Rhetorical Topics Research Articles

Study Report: Knowledge and Influence of Copyright Law for U.S. Professional Writers Working in Educational-Context Digital Environments

In fall 2007, with the assistance of research adviser William Hart-Davidson, PhD, Co-Director Writing in Digital Environments Research Center, an empirical study was conducted exploring copyright law's mediational influence on digital composing using a sequential transformative mixed methods research design. A digital survey (N=334) was administered to a randomly selected population of students and teachers in US technical and professional writing programs. Discourse-based interviews designed to elicit tacit knowledge were also conducted with digital writers regarding how they factored in copyright law and fair use in their composing decisions. Student interviewees ranged from professional writing undergraduate to rhetoric and composition PhD candidate on the job market. The discourse-based interviews were supported as well by examining a wide variety of web texts supplied by research participant interviewees. The study sought to examine three main areas of inquiry: 1) the status of knowledge and understanding of copyright law in the field of technical and professional writing as well as with professional writers; 2) the thinking processes, or rhetorical invention, of writers in these programs composing webtexts in light of copyright law; and 3) what happens to mediational means as writers leverage them in digital contexts. In this report the study's six major findings and seven granular findings are briefly summarized and discussed. Questions, an answer key with explanations, and question-by-question survey results to the knowledge portion of the copyright quiz are provided. The source material for this report derives from dissertation research and text (Rife, 2008). This report outlines levels of chilled speech measured as part of the survey, as well as specific areas of misunderstanding and understandings about copyright law within the field of technical and professional writing and suggests implications for teaching, learning, and research.Six Major Findings:The study's six major findings were: 1) Web spaces are sites of cultural collision, or commonplaces, where writers occupy sometimes conflicting positions; 2) The intertextuality of web-space-writing provides support for Foucault's theory that the single author is an ideological production representing the opposite of its historical function, i.e. the author-function, in the larger culture; 3) Contrary to assertions by a number of scholars, for digital writers speech is not chilled. Copyright law as a system of invention organized by rhetoric instead produces speech; 4) Rhetorical topics congeal as a heuristic mediating the digital composing process of writers. Copyright law is just one topic in this heuristic, and not the most important topic; 5) For this group of writers, ethics trumped the law in importance when considering digital composing choices; 6) Whether copyright law serves as a rule or tool on the activity theory triangle is influenced by levels of writers' knowledge and understanding of the law. Seven Granular Findings:The study's seven granular findings concern clear misunderstandings among professional-digital writers regarding: 1) the difference between copyright and plagiarism; 2) the differences between unauthorized use and authorized use; 3) the government exception to copyright; 4) the fact that US copyright law protects creative work to a higher extent than it protects factual' work. Additionally clear areas of understanding are discussed such as: 5) understanding that US copyright protects derivative works; Despite claims of other scholars, the survey also found:6) digital writers were not all that uncertain about their knowledge of copyright and fair use and writers have a relatively stable confidence level regarding their own understandings of the law. Finally: 7) the technical and professional writing community believes that knowledge of copyright law is important to their work as digital writers.Implications:Implications for teaching, learning and research include suggestions for changing technical and professional writing curriculum and pedagogical approaches, the need for continued disciplinary theory building in the area of composing process theories as well as research design, and the call for additional research with respect to a number of complexities and contradictions that emerged from this study.

Poetry, power and rhetoric at the end of the 4th C. A.D.: the nuptial poems composed by Claudian on the occasion of the marriage of the emperor Honorius and Marie

AbstractThis study sets about to analyse the complex relations between rhetoric and reality by examining the use of traditional material, both rhetorical and mythological, in the group of nuptial poems written by Claudian in 398 A.D., and to show across the political and religious dimensions of these poems, how the use of topoi in the representation of the present proves to be both mirror and mask of reality. One finds that, in the political domain, Claudian, in consonance with imperial ideology, holds up a lofty mirror to the court and uses rhetorical topics to hide the shadowy aspects of the situation of the western empire controlled by Stilicho; in the religious domain, the poet ignores completely the Christian aspect of this marriage, unlike certain other late authors of epthalamic works, and anchors his poetry strongly in pagan tradition.

Rhetorical Invention in Design

Though scholars have begun to explore how texts mediate design, little is known about rhetorical invention in design. To investigate how heuristics used for rhetorical invention and design might be related, the author analyzed how one disciplinary design heuristic, the information system cliché, influenced the production of both a computer system and a specification text for the system. The cliché was used to generate design proposals, which designers evaluated using at least three criteria: projected context of use, correspondence between the proposals and their textual inscriptions, and system coherence. Results indicate that disciplinary heuristics and rhetorical topics overlap in design; however, the rhetorical character of disciplinary heuristics is obscured in textual representations of the design. Both types of heuristic serve as interpretive instruments and are used dialogically to develop the parts of a design or text within the context of the whole.

