Rhetorical Choices Research Articles

Between law and custom: praising the prince and representing subjecthood in early modern Venice☆

AbstractSince the early fifteenth century, cities under Venetian rule used to pay homage to each newly elected doge by means of ambassadors tasked with delivering congratulatory orations praising him. Historical sources describe this ceremonial as a custom (consuetudine), namely a long‐established practice acquiring force of law through its constant and uninterrupted observance by a community of individuals viewing it as mandatory. By promoting a closer analysis of both Venetian and local legislation on congratulatory embassies, this article questions this reading. The aim is to highlight the role of written legislation in shaping the rhetorical choices made by subject orators and in (re)defining the performative function fulfilled by the periodical homage paid to the republican prince.

‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, or Affect and Ethics in a Spectacle of Distant Suffering: 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War Documentaries

This article explores the rhetorical interplay of affect and ethics in mediated violence within war documentaries, focusing on four films that portray the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war: Motherland (2022), 45 Days: The Fight for a Nation (2021), Invisible Republic (2022), and 1489 (2023). The analysis primarily employs a rhetorical method, while the theoretical framework builds on scholarship from three different areas of inquiry, thus engaging with Judith Butler’s philosophy of ethics, Wendy S. Hesford’s rhetorical theory of spectacle of distant suffering, and Sinnerbrink’s and Rossouw’s ideas on ethical experience through film. The article deploys as a leading trope Emmanuel Levinas’ ‘face’—a concept that communicates both the precarious life of the Other and the interdiction on violence—to gauge the rhetorical gesture in the establishment of relationality necessary for cinematic ethics to be transformational. Finally, the article offers theoretical propositions to better comprehend the intricate entanglements between affect, ethics, and war and their manifestation in the rhetorical choices of war documentary filmmakers.

Examination of state-level school safety data dashboard characteristics

Choices made on data visualizations guide how users make meaning of the information presented. This research investigates design decisions made on 115 state-level dashboards reporting school safety data. Using pre-determined codes drawn from a framework of visualization rhetoric, dashboard characteristics were described and analyzed. Analysis demonstrates that school safety dashboards vary significantly in types of school safety data included as well as how such data are presented. Most dashboards lack specific interpretative text or narration, meaning the messages and stories communicated by dashboards are influenced largely by choices in data included, how it is visually represented, and the interactivity provided to users. The choices craft divergent stories about school safety for dashboard users—including, but not limited to, those that foreground student behavior as the central threat, those that present school practices as problematic, and those that center community creation—which may shape public discourse around school safety. In concert, rhetorical choices reflect different perspectives on safety, students, and schools.

Essentializing Muslims in Ecuadorian Journalism

The relationship between Latin America and the so-called ‘Muslim World’ is a tenuous one, as public perceptions of Muslims are generally quite negative despite consistent, typically economically beneficial historical and contemporary immigration from the Middle East. Indeed, despite Muslims constituting less than one-tenth of one percent (0.011%) of the total population in the predominantly Catholic country of Ecuador, which is located in northwestern South America, anti-Muslim sentiments are increasing both in frequency and severity. As a result, this article contextualizes the reality and challenges of Muslims in Ecuador by offering a thematic analysis of almost one-thousand articles concerning Muslims in El Comercio, the Quito-based, leading newspaper of Ecuador. Two subcorpora were created and are referenced here, one containing article titles (3,095 words) and one containing article content (543,389 words). By utilizing a computationally-driven, mixed methods approach to extract and examine these articles, this analysis is couched within the understanding that discourses surrounding Muslims overwhelmingly perpetuate and reinforce negative stereotypes through deliberate rhetorical choices.

Examining teachers’ rhetorical choices

Abstract This study examines the role of disaffiliative reactions, specifically disagreement, in teacher-student interactions. Disagreement is often seen as confrontational and disruptive, but this research investigates whether it is a dispreferred act in these interactions. By analyzing teacher-student interactions and considering students’ final achievement scores, the study explores how teachers respond to students’ arguments. The paper specifically examines the context in which teachers contradict students’ arguments when requesting a reconsideration of their scores. While destructive responses are typically considered face-threatening, the findings suggest that they are the preferred linguistic behavior for teachers in these situations. This is because a constructive or affiliative reaction may potentially undermine the teachers’ fair assessment policy and authoritative power. The study also reveals that the severity of disagreements varies based on the tone of the students’ justifications. When students include compliments in their justifications, teachers tend to respond with mitigated disagreement, whereas openly critical justifications are more likely to elicit aggravated disagreement from teachers. The study illustrates that different cultures may have varying norms and expectations regarding disagreement and confrontational behavior.

