front cover of Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness
Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness
Patricia Bizzell
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992
This collection of essays traces the attempts of one writing teacher to understand theoretically -  and to respond pedagogically - to what happens when students from diverse backgrounds learn to use language in college.

Bizzell begins from the assumption that democratic education requires us to attempt to educate all students, including those whose social or ethnic backgrounds may have offered them little experience with academic discourse.  Over the ten-year period chronicled in these essays, she has seen herself primarily as an advocate for such students, sometimes called  “basic writers.”

Bizzell’s views on education for “critical consciousness,” widely discussed in the writing field, are represented in most of the essays in this volume.  But in the last few chapters, and in the intellectual autobiography written as the introduction to the volume, she calls her previous work into question on the grounds that her self-appointment as an advocate for basic writers may have been presumptous, and her hopes for the politically liberating effects of academic discourse misplaced.  She concludes by calling for a theory of discourse that acknowledges the need to argue for values and pedagogy that can assist these arguements to proceed more inclusively than ever before.

The essays in this volume constitute the main body of work in which Bizzell developed her influential and often cited ideas.  Organized chronologically, they  present a picture of how she has grappled with major issues in composition studies over the past decade.  In the process, she sketches a trajectory for the development of composition studies as an academic discipline.
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Academic Writing for Graduate Students, 3rd Edition
Essential Tasks and Skills
John M. Swales & Christine B. Feak
University of Michigan Press, 2012
Like its predecessor, the third edition of Academic Writing for Graduate Students explains understanding the intended audience, the purpose of the paper, and academic genres; includes the use of task-based methodology, analytic group discussion, and genre consciousness-raising; shows how to write summaries and critiques; features Language Focus sections that address linguistic elements as they affect the wider rhetorical objectives; and helps students position themselves as junior scholars in their academic communities.

Among the many changes in the third edition:
*newer, longer, and more authentic texts and examples
*greater discipline variety in texts (added texts from hard sciences and engineering)
*more in-depth treatment of research articles
*greater emphasis on vocabulary issues
*revised flow-of-ideas section
*additional tasks that require students to do their own research
*more corpus-informed content
*binding that allows the book to lay flat when open.

The Commentary (teacher's notes and key) (978-0-472-03506-9) has been revised expanded. 

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Across Property Lines
Textual Ownership in Writing Groups
Candace Spigelman
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Candace Spigelman investigates the dynamics of ownership in small group writing workshops, basing her findings on case studies involving two groups: a five-member creative writing group meeting monthly at a local Philadelphia coffee bar and a four-member college-level writing group meeting in their composition classroom. She explores the relationship between particular notions of intellectual property within each group as well as the effectiveness of writing groups that embrace these notions. Addressing the negotiations between the public and private domains of writing within these groups, she discovers that for both the committed writers and the novices, “values associated with textual ownership play a crucial role in writing group performance.”

Spigelman discusses textual ownership, intellectual property, and writing group processes and then reviews theories relating to authorship and knowledge making. After introducing the participants in each group, discussing their texts, and describing their workshop sessions, she examines the writers’ avowed and implied beliefs about exchanging ideas and protecting individual property rights.

Spigelman stresses the necessary tension between individual and social aspects of writing practices: She argues for the need to foster more collaborative activity among student writers by replicating the processes of writers working in nonacademic settings but also contends that all writers must be allowed to imagine their individual agency and authority as they compose.

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Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education, 1885-1937
Susan Kates
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

In this study of the history of rhetoric education, Susan Kates focuses on the writing and speaking instruction developed at three academic institutions founded to serve three groups of students most often excluded from traditional institutions of higher education in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century America: white middle-class women, African Americans, and members of the working class.

Kates provides a detailed look at the work of those students and teachers ostracized from rhetorical study at traditional colleges and universities. She explores the pedagogies of educators Mary Augusta Jordan of Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts; Hallie Quinn Brown of Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio; and Josephine Colby, Helen Norton, and Louise Budenz of Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York.

These teachers sought to enact forms of writing and speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the very essence of their pedagogies. They designed rhetoric courses characterized by three important pedagogical features: a profound respect for and awareness of the relationship between language and identity and a desire to integrate this awareness into the curriculum; politicized writing and speaking assignments designed to help students interrogate their marginalized standing within the larger culture in terms of their gender, race, or social class; and an emphasis on service and social responsibility.

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Activist WPA, The
Changing Stories About Writing and Writers
Linda Adler-Kassner
Utah State University Press, 2008
One wonders if there is any academic field that doesn’t suffer from the way it is portrayed by the media, by politicians, by pundits and other publics. How well scholars in a discipline articulate their own definition can influence not only issues of image but the very success of the discipline in serving students and its other constituencies. The Activist WPA is an effort to address this range of issues for the field of English composition in the age of the Spellings Commission and the No Child Left Behind Act.

Drawing on recent developments in framing theory and the resurgent traditions of progressive organizers, Linda Adler-Kassner calls upon composition teachers and administrators to develop strategic programs of collective action that do justice to composition’s best principles. Adler-Kassner argues that the “story” of college composition can be changed only when writing scholars bring the wonders down, to articulate a theory framework that is pragmatic and intelligible to those outside the field--and then create messages that reference that framework. In The Activist WPA, she makes a case for developing a more integrated vision of outreach, English education, and writing program administration.
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Adam Smith
The Rhetoric of Propriety
Stephen J. McKenna
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006

