Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Language Difference And Translingual Enactments, Kate Mangelsdorf

Selected Works Temporary Series

This is a response chapter that appears in _Crossing Divides: Exploring Translingual Writing Pedagogies and Programs_, eds. Bruce Horner and Laura Tetreault. Logan: Utah St. UP, 2017, pp. 199-205. This book won the 2016-17 Mina P. Shaughnessy Book Award from the Modern Languages Association (MLA).

Toggling The Switches, Zach Thomas

Bridges: A Journal of Student Research

In this paper, I use Richard Lanham's work within the field of rhetoric to explore the rhetorical implications of multilingualism and code switching. Specifically, I will discuss and question some of the basic assumptions of employing another language: What is at stake when we communicate with others in another language, especially native speakers? How might using an L2 language and recognizing/using different dialects within that language cause a speaker to reconsider their native tongue? What does the presence of numerous regional peculiarities and nonstandard varieties within languages say about our desire for "ideal" or "standard" speech?

Racialized Slacktivism: Social Media Performances Of White Antiracism, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

This chapter is an analysis of common white netizens' responses to the killing of Trayvon Martin and to the viral video, "Kony 2012." It argues that such responses are a form of "racialized slacktivism," that is, an effort to return to a sense of oneself as a good, happy white person by going through the motions of demonstrating an antiracist online version of oneself.

Understanding The Dynamics Of Peer Review And Its Impact On Revision, Julie Kopp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research in writing studies has focused on what happens as students, and often their teachers, talk about student writing. This line of inquiry has identified several strategies for productive peer interactions, including spontaneous talk (Danis; Dipardo and Freedman; Johnson, The New Frontier; Bruffee; Lam), a flexible environment (Dipardo & Freedman; Johnson, "Friendly Persuasion"), positive rapport (Rish; Thompson; Wolfe), feedback and support (Barron; Covill; Flynn; Grimm; Lam; Yucel, Bird, Young, and Blanksby; Zhu), and reflection (Yucel, Bird, Young, and Blanksby). However, research invested in understanding the extent to which such interactions result in better revisions or make students better writers has …

Ua1f Ogden-Robinson Oratorical Contest Winners, Wku Archives

WKU Administration Documents

List of winners of the Ogden-Robinson oratorical contests. These two oratorical contests originated in the Ogden College in 1885. The Robinson award is given to the winner of a contest for freshmen and sophomores. The Ogden Medal is given to the winner of the upperclassman contest. Since the merger of Ogden College and WKU the even is generally held on or near Ogden College Founders’ Day which is observed on the first Friday of April.

Mary Tyler Moore & Her Role In The Feminist Movement, Haley Steward

Outstanding Gateway Papers

First airing in 1970, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was viewed as “TV’s first truly female dominated sitcom” (Reese). As society was being challenged to accept new values that promoted equality for women on both a personal and political level, The Mary Tyler Moore Show had begun to positively portray the realities of the feminist movement. The women characters of the show, Mary, Rhoda, and Phyllis, brought forth many controversial issues that were occurring throughout America during the decade. As early as the pilot episode, Mary Richards, played by Mary Tyler Moore, was everything that a woman of the early …

A Polyvalent Mediterranean, Or The Trope Of Nomadism In The Literary Oeuvre Of Igiaba Scego And Abdourahman A. Waberi, Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

Publications and Research

I argue that novelists Igiaba Scego and Abdourahman A. Waberi, building on the work of Nuruddin Farah among others, engage the trope of nomadism so as to propose a pre-colonial imaginary of a Somali polyvalent cosmopolitanism as a possible tool for thinking through our contemporary geographies of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

Bad Ideas About Writing, Cheryl E. Ball, Drew M. Loewe

Open Access Textbooks

Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction. Inspired by the provocative science- and social-science-focused book This Idea Must Die and written for a general audience, the collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing. Contributors, as scholars of rhetoric and composition, provide a snapshot of and antidotes to major myths in writing instruction. This collection is published in whole by the Digital Publishing Institute at WVU Libraries and in part by Inside Higher Ed.

Supplemental files feature archived episodes of the Bad Ideas About Writing Podcast …

When The First Language You Use Is Not English.Pdf, Patti Wojahn, Beth Brunk-Chavez, Kate Mangelsdorf, Mais Al-Khateeb, Karen Tellez-Trujillo, Laurie Churchill, Cathilia Flores

Departmental Papers (English)

No abstract provided.

