ENGL 5364 History of Rhetoric: Survey of Classical Rhetoric & Contemporary Connections

Course Overview
This course will introduce you to contemporary rhetorical theory scholarship that will familiarize you with a range of intellectual traditions that extend beyond canonical Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions. I have designed this seminar to make an argument about the work of rhetoric and positionality of human and nonhuman concerns: an understanding of rhetorical theory is crucial to an understanding how persuasion works on and with different audiences. The goal is to demonstrate that rhetorical history in the course title can be herstories of rhetorics. I'll ask you to read scholarship in rhetorical theory that can help us articulate why such an easy equation of Aristotelian and Greco-Rroman rhetoric persists outside the field, even in this department. By the end of the semester, you'll be familiar with the wide range of concerns the field takes up, and you'll be in a better position to articulate the ways in which your own scholarly concerns might be taken up rhetorically. Our rhetorical inheritances encompass an ecosystem of knowledges where indigenous, intersectional feminist, Black, Latinx, Queer, and other rhetorical traditions co-exist in dialogical conversation.

Representative Texts

Most course readings will be available as pdfs in a shared One Drive folder or available through TTU library's “Document Delivery” feature. Listed below are representative of what will be featured within our course readings. Enrolled students will be invited to weigh-in on course readings to refine the scope.

• • Chávez, K. R. (2013). Queer migration politics: Activist rhetoric and coalitional possibilities. University of Illinois Press.
  • Cho, S., Crenshaw, K. W., & McCall, L. (2013). Toward a field of intersectionality studies:
  • Theory, applications, and praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38(4), 785–810.
  • Collins, P. H. (2019). Intersectionality as critical social theory. Duke University Press.
  • Coole, D., & Frost, S. (Eds.). (2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Duke University Press.
  • DeVoss, D., Haas, A., and Rhodes, J. (2019). Technofeminism: (re)generations and intersectional futures. Computers and Composition, 51.
  • Gilio-Whitaker, D. (2019). As long as grass grows: The Indigenous fight for environmental justice, from colonization to Standing Rock. Beacon Press.
  • Haas, A. M. (2012). Race, rhetoric, and technology: A case study of decolonial technical communication theory, methodology, and pedagogy. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 26(3), 277–310.
  • Hesford, W., Licona, A. C., & Teston, C. (Eds.). (2018). Precarious rhetorics. The Ohio State University Press.
  • Itchuaqiyaq, C. U. [Forthcoming]. When the sound is frozen: Extracting climate data from Inuit narratives,” In Technical Communication for Environmental Action, S. D. Williams, ed. 
  • Jackson, S. J., Bailey, M., & Welles, B. F. (2020). #HashtagActivism: Race and gender in America's network counterpublics. MIT Press.
  • Kimmerer, Robin W. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed, 2013.
  • Mohanty, C. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Duke University Press.
  • Rickert, T. (2013). Ambient rhetoric: The attunements of rhetorical being. University of Pittsburgh Press.
  • Royster, J. J., Kirsch, G. E., & Bizzell, P. (2012). Feminist rhetorical practices: New horizons for rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies. Southern Illinois University Press.
  • Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. Zed Books.
  • Walters, Margaret. (2005). Feminism: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
  • Wang, B. (2013). Comparative rhetoric, Postcolonial studies, and transnational feminisms: A geopolitical approach. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 43(3), 226–242. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2013.792692
  • Wang, Z. (2020). Activist rhetoric in transnational cyber-public spaces: Toward a comparative materialist approach. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 50(4), 240–253. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2020.1748218

ENGL 5366 Teaching Technical and Professional Writing

English 5366 is a course that will prepare you to teach technical and professional writing as an introductory (survey) course for students across the disciplines. It will introduce you to the theoretical and pedagogical knowledge you will need to teach technical and professional writing successfully. English 5366 will also ask you to consider critical issues related to teaching technical communication. From this foundation, it will progress to more practical concerns ranging from what to teach in a technical writing introductory class, how to teach this information in both face-to-face and online settings, and why to teach it.

In addition to technical writing pedagogy, you'll write a variety of technical documents as you prepare a lesson, review textbook components, develop assignments, observe master teachers at work, and report your findings and experiences. You'll conclude the semester by producing a teaching portfolio that showcases your preparation for teaching technical communication. The portfolio will include a syllabus and weekly schedule for an introductory course, a lesson plan with instructional materials, a teaching philosophy, and an instructional video appropriate for online teaching.