front cover of Adapting the Past to Reimagine Possible Futures
Adapting the Past to Reimagine Possible Futures
Celebrating and Critiquing WAC at 50
Megan J. Kelly
University Press of Colorado, 2024
Developed from presentations at the Fifteenth International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference, this edited collection celebrates the 50th anniversary of the WAC movement while also identifying innovative directions for writing pedagogies, program building and impact, and program mobilization. Contributors reflect on the evolution of WAC as an educational movement as well as the challenges and possibilities facing WAC programs as they respond to the shifting contexts of higher education. The chapters in this collection—found in sections on faculty development, classroom implications, and institutional considerations—offer a range of practices, pedagogies, frameworks, and models for readers who are invested in building and sustaining WAC programs that impact their college and university campuses through cultures of writing. Adapting the Past to Reimagine Possible Futures engages topics such as program assessment, professionalization, and interdisciplinary collaborations, and connections with creative writing. Its 17 chapters testify to WAC’s persistence, resilience, and impact in a dynamic educational landscape.
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Adapting VALUEs
Tracing the Life of a Rubric through Institutional Ethnography
Jennifer Grouling
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Adapting VALUEs traces the use of the American Association of Colleges and Universities' VALUE rubric for written communication at two small universities. Through the lens of institutional ethnography, Jennifer Grouling examines how faculty and administrators adapted the rubric for their own purposes and writing programs. Throughout the book, Grouling explores the ways in which faculty members' interactions on committees, views of the classroom, disciplinary affiliation, and racial privilege impacted their views of this national rubric. Overall, Adapting VALUEs offers valuable insights into the power of the rubric as both a national and a local text that dictates pedagogical and administrative practice.
 
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African American Literacies Unleashed
Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom
Arnetha F. Ball and Ted Lardner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

This pioneering study of African American students in the composition classroom lays the groundwork for reversing the cycle of underachievement that plagues linguistically diverse students. African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom approaches the issue of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in terms of teacher knowledge and prevailing attitudes, and it attempts to change current pedagogical approaches with a highly readable combination of traditional academic discourse and personal narratives.

Realizing that composition is a particular form of social practice that validates some students and excludes others, Arnetha Ball and Ted Lardner acknowledge that many African American students come to writing and composition classrooms with talents that are not appreciated. To empower and inform practitioners, administrators, teacher educators, and researchers, Ball and Lardner provide knowledge and strategies that will help unleash the potential of African American students and help them imagine new possibilities for their successes as writers.

African American Literacies Unleashed asserts that necessary changes in theory and practice can be addressed by refocusing attention from teachers’ knowledge deficits to the processes through which teachers engage information relevant to culturally informed pedagogy. Providing strategies for unlearning racism in the classroom and changing the status quo, this volume stresses the development and maintenance of a real sense of teaching efficacy—teachers’ beliefs in their abilities to connect with and work effectively with all students—and reflective optimism—teachers’ informed expectations that all students have the potential to succeed.

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After Plato
Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing
John Duffy
Utah State University Press, 2020

After Plato redefines the relationships of rhetoric for scholars, teachers, and students of rhetoric and writing in the twenty-first century. Featuring essays by some of the most accomplished scholars in the field, the book explores the diversity of ethical perspectives animating contemporary writing studies—including feminist, postmodern, transnational, non-Western, and virtue ethics—and examines the place of ethics in writing classrooms, writing centers, writing across the curriculum programs, prison education classes, and other settings.

When truth is subverted, reason is mocked, racism is promoted, and nationalism takes center stage, teachers and scholars of writing are challenged to articulate the place of rhetorical ethics in the writing classroom and throughout the field more broadly. After Plato demonstrates the integral place of ethics in writing studies and provides a roadmap for future conversations about ethical rhetoric that will play an essential role in the vitality of the field.
 

Contributors: Fred Antczak, Patrick W. Berry, Vicki Tolar Burton, Rasha Diab, William Duffy, Norbert Elliot, Gesa E. Kirsch, Don J. Kraemer, Paula Mathieu, Robert J. Mislevy, Michael A. Pemberton, James E. Porter, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Xiaoye You, Bo Wang

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After the Public Turn
Composition, Counterpublics, and the Citizen Bricoleur
Frank Farmer
Utah State University Press, 2013
 In After the Public Turn, author Frank Farmer argues that counterpublics and the people who make counterpublics—“citizen bricoleurs”—deserve a more prominent role in our scholarship and in our classrooms. Encouraging students to understand and consider resistant or oppositional discourse is a viable route toward mature participation as citizens in a democracy. 

Farmer examines two very different kinds of publics, cultural and disciplinary, and discusses two counterpublics within those broad categories: zine discourses and certain academic discourses. By juxtaposing these two significantly different kinds of publics, Farmer suggests that each discursive world can be seen, in its own distinct way, as a counterpublic, an oppositional social formation that has a stake in widening or altering public life as we know it.

Drawing on major figures in rhetoric and cultural theory, Farmer builds his argument about composition teaching and its relation to the public sphere, leading to a more sophisticated understanding of public life and a deeper sense of what democratic citizenship means for our time.
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Agents of Integration
Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act
Rebecca S. Nowacek
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011
The question of how students transfer knowledge is an important one, as it addresses the larger issue of the educational experience. In Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act, Rebecca S. Nowacek explores, through a series of case studies, the issue of transfer by asking what in an educational setting engages students to become “agents of integration”— individuals actively working to perceive, as well as to convey effectively to others, the connections they make. 

While many studies of transfer are longitudinal, with data collected over several years, Nowacek’s is synchronous, a rich cross-section of the writing and classroom discussions produced by a team-taught learning community—three professors and eighteen students enrolled in a one-semester general education interdisciplinary humanities seminar that consisted of three linked courses in history, literature, and religious studies. With extensive field notes, carefully selected student and teacher self-reports in the form of interviews and focus groups, and thorough examinations of recorded classroom discussions, student papers with professor comments, and student notebooks, Nowacek presents a nuanced and engaging analysis that outlines how transfer is not simply a cognitive act but a rhetorical one that involves both seeing connections and presenting them to the instructors who are institutionally positioned to recognize and value them. 

Considering the challenges facing instructors teaching for transfer and the transfer of writing-related knowledge, Nowacek develops and outlines a new theoretical framework and methodological model of transfer and illustrates the practical implications through case studies and other classroom examples. She proposes transfer is best understood as an act of recontextualization, and she builds on this premise throughout the book by drawing from previous work in cognitive psychology, activity theory, and rhetorical genre theory, as well as her own analyses of student work. 

