Major companies in the insurance industry—notably Allstate, Progressive, and Farmers—often employ personification as a creative rhetorical tool in digital video advertisements. By leveraging brand characters in various ways, these companies seek to establish trust and engender emotional impact in customers. Allstate ascribes destructive characteristics that are associated with house cats to its Mayhem character; in doing so they evoke the desired emotional responses of humor and fear. Progressive creates and deploys the Motaur character, a visual personification and play on the Centaur; in this case, the company’s rhetorical strategy is to evoke humor and nostalgia that resonate with motorcycle owners. Farmers’ strategy is to win customers by demonstrating experience and empathy; they do so with the Professor Burke character, whose professorial ethos functions to evoke feelings of trust. I employ the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) in my analysis to explore the relationships between personification, emotional appeals, and persuasion.

With tightening university budgets, never before has the activity level of research grant proposal writing been more intense. With increased proposal numbers, including for the National Science Foundation's (NSF) prestigious CAREER award, has also come increased competition and decreased funding rates. This dissertation has searched for successful and unsuccessful characteristics from funded and unfunded CAREER proposals. The research focused on a study of two key subjects: 1) a corpus of 20 texts that included 12 funded proposals and 8 unfunded proposals from across NSF programs, and 2) an ethnographic analysis comprised from interviews with 14 NSF program officers (PO) from varying programs. Coding elements with the texts to uncover topical chains of content, rhetorical, and document design strategies revealed sound rhetorical moves and rhetorical mistakes. The study also illustrated evidence of adherence to or neglect of NSF-mandated writing/formatting conventions as connected to the likelihood of receiving funding. Moreover, the study revealed conventions that have developed for the genre that are not prescribed by NSF but that, nevertheless, seem to be expected. Through genre field analysis, the study's interviews with program officers (PO) revealed a system of genre-agents and player-agents that interact together in a highly rhetorical and social system. This system, comprised of locales in which a multitude of play scenarios can be enacted to exert influence, operates within fairly exact rules of play. Such rules may be published by NSF or simply be "understood," yet principal investigators (PI) are held accountable for them regardless. The ethnography created from interviews with POs revealed multiple genre field elements (e.g., genre- and player-agents, transformative locales, play scenarios, penalty conditions) as well as common mistakes and best practices. A complete mapping of the CAREER award proposal preparation, submission, and review process resulted from the study, which mapping has offered insightful strategies to expand PI (and other agents') influence on the funding process. The dissertation concluded by offering investigators a step-by-step process to identify and map the elements of the proposal genre field in which they operate.

The Dynamic Unity of Writing (DUW) offers an object oriented theory of writing, based on the idea of a dynamic unit, which is the simultaneous manifestation of distinct thought processes acting as one. This thesis demonstrates how writing, while grounded in consciousness, fulfills the four characteristics of a dynamic unit: that in its unity of action, writing is a basic level structure; that writing is more than the sum of its parts; that it is observable only in a context of operation; and, that writing exhibits a pattern of correlation across elements. This theory blends the four elements of the DUW (self, technology, style, and process) as an approach to understanding the roles of exigence and emergence in textual coherence and in both a writer’s and writing’s development. As a self-reflective tool, the DUW offers a framework through which writers can self-identify areas of intervention where further development of an element or elements of writing can result in an improvement of writing skills.

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No description available.

Students in required writing courses often fail to see the purpose of their writing and invest themselves in their writing. Many composition pedagogues have noticed that one solution to this problem is to help students publish their writing, and have reported the positive outcomes of their publication-focused courses. However, this practice has not been grounded in theory. My project connects the practice of publishing student writing to theory. I draw on Kenneth Burke's and other's ideas of text as action and show how the ancient cannon of delivery is a necessary means of experiencing and understanding text as action with consequence. I then argue that publishing is one of the most effective methods of delivery that can help students understand the implications of enacted texts. I then couch this theory in practice by presenting a variety of sources that report on the impact of publishing student texts; I include my own data collected while teaching two publication-focused, first-year writing courses at Brigham Young University during Fall 2012 and Winter 2013 semesters. This data suggests that in most cases, publishing student writing positively impacts student identity, motivation, process, and product. I explain the results of my own observations and those of various composition pedagogues with the theory of text as action being powerfully experienced by students as they work toward delivering their texts to public audiences via publication.

The Mormon Church has continued to grow in size and prominence since 1830 when Joseph Smith announced the formation of this new Christian organization. The struggle to gain recognition for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) among the body of Christian groups has been a vigorous and energetic one. Out of the band of closely knit followers have developed leaders who were particularly gifted at proclaiming and defending the beliefs of this faith. One of the men who was foremost in advancing the views of the Mormon people during the years 1880 to 1930 was Brigham Henry Roberts. Throughout the major portion of his life, he was engaged in speaking and writing in behalf of Mormon doctrine and Mormon people. Inevitably it won for him the characterization, "Defender of the Faith."

In laying a general foundation for this study, a brief survey of language, its origin and use by man, and its basic levels of structuring, will be presented. Patterns generated through language structuring and the inherent value of structure in language to convey meaning or esthetic qualities will also be considered. Finally, basic implications of patterns incorporated into language will be presented.

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No description available.