About the Author

Danielle Roach is currently pursuing her PhD in Rhetoric and New Media at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia where she is also serving as the Assistant Director of Composition Studies. She has taught writing for about seven years and is especially interested in multimodal composition and play in the writing classroom. Her research interests include digital communities, authorship, rhetorics of play, computers and composition, writing program administration, and digital humanities.

Contents

Introduction

Writing: The "Right Way" versus the "Wrong Way"

Academic Perspectives on Plagarism

OEMs & Academic Authorship

Conclusion

Works Cited

Introduction

Authorship as a critical construct has been parsed and debated in scholarly circles for centuries, and yet within the walls of writing classrooms, both students and instructors have for a long time tacitly accepted that there is a right and a wrong way to be an author. In Western cultures, and in the United States in particular, the model for the “right way” indicates adherence to grammatical and structural standards, understanding of genre and modes, and assimilation into some overarching academic discourse. At the same time, however, the “wrong way” includes an individual's copying the words of others, re-creating passages from published authors, and incorporating other too-close-to-the-original content. Complicating these contradictions is the intersection of the writing classroom with digital culture and the internet in particular. Painfully evident at this intersection is the inherent disconnect between how authority is conceived in the composition classroom and how it is conferred in other social spaces.

One more recent phenomenon associated with digital culture has been the online essay mill (OEM). Hundreds of sites purport to offer students a chance to share, sell, and buy essays. Within the confines of the commercial web, these sites work to challenge dominant ideas about authorship while simultaneously reinforcing those standards as legitimate by promising students opportunity to cheat that system. Thus, an examination of the rhetoric of the sites themselves can help further enrich our understanding of the function and voice of OEMs. In any discussion of plagiarism and authorship in digital spaces, resting on the voices of academics would be at best naïve and at worst wholly inadequate for gaining any true sense of the circulation of power and ideas that inform and construct this complex issue. Looking at the language used by the sites themselves allows us a more complete notion of how online paper mills, students, and writing classrooms within the academy interact to inform, complicate, and define the role of the author.

This paper will examine some of the scholarly and theoretical discussions about plagiarism and writing before moving to an interrogation of the language and practices of OEMs. By examining these sites, this paper seeks to explore both the possibilities and limitations inherent in a discourse that frames academic “rules” about writing and authorship as standards to be simultaneously subverted and reified.

About the Author

Megan McIntyre is a PhD student at the University of South Florida where she works as Mentoring Coordinator for the University's First Year Composition program. Her research interests include writing pedagogy and practice as well as the intersections of rhetoric, writing, ethics, and politics.

Contents

Introduction

Donald Rumsfeld and Operation Iraqi Freedom

Winning Hearts & Minds: The Way Forward in Afghanistan

Rhetorical Training & Effective Intercultural Communication

An Overview of Rhetorical Training

Conclusion

Works Cited

Introduction

It is a fundamental mistake to see the enemy as a set of targets. The enemy in war is a group of people. Some of them will have to be killed. Others will have to be captured or driven into hiding. The overwhelming majority, however, have to be persuaded.

– Frederick Kagan

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

– Aristotle

General Barry R. McCaffrey begins his foreword to Suzanne Nielsen and Don Snider’s 2009 American Civil-Military Relations by declaring that “senior military leadership must be objective, expert, and determinedly nonpartisan” (xiii). Though General McCaffrey certainly means that senior flag officers must be experts in military history and strategy, he suggests that their capabilities must go beyond these traditional areas of expertise. Later in his foreword, General McCaffrey explicates these three key traits (objectivity, expertise, nonpartisanship) and argues that the military “must broadly develop selected officers for service at senior levels and convey to them their responsibility to be expert at their assigned political-military roles” (xv). Part of this training for senior flag officers charged with negotiating the treacherous political waters surrounding military policy must be rhetorical.

Beyond General McCaffrey’s broad recognition of the need for officers who can mediate the relationship between the civilian leadership, whose goals are political, and the military, whose goals are first strategic, there is also a particular event that should serve as an impetus for a renewed focus on rhetorical training: the implacability of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At the moment when persuasive abilities were most necessary, “many senior flag officers,” says General McCaffrey, “were ill-prepared to respond effectively” when faced with Secretary Rumsfeld’s “arrogance, disingenuous behavior and misjudgments” (xv).

Not only are rhetorical skills necessary for navigating American civil-military relations, such skills would also be a vital complement to the cultural and language training now compulsory for military officers at all levels of rank. The emphasis on counterinsurgency strategy, which requires an increased focus on cultural training, necessitates a new way of understanding the modern use of force. General Rupert Smith, in his book The Utility of Force, suggests that by 1991, the “industrial army became effectively obsolete” (269). Instead of a world in which two armies meet on a battlefield, uniformed and easily distinguishable from civilians, the reality of post-industrial conflict is far less neat: “A single massive and culminating event” has been replaced by “a series of events which may serve to deliver the desired political outcome” (404). It is under these circumstances that officers operate in theatres of war, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan, in which the focus is not on the destruction of an opposing military power as much as on winning the sympathies, the “hearts and minds,” of the people. In such conditions, an awareness of how ethos (credibility), pathos (emotional appeals), logos (logic), and kairos (timeliness) operate in conversation (and how these appeals combine with attention to particular cultural norms) to form persuasive, ethical, and culturally appropriate arguments could prove to be an invaluable tool in the battles for the hearts of the Iraqi and Afghan people.

