1. Brief background to  English in Namibia
Article 3(1) of The Constitution of the Republic of Namibia (1990, 3)  declares that “the official language of Namibia shall be English”. This, clearly, is a pragmatic response to a situation before independence where the South African Administration in place before 21 March 1990 had established Afrikaans as lingua franca. It was also the medium of all official administration and instruction in most schools. Independence changed all that since there was now a desire to learn and use English in schools and in the place of work. The choice of English, a language for international business and effectiveness in our dot.com age, was appropriate and timeous.
For education, however, this declaration meant a tall order and several implications. Policies and strategies by means of which they could be achieved were to be framed within a short time if the declaration were to meet with success. Personnel to implement it were to be produced within an equally short time and, above all, the preparation of basic teaching and learning materials was to be undertaken with the seriousness that both the task at hand and reality posed. However appropriate these actions might be, given the context within which they were to be accomplished, any planner would be wary of the extent to which the declared ideal would be achieved.
But the responsible ministry, then that of Basic Education and Culture( MBEC), took on this declaration head on. Its first task was to frame an appropriate policy directive that English be the medium of instruction from Grade 4 upwards. In Grades 1-3, the policy recommended that mother tongues be used as a medium of instruction. Implicit in this directive was the hope and truth that teachers who had hitherto used Afrikaans as a lingua franca in most schools would be prepared to implement the said policy directive. To achieve this ideal, one needed adequate and aggressive training sessions, workshops, and seminars side by side with the production of instructive teaching and learning materials. The reality on the ground is that teachers could have done with more of these sessions, for quite a lot of them are not confident in the use of English in a number of contexts and in various scenarios.
The policy by MBEC directed further that English be both a subject and a medium of instruction from Grade 4 to university/ tertiary levels. This is still so with but interesting results.
This is the watershed of achievement or not in English Language in all levels of Education in Namibia since independence. This is the also the context that has a significant bearing on the achievement of higher education learners in critical thinking. As can be appreciated, clarity and precision in the use of language are the hallmark of meaningful critical thinking whether in the specific domain of critical thinking, or, indeed, in the case of critical thinking across the curriculum. If confidence in the use of language is lacking, achievement in a field such as Critical Thinking will beg serious questions.

2. The problem
It seems, as it was the logical thing to do at the time, that a number of workshops and short courses meant to give teachers the content of English and confidence to both use and teach it were organized, but it is clear that they were not enough and were not followed up. As a result, up to now, “amongst some teachers, particularly those less qualified and older; there [is] anxiety about the effects on them of the implementation of an English medium policy” (Harlech-Jones, 1990, 203). This behaviour is common even amongst younger graduate teachers today. Their mastery of the content and use of English is still wanting. It is little surprising, therefore, that attempts to use English are accompanied by anxiety. For the learner of English at any educational level in Namibia, this position is both serious and challenging.
This is why teaching Critical Thinking at the Polytechnic of Namibia, in a situation in which learners’ achievement and preparedness prior to taking up tertiary education beg questions, poses several challenges. One wonders whether, in this situation, teaching critical thinking is worth its while and whether, if one teaches it painstakingly, there will be any achievement at all. Another thing; how would one deal with the language issue given the above scenario? Would critical thinking refine the language of learners? If it does, what would be its future at the Polytechnic? If it succeeded here, would the effect be felt in schools as well?
It is possible, however, to master critical thinking skills even  in this context if creative approaches to  teaching critical thinking are used. This approach could be used in schools and colleges as well.

3. The case of the Polytechnic of Namibia
In so far as fluency and confidence in the use of English is concerned, the Polytechnic receives inadequately qualified students. This is why a majority of them enroll in the Basic English Module (Module 1) and even then, really struggle through it. The minimum a student needs in English to be admitted to the Polytechnic is an E symbol or roughly 35-40% at the Grade 12 /IGCSE examination. To expect these students to graduate after three years with fluency and competence in English is a tall order.
It could be done if the programmes in the Department of Communication/English were refined so as to give particular attention to the weak student and, at the same time, grant the stronger candidate opportunity to grapple with language issues at the level of his capacity.
At the moment, the department above teaches six modules, one Communication Skills course for Engineering Students, and one Communication and Critical Thinking course. Four of these modules, that is, 1 to 4, deal with issues from basic grammar and usage to writing and research. Critical Thinking is a minor component of each of these four modules. The attention it deserves in these modules is wanting. It is also so in the Communication Skills course. Modules 5 and 6 are really a Business Communication course divided into two parts.
What is disturbing is that students complete these modules but still remain incompetent in the use of English and the stakeholders are not quite happy. There is thus need to re-examine this position with a view to addressing not only the issues of  relevance, mastery, fluency, and competence, but the place of critical thinking in the Department of Communication if our department is to take its place in the community of departments grappling with the teaching of Critical Thinking.

4. Introduction of Critical Thinking
This is one of the reasons why Ms Marietjie de Klerk, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Nature Conservation at the Poltechnic, initiated the introduction of Critical Thinking at the Polytechnic of Namibia. Her insight was gained from her research into this subject for her Masters dissertation. The Department of Communication took this course on board at the beginning of 2001 and has so far produced three crops of graduates totaling 60.
The ability of these students in the use of English has improved to a certain extent. One hopes that they will continue the habit, started while taking Critical Thinking as a course, of reading various texts critically well after leaving the Polytechnic and in their places of work.

5. Critical Thinking at the Polytechnic of Namibia
Teaching Critical Thinking at the Polytechnic of Namibia given the above scenario presents interesting challenges and the teacher needs to be a man or woman of unfailing courage, stamina, warmth, and vision.
We do not require any prerequisites for admission to the course at the moment for we believe that through hard work we can produce a useful graduate. The course is called “Communication and Critical Thinking” because we try to foster competence in both English Language and Critical Thinking.

As a one semester course at the Polytechnic, Communication and Critical Thinking exposes learners to the skills of critical thinking, language communication, and information literacy. The course is taught practically throughout the semester and, in the course of this period, substantially gets learners to grips with critical thinking, language mastery, and information literacy. Suitable texts drawn from a wide range of disciplines and walks of life are often used. To attain the practical nature of the course and realize  the force of creative and critical thinking, every aspect of content is often augmented by  several  oral and written exercises, role plays, discussions, problem-solving, case studies, project work, research, hands-on sessions/activities, and self-criticism.
By the end of the course, learners will not only have practically mastered various critical thinking skills and understood how to apply them to their disciplines, world of work, and lives; understood the use of common and various language features for clear, accurate, logical, and powerful communication; and appreciated and validated the importance of information literacy competencies; but will also have grasped the reality and use of life-long learning skills.

Throughout each week, the three aspects of the course are covered. The first of these, Critical Thinking, introduces the subject of critical thinking by a brief examination of its historical context and then goes on to give the distinction between Critical Thinking and Reasoning and ends by asking learners to participate in the fundamentals of Critical Thinking.Thereafter, this aspect of the course covers argument, evidence, fallacies, and value judgements. The second aspect of this course, Information Literacy, practically exposes students to the conceptualization, gathering, evaluation, synthesization, and use of information; notemaking; summary writing; citations and style of presentation in books and journals; and the use of notes and the bibliography.The third aspect of the course, Language and Critical Thinking, treats the significance of effective language in Critical Thinking; reading strategies; the  mastery of the Word; sentence structure; paragraph structure; and grammar and usage.
It is commendable that in the course of our work, even weak students manage to attain a degree of mastery and effective use of such language aspects as diction, syntax, punctuation, and spelling. In addition, they begin to appreciate the use of correct language in different contexts. They also master the importance of accuracy in the choice of language in such aspects of communication as the relationship between sender and receiver, and, how the resulting play of barriers to communication and feedback influence the force and achievement of creative and critical thinking.

6. Teaching and Learning Strategies
Some of the teaching and learning strategies that have helped us to equip students with competence and confidence in the use of the English Language include:
1. The use of the Socratic approach to teaching and Learning. It has been useful to demand that students give the correct answer before moving to the next issue. This has worked quite well. We have learnt, even in our infancy, that Critical Thinking thrives well in a context of unrelenting questioning. Through this approach, the students grasped such terms and concepts as probing, questioning, interpretation, conceptualizing, analysis, and passing judgement.
2. Use of local Namibian cases taken from real life and local newspapers. Such issues as HIV Aids, rape, child abuse, conflict management, poverty, and ignorance made useful subjects for discussion.
3. Use of student/pupil teachers. Asking one of the students to act as the Critical Thinker teacher of the day is useful. As we know, to “teach is to learn twice” or “to teach is to be automatically involved in learning…” This approach produced interesting results. It is reported, for example, that one day when I was away on duty, one student stood up and conducted the class for a full hour.
4. Use of cases that relate to the students’ job experiences, subject knowledge, or class excursions is instructive.
5. Critical Reading. In our case students read five novels in a semester and comment on them in writing. The nose-in-the-text analysis of prose, different contexts, and different language features helps our students to master such issues as grammar, spelling, and punctuation. We noticed that obsessive reading and immersion into what is read could help students to gain skills in the mastery of language.
6. Use of Silence. This allows a lot of reflection. Simply get to the class and announce a controversy or a topic and keep quiet. Wait for some time and ask questions on the material given. The range of possibility and the response are great.
7. Word, Sentence, Paragraph, and discourse comprehension and analysis followed by critical writing.
8. Summary of key issues, note taking and making, extracting information from short critical texts.

