

From the Archive: A Sonnet (1997)
Billy Schraufnagel English Lit, p.10 November 11, 1997 If you want to accomplish your delight, Find your own way to grope along in dark...
Jul 22, 2023


On Strategic Communication
Kenneth Burke writes that a strategy is a response to a situation. And a situation is a shorthand-term for a structure of motives. By...
Jun 26, 2023


From the Archive: Contemplative Communication
Love as the Redemption of Suffering You stand in a clearing whose cost you know in tendon and bone. - Wendell Berry, “Clearing” In the...
Jun 1, 2023


Top Ten Books on Rhetoric
An intrepid student recently asked me, "I pose a request: If you can reduce rhetorics most relevant books to a list of ~5-10, I'd be...
Apr 30, 2022


The Permanence of Wilbur Samuel Howell
For so many centuries, as the Roman Empire, rhetorical education prevailed for the most part in a continuum from Quintilian until the...
Apr 4, 2021


Tribute to Northern Illinois University
After two years as Visiting Assistant Professor at NIU, my time as a Huskie has come to an end. It was my first job after earning my PhD...
Aug 1, 2019


Hegel and the Teaching of Culture
I just finished the 2017-18 academic year teaching Introduction to Communication Studies (COMS 252) at Northern Illinois University, a...
May 18, 2018


Bring your book to class. Open the book. Say something!
Recently a student interviewed me for a class project. The 19-question interview covers many aspects of teaching, including goals for the...
Oct 18, 2017


Designing a Composition Course
I have now finished my Ph.D. and my first year as an Adjunct Professor. Here's a report from the field. I started graduate school in 2006...
Jun 1, 2017


Aesthetics and Sensation in Rhetoric
From the end of my dissertation, Kenneth Burke's Adolescence, 1915-1920: An Archival Study of Influence: At the end of 1918, after a few...
Oct 24, 2016