Because of the disastrous consequences of senior flag officers’ inability to communicate effectively with someone as certain and uncompromising as Donald Rumsfeld and because of the increased emphasis on intercultural communication, senior officers need sustained rhetorical training. In what follows, I will discuss the consequences of the breakdown of honest discourse between Donald Rumsfeld and the military officers advising him on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the importance of rhetorical training for negotiating intercultural communication in areas of conflict. I will also suggest ways in which rhetorical training fits into the cultural training already underway in many military institutions and briefly sketch the necessary components of a rhetorical curriculum.

About the Author

Joshua Cruz is currently studying literacy and higher education at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also taught reading and writing skills classes at the community college level while attaining a master's degree in English from Rutgers University. He plans on returning to the community college to continue teaching literacy to at-risk and marginalized students.

Contents

Introduction to Student Alienation and Self-Schema

Several Studies to Justify an Interest in Self-Schema Theory

Practical Application

Works Cited

Introduction to Student Alienation and Self-Schema

I remember my eighth grade English classroom. Specifically, I remember a motivational poster on the wall: Snoopy the Dog sitting at a typewriter on his doghouse, and underneath was the phrase “It’s exciting when you are writing something you know is good.” This poster rang true with me even then, and I found myself nodding in agreement when I first saw it. When writing something “good,” it is not dissimilar to an artistic process. A sense of pride permeates the writer for creating something that conveys, in the best possible way, an idea. The story, essay, report, or what have you becomes something that represents the writer, something that the writer feels a connection to. To use a colloquial but appropriate phrase, the writer “owns” the writing. It is the writer’s brainchild.

Ideally, anyway. Not all writers feel this kind of connection to their writing, perhaps most of all the student that is forced to write for a writing class. For this student, often the writing is a chore, something to be completed, graded, and to move on from. In “Whose Paper is This, Anyway?,” Mark Dubson discusses the disheartening experience of finding a handful of his students’ completed and graded papers discarded in the trash, assuming that all the students “wanted to do more than anything was to get the papers out of their life” (93). He continues to discuss “many factors that come together to alienate students from the work they do,” not the least of which are student attitudes toward writing: they dislike it, fear it, or at the very least, do not understand it (94). Dubson then lays out some of the “cultural ironies” that lead to this mentality.

Dubson seems to be on to something here; anyone teaching a college writing based course knows that the students who embrace their work are, nine times out of ten, the students who have the most successful experiences in these classes. Consequently, it might be argued that mentality/attitude, more than course material, more than time constraints and distractions, perhaps even more than effective teaching, determine whether or not students will “get anything” out of their writing courses. Perhaps then, the direction we should go as teachers is not to debate over voice or discourse, to stress grammatical structures, or to quibble over whether or not three or five paragraph essays are the most appropriate for test taking situations. Instead, it might behoove us to focus more on changing students’ attitudes towards writing so that they embrace writing itself and begin to think of themselves as writers--not just students that have to write.

What I am suggesting at this point probably sounds like touchy-feely nonsense, and the objection might be raised that students don’t learn anything substantive about writing simply because they learn to like writing. Actually, I ground my argument in a theory that was introduced to the field of social psychology in 1977, and that has only just started being applied to education. Coined by Hazel Markus, the concept of self-schema has been applied to health related behavior, but has received less attention in the field of education. Self-schemata are “domain specific” ways of thinking about the self that “make quick and confident judgments to adapt flexibly to different information-processing goals, and to accurately retrieve information relevant to that domain… Schematic individuals are chronically sensitive to schema-relevant stimuli, and they pay close attention to and favor information pertinent to the domain” (Cross and Markus 423).

To simplify, one’s self-schema is one’s identity. It is a label that one might ascribe to oneself, such as athlete, artist, or writer. It is more than simply the label, however. It is also what the individual thinks of as schematic or “domain specific” behavior for that label: an athlete exercises, eats a balanced diet with a focus on protein, may have knowledge about sports, medicine, the human body, etc. An individual with a self-schema of athlete, then, will engage in these behaviors willingly and gladly, as they are behaviors consistent with that identity. Further, there is a mental-behavioral component to self-schema, and individuals schematic for a particular domain (say, athleticism) will generally be more interested in academic matters that pertain to athletics, becoming a better athlete, facts about athletics, etc. The schematic athlete is more receptive to learning about athletics. The same can be said for individuals who think of themselves as writers and their relation to writing.

