In her essay “A Woman of Power: Rosalynn Carter and the Mental Health Scene,” Marie Whelan provides an insightful neo-Aristotelian analysis of Rosalynn Carter’s rhetorical tactics as she campaigned for mental health care reform in the United States. Whelan’s investigation provides an excellent context for Carter’s feminine persona and role as a mother of the nation figure, though her neo-Aristotelian framework does not fully address the connection between Carter’s rhetorical tactics and her public image. This paper examines Carter’s rhetorical tactics of using personal anecdotes, encouraging unity between herself and her audiences, and inviting audience participation through the lens of the feminine style. Specifically, I examine how Carter utilizes these rhetorical tactics in two newspaper op-eds to effectively support her point while fulfilling her role as a mother of the nation figure. An analysis of Carter’s rhetoric through the lens of the feminine style allows for a more nuanced understanding of Carter’s rhetoric in the context of her public persona and better accounts for the historical period in which she campaigned.
This article explores the materiality and embodied effects of writing by asking the research question: how are writers’ composing processes affected by the writing technologies they employ? Current scholarship on the embodied effects of writing highlights lived experiences and merits of specific technologies but does not fully investigate the importance of the body itself in the composing process. Drawing together select studies on embodied composition with my own autobiographical study, I investigate the interrelationship between a writer’s body, writing technologies, and the text produced. I build this understanding using Saldana’s coding methods and inductive analysis of screen recordings, material recordings, and think-aloud protocols. Findings indicate that technologies that caused the most physical discomfort resulted in the fewest generated words and sentences in response to the given prompt and the least amount of time spent writing or generating prose. While these results are unsurprising, the primary takeaway is that writing practices should not be seen as universal or generalizable. Instead, writing ought to be understood and researched as a deeply personal experience that matches technologies to a writer’s individual comfort. Although limited, this study also has pedagogical implications, suggesting teachers reimagine the composition classroom by centering the unique, lived bodies of their students.
The field of Writing Studies borrows and adapts research methods from many disciplines, including quantitative and qualitative methods from the social sciences. However, many people still think of empirical research as something that is out of reach for undergraduate students in liberal arts majors. In this methodological reflection, the author describes her own journey from believing empirical research was for other people (especially those who like math) to conducting her own empirical research study related to faculty and students’ perceptions of “Standard English.” The author’s reflection on the process of designing her study and collecting data not only provides an encouraging and honest “behind-the-scenes” look at the recursive nature of empirical research for other novice researchers in Writing Studies, but also reminds more experienced researchers, especially faculty, of the unique constraints undergraduate researchers face, especially when conducting studies that involve faculty as participants or rely on faculty to recruit participants.
