Connors provides a history of composition and its pedagogical approaches to form, genre, and correctness. He shows where many of the today's practices and assumptions about writing come from, and he translates what our techniques and theories of teaching have said over time about our attitudes toward students, language and life. Connors locates the beginning of a new rhetorical tradition in the mid-nineteenth century, and from there, he discusses the theoretical and pedagogical innovations of the last two centuries as the result of historical forces, social needs, and cultural shifts. This important book proves that American composition-rhetoric is a genuine, rhetorical tradition with its own evolving theria and praxis. As such it is an essential reference for all teachers of English and students of American education.

"The authors address the current racial tensions in North America as a result of public outcries and antiracist activism both on the streets and in schools. To create a willingness among teachers and students in writing, rhetoric, and communication courses to address matters of race and racism"--Provided by publisher.

Featuring roughly sixty specially commissioned essays by an international cast of leading rhetoric experts from North America, Europe, and Great Britain, the Handbook will offer readers a comprehensive topical and historical survey of the theory and practice of rhetoric from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment up to the present day.

Style: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy conducts an in-depth investigation into the long and complex evolution of style in the study of rhetoric and writing. The theories, research methods, and pedagogies covered here offer a conception of style as more than decoration or correctness—views that are still prevalent in many college settings as well as in public discourse.

This book brings together Latinx scholars in Rhetoric and Composition to discuss keywords that have been misused or appropriated by forces working against the interests of minority students. For example, in educational and political forums, rhetorics of identity and civil rights have been used to justify ideas and policies that reaffirm the myth of a normative US culture that is white, Eurocentric, and monolinguistically English. Such attempts amount to a project of neo-colonization, if we understand colonization to mean not only the taking of land but also the taking of culture, of which language is a crucial part. The editors introduce the concept of epistemic delinking and argue for its use in conceptualizing a kind of rhetorical and discursive decolonization, and contributors offer examples of this decolonization in action through detailed work on specific terms. Specifically, they draw on their training in rhetoric and on their own experiences as people of color to help reset the field's agenda. They also theorize new keywords to shed light on the great varieties of Latinx writing, rhetoric, and literacies that continue to emerge and circulate in the culture at large, in the hope that the field will feel more urgently the need to recognize, theorize, and teach the intersections of writing, pedagogy, and politics.

From the beginning, rhetoric has been a productive and practical art aimed at preparing citizens to participate in communal life. Possibilities for this participation are continually evolving in light of cultural and technological changes. The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric explores the ways that public rhetoric has changed due to emerging technologies that enable us to produce, reproduce, and distribute compositions that integrate visual, aural, and alphabetic elements. David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel argue that to exploit such options fully, rhetorical theory and pedagogy need to be reconfigured.

Reclaiming the Rural moves beyond typical arguments for the preservation, abandonment, or modernization of rural communities, analyzing how communities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico sustain themselves--economically, environmentally, intellectually, and politically--through literate action.