Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the diverse definitions of sustainability in higher education, focusing on the rhetorical uses of the term among various institutions within the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Design/methodology/approach: The paper begins with an overview of the term…

This essay presents a critical commentary on McCroskey et al.'s (2004) general model of instructional communication. In particular, five points are examined which make explicit and problematize the meta-theoretical assumptions of the model. Comments call attention to the limitations of the model and argue for a broader approach to…

This article examines Donald M. Murray's ideas about what he considered the essential solitude of all writing and what happens within that solitude. Murray, a pioneer of the process and modern expressivism movements in composition, identified a number of forces that he felt were at work within his mind whenever he wrote; this complicated aloneness…

In the last two decades, emotion has emerged as an important theme in discussions of design. However, there is no framework to date that encompasses both emotion and information design in a single theory. This dissertation was motivated by a lack of substantive theory that would allow design researchers and educators to model the relationships…

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…

If the idea is true that a theory is an abstract model that explains an objective phenomenon, where objective means anything that exists independent of individual human volition, then the best known example of such a rhetorical theory would be Lloyd Bitzer's famous rhetorical situation. Bitzer has argued that a rhetorical act comes into being when…

Proposes an alternative to the patriarchal bias in most traditional rhetorical theories--invitational rhetoric, grounded in the feminist principles of equality, immanent value, and self-determination. Argues that its purpose is to offer an invitation to understanding and that its communicative modes are the offering of perspectives and the…

Discusses the need for a model for technical documents that expresses the relationship between the various technical genres and their rhetorical contexts. Advocates the use of James Britton's model, with its criteria for classifying documents as well as its rationale for a scope and sequence for teaching technical writing. (SR)

Maintains that rhetoric is about the place of human action in the temporal continuum. Identifies critical elements of temporal organization for rhetorical scholars and investigates their potential as argument structures. Introduces a time-vocabulary model as a powerful and pragmatic tool for locating intratextual patterns of temporality. (SR)

Combines the ideas of Erasmus, the Renaissance humanist, and Bakhtin, the twentieth-century Russian philosopher, into a unified theory of business correspondence. Presents both a set of guidelines and a model for the practice of dialogical correspondence. (SR)

Describes a new pedagogical model in the teaching of technical writing based on "technical writing as enculturation." Examines this model's relationship to the workaday world and its roots in classical, especially Ciceronian, rhetoric. Argues that this model's roots in both the modern and classical world enhances its usefulness. (HB)

Compares the current use of prose models to those developed by the Greek Sophists. Outlines problems with using professional writing excerpts as examples of rhetorical modes when they were not written as such. Argues that composition texts based on prose models err by implying that all writing fits into modal categories. (HB)

Argues that meaning and persuasion are essential to public relations. Presents a model based on a rhetorical perspective, which addresses the impact of words and symbols, as a worthy candidate to be the dominant model in the field of public relations. (HB)

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…