In face-to-face conversation, it's easy to react with shock and moralism to the incivility enabled by social media, easy to lament that we live in an era when communication has gone wrong. The digital era, however has also reinvigorated voice--both written and spoken--in other, less toxic, ways. We've seen a resurgence in oral composition (think:…

The author explores the place of feminism in teaching through the lens of rhetorical dexterity, providing a case study.

In a reflection on her teaching practices, Wendy Bishop in "Teaching Lives" suggests that over time she became a "social expressivist," in that by writing about her own teaching she learned "to develop a personal voice within the public matrix of professional communities" (ix). For the compositionist committed to the…

The author writes that his experience in teaching has taught him that the perfect text simply does not exist, however the closest approximation to perfection lies in the direction of the classical world. Hal McDonald says that he cannot see how one can teach rhetoric without passing through pedagogical territory first cleared by Aristotle,…

Following her return to the classroom after a two-year administrative absence, Kathleen Thornton--the Director of Undergraduate English Advisement and a lecturer at the University of Albany, New York--was struck by the language her undergraduate students used to discuss the stories of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe or Nathaniel Hawthorne. While…