Introduction
“Social distancing.” “Black Lives Matter.” “In these uncertain times.”
Over the past few months, we’ve seen countless ways that words and rhetoric matter—personally, politically, and even commercially. Rhetoric influences our experiences of the world, and it helps us make meaning and knowledge within that world, too. Even three apparently simple words— “I can’t breathe”—can express centuries of oppression and the will to resist and effect change.
In analyses, summaries, arguments, proposals, blogs, websites, presentations, and videos, student writers in American University’s College Writing classes join ongoing conversations by reading critically, learning rhetorical strategies, practicing metacognition, and forming and communicating their own insights. The texts in this collection—selected from work in College Writing in the 2019-2020 academic year—reveal the experience and power of rhetoric. These writers demonstrate the necessity of listening to other perspectives before forming an argument. They explore the ways that rhetorical choices can persuade us, or fail to do so. They remind us that we can have intellectual arguments about topics that are both clearly significant, such as gun violence, and deceptively trivial, such as cheese. They use the power of words and rhetoric to find meaning in Survivor, periods, and housing in Berlin; they offer compelling insights into and new knowledge about African-American Vernacular English and diversity. And they reveal writers in the process of writing: choosing topics, inventing arguments, and reflecting on their own work.
This year’s Atrium was compiled in a time of national upheaval, when students and faculty finished the school year from their homes because of a pandemic and when the country was caught up in outrage over extrajudicial police killings of African Americans. And yet this collection is fundamentally hopeful; it implicitly argues for argument and for engagement not as solutions in themselves but as avenues to understanding, solutions, and reform.
Language and rhetoric are powerful; these writers exemplify the positive deployment of that power.
Lacey Wootton
Director, Writing Studies Program
Atrium Selection Committee:
Chuck Cox
Caimeen Garrett
Stina Oakes (chair)
Naseh Nasrollahi Shahri
Allison Sparks