<p> This study examines how Chinese philosophical values and rhetorical traditions that contribute to coherence differ from those prevalent in English. It attempts to discover how six Chinese ESL undergraduate participants demonstrate coherence in their persuasive writing, and how their practice of, and views toward coherence in writing change over a semester during which they are exposed to an American college writing classroom.</p><p> Three types of essays were collected for qualitative analysis in this study: a diagnostic departmental pre-test essay at the beginning of the semester, a final essay given as a post-test, and two drafts of a CATW (CUNY Assessment Test in Writing) practice essay that were written for the advanced writing course. In addition, data were also collected from a background questionnaire, a classroom observation, and two rounds of interviews during the course of a semester.</p><p> The study explored the features of coherence at both local (sentence) and global (discourse) levels. The knowledge of cohesion and coherence was employed to investigate how the Chinese learners of English achieved coherence within and beyond the paragraph level. The study discussed how the participants struggled to learn the appropriate use of explicit transitions and patterns of development to create a logical flow of ideas, how their writing generally cohered around one controlling idea throughout the essay, and how they changed their perceptions of coherence in an American university setting. The findings suggest that the Chinese ESL learners' writing quality could be improved in the Western context through coherence-related classroom instruction, revision practice, and teacher-student writing conferences, all aimed at helping them to understand Western notions of coherence while continuing to value their own cultural traditions.</p><p> The study's goal is to help both writing instructors and students; it is hoped that the findings of the study will help instructors to design appropriate writing instruction for such students, as well as helping the students to become familiar with coherence, in the process allowing them to get the most out of their college education and their efforts to improve at writing.</p>

This study addresses the need for research which examines collaborative writing using computers. Its purpose was to identify, through observation and description, distinctive features of collaborative composing with a computer. The study examines how three writers collaborated in writing using a personal computer. The group's writing sessions were recorded on audio tapes that were then transcribed for analysis. The analysis consisted of examining the data for patterns that might account for certain aspects of collaborative composition including how the group made decisions and negotiated their individual writing styles and strategies, and how the computer affected their writing processes. The analysis of the data identified variables specific to collaborative writing at the computer. The addition of these variables created new relationships among factors already found in individual composition. Further research is needed to determine more precisely how these factors interact. Suggestions for such research are included.

This thesis is a study of narratives by eighteen children 10 to 13 years old who live in an Algonquin community of Quebec. The narratives, primarily of children's personal experiences, were collected in peer groups, and were told in English, the children's second language. The specific contributions of children to each other's narratives were investigated and are described. The structural properties of a subset of the narratives were also examined using high point analysis (Peterson & McCabe, 1983). Findings resembled those reported for non-Aboriginal children with respect to the inclusion of the narrative elements of orientation, actions, and evaluation. However, the positioning of these elements and the low incidence of others resulted in differences in the structure of the narratives. Other aspects of the narratives considered include theme, narrator role, and the use of reported speech. The characteristics of the narratives are discussed as means by which the children in the study constructed and co-constructed narrative meaning. / Information on the functional dimensions of narratives in the community and on the sociocultural context in which the children live is also provided in order to facilitate the reader's appreciation of factors that influence children's narrative production.

<p> This dissertation presents the findings of an on-line survey completed by 222 FYC (First Year Composition) instructors at universities and community colleges across the United States along with supplemental information derived from multiple open-ended interviews with seven FYC instructors in Arizona. Both survey and interview questions were designed to accomplish three primary goals: to determine which conventions of academic English FYC instructors identify as most important; to understand the common problems encountered by instructors in teaching those conventions, and; to solicit instructors' perceptions about ways in which learning outcomes might be improved. </p><p> Results indicate general consensus among FYC instructors on which skills are both the most critical to academic English proficiency and the most difficult for their students to learn. At the same time, the survey and interview responses reflect widespread dissatisfaction with the ways in which academic English sequences are currently structured, apparently related to the instructors' common perception that the sequences are only "somewhat" successful in terms of preparing students for successful academic writing. Accordingly, the overwhelming majority of FYC instructors suggest changes for increasing the effectiveness of their programs; however, there is surprisingly little agreement among them on what those changes should be. </p><p> The concluding section of this study presents pragmatic suggestions &mdash; congruent with a number of the instructors' observations &mdash; for reconfiguring FYC sequences. Additionally, it is argued that, aside from the targeted skills addressed by the instructors, the survey and interview responses indicate that academic English has been implicitly invested with culture-specific values which should be made explicit in instruction and which, given the gatekeeping status of FYC courses, the increasing diversity of student populations and the growing divide between the academic and wider cultures, require critical examination.</p>

