Rhetorical Choices Research Articles

A Win–Lose Situation: Historical Context, Ethos, and Rhetorical Choices in John Muir's 1908 “Hetch Hetchy Valley” Article

In January 1908, Club Bulletin publishes an article by its president, John Muir, entitled, The Hetch Hetchy This valley lies in the northeast corner of the newly established Yosemite National Park and is almost identical to the main Yosemite Valley. San Francisco city planners have argued that the valley should be dammed to create a reservoir that will supply their city with clean water. Muir passionately retorts in his article that the Hetch Hetchy Valley must not be dammed; it must be preserved, simply because it possesses intrinsic value as a source of recreation and spiritual renewal. rhetorical choices in this article are greatly influenced by the historical events leading up to the dam proposal. fight over the dam project becomes a representation of the preservationist, conservationist, and industrialist sentiments of the day. power John Muir exercises in influencing the federal government's choice to approve or reject the proposal rests in his ability to influence national opinion regarding the project. This ability to influence is determined in part by his ethos as perceived by his three audiences: preservationist, conservationist, and industrialist. Muir chooses to target his sympathetic preservationist audience and in doing so makes textual choices that vilify his opponents while attempting to foment the passions of his supporters. fight becomes a bitter one by the time the darn project finally receives approval in 1913. However, in 1908, when the article is written, the battle is just starting to heat up. Historical Context John Muir was, and is, a widely read field naturalist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838, he moves with his family to a farm in Wisconsin when he is eleven. Muir studies natural science at the University of Wisconsin for two years in the early 1860s but does not complete a degree. He is interested in both technology and nature, but an industrial accident in Indianapolis nearly costs him his eyesight in 1867 and leads to a pivotal decision. Convalescing from blindness with a brochure of Yosemite Valley in his lap, Muir writes to his lifelong friend, Mrs. Jeanne Carr, As soon as I got out into Heaven's light I bade adieu to all my mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God (qtd. in Bade 155, Vol. 1). Muir's renewed devotion to nature studies begins with a 1,000mile walk from Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find ... (Thousand-Mile Walk 1). following year Muir sails to San Francisco and eventually settles in Yosemite Valley, where he is based for the next five years. He spends much of his time ranging the mountains and high meadows recording botanical and geological observations, as well as his well-known wilderness epiphanies (Cohen 28-88). In 1874, Muir publishes a series of articles entitled Studies in the Sierra that launches a successful writing career (Wolfe 88). Also during this period, he is able to play host and Yosemite guide to such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Asa Gray, and Joseph LeConte (Muir, Wilderness 163, 251; Fox 20). By the 1880s, Muir is publishing articles about forest destruction in the Nevada through the influential Century magazine. Due largely to the work of Muir and the Century's associate editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, Congress votes to create Yosemite National Park in 1890 (Vickery 76). In 1892, Muir, two Berkeley professors, and a San Francisco attorney start the Club, modeled after the Appalachian Mountain Club. Muir is nominated president, a role he enthusiastically fulfills until his death in 1914 (Fox 107). In the spring of 1903, on a political tour through the West, President Theodore Roosevelt requests that Muir show him Yosemite. Muir and Roosevelt spend four days camping under the stars, vigorously touring the valley on horseback, and striking up a lasting friendship (Roosevelt 321). …

On Wonderful Machines: The Transmission of Mechanical Knowledge by Jesuits*

This paper attempts to draw attention to non-conventional but popular modes of transmitting scientific knowledge in Jesuit institutions in the 17th century. The particular case study focuses on a fictive dialogue between Galileo, Mersenne and Paulus Guldin on the power needed for moving the huge globe of the earth by mechanical means. The dialogue was written by a Jesuit mathematician named Paolo Casati (1617–1707) and published in 1655. Apparently, Casati offers his readers an idealized representation of a real event that took place at the Collegio Romano, where explanation of mathematical problems in a kind of public ritual used to take place once or twice a month in presence of philosophers, theologians, visitors and students. My analysis of some parts of Casati’s Terra Machinis Mota exemplifies the Jesuits’ success to accommodate the project of Renaissance practical mathematicians – the fusion of the pseudo-Aristotelian interest in machines with the mathematical approach of Archimedes – to the framework of the traditional mixed mathematical science that legitimized it and spread it among wide audiences. Casati’s text demonstrates how at least some Jesuit mathematicians were ready to adopt Galileo’s early mechanical project. However, moving from an analysis of the contents of mechanical knowledge popularized in this text to its analysis on the rhetorical level reveals the unbearable tensions by which Jesuit scientific culture was actually torn. The rhetorical choice to construct a representation of a seemingly friendly dialogue between the quasi-heretic Galileo, the Minim friar Mersenne and the suspected character of the Jesuit Guldin reveals the strategies by which Galileo’s heretic image was tamed in order to fit the Jesuits’ needs to construct themselves an enlightened public image.