ENGL 5368 Studies in Written Argumentation

Argumentation theory is typically taught in Communications departments as part of training in speech and debate or “classical rhetorical analysis.” This course will cover the barest handful of the seminal figures (Toulmin, Olbrechts-Tyteca) in argumentation theory since some familiarity remains useful for our graduate students. You will also have an opportunity to complete a short traditional argumentation analysis on a public argument of your choice. However, our early readings will demonstrate that much in argumentation theory—even recent commendable efforts to remedy it—pines away for a fraught and unwise return to logical forms of argumentation. By comparison, a great deal of 20th century rhetorical theory has been prompting us to ask much more relevant questions, such as “What if logic and reason was never enough to persuade?” and “If public audiences don't respond to logical or factual arguments all the time, then what sorts of alternative rhetorical and written appeals should we study and compose instead?” (case in point: see the post-truth #fakenews present).

Therefore, this course will take as its premise that technical communication, rhetoric, and composition graduate students are better served studying “public rhetoric” and “public sphere theory” than argumentation theory proper. Public sphere theory is a cross-disciplinary body of work that explores a broader range of theories of public discourses that encompass emotional, embodied, posthuman, technologically-mediated, gendered, racialized, affective, and queer approaches to studying public and counterpublic discourses. Alongside the traditional study of arguments, public sphere theory importantly equips researchers to study the structural conditions and logics of inclusion and exclusion that give rise to various definitions of “rationality” and who or what counts as a public speaker at a given historical moment. We will begin with canonical work like Plato's Callicles arguing that the Mighty should rule over the Many (the demos) and Jurgen Habermas's normative approach to critical rationality. We will move on to read Habermas's critical interlocutors like Nancy Fraser, Catherine Squires, and Michael Warner, as well as the major rhetoric, composition, and technical scholars who have grappled with public sphere theory scholarship. Finally, students will have the opportunity to put public rhetoric theory into practice by composing arguments (via critical making scholarship) that have the potential to engage actually existing publics of their choosing (professional, personal, academic, non-academic). While not a technical communication course per se, students who are interested in social justice and ethics will find a great deal of productive overlap between public sphere theory and the former in this course, especially in recent work on tactical technical communication.

ENGL 5371 Foundations of Technical Communication

How do we define technical communication? How might it differ from or relate to professional writing, engineering communication, science communication, health communication, or composition? How does rhetoric relate to technical communication? Is rhetoric just something for scholars of technical communication or do practitioners use rhetorical principles as well? Exploring the answers to these and similar questions will help you situate yourself to graduate study in technical communication.

ENGL 5371: Foundations of Technical Communication is the gateway to graduate education in technical communication. The course introduces graduate students to the central texts, enduring themes, and persistent tensions in technical communication. We will explore the history of technical communication, its conceptual frameworks, and its dual identity as an academic and professional field. We will survey technical communication foundational topics such as genre, design, and the user, and emerging trends and concepts like tactical technical communication, decolonial technical communication, and technical communication as infrastructure. The course will function as an introduction to the field while preparing you to take part in ongoing scholarly conversations through the typical genres of graduate school. Students can expect to receive a solid foundation for understanding the field to better articulate and pursue their own interests within it.

ENGL 5372 Technical Reports

This course focuses on the report—the primary work place document that creates knowledge and supports decision-making. Our class will examine reports of various types: information reports, analytical reports, feasibility studies, recommendation reports, empirical research reports. We will consider proposals as part of the document cycle that leads to reports. In the workplace, proposals seek approval or funding for a plan or activity. Reports provide information on the progress of such activities, or on the status of research.

All writing in some way tells a story, and so it is with reports and proposals. A proposal from a social service agency seeking money to expand a program for the poor must tell the story of the people it hopes to serve. A report on a study of sub-atomic particles conducted by physicists using a particle accelerator tells the story of those particles, even though they exist only for nano seconds. Narrative is intrinsic to reports and proposals.

As is typical in any graduate technical writing class, we will approach this topic from a theoretical and applied perspective. We will analyze existing documents using rhetorical theory and we will produce reports and proposals based on primary and secondary search. The class will involve reading and response in Blackboard and a report project in which students address a decision they are facing in their lives.

Our main text will be Houp, Pearsall, Tebeaux, Dragga. Reporting Technical Information. Oxford University Press.

ENGL 5374 Technical Editing

In ENGL 5374 Technical Editing, students will learn how to edit technical documents, from proofreading for errors at the surface to ensuring that the document contains appropriate content, organization, and visuals for its audiences. Students will also learn how to use traditional editing marks, editing functions within word processors, and principles of layout and design. Finally, students will learn about the profession of editing and develop pieces to support their careers.