Hedges and boosters in L2 (Czech) Master's theses and published research articles: A contrastive analysis

AbstractThis article studies the use of lexical hedges and boosters in English‐medium Master's theses by L2 (Czech) graduates in English language and literature programmes. Drawing on the metadiscourse framework and adopting a corpus‐based approach, the study analyses the frequency, realisations, and function of hedges and boosters in a corpus of 48 Master's theses in linguistics, literature, and education. The results are also compared to a reference corpus representing L1 English published academic discourse in the same disciplines. The analysis shows that the Master's theses of Czech students use fewer hedges and slightly more boosters than L1 expert writers and thus display a somewhat less cautious stance. The results also indicate that Czech graduates show a strong preference for content‐oriented hedges and emphatics as boosters. This suggests that the rhetorical choices of Czech graduates bear features of learner discourse and may be affected by the merging of L1 and L2 academic conventions and the power relations between the student‐writer and the examiners inherent to the Master's thesis. Based on these findings, the article draws some implications for L2 writing pedagogy.

How do students use ChatGPT as a writing support?

AbstractEducators and researchers are interested in ways that ChatGPT and other generative AI tools might move beyond the role of “cheatbot” and become part of the network of resources students use for writing. We studied how high school students used ChatGPT as a writing support while writing arguments about topics like school mascots. We asked: What did students prompt ChatGPT to do? And how did students take up ChatGPT's responses to those prompts? We used Flower and Hayes' writing model to analyze screencasts of students interacting with ChatGPT and one another as they planned, drafted, and reviewed their arguments. Our data show that while planning and drafting, students primarily asked ChatGPT for ideas and then built upon those ideas to develop their own arguments. While reviewing, they generally used ChatGPT as they might use Grammarly or other editing tools. Students also compared their writing with that of ChatGPT, which allowed them to identify their unique writing voices and build meta‐level understandings of rhetorical choices and effects. Our study indicates that ChatGPT can become a part of a social, distributed model of writing, and that students can use ChatGPT as a resource for writing without sidestepping the processes of planning, drafting, and reviewing.

George H.W. Bush’s unexceptional moment: rhetorical casuistry following the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day

In the fall of the Soviet Union and resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, many Americans doubtless saw the realization of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War strategy. However, it was not Reagan who was tasked with responding to this momentous occasion, but George H.W. Bush. Rather than exult over communism’s failure in the USSR, Bush’s response was careful, measured, and surprisingly lacking in the American exceptionalist bluster that characterized his predecessor’s approach. This essay evaluates Bush’s rhetorical choice as a case study in what Kenneth Burke called “casuistic stretching”: introducing new principles while remaining faithful to the old. I argue that Bush’s casuistic stretching drew from core narratives of the American founding to reconceptualize the United States’ relationship with Russia’s fledgling democracy. While this choice may have assuaged the international community, domestic appeal for Bush’s rhetorical strategy was ultimately blunted by his political proximity to Reagan, a situation that can be better understood using Stephen Skowronek’s theory of political time. Thus, my larger argument is that political time provides insight into the limits of casuistic stretching for presidential rhetoric. Casuistic stretching, as Bush’s example illustrates, requires sensitivity to the not only the particulars of a situation, but also the competing and contingent hierarchies of value that exist within the broader moment of political time.

A Critique on Rhetorical Devices Used by Pakistani Politicians to Increase their Vote Bank A Critical Discourse Analysis of Urdu Newspapers' Headline

This research study has investigated how Pakistani politicians use rhetoric in their addresses during the election campaigns 2024 to persuade their voters. The sole purpose of this research is to discover the dimensions and power of Rhetorical devices used by Pakistani politicians for their personal objectives. It has explored how politicians grab the attention of the public by using rhetorical choices in their discourses. The best and most frequent uses of Rhetorical devices by politicians are antithesis, allusion repetition, hyperbole, metaphor amplification, alliteration, parallelism, symbolism, allegory, and imagery. The current research study employs the Power, Ideology, and Manipulation Identification (PIMI) model, a novel problem‐ oriented tool designed for the systematic examination of political discourse. This model integrates and adapts elements from two established analytical frameworks (Chilton & Schäffner, 1997; van Dijk, 2006) and is rooted in the theories and methodologies of Critical DiscoursemAnalysis (CDA).

