Students do their best work when they have a sense of agency around science and science learning. Scientific practices like argumentation and critique are areas in which students' agency is especially visible, as they require many points of decision-making and evaluation. While argumentation and critique are fundamental practices in both classroom…

Literature can be a powerful resource for adolescents' psychosocial development, as it provides opportunities to experience the world through the perspectives of others and juxtapose these with one's own experiences. However, gaining access to these perspectives requires going beyond literal words on the page to explore interpretive meanings. This…

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…

The 5th International Conference on Language, Literature and Culture has been hosted by Mehmet Akif Ersoy University (Burdur, Turkey), in cooperation with Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) and Süleyman Demirel University (Isparta, Turkey). Our main aim has been to provide a forum for discussion, to facilitate integration in these fields, and to…

Background/Context: Literacy education has always been hotly contested, and in England the debate has recently intensified in controversies over synthetic phonics teaching and the National Literacy Strategy. This article brings together four theoretical and policy contexts in studying this debate: (1) the long-standing and on-going "reading…

This paper proposes the examination of the "rhetorical compact" as a new genre of rhetorical criticism. The paper contends that the study of rhetorical compacts and the resulting influence on rhetorical patterns can serve as a tool to the scholar seeking to identify the implicit strategies in textual analysis. It suggests a linear…

Seeking the answers as to what makes one speaker more charismatic than another and why some speeches are merely effective while others move audiences to a transcendent state is a difficult task. This paper follows up on this challenge and seeks to provide some answers as to how the prophetic works of Richard Brothers moved his followers to a…

Analyzes the forensic and deliberative strategies employed by attorneys in the 1972 trial of Angela Davis. Integrates the findings with studies of legal rhetoric. (PD)

Using the historic debates as a case study, the author draws inferences about how and why conspiracy arguments become credible and concludes that Lincoln's achievement was strategic and tactical, reflecting an intuitive understanding of how political arguments involving moral questions are discussed in the public sphere. (PD)

The purpose of this paper is to describe and criticize methods critics commonly use to judge speech effects from historical records alone, and to provide a case study illustrating the application of those methods. (Author/JB)

Outlines a political campaign strategy employed by incumbents using three stages of development: legitimacy, identification, and reinforcement. A case study demonstrates the effectiveness of the strategy. (JMF)

States that feminist argumentation is characterized by its commitment to analyze critically patriarchal reasoning and (re)visioning argument theory to include considerations of gender. Analyzes how/why a patriarchal line of argument privileging the male norm is produced and (re)produced in the fetal protection controversy. Uses the "Johnson…

Uses a pragma-dialectical analysis to argue that the legal process is rational. Suggests that the legal system's own rules guarantee that the conditions of rational and efficient discussion are present. Describes the Netherlands' civil procedure rules and shows how such rules help ensure that legal discussions are rational. (SG)

Uses vice president Albert Gore Jr.'s book "Earth in the Balance" as a case study to examine the relationship between analogy and "presence." Argues that presence is a flexible critical construct allowing for examination of the relationship between the style, substance, and structure of arguments. Explores relationships between…

Defines rhetorical enterprise as the combination of content and delivery which fosters a symbiotic relationship between source and receiver, and suggests a critical methodology for assessing the goals, methods and precedents of rhetorical enterprise. Provides a case study of the Reverend Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II and his Science of Living…