When Children Are Water: Representation Of Central American Migrant Children In Public Discourse And Implications For Educators, Theresa Catalano

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Since June, 2014 when the U.S. government began to document an increase in unaccompanied/separated children arriving in the United States from Central America, these children have become a frequent topic in media discourse. Because rhetoric about immigration issues have been shown to affect schooling of these children, the present paper aims to examine how these children are represented in the discourse of one community. Findings from this critical multimodal discourse analysis reveal multiple strategies of representation that result in the dominant metaphor of IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE DANGEROUS WATER and negative perceptions that have implications for the education of these students.

A Dangerous Game: The Dehumanization Of Children In Massachusetts Testing And Data Discourse, Gregory Shea

The Graduate Review

A great deal has been written about the ills of standardized testing, most of which focuses on their lack of validity and negative impacts on students. One topic that has not been explored in depth is the ways in which the discourse around testing can dehumanize public school students. This paper turns its attention to utterances of the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education, Mitchell Chester, along with the utterances of the superintendents of two large urban districts in Massachusetts. The thesis of this discourse analysis is that the words of these administrators betray an unconscious but troubling ideology of dehumanization. The …

On Digital Doctrine: The Mediatization Of Religious Culture, Celina Yebba

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Media is a constant feature in our modern lives, transforming and influencing society and culture. This study examined how increased participation in digital media has changed the nature of religious representation, culture, and practice. Data was collected from both secular websites and religious media spaces where people post information about religion. This discussion is a necessary step in determining how media has not only become embedded in religious culture but has influenced the transformation of American religious culture. The first part of this analysis concentrated on uncovering rhetorical strategies in religious digital spaces. I assumed that organizational identification would be …

The Communicative Value Of Emr Education: Medical Students' Perceptions Of Introductions To Emrs, Justiss Burry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research in medical education includes a number of studies that describe the complexities (Tierney et al., 2013; Gagon et al., 2009; Pippitt, Stevenson, & Samuelson, 2013), benefits (Milano et al., 2014; Hammoud et al., 2012; Silverman et al., 2014), and limitations (Peled, Sagher, Morrow, & Dobbie, 2009; Wald, George, Reis, & Taylor, 2014; Pelletier, 2016) of helping medical students understand and achieve fluency with electronic medical records (EMRs). In addition, studies in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) have been calling to attention the effectiveness of rhetorical studies within medical contexts (Scott, Segal, & Keranen, 2013; Segal, 2005; Rausch, …

Connecting Theory And Evidence: A Closer Look At Learning In The Writing Center, Alexandra M. Valerio

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This study seeks to explore ideas about learning and how it happens in writing center tutorials. The questions posed for this research are the following: 1) What does learning look like in writing center consultations? and 2) What moves do tutors make to prompt learning moments? The study was created by video recording nine writing center consultations over the course of a single semester. The researcher conducted the sessions herself and worked with the same writer each time. Segments of sessions were transcribed to reveal patterns of learning at work. Reflective memos were also collected, as well as a final …

The Rhetoric Of Inmates: Identification Processes In The San Quentin News, Alexandra Stepanov

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The intent of this thesis is to create a new heuristic for processes of identification. Currently, Burke's identification theory only accounts for his definition of successful identification. This thesis explores how Burke's initial identification theory interacts with other theories that contribute to identity formation. Specifically, Fernheimer's identification half-steps, Reynold's ethos as location theory, and Kerschbaum's commodification of difference will be used to build on Burke's theory and develop a new heuristic. The new heuristic will be applied to the San Quentin State Prison's inmate-run newspaper, the San Quentin News, to explore how inmates are utilizing rhetorical identification strategies to change …

Toward The Anthropology Of White Nationalist Postracialism: Comments Inspired By Hall, Goldstein, And Ingram’S “The Hands Of Donald Trump”, Jeff Maskovsky

Publications and Research

This article explains Donald Trump’s brutal political effectiveness in terms of his white nationalist appeal. It locates the intellectual, popular, and policy imperatives of Trumpism in a new form of racial politics that I am calling white nationalist postracialism. This is a paradoxical politics of twenty-first-century white racial resentment whose proponents seek to do two contradictory things: to reclaim the nation for white Americans while also denying an ideological investment in white supremacy. The article shows how Trump’s excoriation of political correctness, his nostalgia for the post–WWII industrial economy, his use of hand gestures, and his public speaking about race …

