The focus of this study is the area of discourse analysis. This thesis is a rhetorical analysis of the political discourse of Queen Rania of Jordan’s English speeches. The data of the study consist of 56 English speeches (56,706) words delivered by Queen Rania from 2001 to 2010 in different countries around the world. This study investigates how Queen Rania tries to convince the audience by using various rhetorical techniques. It investigates two main canons of rhetoric, invention and style, which are based on the classical Aristotelian classification of rhetoric. In analysing invention, her ethical, emotional and logical appeals to the audience will be examined in detail. In addition to that, this study analyses Queen Rania’s style in her speeches in a corpus-based study of two figures of speech, metaphor and metonymy. This study examines whether her speeches draw on the characteristics of the feminine style of women’s political discourse proposed by Campbell (1989a), Dow and Tonn (1993) and Blankenship and Robson (1995). The qualitative and quantitative analysis reveals that women’s political discourse has common features such as using personal experience to construct political decisions, being inclusive, believing in achievements, not mere words and promises and prioritising women’s issues and supporting their rights in the political arena. These observations support the results of the studies propounded by Campbell (1989a), Dow and Tonn (1993) and Blankenship and Robson (1995). It is argued that figures of speech such as metaphor and metonymy are not only used for ornamentation to make the speeches appealing to the audience; they are also used to call the audience to action and convince them to adopt certain ideas or change prior ones. It is revealed that political speeches use certain rhetorical techniques in order to persuade the audience such as employing rhetorical questions, telling stories, argumentation and identification, inter alia.

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This thesis reframes, or reforms, ‘nature writing’ (‘Nature Writing Reformed’) through the practical and theoretical recombination of human, tree, and page. Understandings of ‘writing’, ‘nature’, and their phrasal relation in ‘nature writing’, are explored through a sustained enquiry into the reading and writing practices principally undertaken by the author (Camilla Nelson) in relation to one specific apple tree in the walled garden of University College Falmouth’s Tremough Campus, Cornwall. The central claim of this thesis is that composition is always environmentally constructive and constructed: how (the method with which) you read and write, and where (the environment in which) you read and write, i.e. the situation and materials you read and write with, affect not only the composition of the written text but the composition of the human, as well as the other-than-human, entities involved in this practice. This thesis is explicitly structured as an interweave of variously material (word; page; room; box; walled garden; library; studio; tree) and conceptual (word; page; theory; footnote; hyperlink; field of research) framing devices (and / or environments). The structure of this thesis and that of the orchard and studio installations, which together constitute the final PhD research submission, play on the variety of framing and reframing that occurs in relation to the spatio-temporal specifics of material and conceptual composition (as evidenced in the Media Log). This ‘reform’ of nature writing, as an interweave of human and other-than-human environments (or frames), is developed in relation to Mark Johnson’s expanded theory of ‘mind’ by way of the conceptual and material practice of metaphor (Johnson, 2007). This thesis combines the theories and practices derived from the (prinicipal) field of ‘Nature Writing’ (as defined in the correspondingly titled chapter), with those suggested by contemporary developments in cognitive philosophy, neuroscience, microbiology, systems theory, and translation studies.

Coursework essay production plays central roles in the learning and assessment of many undergraduates. This investigation is concerned with how students accomplish essay production through engagements with documents and other resources. Unlike more traditional psychological approaches, 'cultural psychology' (Cole, 1996) sees such resources as intrinsic to cognition and action. Cultural psychology is adopted as the theoretical framework for this investigation. Three empirical studies are conducted. They comprise a set of complementary lenses, focusing upon different 'levels' of activity and different aspects of context.