Civility as rhetorical enactment: The John Ashcroft “debates” and Burke's theory of form

This essay analyzes Senate debate over the nomination of John Ashcroft for Attorney General using Kenneth Burke's theory of form in an effort to understand how (in)civility is created through the argumentative process. Personal attacks are nearly always rhetorically justified by senators who make them: Senators carefully create and then satisfy an appetite for incivility. This conclusion indicates that the norm of civility constrains floor rhetoric, but that civility needs to be rethought as a rhetorical enactment in relation to multiple audiences, rather than simply as a set of unwritten rules. Such an approach foregrounds audience fragmentation as an influence on Congressional speech and conceptualizes civility as a rhetorical choice made by speakers within the constraints of normative behaviors.

Metapahor, Ambiguity, and Motive in Evolutionary Biology

This article analyzes the power of ambiguous metaphors to present scientific novelty. Its focus is a series of papers by the prominent population biologist W. D. Hamilton in which he redefined the meaning of biological altruism. In particular, the article draws on Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad to examine why suggestions of motive are so pervasive in Hamilton’s representation of genetic evolution and what epistemological consequences result from this rhetorical choice. Specifically, the metaphorical language of motive allows Hamilton to represent genes ambiguously and simultaneously as both the agents of evolutionary action and as the agency or mechanism by which organism agents act. The textual ambiguity generated by the agent-agency metaphors both reflects and constructs a conceptual ambiguity in the way evolutionary processes are theorized. Analysis of Hamilton’s rhetoric thus suggests the productive function of ambiguous metaphors in highly technical scientific texts.

Lost in the Translation: Shifting Claims in the Migration of a Research Technique

Research techniques are sometimes seen as the atoms or essential building blocks of research projects: invariant, inviolable steps that are applied the same way, no matter what the socioeconomic characteristics of the environments in which they are deployed. That is, they are often seen as arhetorical, and rhetorical choice and agency play a role only in how they are arranged and implemented. In this article, I draw on the notion of translation to provide an alternate account, one that emphasizes the rhetorical nature of research techniques without overdetermining the influence of the environments in which they developed. To illustrate, I examine how one research technique—prototyping—has been translated to fit four different socioeconomic environments, undergoing significant changes in claims and implementation while maintaining enough coherence to be seen as a unitary technique. Finally, I argue that the notion of translation provides us with an account that emphasizes the rhetorical nature of research and our agency as researchers while still acknowledging how techniques constrain our work.

Inventing a voice: the rhetoric of American first ladies of the twentieth century

Chapter 1 Editor's Introduction: First Ladies' Fundamental Rhetorical Choices: When to Speak? What to Say? When to Remain Silent? Chapter 2 1 First Lady: A Site of American Womanhood Chapter 3 2 Ida Saxton McKinley: Indomitable Spirit or Autocrat of the Sick Bed Chapter 4 3 Edith Kermit Roosevelt: First Lady, First Mommy Chapter 5 4 Helen Herron Taft: Opportunity and Ambition Chapter 6 5 Ellen Axson Wilson: A Rhetorical Reassessment of a Forgotten First Lady Chapter 7 6 Edith Bolling Galt Wilson: Actions Speak Louder than Chapter 8 7 Florence Kling Harding: Bridging Traditional and Modern Rhetorical Roles Chapter 9 8 Grace Goodhue Coolidge: Articulating Virtue Chapter 10 9 Lou Henry Hoover: Mining the Possibilities as Leader and First Lady Chapter 11 10 Eleanor Roosevelt: A Rhetorical Reconstruction of First Ladydom Chapter 12 11 Bess Wallace Truman: The Boss from Independence Chapter 13 12 Mamie Geneva Doud Eisenhower: Reflecting the Mood of the Nation Chapter 14 13 Jacqueline Kennedy: Rhetorical Construction of Camelot Chapter 15 14 Lady Bird Johnson: Making of a Public First Lady with Private Influence Chapter 16 15 Pat Nixon: Wisdom to Know the Difference Chapter 17 16 Betty Ford: A Certain Comfort From a Candid First Lady Chapter 18 17 Rosalynn Carter: Crafting a Presidential Partnership Rhetorically Chapter 19 18 Nancy Reagan: Leading Lady, Supporting Actress, or Bit Player Chapter 20 19 Barbara Bush: Her Rhetorical Development and Appeal Chapter 21 20 Hillary Rodham Clinton: Using Her Vital Voice Chapter 22 Epilogue: Laura Bush: Using the Magic of Words to Educate and Advocate