Aesthetic Reading: Struggling Students Sensing Their Way To Academic Success, Cheryl Hogue Smith

Publications and Research

This article proposes to extend the revised transactional theory of reading that I introduced to JBW readers in 2012. That revised theory, building on Rosenblatt’s distinction between efferent and aesthetic reading, described a third reading stance I named “deferent” to designate the tendency of struggling student readers to defer their interpretations of texts to classmates or teachers deemed to have superior skill or authority. This new essay proposes a fourth, “anesthetic” stance of reading that focuses on counterproductive emotions struggling readers and writers feel that cause them to adopt a deferent stance of reading. This article also examines the dispositions …

Multimodal Pedagogies, Processes And Projects: Writing Teachers Know More Than We May Think About Teaching Multimodal Composition, Jessica B. Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

Multimodal writing refers to texts that use more than one communicative mode to convey information. While there is much scholarship that examines the history of alphabetic writing instruction and the alphabetic composing processes of students, little research explores the historical origins of multimodal composition and the processes in which students engage as they compose multimodal texts. This two-part project takes a fresh approach to studying multimodal writing by exploring the multimodal pedagogies of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric and writing teachers, analyzing the role of mental and physical images in modern writers’ composing practices, and investigating contemporary students’ processes for …

Candidacy Rhetoric In The Rise Of The Donald And Its Relation To Populist And Fascist Ideology, Robert A. Moore

CMC Senior Theses

This essay provides a comparison of Trump’s rhetoric to fascist and populist ideology through an analysis and politolinguistic framing of the usage of apophasis, mesarchia, and pathos in Trump content spanning the first six months of his candidacy for the 2016 U.S. presidency seat. This account finds that Trump is decidedly Ur-Fascist or populist, and cannot be neither of the two, is likely both Ur-Fascist and populist, and leans more in favor of populist ideology given the analyses undertaken. This account ultimately aims to have supported critical discourse analysis (CDA) and politiolinguistics in support of these approaches as rigorous political …

Bad Ideas About Writing, Cheryl E. Ball, Drew M. Loewe

OER Main

Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction. Inspired by the provocative science- and social-science-focused book This Idea Must Die and written for a general audience, the collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing. Contributors, as scholars of rhetoric and composition, provide a snapshot of major myths about writing instruction in these essays. This collection is published in whole by the Digital Publishing Institute and in part by Inside Higher Ed.

Satirical Perspectives: A Cross-Cultural Comparison, Mariah Johnson

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This paper proposes a cross-cultural examination of the societal satire of the countries of America and Soviet Russia by way of comparison of two satiric novels. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt satirizes the business values of capitalist America and the materialism perceived in an economic system based on the mass production and mass consumption of goods. Yurii Olesha’s Envy uses Babbitt in intertextual conversation to perform a similar critique of the Soviet Russian society and values of the same time period. Satiric theory provides a framework for understanding and relaying how each novel performs its parody of the respective society, while historical …

There's No Space Like Home : Locavore Writing And Rhetorics Of Place, Darcy Mullen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project seeks to treat the word “local” as a social construct that, if left unexamined, has concrete consequences, from seed to fork, and from reader to student writer. As a study in contemporary rhetorical formations, I focus on what I term the genre of Locavore writing as a discrete genre of social movement writing, to intervene in definitions and applications of a set of rhetorical concepts; discourse communities, rhetorical situations, and proverbial knowledge. Additionally, I reframe the need for post-spatial turn considerations within rhetorical studies in spatial rhetoric for both the study of literature, and writing pedagogy. The focus …

The Bridge, Volume 14, 2017, Bridgewater State University

the bridge

Editor-in-Chief:
Allie Briggs

Editors:
Katherine Nazzaro
Medjine Tercy
Alexandria Machado
Alyssa McLellan
Rupert Simpson
Parker Jones
Mialise Carney

