This book uses logos, pathos, and ethos in critical thinking, active reading, and persuasive writing. Accessible and stimulating, the versatile manual can be used as a rhetoric, a reader, a guide on research writing, and a guide on style. Through its chapters, users learn to excel at what they say; through our style interchapters users earn to excel at how they say it. Cheating, conservation, race, politics, male/female communication styles, gun control, abortion, same-sex marriage, stem cell research ndash; many diverse and mature readings on these subjects engage readers and writers in analytical thinking and stimulate them to react with thoughtful discussions and compositions. For individuals who want to communicate clearly, argue persuasively, and analyze and evaluate what they read.

Winner of the 2017 Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Book Prize Software developers work rhetorically to make meaning through the code they write. In some ways, writing code is like any other form of communication; in others, it proves to be new, exciting, and unique. In Rhetorical Code Studies, Kevin Brock explores how software code serves as meaningful communication through which software developers construct arguments that are made up of logical procedures and express both implicit and explicit claims as to how a given program operates. Building on current scholarly work in digital rhetoric, software studies, and technical communication, Brock connects and continues ongoing conversations among rhetoricians, technical communicators, software studies scholars, and programming practitioners to demonstrate how software code and its surrounding discourse are highly rhetorical forms of communication. He considers examples ranging from large, well-known projects like Mozilla Firefox to small-scale programs like the “FizzBuzz” test common in many programming job interviews. Undertaking specific examinations of code texts as well as the contexts surrounding their composition, Brock illuminates the variety and depth of rhetorical activity taking place in and around code, from individual differences in style to changes in large-scale organizational and community norms. Rhetorical Code Studies holds significant implications for digital communication, multimodal composition, and the cultural analysis of software and its creation. It will interest academics and students of writing, rhetoric, and software engineering as well as technical communicators and developers of all types of software.

Argumentation: The Art of Civil Advocacy teaches students the principles of argumentation as a practical way to engage in interpersonal and public deliberation. Authors Larry Underberg and Heather Norton offer a unique approach for creating civil discourse by encouraging students to consider how they argue with others to enhance or diminish opportunities for future dialogue. A variety of everyday examples are provided in the text to demonstrate how well-reasoned argumentation can strengthen communities and create productive citizenship. Students gain a better understanding for the situations, environments, and relationships that form the context for an advocate, and how those factors can influence discourse.

Using a flexible software system, this book teaches evidential and inferential issues used in drawing conclusions from masses of evidence.

Powering the Future brings together material that assesses innovative solutions to the global climate and energy crises. It explores the fundamental differences between alternative and renewable energy sources, and the role of developing nations in implementing these technologies, among other issues. Chapters address: An overview of green energy sources and select worldwide initiatives The benefits of alternative energy Drawbacks to energy alternatives Differing approaches to alternative energy implemen-tation The alternative vs. renewable energy debate Alternative energy in the developing world. A general introduction and introductory essays to each chapter give the reader the necessary background to put the issue in perspective.

First-year composition became the most common course in American higher education not because it could “fix” underprepared student writers, but because it has historically served significant institutional interests. That is, it can be “conceded” in multiple ways to help institutions solve political, promotional, and financial problems. Conceding Composition is a wide-ranging historical examination of composition’s evolving institutional value in American higher education over the course of nearly a century. Based on extensive archival research conducted at six American universities and using the specific cases of institutional mission, regional accreditation, and federal funding, this study demonstrates that administrators and faculty have introduced, reformed, maintained, threatened, or eliminated composition as part of negotiations related to nondisciplinary institutional exigencies. Viewing composition from this perspective, author Ryan Skinnell raises new questions about why composition exists in the university, how it exists, and how teachers and scholars might productively reconceive first-year composition in light of its institutional functions. The book considers the rhetorical, political, organizational, institutional, and promotional options conceding composition opened up for institutions of higher education and considers what the first-year course and the discipline might look like with composition’s transience reimagined not as a barrier but as a consummate institutional value.