7. Student Views on the Course
The involvement, enthusiasm, and range of students’ views below indicates that our approaches to teaching Communication and Critical Thinking at the Polytechnic of Namibia are effective to a certain extent thus far. It is fitting that I allow the students themselves to speak.

1. Asked the question, “What did you like most about this course?”, the answers were interesting to read. Some of them were:
* … Critical Thinking itself and especially the reading of books … was… challenging yet exciting.
* I liked the critical reading assignments because they improved my English.
* I was a lazy reader especially of novels, but after reading novels [on this course] my brain was made wide open to think about the writer was trying to say. My problem solving was improved by using critical thinking skills.
* Makes me aware how bad my English is. I now know what areas I should concentrate on to improve my reading, understanding, writing, and thinking critically.
* Critical thinking by reading and summarizing novels.

2. To the June 2002 examination question, “What is the use of Critical Thinking to you?”, there were equally such interesting answers as the following:
* Critical Thinking improved my thinking and reasoning. Critical thinking helped me to look and react to instructions and arguments from a different perspective. Critical thinking made me develop a state of broadmindedness.
* I think that Critical Thinking will play a vital role in my studies and later in my career…. Where you use critical thinking you don’t jump to conclusions and you listen and think before you react.
* Critical Thinking equips me with  every day decision making. It helps me with my every day life. By now I know that I do not need to rush when making decisions. I have to wait and be calm and look into the variety of ideas, so that my decision can allow judgement to be made with certainty. It allows me to play around with my mind.
* Critical Thinking is very useful to me in a way that it has prepared me to be a person who not only thinks about my thinking, but be able to think critically on my thinking and evaluating why I’m thinking the way I do. To be able to give valid reasons to a given statement and give conclusions. To be able to give argument on both sides “fairmindedly”.

3. To the June 2002 examination question, “How do Critical Thinkers often react to problems and controversial issues?” the following answer was interesting:
* Critical Thinkers regard problems and controversial issues as exciting challenges while uncritical thinkers regard problems and controversy as rubbish and the hardest part of life.
* Critical thinkers know that problems are part of life, so they won’t hesitate to face problems and controversy. If you have never faced a problem in your life, you have never lived life at its best. “Err is human” by Alexander Pope.

4. The following selections from student critical analysis of prose texts (arising from their Critical Reading assignments) make relieving reading:
* I therefore conclude on the above mentioned activities under discussion that the objective of critical thinking was met. The exercise was important because it provided students with relevant applicable skills and knowledge of speaking and writing good English.
* I would not recommend this book for soft-hearted critical thinking students. It is very scary, worse than Stephen King’s horror novels.
* I personally have taken an enormous amount from this book.
* I like the way the author communicated to the readers like using punctuation and good English.
* Shakespeare’s English is very difficult to read and understand and there were a lot of characters involved, which was discouraging, but I managed to figure out what the play [The Merchant of Venice] was all about.
* I learnt a few things in Critical Reading. In reading novels I learned about the use of tenses … the way the author puts a sentence to me as a reader… In a novel you can gain a lot of reading experience… In future I will continue to read novels to upgrade my reading, writing, and speaking skills.

8. Re-statement of the argument/thesis
It is clear from the above picture that with concerted effort, even poor students can learn and learn to learn. The improvement within one semester is considerable. All we require is country, institutional, and individual efforts and collaboration.
It is clear that a programme that is sensitively framed or constructed will produce not only effective communicators, but also equally effective critical thinkers.

9. Recommendations
The way forward for critical thinking at the Polytechnic of Namibia will be attained by attending to the following recommendations:
1. There is need for a comprehensive philosophy of language, language teaching, and research in the Department of Communication.
2. The department should determine its specialisms and place in Namibia and in the SADC region by refining its offerings. In doing this, it should also determine the place of “Remedial English” in the department.
3. The department should refine the offerings of English in the department so that the Communication and Critical Thinking course can be taken by students who have completed module 4 or equivalent or a higher English content module in view of the need for competence in English and the expectations of the employer.
4. The Polytechnic should consider the offering of Critical Thinking for all staff and students.
5. The institution should enforce the idea and practice of English and Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum.
6. Practical workshops for school teachers on an ongoing basis should be encouraged. Creative and Critical Reading is one area that could be considered in these workshops.
7. The department should consider obligatory literature component (or extensive reading of good English texts).
8. The department should bring about the re-examination of the IGCSE/HIGCSE English Examination.
9. Interventions into the teaching of English in schools by the Polytechnic are necessary.
10. The department should introduce a Student Journal of Creative and Critical Thinking.

If these recommendations were considered there would be marked improvement in English Communication at the Polytechnic of Namibia. This would have some positive effects on the use of English in various contexts in Namibia as well. Above all, Critical Thinking would find a fertile ground here and would be an aid in the refinement of English Language at all levels of education in Namibia.

REFERENCES
Angula, N. (1992). Language Policy Evolution and Implementation : Choices and Limitations. In Proceedings of the National Conference in the Implementation of the New Language Policy. Ongwediva Teacher Training College.
Barnes, C.A., (Ed.) (1992). Critical Thinking : Educational Imperative. San Francisco : Jossey-Bass Publishers.
The Constitution of the Republic of Namibia.
Essilfie, T. (1987). The African Linguist and his chores : Language Teaching Programmes in SADC Universities and the philosophy behind them.  In: E. Ngara & A. Morrison (Eds.), Literature, Language and the Nation : Proceedings of the Second General Conference of the University Teachers of Literature and Language (ATOLL), 211-218.
Harlech-Jones, B. (1990). You taught me Language : The implementation of English as a Medium of Instruction in Namibia. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.
Harlech-Jones, B., Mbise, I., &Vale,H. (Eds.) (2001). Guardian of the Word : Literature, Language and Politics in SADC countries. Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan.
Koroma,S. (2001). “English Across the Curriculum”. A paper delivered at the Orientation of Academic and Administrative Staff at the Polytechnic of Namibia ; Centre for Teaching and Learning.
Perkins, D. (Ed.) (1967). English Romantic Writers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Legese,K, & Otaala,B. (1998). Performance at (H)IGCSE in Namibia, 1995 – 1997 : Implications for Teaching and Learning : A Report of a Workshop held at the Rossing Foundation, 25 – 27.
Ministry of Basic Education and Culture (MBEC). (1992). The Language Policy for Schools : 1992-1996 and Beyond. Windhoek.
MBEC. (1997). Toward Education for All : A Development Brief for Education, Culture, and Training. Windhoek: Gamsberg Macmillan.
MBEC. (2000). Report on the English Language Proficiency of Namibian Teachers.
Multidisciplinary Group Number 7. (2002). Report on Knowledge, Information and Technology submitted to the National Planning Commission – Namibia Vision 2030.
Njabili, A.F., (1998). Examinations : Legacy, Performance, Standards and Power with particular reference to the International Certificate of Secondary Education (GBCSE) in Namibia. Inaugural Lecture. University of Namibia.
Pflaum, S. (1997). The Teaching of English in Namibian Secondary Schools, with Suggestions. In: B.Otaala, et al (Eds.), Issues in Education. Windhoek: John Meinert.
Rickerts, B. (2000).  The Effect of a Reading  Programme on the Reading Comprehension, Vocabulary and Achievement in English of First-Year College Students. Unpublished M.Ed. Dissertation. University of Namibia.

At the 1998 International Conference on Argument, Ziegelmueller and Parson proposed a perspective on what constituted linguistically sound arguments. While those positions are surely memorably familiar to the listener or reader, it is possible that four years has dimmed recollection of these insights. Thus this paper will first summarize the positions taken in the 1998 paper presented here in Amsterdam; then it will focus on the one area which received but scant attention. In a word it will look at the possibilities of eloquence and argument; stated another way, it will return to the divorce between lexis and logos, and propose a settlement. That settlement will start with an awarding of the first of children involved, the lexical strategy with the name of “metaphor.” The awarding of the subsequent three children will await future conferences.
The earlier paper began by surveying a series of definitions of Good Argument, which included its reasonability – reasonable argument is that in which “the form of inference is free of obvious defects, and the underlying assumptions of the argument are shared by the audience” (Zarefsky, 1981: 88). Other definitions featured an argument’s “soundness”. An argument is sound, Farrell argues, if it:
1. is addressed to an empowered and involved audience,
2. conforms to the consensual standards of the specific field, and
3. is consistent with social knowledge (Farrell, 1977).
After surveying differing perspectives on Good Argument, we concluded that Good Argument is one that is linguistically sound and proposed three characteristics of linguistically sound arguments:

A linguistically sound argument:
1. conforms to the traditional field invariant standards of inductive and deductive argument,
2. is based upon data appropriate to the audience and field, and
3. is expressed in language that enhances the evocative and ethical force of argument (Ziegelmueller and Parson, 3-5).

Without reviewing the reasoning or data involved in establishing these characteristics, the purpose of this paper is to develop the third characteristic of linguistically sound arguments: the problem of language.