Faculty Advisors:
Katy Whittingham
Evan Dardano

Graduate Consultant:
Jill Boger

Design Consultant:
Cheryl Sirois

Student Consultants:
Kelsey Leuenberger
Stephanie Janeczek
Claire Alexander

Goldman’S Paradox: Imperfect Perfection, Aaron Manuel

Outstanding Gateway Papers

In The Paradox of Punishment, Alan Goldman argues that the mixed theory of punishment is inherently contradictory. Goldman explains that the mixed theory is a combination of two older theories of punishment: retributivism and utilitarianism. The combination of these two theories into a single mixed theory was intended to mitigate these theories’ flaws. However, Goldman asserts that the two theories are incompatible, as justification of one requires dismissal of the other, creating a paradox. While I agree that Goldman’s paradox exists, and that it is logically inescapable, I believe he has neglected several points of analysis which weaken the …

The New Face Of Civil Revolution, Kalen Gray

Outstanding Gateway Papers

"The New Face of Civil Revolution" explains how with changing times comes changing platforms of expressing disdain for modern oppression against Black people of the United States of America. By juxtaposing the Black Power Movement and the Black Lives Matter Movement, this article provides a history of the oppression Black people face in America, as well as the many ways that these separate movements operate. Based on diversity of populations served, leadership, and the ways in which these movements gain supporters, this paper ultimately shows that there is currently a call for a new method of achieving equality in the …

Integrated Marketing Communication As Epideictic Rhetoric And Its Implications For Ethical Branding, Tricia Mcfadden

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Traced to ancient scholarship, rhetoric, and the philosophy of communication and through interpretive perspectives, rhetoric, narrative and ethics have been established grounding of communication and social structures. IMC has emerged as a contemporary genre of epideictic rhetoric with ethical obligations to our postmodern polis. Through the redefining of the branding metaphor within an ethical, grounded and narrative framework, the focus on ethos and connection to the audience through Schrag’s “fitting response” may combat the previous challenges of narrative and marketing and its deconstructive effects. IMC as communicative praxis engages branding discourse in action with texture as the bonding agent between …

On Making A Difference: How Photography And Narrative Produce The Short-Term Missions Experience, Joshua Kerby Jennings

Theses and Dissertations--Community & Leadership Development

Short-term missions participants encounter difference in purportedly captivating ways. Current research, however, indicates the practice does not lead to long-lasting, positive change. Brian M. Howell (2012) argues the short-term missions experience is confined to the limitations of the short-term missions narrative. People who engage in short-term missions build assumptions, seek experiences, understand difference, and convey meaning, as a result of this narrative. The process of telling and retelling travel stories is integral to the short-term missions experience. Drawing upon literature on tourism, narrative, development, and photography, this study intends to evaluate the inefficacy of short-term missions through the stories which …

Efl Education In Mainland China: Word Memorization And Essay Writing Among High School Sophomores, Rehema Clarken

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This dissertation explores English as a Foreign Language instruction within the context of the contemporary Chinese education system. Basic outlines chart the historical development of EFL studies in the United States and China framing the question of what each community values as important measures of success when assessing language learning. While traditional Chinese methods value strict memorization of vast word lists (背单词, BeiDanCi, BDC) the US educational community stresses essay writing—particularly on standardized tests such as the ACT, SAT, and TOEFL, which are required for university admissions. Therefore, this study investigates the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and writing ability among …

Language, Rhetoric, And Politics In A Global Context: A Decolonial Critical Discourse Perspective On Nigeria’S 2015 Presidential Campaign, Yunana Ahmed

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

In this dissertation, I conceptualize a rhetorical and linguistic analysis of politics from a decolonial framework (Mignolo, 2011; Smith, 2012). My analysis draws on classical rhetoric (Aristotle, 2007), cultural rhetoric (Mao, 2014; Powell, et al., 2014; Yankah, 1995), and linguistics (Chilton, 2004) to reveal the different ways ideological and hegemonic struggles are discursively constructed in Nigerian political campaign discourse. The data for this study come from two speeches delivered by former President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan during the 2015 electoral campaign. This includes his declaration-of-intent speech and his speech marking the commencement of his formal campaign activities. My …

Analysis Of Dialog Surrounding Animal Testing In Vaccine Research, Natalie Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study analyzed the scholarly discussions surrounding the topic of animal testing for vaccine potency and safety in humans. The primary stakeholders in this discussion are the scientists, medical professionals, and researchers who are involved in animal models and alternative testing methods, specifically related to vaccine development. The debate among these professionals regarding alternative methods, which encompasses any testing approach that does not involve animals, has been analyzed. This project looks at the argument from a historical perspective, which provides background context for the current debate and an understanding of how the current arguments originated. The changing mindset over time …