This thesis analyses nine novels and two films by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, spanning the period from La Salle de bain (1985) to Nue (2013). Drawing on the hermeneutic phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur, it argues that Toussaint's texts can be fruitfully understood as representing fictionalised forms of reflexive narrativity. Through the close readings of the texts developed in this thesis, it is argued that Toussaint's anonymous fictional narrators are presented as both the readers and writers of their own lives, engaged in reimagining their own past experiences in ways which are heuristically motivated towards future possibilities for action, and that these reimaginings are represented both as and through the formal variations of the texts themselves. Also emphasised, however, is the way in which such refigurative narrative engagements are frequently depicted as deceptive or problematic. The first chapter, Self in the World, analyses La Salle de bain (1985), L'Appareil-photo (1988) and La Réticence (1991), focusing on the ways in which Toussaint's novels engage with thematic issues of subjectivity, identity, agency and the human capacity for reflexive narrativity. The second chapter, The Other in the Self, analyses two novels, Monsieur (1986) and La Télévision (1997), and two films, La Sévillane (1992) and La Patinoire (1999), focusing on the ways in which Toussaint's texts deploy various forms of ironic discourse in the critical mediation of the relationship between individual subjectivity and the exigencies of society, the workplace, and problems related to creative agency. The final chapter, Selfhood in the Other, analyses the novels of Toussaint's Marie tetralogy, Faire l’amour (2002), Fuir (2005), La Vérité sur Marie (2009), and Nue (2013), focusing on how this series interrogates philosophical questions of intersubjectivity by drawing on a number of historical conceptualisations of the aesthetic concept of the sublime.

Many secondary educators, specifically academics in the humanities, are enormously productive authors and do not need to hide behind literary authors with respect to commitment and diligence. In contrast, academics avoid reflecting on their own writing practices as well as their methods in teaching it. A poetics of writing in the humanities has not been written until now, writing not being a regular part of academic curriculum, also because secondary educators recognize students more as researchers an academics but seldom as authors and writers.

This research focuses on the contrastive analysis of authentic persuasive business correspondence written in English by Thai speakers and native English speakers in the Thai business context. Three types of persuasive correspondence - sales promotion, request, and invitation - were analysed from contrastive text linguistic and pragmatic perspectives. The purpose was to examine, compare and contrast their rhetorical structures, functions and linguistic realisations as well as persuasive and politeness strategies, and to compare these features to those found in textbook samples of persuasive letters in order to investigate the extent to which those samples represent the authentic, real-life correspondence. The findings report on cross-cultural variations which differentiate the persuasive writing patterns and strategies of Thais and native English speakers. Despite some shared writing conventions, the findings reveal diversity in some rhetorical moves, linguistic realisations, rhetorical appeals and politeness strategies. The diversity includes some cultural-bound discourse patterns and cultural-specific textual features, many of which can be traced to interference from the Thai language and culture. An exploration of the nature of sales promotion, request, and invitation letters presented in one American and two Thai textbooks on Business English writing reveals that their letter samples reflect the characteristics of the authentic corpus in the business contexts to which they belong. The implications of this research are twofold. First, it has implications for the teaching of English business letter writing especially in the Thai context and the innovation of more advanced materials and methods for this pedagogical purpose. Second, it raises an awareness of differences in persuasive writing across languages and cultures, worth noting for developing cross-cultural understanding and communication strategies for effective intercultural business interactions in the dynamic business environment of the 21st century.

by Christos H. Papadimitriou, Paris C. Kanellakis. / Bibliography: leaves 42-43. / NSF Grant MCS77-01192 and NSF/RANN Grant APR76-12036.

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This thesis is comprised of a critical component and a creative component. The creative component consists of a portfolio of creative writing drawn from a fictionalized memoir, and the critical component consists of three interconnected chapters analyzing the creative component. The creative component, titled The Accidental Peacemaker, has been written alongside my recently published (and related) book, How to Make Peace in the Middle East in Six Months or Less Without Leaving Your Apartment. It is a satirical, first-person fictionalized memoir about how the Middle East conflict manifests in North America, told from the point of view of a North American Jewish narrator. The critical component contextualizes the creative component by situating it within the disparate genres of creative writing that inform it, and by exploring its descent from them. Together, the three critical chapters argue that the creative component stands at the intersection of life writing, North American Jewish Writing, and humourous political writing. The first critical chapter, on life writing, examines the overlaps between fiction and memoir, and argues, in part, that from a creative writer's point of view, a sharp distinction is challenging to pinpoint. The second critical chapter, on North American Jewish writing, explores some efforts that have been made to determine what characteristics identify “Jewish writing,” and which identifying marks are germane to this particular piece of creative work. The third critical chapter, on humourous political writing, argues that humour and politics are particularly intertwined in North American writing and media today, and that by using humour and first-person life writing, an author can probe into sensitive political terrain without as much risk of needlessly offending as they might have if they used other approaches.