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Frank D Angelo Annotated Bibliography Articles

After a conference interrogating what English studies should involve, D’Angelo determines that it should have a functional approach to all of the possible fields that could be included within “English,” be it creative writing, theoretical critiques, literary composition classes, and so forth. English studies should not only focus on literature as a singular entity, something existing on its own. Instead, there should be study of a multiplicity of linguistic and compositional forms that are inherent in communication and, thereby, part of English as a form of communication.

Composition arrangement is more than the ordering paragraphs; it is also an organization of ideas and logical sequencing of thoughts. The ideas that generate each paragraph follow a logical pattern of formatting that at once follows specific conventions and simultaneously creates its own process of development. The essay emerges as a sequence of structurally related topic sentences that become, secondarily, structurally related paragraphs. D’Angelo therefore argues that an expansion of basic understandings of structure must occur and include analysis discourse to examine the emergence of such sequences.

Early twentieth century product advertisements engage in discourses designed to appeal to readers and persuade them to make purchases. D’Angelo demonstrates that analysis of advertisements in classrooms acquaints students with particular conventions and styles of rhetoric that appeal to the psychological needs and desires of consumers. In the conclusion of this article, D’Angelo provides a class lesson structure designed to guide students towards seeing how advertisements are organized and structured to achieve specific ends: a community of consumers ready to buy what they are shown.

Composition is a process through which the mind orders, organizes, and structures ideas. As the human mind develops, or goes through an “evolution of consciousness,” use of language for the purpose of communication similarly transforms and improves. The societies we grow up in have individual codes which help the mind move ideas from undifferentiated to differentiated wholes. Through the developmental stages of the human mind, the ability to reason, rationalize, and thereby to interact with others become more and more advanced. Strategies are learned. We internalize the structures of how to interact effectively and then put these into practice. In the composition classroom, awareness of cognitive development assists in formulating lesson plans based on the students’ needs and abilities.

Tracing graffiti’s history as far back as the walls of Pompeii, D’Angelo narrates the presence of these writings and drawings in Western civilization. Throughout his analysis, D’Angelo demonstrates that graffiti plays a valuable role in critiquing popular social conventions and practices. Graffiti can also satirize politics and gender norms, as well as parody clichés. They appear as the unrestrained remarks that articulate contrary opinions in ways that can persuade, ridicule, and entertain. Graffiti can be formed via succinct expressions or rhythmic rhymes, or use alliteration as a tool. This informal form of communication therefore engages in highly complex forms of rhetorical construction.

Many writing teachers perceive invention and imitation as mutually exclusive processes; one is a form of unique generations of ideas and styles while the other is perceived as merely copying others. However, D’Angelo argues that imitation can teach students various styles and forms from which they can draw and assist their own process of creation; having these forms to draw from removes the difficulties inherent in to write original pieces before learning the standards, and perhaps not even knowing what they want to write about. The emphasis switches and thereby creates room for students to develop their own forms of invention without the added pressure of starting out with no tools to do so. “In Search of the American Dream.” Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline. Eds. Duane H. Roen, Stuart C. Brown, Theresa Enos. Nahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999. 55–64.

D’Angelo’s autobiographical essay addresses pivotal moments in his life, as well as defining the motivating forces that have led to his current position in Composition and Rhetoric Studies. D’Angelo emphasizes his parents as foundational in his love of education, specifically their belief that education was a way for him to achieve the “American Dream.”

Historical narratives of the modern composition textbook illuminate the transformations that rhetoric underwent during the nineteenth and late eighteenth centuries and how this impacts twentieth century composition teaching practices. D’Angelo focuses on description, narration, exposition, and argumentation as four main areas of rhetoric composition. Changes made to rhetoric and composition processes made during the nineteenth century have largely gone unaddressed. However, the author goes on to note a need to define some of the problems that have arisen out of this conundrum, such as the blurred lines of distinction between forms of discourse and modes of discourse despite their differences. Similarly, D’Angelo acknowledges that former approaches to composition rhetoric such as an emphasis on faculty and associationist psychology are outmoded, needing careful analysis and revision to develop new modes of teaching composition.

D’Angelo argues for a synthesis of linguistics and rhetorical studies. After an examination of how case grammar works, he suggests that the construction of a sentence is in many ways comparable to the process of production in rhetorical compositions. The relative similarities between the terminologies of Burkean concepts of rhetoric and case grammar frameworks illuminate the functions and success of particular sentences and larger compositions. If both linguistic and composition rhetoric scholars work together, rather than in ignorance of each other, D’Angelo determines that they will be able to produce a “semantic theory of rhetoric” which can then be used to construct, define, and inform patterns of discourse.

