A Fordham Cap
Alas, I no longer have the Fordham U. ballcap I bought about 25 years ago. I do have a story about it though. Teaching at Moravian College, I would sometimes use spring break to get a day in the city. Sometimes I’d have an agenda, but mostly I just wanted to feel the vibe on…
You just never know: Rhetoric in sending a sympathy card
There was this student — I’ll call her Sadie — in one of my classes at Moravian College in the mid-90s. She was one of those people whose body language in the first week of the semester said clearly, “I don’t want to be here.” I noticed but did not call her out. After a…
Getting to Normal
I am writing this essay more than a decade after I made a camping/biking trip to the Midwest. On that trip, as with similar excursions in 2009 and 2011, I brought my (now ancient) Flip camera with me and captured some video. (The camera was hand-held, hence the shakiness of many of the shots linked…
Biking — A Sidebar
Of course I’ve had a bicycle since I was 12 years old, but biking became a more serious avocation for me late in the 20th century. About that time, a college friend, Dennis Berry, with whom I’d reconnected and who was a serious cyclist, suggested the two of us ride across the U.S. when we…
Professor Wingard’s Conversion from Loyalty to Secession
https://www.thedaln.org/#/detail/1af338b6-3f6c-4724-9b31-9db1a0e3b4b9 The above link takes you to something I wrote in 2016 while I was teaching at Penn State-Abington. It describes my becoming literate in Writing Studies, after a career as a literature professor.
Cycling the Pine Creek Trail: The Rhetoric of Travel
“Act-Suffer-Learn” My wife telling me “You’re too old to go off by yourself like that” was what clinched it for me. I had been discussing with her a plan to go on a four-day camping trip to remote north-central Pennsylvania, alone, and to bike the Pine Creek Trail, which runs about 63 miles from Wellsboro…
Alan Wingard, 1933-2023
Alan was the first surviving child of Leroy (Lee) and Dorothy (Dot) Wingard, born April 13, 1933. He was 13-1/2 years older than me. So that when I was a child, he graduated from high school (1951) and began college. I have very few memories of him from my childhood. He did live at home…
Distant lights. Distant memories
This is the house I grew up in. My parents moved here shortly before I was born, and I lived here from then (October 1946) until I went away to college in 1964. I didn’t move away permanently until I got married (September 1969). I was in the Navy then, and took up residence in…
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…
Rhetorman 