This focused examination complements existing longitudinal studies and will help readers better understand not only the opportunities and challenges confronting students as they work to become agents of integration but also the challenges facing instructors as they seek to support that student work.
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The Alchemy of English
The Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-native Englishes
Braj Kachru
University of Illinois Press, 1990
       "What emerges from Kachru's fine work is the potential demarcation
        of an entire field, rather than merely the fruitful exploration of a topic.
        . . . [Kachru] is to be congratulated for having taken us as far as he
        already has and for doing so in so stimulating and so productive a fashion."
        -- World Englishes
      "A potent addition to theoretical, sociolinguistic, attitudinal
        and methodological explorations vis-à-vis the spread and functions
        of, and innovations in, English from the viewpoint of a non-Western scholar."
        -- The Language Teacher
      
      Winner of the Joint First Prize, Duke of Edinburgh English Language
        Book Competition of the English-Speaking Union of the Commonwealth, 1987
     
 
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All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing
An Explanation of Meter and Versification
Timothy Steele
Ohio University Press, 1999
Perfect for the general reader of poetry, students and teachers of literature, and aspiring poets, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing is a lively and comprehensive study of versification by one of our best contemporary practitioners of traditional poetic forms. Emphasizing both the coherence and the diversity of English metrical practice from Chaucer’s time to ours, Timothy Steele explains how poets harmonize the fixed units of meter with the variable flow of idiomatic speech, and examines the ways in which poets have used meter, rhyme, and stanza to communicate and enhance meaning. Steele illuminates as well many practical, theoretical, and historical issues in English prosody, without ever losing sight of the fundamental pleasures, beauties, and insights that fine poems offer us. Written lucidly, with a generous selection of helpful scansions and explanations of the metrical effects of the great poets of the English language, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing is not only a valuable handbook on technique; it is also a wide-ranging study of English verse and a mine of entertaining information for anyone wishing more fully to write, enjoy, understand, or teach poetry.
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An Alternate Pragmatism for Going Public
Jim Webber
Utah State University Press, 2017

An Alternate Pragmatism for Going Public interrogates composition’s most prominent responses to contemporary K–16 education reform. By “going public,” teachers, scholars, and administrators rightfully reassert their expertise against corporate-political standards and assessments like the Common Core, Complete College America, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment. However, author Jim Webber shows that composition’s professional imperative for self-defense only partly fulfils the broader aims of “going public,” which include fostering public participation that can assess and potentially affirm the public good of professional judgment.

Drawing on the pragmatic/democratic tradition, Webber envisions an alternate rhetoric of professionalism, one that not only reasserts compositionists’ expertise but also expands opportunities for publics to authorize this expertise. While this public inquiry and engagement may not safeguard professional standing against neoliberal reform, it reorients composition toward an equally important goal, enabling publics to gauge the adequacy of the educational standardization so often advocated by contemporary reform.

An Alternate Pragmatism for Going Public shows how public engagement can serve composition’s efforts related to “going public.”

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American Legal English, 2nd Edition
Using Language in Legal Contexts
Debra S. Lee, J.D., Charles Hall, and Susan M. Barone
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Law is a profession that requires the ability to read critically, write well, synthesize sources from research, and speak concisely and clearly. American Legal English was developed to help non-native speakers improve their ability to understand and communicate in English with their legal counterparts around the world. The text is an introduction to basic legal information and the U.S. legal system that addresses the major areas of law and provides actual cases and statutes so that students can become familiar with legal syntax and legal vocabulary.

Each chapter addresses a particular area of the law and has three parts:

  • Discovering Connections is a warm-up activity that focuses on non-legal concepts that lead into a discussion of the law.
  • Legal Listening and Legally Speaking offer the opportunity to practice new vocabulary terms before they are used in context later in the chapter.
  • Legal Thumbnail provides a simplified summary of the law with actual statutory and case materials.

In the second edition, the language development activities have been moved to the back of the book and are organized in the categories of writing, reading, oral communication, grammar, and culture.


 

Supplemental listening activities (21 tracks) are available via an audio CD (978-0-472-00325-9) or MP3 download (978-0-472-00360-0) is available for use in conjunction with this textbook. Running time: 000:40:02.

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American Regional Dialects
A Word Geography
Craig M. Carver
University of Michigan Press, 1989
Discusses the origin, distribution, and character of American dialects
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Amplifying Soundwriting Pedagogies
Integrating Sound into Rhetoric and Writing
Michael J. Faris
University Press of Colorado, 2022
While sonic rhetoric is still a growing subfield of writing studies, attention to pedagogy remains an underattended but increasingly important conversation. Amplifying Soundwriting Pedagogies addresses this gap by offering a broad range of assignments to support university instructors who seek to integrate the use of digital audio into their writing and rhetoric curricula. Each of the 25 chapters in this edited collection provides a written introduction to an adaptable soundwriting activity or sequence of assignments; a transcribed audio reflection from the instructor discussing the assignment’s purpose, strengths, and weaknesses; student-oriented documents such as assignment prompts, and rubrics) that readers can adapt in their own teaching; and examples of student work (audio with transcriptions) hosted on the book’s website.
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Analyzing Syntax & Semantics Textbook
Virginia Heidinger
Gallaudet University Press, 1984
This 22-chapter text explores the structure of language and the meaning of words within a given structure. The text/workbook combination gives students both the theory and practice they need to understand this complex topic.

       Analyzing Syntax and Semantics features the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) approach. This method uses student performance objectives, practice, feedback, individualization of pace, and repeatable testing as instructional strategies.
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Analyzing the Grammar of English
Third Edition
Richard V. Teschner and Eston E. Evans
Georgetown University Press, 2007

Analyzing the Grammar of English offers a descriptive analysis of the indispensable elements of English grammar. Designed to be covered in one semester, this textbook starts from scratch and takes nothing for granted beyond a reading and speaking knowledge of English. Extensively revised to function better in skills-building classes, it includes more interspersed exercises that promptly test what is taught, simplified and clarified explanations, greatly expanded and more diverse activities, and a new glossary of over 200 technical terms.