That lexis and logos have been divorced should come as no surprise. From the early applications of Aristotle to the present, the view of arguments as valid – when determined by a mathematical account of validity – have dominated the view of argument. Toulmin’s comments on the problems of the mathematical model and the need for a substitute model are well known (Toulmin, 3-10). Similarly, Chaim Perelman sees modern logic becoming increasingly removed from argument in discourse, being content to set up its own systems: “In modern logic, the product of reflection on mathematical reasoning, the formal systems are no longer related to any rational evidence whatever. The logician is free to elaborate as he pleases the artificial language of the system he is building, free to fix the symbols and combinations of symbols that may be used” (Perelman/Olbrects-Tyteca, 13).

1. Presence and argument
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca discuss in The New Rhetoric (1969) the centrality of the concept of “presence” to argument. They see presence as an “essential factor to argumentation” because “through verbal magic alone,” a rhetor can “enhance the value of some of the elements of which one has actually been made conscious” (1969, 116-7). Presence becomes the quality arguments possess to varying degrees, endowing them with a sense of urgency. Presence is the featuring of the important, the focusing on the issues to be decided. One of the links he suggests is through the imagination and he quotes Bacon’s view of rhetoric as applying reason to the imagination. Their comment makes the link clear: “Bacon is expressing, in the philosophical language of his day, an idea not far removed from ours: presence, at first a psychological phenomenon, becomes an essential element in argumentation (Perelman/ Olbrechts-Tyteca, 117). Another way of talking about presence is to say that presence, among other things, is the clothing of argument. Presence is primarily a product of lexis.
While the importance of presence is stressed in their work, Perelman and Olbrechts­Tyteca say little about the means by which arguments acquire presence. In their discussion of producing presence, they mention repetition, evocation of detail, the use of tense, definite pronouns, synechdoche, amplification, and metaphor. Their treatment of metaphor, however, is typically classical; in their words, “We cannot better describe a metaphor than by conceiving it as a condensed analogy” (Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca, 399). This study contends that metaphor is a primary vehicle – though certainly not the only vehicle – which can both evoke and even suppress presence in discourse.

2. Lexis and the metaphor: back to Aristotle
The search for a way to link lexis productively to argument takes us back to Aristotle, and of ways in which his interpreters have framed and reframed him. In fact, the various definitions given to lexis reveal some of the problem: in retracing definitions of lexis, Ricoeur observes Hardy’s focus on “elocution” in 1932; most English translations tend to follow EM Cope’s 1877 definition as “style.” While Ross (1949) and Bywater (1985) use “diction,” the dominant translation appears to be “style”; Lucas comments that “lexis can often be rendered by style but it covers the whole process of combining words into an intelligible sequence” (Ricocur, 370). There are two problems (at least) in Aristotle which have given rise to differing accounts of at least one particular of lexis – the metaphor. The first is that Aristotle wrote of the metaphor in both the Poetics and the Rhetoric; probably the Poetics was written first, and contains the definition: “Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy.” (Poetics, 1457b6-9). In both treatises, as Ricoeur observes, “Metaphor is placed under the same rubric of lexis” (Ricoeur, 328). Thus we have metaphor discussed in both works, briefly in the Rhetoric, and the question arises to whether it is the same thing in both, or performs the same function. Ricoeur’s analysis is most instructive on this point:

The duality of rhetoric and poetics reflects a duality in the use of speech as well as in the situations of speaking. We said that rhetoric originally was oratorical technique; its aim and that of oratory are identical, to know how to persuade. Now this function, however far-reaching does not cover all the uses of speech. Poetics – the art of composing poems, principally tragic poems-as far as its function and its situation of speaking are concerned does not depend on rhetoric, the art of defense, of deliberation, of blame, and of praise. Poetry is not oratory. Persuasion is not its aim; rather, it purges the feelings of pity and fear. Thus, poetry and oratory mark out two distinct universes of discourse. Metaphor, however, has a foot in each domain. With respect to structure, it really can consist in just one unique operation, the transfer of the meaning of words; but with respect to function, it follows the divergent destinies of oratory and tragedy. Metaphor will therefore have a unique structure but two functions: a rhetorical function and a poetic function (Ricoeur, 327).

Aristotle comments that metaphors will occur in ordinary use of language, so are appropriate in rhetoric:
In the language of spoken prose, only the current term, the distinctive name, and metaphors can be used to advantage; we so infer because these, and these alone, are what every one uses in ordinary conversation. Every one does use metaphors, as well as distinctive names and current terms. So it is plain that good composition will have an air of novelty (Rhetoric, 1404b49-55).

They have specific demands for appropriateness, however. The metaphor must have a “correspondence” or proportion between the metaphor and what is signified; “otherwise the impropriety will be glaring… If you aim to adorn a thing, you must take your metaphor from something better in its class; if to disparage, then from something worse” (Rhetoric, 1405a14-20).
One of the problems understanding the value of metaphor in Aristotle is that he appears to take conflicting positions on it. In the Topics, he seems clear that the metaphor works against meaning: “everything is unclear that is said by metaphor.” (Topics 139B34). Given this position and his view of perspicuity as a virtue of style in the Rhetoric, we may have a problem. But as Richard Moran comments, “his attitude is not always so dismissive, not even in philosophical contexts, and he often makes explicit mention of particular metaphorical transfers that are not harmless but are seen as actually instructive” (Moran, 387). Even within the Rhetoric itself there is some ambivalence about the use of metaphor. When it is linked to style in Book III, there is the attitude of regret, due to the nature of the audience. In a more perfect world, as Moran comments, “those in public debate would concern themselves only with the facts of the case, and seek to give neither pleasure nor offense” (Moran, 387). While Aristotle’s comments on lexis do not focus specifically on the metaphor, it seems a dubious use of lexis, and he even makes a disparaging comment about actors, who use style to overwhelm substance.
On the other hand, he seems most positive at times about the use of metaphor. “We learn above all from metaphors” (1410b12) when Aristotle discusses them as ways to see the relationship between proportional figures, such as genus and species. In fact, in explanation, Aristotle even introduces a metaphor of his own:
Men feel toward language as they feel toward strangers and fellow citizens and we must introduce an element of strange­ness into our diction because people marvel at what is far away and to marvel is pleasant. (Rhetoric, 1404b9-12)

Aristotle describes the criteria necessary for producing effective metaphors: they must be pleasing, contain lucidity, and also strangeness (1405a8). While his comments on lucidity are similar to those in the Topics and Categories, his statements that they must please and contain strangeness emerge from his discussion of lexis, and from metaphor specifically.
If Paul Ricoeur is correct, that the metaphor functions differently in poetics than it does in rhetoric, then we might stop to ask how the metaphor functions in rhetoric. The argument here is that the metaphor functions enthymematically, and to the extent it does, lexis becomes a key component of argument. Without revisiting all the previous visits of the enthymeme from McBurney in 1937 to the present, I would like to borrow Conley’s summary of its essential characteristics since he has surveyed the previous visits.
1. The enthymeme is a deductive sort of argument….
2. One must be careful not to reduce ‘enthymeme’ to a formalist conception …
3. If an enthymeme should be expressed as a truncated syllogism, it is to expressed for practical reasons, not for formal reasons….
4. The premises of an enthymeme are probabilities, not certainties….
5. If there are missing premises in an enthymeme expressed as a truncated syllogism, they are supplied by the audience to fill out the argument….
6. Finally, the premises of enthymeme are not simply statements of probable fact, but reflect values and attitudes as well….
(Conley, 169)

Our purpose is not to make all metaphors into deductive enthymemes. However, the process by which these attitudes and values (which can be expressed in metaphors, and surely are) are appropriated by audiences is similar to the way it would appropriate a metaphor. Now the metaphor, Aristotle says, “conveys learning and knowledge through the medium of the genus” (1410b13). This learning is most often produced by understanding the substitution of one term for another (and the substitution in Aristotle is of the singular noun). So while there was a logical order, as Ricoeur comments, in the relationship of terms, the metaphor becomes a deviation from that relationship. The metaphor, as Ricocur continues, “destroys an order only to invent a new one” (Ricoeur, 334) But the invention must be recognized to create that knowledge; each metaphor contains the new information; it either redescribes or recreates a new reality.

The creation of this new reality is a joint project between the rhetor and poet and the audience involved. Hence Lloyd Bitzer’s now famous definition of the enthymeme fits the process of metaphoric understanding. Bitzer defines:
The enthymeme is a syllogism based on probabilities, signs, and examples, whose function is rhetorical persuasion. Its successful construction is accomplished through the joint efforts of speaker and audience, and this is its essential character (Bitzer, 408).

The creation of the metaphor is similarly a joint effort of rhetor and audience; it may use the name of signs, probabilities and examples, for it is the substitution of nouns. A metaphor may then occur as part of an enthymeme and may be negotiated in the same way aspects of an enthymeme are negotiated. For a metaphor to function as a comparison, the grounds on which the comparison is based must be “available” to audiences. When it is, the use of the metaphor will be rewarded much as one would reward an rhetor’s enthymeme; one pleases oneself by either understanding the new reality created by the metaphor or by completing the chain of the enthymeme. Richard Moran makes the implications clear:
Such imaginative activity on the part of the audience contributes directly to the rhetorician’s aim of persua­siveness…. But the crucial advantage here is not simply the surplus value obtained by having others work for you, but rather the miraculous fact that shifting the imaginative labor onto the audience makes the ideas thereby produced infinitely more valuable rhetorically than they would be as products of the explicit assertions of the speaker (Moran. 396).