(So) What if it's All Just Rhetoric?

This essay reviews Professor Eugene Garver's For The Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief. Partly through legal examples such as Brown v. Board of Education, Garver explores the role of ethos in persuasion and develops an ethics of practical reason, which he applies to judicial opinions. This review discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Garver's approach, and uses his argument to consider why legal academics are often hostile to the rhetorical dimensions of the law. The essay concludes that Garver makes a persuasive case for treating rhetorical choices as ethical choices properly subject to ethical criticism, but that such criticism will not alter judicial practice very much. It also concludes that legal academics should not be so hostile to rhetoric, especially because much of what we do counts as rhetoric. Nor should we be bothered by the fact (and it is a fact) that much of what counts in law rests on rhetorical strategies that go beyond logos. That fact implies that we do not have a comparative advantage in teaching and analyzing all aspects of law, but it does not imply that we have no such advantage. Rather than criticizing rhetoric, it would be better to acknowledge explicitly that law and rhetoric are inseparable, and that if we have a comparative advantage over other disciplines it lies largely in the logic of the law. We therefore should be content to be partisans of logic. To the extent we have a comparative advantage, we have limited influence over the direction of the law; to the extent we seek such influence, we are likely to lose our comparative advantage.

Teaching Language Awareness in Rhetorical Choice

This article introduces an IText system the authors built to enhance student practice in language awareness within commonly taught written genres (e.g., self-portraits, profiles, scenic writing, narratives, instructions, and arguments). The system provides text visualization and analysis that seek to increase students’ sensitivity to the rhetorical and whole-text implications of the small runs of language they read and write. The authors describe the way the system can create possibilities for classroom discourse and discussion about student writing that seem harder to reproduce in traditional writing classrooms. They also describe the limitations of the current system for wide-scale use and its future prospects.

Seduction theory and the recovery of feminine aesthetics: Implications for rhetorical criticism

This essay addresses applications of rhetorical criticism to seduction theory. Recently recovered and articulated by post‐modern and neo‐sophistic theorists, critics judge seductive aesthetics both liberating and subversive insofar as they lessen woman's dependency upon the patriarchal scripts of logocentric rhetorics. Seductive stratagems include affective appeals, teasing, withdrawing, and a demeanor mirroring charm, allure, and enchantment. This essay addresses issues relative to rhetorical criticism and the interpretative value of seduction theory as a critical lens. Specifically, we explicate seduction theory and its critical bearing. We analyze, by way of illustration, Hillary Rodham Clinton's use of seductive appeals as an “undecided” candidate for the United States Senate. The First Lady's forestalled candidacy, listening tour, and identity management, we posit, reveal rhetorical choices constituted in seduction theory.

The Craft of Writing: Breaking Conventions

When writers think of conventions as falling along a continuum from syntactic to rhetorical choices rather than as absolute rules, they better understand the roles conventions can play in communicating meaning. Using examples from popular publications, Cornelia Paraskevas argues for productively flouting conventions.

