An oral communication course, offered at Michigan State University during the 5-week summer session, was conducted for academically talented high school students. Students learned about the responsibility of creating and delivering ethical, informed, and rhetorically sensitive messages. Each student researched one socially significant issue, and…

In an electoral process in 1988 and 1989, voters replaced General Augusto Pinochet as leader of Chile. The use of political cartoons by both pro- and anti-Pinochet forces is explored in this paper. Cartoons have long been recognized as a form of mass communication. In the Chilean elections cartoons played an important role in the battle for the…

The philosophical and educational significance of the present study lies in its attempt to clarify the value and importance of the Socratic legacy for education, in addition to underscoring the difficulty of understanding that legacy. Perspectives on Socrates and his legacy, from Friedrich Nietzsche to contemporary critics, such as Bruce Kimball…

This research review explores the propaganda model proposed by E. S. Herman and N. Chomsky (1988) as an alternative way of looking at the American news media. The study begins with a review of the theoretical assumptions and the supporting empirical findings highlighting the propaganda framework, following which is a synthesis of research…

An examination of the rhetoric of two social movements in the United States--the proslavery movement of the pre-Civil War Period and the anti-feminist movement of the 1970s--reveals that both contain a common theme, paternalism, and that both use similar rhetorical strategies to explicate the theme through a familial metaphor, Father. Examples of…

Difficulties have arisen in implementing the principles of modern rhetoric in the classrooms of teachers who are interested in and committed to the principles of modern rhetoric as well as in the classrooms of teachers who use writing primarily for drill and evaluation. Although problems such as time limits, pressure from parents, lack of…

Members of the Polish faculty at the English Institute (Poland) primarily use English as a second language (ESL) techniques to teach writing, with grammar and idiom drills, and little writing beyond the sentence level. An American professor, on the other hand, used a process approach to teach writing by providing specific instructions about…

The use of media in persuasive messages was investigated in five studies addressing: (1) the effectiveness of realistic media in such messages; (2) interaction of field dependence/independence or hemisphericity with media type in persuasive message delivery; and (3) whether mediated messages should be designed differently for learners with…

A typology developed from case structure and argumentation theory was used in an analysis of case types that evolved in the discussion of 12 issues during a 10-hour bargaining session between negotiators for teachers and a school board. Case types in the typology were (1) need-plan, which argues for the need to change the status quo; (2)…

In order to create the ethos of a social "movement," a collective must show that it is moving (1) against something (an enemy); (2) towards something (a vision of possibility); (3) from something (situation of origin); and (4) with something (an ever-expanding collection of people). When applied to protestant Christian feminism (as…

The symbolic function of curricular debate, as it is manifested in the minimum competency testing movement (MCT), is investigated. Curricular debate necessarily reflects the demands of the society in which it arises. The topics that are addressed spring from this milieu and the language in which issues are couched must be appropriate to it.…

Defining emotional responses as the interaction of three primary emotions occurring along pleasure-displeasure, arousal-nonarousal, and dominance-submissiveness continua, a study hypothesized that (1) a systematic relationship exists between the emotions elicited by the candidate and voting behavior, and that (2) the emotions elicited by…

To explore the impact of the environment on perceptions of compliance gaining situations, 97 university students were asked to recall and describe situations in which they had had to persuade someone to do something. Their descriptions of compliance gaining situations were then evaluated for similarity by three additional groups of students. The…

Intended for high school composition instructors, this book resolves the seeming contradiction between creative, expressive writing and formal exposition and argumentation by presenting a teaching method that treats creative writing as a necessary--if not sufficient--cause for exposition. The first two chapters describe a sequence of short fiction…

Evaluators of argument are frequently confronted by conflicting claims. While these claims are usually based on probabilities, they are often resolved with the accepted claim treated as though it were "true," while the rejected claim is treated as though it were "false." Scenario testing is the label applied to a set of…