WRTC Faculty Publish Three Books
Office of the Provost
Recently, three WRTC faculty have successfully published their work: Assistant professor Alex Parrish’s, book Adaptive Rhetoric: Evolution, Culture, and the Art of Persuasion was published November 27, 2013; Associate Professor Kurt Schick’s co-edited collection, A Guide to Composition Pedagogies 2nd edition, was published on December 2, 2013 and; Kurt Schick and Instructor Laura Schubert have a co-authored textbook, So What? The Writer’s Argument, published December 2, 2013. Each book brings a unique perspective to the discipline focusing on different spheres of writing, rhetoric and technical communication.
Parrish’s book, published by Routledge, is an investigation into rhetoric scholarship. The publication seeks to provide “a deeper history of rhetoric that transcends the written and the televised, and reveals the artifacts of our communicative past” (Amazon.com). However, the novel is not only useful for those in scholarship, but also professors and graduate students in the field. Associate Professor Carol Zitzer from California State University, Long Beach states that the book “provides students with the theoretical framework that they will need to understand teaching composition and to develop their own pedagogical concepts. More importantly, it provides realistic, applicable examples of what can and does happen in composition classrooms and how instructors of composition shape students' college experiences as writers and thinkers."
Similarly, A Guide to Composition Pedagogies 2nd edition, published by Oxford University Press, is also geared towards graduate students and composition professors; however, by contrast, Schick’s book focuses on composition theory and student centered writing. The book is pedagogically driven and has significant updates from the first edition. Specifically, “The essays within now contain an increased focus on issues raised by diversity, each pedagogy's approach to assessment, and technology's effect on composition”.
Oxford University Press also published Schick’s other book, co-authored with Laura Schubert, So What? The Writer’s Argument. The textbook focuses on the practice of argumentation and communication through discussion of audience and genre in the “broader context of academic inquiry.” The textbook successfully engages students, as stated by Associate Professor Cheryl Edelson from Chaminade University "The scholarly apprentice model in So What? connects academic writing to the larger writing culture and lends itself to student empowerment and engagement, by allowing students to see their role in the process".
The department of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communications is housed in Harrison Hall 2276.
