Books>Rhetoric

Genre in a Changing World

Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions and educational settings. Genre in a Changing World provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, North and South America, were selected from the over 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies) held on the campus of UNISUL in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil in August 2007 — the largest gathering on genre to that date. The chapters also represent a wide variety of approaches including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, media and critical cultural studies, sociology, phenomenology, enunciation theory, the Geneva school of educational sequences, cognitive psychology, relevance theory, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, and schema theory. Sections are devoted to theoretical issues, studies of genres in the professions, studies of genre and media, teaching and learning genre, and writing across the curriculum. The broad selection of material in this volume displays the full range of contemporary genre studies and sets the ground for a next generation of work.

Un/Commonplaces: Redirecting Research and Curricula in Rhetoric and Writing Studies

This project examines commonplace notions of text and intertextuality, the idea that “writing is recursive,” the disciplinary identification and preoccupation with composition rather than writing, and the historical privileging of pedagogy over (and often in lieu of) curriculum development. In tracing these commonplaces, I also work to establish new directions for our research that are sometimes grounded in our own, often overlooked disciplinary theory, while also moving outside of the humanities in search of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology: A Methodological Investigation

To try and explain everything means to explain nothing.

The Immediacy of Rhetoric: Definitions, Illustrations, and Implications

Because of its complexity, 'kairos' is frequently explained in relation to other key terms of time and place.

Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory

A classical discussion of how to speak appropriately to audiences.

Designing for Lifeworlds: Genre and Activity in Information Systems Design and Evaluation

Increasingly, professional communicators design and evaluate information systems. Yet the dominant theoretical frameworks and research methodologies are limited in important ways.

The Rhetorical Dimensions of Cyberspace

The sophisticated command of language, it has been said, is what distinguishes the human being from all other species of animals. The power to create and employ linguistic signifiers in order to communicate with relative certainty (deconstructionist theory notwithstanding) that which is signified, and the power to co-create meaning within social contexts by using these linguistic tools are hallmarks of our humanity, for better or for worse, which have been throughout the ages subjects of intense interest, study, scholarship, and debate. It is through the use of these linguistic tools that we share experience and investigate the nature of our being, pose the questions who are we, what are we, and even why are we, speculate about the answers, then test and challenge claims to truth derived from our speculating/answering process. In many ways, we are bound on all sides of our conscious being by language and thus share basic needs to see and to understand the complex nature of that which binds us. The study of that complexity is called rhetoric, and those of us who call ourselves rhetoricians, no matter our personal theoretical preferences, hold to our belief that language is empowering, that the observation and analysis of oral and written communication can make us better communicators ourselves and can serve as pedagogical tools for empowering others.

Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives

This is the first in a series of online books sponsored by the WAC Clearinghouse. The chapters in this edited collection consider human activity and writing from three different perspectives: the role of writing in producing work and the economy; the role of writing in creating, maintaining, and transforming socially located selves and communities; and the role of writing formal education. The editors observe, 'The activity approaches to understanding writing presented in this volume give us ways to examine more closely how people do the work of the world and form the relations that give rise to the sense of selves and societies through writing, reading, and circulating texts. These essays provide major contributions to both writing research and activity theory as well as to the recently emerged but now robust research tradition that brings the two together.'

Basic Communication Theory

In the 1940's researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories devised a model of the process of human communication. This model consists of numeous elements.

The Author's Voice and the Reader's Role: An Analysis of Rhetorical Issues in How-to Texts

In mainstream computer applications such as Microsoft Word for Windows version 6.0, one will find a User's Guide included with the product. This User's Guide is a primary manual. It is included with the software application. A visit to any large bookstore will also reveal a large number of manuals about Word. Called secondary manuals, these manuals are not written by the same software development company that produced Word, nor are they included with Word. Both types of manuals are produced by technical writers and in many ways are similar in scope, content and cognitive strategies. However, in other respects some primary and secondary manuals are quite different, and that difference is the focus of this thesis.

User-Friendly Usability Reports: The Effect of Praise on Product-Improvement Efforts By Teams

A largely uncharted issue in usability is the effect that a particular style of usability report has on the motivation of the team whose work the report addresses. Recent work in cognitive science and social psychology offers evidence of an intimate interconnection among thought, emotion and motivation, with implications for usability reports as well as other forms of technical communication. In this preliminary study, fifteen triads of adult workers arranged materials on a prototype Web site for forty-five minutes. They were then subjected to negative, positive-and-negative, or neutral feedback conditions. Measures for motivation were post-treatment time on task, as well as individual self-reports on attitudes.

Aristotle's Rhetoric

Welcome to the online version of Aristotle's Rhetoric. These hypertext pages are based on the 1954 translation of noted classical scholar W. Rhys Roberts. In editing this text, every effort was made to preserve the original style of Roberts' print edition, though footnotes and parenthetical Greek phrasings were omitted due to the typographical restrictions of hypertext markup language. In addition, British punctuation rules were generally altered to conform to American style, though British spelling conventions were retained.

A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples

A comprehensive glossary of figures of speech.