Quotation and Self-Fashioning in Margaret Paston’s Household Letters

Quotation and Self-Fashioning in Margaret Paston’s FFousehold Letters Valerie Creelman St. Mary’s University T he private co rrespo n d en ce an d papers of the Pastons, a fif­ teenth-century gentry family of Norfolk, England, have been an invalu­ able primary source for medieval scholars in piecing together the social, cultural, economic, and domestic details of a gentlewoman’s life in the late medieval period.1 O f particular interest have been the letters of Margaret Paston, whose correspondence represents the largest preserved collection of female-authored letters by a gentlewoman in late medieval England. Despite this abundance of material, few scholars have moved beyond the historical and philological interests of these letters to discover what they can teach us about women’s rhetorical skill, compositional practices, and participation in applied rhetorics like medieval letter-writing. Recent scholarly work on the Paston women’s letters demonstrates, however, that important steps are being taken in this direction: Diane Watt, for example, explores what she terms “household rhetoric” in discussing the Paston letters, and Roger Dalrymple examines the reactive, consolatory, and redressive aspects of the Paston women’s letters. Broader in scope, l For sociohistorical discussions of fifteenth-century gentlewomen see Archer, Goldberg, Jewell, Leyser, Power, Shahar, Swabey, and Ward. ESC 30.3 (September 2004): 111-128 Valerie Creelman is an assistant professor at Saint M ary’s University. Interested in medieval women’s writing and literate practices, she explores such topics as gender, social relations, and identity through her study of fifteenthcentury gentlewomen’s letters— particularly correspondence related to household and estate administration. She recently completed her dissertation entitled Household Words: The Rhetoricity ofFifteenthCentury Gentlewomen’s Household Letters and is currently working on several projects related to medieval women’s epistolography. Earlier this year, she was nominated for the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal based on her doctoral work at the University of Waterloo. Albrecht Classen’s and Malcolm Richardson’s respective efforts have worked to provide scholars with a methodology and corpus of medieval women’s epistolary writings for further study. Each author’s scholarly work not only charts new approaches and directions in studying women’s episto­ lary writings, but also emphasizes the need for and importance of studying the rhetoric of women’s household letters to enrich our understanding of women’s literary history. While scholars agree that Margaret Paston’s letters display a woman of considerable influence and consequence in the Paston family, less attention has been directed to the language of Margaret Paston’s letters to determine how her linguistic and rhetorical choices contribute to this impression of her. One distinctive feature of Margaret Paston’s household letters is her frequent reference to and recital of external sources (individuals’ state­ ments or words) in her reports. Despite the prevalence of this practice throughout her correspondence, its purpose and rhetorical effects have not been fully explored. One obvious effect of Margaret’s incorporation of others’ reported speech is that it constructs her authorial position as a reporter, chronicler, and, perhaps, even translator of the household and estate-related events, information, and experience she recounts in her household letters. This reporting role has, however, largely character­ ized Margaret Paston’s subject position in these letters as a passive and peripheral one. This characterization is not entirely surprising given that, in discussions of medieval women’s literary history, the authorial roles of chronicler and translator have been identified as strategies of submission used by women to attach themselves to male authorities and participate in male literary activities (Barratt 12-16). Margaret’s own literary activity falls within this purview, for her routine composition of these household letters is attached to the male authority of her husband, John Paston 1. Margaret’s letter-writing is, after all, primarily motivated by her husband’s request that she provide him with an ongoing written account of household and estate matters. Consequently, the report mode that characterizes her speech function throughout her letters is one that speaks of her subordinate position as a wife obligated to provide her husband with frequent written reports in governing estate business in his absence. Taking this social dynamic into consideration, this...

Coming into McPhee country: John McPhee and the art of literary nonfiction

John McPhee, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 forAnnals of the Former is considered one of the most distinguished writers of literary nonfiction.Coming into McPhee Countryis the first comprehensive anthology to address his significant body of work. The first section, 'The Evolving Writer, ' examines his work from a biographical point of view, explaining background and influences that affected his development as a The second section, 'McPhee and the Natural World, ' focuses on his representations of the natural world and explores his work from the framework of both wilderness and urban environmentalism. The final section, 'The Writerly Challenges of McPhee, ' discusses his rhetorical choices in structure and style and demonstrates how his seemingly artless presentation is literary in every sense of the word. Overall, this volume salutes McPhee s enormous and enormously varying oeuvre and confirms his stature as a major American writer.

The Stylish Semicolon: Teaching Punctuation as Rhetorical Choice

Angela Petit Angela Petit provides a strategy for teaching the semicolon to point out to students that grammar choices create style in writing.

