Since Fall 2004, the Undergraduate Catalog at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville has listed a two-part "Communicating through Writing" (WC) requirement, which includes two first-year composition courses and an upper-division course in one of thirty-five majors. Most students fulfill the former by enrolling in English 101 and 102, a…

Explains how the Sophistic tradition, an alternative to the Platonic-Aristotelian rhetorical tradition, provides the historical foundation for a paralogic rhetoric that treats discourse production and analysis as open-ended dialogic activities and not as a codifiable system. Argues that teachers must examine the powerful paralogic/hermeneutic…

At Southerland Institute (a pseudonym), in spite of the teacher's strong statements in favor of encouraging students to think for themselves and to work together, the writing program Southerland's teachers outline is formulaic with its required modes, prescribed five-paragraph-like essay form, and bell-curve grading practices. A new rhetorician…

Writing teachers should employ a pragmatic-eclectic approach to help freshman students become acquainted with as many writing models as possible. To privilege one model over the many others is to ignore the student's need for self- and world-discovery. The composition classroom has become the current center of critical reading and thinking skills,…

This paper proposes a set of new methods for intercultural rhetoric research that is context-sensitive and, in many instances, goes beyond mere text analysis. It considers changes in the field as intercultural rhetoric has moved from the EAP study of student essays to the study of writing in many disciplines and genres. New developments in text,…