Although postmodern fiction and critics, as well as the New Journalists, can bring new organizational possibilities to the composition classroom, classical rhetoric must remain a primary tool within composition studies. Although personal and innovative writing have their value in encouraging students to develop their personal voices within their writing, there must necessarily be a basic understanding of how to organize thoughts and present them to make them accessible and effective. All communication is based on a basic function of rhetorical tropes and, therefore, students must know and be aware of these forms. Teachers must give students the tools that will make them feel comfortable and confident enough to write.

The graffitist performs the role of a moral critic by parodying advertisements that make psychological appeals to both the conscious and subconscious of consumers. The underlying messages of most advertisements are, in fact, based in engaging buyer emotions and thus persuading people to purchase products that they neither want nor need, and in some cases are detrimental to their health. Graffitists construct satirical critiques of these advertisements and expose the ultimate themes of these advertisements. Companies are thereby exposed as simply preying upon individuals. In teaching them how to properly analyze ads, educators give students tools to deconstruct the underlying messages in advertisements.

Rhetorical invention underwent a transformation during the nineteenth century from which it emerged as a “method of development” within composition. However, the underlying premise of invention and invention strategies still exists. In composition studies, teachers understand writing as an ongoing process of arranging and generating ideas. Within the classroom, students should be provided with methods and procedures that assist in evolving and refining their compositions. Development is the key aspect of providing paradigmatic topoi to students, enhancing how they will broach the tasks of producing and compositing persuasive and effective texts. Students learn to work within particular modes and forms and can draw from these to avoid feeling pressured to invent new ideas with no guidance. Students can then apply these lessons to the texts they read and form their own critical understandings of rhetoric.

Rhetoric has a valuable place in composition studies for its role as both a science and an art. However, if rhetoric becomes a study of the master tropes alone, composition rhetoric will deteriorate into an examination of linguistic functions rather than persuasion. This act will lead to a collapse in the distinctions between figurative and literal writing language and render them part of what D’Angelo describes as a continuum. Writing should thereby be known as an imaginative process developed alongside mental developmental stages. Such understandings assist teacher and students to articulate and define conscious and subconscious composition techniques.

Introducing an argument for Composition Rhetoric as a specialization within Graduate English Studies, D’Angelo analyzes the importance of composition within the liberal arts as a whole. The construction of all literary works is a systematic coordination of language into parts aimed towards particular objectives. Studies in rhetoric prepare students to create connections and understand the texts they come into contact with and personally contrive.

To understand rhetorical modes of discourse requires awareness of the cognitive formation of ideas and the structures which link them together. As scholars attempt to identify master tropes as inherently implicit within the composition process, the concept of metaphorical identification takes precedence as both a discourse and the means to attaining the final end. D’Angelo proposed that cognitive studies, rhetorical composition theories, classical rhetoric studies, and nineteenth century composition theories should, therefore, necessarily be included within debates about rhetoric.

Graffitists construct statements regarding cosmopolitan vices and social issues that are apparent in every day life. However, graffiti differs from proverbs in that it does not represent folk wisdom. Graffitists utilize a range of rhetorical devises to make persuasive arguments that appeal to social consciousness and conscience. These statements become memorable by the use of repetition, rhyme, pun, irony, and allusion. D’Angelo argues that the rhetorical and satirical aims of graffiti cause it to be a form of expression that should, justifiably, be studied seriously in the academic arena.

Proverbs, short and concise sayings which impart information informing a consensus of common values and knowledge within a community, can function as key components of rhetorical arguments. Originally used to describe or impart folk wisdom, they have been used for educative purposes as well as guiding forces in decision making and ethical training. For rhetorical purposes, proverbs are easy to remember and intone a sense of familiarity with a particular group or society, thereby appealing to what people know and are familiar with. Proverbs can also paraphrase ideas into easily stated and comprehended declarations. In this manner, proverbs can reenter rhetorical studies as a tool for constructing persuasive appeals and arguments.

Writing is a mental process that informs a reader of the author’s perceptions and idea development. In a seven stage critique of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can Never Go Home, D’Angelo demonstrates the creation of sentences, as well as how they function within the construction of paragraphs and the logic behind structuring the paragraph, as insightful displays of the author’s conscious and subconscious workings. D’Angelo bases this theory on a belief that the author’s cognitive development in implicit in the structuring of the final text and the style in which it is composed. The rhetorical strategies that are visible within each aspect of a composition are dependent on the person creating it. Therefore, text analysis requires the writer’s psychological reasoning to be accounted for, as well as the style in which they choose to write.