Enlivening Wit

The birth of such innovative newspapers as The Tatler and The Spectator enables the readers to observe and join the public debate through a new intellectual lens. The use of Latin epigrams opening every issue of The Spectator emphasizes not only the close interest in classical literature and culture, but also the communicative strategy focused on the celebration of wit through the moral paradigms of ancient Roman poets, at a time of the rise of modern public opinion. The poetical and rhetorical choices of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, along with other Latin poetry enthusiasts such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, bitingly denounce social hypocrisies and contradictions through parody and mockery. Their purpose was to rebut conventional behavior through the permeating force of Enlightenment wit inspired by cleverness, satire and sarcasm.

"Identity" in the discursive practice of contemporary socio-political movements

The rhetoric of contemporary socio-political movements often formulates its demands and arguments using the word ,,identity”, despite the lack of its clear definition. The article aims to analyze the additional meanings that ,,identity” acquires in the discursive practice of modern socio-political movements such as feminism, the LGBT movement, and environmental activism, as well as to examine the role of ,,identity” in these discourses. Research materials are classic works related to each socio-political movement. As the result the paper claimes that in feminism, the LGBT movement, and environmental activism, the word ,,identity” serves as a tool to attribute importance to aspects previously considered secondary - whether it be women, gender, or biological organisms. The search for the reasons behind such a rhetorical choice implies immersing into the theory of psychologisation of modern society (J. De Vos) and the theory of psychological power (M. Foucault).

Author mentions in science news reveal widespread disparities across name-inferred ethnicities

Abstract Media outlets play a key role in spreading scientific knowledge to the public and raising the profile of researchers among their peers. Yet, how journalists choose to present researchers in their stories is poorly understood. Using a comprehensive data set of 223,587 news stories from 288 US outlets reporting on 100,486 research papers across all areas of science, we investigate whether authors’ ethnicities, as inferred from names, are associated with whether journalists explicitly mention them by name. We find substantial disparities in mention rates across ethnic names. Researchers with non-Anglo names, especially those with East Asian and African names, are significantly less likely to be mentioned in their news stories, even with extensive controls for author prestige, semantic content, news outlets, publication venues, and research topics. The disparities are not fully explained by affiliation locations, suggesting that pragmatic factors play only a partial role. Furthermore, among US-based authors, journalists more often use authors’ institutions instead of names when referring to non-Anglo-named authors, suggesting that journalists’ rhetorical choices are also key. Overall, this study finds evidence of ethnic disparities in how often researchers are described in the media coverage of their research, likely affecting thousands of non-Anglo-named scholars in our data alone.

Driving in Cars with Noise

Driving in Cars with Noise

‘Be Creative and Have Fun’: elementary‐aged children's digital and embodied composing in science

AbstractA team of literacy, science, and theatre educators have been working to engage children in an urban public school system in the United States through embodied performances, where students embody and dramatise science ideas. This study focuses on one fourth‐grade classroom when instruction was done remotely due to Covid‐19. Children in the class were asked to compose videos of themselves acting out and/or exploring science phenomena and concepts, and we analysed the affordances of these multimodal compositions. We situate the need for this study in claims from the Next Generation Science Standards that literacy skills are necessary to build and communicate science knowledge. In doing so, we center social semiotics perspectives that conceive of composition broadly as production‐oriented processes drawing from various semiotic resources. The multimodal compositions in Mr. M's science class included both primarily embodied compositions and primarily digital compositions, and we elaborate on one focal example of each in the findings. Intertwined affordances of the focal children and their classmates' multimodal science compositions include opportunities to creatively engage with and negotiate science ideas, to draw from personal and social knowledge during meaning‐making, and to intentionally make rhetorical choices.

Protectors of liberal democracy or defenders of past authoritarianism?: authoritarian legacies, collective identity, and the far-right protest in South Korea

ABSTRACT Between 2016 and 2019, South Korean conservatives organized a movement called the T’aegŭkki Rallies to oppose the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye and to protest against President Moon Jae-in’s administration. This movement is puzzling for its timing, demographic composition, and rhetorical choices. Through in-depth interviews with rally participants and non-participants, I illustrate that a collective identity, shaped by authoritarian socialization, strengthened with positive memories about an authoritarian past, combined to mobilize rally participants. Curiously, rally participants saw themselves as defenders of liberal democracy, protecting South Korea against progressive forces seeking to turn the country into a communist state. However, my interviews revealed that they were, in fact, trying to protect the authoritarian past. In this manner, South Korea’s authoritarian legacy entrenches ideological polarization and hampers common understandings of democratic citizenship.

