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PARS in Charge
Resources and Strategies for Online Writing Program Leaders
Jessie Borgman
University Press of Colorado, 2023
This edited collection, the third in a series of books by editors Jessie Borgman and Casey McArdle, explores the complexity of administrative positions within writing programs and how online courses make administration even more complex. Drawing on the PARS framework (Personal, Accessible, Responsive, Strategic) used in the first two books, PARS in Charge provides insights and examples from administrators across the country focusing on how they have implemented the PARS framework to be successful online writing program leaders in their specific leadership positions.
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PARS in Practice
More Resources and Strategies for Online Writing Instructors
Jessie Borgman
University Press of Colorado, 2021
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Performing Prose
The Study and Practice of Style in Composition
Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

In Performing Prose, authors Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth breathe new life into traditional concepts of style. Drawing on numerous examples from a wide range of authors and genres, Holcomb and Killingsworth demonstrate the use of style as a vehicle for performance, a way for writers to project themselves onto the page while managing their engagement with the reader. By addressing style and rhetoric not as an editorial afterthought, but as a means of social interaction, they equip students with the vocabulary and tools to analyze the styles of others in fresh ways, as well as create their own.

Whereas most writing texts focus exclusively on analysis or techniques to improve writing, Holcomb and Killingsworth blend these two schools of thought to provide a singular process of thinking about writing. They discuss not only the benefits of conventional methods, but also the use of deviation from tradition; the strategies authors use to vary their style; and the use of such vehicles as images, tropes, and schemes. The goal of the authors is to provide writers with stylistic “footing”: an understanding of the ways writers use style to orchestrate their relationships with readers, subject matter, and rhetorical situations.

Packed with useful tips and insights, this comprehensive volume investigates every aspect of style and its use to present an indispensable resource for both students and scholars. Performing Prose moves beyond customary studies to provide a refreshing and informative approach to the concepts and strategies of writing.

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Personal, Accessible, Responsive, Strategic
Resources and Strategies for Online Writing Instructors
Jessie Borgman
University Press of Colorado, 2020
Drawing on their novel PARS framework, Jessie Borgman and Casey McArdle explore the complexities and anxieties associated with online writing instruction. PARS offers an innovative way to support your own online instructional efforts as well as those of faculty members in programs that offer online writing instruction. Borgman and McArdle offer extensive examples of how to create assignments, syllabi, and accessible, productive learning spaces. Drawing on work in the design of user experiences, they explore how we can design online writing courses with our students' experiences in mind. Borgman and McArdle encourage us to plan online writing courses strategically, and they reinforce the importance of iterating our course design and teaching practices continually with the goal of creating a better user experience for everyone involved with the course.
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Poetics. Longinus
On the Sublime. Demetrius: On Style
Based on W. Rhys Roberts
Harvard University Press, 1995

Classic criticism.

This volume brings together the three most influential ancient Greek treatises on literature.

Aristotle’s Poetics contains his treatment of Greek tragedy: its history, nature, and conventions, with details on poetic diction. Stephen Halliwell makes this seminal work newly accessible with a reliable text and a translation that is both accurate and readable. His authoritative introduction traces the work’s debt to earlier theorists (especially Plato), its distinctive argument, and the reasons behind its enduring relevance.

The essay On the Sublime, usually attributed to “Longinus” (identity uncertain), was probably composed in the first century AD; its subject is the appreciation of greatness (“the sublime”) in writing, with analysis of illustrative passages ranging from Homer and Sappho to Plato and Genesis. In this edition, Donald A. Russell has judiciously revised and newly annotated the text and translation by W. Hamilton Fyfe and provides a new introduction.

The treatise On Style, ascribed to an (again unidentifiable) Demetrius, was perhaps composed during the secod century BC. It is notable particularly for its theory and analysis of four distinct styles (grand, elegant, plain, and forceful). Doreen Innes’ fresh rendering of the work is based on the earlier Loeb translation by W. Rhys Roberts. Her new introduction and notes represent the latest scholarship.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.

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Political Literacy in Composition and Rhetoric
Defending Academic Discourse against Postmodern Pluralism
Donald Lazere
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
In Political Literacy in Composition and Rhetoric, Donald Lazere calls for revival of NCTE resolutions in the 1970s for teaching the “critical reading, listening, viewing, and thinking skills necessary to enable students to cope with the persuasive techniques in political statements, advertising, entertainment, and news,” and explores the reasons these goals have been eclipsed in composition studies over recent decades.  Obstacles to those goals have included the emphasis in the profession on basic and first year writing at the expense of more advanced study in argumentative rhetoric, and on the privileging of students’ personal writing over critical study of both academic and political discourse.  Lazere further argues that theorists who legitimately champion students’ pluralistic local communities sometimes fail to recognize that liberal education can enable students to grow beyond their home cultures to critical awareness of national and international politics. Finally, he argues that the fixation in recent composition studies on liberally-inclined students and communities “on the margins” has eclipsed attention to the conservative conformity long prevalent in mainstream American society and education. His proposals for curriculum and pedagogy seek to introduce students to a more highly-informed, cogent, and open-ended level of debate between the political left and right.
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Postprocess Postmortem
M. Kristopher Lotier
University Press of Colorado, 2021

