While social values outside of academia are changing from nationalism to globalization, much of English studies remains entrenched in nationalist discourses. Editor Bruce McComiskey and his contributors argue that English studies must shift from a national (petrified, zombified) to a global (cosmopolitan, planetary) orientation in order to remain…

Indoctrination is an ongoing concern in education, especially in debates about moral education. One approach to this issue is to come up with a rational procedure that can robustly justify potential items of moral education content. I call this the 'rationalistic justification project'. Michael Hand's recent book, "A Theory of Moral…

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…

This paper presents a critical review of the cross-cultural writing styles in the light of contrastive rhetoric approach established by Kaplan in 1966. Although Kaplan compared different writing styles depending on the culture each language was attached to, his comparison was criticized by some scholars the prominent one of which is Conor 1996.…

This response to Samuelsson's typology for assessing deliberative democracy in classroom discussions views his analysis through an equity lens. It offers Young's model of communicative democracy as a resource and argues that incorporating that model's emphasis on greeting, rhetoric, and storytelling into the typology can help to promote more…

PowerPoint has received much criticism regarding excessive use of text and the lack of contact with the audience. Why presenters use PowerPoint in this way has not been studied so far. Our study using interviews with beginning and advanced presenters shows that some use the program as a speaking note and as a means to draw the attention away from…

As compositionists have constructed a critical discourse on whiteness, they have tacitly theorized how students' bodies can stifle efforts to both reflect on unfamiliar beliefs and critique their own beliefs. While Composition's latent theories of "embodied censorship" challenge the notion that rationality or empathy can enable…

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook "Modern Rhetoric" (1949-1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a…

For learners of Japanese, a conundrum arises at university level as they are expected to be able to shift between direct and indirect language in various writing tasks. The apparent indirectness in inductive language is required of regular writing tasks such as response essays and e-mails, while the directness of deductive academic writing, a…

Debates regarding higher education's relevance and responsiveness to societal exigencies have in the past three decades resulted in the development of programs with leitmotifs such as "service learning," "problem-based learning," and "civic engagement" (e.g., "Scholarship on Teaching and Learning," McNair…

This article presents selective findings from an ongoing study that investigates rhetorical differences in business letter writing between Vietnamese students taking an English for Specific Purposes course in Vietnam and business professionals. Rhetorical analyses are based on two corpora, namely, scenario (N = 20) and authentic business letters…

This literature review serves to inform the reader on current literature on Contrastive Rhetoric (CR), with specific reference to teaching writing to Japanese students of English. It will examine the historical developments of CR and its present significance before then looking at possible reasons for unique characteristics of Japanese L2 writers…

This study investigated the effect of direct instruction in rhetorical analysis on students' critical thinking abilities, including knowledge, skills, and dispositions. The researcher investigated student perceptions of the effectiveness of argument mapping; Thinker's Guides, based on Paul's model of critical thinking; and Socratic questioning.…

Phishing e-mails deceive individuals into giving out personal information which may then be utilized for identity theft. One particular type, the Personal Solicitation E-mail (PSE) mimics personal letters--modern perversions of "ars dictaminis" (the classical art of letter writing). In this article, I determine and discuss 19 appeals common to the…

This article describes an assignment piloted in spring of 2008 called the Rhetorical Analysis Project, which required students to analyze three different texts addressing a common issue, compose an argument about the representation of that issue as illustrated by those texts, and revise that argument to match a rhetorical model they chose from…