English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Meeting the Needs of the Nontraditional Student:: A Study of the Effectiveness of Synchronous Online Writing Center Tutorials(2010) Hawkinson Melkun, Cheryl Lee; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the fall of 2007, 3.9 million students took at least one online course, reflecting an online education growth rate of 12.9 percent. Many online students are nontraditional, possessing one or more of the following characteristics: delayed enrollment, part time attendance, full-time worker, financially independent as related to financial aid, dependents other than a spouse, single parent, a GED or did not finish high school. While these students bring diversity and life experience to the classroom, they are often ill-prepared for college writing. Though they need help, hectic schedules make it difficult to meet with a writing consultant. This study investigates whether synchronous writing center tutorials can effectively address this client population's needs. Currently, there is a dearth of scholarship relating to online writing tutorials, particularly synchronous tutorials. This two-year study of 189 face-to-face clients and 90 online clients employs quantitative and qualitative research to determine (1) the demographic profile of online users, (2) reasons clients meet online, (3) help sought online, (4) online client preparation, (5) client perceptions of online sessions, and (6) advantages and disadvantages of online sessions. Data were culled from a client questionnaire, online session logs, and consultant and client interviews. Statistically significant differences in client demographics between face-to-face and online users were found in age, ethnicity, and gender: online clients are younger, are more likely to be white, and are more likely to be male. Clients meet online primarily for convenience; however, there is no correlation between distance from campus and online client usage. There were no significant differences in client preparation. Spelling was the only statistically significant category in help sought: online clients seek more spelling help than their face-to-face counterparts. Face-to-face and online clients both viewed their sessions as successful with no statistically significant difference between the groups. Over one-third of clients reported technical problems during their session, and some clients expressed a preference for the emphatic cues found in face-to-face consultations. Advantages of online sessions included assistance with word processing features, the ability to make revisions to the working document, and the ability to record the session.Item Emotional Evidence, Personal Testimony, and Public Debate: A Case Study of the Post-Abortion Movement(2010) Brown, Heather; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates a new movement within the abortion debates in the United States known as the Post-Abortion Movement. Bypassing the stalemate between pro-life and pro-choice, activists in this movement focus on the potential psychological trauma of abortion, and in the last twenty years, they have argued for their views in different forums, grounding their case in the personal testimony of women who have undergone abortions. They have emphasized the validity of their narratives in defining their experience over the authority of medical professionals. This project assembles an archive of this movement, from its early advocacy literature to its professional discourse in journals, to its proliferating presence on websites. While offering a case study of how a movement gets started and has an impact on the public's perception of an issue, the Post-Abortion Movement and its tactics also raise important questions in rhetorical theory concerning the role of personal testimony in arguments. In five chapters, this dissertation gives the history of the Post-Abortion Movement and uses rhetorical theory to analyze its tactics. Its most effective tactic has been the creation of a new diagnostic category: "post-abortion syndrome." In a case study of advocacy, professional, and online genres, this project trace the rhetorical development of this concept and show how stakeholders use women's first-person accounts of their abortion experiences--women whom they identify as "post-abortive." This dissertation argues that Post-Abortion Movement supporters use personal testimonies as both a source of evidence for social science claims in policy arguments and a force for building a community of advocates. While contributing to the growing body of scholarship on narrative and the rhetoric of health and medicine, this dissertation shows how the Post-Abortion Movement's persistent casting of abortion as a potentially negative--rather than therapeutic or liberating--event has significantly influenced the current debate on women's responses to abortion.Item A GENRE OF DEFENSE: HYBRIDITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN'S DEFENSES OF WOMEN'S PREACHING(2009) Zimmerelli, Lisa Dawn; Donawerth, Jane; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how nineteenth-century Protestant women negotiated genre in order to manage more effectively the controversial rhetorical project of defending women's right to preach. After providing a comprehensive overview of the debate of women's preaching in America, this project presents a genre study of a subset of these defenses: those women who do not adhere strictly to their "home" genres, but rather demonstrate a range of generic blending and manipulation in their defenses of women's preaching. This study further reads religion as an integral identity category that was the seat for other activist rhetorics; by extension, then, women's defenses of women's preaching is an important site of activism and rhetorical discourse. Foote, Willard, and Woosley are rhetoricians and theologians; the hybrid form of their books provides them with a textual space for the intersections of their rhetoric and theology. This study examines three books within the tradition of defenses of women's preaching--Julia Foote's A Brand Plucked from the Fire (1879), Frances Willard's Woman in the Pulpit (1888), and Louisa Woosley's Shall Woman Preach? (1891)--as representative of the journey a genre takes from early adaptation to solidification, what Carolyn Miller calls "typified rhetorical action" (151) and as the containers for an egalitarian theology. Foote adapts the genre of spiritual autobiography to include the oral and textual discourses of letters, sermons, and hymn in order to present her holiness theology. Willard experiments with the epistolary genre in order to present her Social Gospel