Rhetorical Act Research Articles

How to Make Your Child Sleep: Designing Rhetorical Experiences

I might give a variety of logical reasons to help my daughter sleep: being tired from swimming, that a sore leg will feel better, or that she will need lots of energy to play with friends. Consequences can be an argument too, like the loss of a stuffed animal if there are any more non-emergency calls for parents before morning. I might even pull out some sort of shameless (and ineffective) ethos-based plea about being the parent and knowing what is best for her. Rhetorical persuasion is a concatenation of moments and forces that are experienced as a unit – a unit with a persuasive quality to it or that creates new directions for speech and action. Similarly, rhetoric can also be understood as the production or design of those experiences. The design is always partial, as no one can control an experience, but the addition, removal, arrangement, and use of elements for the purpose of creating a particular quality of experience is an important rhetorical act. This design-oriented production of rhetorical experiences is a way of focusing on the human agents within a material rhetoric context that avoids relegating the non-human and the non-linguistic to the background. This paper brings design further into the discussion of rhetoric, adds a design-based angle to new materialism, theorizes rhetoric as an experience, considers John Dewey’s notion of experience and Brian Massumi’s work on affect in light of design and material rhetoric, and (of course) to help parents set up their children for a wonderful night’s rest. Article received: April 20, 2020; Article accepted: July 1, 2020; Published online: April 15, 2021; Original scholarly paper

“Science Writing in Higher Education: Effects of Teaching Self-Assessment of Scientific Poster Construction on Writing Quality and Academic Achievement”

Science writing is a complex rhetorical activity that enhances disciplinary participation in university education and requires learner-centered, inquiry-based explicit instruction. This study aimed to determine the effects of teaching writing self-assessment of scientific posters on writing quality and academic achievement in a higher education science class. An interdisciplinary team of science and writing scholars designed an action-research intervention based on two 90-min workshops focused on students’ self-assessment of writing scientific posters for a first-semester Cell Biology course for prospective teachers of biology and chemistry in secondary schools. Students co-created and applied a checklist to assess writing traits central to scientific communication (e.g. use of reliable references and original figures, inclusion of limitations and projections) in their posters. Promoted writing traits were qualitatively coded in double-blind fashion in posters from 19 teams with similar intakes: 9 teams (45 students, 100% population) in the treatment group and 10 teams (50 randomly selected students, 50% population) from two previous years. Principal component analysis (PCA) and permutation ANOVA were used to quantitatively determine divergence between groups. Results indicated that posters constructed by intervention-treated teams were significantly better in terms of the reliability and retrievability of sources; they also showed a higher number of student-made figures, projections and conclusions. In addition, evaluators’ scores for posters increased in the treatment groups, although this did not have a significant impact on overall grades. These results offer empirical support of self-assessment for learning and the use of poster construction as effective pedagogical strategies in science teacher education.

Риторична компетентність учнів: зміст, структура та шляхи формування

The article examines the formation features of students’ rhetorical competence. The essence of rhetorical competence as the individual ability to rhetorical activity in order to realize himself in professional and socio-cultural life is revealed. The methodological scholars’ views on the content and structure of rhetorical competence are presented. Based on the analysis of works on the research topic it is identified the main rhetorical competence components: motivational component (awareness of the importance of rhetorical activity in future personal life and professional development, students’ readiness and ability to perform rhetorical activities successfully); cognitive component (systemic rhetorical knowledge that is basic for the rhetorical competence formation), activity component (rhetorical skills and abilities that ensure the rhetorical activity effectiveness). Methods of rhetorical competence formation are presented: methods of theoretical rhetoric study, methods of practical rhetoric study, methods of theoretical and practical rhetoric study. The exercises system of analytical, speech-communicative, creative character and rhetorical tasks is characterized. The gradual rhetorical competence formation through the application of tasks aimed at teaching the logical, linguistic and psychological and psycholinguistic rhetoric foundations is proposed.

