In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton's multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the…

Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate in online back-and-forth exchanges that influence their rhetorical literacy. Because of the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical, and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public…

This article examines the rhetoric of resistance used by South African anti-apartheid journalists to expose the links between the apartheid government and death squads. By utilizing allusions, repetition, and a concept I refer to as "subversive enthymemes," these journalists managed to reveal publicly information about death squad…

This piece continues the work of scholars in the field who look to uncover the ideological and textual practices of our dependence on the construct of "race" through racialized metaphors. Analyzing the rhetoric of race in "College Composition and Communication" and "College English" since 1990, I assert that our categorization of what "race" is…

Examines three articles written jointly by the same researchers and reporting the results of the same study in three different specialized journals. Points out the inadequacy of the current heuristic for analyzing audiences, and provides the basis for creating a different audience analysis heuristic based on rhetorical analysis of discourse. (HTH)