This remarkable, inexpensive guide packs a comprehensive look at writing (and analyzing) arguments into 200 brief, accessible pages. Best-selling authors Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer offer clear, engaging chapters covering what argument is, how to read (and view) arguments critically, how to write a variety of persuasive arguments, and how to support your arguments with good reasons and appropriate documentation. This remarkable, inexpensive guide packs a comprehensive look at writing (and analyzing) arguments into 200 brief, accessible pages. Best-selling authors Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer offer clear, engaging chapters covering what argument is, how to read (and view) arguments critically, how to write a variety of persuasive arguments, and how to support your arguments with good reasons and appropriate documentation.

When Kenneth Burke conceived his celebrated "Motivorum" project in the 1940s and 1950s, he envisioned it in three parts. Whereas the third part, A Symbolic of Motives, was never finished, A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) have become canonical theoretical documents. A Rhetoric of Motives was originally intended to be a two-part book. Here, at last, is the second volume, the until-now unpublished War of Words, where Burke brilliantly exposes the rhetorical devices that sponsor war in the name of peace. Discouraging militarism during the Cold War even as it catalogues belligerent persuasive strategies and tactics that remain in use today, The War of Words reveals how popular news media outlets can, wittingly or not, foment international tensions and armaments during tumultuous political periods. This authoritative edition includes an introduction from the editors explaining the compositional history and cultural contexts of both The War of Words and A Rhetoric of Motives. The War of Words illuminates the study of modern rhetoric even as it deepens our understanding of post-World War II politics.

As Debby Boone and Rocky Balboa raised the hopes of a country in financial and political crisis, U.S. colleges sought to meet the needs of a growing and increasingly diverse student body while also responding to the public outcry for tangible results. Within English departments, especially in publicly funded institutions, writing instruction came under heightened scrutiny as politicians and taxpayers wondered "Why Johnny Can't Write." Scholars and teachers of writing responded as best they could to these pressures, conducting research on writing processes, developing new pedagogies better suited than skills-and-drills to new student populations, and slowly establishing themselves as disciplinary professionals within rapidly changing and often tumultuous institutions. A product of extensive archival research and numerous interviews, 1977: A CULTURAL MOMENT IN COMPOSITION examines the local, state, and national forces (economic, political, cultural, and academic) that fostered the development of the first-year composition program at one representative site, Penn State University, in the late 1970s. Sidebar commentaries from Stephen A. Bernhardt, Hugh Burns, Sharon Crowley, Lester Faigley, Janice Lauer, Elaine Maimon, Jasper Neel, and John Warnock-many of whom were just beginning in the field in 1977-enrich and complicate the story. In the emerging tradition of program-based histories, such as Barbara L'Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo's HISTORICAL STUDIES OF WRITING PROGRAM ADMINISTRATION (Parlor Press, 2005), 1977: A CULTURAL MOMENT IN COMPOSITION offers a counterpoint to broader institutional histories of composition by investigating how local phenomena can be explained by larger movements and how larger movements can be understood through local contexts. - BRENT HENZE is Associate Professor of English at East Carolina University. His research on the rhetoric of science, reporting genres in ethnological science, scientific institutions, and the scientific treatment of racial difference has appeared in TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION, TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY, RHETORIC REVIEW, and elsewhere. JACK SELZER is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Graduate and Undergraduate Studies in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State. Currently President of the Rhetoric Society of America, he is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of KENNETH BURKE IN GREENWICH VILLAGE, KENNETH BURKE IN THE 1930S, KENNETH BURKE AND HIS CIRCLES (Parlor Press, 2008), RHETORICAL BODIES, UNDERSTANDING SCIENTIFIC PROSE, and GOOD REASONS. - WENDY SHARER is Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at East Carolina University. She is the author of VOTE AND VOICE: WOMEN'S ORGANIZATIONS AND POLITICAL LITERACY, 1915-1930 (2004) and co-editor of RHETORICAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA (2004). Her work appears in several edited collections, as well as in journals such as RHETORIC REVIEW and RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY.

