Rhetoric for Academic Literacy
Hey everyone!
This website is a space for my book idea, a rhetoric textbook that introduces students to academic literacy. With a major focus on navigating college in a no nonsense way, seeing it as an outsider, this text hopes to teach students to both write and developing critical thinking skills while engaging with the very university itself to underscore the points.
Navigating the academy, no matter the level of the institution, can feel labyrinthian for all of us.
Here is a sample table of contents. Looks pretty basic right now, right? That’s because this is the format that I am starting with. By utilizing a writing communities approach, coupled with rhetoric and writing scholars and their guidance on navigating college, this working table of contents will transform into a useful handbook for students, particularly those who have little knowledge of how to navigate college, such as first generation college students. This site also has several short blog posts.
Unit 1: Academic Literacy: Navigating Colonial Academies and Universities
1(a). Course Welcome and Overview College Success and Academic Writing
1(b). Plagiarism and Ethics in Academic Writing
1(c). Literacy Narrative and Intersectionality
1(d). Journaling and Note-taking
Unit 2: Research Ethics and Best Practices
2(a). Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Authority, and Work
2(b). Research Basics I: Finding and Evaluating Sources
2(c). Research Basics II: Summarizing, Paraphrasing, Quoting, and Synthesizing
2(d). Source Integration and Citing Sources Properly
2(e). Comparative Analysis Source Synthesis
Unit 3: Rhetorical Ecologies and Sites of Deliberation
3(a). Audience, Purpose, Exigence (and Kairos)
3(b). Context and Background: Writing Good Introductions
3(c). Argument I: What Is an Argument? Logic? What does it mean to “Reason”?
3(d). Argument Il: Patterns and Strategies for Organization and Counterarguments
3(e). Logical Fallacies and Cause and Effect
Unit 4. Genres of Academic and Professional Writing
4(a). Academic Essay Topic Development
4(b). Narrative Process Analysis Essay Guidelines
4(d). Community Development Proposals.pptx
4(e). Reading and Writing About Visual Arguments
4(f). Creating Multimodal Projects
4(g). Oral Research Presentations
Unit 5. Writing Studies Pedagogy
5(a). Actor Network Theory
5(b). Peer Draft Workshops for Academic Writing
5(c). Revision and Editing Strategies
5(d). Metacognition: Six Pillars of Reflective Analysis
July 24, 2026 Reflection:
I’ve been teaching a course using writing communities pedagogy (Parks, 2017) to see if this approach to first year writing would come more into alignment with my research interests in rhetoric. So much of my approach to first year writing has been an academic literacy approach, designed with students at diverse, MSI, AOI and two-year institutions. I have been deeply dedicated to helping first gen students navigate a space that wasn’t built for them. While navigating the institutions has been easier for me, my queerness and working class leftist politics have made my journey just as difficult; another way of framing that, though, is to say that I have finally stopped ignoring all the contradictions in colonialism and capitalism, and I simply had to speak the truth about that. This conversation goes much deeper, beyond my ability to reflect on it here, and I know that asking students to assimilate into the colonial academy is problematic as heck, which is why I spent the last four years trying to decolonize my brain. And what a journey it’s been! I hope everyone can break free of the delirium of thought offered by more authoritarian ways of thinking, and I have had to come to terms with the fact that no matter what my decolonial, or anti-racist policies are in the classroom (and they are there in my classroom), nothing removes me and my privilege from the classroom.
For me, this has simply meant to align my writing studies pedagogy with my understanding of myself as a rhetorician, as I said above. But I think this is easier said than done. For some, rhetoric isn’t anything but a set of thoughts and feelings, and thus need not be considered the backbone of an entire discipline; for others, it’s everything. I simply wanted to return to a classroom where I felt like I could speak like a rhetorician, but ensure that my class was firmly moded in writing studies pedagogy, since that’s where so much academic literacy pedagogy is built in. I am so glad I did. Some pretty obvious errors in my previous thinking have appeared. In this blog below, I will share those insights as I come to them and make changes.
July 24, 2026 Change:
Today I was looking at the table of contents and realized that two weeks ago I realized that audience, purpose, exigence, and kairos are all inextricably linked, or at least how I talked about them in class. I am almost embarrassed to share that I had exigence and kairos in a separate chapter, with a chapter separating it from audience and purpose. I hope that my reflection will frame where my thinking was and offer solace to others who may have fallen victim to it too.
Quite simply, I thought highlighting key rhetoric words would make the class more rhetoric focused, and not in a “just change the terminology” window dressing sort of way, but in a “I am dedicating class time to talking about concepts that I think are important.” Except I obviously didn’t understand them or their connections to each other. Ouch.