College of Libral Arts The University of Texas at Austin

Welcome

From the Department Chair

The Department of Rhetoric & Writing seeks to graduate students who are prepared to meet the communication tasks required of them in the 21st century. To achieve that goal, our faculty and instructors promote effective writing and critical reading skills among all undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin. We are responsible for the effective teaching of RHE306, the required first-year course in argumentation, and we have designed an array of lower- and upper-division courses to help undergraduates develop literacy in traditional and emerging genres of communication.

What’s more, we offer an undergraduate degree to meet the interests of writers who wish to perform superbly in civic and professional forums; and our graduate program, administered through the Department of English, is one of the highest ranked rhetoric programs in the nation.

To ensure that our teaching draws upon a continually broadening knowledge base and discussion of best practices, we sustain among our distinguished faculty and graduate students cutting-edge research in a variety of fields: rhetoric, writing, and technology.

Linda Ferreira-Buckley

John Jones Article Published in Latest Issue of "Written Communication"

An article by Assistant Instructor John Jones has recently appeared in the March 2008 issue of Written Communication (volume 25, pages 262-289). The article, entitled "Patterns of Revision in Online Writing: A Study of Wikipedia's Featured Articles" appears in a special issue on digital media. Here is the article's abstract:

This study examines the revision histories of 10 Wikipedia articles nominated for the site’s Featured Article Class (FAC), its highest quality rating, 5 of which achieved FAC and 5 of which did not. The revisions to each article were coded, and the coding results were combined with a descriptive analysis of two representative articles in order to determine revision patterns. All articles in both groups showed a higher percentage of additions of new material compared to deletions and revisions that rearranged the text. Although the FAC articles had roughly equal numbers of content and surface revisions, the non- FAC articles had fewer surface revisions and were dominated by content revisions. Although the unique features of the Wikipedia environment inhibit strict comparisons between these results and those of earlier revision studies, these results suggest revision in this environment places unique structural demands on writers, possibly leading to unique revision patterns.

Professor John Slatin, 1952-2008

JohnSlatin

The Department of Rhetoric and Writing mourns the loss of our beloved friend and colleague, John Slatin, who passed away March 24, 2008.

John served UT as a professor of rhetoric and writing, a professor of English, and as director of the Accessibility Institute. Our thoughts are with his devoted wife, Anna, children Ledia and Mason and grandson Wolf, his father Miles and brother Peter, as well as their families and the many close friends who have had the privilege of knowing John.

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