Introduction

Why Did We Create This Book?

Like any good story, this one could begin in a lot of places. But one of the most important beginnings happened in a classroom, with a challenge from some sharp, curious students.

A few years ago, Leigh (one of the authors of this book) was teaching a Rhetoric and Advocacy course at the University of San Francisco (USF). For their central project, she asked students to identify a problem affecting our campus community — something real, something they cared about. The work of the course was to dig into its causes and effects and come up with advocacy strategies to try to fix it.

One group, who proudly called themselves “The Gifted Co.,” didn’t hesitate. To them, the number one issue on campus was clear: textbook costs. Through their research, they confirmed what they already suspected — students were frustrated, anxious, and angry about how expensive textbooks had become. For many, it felt like one more heavy burden on top of already steep tuition at a private university.

One USF librarian even told the group, “I have had students tell me, frankly, that they’ve had to choose between buying food and buying textbooks.” Let that sink in.

The students found that many of their peers were trying to get by in other ways — buying outdated editions (which often led to confusion in class), or turning to pirated copies online (which came with its own risks, including spam and viruses). Nationally, they learned, textbook costs aren’t just annoying — they can actually contribute to lower grades or even cause students to drop out entirely.

So, the big question became: what can we do about it?

Figure i.2. Poster created by Gifted Co. to encourage USF professors to use free or low-cost materials (High_Textbook_Costs_Accessible_Infographic [New Tab])

In talking to professors, Gifted Co. found that many were willing to switch to free or open-source materials. But they were running into the same stumbling blocks that our own department (Rhetoric and Language) had encountered a few years before — professors were convinced in theory but unsure how to execute in practice. Where to start? How could we find free materials that were both engaging and credible? Did they even exist? For most of us, it all felt so overwhelming. It was too easy to assign something already at hand.

And so, we needed another start to the story — a reason not just to provide a book for free, but also to make a book that didn’t yet exist. We found that reason as our department developed a new focus for our courses and curriculum: an emphasis on helping students identify and challenge the power dynamics of language, and a new reflection on the role of the traditional writing and rhetoric classroom in perpetuating unfair and unequal ideas about “good communication.”

We wanted to create a book that questioned those received ideas, and one that complicated and enriched how we taught about context and community. In this, we were inspired by at least four movements in our field and adjacent fields. First, movements that called for linguistic justice and revealed the inequities of demanding “Standard English” at school and other places of power. Second, movements that questioned the value of teaching of generic first-year “academic writing,” given that it often doesn’t match the communication contexts and requirements that students encounter when they leave school, or even as they advance in their majors. Third, movements that advocated for teaching “the full rhetoric”; teaching rhetoric across modalities (written, oral, visual, digital, etc.) and in an integrated way, rather than siloing off each modality into its own course or set of courses. Fourth, the new and overwhelming revolution in Generative AI — and the controversies in education, and in rhetoric and composition specifically, about whether and how to integrate it into the classroom.

And, finally, a third start to the story — we now had the motivation, but we still needed the time, the resources, and the training to overcome the hurdles and navigate the challenges of composing in a new genre. The “Open Educational Resources for Social Justice” grant, on the heels of our smaller, USF-specific grant for OER development, provided exactly that. We couldn’t have created this without the constant support and guidance of our grantors.

Most of the students in Gifted Co. have now graduated from USF — but their voices, like those of so many students featured in this book, continue to inspire us to grow, change, and be better teachers, learners, and users of language.

How Can You Use This Book?

This book takes a different path than many traditional rhetoric, composition, or public speaking textbooks. You won’t find step-by-step guides on the writing process — from brainstorming to revising — or detailed instructions on how to craft a strong thesis statement or wrap up an essay with a perfect conclusion.

That’s not because we think those things aren’t important. On the contrary, they’re essential! But the reason we don’t focus on them here is simple: there are already some excellent, free Open Educational Resources (OER) out there that do a great job covering those topics. In fact, we use several of them in our own classes and highly recommend them:

• For foundational writing and composition: Open English [Website] (Salt Lake City Community College)
• For public speaking guidance: Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy [Website] (Meggie Mapes)
• For research-based writing strategies: The Ask, A More Beautiful Question, 2nd Edition [Website] (Kate L. Pantelides; Nich Krause; and Caroline LaPlue)

We suggest pairing these resources with this book, depending on your needs or the needs of your class.

So, what does this book do? Rather than presenting rhetoric and communication as a set of strict rules to follow, this book offers a collection of flexible strategies — or heuristics — that you can use to understand and navigate communication challenges on your own. We invite you to think about how language, ideology, and power interact in the messages we create and consume.

To that end, we organized our book into five modules. We intend this book to be flexible, so that the modules or chapters you read or skip can be tailored to your needs and those of your course. At the same time, we’ve also organized it with a developmental sequence in mind, so that later chapters build on those that come before.

Rhetorical Foundations

This module orients you to key rhetorical concepts, whether as a reminder of material you covered in earlier courses or as a first-time introduction. It covers the standard history of rhetoric (and its gaps), the Rhetorical Situation, and classical rhetorical appeals (Ethos, Pathos, Logos, Kairos). It ends with addressing values and practices key to a USF education, including the Jesuit value of eloquentia perfecta, listening, and reflection.

Modality and AI

This module then breaks from an implied focus on the spoken word and print text, showing how these concepts can be applied (and adapted) to fit new modalities, like the digital and visual. We grapple with developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, providing a foundational understanding of how they generate text, and ethical and practical considerations for using them as composing tools.

Language Ideology and Linguistic Justice

This section explores how language, power, and identity intersect, focusing on concepts like language attitudes, language ideology, and linguistic justice. It examines how race and power influence perceptions of language, and introduces vocabulary like “code-switching” and “code-meshing”. The section also considers how generative AI both mirrors and impacts these dynamics, offering opportunities — and challenges — for promoting greater language equity.

Discourse Communities

This section introduces the concept of discourse communities and explores how they shape communication, identity, and power dynamics across academic, professional, civic, and cultural contexts. We discuss ways to analyze the norms, values, and language practices of specific communities and assess how these practices include, exclude, empower, or marginalize members and outsiders. We guide you to critically examine your own discourse communities and develop strategies for communicating effectively within and beyond them.

Genre Analysis

The final section explores the concept of genre as a powerful tool for shaping communication across cultural, academic, and public contexts. It examines how genres respond to rhetorical situations, adapt over time, and influence how messages are created, interpreted, and received — whether in journal articles, social media, films, or news. Through critical analysis and hands-on practice, you will learn to evaluate genre conventions, challenge exclusions, and design effective, ethical genre translations for a range of real-world communication needs.

We have developed this book to reflect the values that we discuss within it — and so have integrated multimodal resources, like videos and podcasts, to supplement and enrich our written content. In turn, we’ve incorporated student examples and student voices into many chapters to serve as inspiration and guidance. We intend this book to be a “living” document — revisable and adaptable to its own rhetorical situation.

Our bigger hope is that this book helps you develop the critical tools to figure out what “effective communication” looks like in all kinds of real-world situations — whether you’re engaging with your local community, participating in academic settings, or working in a professional environment.

In that sense, we see this book less as a manual of fixed answers, and more as a companion filled with questions — questions designed to help you research, interpret, and create meaningful communication in your own voice.