Research articles in applied linguistics: moving from results to conclusions

Our paper examines how selected research articles (RAs) reporting empirical investigations in applied linguistics proceed from first presenting results to eventually offering final conclusions or some other form of closure. After reviewing the literature on relevant aspects of RA structure and its functions, we report the findings of a genre analysis of 20 RAs in applied linguistics concerning rhetorical choices among possible Results, Results and Discussion, Discussion, Conclusion, and Pedagogic Implications sections, and identify specific organizational choices within each section. We propose a two-level account (Moves and Steps) of the separate Discussion sections in our corpus, and argue that this is able to capture general trends and specific rhetorical realizations in an insightful way.

The Stylish Semicolon: Teaching Punctuation as Rhetorical Choice

The Stylish Semicolon: Teaching Punctuation as Rhetorical Choice

Perfecting the Rhetorical Vision of Woman's Rights: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anna Howard Shaw, and Carrie Chapman Catt

This essay argues that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anna Howard Shaw, and Carrie Chapman Catt discursively enacted different stages in the evolution of a rhetorical vision for woman's rights. Through close examination of the rhetorical choices in the “classic speeches” of these three rhetors: Stanton's “The Solitude of Self” (1892), Shaw's “The Fundamental Principle of a Republic” (1915), and Catt's “The Crisis” (1916), it invites scholars to recognize the value of comparative critique in preserving the “complex tapestry” of the early woman's rights movement. This analysis claims that a compelling rhetorical vision of woman's rights emerged as each rhetor assumed one of the required leadership roles of social movements (prophet, charismatic, and pragmatist), co-opted an existing cause (existentialism, Methodism, and social Darwinism) to support key elements of a woman's rights philosophy, and adopted a familiar persona that appealed to a different primary audience (universal audience, general public, suffrage rank and file).

The Influence of the Purpose of a Business Document on its Syntax and Rhetorical Schemes

This study attempts to show how the purpose of three types of business and technical documents (instructions, annual reports, and sales promotional letters) affects the syntactical and rhetorical choices authors make in writing these documents. While the results of the examination rendered some predictable results, there were some surprises in the absence of many rhetorical schemes in sales promotional letters. Another value of this study is that it provides partial syntactical and rhetorical “fingerprints” of three important documents in business and technical writing to offer students norms they can go by in constructing such documents.

Well-tempered women: nineteenth-century temperance rhetoric

In this richly illustrated study, Carol Mattingly examines the rhetoric of the temperance movement, the largest political movement of women in the nineteenth century.Tapping previously unexplored sources, Mattingly uncovers new voices and different perspectives, thus greatly expanding our knowledge of temperance women in particular and of nineteenth-century women and women's rhetoric in general. Her scope is broad: she looks at temperance fiction, newspaper accounts of meetings and speeches, autobiographical and biographical accounts, and minutes of national and state temperance meetings.The women's temperance movement was first and foremost an effort by women to improve the lives of women. Twentieth-centuty scholars often dismiss temperance women as conservative and complicit in their own oppression. As Mattingly demonstrate, however, the opposite is true: temperance women made purposeful rhetorical choices in their efforts to improve the lives of women. They carefully considered the life circumstances of all women and sought to raise consciousness and achieve reform in an effective manner. And they were effective, gaining legal, political, and social improvements for women as they became the most influential and most successful group of women reformers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Mattingly finds that, for a large number of women who were unhappy with their status in the nineteenth century, the temperance movement provided an avenue for change. Examining the choices these women made in their efforts to better conditions for women, Mattingly looks first at oral rhetoric amongnineteenth-century temperance women. She examines the early temperance speeches of activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who later chose to concentrate their effort in the suffrage organizations, and those who continued to work on behalf of women primarily through the temperance topic, such as Amelia Bloomer and Clarina Howard Nichols. Finally, she examines the rhetoric of members of the Woman s Christian Temperance Unionthe largest organization of women in the nineteenth century.Mattingly then turns to the rhetoric from perspectives outside those of mainstream, middle-class women. She focuses on racial conflicts and alliances as an increasingly diverse membership threatened the unity and harmony in the WCTU. Her primary source for this discussion is contemporary newspaper accounts of temperance speeches.Fiction by temperance writers also proves to be a fertile source for Mattingly's investigation. Insisting on greater equality between men and women, this fiction candidly portrayed injustice toward women. Through the temperance issue, Mattingly discovers, women could broach otherwise clandestine topics openly. She also finds that many of the concerns of nineteenth-century temperance women are remarkably similar to concerns of today s feminists.

