In this essay, I argue that the queer phrase "it's giving" can teach the concept and practice of rhetorical criticism while also performing a queer rhetorical pedagogy. The proposed activity proceeds in three steps: teaching queer histories, defining rhetorical criticism in queer terms, and practicing criticism queerly. This approach…

This study developed a brief training, the Integrative Writing Training (IWT), to introduce students to two types of rhetorical devices (i.e., direct and indirect integration) that can be used to communicate cross-textual connections through writing. The training did not significantly increase the volume of integration included in students'…

An emerging body of corpus-based genre analysis studies has examined the connection between different types of formulaic language and rhetorical moves in various genres of academic writing. The current study extends this body of research into the understudied genre of narrative stories and the understudied phraseological unit of lexical…

This article considers a pedagogical approach that centralizes student-led archival retrieval of rhetorics. The precise context of the author's inquiry is situated in a Californian classroom wherein the author teaches writing in a Latinx Studies department, serving predominately Chicanx first-generation demographics. In that context, the article…

The writing process has helped define students as autonomous writers within the composition classroom. Yet, our writing identities are not stable and shift throughout the writing process. I argue that composition instructors should enhance students' awareness to their own dynamic, writing subjectivities through a more expansive view of rhetorical…

"Story Culture Live: Black American Story Spaces as Actionable Antiracism Work," was a keynote given at the Northeast Writing Centers Association Conference at the University of New Hampshire in spring 2023. The keynote details the genesis of my podcast, "Story Culture Live," which reimagines storytelling as actionable activism…

The aim of this paper is to explore the violation of Grice's Maxims in the Arabic comedy "Madraset Al- Mushaghbeen" and explain how the violation of the maxims brings about humorous effects in the play. The analysis shows that 61 instances of maxims violation were identified in the play. Maxim of Manner receives the highest percentage of…

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:…

This article examines archival research as a generative community literacy practice. Through the example of a community-based project centered on archival research, I examine the increased possibility the archives hold as a site for rhetorical invention based on collaboration that includes contemporary community members "and" the…

Synthesis is one of the most cognitively demanding practices novice writers must undertake, and research demonstrates that first-year students' synthesis writing practices result in more knowledge "telling" rather than knowledge creation and transforming. Pedagogies used to teach synthesis often focus on developing text-building…

Spurred by burgeoning racist and xenophobic immigration policy and rhetoric, we analyzed the writing of seven second-grade children about their experiences of living connections that span the United States-Mexico border. Informed by research on children's "testimonios" in literacy classrooms and Anzaldúa's concept of the border/lands, we…

This article argues that the field of Rhetoric and Composition has long harnessed the active potential of metaphor to change its own practices but has considerably overlooked student use of metaphor--a particularly urgent oversight given the metaphorical battleground that constitutes the discourse of contemporary higher education. Using this…

Courses: Persuasion; Persuasive Speaking. Objectives: Students will demonstrate the ability to apply persuasive concepts in constructing persuasive messages creatively, and students will present and analyze their persuasive messages.

Writing has become more visible in academia through writing advice manuals and the faculty development activities they inspire. In this article, I examine writing advice manuals and argue they are epistemologically current traditional, which limits how well and how far they can support scholarly writers. Writing advice manuals and composition…

The study of comics is an important part of the project of critiquing normative assumptions underlying multimodality and composition. Extending the efforts of the authors of "Multimodality in Motion"--which explains that "multimodality as it is commonly used implies an ableist understanding of the human composer" (Yergeau et…