Re-reading James Moffett's work in the light of more recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, this paper presents a "deconstructive" account of Moffett's key texts. Understanding them as instances in themselves of rhetoric and textuality, and reading them at once "with" and "against" the grain, the…

The ethics and efficacy of explicitly teaching disciplinary discourse conventions to undergraduate students has been hotly debated. This quasi-experimental study seeks to contribute to these debates by focusing on the conventional special "topoi" of literary analysis--conventions that previous Writing in the Disciplines (WID) research indicates…

The objective of this investigation was to analyze rhetorical strategies of Alice Walker in four narratives, namely, "The Color Purple, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart". As such, this study helps to expand the body of investigation relating linguistics to literature and medium…

Tom Wolfe is widely regarded as the leading theorist and practitioner of New Journalism, the journalistic genre that combines the stylistic features of fiction and the reportorial obligations of journalism to produce a "novelistic sounding" but nonetheless factual literature. The saliency of Wolfe's stylistic boldness has prompted many…

This paper demonstrates the compatability of Aristotle's Four Causes (material, formal, efficient, and final) and George Campbell's Four Forms of Discourse (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) and synthesizes them to form an ordered yet flexible writing model that can be used in composition instruction. Within the context of…

The six articles in this collection explore the following topics relating to rhetoric: the distinction between the truth value and the exchange value of a message and between the signifier and the signified in a message; the rhetoric of silence in modern fiction; the way in which readers are influenced not only by what writers say but by how they…

Paper presented at the Midwestern Renaissance Society Meeting, Urbana, Illinois, April 1970. (DD)

Analyzes the rhetorical practices and the theoretical writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Concludes that he regarded orations as practical instruments and that the judgment that he was disinterested in persuasion is untenable. (JMF)

As an initial step toward discovering whether a separate genre of women's rhetoric exists, this paper analyzes rhetorical forms used by Mary Daly in the book "Gyn/Ecology." The paper first outlines criteria for determining whether a form has rhetorical significance and traces the historical background of the contemporary feminist…

Explains Genette's concept of rhetoric as a treatise on figures and his argument that rhetoric has been restrained and gradually subsumed by the metaphor, the master trope. (SRT)

Argues that Richard Whately was a significant force in shaping the model for teaching writing that has been dominant in the last 90 years. (Author/RL)

Argues that the study of literature has been stripped of its usefulness and purely theoretical while the study of rhetoric has been stripped of theory and reduced to practical, applied stylistics. (SRT)

Since ancient times, the use of metaphor in rhetorical speeches has been a powerful tool for persuasive impact on audiences. Study of 84 important persuasive speeches, from classic to modern, reveals 52 metaphor types. Among these, 11 types account for 60% of all of the examples. These "archetypal" metaphors are used in speeches, not because of…

The purpose of this study was to determine the incidence, extent, order, and character of 18 rhetorical devices occurring in 100 trade books for children in the primary grades. The most frequent rhetorical devices and the total number of uses recorded for each device were alliteration, 1,079; onomatopoeia, 500; antithesis, 335; simile, 261;…

Relates how nursery rhymes have the enduring power to amuse and comfort both adult and child audiences. (HOD)