Analyzing the Grammar of English is the only English grammar to view the sentence as a strictly punctuational construct—anything that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period, a question mark, an exclamation mark, or three dots—rather than a syntactic one, and to load, in consequence, all the necessary syntactic analysis onto the clause and its constituents.

It is also one of the very few English grammars to include—alongside multiple examples of canonical or "standard" language—occasional samples of stigmatized speech to illustrate grammar points.

Students and teachers in courses of English grammatical analysis, English teaching methods, TESOL methods, and developmental English will all benefit from this new edition.

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front cover of And No Birds Sing
And No Birds Sing
Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
Edited by Craig Waddell. Foreword by Paul Brooks. Afterword by Linda Lear
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Craig Waddell presents essays investigating Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book, Silent Spring. In his foreword, Paul Brooks, Carson’s editor at Houghton Mifflin, describes the process that resulted in Silent Spring. In an afterword, Linda Lear, Carson’s recent biographer, recalls the end of Carson’s life and outlines the attention that Carson’s book and Carson herself received from scholars and biographers, attention that focused so minutely on her life that it detracted from a focus on her work. The foreword by Brooks and the afterword by Lear frame this exploration within the context of Carson’s life and work.

Contributors are Edward P. J. Corbett, Carol B, Gartner, Cheryll Glotfelty, Randy Harris, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Linda Lear, Ralph H. Lutts, Christine Oravec, Jacqueline S. Palmer, Markus J. Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Craig Waddell. Together, these essays explore Silent Spring’seffectiveness in conveying its disturbing message and the rhetorical strategies that helped create its wide influence.

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Angelina Grimke
Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination
Stephen H. Browne
Michigan State University Press, 1999

Abolitionist, women's rights activist, and social reformer, Angelina Grimké (1805-79) was among the first women in American history to seize the public stage in pursuit of radical social reform. "I will lift up my voice like a trumpet," she proclaimed, "and show this people their transgressions." And when she did lift her voice in public, on behalf of the public, she found that, in creating herself, she might transform the world. In the process, Grimké crossed the wires of race, gender, and power, and produced explosions that lit up the world of antebellum reform. Among the most remarkable features of Angelina Grimké's rhetorical career was her ability to stage public contests for the soul of America—bringing opposing ideas together to give them voice, depth, and range to create new and more compelling visions of social change. 
     Angelina Grimké: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination is the first full-length study to explore the rhetorical legacy of this most unusual advocate for human rights. Stephen Browne examines her epistolary and oratorical art and argues that rhetoric gave Grimké a means to fashion not only her message but her very identity as a moral force.

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Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions
Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich
Krista Ratcliffe
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

Although women and men have different relationships to language and to each other, traditional theories of rhetoric do not foreground such gender differences. Krista Ratcliffe argues that because feminists generally have not conceptualized their language theories from the perspective of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric and composition scholars must construct feminist theories of rhetoric by employing a variety of interwoven strategies: recovering lost or marginalized texts; rereading traditional rhetoric texts; extrapolating rhetorical theories from such nonrhetoric texts as letters, diaries, essays, cookbooks, and other sources; and constructing their own theories of rhetoric.

Focusing on the third option, Ratcliffe explores ways in which the rhetorical theories of Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich may be extrapolated from their Anglo-American feminist texts through examination of the interrelationship between what these authors write and how they write. In other words, she extrapolates feminist theories of rhetoric from interwoven claims and textual strategies. By inviting Woolf, Daly, and Rich into the rhetorical traditions and by modeling the extrapolation strategy/methodology on their writings, Ratcliffe shows how feminist texts about women, language, and culture may be reread from the vantage point of rhetoric to construct feminist theories of rhetoric. She also outlines the pedagogical implications of these three feminist theories of rhetoric, thus contributing to ongoing discussions of feminist pedagogies.

Traditional rhetorical theories are gender-blind, ignoring the reality that women and men occupy different cultural spaces and that these spaces are further complicated by race and class, Ratcliffe explains. Arguing that issues such as who can talk, where one can talk, and how one can talk emerge in daily life but are often disregarded in rhetorical theories, Ratcliffe rereads Roland Barthes’ "The Old Rhetoric" to show the limitations of classical rhetorical theories for women and feminists. Discovering spaces for feminist theories of rhetoric in the rhetorical traditions, Ratcliffe invites readers not only to question how women have been located as a part of— and apart from—these traditions but also to explore the implications for rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy.

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Annotated Bibliography of Southern American English
James B. McMillan
University of Alabama Press, 1989
A collection of the total range of scholarly and popular writing on English as spoken from Maryland to Texas and from Kentucky to Florida

The only book-length bibliography on the speech of the American South, this volume focuses on the pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, naming practices, word play, and other aspects of language that have interested researchers and writers for two centuries. Compiled here are the works of linguists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and educators, as well as popular commentators.

With over 3,800 entries, this invaluable resource is a testament to the significance of Southern speech, long recognized as a distinguishing feature of the South, and the abiding interest of Southerners in their speech as a mark of their identity. The entries encompass Southern dialects in all their distinctive varieties—from Appalachian to African American, and sea islander to urbanite.
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Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century
Kirk Hazen
West Virginia University Press, 2020
Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century provides a complete exploration of English in Appalachia for a broad audience of scholars and educators. Starting from the premise that just as there is no single Appalachia, there is no single Appalachian dialect, this essay collection brings together wide-ranging perspectives on language variation in the region. Contributors from the fields of linguistics, education, and folklore debunk myths about the dialect’s ancient origins, examine subregional and ethnic differences, and consider the relationships between language and identity—individual and collective—in a variety of settings, including schools. They are attentive to the full range of linguistic expression, from everyday spoken grammar to subversive Dale Earnhardt memes.

