The Story of Writing: From Classical Rhetoric to Rhetoric and Composition

Written to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the rubric “Academic Writing and Research Competences” established by the journal’s late editor-in-chief Mikhail Sapunov, the paper focuses on the origins of academic writing and traces its development in terms of rhetoric. The five stages of classical rhetoric are interpreted as five key components of academic writing: research, logic, culture, knowledge, and language. This approach helps visualize academic writing as a wholesome model composed of cognitive and linguistic elements, describe the impact of this model on the rhetorical and publishing conventions of the global academic discourse, and define the problems in knowledge construction as deviations from the model’s unity in various sociocultural contexts. The study concludes that the low quality of an academic text may result from either losing the predominance of the first two stages of rhetoric (invention and arrangement) or of the other three (style, memory, and delivery). The former signifies an ideological pressure on researchers to substitute their own rhetoric with quotes from canonized sources, whereas the latter provokes them to disregard language and style as inferior to research, because of which texts diminish in clarity. In either case, communication lacks in efficiency. The study of academic writing in the historical perspective contributes to better understanding of the latest trends in its development and elicits the problems which impede the quality of Russian scholarly and academic texts.

Restorying With the Ancestors: Historically Rooted Speculative Composing Practices and Alternative Rhetorics of Queer Futurity

Within literacy, rhetoric, and composition (LRC) studies, composing practices have been studied as an embedded feature of life, one that manifests histories, imagination, and identities through acts of writing. Likewise, in queer LRC studies, the capacity to write with queer rhetorical agency or to recognize the impossibility of composing queer subjectivity has been tied to the living. Scholars have yet to consider with adequacy, however, the ways in which writing is equally bound up with the dead, with ghosts, histories, and ancestors that animate the imagination and attendant composing practices. Tracing the historically rooted speculative composing practices (HRSCPs) of an inquiry group of nine queer composers, this article spotlights queer ancestors as speculative resources for imagining and then composing alternative rhetorics of queer futurity. Specifically, this article details how three queer composers, Coyote (they/them), Helen (she/her), and Margarita (they/them), restory the imagination, happiness, and reality with the ancestors, doing so to challenge the trope of queer unhappy endings attached to realist genres. This article concludes by inviting LRC studies to explore how HRSCPs might be integrated into future research and pedagogy and thereby pursue healing for communities long marginalized within the field.

Honoring Languages: Review of Creole Composition: Academic Writing in the Anglophone Caribbean

In traditional Caribbean villages, the bell crier made important announcements from street to street. People listened and carried the news further. Like the proverbial bell crier, Milson-Whyte, Oenbring, and Jaquette, along with fourteen contributors announced “We are here. And we doin’ dis—‘write [ing] our way in” to academic spaces (Creole Composition, 2019, p. x). Creole Composition provides current perspectives on post-secondary composition pedagogy, academic literacies, and research across multiple academic disciplines. Indeed, this intersectionality addresses Browne’s (2013) argument that Caribbean vernacular orientations and practices fly beneath the radar of the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. Caribbean institutions of higher learning must embrace Caribbean students’ creole-influenced languages.

Archives and the Labor of Building Feminist Theory: An Interview with Sharon Davenport

This article traces the labor of archiving the papers of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA)--a multiracial women’s organization that grew out of the Civil Rights/Black Power movements and maintained active chapters in NYC and the Bay Area during the 1970s. By focusing on the labor of archiving, I take a lead from the methodologies of social-movement scholars in rhetoric and writing who orient to the behind-the-scenes labor of organizing, and the everyday textual labor of building movements and preserving movement histories (Leon; Monberg). My embodied experiences as a cross-disciplinary teacher/scholar of rhetoric and composition and women’s and gender studies, and organizer who prioritizes behind-the-scenes, feminized labor like internal document preparation and childcare—orient me to the labor that scaffolds more public-facing work like publishing theory and speaking publicly. Drawing on an interview with Sharon Davenport, who processed the TWWA’s archives, this article situates archiving as indispensable, feminized, and often-invisible labor that builds the context for feminist writing, theorizing, and teaching in institutions of higher education.

Learning English Rhetoric and Composition as A Vietnamese Student

This study centers around Vietnamese students, with a comparison with East and Southeast Asian students who share the same cultural idea, at higher education level who want to acquire better writing skills in English in and out of academic settings. Since English is not the students' first language, they normally craft an essay from the vocabulary that they know. This is understandable, but a good piece of writing in standard American English is not supposed to be traced word by word. Understanding this fact in-depth and practicing it regularly is the core requirement for English major students. In return, they can join any workplace with their strong writing skills that they have to acquire during their undergraduate years, or more if they attend graduate schools. This group of students is known to be timid since they were raised in a collectivistic community in which many of them make their higher education choices based on firstly the current trend, then what is suitable for them. Thus, by making a bolder choice of declaring English as a major, double major, or minor, they could have better insight into English rhetoric and composition to apply them as a multi-meaning sign to their writings properly.

Ideological discursive formations in an emerging democracy

The inaugural address has received a fair bit of scholarly attention due to the strength in the argument that it occupies an important position amongst discourses that can be termed political; and of course, the recognition that it performs an important political function within the state. The primary interest in the inaugural address has mainly been from the field of rhetoric and composition. This study approaches the inaugural from a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective that allows for an examination of the discourse of governance as it is ideologically expressed in the inaugural address. Four (4) inaugural addresses of four (4) presidents within Ghana’s Fourth Republican tradition were purposefully selected to create a mini corpus for the study. Using the dialectical relational approach and drawing specifically on the concepts of subject positioning, agency in discourse and intertextuality, the analysis examines the ideological discursive formations of governance expressed in the inaugurals as discourse types as well as looks at the issues of subject positioning and agency and their ideological implications in the inaugural addresses. The analysis reveals that though there is an extent to which the ideological discursive formation of collectivism has been naturalised in the addresses, there exist differences in terms of how the subject is characterised within this collectivism. It also reveals that there are differences in how the principals of the two political traditions express agency within the addresses. We argue that these differences do construct and are constrained by the different ideological discursive formations of the two political traditions that have dominated Ghana’s political space.