College Composition & Communication - Volume 54, Issue 4, 2003

Communitarianism and compositionists’ use of the concept of “communities of discourse,” while intended to promote inclusive discourse, can easily fall prey to the myth of progressivism, ignoring the relative costs of discursive conflict or the pressures of consensus and conformity.

This article examines the rhetorical practice of liberation theology and how it has altered social relations of power in Latin America. Using the confrontational rhetoric of liberation theology as an example, we develop a rhetorical model that grounds postmodern theories of rhetorical performance in material relations to explain how marginalized or subaltern groups can effect social change.

In this article I use the lens of postcolonial theory to reflect on my uses of a varied series of writing pedagogies in cross-cultural classrooms at an international college. Such reflection helps reveal how relations of power between teacher and students and underlying ideological assumptions about knowledge and discourse often resulted in hybrid responses of mimicry, frustration, incomprehension, and resistance. A pedagogy constructed against the backdrop of postcolonial theory might provide both students and their teacher in such a cross-cultural setting with a more complex and useful way of understanding issues of power, discourse, identity, and the role of writing.

This article echoes Robert J. Connors’s call for a reexamination of sentence pedagogies in composition teaching and offers an explanation of the unsolved mystery of why sentence combining improves student writing, using insights provided by work in contemporary research in linguistics and in language processing. Based the same insights, I argue that we invite words and phrases, the true members of sentences, to important positions in writing classes and describe practical methods for doing so.

This essay illustrates key features of visual rhetoric as they operate in two professional academic hypertexts and student work designed for the World Wide Web. By looking at features like audience stance, transparency, and hybridity, writing teachers can teach visual rhetoric as a transformative process of design. Critiquing and producing writing in digital environments offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important pedagogy of writing as design.

Book reviews by Nedra Reynolds, Lynn Worsham, Robert R. Johnson, Christopher Wilkey, Scott Warnock, and Tim Fountaine.