A portal to the language scholarship of the last thirty years, Appalachian Englishes in the Twenty-First Century translates state-of-the-art research for a nonspecialist audience, while setting the agenda for further study of language in one of America’s most recognized regions.
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Appeals in Modern Rhetoric
An Ordinary Language Approach
M. Jimmie Killingsworth
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: An Ordinary-Language Approach introduces students to current issues in rhetorical theory through an extended treatment of the rhetorical appeal, a frequently used but rarely discussed concept at the core of rhetorical analysis and criticism. Shunning the standard Aristotelian approach that treats ethos, pathos, and logos as modes of appeal, M. Jimmie Killingsworth uses common, accessible language to explain the concept of the rhetorical appeal—meaning the use of language to plead and to please. The result is a practical and innovative guide to understanding how persuasion works that is suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses yet still addresses topics of current interest to specialists.

Supplementing the volume are practical and theoretical approaches to the construction and analysis of rhetorical messages and brief and readable examples from popular culture, academic discourse, politics, and the verbal arts. Killingsworth draws on close readings of primary texts in the field, referencing theorists to clarify concepts, while he decodes many of the basic theoretical constructs common to an understanding of identification. Beginning with examples of the model of appeals in social criticism, popular film, and advertising, he covers in subsequent chapters appeals to time, place, the body, gender, and race. Additional chapters cover the use of common tropes and rhetorical narrative, and each chapter begins with definitions of key concepts.

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Applied Pedagogies
Strategies for Online Writing Instruction
Daniel Ruefman
Utah State University Press, 2016
Teaching any subject in a digital venue must be more than simply an upload of the face-to-face classroom and requires more flexibility than the typical learning management system affords. Applied Pedagogies examines the pedagogical practices employed by successful writing instructors in digital classrooms at a variety of institutions and provides research-grounded approaches to online writing instruction.
 
This is a practical text, providing ways to employ the best instructional strategies possible for today’s diverse and dynamic digital writing courses. Organized into three sections—Course Conceptualization and Support, Fostering Student Engagement, and MOOCs—chapters explore principles of rhetorically savvy writing crossed with examples of effective digital teaching contexts and genres of digital text. Contributors consider not only pedagogy but also the demographics of online students and the special constraints of the online environments for common writing assignments.
 
The scope of online learning and its place within higher education is continually evolving. Applied Pedagogies offers tools for the online writing classrooms of today and anticipates the needs of students in digital contexts yet to come. This book is a valuable resource for established and emerging writing instructors as they continue to transition to the digital learning environment.
 
Contributors: Kristine L. Blair, Jessie C. Borgman, Mary-Lynn Chambers, Katherine Ericsson, Chris Friend, Tamara Girardi, Heidi Skurat Harris, Kimberley M. Holloway, Angela Laflen, Leni Marshall, Sean Michael Morris, Danielle Nielsen, Dani Nier-Weber, Daniel Ruefman, Abigail G. Scheg, Jesse Stommel
 
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Appropriate[Ing] Dress
Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America
Carol Mattingly
Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Carol Mattingly examines the importance of dress and appearance for nineteenth-century women speakers and explores how women appropriated gendered conceptions of dress and appearance to define the struggle for representation and power that is rhetoric. Although crucial to women’s effectiveness as speakers, Mattingly notes, appearance has been ignored because it was taken for granted by men.

Because women rarely spoke in public before the nineteenth century, no guidelines existed regarding appropriate dress when they began to speak to audiences. Dress evoked immediate images of gender, an essential consideration for women speakers because of its strong association with place, locating women in the domestic sphere and creating a primary image that women speakers would work with—and against—throughout the century. Opposition to conspicuous change for women often necessitated the subtle transfer of comforting images when women sought to inhabit traditionally masculine spaces. The most successful women speakers carefully negotiated expectations by highlighting some conventions even as they broke others.

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Archives of Instruction
Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States
Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille M. Schultz
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Both a historical recovery and a critical rethinking of the functions and practices of textbooks, Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States argues for an alternative understanding of our rhetorical traditions. The authors describe how the pervasive influence of nineteenth-century literacy textbooks demonstrate the early emergence of substantive instruction in reading and writing. Tracing the histories of widespread educational practices, the authors treat the textbooks as an important means of cultural formation that restores a sense of their distinguished and unique contributions.


At the beginning of the nineteenth century, few people in the United States had access to significant school education or to the materials of instruction. By century’s end, education was a mass—though not universal—experience, and literacy textbooks were ubiquitous artifacts, used both in home and in school by a growing number of learners from diverse backgrounds. Many of the books have been forgotten, their contributions slighted or dismissed, or they are remembered through a haze of nostalgia as tokens of an idyllic form of schooling. Archives of Instruction suggests strategies for re-reading the texts and details the watersheds in the genre, providing a new perspective on the material conditions of schooling, book publication, and emerging practices of literacy instruction. The volume includes a substantial bibliography of primary and secondary works related to literacy instruction at all levels of education in the United States during the nineteenth century.

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Aristotle's Voice
Rhetoric, Theory, and Writing in America
Jasper Neel
Southern Illinois University Press, 1994

In this book, Jasper Neel’s sure-to-be-controversial resituating of Aristotle centers around three questions that have been constants in his twenty-two years of teaching experience: What does itmean to teach writing? What should one know before teaching writing? And, if there is such a thing as "research in the teaching of writing," what is it?

Believing that all composition teachers are situated politically and socially, both as part of the institution in which they teach and as beings with lived histories, Neel examines his own life and the life of composition studies as a discipline in the context of Aristotle. Neel first situates the Rhetoric as a political document; he then situates the Rhetoric in the Aristotelian system and describes how professional discourse came to know itself through Aristotle’s way of studying the world; finally, he examines the operation of the Rhetoric inside itself before arguing the need to turn to Aristotle’s notion of sophistry as a way of negating his system.

By pointing out the connections among Aristotelian rhetoric, the contemporary university, and the contemporary writing teacher, Neel shows that Aristotle’s frightening social theories are as alive today as are Aristotelian notions of discourse.

