Elijah P. Lovejoy, generally regarded as America's first martyr to freedom of the press, was killed by a racist mob in Alton, Illinois, in November 1837, after a brief but tumultuous career as an crusading antislavery newspaper editor and preacher. Born into a stern Maine Protestant family, he migrated to St. Louis, became a minister, and began…

The miscellaneous studies section of the proceedings includes the following 14 papers: "The News Shapers" (Lawrence C. Soley); "Journalism and Mass Communication Journal Reviewers: Their Standards and Perceived Roles in the Research Process" (Stanley T. Wearden and Fred F. Endres); "Celebrity Advertising: Perception,…

To determine formal principles of discourse processing and production, a study reviewed theories in various disciplines related to language and/or thought and thereby rationalized an approach of quantitative matrix analysis to the problems caused by discrepant discourse structures encountered in second language learning. Statistical analyses of…

This in-depth study explores problem areas of Hong Kong secondary and university students in writing narrative and argumentative compositions on two different themes. Subjects were 40 university English majors, 40 form four and 40 form six secondary students. The research indicates that the students at these grade levels experienced difficulty in…

Given the perspective of news as a significant cultural form, a study examined the symbolic world constructed by American newsmagazines, particularly investigating the dominant media frames (defined as consistent patterns of cognition and selection by which symbol handlers routinely organize discourse) employed by these news organizations. The…

The United States Supreme Court case, Meese v. Keene, in which the justices narrowly defined the meaning of the term "political propaganda," failed to address adequately the complexities of the issue. In this case it is necessary to bring together divergent views about communications in the analysis of the legal problem, including…

Designed to test the effects of knowledge acquisition on attitude formation and change, this study investigated whether knowledge-oriented instruction would have a different effect on students' nuclear attitudes than attitude-oriented instruction. High school students (N=331) from six schools who had not studied nuclear energy in any class or…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 11 titles deal with the following topics: (1) applying Burke's cluster-agon method to Betty Friedan's rhetoric; (2) the rhetoric of nonviolent action; (3) the president's wife as public communicator; (4) the identification and…

Designed to assist primary teachers in creating a classroom environment that stimulates students' growth in writing, this guide offers suggestions, lists, charts, and activities for classroom use in the primary grades. Following a preface and philosophy, the first section discusses young writers and the writing process, with subsections on stages…

Noting that Hodding Carter, Jr., editor and majority owner of the Greenville, Mississippi, "Delta Democrat-Times," was considered a spokesman of and to the South regarding racial matters during the two decades between the end of World War II and the escalation of the Vietnam war, this monograph examines Carter's newspaper in the two-year…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 20 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the rhetoric of the Moral Majority, (2) epideictic rhetoric in the works of 16th cntury humanist John Colet, (3) rhetoric and the Equal Rights Amendment, (4)…

Thinking skills are important and education is expected to develop them. Empirical results suggest that formal education makes a modest and largely indirect difference. This paper will describe the early stages of an ongoing curriculum initiative in the teaching of critical reasoning skills in the philosophy curriculum on the Howard College Campus…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 13 titles deal with the following topics: (1) a paradigm for the study of communicative style; (2) the rhetoric of conversion in Ohio's abolitionist campaign; (3) a generic approach to the rhetoric of the United States Supreme…

A college-level Southern studies course, team-taught by a history professor and a speech communication professor and designed to integrate the study of history with the study of public address, is described in this paper. After pointing out the interrelation of public address and its historical and political context, the paper lists the topics of…

A list of 87 French expressions that are commonly used in discussion and argumentation is presented. The list was compiled from over 200 documents consisting of transcriptions of radio or television programs and transcriptions of discussions or interviews published in newspapers or periodicals. The material utilized was in the form of dialogues…