The role of rhetorical activity in the development of students’ metacognitive competence

The role of rhetorical activity in the development of students’ metacognitive competence

Archival Artistry: Exploring Disability Aesthetics in Late Twentieth Century Higher Education


 
 
 Jay Dolmage’s (2014) Disability Rhetoric encourages scholars to search beyond normative Aristolean bounds of rhetoric and embrace a critical lens of rhetorical activity as embodied, and disability as an inalienable aspect of said embodiment (p. 289). To that end, this project posits an innovative structure for rhetorically (re)analyzing disability history in higher education through a framework of disability aesthetics. In Academic Ableism, Jay Dolmage (2017) argues that an institution’s aesthetic ideologies and architecture denote a rhetorical agenda of ableism. In Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers (2010) asserts disability is a vital aspect of aesthetic interpretation. Both works determine that disability has always held a crucial, critical role in the production and consumption of aestheticism, as it invites able-bodied individuals to consider the dynamic, nonnormative instantiations of the human body as a social, civic issue (p. 2). Disability, therefore, has the power to reinvigorate the sociorhetorical impact of both aesthetic representation and the human experience writ large. With this framework in mind, this project arranges an archival historiography of disability history in higher education in the late twentieth century at a mid-sized U.S. state institution. During this time, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act was finally signed into law, and universities confronted a legal demand to allow all students access. Ultimately, this project seeks to demonstrate how disability scholars and historiographers can widen the view of both disability history and disability rhetoric in higher education through a focus on student aesthetic performance and intervention.
 
 

Application of Interdisciplinary Theory of Genres in LIS

Purpose/Thesis: The article presents the possibilities of using the interdisciplinary theory of genres, developed in the study of linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, sociology, philosophy, psychology and other disciplines, in library and information science (LIS). The article argues the application of genre theory to LIS offers a new and interesting interdisciplinary perspective.Approach/Methods: A critical analysis of the literature on the subject introduces the basic premises of the interdisciplinary theory of text/information genres in its historical development in the world and in Poland. A similar method was used to present the most important directions genre theory opens to LIS.Results and conclusions: Before genre theory was first applied to LIS, it was developed in disciplines such as linguistics, literature, rhetoric, communication and media, discourse analysis, sociology, pedagogy and others and in many countries on all continents (mainly in the USA, Australia, Brazil and Scandinavian countries). The theory’s success is a result of its interdisciplinary development, beginning from linguistic and classical rhetorical genres approach and problems of categorizing texts to “de facto genres” and their function in everyday communication activities (social/rhetoric approach). Applied to LIS, it frames information objects as social constructs whose meaning is constructed in social discourse, driven by genre knowledge. The library and other information systems should be treated as a social communication activity in the recurrent situation of organizing and retrieving information. It means that the work of a librarian (or other information organizers) involves rhetorical activity of creating information objects, as does the work of other information creators, e.g. authors of scholarly publications. The functioning of information system, i.e. production and organization of textual information should be investigated using methods applied in other disciplines, especially humanities and social sciences, as it allows for a broader research perspective.Originality/Value: The article describes the possibilities of applying genre theory in LIS research, which still do not receive the attention they merit. A wider knowledge of the genre theory would make possible collaborative research involving scholars of other disciplines such as linguistics and sociology.

Scanning as a Rhetorical Activity: Reporting Histories of Ether Experiments in the Johns Hopkins University Physical Seminary (1892–1913)

This article reports on a study that examined papers written by graduate students in the Physical Seminary course at Johns Hopkins University (1892–1913) to investigate how students reused various visuals of the interferometer to construct narratives of late-19th-century Ether research. Their representations of the interferometer focused on the mechanics of the devices by constructing a series of textual-visual relationships, requiring that the reader scan back and forth between the written text and the accompanying visual. These multimodal texts demonstrate how the students used writing activities to create a narrative of equipment development, which highlighted the centrality of trained vision in enculturating graduate students into disciplinary writing practices in the late 19th century. Through an analysis of the specific interactions and the network of visuals the students used to reconstruct a history of Ether investigation, scholars of writing and rhetoric can see how important inclusion of equipment and its detailed discussion was to graduate writing and disciplinary enculturation in the sciences.