He also believes the ideas would be less subject to suspicion if worked out by the audience themselves. If the rhetor is covert, Moran believes that suspicion may be aroused. In fact, he argues that one of the reasons Aristotle is ambivalent about the metaphor is that “both its value as a vehicle of understanding and the dangers of its rhetorical use stem from the same features of its ‘live’ imagistic power” (Moran, 396). In sum, Moran’s description of the use of the metaphor and its value to the rhetor are strikingly similar to Bitzer’s description of the possibilities of the enthymeme:
Presenting a picture whose full meaning is yet to be worked out gains the speaker many of the advantages of assertion without al1 the costs of reason giving, commitment to logical consequences, and so on. And it is because the implications of the image are developed through the imaginative activity of the audience themselves that the ideas elicited will borrow some of the probative value of personal discoveries, rather than be subjected to the skepticism accorded to someone else’s testimony (Moran, 396).

Thus an audience may gain pleasure from completing a rhetor’s enthymeme; it may gain both pleasure and knowledge from understanding a rhetor’s metaphor. Hence one can “double their pleasure” by understanding a metaphor that functions enthymematically. In Aristotle, the metaphor would function as part of an enthymeme; however as we broaden the definition of metaphor, especially in the last century, there is no reason a metaphor could not become an enthymeme.
All of the previous discussion of the possibilities of the metaphor to function within argument – and perhaps as argument – use Aristotle’s perspective on metaphor – that is, the substitution of a particular noun into a disparate context. Paul Ricoeur in The Rule of Metaphor makes the argument that Aristotle’s view – this semantic view of the word – is far too limited a view of metaphor, and would argue for including larger units of discourse – the sentence, the statement, perhaps even the enthymeme (though here I am putting words in his mouth). Ricoeur’s massive work on the metaphor presents a telling argument for viewing metaphor not as substitution of a single word but the exchange of larger discourse.
In his discussion of Aristotle, Ricoeur seeks to distinguish between the poetic and rhetorical use of metaphors. He comments that “rhetoric does not develop in some empty space of pure thought, but in the give and take of common opinion. So metaphors and proverbs also draw from the storehouse of popular wisdom – at least, those of them that re ‘established”’ (Ricoeur, 30). He believes it possible to “sketch a truly rhetorical theory of lexis, and consequently of metaphor, since metaphor is one of its elements.” (Ricoeur, 30). And a rhetorical theory of lexis is necessary because of the auditor; as Ricoeur comments, “when the proof itself is the only thing of importance, we do not bother about lexis; but as soon as the relationship to our hearer comes to the foreground, it is through our lexis that we teach” (Ricoeur, 31).
But as Ricoeur moves from Aristotle through later writings on the metaphor, he maintains the distinction between poetics and rhetoric. “In service to the poetic function,” Ricoeur continues, “metaphor is that strategy of discourse by which language divests itself of its function of direct description in order to reach the mythic level where its function of discovery is set free” (Ricoeur, 247). However the problem is that Ricoeur sees a more limited function for rhetoric, and metaphor seems resigned to the world of description. While “the function of discovery” is not present in every rhetorical metaphor, and may be limited by an audience’s ability to learn, there is no reason to deny rhetoric the possibility of using metaphor “to divest itself of direct description” assuming that the strategy does not prevent the learning of the audience.

3. Perelman and presence revisited
One can easily praise Perelman for his efforts to make lexis a necessary component of argument. His concept of presence, if somewhat ambiguous, is an opening for reuniting the nature of logos with lexis. But, strangely, his view of metaphor is limited, and limiting. Basically he returns to Aristotle’s conception of the metaphor, but borrows only one of its classes: that of analogy.
Perelman also seems to set up a duality between figures of style and figures of argument, without drawing a clear distinction between them; presumably there would also be metaphors of style (poetic metaphors?) and metaphors of argument. Perelman comments, “A figure which has failed in its argumentative effect will fall to the level of a stylistic figure” (Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca, 170). This statement suggests that argumentative metaphors will rise above stylistic metaphors, but neither sets a hierarchy nor reasons why this should be the case. He does observe that “because it is possible to adhere to the argumentative value it contains it may properly be regarded as a figure, though not as a figure of style” (Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca, 170). How metaphors move from being figures of style to being figures of argument is not developed.

While one can praise Perelman for extending lexis to argument and focusing on metaphor as a key ingredient of lexis, his discussion raises several problems:
1. there is no need to limit the definition to but one of Aristotle’s categories, that of analogy;
2. there is no need to limit the functioning of metaphor to that of single word substitution;
3. there is no need to set up to categories of metaphor and then arrange them in a hierarchy. Paul Ricoeur’s damaging comment, “A purely rhetorical treatment of metaphor is the result of the excessive and damaging emphasis put initially on the word, or, more specifically, on the noun or name, and on naming, in the theory of meaning; whereas a properly semantic treatment of metaphor proceeds from the recognition of the sentence as the primary unit of meaning” (Ricoeur, 44)

What is important to recognize is that Ricoeur’s view of rhetoric – insisting on the single word and its substitution as necessary to a view of metaphor in argument – need not be maintained. The broadening views of metaphor, views established through argument by Ricoeur can easily inform our study of argument – thus broadening both the scope and materials argument as wel1 as Perelman’s productive concept of presence.
Hopefully at least two things have been demonstrated by this discussion. First, lexis is a vital, necessary part of argument. Second, the first born child of the relationship between lexis and logos has been the metaphor, and it should be accorded some proprietary rights in the consideration of argument, and that application within a broadened view of metaphor.
Kenneth Burke argued that we need to see tropes not as ornaments but as perspectives on human symbol using. In the Grammar of Motives, he proposed four master tropes: synechdoche, metonymy, irony, and metaphor. We have explored the function of the perspective of metaphor – as a perspective, as a way of seeing – in the function of argument. Whether the younger children, synechdoche, and irony, should be included as major components of lexis in argument, will have to await future conferences (Burke, A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives, 503-29).

REFERENCES
Bitzer, L. (1959). “Aristotle’s Enthyrneme Revisited,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 45, 399-405
Burke, K. (1962) A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives. Cleveland, Meridian Press. 503-529.
Bywater, I. Trans. (1985). The Poetics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. ed. J. Barnes. Princeton.
Conley, T. (1984) “The Enthymeme in Perspective,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 168-87.
Cooper, L. Trans. (1932). The Rhetoric of Aristotle. New York.
Cope, E. M. (1877) The Rhetoric of Aristotle, with a Commentary, rev. and ed. J. E. Sandys, 3 vols, Cambridge.
Forester, E.S. (1960). The Topics. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Kauffman, C. and D. W. Parson. (1990). “Metaphor and Presence in Argument,’ In: D. C. Williams and M. D. Hazen, eds., Argumentation Theory and the Rhetoric of Assent. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 91-102.
McBurney, J. H. (1936), “The Place of the Enthymeme in Rhetorical Theory,” Speech Monographs, 3, 49-74.
Moran, R (1996). “Artifice and Persuasion: The Work of Metaphor in the Rhetoric,” In: A. O.Rorty, ed, Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Berkeley, University of California Press. 385-398.
Perelman, C and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969). The New Rhetoric. South Bend, University of Notre Dame Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1975). The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.
Toulmin S. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge, University Press.
Zarefsky, D. (1981). “‘Reasonableness’ in Public Policy Argument: Fields as Institutions,” In: G.
Ziegelmueller & J. Rhodes, eds, Dimensions of Argument. Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 88-97.
Ziegelmueller, G. and D. W. Parson. (1998). “Linguistically Sound Arguments,” Paper Presented at the Fourth International Conference on Argumentation, Amsterdam.

1. Introduction
The central research problem presented in this paper is the relationship between argumentation, self-representation and narrative activity. Our main goal is to describe how group identity is collaboratively narrated in and through the arguments displayed in a group discussion activity that took place in a computer literacy program (La Gran Dimensión-LGD-) for adult Mexican immigrants in San Diego, California.
For this purpose we need to focus, first on the relationship between narrative and argumentation and second, on the one existing between argumentation and identity. Our analysis shows that argumentative structures are part of the narrative activity embedded within the group discussion activity taking place in La Gran Dimensión (LGD). Group-discussion activities, such as the one presented in this paper, serve to construct a group identity, based on argumentative structures related to linguistic, national origin, friendship, and goal-oriented cultural identifications.

2. Narrative and argumentation
Generally, when we think of narratives or stories, we think of them in terms of past events that contain a setting, a complication action and a resolution (Ochs, 1996). Classical sociolinguistic definitions of narratives (Labov and Waletzky, 1967, 20) consider them as a sequence of two or more clauses, which are temporally ordered. In this way, the overall structure of a narrative consists of the following elements (Labov, 1972): abstract or one or two clauses summarizing the whole story; orientation or set of clauses which identify the time, place, persons, or situation; complicating action or narratives clauses comprising the sequence of events; evaluation or clauses giving the point of the story; resolution or the part following the evaluation; and coda or the ending that brings the listener back to the present. Labov and Waletzky´s model distinguished two main functions in the narrative, the referential and the evaluative function. The referential function referred to the ability to match temporal sequences and the evaluative function consisted of that part of the narrative which reveals the attitude of the narrator towards the narrative. Although the evaluative function of narratives implicitly conveys the speaker’s stances[i] and dispositions towards the events portrayed, narrative and argumentation have been studies as two separate fields of studies (Carranza, 1999).

