Doug Brent's Papers on Rhetoric and Communication

Note: These papers are mostly from my own files. I have tried to insure that they are as close to the final published versions as possible, but editorial variations may have crept in. "Official" scholarly references ideally should cite the original texts.

The exceptions are the papers (misnomer) originally published in electronic peer-reviewed journals. In these cases I have simply set pointers to the journals' own archives, which represent the most "authoritative" (another misnomer) versions available.

Papers on Information and Communication Technology

Teaching as Performance in the Electronic Classroom. A paper on the ways in which new modes of electronic teaching can shift our understanding of teaching from "performance" to "thing."

Rhetorics of the Web: Implications for Teachers of Literacy An exploration of the impact that "true" nonlinear hypertext might have on our ways of reading, writing and thinking, and of the implications of these changes for teachers.

E-Publishing and Hypertext Publishing . A guest-editor's introduction to the first all-hypertext issue of EJournal. Discusses the changing roles of author, editor, publisher and text in the age of hypertext. This issue also features hypertext articles by Richard Andersen, John December and Charles Ess.

Stevan Harnad's Subversive Proposal: Kick Starting Electronic Scholarship Summarizes and critiques the current debate over the future of electronic journals, focussing principally on the conversation that Stevan Harnad began with his famous "subversive proposal."

Information Technology and the Breakdown of "Places" of Knowledge Discusses how electronic text is eroding the distinctions between disciplines. Uses Ong, Bolter, Myrowitz and Goffman as theoretical lenses and the rhetorical concept of "places" (loci communes) as a guiding metaphor.

Oral Knowledge, Typographic Knowledge, Electronic Knowledge: Speculations on the History of Ownership Discusses the possible fate of concepts such as copyright and individual ownership of knowledge in an age of electronic text. Uses communication history and the "theory of transformative technology" as articulated by Ong, McLuhan and Bolter as a main theoretical lens.

Monograph

Reading as Rhetorical Invention: Knowledge, Persuasion, and the Teaching of Research-Beased Writing. This book draws from classical and modern Western rhetorics, reader-response and discourse-processing theories to argue that rhetorical theory should include a theory of reading to describe how meaning is made during the act of reading.

Papers on Rhetoric and Composition Studies

Using an Academic Content Seminar to Engage Students with the Culture of Academic Research. A paper in the Journal of the First Year Experience and Students in Transition 18(1) 2006: 23-54. The paper reports a qualitatitative study of students in the Faculty of Communication and Culture's First Year Seminars. It concludes that a seminar offering the opportunity to work on an extended research project is an important way of helping students absorb university culture. It also concludes that much more research is needed on academic content seminars as opposed to extended orientation seminars.

Reinventing WAC (Again): The First Year Seminar and Academic Literacy. (2005) College Composition and Communication, 57, 253-276. Argues that First Year Seminars can be a good bridge to Writing Across the Curriculum, and uses interviews with students to show how a FYS can teach the writing of the research paper as a genre.

Dangerous Partnerships: How Cometence Testing Can Sabotage WAC. (2005) The WAC Journal, 16, 78-88. Argues that institution-wide writing competence tests may seem like a good way to advance the aims of Writing Across the Curriculum -- but warns that they can also establish a remedial frame of mind that is deadly to the WAC mission.

Is Anyone Listening? Writers Being (Mis)Read in the Academy This paper explores narratives of failure in responding to student writing: responses that send the wrong messages, that fail to accommodate the students' senses of themselves and how they fit into the academy, and that simply fail to help students learn. The paper addresses the social and institutional that help produce such failures and suggests ways of addressing them. (Co-written with Mary-Louise Craven, Margaret Procter and Jane Ledwell-Brown)

The Researcher as Missionary: Problems with Rhetoric and Reform in the Disciplines. Judy Segal, Anthony Paré, Doug Brent, and Douglas Vipond. Discusses the practical and ethical dilemmas faced by rhetoricians who seek to inform the members of other discourse communities about the practices of those communities.

Rogerian Rhetoric: An Ethical Alternative to Traditional Argumentation A chapter from Argument Revisited, Argument Redefined: Negotiating Meaning in the Composition Classroom, ed Barbara Emmel, Paula Resch, and Deborah Tenny (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996). This chapter discusses Rogerian rhetoric and how it can be used in the classroom as an alternative or supplement to the teaching of more traditional forms of argument. It focusses on Rogerian rhetoric more as a means of ethical enrichment than of persuasion in the traditional sense.

