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Rhetoric
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Rhetoric is the study of how language is used to persuade, inform, and influence audiences, and it sits at the center of communications, English, political science, and philosophy curricula. Its academic interest lies in the tension between language and reality, form and meaning, power and reason. Students engage with foundational questions about what makes an argument effective and how speech shapes public life. Core thinkers and frameworks that appear across coursework include Aristotle's definition of rhetoric, Plato's critique of false rhetoric as it relates to democracy, Foucault's contributions to rhetoric and ideology, and the competing positions of Bitzer and Vatz on how rhetorical situations are constructed.

Papers on this topic take several distinct approaches. Some are historically oriented, tracing classical and modern rhetorical theory to compare how ideas about persuasion have evolved. Others focus on close analysis of specific texts or speeches, such as Carmichael's Black Power speech or George Orwell's political writing, using rhetorical frameworks to examine how language and power operate together. Additional papers explore rhetoric within specific domains — religion, education, and political ideology — while others work through theoretical debates about the relationship between knowledge and rhetoric or the role of rhetorical education in shaping civic life.

A strong essay on rhetoric grounds its thesis in a clear claim about how a specific use of language achieves — or fails to achieve — a persuasive effect. Evidence drawn from the text, speech, or theoretical framework under analysis carries the most weight. The most common pitfall is treating rhetoric as merely a list of devices; effective essays instead connect those devices to broader questions of audience, power, and meaning.

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Essay Doctorate
Journalist terminology in terrorism coverage: a content analysis of news outlets
This paper looks at issues of terminology and the media and how various media outlets can great influence the way that the public views such events. This paper examines the media outlets of the BBC, Al Jazeera, Al Arabyia, and Ahram and their treatment of Egyptian security forces and protesters in Egypt on August 14th.
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Thesis Undergraduate
Othello: The Tragedy of Internalized Racism William
This paper is an explication of the role of race and interracial marriage in William Shakespeare's tragedy of "Othello." It argues that the play begins with a deliberately promising portrait of the ability of whites and blacks to get along in the multiracial city of Venice. However, the subliminal racism bubbling beneath the surface ultimately proves to be Othello's undoing.
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Essay Doctorate
Urban Data Review Reades Et Al. (2007)
Reades et al. (2007) presented some interesting ideas about the use of data collection and its practical application in an urban setting. The authors discussed spatiotemporal data as a new object of desire for those…
~1 min read
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Paper Masters
Google\'s Dilemma in Organization
This paper examines Google’s dilemma in China when the company decided to launch the Chinese search engine for its users who were experiencing severe quality problems when using Google.com. The discussion begins with an evaluation on whether Google made the right choice to initially launch this search engine and censor the results and how its rhetoric has changed over time. The other sections discuss the perspectives on ethics that influenced its decisions, whether its rhetoric match its behavior, and implications of the decision on Chinese users of its services.
~1 min read
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Essay Doctorate
Common Sense -- Thomas Paine Thomas Paine,
Thomas Paine, one of the most influential writers of the American Revolution, wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense. In this short work, he incited and inspired American Patriots to declare independence from Great Britain.
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Research Paper Doctorate
East Asian history: key periods and developments
Neo-Confucionism was not simply a revitalization of the ancient teachings of Confucian in China. It emerged as a distinct response to what was considered a foreign ideology, that of Buddhism, which was increasingly popular but condemned by many officials. This paper examines how Neo- Confucian texts specifically positioned themselves rhetorically as anti-Buddhist texts in overt and covert ways.
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Research Paper Doctorate
Anthony Blond in His Book a Scandalous
Anthony Blond in his book A Scandalous History of the Roman Emperors (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000), a book originally published in 1994, the author seems to have written a history of Rome for the current tabloid age,…
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Essay Doctorate
Evolution of historiography on Jim Crow segregation in the American South
Vann Woodward and Jim Crow Evaluating the impact of Reconstruction social policy on blacks is more controversial due to the issue of segregation. Until the publication of C. Vann Woodward Strange Career of Jim Crow in 1955, the traditional view was that after the gains of Reconstruction, Conservative Democrats clamped down on the blacks by instituting an extensive system of segregation and disfranchisement (Woodward, 1974). Woodward, however, argued that there was a period of fluidity in race relations between the end of Reconstruction and the 1890s. Woodward concentrated on de jure segregation rather than de facto segregation, in part because he was influenced by the Brown v. Board of Education decision ( 1954) and the growing agitation over desegregation. In still another example of current affairs influencing a historian's viewpoint, Woodward wanted to show that segregation was not an irrevocable folkway of Southern life, but actually a rather recent innovation. Despite attacks from a number of scholars who pointed to the existence of segregation during the antebellum period in both the North and South, and, most pointedly, even during Reconstruction, Woodward's view was widely accepted. Woodward's critics were limited by their own desire to make history conform to their expectations and as a result simply searched for proof that segregation represented the norm in Southern life (Dailey, et al 2000). As a result their work lacked a dynamic approach which would emphasize process (Rabinowitz, 1978).
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Paper Undergraduate
Strategy -- Rulers, States and War it
Sun Tzu's The Art of War was reportedly written approximately 2,500 year ago near the end of a thousand years of constant warfare in China. Military strategy would have been well honed by that time and the dangers inherent in going to war against an enemy well understood. This essay examines some of the main themes in the book and contrasts it with the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq.
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