On the other hand, there also exist aschematic individuals: “Aschematic persons do not recognize their ability in a given domain, and they do not assign their ability critical personal importance. The aschematic individual may be less likely to recognize the relevance of an ability for a given task and may be less adept at anticipating and simulating the necessary strategies for completing a desired task” (Cross and Markus 424). The students that we have in writing classes, as Dubson recognizes, are “writer aschematic.” They do not internalize the writing process due to several cultural ironies, and their identities are set against being conceived of as writers. They do not care to learn about it, they certainly don’t want to engage in behavior characteristic of a writer, and were composition/college writing not a required course, they would likely not be there at all. An important note is that they are not incapable of writing well; they simply don’t care to.

This concept of self schema is not just speculative theory, either. For a portion of this discussion, I would like to address several psychological studies performed in the past twenty years on self-schema in relation to education. While many of these studies are not specific to writing, I believe they can be applied to the composition classroom, perhaps even more effectively than other fields. I will end this paper by discussing some basic ways that we might practically apply this self-schema theory to writing and composition in general.

About the Author

Lara Smith-Sitton is a Rhetoric and Composition PhD student at Georgia State University. Her primary research interests are writing program design, 18th- & 19th-century rhetoric, service learning, and business & technical writing. She also serves as Associate Director of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association and Managing Editor of South Atlantic Review.

Contents

Introduction
   

Building a Bridge...

Making The Introduction

Keeping Smith Relevant

Uncover the Truth

Close Analysis and...

Moving from Historical...

Works Cited

Introduction

He is not a citizen who is not disposed to respect the laws and to obey the civil magistrate; and he is certainly not a good citizen who does not wish to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole society of his fellow-citizens.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

When the institutions or public works which are beneficial to the whole society, either cannot be maintained altogether, or are not maintained altogether by the contribution of such particular members of the society as are most immediately benefitted by them, the deficiency must in most cases be made up by the general contribution of the whole society.

-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

In 1776, Adam Smith, a Scottish professor of moral philosophy and logic, published An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (more commonly referred to as Wealth of Nations). This lengthy text (some editions in excess of 1,200 pages), which asserts principles of a free-market economic system, found its way across the Atlantic Ocean and into the personal libraries of some of America’s most significant founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. The theories contained therein contributed to the establishment of our country’s economic structure, and Smith was anointed with the patriarchal title, “the father of capitalism” (Krueger xxii). Though over two hundred years have passed since the first printing of Wealth of Nations, business schools, economics programs, fiscal conservatives, right-wing politicians, and political pundits still refer to sections to support an agenda promoting deregulation, free enterprise, and limited federal funding for social programs, including, specifically, a national health care system.

However, Adam Smith also wrote another book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which he intended to be read alongside of Wealth of Nations. When considering the two texts together and evaluating Smith’s theories in the context of the 18th-century marketplace, many of the contemporary capitalist theories attributed to Smith from Wealth of Nations are often misstated and the broader intent of his work misunderstood. G. R. Bussiry and Marc Jones offer: “Smith’s concerns were primarily ethical, and the economic system he devised was the means to achieve a more moral, ethical, and just social order—not just an end in itself, as is so often implicit in the works of contemporary proponents of capitalism” (622).  Today’s students might be surprised to learn that the ideas of capitalism that are often so casually thrown around in the mainstream media are often not Adam Smith’s philosophies. Could it be that Wealth of Nations did not give full license to individuals to pursue their own interests without government intervention? Close examination of his works confirms Smith was actually an advocate of some government regulation (see Wealth of Nations). In addition, he felt, “to feel sympathy for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge in benevolent, affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature . . .” (Smith, Theory 23). This may be something quite different than what students may understand about Smith. Exploring Adam Smith’s writings and rhetoric could provide a tool for not only connecting with today’s students—particularly, business students—but also teaching about writing, rhetoric, critical thinking, and close analysis.

My paper will focus on how the reconsiderations and explorations of Smith’s two best known and most published works are important not only for economists, business students, and rhetoric scholars but also offer opportunities for writing instructors seeking to connect with students in writing classrooms. My research includes an analysis of some of the commonly misunderstood sections of Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments that could be useful as classroom examples. I will also identify examples of contemporary references to Smith in the mainstream media that may prove useful for discussion and student research. In my work as a business writing and communications instructor, I have included Adam Smith in my courses and found that students enjoy considering Smith’s influence and theories in contemporary business and culture. Because students recognize the name “Adam Smith” and his book Wealth of Nations, they seem interested in the classroom discussion and open to discussing the canons of rhetoric once they understand he was more than simply the founder of capitalism. Because they see Smith as someone who shaped the US financial market, his inclusion as a part of our class makes writing and rhetoric seem relevant to students, particularly BBA students. Smith then becomes a vehicle for writing and rhetorical instruction, as well as a prompt for lively classroom discussion and writing projects.