The University of Winnipeg’s Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications has the distinction of being the first independent writing program in Canada. Conceived in 1986 as The Writing Program, it underwent a review in 1993, separated from the English Department to become the Centre for Academic Writing, and then began offering a communications program in partnership with a local college...

E PIDEICTIC RHETORIC—THE RHETORIC OF ‘‘PRAISE AND BLAME’’— grounds itself in a culture’s mainstream values. People or things (in this study, lifestyles and products) that purport to demonstrate or embody currently favored values are praised and thus reinforced in epideictic rhetoric, and those out of favor and perceived as nonmainstream in common culture are criticized. Chaim Perelman and Lucie...

Dr. James Hansen’s 1988 testimony before the U.S. Senate was an important turning point in the history of global climate change. However, no studies have explained why Hansen’s scientific communication in this deliberative setting was more successful than his testimonies of 1986 and 1987. This article turns to Hansen as an important case study in the rhetoric of accommodated science, illustrati...

This paper theorizes a new discipline, comparative legal rhetoric, which can accomplish two important goals. First, in society broken down by intractable polarization and win/lose dichotomies, rhetoric identifies alternative, nontraditional non-Western ways to communicate persuade. How we talk is deeply connected how see the world. If take break from argument structure that defines Western comm...