This article introduces an assignment that uses key messages to introduce students to the different ways that rhetoric is used in professional writing. In particular, this article discusses how analyzing and writing reports about organizational web sites can help students perceive the rhetorical nature of professional communication, gain familiarity with several professional writing genres and writing conventions, become more critical readers, and recognize the relationship between an initial study and a report that communicates the findings from that study.
Thanks in large part to a $30 million gift, Miami University, located in Oxford, Ohio, is in the midst of constructing a new state-of-the-art School of Business. This enormous new structure, which will measure 210,000 square feet, will house the Farmer School of Business's six academic departments, as well as a trading room that enables students to simulate stock-trading activity, Net classrooms, 500-and 150-seat auditoriums, a library, and electronic research facilities. As the plans for this massive structure suggest, traveling from the English department to the business school entails more than simply crossing the street; it means walking into an entirely different world. When we enter the business school as writing across the curriculum (WAC) administrators, we're not simply stepping into a different discipline, we're often stepping into different ideologies and values as well as different ways of thinking, talking, and writing. As in any WAC venture, two guiding principles are "know your audience" and "adapt to your environment." Admittedly, all WAC endeavors are by nature site specific; consequently, this article advocates rhetorical analysis that first uncovers and draws on the language and methods of a specific discourse community so that WAC administrators in a variety of institutional sites and cultures can then effect change.As WAC administrators in the School of Business, we are tasked with encouraging curricular change in a discipline intensely devoted to content and preparing students to succeed in established forms of capitalism. We are also assigned to work with an overwhelmingly male faculty that teaches 3/3 Pedagogy Published by Duke University Press
This article demonstrates how students in a disciplinary writing study conducted at Miami University's business school failed to understand writing assignments based on the names of the assignments. It proposes effective writing-assignment names as prompts to connect students to previous writing experience and reinforce students' acquisition of disciplinary writing skills and genres. In addition, the article suggests that writing-assignment names offer a pedagogical tool for integrating learning across a discipline; that is, naming writing assignments encourages faculty to identify and define the types of disciplinary writing and critical-thinking skills that students should learn. M ost people are familiar with the shell game. Three shells are placed on a flat surface, and a ball is placed underneath one of the shells. The object of the game is to keep your eye on the ball, yet in most instances, the hand proves quicker than the eye, and you lose the ball and thus lose the game.With the vast array of names they use to title and describe college writing assignments, instructors sometimes engage in their own shell game: They hide their expectations and keep students from seeing or even guessing how their own previous writing experience applies to the task at hand. Even when given a logical assignment sequence, students often miss that logic amid the shuffle of words used in the names of writing assignments. And ultimately, the students lose. In this article, I argue that writing-assignment names offer a pedagogical opportunity by cuing students to conjure previous writing experiences and reinforcing students' acquisition of new writing skills and genres. In other words, by appropriately naming writing assignments, instructors can
s Rhetoric, History, and Women's Oratorical Education is an engaging and instructive examination of American women's speaking practices and the ways in which women learn to speak. Whereas early feminist inquiry focused predominately on the voices of "extraordinary" women speaking and writing from highly visible public platforms, more recent studies by historians of rhetoric have turned attention to the variety of ways women from different races, cultures, religions, regions, and social classes received rhetorical training. This collection especially highlights the increased scholarly interest in women's oratory. Featuring the work of eleven scholars from the fields of rhetoric and composition, communication, history, and education, the collection encompasses the late eighteenth century to the present. However, rather than a comprehensive treatment, the eleven essays included in this collection offer a generative study-pointing to a wide range of subjects and approaches for examining women's rhetorical education and speaking practices within their cultural contexts.Gold and Hobbs supply a broad definition of rhetorical education "not just as formal instruction in writing or speaking derived from classical rhetoric, but any form of education designed to promote rhetorical competence, be it writing, speaking, reading, listening, or . . . movement of the body" (pp. 3-4). Additionally, they call on researchers to ask: "Where does oratorical education take place? Where are the places where women learn to speak? What counts as rhetorical performanceor rhetoric? What have we belittled, dismissed, or missed? What is it crucial that we see?" (p. 4). The contributors to this collection heed this call looking at female rhetors, genres, practices, rhetorical theories used and authored by women, and sites and movements that influenced women's speech. In doing so, the authors closely examine a broad range of artifacts including remnants of speeches; school curricula; programs and press coverage from school exhibitions; personal letters; diaries; textbooks; conduct books; contemporary multimedia; and illustrations of women's dress, stance, expression, and movement. These contributions especially draw and build on works such as Nan Johnson's
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