With the advent of new media and technology, the notion of the rhetorical situation has changed, and there is now the exigence of a new theory of the rhetorical situation that better incorporates such new notions. By bringing together critical theory of technology and theory of critical geography, along with rhetoric and language theory, this book proposes a new theory on the rhetorical situation that has more explanatory power, and accounts for, frames, critiques, and analyses the fundamental assumptions and beliefs on the rhetorical situation. This theory conceives the constituents of the rhetorical situations as indiscrete and non-linear entities. The book offers an innovative way to study the rhetorical situation in a new light that will broaden the research scope of rhetoric.

What current theoretical frameworks inform academic and professional writing? What does research tell us about the effectiveness of academic and professional writing programs? What do we know about existing best practices? What are the current guidelines and procedures in evaluating a program’s effectiveness? What are the possibilities in regard to future research and changes to best practices in these programs in an age of accountability? Editors Shirley Wilson Logan and Wayne H. Slater bring together leading scholars in rhetoric and composition to consider the history, trends, and future of academic and professional writing in higher education through the lens of these five central questions. The first two essays in the book provide a history of the academic and professional writing program at the University of Maryland. Subsequent essays explore successes and challenges in the establishment and development of writing programs at four other major institutions, identify the features of language that facilitate academic and professional communication, look at the ways digital practices in academic and professional writing have shaped how writers compose and respond to texts, and examine the role of assessment in curriculum and pedagogy. An afterword by distinguished rhetoric and composition scholars Jessica Enoch and Scott Wible offers perspectives on the future of academic and professional writing. This collection takes stock of the historical, rhetorical, linguistic, digital, and evaluative aspects of the teaching of writing in higher education. Among the critical issues addressed are how university writing programs were first established and what early challenges they faced, where writing programs were housed and who administered them, how the language backgrounds of composition students inform the way writing is taught, the ways in which current writing technologies create new digital environments, and how student learning and programmatic outcomes should be assessed.

Examining the development of rhetoric and composition, using the writings of Theresa Jarnagin Enos as a basis for studies of broader trends, this book explores topics including the historical relations of rhetoric and composition, their evolution within programs of study, and Enos’s research on gender.

With the prevalence of smartphones, massive data storage, and search engines, we might think of today as the height of the information age. In reality, every era has faced its own challenges of storing, organizing, and accessing information. While they lacked digital devices, our ancestors, when faced with information overload, utilized some of the same techniques that underlie our modern interfaces: they visualized and spatialized data, tying it to the emotional and sensory spaces of memory, thereby turning their minds into a visual interface for accessing information. In Excavating the Memory Palace, Seth David Long mines the history of Europe’s arts of memory to find the origins of today’s data visualizations, unearthing how ancient constructions of cognitive pathways paved the way for modern technological interfaces. Looking to techniques like the memory palace, he finds the ways that information has been tied to sensory and visual experience, turning raw data into lucid knowledge. From the icons of smart phone screens to massive network graphs, Long shows us the ancestry of the cyberscape and unveils the history of memory as a creative act.

What is “digital rhetoric”? This book aims to answer that question by looking at a number of interrelated histories, as well as evaluating a wide range of methods and practices from fields in the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences to determine what might constitute the work and the world of digital rhetoric. The advent of digital and networked communication technologies prompts renewed interest in basic questions such as What counts as a text? and Can traditional rhetoric operate in digital spheres or will it need to be revised? Or will we need to invent new rhetorical practices altogether? Through examples and consideration of digital rhetoric theories, methods for both researching and making in digital rhetoric fields, and examples of digital rhetoric pedagogy, scholarship, and public performance, this book delivers a broad overview of digital rhetoric. In addition, Douglas Eyman provides historical context by investigating the histories and boundaries that arise from mapping this emerging field and by focusing on the theories that have been taken up and revised by digital rhetoric scholars and practitioners. Both traditional and new methods are examined for the tools they provide that can be used to both study digital rhetoric and to potentially make new forms that draw on digital rhetoric for their persuasive power.

The development of online learning environments has enhanced the availability of educational opportunities for students. By implementing effective curriculum strategies, this ensures proper quality and instruction in online settings. The Handbook of Research on Writing and Composing in the Age of MOOCs is a critical reference source that overviews the current state of larger scale online courses and the latest competencies for teaching writing online. Featuring comprehensive coverage across a range of perspectives on teaching in virtual classrooms, such as MOOC delivery models, digital participation, and user-centered instructional design, this book is ideal for educators, professionals, practitioners, academics, and researchers interested in the latest material on writing and composition strategies for online classrooms.

Foundational Practices in Online Writing Instruction addresses administrators’ and instructors’ questions for developing online writing programs and courses. Written by experts in the field, this book uniquely attends to issues of inclusive and accessible online writing instruction in technology-enhanced settings, as well as teaching with mobile technologies and multimodal compositions.

Writing Studio Pedagogy (WSP) breaks from the tradition of teaching and responding to writing in traditional ways and moves the teaching and learning experience off the page and into engaging spaces in multiple ways, which can enhance the composing process. Through this collection, scholars interested in rethinking approaches to teaching, writing pedagogy, and innovative learning will find new ways to challenge their own understandings of space, place, and collaboration. WSP involves an attention to space and place in the development of rhetorical acts by focusing on the ways in which they enhance pedagogy. This book takes a unique opportunity to return to pedagogy as the foremost priority in any learning space. Educators might preference WSP for its emphasis on student-centeredness by creating productive interactions, intersections, and departures that arrive from prioritizing learning. WSP acknowledges the centralized role of students and teachers as co-facilitators in learning and writing. These threads are intentionally broad-based, as the chapters contained in this book speak to the complexity of WSP across institutions.

Helen Foster problematizes one of the dominant metaphors in rhetoric and composition, the notion of “writing process,” and, in turn, offers an important and engaging new approach for the future of the discipline, one that directly addresses the complexities, challenges, and opportunities for writing research in a postmodern world.

In The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction, Muhsin J. al-Musawi offers a groundbreaking study of literary heritage in the medieval and premodern Islamic period. Al-Musawi challenges the paradigm that considers the period from the fall of Baghdad in 1258 to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919 as an "Age of Decay" followed by an "Awakening" (al-nahdah). His sweeping synthesis debunks this view by carefully documenting a "republic of letters" in the Islamic Near East and South Asia that was vibrant and dynamic, one varying considerably from the generally accepted image of a centuries-long period of intellectual and literary stagnation. Al-Musawi argues that the massive cultural production of the period was not a random enterprise: instead, it arose due to an emerging and growing body of readers across Islamic lands who needed compendiums, lexicons, and commentaries to engage with scholars and writers. Scholars, too, developed their own networks to respond to each other and to their readers. Rather than addressing only the elite, this culture industry supported a common readership that enlarged the creative space and audience for prose and poetry in standard and colloquial Arabic. Works by craftsmen, artisans, and women appeared side by side with those by distinguished scholars and poets. Through careful exploration of these networks, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters makes use of relevant theoretical frameworks to situate this culture in the ongoing discussion of non-Islamic and European efforts. Thorough, theoretically rigorous, and nuanced, al-Musawi's book is an original contribution to a range of fields in Arabic and Islamic cultural history of the twelfth to eighteenth centuries.