Advertisers, to increase product sales, use appeals to the audience’s unconscious and subconscious desires by creating objects/ figures/ symbols that appeal to unknown or unrecognized desires. This article argues that training in classical rhetoric gives students the tools to deconstruct these ads and examine their elements that aim to persuasively engage the psychological “id”.

Although paraphrasing has lost popularity in composition rhetoric classes due to perceptions of it as a mere restating, possibly plagaristic exercise, D’Angelo argues that it should be brought back for its value in persuasive compositions. Paraphrasing exercises in classrooms can show students how to clarify and consisely depict ideas within an already existing work. Paraphrasing exercises also provide students with a variety of stylistic options while they work to restructure texts, reorder information and add or remove details. Further, it requires students to interact and engage with language, thereby improving their grammar and widening the scope of their diction. Through a variety of exercises, students learn how to transform a given composition into a new and, it is to be hoped, improved text.

The two main types of dialogue, descriptive and didactic, function to either portray characters and define their personalities or educate readers, respectively. While writing persuasive essays, the fundamental aspects of a didactic dialogue can produce ideas for the writer and inform new ways of introducing certain points or concepts. Both forms operate to inform. D’Angelo argues that a unique aspect of the dialogue is its “auditory qualities” that situate a discussion or topic within a particular social frame, drawing upon more than one of the five human senses. Within a written composition, dialogues provide ways of informing readers of information without the author explicitly telling them what they should be learning.

The “master tropes” are identified as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. They are, in many ways, comparable to the stages of mental development as they have been identified and analyzed by major psychologists, in that they all represent stages in a process of overall development and awareness of self/society. The analogical act which we use to develop theories for “new” rhetoric is based on ancient classical forms of rhetoric, but can offer us contemporary methods of discovery and understanding.

Ekphrasis, the practice of utilizing language to render a visual image for readers/audiences, is an important component of rhetorical studies. In progymnasmatics, ekphrasis was an exercise in using vivid diction and clarity as parts of descriptive abilities to conjure particular images for the audience. In poetics, it takes the form of describing works of art, historically any work, from a bowl to a sculpture, and currently what is considered high art, such as “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” In ancient times, ekphrasis was emphasized as an important strategy to paint a broad picture which the audience could draw from and thereby make connections that could prove valuable for the rhetor’s purposes. In modern times, ekphrasis can similarly be studied and implemented to impact at least two of the five human senses for its ability to elicit a desired response from an audience.

Greeting cards engage in epideictic discourses, the communication of emotional sentiment such as praise, mourning, and gratitude, in the modern version of ancient ceremonial discourse. The various composition styles of greeting cards – rhyme, couplets, and repetition – are aspects of how these cards are rhetorically structured to convey specific emotional meanings contextualized between the sending and receiving individuals.

There are basic principles, both mechanical and rhetorical, that guide the writing/composition process. These have specific structures and conventions that students must know while composing. Linguistics and an understanding of discourses – and especially the discourses of each field of study – is vital for a teacher to educate student how to write, why to write, and what to write. The gaps in student knowledge will adequately show themselves as their teacher progresses in outlining and defining the principles of writing, the structures, and conventions. Students, therefore, should not only be taught to identify basic concepts, but also be able to understand them as simple, easy to use tools that they can feel comfortable and confident to employ.

Conceptions of paragraph unity have been based on the “topic sentence” as the indicator of content and intent in global organization structure. The topic sentence functions rhetorically as an aspect of the composition that students can refer back to depict what is occurring in a paragraph or a paper as a whole. Macropropositions are similar to topic sentences, but differ in that they inform, propose, and organize particular ideas and conceits, rather than paragraphs. D’Angelo argues for writing teachers to educate students on the value of these two tools to express themselves in clear, concise, and easy to remember ways. Therefore, students should be trained to understand the importance of topic sentences as fulfilling a basic need of their audience.

D’Angelo argues that composition studies should not focused solely on naming the parts of a text, but should also emphasize the tropological relationships that structure arrangements. After outlining the four master tropes in nonfiction, D’Angelo moves on to demonstrate how these writings are arranged by tropes as the joining factors that unite ideas and patterns of production. As writers develop a topic, their writing will evolve itself into a particular mode which corresponds to one of the four master tropes. As D’Angelo explains, students and writers must necessarily be aware of how the master tropes function in order to refine their own work.