Directly engaging students with rhetorical reading and writing can increase self-awareness about writing, improve reading abilities and confidence, and raise awareness of research writing as conversation. In this article, the authors describe several assignments and activities that engage students with the rhetorical situation toward the aim of…

As a communication educator, the author's goal is to help students examine and understand how communication addresses--or, in this case, fails to address--public problems such as gun violence. Communication concepts can provide insight about America's bewildering debates about gun violence, and in turn, these debates can help illustrate and refine…

Courses: This single-class teaching activity was designed for courses on public speaking, rhetorical criticism, and critical thinking. In addition, instructors can adapt this activity for online or face-to-face courses on intercultural communication, organizational communication, listening, and political communication. Objectives: By completing…

This article presents the author's response to "How Do We See What We See? Pedagogical Lacunae and Their Pitfalls in the Classroom" by Jennifer A. Rich. McKinney describes how she tweaked a rhetorical analysis assignment to have it produce more summary, description and response. She stresses that teachers can create a more rhetorically viable…

Videogames challenge our notions of identity, creativity, and moral value, and provide a powerful new avenue for teaching and learning. This book is a rich and provocative guide to the role of interactive media in cultural learning. It searches for specific ways to interpret videogames in the context of human experience and in the field of…

Discusses the redesign of the sophomore literature course at Francis Marion University by an interdisciplinary team. Considers the three diverse epistemologies found in different disciplines, concluding that literary study is best pursued within the rhetorical tradition of analysis and disputation. (DMM)

Three areas of the classical rhetoric of Aristotle, adapted for the modern discourse of inquiry and demonstration, provide a systematic framework for students to understand thought, investigation, and writing in other disciplines: aitia, kairos, and the enthymeme and the example. Aitia, or cause, has four aspects--the material cause, the formal…

This monograph is designed to help English teachers see what it is that the literary theory of deconstruction has to offer them as they pursue their work. The monograph focuses on the implications of deconstruction for the English classroom in American schools. It includes a discussion of Jacques Derrida's philosophy of reading and writing a…

Teachers' role as primary audience has important implications for writing instruction. Teachers represent a combination of two audiences: a literal audience--a specific person or group of people implied in a writing assignment--and an ideal audience shaped by the writers themselves. As these two general types of audiences imply, writers both…

This book, the final work of a noted rhetorician and scholar, examines the history and development of English studies, and the economic and social changes that affect the understanding of the humanities today. Noting that while rhetoric once held a central place in the college curriculum, the book describes how rhetoric became marginalized in…