This article narrates the experience of rhetoric and composition faculty developing a graduate program at a growing state university in south Texas. The narrative emphasizes the contextual constraints that required "institutional critique" and rhetorical negotiations. The second part of the article argues for a critical stance on how we…

I see a parallel between the illiteracy I witnessed while working in the court system and the challenges facing first-year writers at the university. In both cases, problems arise due to unfamiliarity with the discourse community into which one enters. In response, because much of the language governing composition and rhetoric is rife with place…

Although Japanese Americans' concept of "gaman" has been stereotypically associated with silent passivity, several practiced this principle as a form of resistance in personal writings about the U.S. government's incarceration of them during World War II. This article focuses on the relationship between gaman, an inherited cultural…

Problem Statement: In this qualitative small-scale study, I aimed at investigating why students have difficulties in adjusting themselves to English writing conventions. I also examined the possible bilateral effects of Turkish and English writing conventions to determine whether engaging learners in contrastive rhetoric exercises can elucidate…

This article recounts the experiences of a team of faculty, graduate students, and instructional technologists facilitating Rhetorical Composing, a writing-focused Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). When first offering the MOOC, we recognized quickly that we needed to emphasize the global makeup of our learning cohort to foster a stronger sense of…

American Indian writers in college have a distinct cultural background related to rhetorical agency and language. Particularly for Indian students who grew up on reservations, the effects of official federal policies regarding the use of English for assimilation remain significant. However, in writing classes, we have an opportunity to reverse…

Design is a rhetorical activity that requires creative thinking in response to difficult situations. That creative work ultimately builds new relationships and new contexts. Sustainable design can become an approach to composition that alters ways of thinking about writing situations, keeping ethical and contextual factors in focus, and…

How best to teach and compose negative messages is a topic that continues to challenge and spark debate among business communication educators and researchers. Even where business communications textbooks emphasize the importance of context and audience analysis to determine whether to adopt a direct or indirect arrangement when expressing bad…

The treatment of a research paper as an isolated utterance within a composition classroom is problematic in that such papers may fail to encourage transfer of writing knowledge. In this essay, I argue that a research paper's failure to work as a utterance situated within a conversation--as critiqued through a framework constructed by Mikhail…

English writing instruction is an important part in college English pedagogy. Traditional way of teaching English writing lays much emphasis on word, grammar and sentence rather than the level of discourse. Under the traditional way, the students have difficulties to yield well-organized and coherent compositions. Theme Theory provides a…

We propose that new concepts are needed to discuss increasingly common rhetorical practices that are not closely aligned with the ways in which rhetorical delivery has historically been situated. We are specifically interested in situations where composers anticipate and strategize future third-party remixing of their compositions--composing for…

My dissertation examines the ways in which composition pedagogies have, both in theory and in practice, systematically worked to exclude individuals with disabilities. Persisting in composition studies is the ideological belief that traditional writing and intelligence are somehow inherently linked, that traditional literacy is central to defining…

Walter Ong tells us that the noetic--the rhetorical characteristics of feeling, sensation, and intuition applied to a given communicative situation or act--stems from the oral tradition. The noetic contrasts with the print legacy of argument in which "teaching something is the same as 'proving' it'" ("Ramus" 156). Ong's sense…

If I can show my literature students how Nabokov can take them from familiar representations of experience to representations of less familiar experiences, from a knowledge of the given world to an understanding of the world of the imagination, then, it seems to me, I ought to be able find some way of showing my composition students how to do it…

I propose that we think about what a paragraph is by considering its "function," what it does in a piece of writing, whether in a popular novel, a newspaper article, an e-mail, a business report, or a lofty piece of literary criticism. We might think about a paragraph as a "rhetorical dwelling."