Medicine in Plutarch'sMoralia

TheMoraliais an unfortunate term for the writings that have come down to us under the name of Plutarch of Chaeronea (ca. A.D. 50–120). They discuss rhetorical topics and general philosophical issues. A few are expressedly devoted to medical themes, for example, the tract entitledDe sanitate tuenda praecepta(Mor.122B–137E). But the medical material is sadly scattered throughout the extensive oeuvre, and it is difficult to gain a clear perspective.

Classical rhetorical topics and contemporary historical discourse

This paper suggests a specific contribution of contemporary history and philosophy of science to the theory of history. The “pragmatic” in the technical sense of analysis of use and user aspects of scientific discourse, and the “pragmatist”, in the sense of a focus on utility as canon, dimensions of modern philosophy of science illumine the structure of historical inquiry. Simply put, the structure of writing produced by the historical discipline is argumentative. Further, the nature of the historical argumentative strategies is best described by reference to classical rhetorical, to topical modes of argument.

The treatment of action in medieval poetics, 1175‐1280

This essay explicates the notion of “action” as it was articulated in the New Poetics and as it served as a topical system for poetic invention. Adam de la Halle's “Le Jeu de la Feuillee” is analyzed as a case study of rhetorical topics employed for dramatic invention.

The components of written response: A practical synthesis of current views

Written responses to student writing continue to play an important part in most composition classes despite increased employment of peers and tutors as sources of informed opinion and despite increasing emphasis on the importance of oral response. How best to respond to students' essays therefore concerns us all, at whatever level we teach. Yet valuable as we believe our penciled comments to be, this timeconsuming, difficult task proves too frequently a confused, unsatisfying experience for us; worse, our efforts prove too often apparently unhelpful to students who, if uninstructed, are alienated, antagonized, by our thought-heavy marginalia and terminal remarks. I suspect many of us, seated before a stack of papers, wonder over late-night coffee if we are doing this job well, if the results are worth the effort. Much of the research done on response remains buried in unpublished dissertations (for accounts of such research, see Jarabek and Dieterich, Knoblauch and Brannon 1981, Lamberg*), and the published material, scattered throughout the professional literature, is not readily available for comprehensive review. Compared to the growing body of literature devoted to other compositional and rhetorical topics, the amount of accessible advice on how to respond productively to student writing is scant. Nevertheless, enough such material of a practical nature exists to warrant attention. What follows is an attempt to summarize and to synthesize some of the guidelines for writing effective comments that this literature suggests, thereby supplementing C. W. Griffin's recent review-essay, which deals exclusively with the components of a theory of evaluation. To bring together and to group under general rubrics the eighty-one items here reviewed may assist the formation of a useful theory of response and may, more immediately, bring greater coherence and consistency to the almost daily act of commenting on student themes.

Twelve Steps to Using Generative Sentences and Sentence Combining in the Composition Classroom

The academic journals are full of articles on value of generative sentences and sentence combining in composition classroom.1 Instructors who wish to integrate both techniques into their current teaching strategies may find useful following step-by-step method of instruction-a method which requires little new technical terminology, and which has been used by many teachers, both experienced and inexperienced, over last four years. Students learn to write clear sentences with relatively short main clauses, to add details and make interand intra-paragraph transitions by means of a variety of free modifiers, and to use parallel and non-parallel structures meaningfully. All of material is simple enough to be presented on blackboard, though dittos are helpful; and teachers may present material intensively in several class meetings, or else in conjunction with other material (e.g., journal writing, analysis of model essays, discussion of invention and other general rhetorical topics) over twelve or more class periods (one step per class hour). We wish to emphasize that our remarks here are for most part neither novel nor exhaustive; our intention is simply to show how, within a coherent, traditional framework, students may be led to generate clearer, more efficient, and more imaginative sentences, using sentencecombining exercises to complement instruction in generating sentences. Step One. Students must first learn to view language as a system of structures; that is, they must become a little more conscious of structural cues by which they make sense of everyday speech and writing. To this end, instructors may begin by reviewing traditional, meaning-oriented definitions for parts of speech, since most college students have encountered these definitions at some point in their schooling. In traditional terms, of course, a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing, a verb shows action or state of being, an adjective modifies a noun, and an adverb modifies a verb. The problem with such definitions is that they do not explain

A rhetorical rationale for interdisciplinary graduate study in communication

Communication is an inherently interdisciplinary subject matter because it occurs as a consequence of biophysical, conceptual, and social processes, and because its uses and effects are drawn out differently in the various contexts of its employment. Graduate education in speech communication may explore these senses of interdisciplinarity without depending upon a fixed theoretical framework for description and explanation by using a system of rhetorical topics designed to stimulate and guide inquiry into alternative methods of invention and judgment. The topical system recommended here suggests lines of inquiry that may be pursued in appropriately designed classroom discussions, bibliographical assignments, and field research projects.

Boethius and the history of medieval rhetoric

In Boethius’ view, rhetoric was clearly subordinate to dialectic, and rhetorical topics derived their force from the inference rules contained in dialectical logic. Early medieval rhetoricians were not influenced by this conception of rhetoric, but it came to play an important role in rhetorical theory after the tenth century A.D.