Sociolinguistic and discourse analysis definitions of narrative as a discourse analytic category which involves an evaluative point (Labov, 1972) of characters and events have exceptionally been related to argumentation (Van Dijk, 1984). Recent discourse analytic approaches have shown how argumentative stories are told to back up positions, opinions and interpretations of experience related to characters and events (Schiffrin, 1985; Van  Dijk, 1993; Carranza, 1999; De Fina, 2000). These studies also agree on the complex interrelationship that exists between argumentative and narrative structures in concrete communicative situations.Rhetoric studies (Antaki, 1994; Fisher, 1987) remind us of the existence of reasoning schemas among the rhetorical operations available to the storyteller. As Fisher (1987) points out: “narrative rationality does not deny the fact that discourse often contains structures of reason that can be identified as specific forms of argument and assessed as such.” However, the complexity of the relationship between arguments or “structures of reason” increases in conversational narratives.
Conversational narratives are part of people’s everyday life, which include speakers’ social activities. As Ochs & Capps (2001:18) indicates: “conversational narratives routinely involves questions, clarifications, challenges, and speculations about what might possibly have transpired.” That is, conversational narratives can be part of speakers’ different discursive activities, which are dependant on the communicative situation they are involved. From this angle, accounts of different personal experiences can be embedded in ordinary conversations, part of explanatory texts, descriptions, interviews, chronology, group discussion activities, etc.

Narrative constitute in this way a genre and activity which can be examined in terms of a set of dimensions. The narrative model proposed by Ochs and Capps (2001), focuses on the dimensional aspects of the narrative.  For these authors, instead of thinking of a fixed temporal and spatial narrative structure applicable to any narrative, it is important that researchers think of narrative dimensions, which “establish a range of possibilities” having to do with the following five factors:
1. the number of interlocutors telling the narrative;
2. how tellable the account is;
3. how grounded it is in the surrounded discourse;
4. whether it follows or not a temporal and causal organization;
5. how much of a moral stance the narrative reflects (Ochs and Capps, 2001: 23).

From this approach, narratives become part of social life and can adopt different forms in discourse, from prototypical narratives, with a clear delimitation of a setting, complicating action and a resolution to other kinds of narratives that do not contain all these elements and can take the form of plans, agendas, news, scientific presentations and even prayers (Ochs and Capps, 2001).
In this paper, we approach discourse as being multi-embedded so we can always find narratives or different dimensional aspects of narratives as part of individuals’ discursive activities, including group discussion activities.

3. Argumentation and Identity
The relationship between argumentation and identity presented in this paper is based on the cultural historical approach to identity (Werstch, 1991).
Our discussion centers on three main theoretical assumptions:
1. identity as a situated and mediated action;
2. Identity as a communicative action;
3. Identity as a rhetoric action.

First, we are concerned with identity as a situated and mediated action. We understand that the actions that people engage in keep a close relation with the contexts in which these actions develop, and with the mediational means people use. In addition, we understand identity as a communicative action, with teleological, dramaturgical and normative components (Habermas, 1979). That is, people’s performance of certain cultural identification acts tend to be ratified in front of an audience who can identify with their state of consciousness and private world. The dramaturgical action takes a special value when we talk about cultural identity, since it is part of the tapestry that, together with other identities, constitute our private personal world. Then, when we talk about our cultural identity we are performing a manifestation of our thinking that has as referent a part of ourselves, a part of how we perceive ourselves, and in sum, a part of our subjective world.  In addition, identity constitutes a rule-governed action, which is a socially situated component of cultural identity. In this sense, a social group can demand a given actor to behave in a given way depending on the agreements/treatments that regulate interpersonal relations in that social group.
Finally, we understand identity as a rhetoric action. That is, identity is not mere informative action. Identity acts are argumentative manifestation of the self. They are created to persuade and convince our audience of our belonging to a certain cultural group. Moreover, we understand identity as collaborative constructed in communicative events. The acts of identity (cultural, ethnic, professional etc.) are rhetorical actions when they become either ratified or rejected in the presence of “others”. In fact, many times we are aware of our cultural identity when we expose ourselves to an audience. In these cases, rhetoric acts of identity are a moral instrument to persuade an audience and aim at influencing and modifying their point of view. That is, individuals engage in argumentative discourse to position themselves toward the social representations they share on certain issues (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969; Antaki, 1994). As Billig (1988) explains: “the structure of the way we argue reveals the structure of our thought”. In the process of deliberation, we use the same arguments that we employ when we try to persuade others”.
In the following section, we analyze how the relationship between narrative, argumentation and identity is played out in the unfolding of a group-discussion activity.

4. The discussion group: an ideal setting to study and construe acts of cultural identity
The discussion group has a special psychological significance to study cultural identity in formation because of its interactive nature. The discussion group requires and permits exposition, conflict and negotiation of individuals’ points of view and experience meaning, involving an effort of behalf of the participants to create shared realities. It permits access to new ideas, the search of agreements, and the possibility of arguing and counter-arguing to expound own opinions and to persuade others of the validity of different points of view. These are features that finally redound to new ways of understanding the others and ourselves. Since negotiation in an inter-psychological plane is explicit, discussion groups facilitate observation of the process of individual appropriation of ways of argumentation, self-reflection and group-belongingness, that are initially founded on a social plan. Therefore, the discussion group offers the ideal setting to study how the acquisition and mastering of new forms of thought and speech genres are used to construct cultural identity. In a discussion group, we can examine how individuals’ acts of identification are constructed and reconstructed both externally and internally in the course of the discussion activity.

In addition, we believe that group discussion activities foster a dialogic construction of identity in the sense that people create, and recreate identity when they are confronted with others (Bakhtin, 1981). Dialogicity is also important in literacy activities (Shor & Freire, 1987), as the one we are analyzing in this paper. Freire’s pedagogical ideas claim that all educative practices must adapt themselves to the best of their ability to the social and cultural reality of students, reflecting the problems of the community, and at the same time giving them an active role in the teaching-learning activity. Real dialogue about “generating topics” is the only way to accomplish this goal, by making the students “voice” (Bakhtin, 1981) emerge and by creating a group consciousness of “oppression” (Shor & Freire, 1987).
We believe that in the context of a minority bicultural educational setting, group identity is a meaningful “generative topic” to deal with. Individuals build arguments by mediational means. We can study the way we build our identity through the discursive ‘acts of identification’ individuals engage in. Then, through the analysis of people’s discourse about their identity, we are analyzing how they are constructing their identity. In our example, we show how this construction is collaboratively constructed in a guided activity designed to promote the shared construction of group identity in an bi-cultural educational setting works. The analysis shows how the identification act of a group identity can be read as a piece of argumentative discourse intended to convince the audience, namely the instructor and the adult students, of the acceptability of a group identity.

5. Data Collection
Data was collected through participant-observation in a bilingual/bicultural after-school computer literacy program for adult Mexican immigrants in San Diego, California.Observation sessions took place twice a week in two-hours classes for six months. Some of the sessions were videotaped and transcribed according to conversation analysis conventions (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974).

5.1 Setting: LA GRAN DIMENSIÓN  (LGD)
La Gran Dimensión is an adult computer program whose main goal is the use of technology as a resource to effectively making transactions and access mainstream institutions in Mexico and the U.S. Adults of Eden Gardens, a predominantly Mexican-Latino community in North San Diego county become familiar with health and social resources available to them in their community through the use of technology[ii]. LGD is part of a larger project called La Clase Mágica or LCM, founded in 1989 by Professor Olga Vásquez and her team at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition at UCSD. LCM was created as an after-school program to satisfy the linguistic and cultural needs of the Mexican/Latino community in San Diego. UCSD undergraduate students, under the direction of the project director or collaborating colleagues assist the instructor in providing individualized instruction to participating adults. La Gran Dimensión (LGD) evolved from a demonstrated interest of parents of children attending La Clase Mágica. LGD was developed in an effort to provide the adults of the community in Eden Gardens in Solana Beach with the resources that would enable them and their children to successfully navigate the professional and academic pipeline. Adults currently attending are from working class background and are mostly dominant Spanish speakers. Both Macintosh and PC computers are used to introduce adults to various computer literacy and language skills.

5.2 ACTIVITIES AT LGD: the Logo Activity
Activities at LGD included initial evaluations about computer knowledge, language, students’ personal interests, expectations and motivation to take the class. Based on the initial evaluations, the instructor developed activities accordingly, having to do with computer set up, use of disc drives, organization of the information in folders, Microsoft word, printers usage, Internet workshops, and e-mail accounts. One of the main activities at the time the data was collected was to use computer knowledge to create a magazine, which would bring participants’ interests and cultural experiences together. For this purpose, the instructor designed a group activity in which participants were to work collaboratively in the design of a Logo for the quarterly magazine. The main goal of the Logo activity was to foster the empowerment of the Latino community through the commonality of their multiple identities.

