The purpose of this workshop paper is to understand the ways that women and men who work in the field of composition-rhetoric studies can more fully understand and articulate ways to enable women writing students to use more fully the new kinds of technology that proliferate in the digital realm. The material is based on the author's twenty-six…

Popular discourse and advocacy efforts characterize homelessness as a social problem bound by the present-centered concerns of physical affliction and material deprivation. Wayne Powers's documentary film "Reversal of Fortune" exemplifies this tendency by performing a "social experiment" to investigate how giving a homeless man $100,000 would…

Over the past twenty years much work has been done by teachers of secondary English to describe and make explicit the semiotic resources used to access and critique the discourses of powerful institutions such as schooling. At the same time, however, there has been a growing recognition that the rhetorical resources needed for adolescents to…

It is contended that in Harvey Pegues's essay on objectivism and constructivism in the summer 2007 issue of "The Educational Forum", Pegues conducted an intellectual discourse in which legitimate or good-faith disagreement was not an option, and disparaged and imputed the negative motives with which he disagreed. This article responds by pointing…

Prevailing idealist and materialist theories of rhetoric fail to account for the continual circulation and recirculation of "racism" as a scientific discourse. An alternative theory of modal materialism addresses this problem by suggesting that the properties of all being are constituted through three distinguishable forms of matter that include…

Two experiments investigated the processing and appreciation of double grounding, a form of intentional ambiguity often used in the construction of headlines. For example, in "Russia takes the froth off Carlsberg results," the key element, "takes the froth off," is significant both metaphorically, where it refers to the…

The work of Students Informing Now (S.I.N.), an immigrant student organization at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is described in this column. The authors argue that S.I.N.'s diverse activities and textual products construct a counternarrative that challenges and reframes the debate on undocumented students and immigration. Focusing on…

This article offers a way of using the theory of audience design--how speakers position different audience groups as main addressees, overhearers, or bystanders--for written discourse. It focuses on main addressees, that is, those audience members who are expected to participate in and respond to a speaker's utterances. The text samples are…

Stasis theory is a powerful tool for rhetorical analysis, recently under fresh consideration by rhetorical theorists (e.g. Gross) and scholars who identify its utility in the writing classroom (e.g. Carroll). In this study, the author applies stasis theory to a paleontological argument involving a controversial fossil, "Protoavis texensis."…

Visual rhetoric fuels composition as rhetors refinish filmed moments to show others what they "see" in them. My work examines projects that model strategic discourse in public spaces. It offers ideas for achieving full and guarded disclosure when clarity is but one of several communicative goals. (Contains 30 notes.)

Parody and related forms of political humor are essential resources for sustaining democratic public culture. They do so by exposing the limits of public speech, transforming discursive demands into virtual images, setting those images before a carnivalesque audience, and celebrating social leveling while decentering all discourses within the…

Researchers studying technology development often examine how rhetorical activity contributes to technologies' design, implementation, and stabilization. This article offers a possible methodology for studying one role of rhetorical activity in technology development: knowledge consolidation analysis. Applying this method to an exemplar case, the…

In this article, the authors comment on Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle's "Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions." As Downs and Wardle note, a one-year academic writing course will not prepare students to write in all fields, and evidence suggests limitations on the transfer of skills. The authors agree, in addition, that the study of…

Study abroad has become, at least rhetorically, a core element in U.S. post-secondary education. For those who practice study abroad and have dedicated themselves to leading students, managing programs, or theorizing the role of study abroad in its relationship to the academy generally, the meaning of their work is powerfully shaped by rhetorical…

This article surveys and analyzes nearly fifteen years of scholarship situating itself at the intersection of LGBT/queer studies and composition/rhetoric studies. The authors argue that paying attention to queerness provides unique opportunities to engage with students in challenging discussions about how the most seemingly personal parts of our …