include increasing opportunities for students to do academic …

You Keep Using That Meme; I Don’T Think It Means What You Think It Means: Using Memes To Teach Rhetorical Analysis, Kathleen Turner Ledgerwood

Title III Professional Development Reports

Since memes surround us every day and play an increasingly important role in rhetorical strategies used to influence people, this is a great entry point to help students think analytically and critically about the memes that bombard them on social media every day. As a means of entering into visual and verbal analysis, memes can be a really great way to introduce analysis and rhetorical analysis to students. This is a lesson plan to teach rhetorical analysis using the visual and verbal images in memes. The plan also provides extensions and a list of possible resources for use in the …

Taking An “Ecological Turn” In The Evaluation Of Rhetorical Interventions, Peter Cannon

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to develop a new method for the evaluation and assessment of therapeutic libraries in a health ecology. To do so, I employ a modified version of Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation as a methodological tool for the investigation of health ecologies by applying an ecological analysis to an alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment center in Tampa, Florida. By modifying Bitzer’s rhetorical situation schema and expanding the concept of health ecologies, I develop several innovations useful for tracing the impact of actants and rhetorical events specific to health and medicine. A major focus of this dissertation is a …

Learners’ Perspectives On The Use And Support Of Student Created Video Assignments At James Madison University, Annette Bruff Liskey

Showcase of Graduate Student Scholarship and Creative Activities

This research is an exploratory analysis of the use of student created video assignments at JMU, a pedagogical strategy that is increasingly common but not widely researched. The study collected quantitative data via an online survey of JMU students with the objective of examining the use, design, and outcomes of student created video assignments at James Madison University. Survey topics included the requirements of the assignment, the course that included the assignment, resources available and/or used to complete the assignment, students’ perceptions of the learning outcomes, as well as non-identifying information about each respondent’s demographics and academic experience at JMU. …

Yellow Pads And The Return Of The Writer, Gregory Shafer

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

No abstract provided.

Inquiry And Problem Solving In English Composition: Belonging, Exile And Migration [Composition], Phyllis E. Vanslyck

Open Educational Resources

In the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Meanings of War and its Aftermaths Seminar, offered to LaGuardia Faculty in the 2018-19 academic year, we examined numerous critical essays and literary texts, as well as photographs and documentaries, to gain a more nuanced understanding of the ways war continues to inhabit peoples’ lives. When I began participating in this Seminar, I had already planned a first-semester English Composition course based on the theme, Belonging, Exile, and Migration. Thinking about connections between our readings for the NEH Seminar and my course, I was particularly interested in the ways stories of displacement …

Defining Translinguality, Bruce Horner, Sara P. Alvarez

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This article reviews the history of conflicting meanings for translinguality in composition studies, locating that history in the context of other competing terms for language difference with which translinguality is sometimes affiliated and competes, and conflicting definitions of these, and in the context of perceived changes to global communication technologies and migration patterns. It argues for approaching translinguality and the confusion surrounding it as evidence of an epistemological break and explains confusions as a response to the challenges such a break poses. It demonstrates the residual operation of monolingualist notions of language in arguments for “code-meshing,” “plurilinguality,” and “translanguaging” and …

Recycling A Colonial Puritan Sermon: A Case Study, David M. Powers

Sermon Studies

Notes which the teenager John Pynchon took in the 1640s as he listened to the Rev. George Moxon’s sermons in frontier Springfield, MA, have become the inspiration and the ingredients for sermon performances in 21st century New England. The project began with a word-for-word transcription of a symbol-for-symbol manuscript based on a code invented by Pynchon. Then a very few words which the notetaker skipped, in his rush to record just what he heard, were added to provide essential clarification. So, too, was introductory material to frame the experience by encouraging the listening congregation to “stretch” a bit to appreciate …

“Wild Mobs, To Mad Sedition Prone”: Preaching The American Revolution, Barry Levis

Sermon Studies

The Church of England in the American Colonies was really not a single institution. Because no local bishop governed the church in America, falling as it did under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London, the clergy tended to have differing loyalties. Especially in the southern colonies, local vestries ruled the clergy because they controlled their stipends; therefore the clergy followed the lead of the local squirearchy and suppressed their personal views regarding independence. The New England Anglican clergy were equally in a difficult position. Midst the hostility of Puritanism and the Sons of Liberty, they seemed like an alien …

Preaching In Britain’S “Parish Church”: Sermons At London’S St. Paul’S Cathedral, In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries, Frances Knight

Sermon Studies

This paper will address the conference themes of ‘space, place and context’ with an examination of the development of preaching at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, over the course of two hundred years. Completely rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666, on a scale which was intended to rival St Peter’s in Rome, the new St Paul’s was explicitly designed as a Protestant cathedral. Preaching, therefore, was highly valued. Yet, despite the adoption of Wren’s ‘preaching box’ plan, speaking in the colossal space, potentially to a congregation of many hundreds, presented considerable challenges. As one would expect over a two-hundred-year …

Review Of Genesea M. Carter And William H. Thelin’S Class In The Composition Classroom, Christian Aguiar

Inquiry: The Journal of the Virginia Community Colleges

Though community colleges enroll the majority of working-class college students, research on how to best serve the interests of working-class students at our institutions is limited. In Class in the Composition Classroom: Pedagogy and the Working Class, the contributors tackle the issue of supporting working-class students in college composition classes from several angles, offering practical pedagogical advice, guidance on college-wide initiatives, and research into common challenges faced by working-class students. While the text will be most valuable for those who teach writing, its insights apply to anyone who serves at a community college.

