This article outlines a three-part pedagogy capable of responding to the risks, rewards, and headaches associated with public rhetoric and writing. To demonstrate the purchase of this pedagogy, I revisit one of the oldest and most misunderstood public rhetoric and writing assignments: the letter-to-the-editor assignment.

This symposium, "Barack Obama's Significance for Rhetoric and Composition," aims to provoke and renew disciplinary conversations about the meaning of an age now nearly past, as well as to pose questions that resonate for presidential rhetoric generally. It includes: (1) "Obama's Rhetoric: Black Talk Flow, White Folk Fluent"…

This essay examines the definitions and practices of argument perpetuated by popular composition textbooks, illustrating how even those texts that appear to forward expansive notions of argument ultimately limit it to an intent to persuade. In doing so, they help perpetuate constricted practices of argument within undergraduate composition…

Individual agency is necessary for the possibility of rhetoric, and especially for deliberative rhetoric, which enables the composition of what Latour calls a good common world. Drawing on neurophenomenology, this essay defines individual agency as the process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their…

Public rhetoric pedagogy can benefit from an ecological perspective that sees change as advocated not through a single document but through multiple mundane and monumental texts. This article summarizes various approaches to rhetorical ecology, offers an ecological read of the Montgomery bus boycotts, and concludes with pedagogical insights on a…

This article examines the various uses to which Stephen Toulmin has been put in composition studies. It presents data on citations of Toulmin in nine journals, considers appeals to Toulmin in several strains of composition scholarship, and argues that composition scholars ought to attend more carefully to Toulmin's later works. (Contains 4 tables…

Contemporary argument increasingly relies on quantitative information and reasoning, yet our profession neglects to view these means of persuasion as central to rhetorical arts. Such omission ironically serves to privilege quantitative arguments as above "mere rhetoric." Changes are needed to our textbooks, writing assignments, and instructor…

We argue that the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, with its dual emphasis on literacy and occupational skills, can serve as a new model for writing classrooms and writing program administrators. We further contend that the "contact zone" classroom should be replaced with community-based "federations."…

This article presents several excerpts from an article written by Joseph Janangelo titled "Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive Hypertexts." In his article, Janangelo suggested that Cornell's work and ideas about composing model intelligent ways to composing persuasive nonsequential text. Janangelo also wondered if the use of…

Discusses the "stock issues" approach to argument, presents a contemporary stock issue system for the arrangement of a single composition, and constructs a model argument as a way of demonstrating how the system works. (FL)

Explores the complexity of the concept "specificity," then looks at some of the misinterpretations made by developmental writers to illustrate how developmental writing students have difficulty moving from abstract to concrete. (HTH)

Presents a two-stage pedagogy to help students establish original policy arguments. The two steps are designed to help students arrive at their own policy arguments once they have carefully identified and assessed the arguments of others. (HTH)

Attempts to work out a way of understanding and teaching argument that prepares students to participate in serious deliberations on issues that face them every day. Examines two contrasting styles of argument, competitive and collaborative, and where the middle ground between the two lies. (TB)

Discusses a set of options for concluding an essay founded upon Aristotle's four goals of a conclusion: (1) to dispose the hearer favorably towards oneself and unfavorably towards the adversary; (2) to amplify and depreciate; (3) to excite the emotions of the hearer; (4) to recapitulate. Cites various composition theorists to elaborate these…

Describes an approach to composition instruction in which the students are given a body of real or fictional evidence about a particular case and asked to interpret or explain it by means of a closely-reasoned argument. (HTH)