An article on interethnic communication by J. Martin, M. Hecht, and L. Larkey in "Communication Monographs" (1994) suggests some important issues for understanding the potential impact of culture on communication practices--researchers might examine such variations in communication in future research. "Culture" is an ambiguous…

Argues that the phrase "think like a lawyer" confers a technical understanding of legal practices unavailable to ordinary people. Invites critics, in another approach, to examine ways laws are negotiated within rhetorical culture, then transformed into legal edicts. Studies the case of "Separate but Equal" doctrine to offer a…

Examining two very different contexts, a non-pastoral Quaker meeting and an AIDS hospice, offers insight into the complex nature of writing and literacy in spiritual contexts. Such a program is unapologetically comparative, seeking not the "right" view of spirituality but rather a view of how spirituality is expressed through language.…

While the debate over the role of metaphor in language, thought, and meaning is not new, in the past decade there has been a move among organizational scholars to use metaphors in critical research. This paper presents a review of one area of the existing literature on metaphor--that dealing primarily with the nonliteral view of metaphors within…

Noting that many instructors involved in teaching writing to students of differing cultural backgrounds seek to pinpoint the origin of the differences in communication between the form of written language conveyed to students and that which they use in their everyday language, this paper recommends ethnography to provide evidence as to what is…

Sees English as the language of power and status, with a gatekeeper role in the economics and political contexts of many countries. Discusses the English classroom as a site that breaks down the barriers between the school discourse and the world discourses. Discusses specific classrooms where teachers, students, or community members take the…

Noting that metaphor has become a multidisciplinary concern, this monograph examines the concept of metaphor in an educational perspective and describes and analyzes how certain specific metaphors are used in education. To define the concept, the monograph studies different theories of metaphor and previous definitions. To study how metaphor is…

This paper stems from a study of an eighth-grade writing club in an urban school. The study asked: How would students use a community-based set of texts to create identities for themselves and each other in relation to their communities, their schooling, and writing and to examine issues of personhood? The paper theorizes about what the notions of…

This paper contends that rhetoric is a force for social change. It also contends that the study of persuasive discourse--how it works, what gives it force--is rhetoric. Pointing out that in the past "persuasive discourse" has meant public discourse of various kinds but that nowadays scholars usually expand the category to include…