Writing Genres, Writing Classes, Writing Textbooks Uses genre theory (Bazerman, Miller) to analyse the genre of the textbook, particularly the composition textbook. I argue that composition textbooks represent a response to a socially constructed pedagogical situation that is largely devoid of social meaning, and present an alternative pedagogy in (adapted from Reither, Vipond and Hunt) in which knowledge is socially constructed by a class acting as a research community.

Why Does Rhetoric Need a Theory of Reading? Argues that, while three thousand years of rhetorical theory has provided solid theories of how persuasive discourse is composed, rhetoric needs to turn its attention to how persuasive discourse is processed by readers/hearers. Uses reader-response theories such as those of Rosenblatt and Iser and rhetorical theories such as those of Booth and Burke.

Young, Becker and Pike's "Rogerian" Rhetoric: A Twenty-Year Reassessment Assesses Young, Becker and Pike's 1970 textbook Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. This book introduced the world of composition studies to a new, supposedly more co-operative rhetoric based on Carl Rogers' therapeutic techniques. The paper argues that, while Young, Becker and Pike's approach to rhetoric is dated and does not take into account modern phenomenological notions of language, Rogerian rhetoric nonetheless offers a valid alternative to traditional argument.

Computer-Assisted Commenting and Theories of Written Response. The "computer assisted" part is completely obsolete now but I still stand behind the theories of written response. I also think the general lesson on automating education stands as well today as it did in 1991.

Indirect Structure and Reader Response. An oldie (1985) but an often-reprinted goodie. Argues that "indirect structure," which is commonly cited in business communication texts as a way to buffer bad news, does not take account of the ways people really read and generally does more harm than good.

Short Papers, Texts of Oral Presentations, Works in Progress

Academic Literacy Seminars. A presentation to the 2004 Conference on the First-Year Experience. This paper describes the University of Calgary's academically based first-year seminars, and argues that first-year seminars based on academic content are hugely under-reported and under-researched in the FYE literature. The paper also reports some very preliminary results of interviews that explore students' experience of research.

Same Roots, Different Soil: Rhetoric in a Communications Studies Program. A chapter forthcoming in Roger Graves and Heather Graves' Composition in Canada. This chaoter describes the unusual position of the University of Calgary's writing program in a Communications Studies program rather than in an English department. It discusses the troubled relationship between rhetoric, media studies, and English studies in Canada and the United States, and how this relationship has affected the University of Calgary's program.

Writing Across the Disciplines: Politics and Pedagogy. An address to the University of Regina's Faculty of Arts on Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines (2003).

Knowledge Received/Knowledge Constructed: Principles of Active Learning in the Disciplines. A keynote address for Laurentian's Writing Across the Curriculum Faculty Workshop. Intended as a warmup to introduce faculty members from across the disciplines to the general idea of active learning, especially writing-to-learn strategies.

Creating an Academic Community of Discourse in the Classroom. A set of materials presented at the Laurentian University Writing Across the Curriculum Workshop. It consists mainly of course materials which formed the nucleus for discussion of how a classroom can be turned from a presentational device into an active research community.

Ideas from the Writing Across the Curriculum Workshop A brief list of tips and techniques from a workshop at the University of Calgary.

(with Diana Brent) "Technologies of Resistance/Resisting Technology: Braille, Computers, and Literacy for the Visually Impaired." A paper presented to the Inkshed Working Conference #17, Bowen Island, May 2000.

Rogerian Rhetoric A short entry on Rogerian Rhetoric, from Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory and Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies, ed. Mary Kennedy.

In the Mirror of Genre: Students Write this World. A short hypertext based on a talk given at the Inkshed XVI conference, reporting the results of research-in-progress about how students read and write WWW genres.

Web Courseware Authoring Packages: Some Troubled Thoughts. A brief article in Inkshed.

Keeping the "Literacy" in "Information Literacy." A brief article on the convergence between Information Literacy and Writing Across the Curriculum.

The Politics of Writing in the Disciplines. A CCC presentation that follows up on the article "Problems with the Missionary Position," also on this page.