Words as gestures

This paper suggests that, in looking toward a future pragmatics, we would be wise to consider the implications of current work on metaphor and iconiciy, and start paying more attention to questions related to how paradigmatic stylistic and rhetorical choices function as figurative gestures in speech and writing. We need pragmatically feasible approaches to studying the stylistic and rhetorical forms and functions of language, the paper argues, because it is largely through these that speakers create frames of reference. The underlying point is that a linguistic reference always appears in a frame that influences how it is perceived and interpreted in a context. This framing effect is a natural function of style. In any context, it is invariably some unique how that particularizes a generic what into an individually meaningful pragmatic performance. Pragmatic accounts of linguistic events remain emotively and motivationally opaque if the frame of reference provided by gestural uses of language is not included in the analysis. For this reason, it is argued, pragmatics can no more do without systematic approaches to style than it can do without systematic approaches to propositional content and context.

Historical Narratives, Rhetorical Narratives, and Woman Suffrage Scholarship

Book Reviews Review Essay Historical Narratives, Rhetorical Narratives, and Woman Suffrage Scholarship Bonnie J. Dow "The Transfiguring Sword": The Just War of the Women's Social and Political Union. By Cheryl Jorgensen-Earp. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1997; pp. χ+ 201. $29.95. Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820-1920. By Suzanne M. Marilley. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996; pp. xi + 281. $39.95. African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920. By Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1998; pp. xii + 192. $39.95 cloth; $16.95 paper. Other Powers: The Age of Suffragism, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. By Barbara Goldsmith. New York: Knopf, 1998; pp. xv + 531. $30.00. The publication of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's two-volume Man Cannot Speak for Her (MCSFH) in 1989 was a central event in the study of first wave feminist discourse.1 Although previously published essays by Campbell and others treated different actors and issues within the woman's rights movement, Campbell's book performed an indispensable function in the development of a field of study: it gave scholars a framework and a specifically rhetorical narrative to guide our understanding of the movement and its discourse. In 1990,1 began teaching a course in the rhetoric of the woman's rights movement, a course I have taught every year since then, and Campbell's two volume work always has been my primary text. Over the years, I have added and subtracted from my syllabus to expand on issues Campbell covers only briefly or to de-emphasize topics or discourse that she finds more interesting than I do. But the scaffolding remains the same; as I recently said to a group of students in Bonnie J. Dow is Associate Professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 2, No. 2, 1999, pp. 321-365 ISSN 1094-8392 322 Rhetoric & Public Affairs a seminar on feminist rhetoric, Campbell's account of first wave discourse is hegemonic , and understandably so. Not only does it display first-rate research and analysis , it does what good criticism should do: it makes choices, argues for them, and provides interpretation that illuminates rhetorical dynamics by interweaving them with useful contextualization. It makes sense of a long, complicated, and diverse collection of rhetors and rhetoric. Ultimately, MCSFH is a diachronic account. Although its chapters explore themes in the woman's rights movement, those themes exist within a chronology, and that chronology has a telos: to account for the development of rhetorical strategies that contributed to the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. As such, MCSFH necessarily neatens the movement and distills its arguments, keeping a focus on rhetorical choices made by participants and the function of those choices in confronting the exigencies that such a movement must address in order to succeed . Indeed, as Campbell notes, "the works anthologized and analyzed are persuasive masterworks of the early movement. As such, they contributed to the development and survival of that movement, and they represent skillful human artistry in the face of nearly insuperable rhetorical obstacles."2 The influence of this approach on the treatment of feminist discourse in this field is powerful. Martha Solomon [Watson]'s edited collection of essays on the woman suffrage press, A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910, follows a similar format, in chronologizing women's newspapers throughout the nineteenth century and focusing on their contributions to the development of arguments that guided the movement to fruition.3 More recently, Cheryl JorgensenEarp 's book, "The Transfiguring Sword": The Just War of the Women's Social and Political Union, although it treats British woman suffrage discourse over a short period of time, displays a similar orientation. Taking as her task the explanation of "the adoption of violent tactics as a question of rhetorical invention," JorgensenEarp argues that British women's escalation to violence in their suffrage campaign in the early twentieth century should be viewed rhetorically in two senses: in terms of its origins as a response to rhetorical exigency and as the grounds for a rhetorical campaign...