Every code text is informed by stylistic decisions that impact how the text is interpreted and understood. While software developers have long discussed concerns of style in regards to writing code, scholars of computation would benefit from a rhetorical approach to style, an approach that links style to substance and sees style as situated and…[Read more]

The enthymeme, while serving as the central basis for heuristic invention, also works at the local or sentence level as a rhetorically oriented algorithmic procedure through which a rhetor determines the most probable success in persuading an audience to action.

Scholars of, or interested in, rhetoric have an opportunity to build upon the emerging body of work from the fields of software studies and critical code studies in order to explore the potential for meaning-making made possible through code and its expression(s). Over the last decade, rhetoric has significantly expanded to incorporate image,…[Read more]

‘A Complaint against Blacksmiths’, unique to BL, MS Arundel 292, may gesture towards fourteenth-century legislation against night-time work, yet is underpinned by delight in the sights and sounds of the forge. The smith’s smoke-smattered visage is simultaneously disgraceful and inspiring to its medieval audience. Many of us experience a diffe…[Read more]