In Postprocess Postmortem, Kristopher M. Lotier surveys the postprocess era-that-never-was, its end, and its after-lives. Employing cutting-edge digital research tools to track the circulation of texts and shifting scales from the global to the local and back again, he offers a revisionist history of a largely unchronicled past. From one perspective, the history of postprocess might seem to be a history of failure: what could have become The Next Big Thing in composition and writing studies during the 1990s and early 2000s never quite ascended. Today, few writing studies scholars apply the term postprocess to their own research or self-identify with a postprocess movement. And yet, as Lotier demonstrates, numerous core postprocess tenets have attained disciplinary centrality. The result: whether they admit to doing so or not, many contemporary scholars employ a postprocess vocabulary, allowing the ideas underlying this important movement/theory/period/attitude to live on.

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Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition
Bruce Mccomiskey
Utah State University Press, 2017

Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition is a timely exploration of the increasingly widespread and disturbing effect of “post-truth” on public discourse in the United States. Bruce McComiskey analyzes the instances of bullshit, fake news, feigned ethos, hyperbole, and other forms of post-truth rhetoric employed in recent political discourse.

The book frames “post-truth” within rhetorical theory, referring to the classic triad of logos, ethos, and pathos. McComiskey shows that it is the loss of grounding in logos that exposes us to the dangers of post-truth. As logos is the realm of fact, logic, truth, and valid reasoning, Western society faces increased risks—including violence, unchecked libel, and tainted elections—when the value of reason is diminished and audiences allow themselves to be swayed by pathos and ethos. Evaluations of truth are deferred or avoided, and mendacity convincingly masquerades as a valid form of argument.

In a post-truth world, where neither truth nor falsehood has reliable meaning, language becomes purely strategic, without reference to anything other than itself. This scenario has serious consequences not only for our public discourse but also for the study of composition.

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Privacy Matters
Conversations about Surveillance within and beyond the Classroom
Estee Beck
Utah State University Press, 2020
Privacy Matters examines how communications and writing educators, administrators, technological resource coordinators, and scholars can address the ways surveillance and privacy affect student and faculty composing, configure identity formation, and subvert the surveillance state.
 
This collection offers practical analyses of surveillance and privacy as they occur within classrooms and communities. Organized by themes—surveillance and classrooms, surveillance and bodies, surveillance and culture—Privacy Matters provides writing, rhetoric, and communication scholars and teachers with specific approaches, methods, inquiries, and examinations into the impact tracking and monitoring has upon people’s habits, bodies, and lived experiences.
 
While each chapter contributes a new perspective in the discipline and beyond, Privacy Matters affirms that these analyses remain inconclusive. This collection is a call for scholars, researchers, activists, and educators within rhetoric and composition to continue the scholarly conversation because privacy matters to all of us.
 
Contributors: Christina Cedillo, Jenae Cohn, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Dustin Edwards, Norah Fahim, Ann Hill Duin, Gavin P. Johnson, John Peterson, Santos Ramos, Colleen A. Reilly, Jennifer Roth Miller, Jason Tham, Stephanie Vie
 
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Professionalizing Multimodal Composition
Santosh Khadka
Utah State University Press, 2023
Multimodal composition is becoming increasingly popular in university classrooms as faculty, students, and institutions come to recognize that old and new technologies have enabled, and even demanded, the use of more than one composing mode for communicating, solving problems, and keeping up with the latest discourse. Professionalizing Multimodal Composition embraces and enacts multimodal composition in various writing courses and programs by exploring institutional, programmatic, and individual faculty initiatives for capacity building and human resource development across institutions.
 
Academic leaders, scholars, and faculty who have successfully designed and launched academic programs or faculty development initiatives discuss the theoretical and logistical questions considered in their design, the outcomes they achieved, and how others can emulate them. This exchange of knowledge, insight, experiences, and lessons learned among community members is critical for enabling or inspiring other programs, departments, and institutions to conceive, design, and launch academic programs or faculty development initiatives for their own faculty.
 
The larger goal of professionalizing is to work with teaching faculty to increase their interactional expertise with multimodal composition, and this collection offers a set of models for how faculty can do that at their own institutions and in their own programs.
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Punctuation and Persuasion
Patrick Barry
Michigan Publishing Services, 2022

With a little knowledge and a lot of practice, you can do more than just sound more professional when you skillfully use commas, semicolons, and other forms of punctuation. You can, importantly, become more persuasive. 

That’s what students who have taken Professor Patrick Barry’s classes at the University of Michigan Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, and the UCLA School of Law have learned, as have the over 100,000 people who have enrolled in his online course “Good with Words: Writing and Editing” on the educational platforms Coursera and FutureLearn. 

Now, thanks to this book, you can undergo that same rhetorical transformation. Punctuation doesn’t have to be a pain point. When properly mastered, it can be a powerful tool for all kinds of advocates. 

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