This site is called Rhetorical Critic, but my name is Mike Duncan. I’m a professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, where I’ve worked since 2009. My Ph.D. is in Composition Studies (called Rhetoric and Composition elsewhere), and I teach courses in rhetorical theory, research methods, usability, style, history of rhetoric, technical writing, editing, religious studies, kitchen sinks, etc. While I live in an English department and caucus with the technical communication folks, I think of myself mostly as a rhetorician. I am also Managing Editor of Technical Communication & Social Justice, a peer-reviewed journal that I helped found.
This site serves as a place to keep an updated academic bibliography and to display short essays of mine that don’t have a home elsewhere and don’t fit neatly into the typical academic venues. Previous incarnations of this site were freewheeling blogs, but that format pressured me to write shorter pieces, and I’m in the mood these days to write in longer, more focused formats opposed to the shorter forms of social media.
Bibliography (some of these available through academia.edu)
Duncan, Mike. “Personal Conferences with the Engineers: The Innovative Technical Communication Pedagogy of Sada Harbarger, 1884-1942.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2023), 1-24, DOI: 10.1177/00472816221148476 (released online in February).
Duncan, Mike. Rhetoric And The Synoptic Problem. Fortress Press/Lexington, 2022.
Duncan, Mike. “Expanding Ethical Pedagogy in Technical Communication: Learning from Killer Nanobots.” Technical Communication Quarterly (2021), DOI: 10.1080/10572252.2021.1977850.
Duncan, Mike. “The Danger of Using Style to Determine Authorship: The Case of Luke and Acts,” In Style and the Future of Composition Studies, Eds. Paul Butler, Star Vanguri, and Brian Ray. Utah State UP, 2020.
Ozaki, Naoko, Jillian Hill and Mike Duncan. “The Rhetoric of a Kamikaze Manual.” Technical Communication 67.3 (2020): 61-79.
- 2022 CCCC Technical and Scientific Communication Award in the category of Best Article Reporting Historical Research
Joswiak, Regan and Mike Duncan. “Inform or Persuade? An Analysis of Technical Communication Textbooks.” Technical Communication 67.2 (2020): 29-41.
Duncan, Mike. “Knives in the Air: Argumentative Arrangement in Demosthenes’s 330 BCE On The Crown and Donald Trump’s October 10, 2019 Minnesota Rally Speech.” Relevant Rhetoric 11 (2020): http://www.relevantrhetoric.com/KnivesInTheAir.pdf.
Sciullo, Nick J. and Mike Duncan. “Professionalizing Peer Review: A Suggestion for a More Ethical and Pedagogical Review Process.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 50.4 (2019): 248-264.
Duncan, Mike. “The Missing Rhetorical History Between Quintilian and Augustine.” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 33.4 (2015): 349-376.
Duncan, Mike and Adam Ellwanger. “The Rhetoric of Moderation in Deliberative Discourse: Barack Obama’s December 1, 2009 speech at West Point.” Cogency 6.1 (2014): 63-90.
Duncan, Mike and Jillian Hill. “Termination Documentation.” Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 77.3 (2014): 297-311.
Duncan, Mike. “The New Christian Rhetoric of Origen.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 46.1 (2013): 88-104.
Duncan, Mike. “The Research Paper as Stylistic Exercise.” In The Centrality of Style, Ed. Mike Duncan and Star Medzerian Vanguri. West Layafette, ID: Parlor Press, 2013. 161-173.
The Centrality of Style, Eds. Mike Duncan and Star Medzerian Vanguri. West Layafette, ID: Parlor Press and WAC Clearinghouse. http://wac.colostate.edu/books/centrality/
Duncan, Mike. “The Curious Silence of the Dog and Paul of Tarsus: Revisiting the Argument from Silence.” Informal Logic 34.1 (2012): 83-97.
Duncan, Mike. “Polemical Ambiguity and the Composite Audience: Bush’s September 20, 2001 speech to Congress and the Epistle of 1 John.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41.5 (2011): 455-471.
Duncan, Mike. “Questioning the Auditory Sublime: A Multisensory-Organic Approach to Prose Rhythm.” JAC (Journal of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture) 31.3-4 (2011): 579-608.
McCarthy, Phillip, and Adam Renner, Michael Duncan, Nicholas Duran, Erin Lightman, Danielle McNamara. “Identifying Topic Sentencehood.” Behavioral Research Methods 40.3 (2008): 647-664.
Duncan, Mike. “Whatever Happened to the Paragraph?” College English 69.5 (2007): 470-495. Rpt. in Style in Composition and Rhetoric: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Paul Butler. Bedford St. Martin’s: Boston, 2009.
Also:
- Duncan, Mike. “Math of the Spear Carrier.” Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Feb/Mar 2022.
- Duncan, Mike. “Understanding The Paragraph and Paragraphing by Ian McGee.” Composition Studies 48.3 (2020): 155-157.
- Duncan, Mike. “The Three Types of Peer Reviewers.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 19 June 2018.
Contact
To email me, take ‘mikeduncan’ and combine it with ‘badrhetoric.com’. Or, ‘duncanm’ with ‘uhd.edu’.