6. Data Analysis
In the following segment the instructor, a group of eight members of the Latino/Mexican community of Eden Garden in Solana Beach (Técnico, Lucía, Gloria, Benito, Isabel, Rita, Ana, Sole, Javi), two UCSD students (Molly and Jean) and two of one of the participants’ sons (Angel y Manuel) gathered to discuss about the title and best logo for the quaterly magazine. The following piece takes place after participants had been discussing the best titles for the magazine such as (Una Nueva Experiencia / A New Experience); Express Ourselves; Aprender es un reto / Learning is a challenge; El espacio del conocimiento / The knowledge space. The instructor poses the question: “¿quienes somos?” (who are we?) and the group collaboratively provide the answer to the question.

6.1 CO-CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY
1. I: somos un grupo de ­((writing down in notebook))
2. I: we are a group of  ­((writing down in notebook))
3. (.5)
4. Is: de amigos=
5. Is: of friends=
I: venga ayudadla=yo voy escribiendo y después alguien lo escribe a ordenador (.3) somos un grupo de amigos
I: let’s go help her=I keep on writing and then someone else writes it down in the computer (.3) we are a group of friends
6. [((looking at Isabel
7. Is: [((Isabel addresses Benito)) tú también
you too
8. A: [de distintas nacionalidades
A: [from different nationalities
9. I: de distintas nacionalidades
I: from different nationalities
10. A: (.2) y culturas
A: (.2) and cultures
11. (2.0)
12. L: pero una misma:: (.)
L: but the same::: (.)
13. A: p-e-r-o una misma lengua
A: b-u-t the same language
14. Is:  [con una misma meta
Is: [with the same goal
15. L: con una misma cultura (.) en una misma ((gesturing )) (.) con una misma
L: with the same culture (.) in a same ((gesturing)) (.) with the same
16. (…) ((Lucía looks towards Bea and Marita)) ESO!!
(…) ((Lucía looks towards Bea and Marita)) THAT’S IT!!
17. Is: [aprender
Is: [to learn
18. I: ILUSIÓN­
I: ENTHUSIASM ­
19. L: [con una misma:::
L: [with the same:::
20 A: [con un mismo interés
A: [with the same interest
21. M: [con un mismo impulso
M: [with the same drive
22. L: no otra palabra (.) con una misma ((gesturing with hands as if looking for words))
L: no (.) with the same
23. T: (…)
24. L: con una misma ((gesturing))
L: with the same
25. B: [((gesturing]
26. Is: intención ­
Is: intention ­
27. L: con una misma::
L: with the same:::
28. A: (más concreto)
A: (more concrete)
29. L: ((gesturing))
30. A: ((turning aside and gesturing)) a ver=trae la caña de pescar
A:  let’s see=bring the fishing rod
31.HA HA HA HA HA HA ((everybody laughs))

As we can see in this piece, the instructor starts constructing the group identity by letting participants elaborate and complete the sequence she starts in line 1. Isabel brings in the first identity group marker when she elaborates on the instructor’s suspension of the sentence (a group of friends/ un grupo de amigos) in line 3. Amigos/friends is one of the main identities in LCM design where any participant observing at any time in LCM is considered an “amigo”, someone who is there to help, facilitate, mediate in the successful completion of the activity taking place at the time. UCSD undergraduates are considered amigos and as such are well received by the kids in MCM and LCM. It is interesting that Isabel, who is a newcomer to the program at that time, brings up “amigos” as the first group identity marker. After participating in the program for one month at the time of the recording, Isabel is one of the most enthusiastic followers and supporters of LGD. Her final evaluation at the end of winter quarter showed her as the highest achiever in the program. She also attended the spring quarter and was very eager to learn. In line 4, the instructor encourages the rest of the group to help Isabel with more ideas. Ana, from Argentina, brings the first differential group identity markers in line 6. She acknowledges the different nationalities of the group, which includes Mexico, Argentina, Guatemala, Spain and the U.S. She immediately adds to the sequence in line 7, the different cultural experiences of the group.

The second common identity marker of the group is language in lines 10-11. Both Lucía from Mexico and Ana from Argentina agree on language as a shared cultural identifier in this context. Despite dialectal, regional, prestige and other sociolinguistic differences, Spanish as opposed to English brings unity to the group. From line 13, Lucía tries to develop an idea that does not come to her mind at the moment. The repetition of con una misma in lines 13, 20, 22, 25 ends the sequence with a collective laugh.
Isabel brings another common identity marker (line 12), which is the shared goal of the group. She later defines that common goal as “learning” (aprender) in line 15. In trying to scaffold Lucía’s ideas the instructor suggests ilusión/enthusiasm in line 16, which overlaps with Ana’s “interés/interest” and Marita’s “impulso/drive” in lines 18-19. The last attempt to elaborate on Lucía’s sequence is done by Ana in line 24. She refers to “intención” (intention) as another shared identity markers of the group. We can see how participants in this group identify themselves as sharing the same language, learning through the different experiences, motivations, interests they share and building a common identity through the different national and cultural identities they display.

7. Conclusion
This paper has looked at the relationship between narrative, argumentation and identity within a group discussion activity with members of the Latino community in California. The analysis of the Logo activity has dealt with the interrelationship between narrative and argumentative structures. The analysis shows how argumentation can be collaboratively constructed through group-identity acts of identification which are part of a group-discussion activity.
Literacy activities such as the Logo activity presented in this paper, contributes to the creation of group consciousness (Shor & Freire, 1987), which finds its logic within the narrative framework. The data analyzed in this paper brings out definitions of argumentation which find their logic within the discursive activity taking place during the group-discussion activity. More than persuading an audience participants collaboratively construct acts of identification based on national, linguistic, and goal-oriented cultural identifications.

NOTES
[i] Stances refers to the position adopted by the narrator regarding characters and events portrayed in the narratives.
[ii] For more information visit the LGD web at: http://communication.ucsd.edu/LCM/lgd.html#english

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Sports and politics are popularly held as discrete, though sometimes overlapping, domains (Edwards, 1973; Hartmann, 1996; Hoberman, 1997). In contrast to the popularly held notion that sport is not, and should not be, political, Burstyn (1999) argues that sport is in fact central in dominant political and social systems. She adopts the term “sport nexus” as a cipher for the “multibranched transnational economy” surrounding Jhally’s (1984) “sport-media complex,” which articulates sport with “the mass media, corporate sponsors, governments, medicine, and biotechnology” (Burstyn, 1999, p. 17). In this paper, I further develop the claim that sport is, indeed, a political spectacle by examining the performative dimensions of two major grassroots Olympic boycott movements begun in the United States. The purpose of my investigation is to illustrate the ways in which grassroots U.S. Olympic boycott rhetoric advances a complicity theory of discrimination that, in conjunction with theories of social justice, has the potential to inform broader human rights campaigns.

Originally proposed as peaceful competition among individuals from many nations, the Olympics have evolved into nationalist spectacles (Guttman, 1992; Hulme, 1990). Grassroots U.S. American boycott movements in Olympic history, such as the Jewish boycott of the 1936 Berlin Games and the Black boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Games, offer critiques of Olympism, nationalism, and racial essentialism that contribute to a complicity theory of discrimination. I analyze the discursive strategies at work in the two boycott movements from a rhetorical perspective informed by McGary’s (1999) “theory of collective moral liability” (p. 87). I assert that the discursive strategies of the boycott movements are consistent with a social justice framework because they draw attention to social, political, and economic complicity in discrimination and provide a forum through which people can address their implication in, and moral liability for, discriminatory practices and policies.

In the past decade, communication scholars have shown increasing interest in social justice research. Much of this recent work argues that social justice is a marginalized concern in the discipline and focuses on applied case studies and the difference researchers can make in the lives of others (e.g., Frey, 1998; Frey, Pearce, Pollock, Artz & Murphy, 1996; Pearce, 1998; Pollock, Artz, Frey, Pearce & Murphy, 1996). Wood (1996), however, interprets social justice broadly and argues that publications across the field demonstrate a commitment to the dismantling of social injustice. This study contributes to the development of social justice research within the field of rhetorical and media studies, and illustrates the ways in which discourse analysis can contribute to the development of material and discursive responses to social injustice.

The approach to social justice taken here is drawn from McGary’s (1999) explication of a theory of collective moral liability. His conditional approach to moral liability is premised on the assumption that “the notion of community is crucial” insofar as individuals come together as free moral agents in order “to carry on a common struggle for existence” (p. 87). As free agents, the individual members of a collectivity are morally liable for a faulty practice if they know about the practice (or should know about it) and they identify with, or fail to dissociate from, the practice. The second condition is elaborated so as to encompass three distinct possibilities for liability. The first of these three possibilities deals with institutional, material, discursive, or psychological support “for the group that engages in faulty practices” (p. 89) such that the group is able to remain powerful and continue its unjust practices. The second disjunction of this condition “requires disassociation where appropriate” (p. 89). Disassociation requires public denouncement of the practice, at the very least, and direct action as well as refusal to accept enrichment that results from the faulty practice, at best. The third disjunction of identification/disassociation accounts for situations in which a moral agent “collaborates with a tyrannical power in order not to blow his [sic] cover as an agent set on destroying it” (p. 90); thus, a person who does not disassociate from a faulty practice because their solidarity is part of a reasonable strategy to prevent or decrease harm should not be held morally liable. McGary’s two major conditions under which a moral agent can be held morally liable for a faulty practice, when satisfied, constitute “a moral basis for liability” (p. 88) that can be extended to discourse analyses of movement rhetoric in order to demonstrate the ways in which consciousness raising, public denouncement and separation contribute to a complicity theory of discrimination.

