This is a gentle introduction to the Kappa Coefficient, a commonly used statistic for measuring reliability between two raters who are applying nominal codes or category labels to qualitative data. This was created for grad students in the Humanities and has been used in both course and workshop settings.

While written assignments are typically growing in length in line with the ever-expanding volume of resources available to student writers, platforms like Twitter demand more succinct approaches to writing and offer a range of non-traditional stylistic options in its toolbar. Perhaps the twessay is the haiku of the essay genre: short but with a…[Read more]

This paper examines the shared characteristics and effects of rhetoric and dance in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue by Ben Jonson.

This essay explores the meaning of Kenneth Burke’s notion of the “poetic corrective” from his book Permanence and Change by examining the ideas of William Carlos Williams, a lifelong friend and frequent correspondent with Burke. Williams’s poetry is also examined as a potential model for the “poetic corrective,” which I suggest is what Burke might…[Read more]

In English, some participles have already become prepositions. The author noticed in her work as a technical editor that most of her writers seemed to perceive the participle using as a preposition already although it is not listed as such in the dictionary. The paper gives the evidence and rationale for making such a claim. It offers a window on…[Read more]

Slideshow to accompany presentation of essay “Participles Becoming Prepositions—Some Arcane Information for Editors” (http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6KP7Z)

This essay focuses on the woman’s page in the Grain Growers’ Guide, edited between 1912 and 1917 by Francis Marion Beynon. I approach this material with questions that have become prominent in rhetorical studies of women’s writing. How were women called forth to speak, and what were their motivations to participate in public debate? How did woman…[Read more]

In this paper, I show how, as a philologist, William Strunk’s approach to language was a rich historical and rhetorical experience far from the prescriptivism E.B. White ascribes to him in the first edition of The Elements of Style (1959). An interesting historical parallel exists between Strunk’s tenure as a PhD student in philology at Cornell…[Read more]

Technology is transforming twenty-first century education. Central to the study of English Literature is critical thinking and writing, and with the advent of digital texts (along with the precursor – digitized writing) the space of the discipline continues to expand. One way to get at what is being done in the study of literature is to explore…[Read more]

In the last six years, scholars have engaged with the effects of globalization on the study of collective memory, emphasizing the de-territorialization, de-nationalization of memory cultures. While being attentive to the global circulation and transformation of collective memories, authors in this issue seek to revisit and critique some…[Read more]

I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to the nineteenth century “conversation handbook” (Connors) and other cultural guides to middlebrow identity formation including The Book-Of-The-Month Club. The Elements of Style is a guide to a genteel language performance rooted in the racialized,…[Read more]