"Critical Literacy in a Digital Era" offers an examination of the persuasive approaches used in discussions on and about the Internet. Its aim is to increase awareness of what is assumed, unquestioned, and naturalized in our media experience. Using a critical literacy framework for her analysis, author Barbara Warnick argues that new media technologies become accepted not only through their use, but also through the rhetorical use of discourse on and about them. She analyzes texts that discuss new media and technology, including articles from a major technology-oriented periodical; women's magazines and Web sites; and Internet-based political parody in the 2000 presidential campaign. These case studies bring to light the persuasive strategies used by writers to influence public discourse about technology.
The book includes analyses of narrative structures, speech genres, intertextuality, argument forms, writing formulae, and patterns of emphasis and neglect used in traditional and new media outlets. As a result, this distinctive work identifies the features of online speech that bring people and ideas together and enable communities to form in new media environments.
As a unique study of the ways in which ideology is embedded in rhetorical texts, this volume will play a significant role in the development of critical literacy about writing and speech concerning new communication technology. It will be of interest to readers concerned about how our talk about communication affects how we think about it, in particular those interested in communication and social change, public persuasion, and rhetorical criticism of new media content.

"Critical Literacy in a Digital Era" offers an examination of the persuasive approaches used in discussions on and about the Internet. Its aim is to increase awareness of what is assumed, unquestioned, and naturalized in our media experience. Using a critical literacy framework for her analysis, author Barbara Warnick argues that new media technologies become accepted not only through their use, but also through the rhetorical use of discourse on and about them. She analyzes texts that discuss new media and technology, including articles from a major technology-oriented periodical; women's magazines and Web sites; and Internet-based political parody in the 2000 presidential campaign. These case studies bring to light the persuasive strategies used by writers to influence public discourse about technology.
The book includes analyses of narrative structures, speech genres, intertextuality, argument forms, writing formulae, and patterns of emphasis and neglect used in traditional and new media outlets. As a result, this distinctive work identifies the features of online speech that bring people and ideas together and enable communities to form in new media environments.
As a unique study of the ways in which ideology is embedded in rhetorical texts, this volume will play a significant role in the development of critical literacy about writing and speech concerning new communication technology. It will be of interest to readers concerned about how our talk about communication affects how we think about it, in particular those interested in communication and social change, public persuasion, and rhetorical criticism of new media content.

The second edition of Rhetoric Online: The Politics of New Media has been extensively revised and expanded in order to systematically examine how rhetorical theory can be applied to political activity across a wide range of new media technologies. Warnick and Heineman study the web as a public sphere, touching on how websites, social media, smartphone applications, blogs, viral video, and web-based anti-institutional practices such as hacktivism impact everything from electoral politics to activism. Furthermore, they provide critical insight into how rhetoricians might consider existing theories of persuasion, identity, narrative, intertextuality, social movements, and more in the context of evolving new media technology. This edition contains completely new chapters on viral video, social identity and social media, and anti-institutional politics online.

No single work is more responsible for the heightened interest in argumentation and informal reasoning--and their relation to ethics and jurisprudence in the late twentieth century--than Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's monumental study of argumentation, "La Nouvelle Rhetorique: Traite de l'Argumentation." Published in 1958 and translated into English as "The New Rhetoric" in 1969, this influential volume returned the study of reason to classical concepts of rhetoric. In The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric, leading scholars of rhetoric Barbara Warnick, Jeanne Fahnestock, Alan G. Gross, Ray D. Dearin, and James Crosswhite are joined by prominent and emerging European and American scholars from different disciplines to demonstrate the broad scope and continued relevance of "The New Rhetoric" more than fifty years after its initial publication.
Divided into four sections--Conceptual Understandings of The New Rhetoric, Extensions of "The New Rhetoric," The Ethical Turn in Perelman and "The New Rhetoric," and Uses of "The New Rhetoric"--this insightful volume covers a wide variety of topics. It includes general assessments of "The New Rhetoric" and its central concepts, as well as applications of those concepts to innovative areas in which argumentation is being studied, such as scientific reasoning, visual media, and literary texts. Additional essays compare Perelman's ideas with those of other significant thinkers like Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon, explore his career as a philosopher and activist, and shed new light on Perelman and Olbrechts- Tyteca's collaboration. Two contributions present new scholarship based on recent access to letters, interviews, and archival materials housed in the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Among the volume's unique gifts is a personal memoir from Perelman's daughter, Noemi Perelman Mattis, published here for the first time.
"The Promise of Reason," expertly compiled and edited by John T. Gage, is the first to investigate the pedagogical implications of Perelman and Olbrechts- Tyteca's groundbreaking work and will lead the way to the next generation of argumentation studies.