McPhail (1991) defines complicity as a theory of negative difference linked to argumentative essentialism. He recommends a move “from argumentative essentialism to dialogic coherence as a rhetorical strategy for transcending the politics of complicity” (McPhail, 2002, p. 130). This study pauses in the space between complicity and coherence to consider the ways in which moral agents (in this case, proponents of grassroots Olympic boycott movements) discursively construct a complicity theory of discrimination in which individuals who fail to meet the conditions for social justice advanced by McGary (1999) are publicly acknowledged as accomplices in a wrongdoing.
Moreover, the rhetorical strategies evidenced in grassroots Olympic boycott movements illustrate the movement toward a dialogic conception of rhetoric as coherence, in which “diverse conceptions of reality” are synthesized and assumptions of essential difference are challenged (McPhail, 1996). In the next section, I provide an historical overview of the Modern Olympic Movement, focusing on the ways in which class, race, and gender essentialism contribute to International Olympic Committee (IOC) and American Olympic Committee (AOC) complicity in the maintenance of social injustice. I then consider the discursive strategies employed in the 1936 and 1968 Olympic boycott movements, respectively, in terms of their potential to inform a rhetorical perspective on social justice, before concluding with recommendations for future Olympic boycott movements.

In the late nineteenth century, athletic and artistic festivals in England inspired an aristocratic young Frenchman named Pierre de Coubertin to propose a revival of the ancient Greek Olympic Games. Coubertin was interested in the “vital connection between sports and life’s more serious contests” (Guttmann, 1992, p. 13). A gifted propagandist, Courbertin sold his idea to an unenthusiastic and often discouraging audience composed largely of statesmen and leaders of national athletic organizations. Writing his Memoires Olympiques, Courbertin poetically remarks, “If the Olympic Games have been reborn it was perhaps during those instants when every heart beat as one” (in Guttmann, 1992, p. 14). Despite Courbetin’s unfailingly optimistic vision of a peaceful international festival, the Olympics were a controversial political spectacle from the beginning. An examination of the political dimensions of Olympic rhetoric and ideology yields insight into the sports context into which the proponents of grassroots boycott movements insert their political statements.
An early Olympic ideal, one that persisted for almost a century, defined the eligible athlete in terms of amateurism. The amateur status of the athlete continued an elitist and exclusionary practice formalized by many athletic clubs in the nineteenth century. Amateurism was first defined by the athlete’s vocation. Anyone who performed manual labor for pay was excluded from participation. Later, the rules evolved to address sport directly, forbidding participation by anyone who received any material benefit associated with athletics. Arguments in favor of amateurism regulations exhibited the racism, and especially the class discrimination, of the time. Poor Whites and most people of color were unable to gain membership to the elite clubs from which amateur Olympians were selected. Moreover, many early U.S. American Olympians were required to pay their own traveling expenses to the Games, thus further limiting the participation of all but the elite members of the leisure class. Amateurism regulations developed throughout the first decade of the twentieth century but were most rigidly enforced in later Olympic Games, such as the infamous withdrawal of Jim Thorpe’s two gold medals in 1912.

After a successful start in Greece in 1896, the Olympic Movement practically fell to pieces as bitter rivals and ad hoc organizations competed for control of the event. A poorly organized and advertised Paris Olympics of 1900 was marred by accusations of cheating and insulting behavior on the part of the French. On a brighter note, the 1900 Games were the first in which women were invited as competitors. Eleven female athletes participated in the Olympic Games in France. American Margaret Abbot won a gold medal in golf. British tennis champion Charlotte Cooper won the singles match and a mixed doubles match with Reginald Dougherty. Both women’s golf and tennis, however, were subsequently dropped from the Olympic program (tennis would be included again in 1908). Figure skating, widely considered a more feminine sport than golf or tennis, was included in 1908 and swimming was added in 1912, due to the efforts of the Federation Internationale de Natation Amateur (Guttman, 1992).
In 1904, the Olympic Games moved to St. Louis, Missouri, after having initially been planned for Chicago, Illinois. Few foreign nations traveled to the United States for the St. Louis Games. Missouri was commonly considered “a wilderness settlement menaced by Indians” (Guttman, 1992, p. 25) by many Europeans. All but 122 of the participating athletes were Americans. St. Louis organizers had successfully bargained for the Olympic Games as a complement to their belated world’s fair celebration of the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. The Olympic Games gradually gained recognition as a popular family outing and were incorporated into larger festivals.

These early Olympics provide interesting insight into popular culture at the turn of the century. Among the more notable incidents at the 1904 St. Louis Games was a festival called “Anthropological Days.” The American Olympic organizers set aside August 12 and 13 for Anthropological Days, during which a number of “savages” from Asia, Africa, and the Americas were rounded up from sideshows at the fair and asked to demonstrate their native games and to compete among themselves in modern sports. The poor performances of the untrained Ingorots, Kaffirs, and Pagagonians were naively taken as evidence in support of the racist theories of the day (Guttman, 1992, pp. 25-26). Although the spectacle was planned in conjunction with the World’s Fair and not the Olympic Games, the parody of Olympic track and field events suggests a deeper connection between the two events. The colonial gaze upon the native competitors in the “Anthropological” exhibition can be articulated to the nationalist impulse to contain and control the body of the athlete. Baron de Coubertin is said to have remarked “prophetically,” that “such charades would lose their appeal when black men, red men and yellow men learned to run, jump and throw as well as, or better than, white men” (Arnold, 1983).

After two decades of reasonably successful Olympic Games, the IOC was ill prepared for the boycott debate that would challenge Germany’s bid for the 1936 Games. The Olympic Games had been awarded to Berlin in the spring of 1931, when Heinrich Brüning was Germany’s chancellor, to symbolize “the full reintegration of Germany within the world of international sports” (Guttman, 1992, p. 53) after the IOC’s exclusion of Axis powers from the Antwerp Games. In the United States, the boycott debate began in 1933 as concern about the treatment of U.S. American Jews in Germany and the participation of German Jewish athletes (Gottlieb, 1972). Accompanying a more general movement to boycott Nazi goods and services in protest of the anti-Semitic policies and program of the National Socialist Party, the Olympic boycott movement was premised on the knowledge that German Jewish athletes were being barred from sports organizations and facilities. Thus, Germany could not hold to the Olympic ideal that demanded, in Avery Brundage’s oft-quoted words, “no restriction of competition because of class, color, or creed” (Bachrach, 2000).

The boycott movement expressed more than just U.S. American concern about the ethics of international sport; it provided a forum in which U.S. Americans could debate the developments in German social and political formations. Lipstadt (1986) argues that the “battle over the Games was, at least in part, a microcosm of the fight between interventionists and isolationists over how America should react, if at all, to developments in the Reich” (p. 64). This paper is premised on the belief that the Olympic Games, as a popular athletic festival and contemporary mass-media phenomenon, is an appropriate venue for interventionist forms of social protest in the form of grassroots boycott movements precisely for the reasons outlined in McGary’s (1999) theory of collective moral liability. The rhetorical strategies adopted by proponents of the 1936 boycott can illuminate some of the possibilities for action based on collective moral liability by demonstrating a discourse in which all members of society are seen as complicit in discrimination until and unless they engage in overt disassociation from, or the radical undermining of, oppressive social, political, and economic practices.

Among the earliest and most forceful proponents of a boycott of the Nazi Games were the American Jewish Congress (AJC), the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) the Jewish Welfare Board, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Brooklyn Congressional Representative Emanuel Celler, and prominent Jewish athletes and sports personalities such as Nat Holman (Levine, 1992). Before taking an official stance against the 1936 Olympics, the American Jewish Congress “conducted a series of mass protest meetings and public marches in an effort to rally America against the Hitler regime” (Gottlieb, 1972, p. 184). Rabbi Stephen Wise and Bernard Deutsch of the AJC also contacted the American representatives to the IOC to request American opposition to the Olympics in Nazi Germany. These initial public and personal actions meet McGary’s (1999) criteria for exemption from collective moral liability because they demonstrate both the knowledge of unequal opportunity for Jewish athletes and disassociation from Nazi persecution. Moreover, the public marches and meetings exerted social pressure by contributing to public knowledge about the Third Reich’s “stated objective of using the games as a means of showcasing Nazi accomplishment and power” (Levine, 1992, p. 220). The AJC and ADL initially found support from AOC representative Charles Sherrill, who vowed to support the use of American pressure to change German policy against Jews and, at the very least, Jewish athletes. Eventually, however, Sherrill, who in 1935 openly espoused pro-fascist views, joined AOC president Avery Brundage in insinuating that the boycott movement was a communist conspiracy that would actually create anti-Semitic backlash against American Jews in the United States. Furthermore, both Sherrill and Brundage held fast to the conviction that the AOC should “not interfere in Germany’s internal political, religious, or racial affairs,” lest other nations be tacitly encouraged to intervene in America’s racial and political conflicts (Lipstadt, 1986).

