Characterized by specific and rigid boundaries of institutional practices and expectations in the academy, student writing is a synergistic literacy practice where students are required to construct generically diverse texts by yoking concepts with appropriate linguistic resources. This empirical study involving 196 first-year ESL students at a…

As Barry Brummett (1984) has argued, the purpose of rhetorical theory is pedagogical--providing students with resources for understanding the rhetorical transactions that they encounter every day. An understanding of the implications of ideology is necessary for advanced communication students. Kellner and Share (2005) contend that this is…

An act of rhetoric has attitudinal significance; that is, a part of rhetoric involves persuasion. Further, attitudinal frames of reference relate to and result from the retrieval of stored information (memory, etc.) and the generation of arguments. By studying the relative strength that subjects use in arguing an "issue-concept," the…

The concept of the message" must be augmented so as to give a satisfactory account of communication. The author lays the groundwork for the analysis of the elements composing the paramessage". (Author/MF)

Clarifies problems concerning the nature and scope of rhetoric, including its relation to human knowledge, by viewing rhetorical methods as universal, rule-governed, and productive of knowledge having normative force. Knowledge is conceptualized as developing within a social-symbolic sphere of methods, subject matters, derivations, applications,…

In this reconsideration of social knowledge, an attempt is made to resolve ambiguities related to the original project on social knowledge. Three regions of dispute fostered by the original essay are examined and explained: the definition of social knowledge, the issue of form, and the problems of normative impact. (JMF)

The roles that essentially contested concepts play in persuasive discourse are examined in this paper. The first section of the paper reviews W. B. Gallie's original explication of the nature of essentially contested concepts and the body of theoretical literature that has developed in response to it. It then notes three major areas of…

Debates the use of concepts from cognitive psychology to explain the structuring of attitudes and opinions. The debate zeroes in on the structures of cognition, the reflexivity of attitudes, the function of the social context, the effect of ideology on the structures of vocabulary, the communication process, the role of ideology in organizing…