Joel Wingard, aka “Rhetorman” for the purpose of this site.

  I am a retired English professor. I have a Ph.D. in liteary studies, but for the greatest part of my career I directed writing programs, initially as a concentration within the English major at Moravian College (since 2022, Moravian University) then a writing-across-the curriculum program that I helped launch in 2001. In the course of that work, I pretty much abandoned the profession of literature to learn Rhetoric and Composition. Eventually, I expanded my undrstanding of writing to include multi-modal composition. The germ of this website lay in a digital portfolio assignment I gave to a class at Penn State University’s Abington campus, where I was hired to teach multi-modal writing. I made the site as a rough model for what I was asking students to do as a semester project.
  I’m writing in the public sphere rather than keeping a journal because I believe rhetoric is important and omnipresent, as the quote from Stephen Mailloux suggests. In 2012, I attended an “immersive” experience under the direction of Richard Miller at Rutgers U. It was called “Creative Critical Writing,” and his point was that publishing online was a way to get to readers without having to go through the gatekeeping that editors do. For me, it was a chance to have greater control over what I write. In 1992, I signed a contract with HarperCollins publishers to produce a college-level introductory literarture text book. I worked on that project for four years, with the book, Reading and Responding to Poetry, Fiction, Drama, and the Essay, published in 1996. I learned then that once a book is published, it’s is no longer the writer’s own. Writing the book was exciting, demanding, and exhausting, but it was mine. Once it was published, it was just another commercial project; as it happens, it was a commercial failure, no matter how good it actually was. My editors at HarperCollins were great: receptive to and supportive of my ideas and my approach to reading literature in the college classroom. But for a textbook to succeed commercially, it has to be adopted by colleges. That means more gatekeepers in the form of curriculum committees, academic departments, even individual professors. As I was writing the book, my audience was students; I didn’t fully appreciate that in order for students to read it, a lot of non-students had to approve. So what Richard Miller preached in that short summer program at Rutgers resonated with me.