Notes On ” ‘/’ and ‘-‘?: An Empirical Consideration of the Relationship Between ‘Rhetoric’ and ‘Composition’

This article by Eric Detweiller dives deeply into the subtle difference between what we as scholars mean when we use the words “rhetoric” and “composition” in our journal citations. The point he makes is interesting in that he lays out an ongoing argument in the field of where one word ends and the other begins. Both terms possess a myriad of denotations and connotations and get used interchangeably depending on the speaker or writer.

The goal is to sift through the recent disagreements at conferences and in journals about how the words get used and then formulating a system that categorizes the various journals that scholars in the Rhet-Comp field publish into either R or C publications. After laying out his methodology, he studies the scholarly tendencies of the different publications such as which scholars get cited the most, what publications are quoted most often, what key words show up most often.

The combination of word clouds, euler diagrams, and other charts gets a little confusing, but does show that both groups value Kenneth Burke whereas for example, Bakhtin shows up more in the C publications and Aristotle more so in the R ones. The point is that there is a subtle but clear divide in terms of which scholars get used as evidence when forming arguments, and from that data (and similar distinctions) one can if one wants divide the two fields, not so much by dictionary-style definitions or theoretical analysis, but by quantity information based on word choice and scholarly representation.

The article is long, and one would doubtless quote from every aspect it but would potentially quote extensively from a specific section or two, using data gained from this study that parses the metonymy from the metaphor in the discussion between the discipline(s) of Composition and Rhetoric.