The Rise Of ‘Right-Wing’ Human Rights Rhetoric: A Palestinian & Israeli Case Study, Leah Wilson

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Human rights are historically understood as ‘liberal’ rhetoric, yet the following study will present an unprecedented turn by an Israeli ‘right-wing’ organization to human rights language and methodologies as a means to advance their goals. For context, the study will review how ‘liberal’ organizations in the region have employed rights-based frameworks, dating back to the rise of the first intifada in the late 1980’s. Specifically, the study focuses on three organizations that utilize the Israeli court system for their work: ACRI (Association for Civil Rights in Israel), Adalah (The Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel), and HaMoked. Human …

Around Her Table: A Digital Community Archive Featuring Azorean-American Women In New England, Suzanne Lyn Parenti Sink

English Theses & Dissertations

Around Her Table is a born-digital dissertation dedicated to collecting, preserving, and validating the Azorean-American woman’s immigrant experience and cultural identity through the transformative power of participatory archives. The site address is www.aroundhertable.org. The digital exhibit features the oral histories and artifacts related to the domestic sphere of six Azorean-American families, with particular emphasis on artifacts related to the kitchen, hand-worked textiles, and religious practices. Driving the urgency for the creation of new archival records for this community is that fact that despite the nearly one million North Americans who trace their ancestry to the Azores, traditional institutional and civic …

The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In this article, I will focus on two influential writers from the south of Brazil, Cristiane Sobral who currently lives in Brasília, from Rio de Janeiro, and Conceição Evaristo who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro state, from Minas Gerais. I got to know them in São Paulo in 2015 at a public event: the “Afroétnica Flink! Sampa Festival of Black Thought, Literature and Culture.” I will include references to some of their younger contemporaries such as Raquel Almeida, Jenyffer Nascimento, and Elizandra Souza, all of whom reside in São Paulo, in order to illustrate the Black Brazilian women writers’ …

Building A Green Dorm: How Colleges And Universities Across America Have Embraced Sustainable Communal Living, Theresa M. Blickenstaff

Student Publications

Building a dorm is hard work. Building a green, sustainable dorm is doubly so. With their extensive lighting, appliances, heating and cooling needs, fans, and laundry machines, traditional college residence halls are notorious for their large energy footprints. Particularly for colleges such as Gettysburg where dorm living is mandatory for some or all four years, the environmental impact of residence halls is particularly large. As leaders with long histories of inspiring change, colleges and universities in the United States have an obligation to promote sustainable practices. Gettysburg College has announced that in the next few years, it is planning to …

Still Writing At The Master’S Table: Decolonizing Rhetoric In Legal Writing For A “Woke” Legal Academy, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

When the author wrote Writing At the Master’s Table: Reflections on Theft, Criminality, and Otherness in the Legal Writing Profession almost 10 years ago, her aim was to bring a Critical Race Theory/Feminism (CRTF) analysis to scholarship about the marginalization of White women law professors of legal writing. She focused on the convergence of race, gender, and status to highlight the distinct inequities women of color face in entering their ranks. The author's concern was that barriers to entry for women of color made it less likely that the existing legal writing professorate, predominantly White and female, would problematize the …

Best Communication Practices For Nontraditional Students In The Rn-Bsn Online Program, Belinda Kaye Nix

Theses and Dissertations

Research was conducted to determine the best communication practices for nontraditional students in the RN-BSN online program in hopes of building rapport and ultimately improving retention rates. Data for the research was obtained from an anonymous survey of recent University of Arkansas at Little Rock RN-BSN graduates, one individual interview, and an auto ethnographic approach. The auto ethnographic approach includes my personal accounts of practices in advising RN-BSN students. The results show rapport and connectedness can increase with the use of personalized videos, routine check-ins with students, positive communication, and more transparency.

