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. “Consequentialist, Utilitarian, and Hedonistic Ethical Approaches.” In The Routledge Handbook of Ethics in Technical and Professional Communication, Ed. Derek Ross. Routledge, 2025.
- This chapter covers consequentialism and the related concepts of utilitarianism and hedonism, with an emphasis on how such reasoning is deeply embedded into the rhetorical foundation of technical communication, as well how such ethical approaches clash with the ethical and social justice turns in the field.
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).
- While Sada Harbarger is primarily known as the author of the first genre-based technical communication textbook, 1923’s English For Engineers, I argue through extensive archival materials that her innovative conferencing with engineering students and interdisciplinary writing efforts, rather, drove her interwar success at Ohio State. Her rural agricultural background and acquaintance with the engineering faculty, combined with her literature training, led to OSU’s engineering faculty demanding successfully that English promote her without reference to her textbook. Harbarger is also a notable early example of navigating being a female professor teaching engineering writing in a male-dominated English literature department.
Duncan, Mike. Rhetoric And The Synoptic Problem. Fortress Press/Lexington, 2022.
- Mike Duncan argues that the Farrer Hypothesis is the best working solution to the Synoptic Problem in New Testament studies by way of rhetorical theory, as he sees the Synoptic Problem as less about source and textual criticism and more as a writing problem that concerns how and why they were composed The book’s six chapters feature case studies of different aspects of gospel rhetoric, such as how the different post-resurrection accounts interact with each other and how the apostles are portrayed from gospel to gospel. These chapters form a collective argument—that the synoptic gospels are competing rhetorical narratives about Jesus, with the authors of Luke and Matthew reacting to previous gospels with the goal of superseding the previously composed versions of Jesus’s life. However, Duncan acknowledges that the Farrer Hypothesis has special difficulties and cannot be pushed beyond an educated guess, that the Synoptic Problem remains an unsolvable problem due to a lack of evidence and lost original context, and that it is only a philosophical acceptance of the inaccessibility of a solution that paradoxically allows a frank and unsentimental view of the alternatives.
Duncan, Mike. “Expanding Ethical Pedagogy in Technical Communication: Learning from Killer Nanobots.” Technical Communication Quarterly (2021), DOI: 10.1080/10572252.2021.1977850.
- Attention to the ethical dimension in technical and professional communication (TPC) is paramount, especially when dealing with new, emerging technologies. Such technologies frequently rest within corporate environments that may resist ethical gatekeeping. I suggest several methods by which TPC instructors can critically question the limits of corporate structure to show students that they have a variety of options for responding to assignments other than those their employers may offer them.
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.
- Given this collection’s focus, I wish to demonstrate the inherent difficulties of using style to determine ancient authorship when basic rhetorical training in the ancient world stressed stylistic imitation. Furthermore, recognizing the reversible nature of the evidence typically used to sup-port authorship cases calls into question the authorial identification of any manuscript—ancient or modern—on stylistic grounds.
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
- We rhetorically explore the phenomenon of kamikaze attacks from a technical communication and rhetorical perspective by analyzing two 1945 Japanese military manuals, directed, respectively, to officers and pilots on how to organize and conduct suicide attacks against American warships.
Joswiak, Regan and Mike Duncan. “Inform or Persuade? An Analysis of Technical Communication Textbooks.” Technical Communication 67.2 (2020): 29-41.
- We examined how 10 best-selling technical communication textbooks delineated “informative” and “persuasive” purposes in discourse and, in response, suggest a more effective pedagogical alternative to this typical division that instead consistently emphasizes the rhetorical nature of all communication.
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. “Murder With Soft Words.” Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Mar/Apr 2025.
- 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’.