<p>This thesis contributes to the historiography on President Ronald Reagan, political rhetoric, U.S.-Soviet Relations, 1980s politics, and religion in foreign policy. It examines the consistency and purpose of Reagan&rsquo;s religious and moral rhetoric in an attempt to gain an understanding of Reagan&rsquo;s rhetoric as it pertained to his Soviet policies. It draws largely from speeches, articles, summit meetings, interviews, personal correspondences, radio broadcasts, press conferences, political insider&rsquo;s memoirs, and Reagan administration documents that laid out foreign policy strategies for dealing with the Soviet Union. </p><p> I argue that throughout his two terms as president, while there was variance over time in some aspects of his rhetoric (i.e., his characterization of the Kremlin), Ronald Reagan&rsquo;s rhetoric consistently pointed to religion and morality as central aspects of the Cold War and central causes of East-West tensions. He also consistently pointed to the Soviet system as the greatest moral evil facing the world, and his Soviet policies and interactions with Soviet leaders reflected his perception that religion and morality were at the heart of the Cold War and East-West relations. This thesis intends to provide a better understanding of the worldview Reagan presented in his public rhetoric and of the ways his foreign policy actions were, overall, consistent with that worldview. This study defines Reagan&rsquo;s public rhetoric as a tool of persuasion that sought to reshape public and private perceptions of the East-West relationship, the Cold War, and America&rsquo;s role in it. </p>

<p> In the past few decades, web technologies and increasingly accessible digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printers and laser cutters have made it easier for individuals and communities to create complex material objects at home. As a result, communities of individuals who make things outside formal institutions, known as maker communities, have combined traditional crafts and technical knowledge with digital tools and web technologies in new ways. This thesis analyzes maker communities as post-industrial participatory design communities and examines them as participatory spaces where technical communication occurs between individuals with varying levels of expertise and sometimes drastically different knowledges. Ultimately, this thesis asks what technical communicators can learn from maker communities about international post-industrial economies and the future of technical communication. </p><p> This thesis explores how the emergence of interdisciplinary maker communities is rooted in earlier open source movements and the web, how open source principles change when applied to material development processes, how makerspaces and maker faires function as sites that bring together makers in development, and how maker communities serve as examples of post-industrial configurations of participatory communities. </p><p> Through participating in and analyzing maker communities, I suggest that participatory communities are a fundamental component of post-industrial development processes, and that technical communicators are well equipped to deal with the socio-cultural, rhetorical, and technological challenges such communities face. Furthermore, drawing on Liza Potts' theory of Experience Architecture, I suggest that technical communicators will continue to act as guides in decision making processes and as creators of communities, while also creating systems that enable greater exchange of information across platforms and communities, in both physical and digital realms.</p>

<p> This dissertation analyzes war discourse in sixteenth-century military handbooks and history plays with a focus on formal performances of martial rhetoric and the informal language used to rally audiences and justify war. Chapter One uses Rhetorical Genre Studies to classify the pre-battle oration as a social genre with common structures and themes, familiar not only to exhorting commanders and their soldiers but also to the general Renaissance populace. Establishing the pre-battle speech as a highly-conventionalized, even ritualized form of oratory, Chapter Two argues that performances of the genre are social actions in which audience familiarity elevates the speech act. This heightened valuation raises anticipation for the rhetorical moment and helps transform events like Elizabeth's Tilbury Speech and Henry V's Agincourt address into transcendent hero narratives. Chapter Three dissects formal justifications of war in William Shakespeare's <i>Henry V</i> and George Peele's <i> The Battle of Alcazar</i>. The chapter demonstrates a playwright's ability either to persuade an audience of legitimate cause, even in the face of possible war crimes, by systematically leading viewers through the rules of Just Cause Theory or to complicate legitimacy assumptions by disrupting the expected framework and destabilizing the systematic narrative. </p><p> The final two chapters examine informal motives in the trope of martial masculinity and in figurative language descriptions of war. Conducting a character analysis of official and surrogate martial commanders in Shakespeare's <i> 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI,</i> Chapter Four evaluates recurrent themes of effeminacy in the manuals. It connects anxieties about masculinity to questions of patriarchal power and uncertainties about sociocultural transitions occuring within an English society that at once idealized peace and vilified it as emasculating. Using Cognitive Metaphor Theory, Chapter Five uncovers similar anxieties embedded in the figurative expressions used to describe war in which warfare is conceptualized as natural and unpredictable, but England's men lack the knowledge and training to keep the country ordered and war-ready. This study advocates for an increased literary-historical awareness of war discourse and gives explicit evidence for connecting the treatises to early modern literature, an assumption that remains as-yet unproven by prevailing scholarship.</p>