Reseña De Manual De Escritura Académica_Prat Ferrer Y Peña Delgado, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Writing In The Health Sciences: A Collection Of Exemplary Student Writing Spring 2019, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso University Writing Program

English Curricular Materials

"The narratives that appear beyond this foreword, plus one modest literature review, one integrative study, and one healthcare guideline analysis, were written last spring by students from the College of Nursing and Health Professions in sections of English 205. English 205 is a writing-intensive course offered by the English department, listed in the catalog as “Writing in the Health Professions.” As titles go, that’s pretty bland, for a course or for a collection of writing. Writing in the health professions is anything but bland, as you’ll find out if you read any of the work in this collection. Health professionals …

Statement Of Creative Practice: Creative Making And Vr Literature, Mez Breeze

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Editor's Note
Mez Breeze authored her artist’s statement in virtual reality. You can view Mez’s artist’s statement even without a VR headset. Just click this link: https://bit.ly/2Kov372
You’ll need this password to access it: XR_PlayG

Abstract
Constructing creative writing in XR (aka Extended Reality: an umbrella term that covers Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, and a fourth category called Synthetic Reality), and VR in particular, is an exciting and recent phenomenon in the Electronic Literature field. This proposed Statement of Creative Practice will examine the scope and reach of XR artforms while focusing in particular on the subset of …

Basho & Friends Literacy Game For Tablet, Joshua Korenblat

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Basho & Friends is an in-progress prototype for an interactive children’s book. Here, children ages 8-13 collaborate with young Basho, the legendary founder of haiku poetry, to become poets themselves. This project exemplifies a “convivial tool,” defined by philosopher Ivan Illich as a platform designed to promote creative expression. Here, we imagine new possibilities for reading, sensemaking, and creative writing based on past forms and ideas. Through poetry, Basho promotes meaningful principles of literacy and sustainability today. Children can engage with Basho’s story in an historical context and practice haiku to see themselves as authors of their life stories.

Fanfiction As Performative Criticism: Harry Potter Racebending, Khaliah A. Petersen-Reed

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Fanfiction anatomizes a text and in this textual nakedness fanfiction writers recognize gaps in their chosen source texts and seek to supplement these deficiencies through literary disruption. This essay focuses on the kind of fanfiction that critically disrupts through artistic cultural production—a practice that I am labeling performative criticism. I look at Racebending fanfiction that intervenes in the gaps of the Harry Potter series—specifically the gaps related to race. Using fanfiction produced by Harry Potter fans, I will show that by reading and writing fanfiction these writers are blurring demarcation between creative writing and literary criticism.

This Is (Not) A Game: The Adjunct Experience As Playable Fiction, Lee Skallerup Bessette

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

How can a never-ending running 8-bit game be a piece of protest art? In examining her own experience in a related netprov protesting the treatment of adjuncts, the artist explores issues of agency, exploitation, and the very nature of games and playing in her artist’s statement on her game, Adjunct Run: https://adjunctrun.readywriting.org/.

Machine Co-Authorship(S) Via Translative Creative Writing, Aaron Tucker

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This paper argues that machine translation and a symbiotic ecosystem of authorship are central to the poetic works of Aaron Tucker and reveal larger ethical paths for machine-human relationships. In particular, the elements of chance alongside the intersemiotic translative acts that are the nature of human-computer relationships give space to a potential futurity that challenges a human-centric understanding of “reading” and “writing” and generates a type of literature that encourages a reader to better understand their own interactions within their daily digital environments.

The Many Authors Of The Several Houses Of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, And Alex: Authorship, Agency, And Appropriation, Zach Whalen

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex is a computer-generated children’s book of 53,651 words and 350 unique illustrations arranged over 800 pages. The text is a cumulative poem in the style of the nursery rhyme “This is the House that Jack Built,” but with a house for each of the eponymous seven individuals, and with each of their houses containing many more types of things. These houses, these things, and these words were chosen by a Python script that I wrote, and the resulting novel--which can be viewed on my Github repository--is …

Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers: Robbo. Solucja., Piotr Marecki

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

In 1989, Janusz Pelc wrote the game Robbo on an 8-bit Atari, one of the first personal computers, which enjoyed a cult-like status in Poland before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Robbo, a small robot, collects screws and has to get through 56 planets. The game has achieved cult status, spawning hundreds of remixes and modifications. Beginning in the 1980s, fans (once mainly young boys, today adult men) played this game, collecting screws and running away from enemies such as bats, flying eyes, devils etc., while drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, eating crisps and telling jokes. One …

Digital Participatory Poetics And Civic Engagement In The Creative Writing Classroom, Liza D. Flum, Emily Oliver

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This article explores the ways a team-taught course, “Public Poetry in a Digital World,” supported community-building through participatory action and digital creative making. Using digital texts responding to current events, this course fostered students’ civic imagination and invited them to make connections among their own lives, their communities and poetic civic media. This class facilitated critical community engagement through digital pedagogy and final projects in which students performed public scholarship. Ultimately, this course serves as a case study of how teaching born-digital texts with digital tools can expand the capacity of the creative writing classroom.

Toward Disruptive Creation In Digital Literature Instruction, Michael D. Clark

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Given the multimodal and collaborative nature of digital literature along with the ways it often embodies the theories informing its artistic production, approaches to exploring both the creation and study of the form must abandon legacy pedagogies in favor of disruptive, student-driven course experiences. This work must further include explorations of digital culture, means of production, multimodal literacies, and connections with various definitions of literature ranging from print to auditory to visual forms. To accomplish this, instructors must move from more traditional hierarchical roles to those of facilitator and participant, committing consistently to returning decision-making work to the students.