ENGL 5375 Document Design

This course covers the fundamental principles of document and information design. Over the course of the semester students will learn practical and theoretical skills related to desktop publishing, visual communication, and publication production. Using industry-standard software applications, students will learn to create, from scratch, visually attractive and functional documents that are used across academic, scientific, technological, and general business contexts.

ENGL 5379 Empirical Research Methods

The course explores empirical research methods in communication research, emphasizing research design, methods, and quantitative analysis. The course will emphasize: 1) the philosophy of empirical inquiry; 2) methodological concepts including design and data gathering; 3) the assumptions underlying and uses for various statistical analyses (descriptive and inferential), and 4) interpreting and arguing from empirical data analysis results. The course project will focus on designing an empirical research study with the goal of publication.

ENGL 5386 Disability Rhetorics

“Disability justice allowed me to understand that me writing from my sickbed wasn't me being weak or uncool or not a real writer but a time-honored crip creative practice. And that understanding allowed me to finally write from a disabled space, for and about sick and disabled people, including myself, without feeling like I was writing about boring, private things that no one would understand.”

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

“Do we even know what it means to have a disabled (unsound, ill, irrational, crazy) mind in the educational realm, a realm expressly dedicated to the life of the mind?”

Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life

This course will explore the intersection of disability and rhetoric. We will examine how rhetoric shapes experiences of disability and how disability frameworks reshape the study of rhetoric. We will explore questions such as:

• • How do disability frameworks (e.g., disability studies, crip theory, disability justice) change the ways we understand what rhetoric is and how it works? What rhetorical exclusions do these frameworks uncover?
  • How do rhetorics of disability highlight the role of the body in rhetoric and resist mind-body dualism?
  • How do people with disabled and divergent bodyminds do rhetoric?
  • How do disabled people use their experiences and knowledge to reshape understandings of access, care, and community? What rhetorical processes and material conditions influence this work?
  • How can educators and technical communicators prioritize access in their work?

Readings may include all or parts of the following books: Jay Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric; Margaret Price, Mad at School; Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice; Lisa Melonçon (ed.), Rhetorical Accessability; Remi Yergeau, Authoring Autism. We will also read selected articles and digital texts that connect disability to composition, technical communication, and activism.

ENGL 5389 Field Methods of Research

What do we do when we want to study something that can't be re-enacted in a laboratory, dissected analytically from detailed, constrained experimental conditions? This question is incredibly important for researchers who study everyday language and language-in-use. Historically scholars of technical communication and rhetoric have called upon the methods of anthropology, ethnography, observation, note-taking, and interviews. These methods remain crucial to the discipline's ability to study our technical writing, design, and rhetoric as it's practiced in uncontrolled conditions. The technical communication and rhetoric's long-standing relationship with usability testing and now user experience architecture have moved to fuse the traditional ethnographic methods with the experimental insights of user-centered and participatory design research.

Our class will survey and practice those methods most common to field research, ethnography, observation, note-taking, and participatory design research. We will also contextualize those methods relative to the debates and concerns the field has had about replicability, generalizability, and the relationship of qualitative research methods to quantitative methods as equally “empirical.” We will also pay close attention to the ethical implications of this mode of research, attending to the potential risks and rewards of conducting research of language-use outside a lab, in public spaces, even in digital, online, and new media contexts.

(Image credit: Burst via Stock Snap, Creative Commons)

ENGL 5393 Grants and Proposals for the Academy and Industry

Technical communicators and educators see problems in their communities that require sophisticated plans to solve. Such problems often require additional funding and resources or a plan of action which involve formative and summative assessment measurements. In this course you will learn rhetorical processes of grant seeking from identifying a problem, to coming up with an idea to solve the problem, to making sure the idea furthers the mission of the organization, to finding potential sponsors, to planning and developing a proposal. The goal of the course, in other words, is to define objectives and then to turn those objectives into outcomes. Writing grants and proposals in conjunction with TTU researchers or community or industry members is required.

ENGL 5394 User Experience Design

Our experiences with technology go beyond simple appraisals of utility. User experience (UX) refers to the range of meaningful experiences—physical, ludic, affective, aesthetic, and ethical—people have when interacting with technologies at work, play, or anywhere else. UX design, in turn, refers to a process and range of practices that researchers and designers use to create technologies that provide people with experiences they value.

In this class students will undertake a UX design project to research, define, design, and evaluate a digital or physical artifact that affords interactions people find meaningful and, in some way, valuable. Each student will individually develop his or her project by identifying and researching a use context targeted for design, engage future users in activities that help define design requirements, and create paper-based and/or digital prototype(s) for experience-centered evaluation. Throughout the UX design process, students will iteratively develop their design concept and reflect on its development by reading and discussing assigned texts, writing use case scenarios, and participating in class activities.