My Beloved Community

My Beloved Community

Trust-Repair Strategies in Crisis Rhetorical (Sub-)Arenas: An Argumentative Perspective

ABSTRACT This study extends the rhetorical arena approach to crisis communication with an argumentative perspective. A rhetorical activity in which reasons are communicated to justify and obtain acceptance for a claim, argumentation plays a crucial role in (re)legitimizing corporate trustworthiness following a crisis episode. Arguments supporting or rejecting trust claims do not only pervade the corporate crisis response message (e.g., an apology), but also the public reactions in the rhetorical arena, i.e., the multivocal conversational space that opens up in a crisis context. Therefore, rhetorical arena crisis communication takes the form of an argumentative polylogue in which corporate trustworthiness features as the main issue. We develop a method for the analysis of trust-related polylogues occurring in rhetorical (sub-)arenas. Unlike existing methods, like tone analysis of online comments, our approach enables to examine, more specifically, the reasons organizations and stakeholders present for or against trust. This, in turn, provides an enhanced method to assess the effectiveness of a crisis response strategy. In order to illustrate our approach, we elaborate a case study based on an apologetic article published by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a sample of public reactions appearing on media articles and on subsequent online discussion websites.

Rhetoric in Homer?

This article discusses the possibility of exploring the field of rhetoric within the Homeric poems. Is it adequate to employ the term “rhetoric” in discussions of Homeric poetry? We contend, following Knudsen (2014), that yes, the Iliad and the Odyssey provide us with the earliest instances of rhetorical activity in Antiquity. Firstly, we address why some scholars disregard that possibility, then argue why we disagree with them. Finally, we apply the elements of our theoretical discussion to an analysis of Odysseus’ supplication to Nausicaa in Odyssey 6, focusing on: a) the introduction by the Homeric narrator with the terms kerdíon, kerdaléos, and meilíkhios; and b) Odysseus’ strategic speaking when trying to convince Nausicaa to provide him with clothes and information about the way to town.

In These Troubled Times

In this fragmented autoethnographic narrative, I focus on several incidents where silence functions as a political weapon and as a means for coping in these trouble times. Deploying silence is a rhetorical act that unfolds in ethical and unethical ways. It can serve, I argue, as a tactic for resistance and as a strategy to deceive and maintain power.

Uwagi o mowie cynicznej. Kallikles i Trazymach jako mówcy cyniczni

Notes on Cynical Speech. Callicles and Thrasymachusas Cynical SpeakersCynical speech is a proper form of manifestation of what we call cynicism. It takes the form of a persuasive strategy which assumes the achievement of the rhetorical consubstantiation of a cynical speaker and her/his auditorium. Cynical speech is a game that takes place between three sides: a cynical speaker posing as an immoralist, a moralist and an auditorium, the acquisition of which is the aim of both interlocutors. At the outset, the cynical speaker gives the identity of naive dilettantes’ to both the members of the auditorium and the moralist and then tries to persuade the audience to side with him and take on the role of the students of a cynical expert. This is what can be described as cynical modulation. In its course, the initial opposition of a professional versus dilettante turns into an opposition of master versus student, while the unattractive identity of a dilettante is transferred to a moralist. In this way, the speaker achieves what Kenneth Burke thinks is the right goal for any rhetorical act: the speaker’s consubstantiation with the auditorium. This process is presented based on the example of the disputes between Socrates, as a moralist on the one hand, and sophist-politicians Thrasymachus and Callicles, who personify the type of cynical speakers, on the other. The analysis of cynical speech carried out in the paper leads to an indication of some basic features of this way of speaking, as well as the relationship that exists between them and the content of viewpoints voiced by cynical speakers. These viewpoints have been described as aristocratic democratism and people’s anti-democratism. These are two forms of what has been described as the cynical counter-ideal. The adoption of these positions is an indirect expression of the same systematic ambiguity that lies in the form of cynical speaking, which belongs to the very essence of cynicism as a cultural phenomenon.

The Future of the History of Rhetoric is Religious

Recently, in peer reviews of my work on historical religious debates, I have been warned to “avoid[] getting absorbed in … doctrinal minutiae” and informed that such investigations “seem less relevant to contemporary society.” The former comment exemplifies a broader practice of bracketing off religion when studying historical rhetorics and the latter a common assumption that historical religious rhetorics have little to say to modern secular people. Unfortunately, these widespread attitudes risk robbing our field of rich theoretical and practical insights afforded by scholarly study of historical rhetorics of religion.In the past few decades, Western scholars of rhetorical history have increasingly recognized the critical necessity of studying diverse rhetorical traditions from across the globe and of marginalized groups within the West. Attending to religious rhetorics is key to this project. Throughout human history, religion has been a significant site of rhetorical activity: preaching, meditation, prayer, divination, communication with the dead, initiation rites, temple design, scriptural interpretation, proselytizing, liturgy. These rhetorical activities are oral, material, embodied, spatial, visual, and now even digital. Other less-studied rhetorical modes – touch, smell, taste – also feature in these sacred rhetorics. Further, religion has been a key inventional resource in sociopolitical rhetorics that have driven major movements in national and world histories, including abolitionism, anti-colonialism, feminism, and environmentalism. When we bracket off religious rhetoric, we ignore essential pieces of various historical puzzles. We also miss out on historical cases that could fruitfully contribute to contemporary discussions about peace-making, human rights, democracy, and deliberation.The following texts, published in the last five years, illustrate the diversity and scholarly contributions that increased inquiry into historical religious rhetorics would offer.The future of the history of rhetoric is religious.

