Rhetorical figures of speech provide important analytical frames to chart how arguments operate within genres and within genre ecologies. Varieties of the figure prolepsis allow for the rendering of future time or fact in the present, which can be a powerful rhetorical inducement toward social and political action. In this article, we examine how…

Job interviews require applicants to demonstrate two things: experience with direct value to the company and a fit with the team and company culture. A technique is detailed demonstrating how to develop this argument based on aligning credentials with corporate interests, developing advocacy-based themes, and synthesizing material into a…

Collaborative argumentation allows groups to express, criticize, and integrate arguments to achieve the co-construction of collective knowledge. However, students often face challenges when proposing diversified arguments, gathering evidence, and rebutting others reasonably. Incorporating generative conversational agents (GCAs) into collaborative…

Despite students' growing interest in entrepreneurship education (EE), the small body of research exploring rhetorical strategies for proposing new business ventures has focused only on the argument strategies that startup entrepreneurs use when delivering oral pitches to investors. This study, by contrast, explores the "topoi," or lines…

This dissertation reports on research conducted to better understand how college student writers learned to work against their own biases as they researched and wrote arguments. I conducted a review of former studies to design a curriculum that would help students avoid bias and increase their ability to write arguments tailored to specific…

A key purpose of higher education seminars is to support higher-order thinking, yet empirical evidence of how this is evidenced and scaffolded in higher education remains scarce. Building on previous work on identifying rhetorical and linguistic devices for argumentation, we found that higher-order thinking can be evidenced through using…

Riddell's (2020) article, "The Power of Rhetoric," inspired this position paper. She used the neologism "rhetorical literacy" describing it as "one of the most powerful tools [we] can wield" to navigate today's complexity. This article discusses why family and consumer sciences (FCS) practitioners (a.k.a., home…

Studies of the grant proposal tend to conflate academic research grant proposals with other kinds of nonprofit grant proposal genres, even though research and nonprofit grant proposals have different audiences and goals. To address this gap, this study draws on the Aristotelian concept of "topoi" (or typical arguments) and uses corpus…

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate how health educators use emotional appeals on the social media site TikTok to promote well-being, engage audiences and reduce mental health stigma. Design/Method: Our research team conducted a quantitative content analysis of 400 TikTok videos centred on health education. We evaluated the frequency of mental…

Topics and resources from honors education are used to teach argumentation in writing composition. The author discusses efficacies for increasing student awareness of, and reflection on, issues in honors education while engaging first-year students in honors issues that directly affect their lives.

Scholars in the field of writing and rhetorical studies have long been interested in professional writing and the ways in which experts frame their research for disciplinary audiences. Three decades ago, rhetoricians incorporated stasis theory into their work as a way to explore the nature of argument and persuasion in scientific discourse.…

Recursively in history, emotions such as social anger, moral satiety, distrust of the elite and the Establishment, among others, have all contributed to politicians' encouragement and exploitation of a rather emotionally charged discourse (Block, E., and R. Negrine. 2017. "The Populist Communication Style: Toward a Critical Framework."…

This article positions rhetoric as a bridge between oracy and citizenship education. The first comparative curricular study of Scotland, Slovenia and Norway, it demonstrates shared policy aims and practical challenges in the delivery of oracy and citizenship education in these three nations. We argue that the study of rhetoric equips young…

The hearings of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol have two fundamental and distinct tasks and responsibilities: first, to present a true account, based on conclusive evidence and logic; and second, to persuade the American public that this is indeed the only true and conclusive…

The aim of this study is to analyze spoken linguistic features of three-minute startup pitches. Linguistic features analyzed included discourse markers, dysfluency, modality, numeral phrases, pronouns, reduced forms, repetitions, rhetorical questions, vague expressions, and vocatives. The corpus is comprised of 92 startup pitches delivered in real…