Neel explains that by their very nature teachers must speak with a professional voice. It is through showing how to "hear" one’s professional voice that Neel explores the notion of professional discourse that originates with Aristotle. In maintaining that one must pay a high price in order to speak through Aristotle’s theory or to assume the role of "professional," he argues that no neutral ground exists either for pedagogy or for the analysis of pedagogy. Neel concludes this discussion by proposing that Aristotelian sophistry is both an antidote to Aristotelian racism, sexism, and bigotry and a way of allowing Aristotelian categories of discourse to remain useful.

Finally, as an Aristotelian, a teacher, and a writer, Neel responds both to Aristotle and to professionalism by rethinking the influence of the past and reviving the voice of Aristotelian sophistry.

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Around the World in 80 Words
A Journey through the English Language
Paul Anthony Jones
University of Chicago Press, 2018
What makes a place so memorable that it survives forever in a word? In this captivating round-the-world tour, Paul Anthony Jones acts as your guide through the intriguing stories of how eighty places became immortalized in the English language. You’ll discover why the origins of turkeys, limericks, Brazil nuts, and Panama hats aren’t quite as straightforward as you might presume. If you’ve never heard of the tiny Czech mining town of Jáchymov—or Joachimsthal, as it was known until the late 1800s—you’re not alone, which makes its claim to fame as the origin of the word “dollar” all the more extraordinary. The story of how the Great Dane isn’t all that Danish makes the list, as does the Jordanian mountain whose name has become a byword for a tantalizing glimpse. We’ll also find out what the Philippines has given to your office inbox, what Alaska has given to your liquor cabinet, and how a speech given by a bumbling North Carolinian gave us a word for impenetrable nonsense.

Surprising, entertaining, and illuminating, this is essential reading for armchair travelers and word nerds. Our dictionaries are full of hidden histories, tales, and adventures from all over the world—if you know where to look.
 
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The Art of Teaching Speaking
Research and Pedagogy for the ESL/EFL Classroom
Keith S. Folse
University of Michigan Press, 2006
*What elements make a speaking activity successful?
*Which tasks or activities really help build speaking fluency?
*What does the research show regarding speaking activities?
*What mistakes do ESL teachers often make in speaking activity design?

In this highly accessible and practical resource, Keith S. Folse provides a wealth of information to help ESL/EFL teachers design and use speaking tasks that will actually improve students' speaking fluency. The book presents and discusses the relevant research and assessment issues and includes case studies from twenty different settings and classrooms around the world so that readers learn from others about the problems and successes of using various speaking activities.

Teachers will find the chapters on Twenty Successful Activities and Ten Unsuccessful Activities particularly valuable. The successful activities are provided for classroom use and are reproducible. The book also contains five appendixes that explain what teachers need to know about vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar and how they affect the teaching of speaking. Samples of successful lesson plans and a list of resources useful for teaching speaking are also included.

Keith S. Folse, Ph.D., is Coordinator, TESOL Programs, University of Central Florida (Orlando). He is the author of Vocabulary Myths (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and more than 35 second language textbooks, including texts on grammar, reading, speaking, listening, and writing.
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The Article Book
Practice toward Mastering a, an, and the
Tom Cole
University of Michigan Press, 2000
A comprehensive guide and workbook for improving ESL/EFL students' understanding of English articles, The Article Book can be used as either a supplement to any ESL/EFL core text or as a self-study tool for intermediate through advanced learners. Cole involves students in "learning by doing" through an integrated approach to skill acquisition that includes other grammar structures, reading, vocabulary, and speaking.
Each chapter of the book is organized into teachable units or lessons and includes presentation of a grammatical rule with examples, exercises, quizzes, and a comprehensive test. While the fifty rules (and fifteen exceptions) are taught to provide a logical framework for the text and serve as a handy reference, students will learn through guided practice instead of memorization.
Fish Trek is a well-designed interactive computer game designed specifically to help teach English article usage. It offers six game levels, ten levels of difficulty, and a comprehensive practice session. While Fish Trek software supports The Article Book, the book and the software can be used separately.
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Aspects of English Sentence Stress
By Susan F. Schmerling
University of Texas Press, 1976

Aspects of English Sentence Stress is written within the conceptual framework of generative-transformational grammar. However, it is atheoretical in the sense that the proposals made cannot be formulated in this theory and are a challenge to many other theories. The author's concern is not with the phonetic nature of stress; rather, using a working definition of stress as subjective impression of prominence, she attempts to formulate general principles that will predict the relative prominence of different words in particular utterances—what might be called the syntax of stress. She supports her arguments with a large amount of original data and provides the basis for new ways of thinking about this area of linguistic research.

Schmerling begins with a detailed review and critique of Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle's approach to sentence stress; she shows that their cyclic analysis cannot be considered valid, even for quite simple phrases and sentences. Next, she reviews discussions of sentence stress by Joan Bresnan, George Lakoff, and Dwight Bolinger, agreeing with Bolinger's contention that there is no intimate connection between sentence stress and syntactic structure but showing that his counterproposal to the standard approach is inadequate as well. She also examines the concept of "normal stress" and demonstrates that no linguistically significant distinction can be drawn between "normal" and "special" stress contours.

In generating her own proposals concerning sentence stress, Schmerling takes the view that certain items which are stressable are taken for granted by the speaker and are eliminated from consideration by the principles governing relative prominence of words in a sentence. Then she examines the pragmatic and phonological principles pertaining to items that are not eliminated from consideration. Finally, the author contends that the standard views, which she shows to be untenable, are a result of the assumption that linguistic entities should be studied apart from questions concerning their use, in that it was adoption of this methodological assumption that forced linguists to deny the essentially pragmatic nature of sentence stress.

Accessible to anyone who is familiar with the basic concepts of generative-transformational grammar, Aspects of English Sentence Stress presents provocative ideas in the field.

