Accessibility Tools

Transforming Ethos

Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing

by Rosanne Carlo

Paperback Price $25.95
Ebook Price $21.95
30-day ebook rental price $10.50

Buy Now


2022 CCCC Outstanding Book Award, Monograph, Honorable Mention


“An important and timely project, especially in forwarding a vision of teaching writing that steps outside of threshold concepts, writing about writing, and teaching for transfer. There are many teachers who have been quietly hoping for a fully articulated vision of writing that offers an alternative to these disciplinary approaches, which are valuable but limited. I also believe there are many scholars/teachers who value emotion, bodily knowledge, storytelling, place, and social engagement as key elements of teaching writing, which are central to Transforming Ethos.”
Paula Mathieu, Boston College

"Through a careful synthesis of theory, personal explication, and pedagogical example, Carlo offers insight into how a transformative ethos—rooted in place and the material—is central to writing that produces identification across difference"
Community Literacy Journal

"There is something in Transforming Ethos for almost everyone in the modern English Department, and Carlo’s attempts to synthesize these important works and concepts across English studies deserves high praise."
Composition Forum

“Offers an important combination of theory and practice, which is a rare accomplishment in the larger scheme of scholarship in the discipline of rhetoric and composition.”
Rhetoric Review

 

In Transforming Ethos Rosanne Carlo synthesizes philosophy, rhetorical theory, and composition theory to clarify the role of ethos and its potential for identification and pedagogy for writing studies. Carlo renews focus on the ethos appeal and highlights its connection to materiality and place as a powerful instrument for writing and its teaching—one that insists on the relational and multimodal aspects of writing and makes prominent its inherent ethical considerations and possibilities.
 
Through case studies of professional and student writings as well as narrative reflections Transforming Ethos imagines the ethos appeal as not only connected to style and voice but also a process of habituation, related to practices of everyday interaction in places and with things. Carlo addresses how ethos aids in creating identification, transcending divisions between the self and other. She shows that when writers tell their experiences, they create and reveal the ethos appeal, and this type of narrative/multimodal writing is central to scholarship in rhetoric and composition as well as the teaching of writing. In addition, Carlo considers how composition is becoming compromised by professionalization—particularly through the idea of “transfer”—which is overtaking the critical work of self-development with others that a writing classroom should encourage in college students.
 
Transforming Ethos cements ethos as an essential term for the modern practice and teaching of rhetoric and places it at the heart of writing studies. This book will be significant for students and scholars in rhetoric and composition, as well as those interested in higher education more broadly.

Rosanne Carlo is associate professor in rhetoric and composition, codirector of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program, and facilitator of faculty professional development in the Writing Program at the College of Staten Island CUNY, where she teaches primarily first-year writing and MA courses on the teaching of writing. She also coleads a writing partnership with local high schools called #SIWrites: Engaging in College and Career Preparation. Her work has appeared in Community Literacy Journal, Composition Forum, Intraspection, Journal for the Assembly on the Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Rhetoric Review, and The Writing Instructor.

Utah State University Press Logo

Details

  • Paperback Price: $25.95
  • Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64642-062-9
  • Ebook Price: $21.95
  • 30-day ebook rental price: $10.50
  • EISBN: 978-1-64642-063-6
  • Publication Month: September
  • Publication Year: 2020
  • Pages: 216
  • Illustrations: 0
  • Discount Type: Short
  • Author: by Rosanne Carlo
  • ECommerce Code: 978-1-64642-062-9
  • Get Permissions: Get Permission

Related Titles

Browse Related Titles Tagged Under:

University Press of Colorado University of Alaska Press Utah State University Press University of Wyoming Press