<p> Tlingit culture, as with many Indigenous cultures that exist under colonial rule, is often described as being in danger of disappearing. Despite this, the appropriation of and subsequent use of cultural practices by non-Tlingit people, and especially white people, is a continuation of the process of colonization when it is enacted in a manner that is not critical of current and historical racism, capitalist pressures and colonial violence. This project addresses the topic through recorded conversations with seven Tlingit women in Sitka, Alaska in an attempt to place Tlingit cultural production and use in the broader contexts of Indigenous cultural sovereignty and resistance to US imperial power. While various types and extremes of cultural appropriation are examined and compared to theory examining privilege and oppression, this project does not delineate general rules for appropriate and inappropriate use of culture. </p>

<p> Anecdotal evidence suggests interdisciplinary ideas receive significant, positive press. The prevailing commentary details the promises and theoretical benefits of interdisciplinarity, yet countervailing viewpoints are noticeably absent from the conversation in major media sources. Moreover, there is a lack of empirical data exploring the values associated with the term, interdisciplinary. The study examined what ideological assertions are supported through interdisciplinarity in undergraduate education discourse published in <i> The Chronicle of Higher Education </i> from 1993-2013. Employing a critical framing, the study utilized document analysis to examine ideological building blocks (i.e. values, assumptions, symbols, and ideographs) in 177 articles over a 20-year period. Exploring the evolution of interdisciplinarity in the discourse provided an opportunity to present a rich, contextualized meaning of an important higher education concept. The findings suggested a positive, solution-orientation are associated with the term, and offered evidence for an emergent micro-ideology in the higher education community.</p>

<p> Facing the threat of schism in a globalized church by a proposed ban on bishops in openly gay relationships, a parish rector turned to reconstructive rhetoric to promote a unified identity among members of his congregation. This case study uses a sampling of sermons delivered by the Reverend James Nutter, former rector of Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, to examine how <i> rhetoric was used to address his congregation, to promote and support collective identity in a potentially divisive atmosphere.</i> The research asks, what was accomplished by the rhetoric and what resources did the congregants themselves bring into play in constructing and maintaining the collective identity of their community? The goal of this research was to find a resonant <i> representative anecdote</i> summing up the parish's organizational identity. The study uses Burke's theory of identification, which involves a systematic clustering of terms that denote <i>association, disassociation,</i> and <i>transcendence.</i> Data sources consist of 37 primary sample documents from sermons, personal interviews, and a focus group analyzed as a Hermeneutic Unit in the Social Scientific Program, ATLAS.ti. The multi-step qualitative research included close reading, content analysis, and coding of <i>umbrella constructs, constructs,</i> and <i>coding themes, </i> which were clustered into semantic maps of <i>coding networks. </i> The study also drew from discourse, church identity, and organizational theories. It contributes to rhetorical theory in the use of parables as analogical extensions that validate the Christian tenet of &ldquo;families&rdquo; gathering at the table despite diversity, and the resistance at Palmer to the actions of global church leaders that were perceived to marginalize gay members of the community. Congregants echoed the cognitive patterns embedded in the parables, connecting them to their own experience and practice of being members of the congregation. When identity work includes a seasoned preacher effectively addressing a competent audience in the pews, parish identity is found to be similar to, but not identical with the denominational identity. The result was an alignment of shared values in Palmer`s representative anecdote, <i> In my Father's mansion, there is room for you.</i></p>