Empathetic Language in LLMs under Prompt Engineering: A Comparative Study in the Legal Field

The demand for empathetic conversations increases with conversational AIs’ rise and exponentially spreading applications. In areas like law and healthcare, where professional and empathetic conversations are essential, conversational AIs must strive to retain the correctness of information and logic while improving on empathetic language use. When addressing such an issue, we focus on linguistic empathy, relating only to syntactic and rhetoric choices in language while disregarding the emotional aspect of influence. By performing this study, we are interested in finding whether current open-sourced Large Language Models (LLMs) can match human experts in the legal field by using empathetic language while not compromising facts and logic in responses. We compare responses from three open-sourced LLMs under four prompting strategies with the expert responses. In the comparison, we use metrics from three aspects: text and semantic similarity, factual consistency, and ten rules of linguistic empathy from previous research literature. After statistical tests, the comparison results show that language models can use empathetic language without compromising the default knowledge base of LLMs when properly prompt-engineered. To accomplish this, additional domain knowledge is still needed to match factually. The data supporting this study is publicly available at huggingface.co/datasets/RCODI/empathy-prompt and code is available at github.com/RCODI-ConversationalAI/Empathy-Prompt.

Echo and Drag as Resistance: Coloniality, Queerness, and Practices of Reading Student Texts

In this article, a postcolonial theorist and a queer studies scholar reconsider the role of student resistance in Writing Studies’ social justice turn, arguing for a way of reading student texts that accounts for why students might choose to take up social justice or not in their own writing. Through examples from their ongoing research projects, the writers discuss how students’ resistance surfaced not as visible and explicit signs of a changed epistemological framework or political perspective, but as a series of normative rhetorical choices that made space for more transgressive or subversive possibilities.

Epistolary precepts and the expressions of friendship in More’s 1535 letter to Bonvisi

The essay examines More’s 1535 letter to Antonio Bonvisi. It compares the epistle, as a whole and in its salutation and valediction, with the humanist epistolary conventions expressed by Erasmus and discovers that More often, but not always, ignores Erasmian precepts. The essay argues that More’s rhetorical choices deepen our understanding of his enactment of friendship in the letter and of More’s self-understanding near the end of his life.

Is stylistics a hard science? Intersubjective positioning in Language and Literature research article abstracts between 2013 and 2022

The extent of authorial intervention in research writing is partly a personal expression of individuality but largely an attempt to demonstrate disciplinary affiliation and attain disciplinary recognition in the form of publication and citation. To reach this goal, writers draw upon discourse practices and rhetorical patterns that circulate within the discourse community. Using Hyland's model of interaction in academic discourse, the present study explores patterns of personal and interpersonal intrusion (aka stance and engagement) in abstracts of research article by stylisticians. The objective is to examine whether stylisticians' textual and rhetorical choices intersect more with the disciplinary practices of the soft or hard disciplines. To this end, I use the LancsBox corpus analysis tool to compile a corpus of 181 research article abstracts drawn from the Language and Literature journal, which publishes theoretical and empirical research in stylistics, and search for frequencies of stance markers and engagement features in the corpus. Findings from the corpus-assisted analysis are set against frequent patterns of academic interaction in the soft and hard disciplines in order to determine if stylistics can be claimed to be a hard science.

The Transcendental Grounds of Novalis’ Conception of Life as Poetical Work

Abstract The aim of the present paper is to show Novalis’ complete belonging to the history of transcendental philosophy by bringing out the connection between his conception of poetry and the issue of transcendental imagination in Kant and Fichte. Given that solving this problem is the main issue around which Novalisian thought is structured, an attempt is made to consider the writing style adopted by the author as necessary to fulfill this task, and not as an arbitrary rhetorical choice. The connection between poetry and philosophy is then explored in the practical role it has to play among human beings, namely, that of revealing the meaning of the whole reality as a manifestation of the absolute. Thus, life itself is properly displayed by the singular existences as absolute creativity, such as that of poetical creations.