Drawing attention to widespread instances of discourteous speech and hate discourse that permeate US and world culture, Alleen Pace Nilsen maintains that our imperative as educators is to teach "students the benefits of being civil to each other." She proposes some avenues for enriching students' understanding of the power of civil…

Over the past twenty years much work has been done by teachers of secondary English to describe and make explicit the semiotic resources used to access and critique the discourses of powerful institutions such as schooling. At the same time, however, there has been a growing recognition that the rhetorical resources needed for adolescents to…

Proposes that empirical disposition toward the dialog of informal discourse (the Vernacular Rhetoric model) provides a deeper understanding of public opinion than either the Rational Deliberation or the Opinion Poll models. Discusses an outsider's experience witnessing vernacular discourse, the rhetorical locus of public opinion in vernacular…

Shows some of the connections between the social structure of the law and the everyday writing of marketplace participants. Sets out a legal dispute resolution framework and a classification of the types of liability-prone prose. Suggests a rhetorical model that facilitates an expanded perspective of the business writer. Offers an approach for…

Explains the rhetorical implications of actions and states in various models of procedural discourse and in specific writer strategies. Considers more flexible alternatives to the "streamlined-step" model. States that one goal of technical communicators may be to help ensure that systems are designed, developed, implemented, and supported with…

Sought evidence for or against the assumption that significant intercultural variation exists in the rhetorical preferences of national cultures through contrastive analysis of research articles in English (n=36) and Spanish (n=36) on business and economics written by native speakers of each language. (45 references) (Author/CK)