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Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax
WHERE CLAUSES BEGIN
Mary Blockley
University of Illinois Press, 2001
In Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax, Mary Blockley uses modern linguistics to tackle the thorny problem of how to interpret a written language that relied neither on punctuation nor on capitalization to mark clause boundaries and subordination.
 
Distinguished by a remarkable combination of erudition and lucidity,  Aspects of Old English Poetic Syntax provides new insight into the rules that govern syntactic relationships and indicates how these rules differ for prose and verse. Blockley considers the functions of four of the most common and most syntactically important words in Old English, as well as such features of clauses as verb-initial order, negative contraction, and unexpressed but understood subjects. Picking up where Bruce Mitchell's classic Old English Syntax left off, Blockley shows how such common words and structures mark the relationships between phrases and clauses.
Blockley also considers how the poetic tradition compensated for the loss in written texts of the syntactic functions served by intonation and inflection. Arguing that verse relied instead on a prescriptively regulated, unambiguous syntax, she suggests principles that promise more complex and subtle interpretations of familiar texts such as Beowulf as well as a wealth of other Old English writings.
 
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Assessing English Language Learners in the Content Areas
A Research-into-Practice Guide for Educators
Florin M. Mihai
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Assessing English Language Learners in the Content Areas: A Research-into-Practice Guide for Educators seeks to provide guidance to classroom teachers, staff developers, and test-item designers who want to improve ELL assessment outcomes, particularly in the areas of math, science and social studies. The first two chapters of the book establish the background for the discussion of content-area assessment for ELLs, examining several important characteristics of this rapidly growing student population (as well as critical legislation affecting ELLs) and providing a description of various forms of assessment, including how ELL assessment is different from the assessment of English-proficient students.  Important assessment principles that educators should use in their evaluation of tests or other forms of measurement are provided.

 Other chapters review ELL test accommodations nationwide (because, surprisingly, most teachers do not know what they can and cannot allow) and the research on the effectiveness of these types of accommodations. The book analyzes the characteristics of alternative assessment; it discusses three popular alternative assessment instruments (performance assessment, curriculum-based measurement, and portfolios) and makes recommendations as to how to increase the validity, reliability, and practicality of alternative assessments. The book proposes fundamental assessment practices to help content area teachers in their evaluation of their ELL progress.

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Assessing English Learners in the Content Areas, Second Edition
A Research-into-Practice Guide for Educators
Florin M. Mihai
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The new edition of Assessing English Learners in the Content Areas: A Research-into-Practice Guide for Educators seeks to provide guidance to classroom teachers, staff developers, and test-item designers who want to improve ESL assessment outcomes, in the content areas of language arts, math, science and social studies.
 
Significant modifications in education legislation since the publication of the first edition have necessitated this new volume, which includes updated EL demographics as they relate to the Common Core Standards and Every Student Succeeds Act and revised state-by-state test accommodation information. New to this edition is information about the assessment of language arts (in addition to math, science, and social studies). The Second Edition also features new research-based recommendations for large-scale and classroom-based assessments.
 
Like the previous edition, the first two chapters of the book establish the background for the discussion of content-area assessment for ELs, examining several important characteristics of this rapidly growing student population and providing a description of various forms of assessment, including how EL assessment is different from the assessment of English-proficient students.  Important assessment principles that educators should use in their evaluation of tests or other forms of measurement are provided. 

Other chapters review EL test accommodations nationwide (because, surprisingly, most teachers do not know what they can and cannot allow) and the research on the effectiveness of these types of accommodations. The book analyzes the characteristics of alternative assessment and makes recommendations as to how to increase the validity, reliability, and practicality of alternative assessments. The book proposes fundamental assessment practices to help content area teachers in their evaluation of their students’ progress. Two extensive appendixes outline TESOL Proficiency Standards and academic vocabulary for the content areas.
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Assessing the Teaching of Writing
Twenty-First Century Trends and Technologies
Amy E. Dayton
Utah State University Press, 2015

Although fraught with politics and other perils, teacher evaluation can contribute in important, positive ways to faculty development at both the individual and the departmental levels. Yet the logistics of creating a valid assessment are complicated. Inconsistent methods, rater bias, and overreliance on student evaluation forms have proven problematic. The essays in Assessing the Teaching of Writing demonstrate constructive ways of evaluating teacher performance, taking into consideration the immense number of variables involved.

Contributors to the volume examine a range of fundamental issues, including the political context of declining state funds in education; growing public critique of the professoriate and demands for accountability resulting from federal policy initiatives like No Child Left Behind; the increasing sophistication of assessment methods and technologies; and the continuing interest in the scholarship of teaching. The first section addresses concerns and advances in assessment methodologies, and the second takes a closer look at unique individual sites and models of assessment. Chapters collectively argue for viewing teacher assessment as a rhetorical practice.

Fostering new ways of thinking about teacher evaluation, Assessing the Teaching of Writing will be of great interest not only to writing program administrators but also to those concerned with faculty development and teacher assessment outside the writing program. 

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Assessment in the Second Language Writing Classroom
Deborah Crusan
University of Michigan Press, 2010

Assessment in the Second Language Writing Classroom is a teacher and prospective teacher-friendly book, uncomplicated by the language of statistics. The book is for those who teach and assess second language writing in several different contexts: the IEP, the developmental writing classroom, and the sheltered composition classroom. In addition, teachers who experience a mixed population or teach cross-cultural composition will find the book a valuable resource. Other books have thoroughly covered the theoretical aspects of writing assessment, but none have focused as heavily as this book does on pragmatic classroom aspects of writing assessment. Further, no book to date has included an in-depth examination of the machine scoring of writing and its effects on second language writers.

Crusan not only makes a compelling case for becoming knowledgeable about L2 writing assessment but offers the means to do so. Her highly accessible, thought-provoking presentation of the conceptual and practical dimensions of writing assessment, both for the classroom and on a larger scale, promises to engage readers who have previously found the technical detail of other works on assessment off-putting, as well as those who have had no previous exposure to the study of assessment at all.