Poetic Mirrors and the Violence of the Self-Reflexive in Post-Colonial Poetry

Poetic Mirrors and the Violence of the Self-Reflexive in Post-Colonial Poetry Noureddine Fekir (bio) This paper investigates some aspects and implications of self-reflexivity in the verse of modern African poets, poets of African descent, and others such as Pablo Neruda and Mahmoud Darwish, who are associated with resistance to different forms of oppression. Many modern African writers, such as Odia Ofeimun, Syl Cheney-Coker, and Frank Chipasula, wrote poems that were self-reflexive even Cheney-Coker as these poems criticized the political status quo. A pressing question is whether self-reflexivity is a fundamental feature of poetic writing, necessarily born from the inner desire of any poet, to explore the potentials of language while in the process of expressing their thoughts or feelings. This work investigates the use of such a strategy of writing in African poems and then undertakes to construct a genealogy of self-reflexivity to come up with an understanding of the psychological, phenomenological, and political motives behind the frequent resort of poets to this process of mirroring the very being of the text while they proclaim or advocate resistance, to the point of transforming the text into a verbal form of violence against the established political order around them. In this paper, I argue that self-reflexivity, as deployed in the resistance verse written by modern African poets and poets who share the same plight of oppression, is viewed as an integral and organic part of the project of resistance. Such a strategy inescapably springs from the political and intellectual engagement of the poets who see in the aesthetics of poetry a durable and transgressive nature, a perennial tool for warding off and resisting, at times violently, all forms of cultural and physical oppression. Self-reflexivity is defined in this paper as a moment that marks the poem’s recursive nature, where poets may contemplate the medium that they use in a gesture that seems at odds with the dominant tradition of poetic writing, which still persists today and which has generally been intent upon using verse to reflect one’s emotions or describe a specific worldly or metaphysical issue that is of concern to the speaker. However, when poets interrupt the process of representing the world around them or their feelings and veer toward describing the act of writing itself, this can only be viewed as a rhetorical act that counters the signifying nature of [End Page 67] language and offers a moment of reflection that is more akin to the process of contemplating one’s identity as if looking at a mirror. This moment where the poem mirrors itself that speaks about the creative act is one where the poet attempts to construct his identity as a creator of verse which may be viewed metaphorically as a process that is akin to what Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, calls the “Mirror stage.” For Lacan, this stage takes place when the individual, the infant, for instance, looks at a mirror and recognizes himself by contemplating a looking glass. In Ecrits, he states that “we have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (2–3). The individual recognizes his identity as coherent when he contemplates himself in a mirror or in a face that refracts the gaze. The self-reflexive moment in poetry is similar to this act, where the poet contemplates his creative process in order to make sense of his identity as a poet. Such a process is necessary to acquire a certain sense of presence, albeit a fake one, because identity construction is always imaginary for Lacan. What is noteworthy is that Lacan articulates such a desire to construct one’s own image within a social framework. In “The Mirror Stage as Formative,” he states that it is “the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one and in the anxiety of the individual confronting the “concentrational” form of the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effort...

Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

Homeless Advocacy and the Rhetorical Construction of the Civic Home

Retranslating Thucydides as a scientific historian

Abstract The nineteenth century was a period of dramatic change in Europe for the idea of history. While from antiquity through to the eighteenth century, historiography had broadly been considered an artistic and rhetorical activity, this view gradually lost ground in the nineteenth century to an understanding of history as a science. This case study aims to explore how these shifts in attitudes towards the proper aims and methods of history writing might have shaped the interpretation and translation into English of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, a work first written in classical Greek in the fifth century BCE. The analysis is carried out by means of a corpus-based methodology which, I argue, can better enable researchers to engage with each (re)translator’s overall presentation of the source through the production and interrogation of concordances listing every instance of a given search item as it occurs within digitised versions of the target texts. This is demonstrated through an investigation of the use of the term ‘fact(s)’ which reveals a striking divergence in interpretation between the six translations, with Crawley’s (1874) History in particular appearing to lend a significantly more objective and empirical tone to Thucydides in English.

