The essays in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism explore rhetoric as a practical art of deliberation and judgment, best taught and learned through concrete examples of argument, interpretation, and criticism. Historically and in our own time scholars have shown that rhetoric can very well be theorized in the strong sense that...

Organizing things is an important human activity. Whether it is a child organizing toys in some way (by size, color, favorites, and so forth) or an adult piecing together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, the desire to “make order out of chaos” (as one inveterate puzzler put it) reflects a sense that somehow if...

When I was 10 years old, I purchased an introductory electronics book at a local pharmacy. I cherished this book because I knew it contained marvelous and fascinating knowledge about electronics—an awesome, mysterious, and exciting field that was to become the literal foundation of the next step in human progress. Unfortunately, after...