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Assignments across the Curriculum
A National Study of College Writing
Dan Melzer
Utah State University Press, 2014

In Assignments across the Curriculum, Dan Melzer analyzes the rhetorical features and genres of writing assignments through the writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Presenting the results of his study of 2,101 writing assignments from undergraduate courses in the natural sciences, social sciences, business, and humanities in 100 postsecondary institutions in the United States, Assignments across the Curriculum is unique in its cross-institutional breadth and its focus on writing assignments.

The results provide a panoramic view of college writing in the United States. Melzer's framework begins with the rhetorical situations of the assignments—the purposes and audiences—and broadens to include the assignments' genres and discourse community contexts. Among his conclusions is that courses connected to a writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) initiative ask students to write more often, in a greater variety of genres, and for a greater variety of purposes and audiences than non-WAC courses do, making a compelling case for the influence of the WAC movement.

Melzer's work also reveals patterns in the rhetorical situations, genres, and discourse communities of college writing in the United States. These larger patterns are of interest to WAC practitioners working with faculty across disciplines, to writing center coordinators and tutors working with students who bring assignments from a variety of fields, to composition program administrators, to first-year writing instructors interested in preparing students for college writing, and to high school teachers attempting to bridge the gap between high school and college writing.

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Attitudes De Se
Linguistics, Epistemology, Metaphysics
Edited by Neil Feit and Alessandro Capone
CSLI, 2013
In English, we use the word "I" to express thoughts that we have about ourselves, and we use the reflexive pronouns "himself" and "herself" to attribute such thoughts to others. Philosophers and linguists call such thoughts, and the statements we use to express them, de se.  
 
De se thoughts and statements, although they appear often in our day-to-day lives, pose a series of challenging problems for both linguists and philosophers. This interdisciplinary volume examines the structure of de se thought, various issues concerning the semantics and pragmatics of our discourse about it, and also what it reveals about how humans think about themselves and the world around them.
 
Contributors are:
Darren Bradley
Alessandro Capone
Eros Corazza
Wayne A. Davis
Denis Delfitto
Michael Devitt
Igor Douven
Neil Feit
Gaetano Fiorin
James Higginbotham
Yan Huang
Kasia M. Jaszczolt
Michael Nelson
Pietro Perconti
John Perry
Michael G. Titelbaum
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Audience Expectations and Teacher Demands
Robert Brooke and John Hendricks
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

The audience—the community of readers who will use the texts a writer produces—must be an important influence on the writer for his or her work to be effective.

Robert Brooke and John Hendricks examine the difficult task of teaching "writing for an audience" in a classroom where students know that the teacher, not the addressed audience, assigns the grade.

The authors describe in detail a particular writing class, taught by Brooke and observed by Hendricks, that attempted to teach writing for an audience. By combining the experiences from their study with student reactions to the class, they draw some conclusions about the dynamics of teaching writing and about learning in general.

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Authoring
An Essay for the English Profession on Potentiality and Singularity
Janis Haswell and Richard Haswell
Utah State University Press, 2010
The postmodern conviction that meaning is indeterminate and self is an illusion, though fascinating and defensible in theory, leaves a number of scholarly and pedagogical questions unsatisfied. Authoring—the  phenomenological act or felt sense of creating a text—is “a remarkably black box,” say Haswell and Haswell, yet it should be one of the central preoccupations of scholars in English studies. Not only can the study of authoring accommodate the “social turn” since postmodernism, they argue, but it accommodates as well conceptions of, and the lived experience of, personal potentiality and singularity.
      Without abandoning the value of postmodern perspectives, Haswell and Haswell use their own perspective of authorial potentiality and singularity to reconsider staple English-studies concerns such as gender, evaluation, voice, character, literacy, feminism, self, interpretation, assessment, signature, and taste. The essay is unique as well in the way that its authors embrace often competing realms of English studies, drawing examples and arguments equally from literary and compositionist research.
      In the process, the Haswells have created a Big Idea book, and a critique of the field. Their point is clear: the singular person/mysterious black box/author merits deeper consideration than we have given it, and the book’s crafted and woven explorations provide the intellectual tools to move beyond both political divisions and theoretical impasses.
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Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines
A Reader
Diane P. Freedman and Olivia Frey, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines reveals the extraordinary breadth of the intellectual movement toward self-inclusive scholarship. Presenting exemplary works of criticism incorporating personal narratives, this volume brings together twenty-seven essays from scholars in literary studies and history, mathematics and medicine, philosophy, music, film, ethnic studies, law, education, anthropology, religion, and biology. Pioneers in the development of the hybrid genre of personal scholarship, the writers whose work is presented here challenge traditional modes of inquiry and ways of knowing. In assembling their work, editors Diane P. Freedman and Olivia Frey have provided a rich source of reasons for and models of autobiographical criticism.

The editors’ introduction presents a condensed history of academic writing, chronicles the origins of autobiographical criticism, and emphasizes the role of feminism in championing the value of personal narrative to disciplinary discourse. The essays are all explicitly informed by the identities of their authors, among whom are a feminist scientist, a Jewish filmmaker living in Germany, a potential carrier of Huntington’s disease, and a doctor pregnant while in medical school. Whether describing how being a professor of ethnic literature necessarily entails being an activist, how music and cooking are related, or how a theology is shaped by cultural identity, the contributors illuminate the relationship between their scholarly pursuits and personal lives and, in the process, expand the boundaries of their disciplines.

Contributors:

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Ruth Behar
Merrill Black
David Bleich
James Cone
Brenda Daly
Laura B. DeLind
Carlos L. Dews
Michael Dorris
Diane P. Freedman
Olivia Frey
Peter Hamlin
Laura Duhan Kaplan
Perri Klass
Muriel Lederman
Deborah Lefkowitz
Eunice Lipton
Robert D. Marcus
Donald Murray
Seymour Papert
Carla T. Peterson
David Richman
Sara Ruddick
Julie Tharp
Bonnie TuSmith
Alex Wexler
Naomi Weisstein
Patricia Williams

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