Author: Robert Beck

If you recently taught a course in writing, rhetoric, and/or technical, professional, or business communication with a significant thematic focus on writing with or about data, we invite you to publish it as part of the Sweetland DRC Syllabus Repository. Please consider submitting your syllabus so that others might gain inspiration for their future courses by filling out this form. The deadline to submit is Wednesday, June 25th 2025. What is the Sweetland DRC Syllabus Repository? The Sweetland DRC Syllabus Repository is a public, crowd-sourced collection of syllabi of courses taught by our contributors. We see the syllabus repository as…

For much of rhetoric’s history, circulation—the cultural and spatio-temporal flow of texts, ideas, and images through various networks, platforms, and structures—has been less of an explicit area of study and more of an “assumed phenomenon” (Gries, 2018, p. 3) running through the field. However, since the digital turn, our focus on computers, algorithms, and digital platforms that allow texts to accumulate momentum and meaning across time and space has contributed to renewed interest in circulation studies as an area of inquiry and framework. In the introduction to Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, edited by Laurie Gries and Collin Brooke, Gries argues…

Would you rather listen to this post instead? Check out the podcast version here: Two truths and a lie: The road to my disciplinary identity has been paved with curiosity, bad assumptions, and lots of side quests. My first intellectual infatuation wasn’t language or literature, but mathematics. While I struggled with the memorization required in my elementary and middle school math classes (I still don’t know my times tables or how to do long division), it all started to click for me in high school. I did well in statistics, algebra, and geometry, but what I enjoyed the most was…