KENNETH BURKE AND HIS CIRCLES consists of original papers focusing on the intellectual circles in which Burke participated during his long career. Instead of concentrating on Burke himself, as most recent scholarship has done, this book considers Burke as one participant in a host of important overlapping intellectual movements that took place over the course of the twentieth century. Burke is considered as "in conversation" with a host of important principals who influenced Burke and were in turn influenced by him. The essays were selected from among ones first presented at a 2005 conference at Penn State University, the principal repository of Burke archives, and thus the ideal site for this conference's exploration of the circles Burke participated in. Collectively, the papers presented at the conference conceive circles broadly to encompass Burke's relationships to personal friends (e.g., Ralph Ellison), to major intellectual figures (e.g., Richard McKeon, Wayne Booth, Denis Donoghue), to academic fields of study (e.g., neo-Aristotelianism, corporate communication, Continental philosophy), and to cultural and artistic movements (such as jazz and contemporary poetry). Together, the essays offer new and illuminating perspectives on the complexity and diversity of the circles in which Burke worked to produce one of the important and enduring bodies of work in American intellectual life in the twentieth century. JACK SELZER is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Graduate and Undergraduate Studies in the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State. President of the Rhetoric Society of America from 2008 to 2009, he is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, Kenneth Burke in the 1930s, Rhetorical Bodies, Understanding Scientific Prose, and Good Reasons. In 2005, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Kenneth Burke Society. ROBERT WESS is a member of the Emeritus Faculty at Oregon State University and the author of Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism, as well as numerous articles on Burke and other theorists and literary works. He was also the editor of KB Journal's special issue on Ecocriticism (Spring, 2006). In 1999, he received the Distinguished Service Award (1999) from the Kenneth Burke Society and served as its President from 2005 to 2008.

Examining science as a rhetorical enterprise, this book seizes upon one scientific essay--"The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme"--and probes it from many angles. Written by prominent evolutionary theorists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin and first published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1979, the "Spandrels" article is both serious science and vivid prose.
The essays here do not comment on the scientific merit of Gould and Lewontin's essay, but rather use it as an example to demonstrate and test new analytical approaches to scientific rhetoric. Applying methods inspired by Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Ferdinand de Saussure, and others, the contributors employ a range of interpretive strategies: from postmodernist, intertextualist, feminist, structuralist, historicist, sociolinguistic, dramatist, and deconstructionist approaches to readings based on reader-response theory, protocol analysis, the sociology of science, and classical rhetorical theory.
Stephen Jay Gould submits his own retrospective in the final chapter, remarking on the genesis and reception of "Spandrels" and on the critical analyses of his work gathered here. The full text of "The Spandrels of San Marco" is reproduced as an appendix.

What significance does the physical, material body still have in a world of virtual reality and genetic cloning? How do technology and postmodern rhetoric influence our understanding of the body? And how can our discussion of the body affect the way we handle crises in public policy -- the politics of race and ethnicity; issues of "family values" that revolve around sexual and gender identities; the choices revolving around reproduction and genome projects and the spread of disease?

Leading scholars in rhetoric and communication, as well as literary and cultural studies, address some of the most important topics currently being discussed in the human sciences. The essays collected here suggest the wide range of public arenas in which rhetoric is operative -- from abortion clinics and the World Wide Web to the media's depiction of illiteracy and the Donner Party. These studies demonstrate how the discourse of AIDS prevention or Demi Moore's "beautiful pregnancy" call to mind the physical nature of being human and the ways in which language and other symbols reflect and create the physical world.

When Kenneth Burke conceived his celebrated "Motivorum" project in the 1940s and 1950s, he envisioned it in three parts. Whereas the third part, A Symbolic of Motives, was never finished, A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) have become canonical theoretical documents. A Rhetoric of Motives was originally intended to be a two-part book. Here, at last, is the second volume, the until-now unpublished War of Words, where Burke brilliantly exposes the rhetorical devices that sponsor war in the name of peace. Discouraging militarism during the Cold War even as it catalogues belligerent persuasive strategies and tactics that remain in use today, The War of Words reveals how popular news media outlets can, wittingly or not, foment international tensions and armaments during tumultuous political periods. This authoritative edition includes an introduction from the editors explaining the compositional history and cultural contexts of both The War of Words and A Rhetoric of Motives. The War of Words illuminates the study of modern rhetoric even as it deepens our understanding of post-World War II politics.