theology. Woosley includes all of the genres of defenses of women's preaching: sermon, spiritual autobiography, editorial letter, and speech; she also appropriates Masonic rhetoric in order to merge the defense of women's preaching with another kind of defense prevalent at the time: the scriptural defense of women. Significantly, each woman resolves "separate spheres" ideology by suggesting a new religious sphere where men and women participate equally: Foote's sphere is the sphere of holiness; Willard's is her reconceptualized Kingdom of God; and Woosley's is a world of action, where men and women, after ritualized initiation, are responsible for building the temple of God.Item Instrument to Evidence to Argument: Visual Mediation of Invisible Phenomena in Scientific Discourse(2008-07-15) Buehl, Jonathan; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how scientists and scientific editors have approached specific problems related to visualization and visual argumentation in scientific texts. These problems are related to the following research questions: (1) How are new visualization practices established as scientifically credible? (2) How do scientists modify existing instrument output to make new visual arguments? (3) How do scientists use verbal and visual means to transform problematic data into acceptable support for novel claims? (4) What are the practical and ethical boundaries of modifying visual artifacts for scientific arguments? (5) How do scientists refute established (but incorrect) visualizations that have been widely accepted as accurate representations of reality? This project considers these issues rhetorically by examining a number of recent and historical cases. The first three case studies explore how scientists created both compelling and uncompelling visual arguments by mediating the visual output of instruments with rhetorical strategies. These case studies focus on visualizations from physical science: x-ray diffraction photographs, graphics establishing the theory of plate tectonics, and visualizations of atmospheric phenomena. In each case, visualizations articulated invisible phenomena in new ways, transforming unclear or seemingly unremarkable data into convincing knowledge claims. My analysis of these cases explores how scientists integrate visuals into the analogical, causal, transitive, symmetrical, and dissociation arguments that are so essential to the practice of science. The later case studies examine broader concerns regarding ethics, persuasion, and modern scientific visualization. I examine recent issues related to the digital generation and manipulation of scientific images and rhetorical issues related to scientists' increasing dependence on complicated computer algorithms for creating visual arguments.Item Basic Writing, Binaries, and Bridges: Difference and Power in the Production and Reception of Representations of Students(2008-05-30) Champagne, Maurice C; Logan, Shirley; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Difference and power produce powerful, damaging representations of students. Those representations of students affect representations of teachers, writing instruction, and English studies as a whole. Damaging representations of students come from competing definitions of literacy. Because literacy definitions vary, representations of students vary with some students perceived as the "Other." This study analyzes difference and power in the production and reception of representations of students, especially writing students. It also analyzes competing definitions of literacy, connecting them to conflicting representations of students. Furthermore, this study promotes alternative representations of students through interview with six variously situated teachers and program administrators. This study concludes that before writing teachers can improve the field, they must critically assess the ways in which its least prepared students are represented.Item At the Brighter Margins: Teaching Writing to the College Student with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder(2008-04-26) Cooper, Barbara Graham; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Composition studies has paid a great deal of attention to student differences in identity, including gender, race, and socio-economic status. It has also considered the generic problems of writing anxiety and of so-called "basic writers." But composition studies has almost completely neglected the problems and needs of college students with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD). This dissertation argues that college students with AD/HD face a unique set of challenges as writers; these challenges need to be acknowledged, explored, analyzed, and addressed. The rhetorical construction of the individual with AD/HD is examined in both contemporary culture and in the document which authoritatively defines the disorder--the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders-IV Training Revision (2000). Results of a qualitative study of four current college students and of six college graduates all of whom have been diagnosed with AD/HD are presented. This study explored six areas of inquiry in personal interviews with the participants: 1) How does the AD/HD identity affect their self-image as individuals and as writers? 2) How does AD/HD affect their writing process? 3) What positive experiences have they had with writing? 4) What negative ones? 5) What coping mechanisms have they developed for the challenges imposed by AD/HD on the writer? 6) What is or has been helpful to them in the college English class? Further, this paper analyzes how impairment in executive functions of the brain affect the writing of college students with AD/HD. Finally, pedagogy, which is based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning, is suggested to address the challenges faced by the college writer with AD/HD.Item Assessing the Scholarly Value of Online Texts(2007-12-18) Warner, Allison Brovey; Turner, Mark; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Publishing discipline-specific scholarly articles in refereed print journals is a traditional and especially important professional requirement for post-secondary faculty seeking initial employment, tenure, and promotion. Online writing, particularly web-based online journal publications that incorporate the unique hypertextual and/or hypermedia allowances of the medium, is expanding the boundaries of print-based scholarship and engaging academicians within English Studies in ongoing discussions that attempt to resolve issues of parity between print-based and web-based scholarship. A review of the relevant literature shows a persistent