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…

This report describes the development of a learning community in a fifth-grade writers' workshop across one school year and two girls' participation in the learning community. The report examines ways in which teacher-researchers' and students' notions and actions regarding collaboration changed; it also describes the curriculum in the writers'…

Writing teachers should draw on their own use of collaborative techniques in attempting to develop similar support systems within the writing classrooms and in the larger university community. Teacher awareness of the problems that faced them in their past attempts at collaboration should inform them concerning their propensity to oversimplify the…

One of the main problems with higher education is that curriculums, both past and present, objectify and marginalize the experiences of people of color and thus reduce diversity in the graduate and professional school populations. African American, Asians, Hispanics, and other minorities are studied in many college-level classes only as an…

Two different groups of sixth graders were studied as one discussed Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach" and the other discussed Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer." In interviews, students from the two groups offered very different assessments of their experiences, despite the fact that the teacher was the same. The Dahl students,…

It is necessary to continue efforts to adapt the composition curriculum to the diverse needs of the student population. The writing process, even if seen as recursive, varies from student to student and from situation to situation. Students must also be shown that the very conventions and forms of academic writing are culturally situated. The…

A study analyzed the degree to which an African American verbal tradition (Black English Vernacular) survives in the writing of Black students across a generational time span. A total of 867 essays from the 1984 and the 1988/89 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were subjected to primary trait and holistic scoring analysis, and…

Rhetoric scholars must open space for the unheard counter-stories of American Indians, which exist alongside the echo of American-ness that implicates all people in this country. As the scholarly discourse of the academy itself is situated within a framework of the American narrative of conquest and imperialism, scholars must recognize that they…

At Massachusetts Bay Community College a course was designed to create a transition from the process-based basic writing course to the traditional required freshman English course. WTG 100 was designed as an inquiry into academic writing, where students would learn about the various discourse conventions and expectations they would encounter as…

Content area writers need a method of operating that integrates the ways of science but without using the proofs used by specialists. Two concepts from the New Rhetoric--S. Toulmin's "warrants" and C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca's "universal audience"--might enable English professors to serve a regulative or balancing…

The category of the social increasingly informs the way people think about rhetoric. The foregrounding of the social has a two-fold origin in an uneasy relationship between poststructuralism and sociolinguistics. Poststructuralism has provided a strong version of the hypothesis that language is determinative. Sociolinguistics has established that…

Relies on grief literature to develop a heuristic model of patterned stages of national mourning. Applies the model to lend insight into print mediated accounts of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. (NKA)

This book provides a collection of 32 Technology Departments from the "Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy" covering the 1998 to 2002 volume years, which examines critical aspects of literacy in the new information age and the complex issues surrounding the use of new technologies. Articles in the book build on specific examples…

The city is described as a place where strangers meet, and that is also what happens in the public space of the composition classroom. If students share anything, it is an awareness of the need to negotiate the institutional demands of the freshman writing class and an invitation to enter the public forum where the issues can be divisive,…

In research on classroom discourses, case studies have been used to describe the dynamics of effective and ineffective instruction. In other research, quantitative studies have identified global features of such discourse. The research reported here combined the advantages of both methods, investigating how generally effective classroom discourse…