That college research paper you've been sweating over may not seem like a page-turner, but it could be just what a publisher of undergraduate and graduate research is looking for. You could end up a first-time author like RIC student Samantha Gowdey.
She took a rhetoric class in 2020 taught by Professor of English Michael Michaud. Students had to choose a notable figure and spend the semester researching and writing a paper centered on that figure's rhetoric.
Gowdey chose Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States. She focused on how his political rhetoric evolved during his three runs for San Francisco city supervisor.
"Rhetoric," she explains, "is the art of persuading an audience. When you analyze someone's rhetoric, you're looking at what they say, how they say it, their facial expressions, what they're wearing, even the location in which they give their speech."
"Harvey Milk's greatest speech is called The Hope Speech," she says. "It was given in front of a gay community center, a building that the city wanted to tear down. Milk was able to prevent the city from demolishing the building." This is an example of how the place in which you deliver a speech can impact how the speech is received, she says. It's all a part of rhetoric.
In her paper, Gowdey examines Milk's political rhetoric affected the outcome of each of this three races. Milk lost the first two and won the third, but he was assassinated less than a year after taking office.
With Michaud's urging, Gowdey submitted her 'A' paper to a journal called Xchanges – an interdisciplinary, online publication based in the English Department of the University of New Mexico. Xchanges publishes undergraduate and graduate research in technical communication, rhetoric and writing across the curriculum. "Without Dr. Michaud, I wouldn't have had the courage to submit it," she says.
Xchanges accepted Gowdey's paper pending revisions. "When I got my paper back, I never saw so much red in my life," she says. "I spent months going back-and-forth with the editors, making corrections. It was stressful and discouraging, at times. But Dr. Michaud set up Zoom meetings with me to help me work through the revisions they requested. Ultimately, the edits improved the paper."
"It was a pleasure working with Sam," Michaud says. "Sam is an excellent writer, a curious student and will make a fantastic English teacher someday soon. While it was challenging to address the feedback she received from the editors of the journal, she stuck to it to improve the draft. I think she has grown a great deal as a writer from this experience. I hope to have more such opportunities to collaborate with students like Samantha on writing and publishing in the future."
"It's nice to think that my paper and my research can now be cited in the papers of future student researchers," Gowdey says.
Gowdey's paper is titled
Finding a Way to Win Gay in an Evolving Historical Movement and is featured in the fall 2020, Vol. 15, Issue 2, of
Xchanges.