perception within English Studies that online journal publications lack scholarly value in comparison to traditional print publications, and therefore they may not be recognized as equal evidence of scholarly achievement for tenure, promotion, and review purposes. Scholars generally agree upon traditional scholarly standards for assessing print-based texts; however, no grounding rationale for understanding and valuing web-based texts as equally valid scholarship is readily available. This study aims to provide such a rationale. Specifically, this dissertation addresses the need for valuing web-based journal publications as legitimate scholarship particularly among scholars in the subfield of Computers and Writing. The study provides a rhetorical analysis of a select group of "webtexts" published in the Computers and Writing subfield's premier online journal, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. The analysis identifies common characteristics of webtexts and determines the extent to which these characteristics fail to meet, meet and/or extend traditional conventions of scholarship, thus contributing to the ongoing conversation of online scholarship assessment. The findings from the analysis lead to the development of an example assessment heuristic that may be useful for tenure, promotion, and review participants, online journal editors, and scholars within the Computers and Writing subfield to assess and defend the scholarly value of web-based journal publications.Item Chi-Thinking: Chiasmus and Cognition(2008-01-15) Lissner, Patricia Ann; Turner, Mark; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The treatise proposes chiasmus is a dominant instrument that conducts processes and products of human thought. The proposition grows out of work in cognitive semantics and cognitive rhetoric. These disciplines establish that conceptualization traces to embodied image schematic knowledge. The Introduction sets out how this knowledge gathers from perceptions, experiences, and memories of the body's commonplace engagements in space. With these ideas as suppositional foundation, the treatise contends that chiastic instrumentation is a function of a corporeal mind steeped in elementary, nonverbal spatial forms or gestalts. It shows that chiasmus is a space shape that lends itself to cognition via its simple, but unique architecture and critically that architecture's particular meaning affordances. We profile some chiastic meanings over others based on local conditions. Chiastic iconicity ('lending') devolves from LINE CROSSING in 2-D and PATH CROSSING in 3-D space and from other image schemas (e.g., BALANCE, PART-TO-WHOLE) that naturally syndicate with CROSSING. Profiling and iconicity are cognitive activities. The spatio-physical and the visual aspects of cross diagonalization are discussed under the Chapter Two heading 'X-ness.' Prior to this technical discussion, Chapter One surveys the exceptional versatility and universality of chiasmus across verbal spectra, from radio and television advertisements to the literary arts. The purposes of this opening section are to establish that chiasticity merits more that its customary status as mere rhetorical figure or dispensable stylistic device and to give a foretaste of the complexity, yet automaticity of chi-thinking. The treatise's first half describes the complexity, diversity, and structural inheritance of chiasmus. The second half treats individual chiasma, everything from the most mundane instantiations to the sublime and virtuosic. Chapter Three details the cognitive dimensions of the macro chiasm, which are appreciable in the micro. It builds on the argument that chiasmus secures two cognitive essentials: association and dissociation. Chapter Four, advantaged by Kenneth Burke's "psychology of form," elects chiasmus an instrument of inordinate form and then explores the issue of Betweenity, i.e., how chiasma, like crisscrosses, direct notice to an intermediate region. The study ends on the premise that chiasmus executes form-meaning pairings with which humans are highly fluent.Item Summon Up the Blood(2007-04-27) Stephens, Evan Matthew; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Summon Up the Blood is a collection of poems divided into two sections. The first, entitled "Country" deals with the relationship between the individual and the natural world, and with the tendency for one to reflect the other; the second, entitled "City" is primarily concerned with the inner life of the individual amid the stresses of society and culture, and with the difficulties of preserving a sense of self in the modern world. Both sections share the overarching goal of extensively inspecting the necessity of being an honest observer of both the interior and exterior worlds. Influences include Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Tomas Transtromer and Robert Frost.Item Using a Theory of Emotional Intelligence to Teach Basic Writers at a Two-Year College(2007-04-27) Dardello, Andrea Deliece; Logan, Shirley W; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Emotional intelligence scholars such as Daniel Goleman, Reuven Bar-On, John Mayer, David Caruso, and Peter Salovey have all claimed that cognitive ability alone is insufficient to determine an individual's success. Each has pointed to emotional intelligence as a skill needed to obtain one's life goals. The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), the only ability-based test of emotional intelligence developed by John Mayer, Peter Salovey, and David Caruso, was used to teach basic writers at Howard Community College to recognize, understand, use, and manage emotions to determine if being taught emotional intelligence skills in a fifteen-week semester would improve students' emotional intelligence skills and their success in the course. Students also kept emotional intelligence journals wherein they recorded their emotions during six stages of the writing process, including brainstorming, developing a thesis, developing an outline, writing the first draft, receiving feedback, and revision. Using Alice Brand's glossary of positive and negative emotional vocabulary for writers, students identified emotions that aided and stifled their writing process. Although this study did not find that teaching emotional intelligence skills in a fifteen-week semester significantly increased student's emotional intelligence as determined by the MSCEIT, it did find a relationship between students' emotional intelligence score, students' writing skills and their success in the course. Students' reported emotions throughout the course contribute to a success-oriented pedagogy for basic writers.