Surveying Precarious Publics

This essay assumes that the design and use of surveys is a fundamentally rhetorical act. It provides suggestions for employing and designing health-related surveys intended for research participants who might be characterized as inhabiting one or more precarious positionalities. We use “precarious positionality” to signal when research participants self-identify as one or more of the following: a racial and/or linguistic minority, economically disadvantaged, disabled, former or current drug user, undocumented, un(der)educated, oppressed, sexualized, disenfranchised, criminalized,and/or colonized. Drawing on the research team’s experiences with piloting what we hope will eventually become a nationwide survey, the essay describes how to avoid several survey-designpitfalls; it also makes recommendations for how to improve survey-based health research that enrolls participants who inhabit one or more precarious positionalities. Our recommendations attend to rhetorical complexities related to survey ethics, inclusion criteria, privacy, stigmatized and misleading language, variations in discursive repertoires, accessibility, and liability.

Medicalization’s Communicative Infrastructure: Seventy Years of “Brain Chemistry” in the New York Times

ABSTRACT Medicalization theory aims to delineate how and why non-medical issues become demarcated within the realm of medical jurisdiction. The theory postulates that medicalization is marked by diagnostic naming, medical expertise, technological standardization and the de-contextualization of experiential knowledge, and that it is driven by popular media and lay discourse as much as by the communication of health professionals and medical institutions. Although medicalization has been recognized as an inherently rhetorical act, medicalization theory does not attend to the specific communicative means undergirding its orchestration. Drawing from medicalized New York Times coverage of the phrase “brain chemistry” (N = 71), we address this theoretical aperture, identifying through rhetorical analysis the most common communicative devices that emerged across 70 years of coverage and three distinct diagnoses (i.e., mental illness, addiction and overweight/obesity). Our findings reveal three central rhetorical means through which medicalization is communicated including mechanical metaphor, pedagogy of contrast, and moral enthymeme. By tracing content across time, the current study explicates the communicative infrastructure that gives rise to medicalization, thereby extending the literature from questions of why medicalization occurs and what its content is to how it is conveyed and imparted.

Twitter Talk and Twitter Sharing in Times of Crisis: Exploring Rhetorical Motive and Agenda-Setting in the Ray Rice Scandal

ABSTRACTSocial media continues to challenge many of the default assumptions agenda-setting. One particular arena of society that has witnessed the growth of nontraditional content producers has been the sports community, especially when moments of crisis involving broader cultural concerns emerge. This study examines the Twitter content shared and produced regarding the conversation that occurred immediately after TMZ video showing Ray Rice attacking his then-fiancée went viral. By attending to these users’ rhetorical purposes and agendamelding activities, we content that, far from safely agreeing with the dominant opinions in their respective social communities or merely being expressive, users debated with and challenged one another, even inviting disagreement.

“I have a story about Nairobi”: narrator unreliability, ethnicity and the imagination of the Kenyan nation in “Khandpaka” by Awillo Mike and Ja-Mnazi Afrika

ABSTRACT This paper reads the popular song “Khandpaka” by the Kenyan music group Awillo Mike and Ja-Mnazi Afrika (2009) as a rhetorical act that argued for the inclusion of ethnicity, rather than its exclusion, in the imagination of the nation in the Kenya of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The paper’s focus is on the ironical presentation of a humorous story in “Khandpaka.” The amusing narrative in “Khandpaka” – the song title is the English word “handbag,” pronounced with a Kenyan African first language influenced accent – is told by a narrator who recounts the day he took his wife on a sightseeing tour of Nairobi on what was her first visit to the Kenyan capital city. The paper shows that the narrative is a conflicted attempt by an unreliable narrator to imagine a Kenyan nation by suppressing ethnicity. “Khandpaka” is thus read to make its argument by drawing attention to the “limitations” of the narrator’s attempt to exclude ethnicity from the imagination of the Kenyan nation. The examination of and reflection on this narrative in “Khandpaka” reiterates the value of narrative research and the role of popular music in Kenyan society and politics.