The boycott debate also pitted Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) president Jeremiah Mahoney against Brundage who, incidentally, served as AAU president for every year between 1928 and 1935 except 1933. Brundage, who became IOC president in 1952 and later became famous for insisting “The Games must go on” after Palestinian terrorists threatened the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, held tremendous influence with both the AAU and AOC. After German IOC member Karl Ritter von Halt led Brundage on a “carefully controlled” tour of German sports facilities in the fall of 1934, the AOC president “stated publicly that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly and that the Games should go on as planned” (Bachrach, 2000, pp. 47-48). Incidentally, Halt competed in the 1912 Olympics and served in both World Wars. During World War II, Halt was a major general of the SA storm troopers. After the war, Avery Brundage assisted Halt in securing a leadership position with the IOC, despite the general’s “close ties to the Nazi regime” (Bachrach, 2000, p. 47).
The day after Brundage arrived in the United States from his visit to Germany, the American Olympic Association (AOA) voted unanimously to attend the 1936 Olympic Games. Two days after Brundage’s arrival, the New York Times reported the Anti-Defamation League’s call for an Olympic boycott (Guttman, 1992, p. 58). Throughout the fall of 1934 and spring of 1935, numerous other organizations joined the boycott movement, voicing their opposition to the Nazi Olympics in the pages of the New York Times. In August of 1935, Congressional Representative Celler “introduced a house resolution prohibiting the use of public or semi-public funds to pay for the Olympic expenses incurred by participating athletes” (Gottlieb, 1972, p. 201) but the measure failed.

In September of 1935, almost exactly a year after Brundage’s visit to Berlin, the Nuremberg Laws were announced. The overwhelming evidence of Jewish persecution and inequality reinvigorated opposition to American participation in the Olympic Games. Mahoney said that Nazi ideology – based on racial inequality – was the direct opposite of the Olympic code, which was based on the equality of all races and of all faiths in the area of sports. He warned, “I believe that for America to participate in the Olympics in Germany means giving American moral and financial support to the Nazi regime, which is opposed to all that Americans hold dearest.” (Bachrach, 2000, p. 49)
Mahoney was not alone in his continuing opposition to the Nazi Games. A localized but highly publicized boycott movement united Jewish organizations, liberal Catholic politicians, some Catholic and Protestant groups, trade unionists, college presidents, and many former Olympians in their opposition to the Nazi Olympics. American IOC member Ernest Lee Jahncke publicly decried the Berlin Games and was expelled from the IOC in 1936 for his “outspoken stance” (Bachrach, 2000, p. 52). In an open letter to IOC president Henri Baillet-Latour published in the New York Times, Jahncke (1935) argues:
However much you would like us to believe that the Germans have kept their pledges, the fact is that the Nazi sports authorities have dissolved Catholic sports clubs and have denied Germany’s Jewish athletes adequate opportunity to condition themselves for competition in the Olympic elimination contests, and this, of course, is equivalent to excluding them as a group from the German team.

However much you would like us to believe the contrary, the fact is that Jewish athletes, as a group, have been denied adequate opportunity for training and competition. . . . The Associated Press, an impartial news service, has reported: “In only a few German cities may Jews use public athletic fields. To build and maintain their own grounds is almost impossible because of the cost. Consequently many Jewish sportsmen have been forced to play in country fields and pastures where no facilities are available for many contests such as track events. Swimming also is impossible because nearly every municipality has adopted regulations banning the use of pools and beaches by Jews.” (“Jahncke,” 1935, p. 2)

Despite rational and impassioned pleas for American opposition to the Games, Avery Brundage succeeded in sending an American team to the Berlin Games and, in 1936, he was awarded Jahncke’s position on the International Olympic Committee. In part because of his support for the Berlin Games, Brundage is often characterized as an anti-Semite (Bachrach, 2000; Guttman, 1984; Hoberman, 1986). Indeed, his lack of social and political savvy had an unmistakably racist character. In 1955, as IOC president, Avery Brundage wavered in his support of the Israeli National Olympic Committee’s inclusion in Regional Games in Barcelona. The threat of Arab boycott of the IOC-sponsored Regional Games caused Spain to withdraw Israel’s invitation. Appealing to the IOC and sympathetic IOC Chancellor Otto Mayer, the Israeli National Olympic Committee was disappointed by Brundage’s claim that Regional Games organizers had the right to include or exclude any country and that the “IOC should not become involved in the administration of events other than the Olympic Games” (quoted in Guttman, 1992, p. 79). Shortly after, however, Brundage retracted this position and claimed that Spain had violated the terms of IOC sponsorship. His logic, as Guttman (1992) notes, betrays his prejudice:
“‘As a matter of principle,’ he (Brundage) wrote, ‘we had to oppose them in 1936 and we may have to support them in 1955.’ That Brundage was unable to distinguish between American Jews in 1936 and Israelis in 1955 was, unfortunately, typical” (p. 79).

Black athletes and the Black press constituted yet another voice in the boycott debate. The irony of a boycott of the anti-Semitic Nazi Olympics was exploited by Black journalists who criticized supporters of the boycott for ignoring problems of discrimination in America. Few sporting arenas and events were desegregated in the United States. The New York Athletic Club sponsored prestigious track and field competitions that were often won by Blacks and Jews who were otherwise denied entry and membership in the Club. The Olympic Games offered Black athletes a chance at international fame as well as an opportunity to prove themselves in a society that had prejudged them inferior. Nineteen Black athletes competed for the United States in 1936, and all were burdened with the responsibility of not only performing their best but also proving wrong the theory of “Aryan supremacy” advanced by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The tendency to view individual Black athletes as representative of a Black community, or a Black race, continues to the present day. Most notably, however, is the way in which Jesse Owens has been rhetorically and historically constructed as the man who single-handedly discredited Hitler’s racist theories by running and jumping well.

Fourteen gold, silver, and bronze medals in individual and team events were won by African Americans at the 1936 Berlin Games, among them Ralph Metcalfe, Cornelius Johnson, David Albritton, Mack Robinson, John Woodruff, Archie Williams, James LuValle, Fritz Pollard, Jack Wilson, and the infamous Jesse Owens who won an unprecedented four gold medals and was dubbed, for a time, the “fastest human being” (Bachrach, 2000, p. 92). Despite their Olympic achievements, it would be more than a decade before these men, or any other Black athletes, could play in the professional baseball, football, basketball, and golf associations of the United States. Yet for decades following the Nazi Olympics, the plight of African Americans would be overshadowed in the Olympic venue by the discrimination against Blacks in South Africa and political upheaval in Eastern Europe and Asia.
Much to the chagrin of Avery Brundage, the 1940 and 1944 Olympic Games were cancelled because of World War II. After a lackluster 1948 Olympics in London, in which European athletes from war-torn countries struggled to compete with others who had not experienced the devastation of war, Brundage took charge of the Olympic Movement. In 1952, Brundage was elected president of the IOC, a position he would hold for twenty years (Guttman, 1992). During the Cold War years, the Olympic Games took on a new nationalistic air, particularly for the Americans and Russians. As Guttman (1992) explains,
In the rhetoric of the Olympic Charter, the games are contests among individuals, not among nations, but there is an apparently ineradicable tendency in all of us to transform the athletes into representatives of the Self with whom we can identify as they struggle against representatives of the Other . . . Theoretically, a wrestling match between two Americans or between two Russians should be as compelling for the sports fan as one in which the American grapples with the Russian, but it is not. The Olympics took on a new political dimension in 1952, one that was destined to grow increasingly important in the decades to follow. (Guttman, 1992, p. 97)

Political conflicts also threatened the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia. The Suez War, begun by Egypt’s seizure of the Suez Canal and Russia’s invasion of Hungary, led to Avery Brundage’s idealistic (and erroneous) assertion that, in ancient times, “all warfare stopped during the period of the Games” (Guttman, 1992, p. 99). In the end, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands all boycotted the Melbourne Games. Thus, boycotts of the Olympic Games were nothing new, they had simply not been successfully waged in the United States. The African American boycott movement of 1968, like the Jewish boycott of 1936, was a grassroots movement that capitalized on the visibility of the Olympic Games in order to call attention to social and political atrocities.
Beginning in 1960 when a reporter asked African American decathlete Rafer Johnson about the likelihood of an Olympic boycott in support of the struggle for civil rights in the American south, the world’s international sports spectacle has been a tempting forum for Black social and political expression. As Hartmann (1997) points out, one of the factors “underlying the attractiveness of a boycott as an effective tool for forcing racial change was the importance of international, Olympic-style sport for American international relations concerns at the height of the Cold War” (p. 58). During the first half of the 1960s, several half-hearted Olympic boycott appeals were advanced. In 1963, comedian, civil rights activist, and former collegiate athlete Dick Gregory asked Black athletes to boycott an AAU track meet in Moscow. He argued that, without their contributions, the lackluster performance of the White athletes would “bring this thing into the open… push this thing out on an international level” (Gregory, 1964, p. 193). While the athletes were unenthusiastic, many began to examine the hypocrisy of competing in interracial meets abroad while being denied entrance into segregated sports facilities in America. In March of 1964, former Olympic gold medallist Mal Whitfield advocated a boycott of the Games in Japan unless “Negro Americans” were guaranteed equal rights and first class citizenship (Hartmann, 1997, p. 58). Despite these early calls for a boycott by African Americans, the racial apartheid policies of South Africa would provide the impetus for the IOC’s official reconsideration of the role of racial and cultural politics in the Olympic forum.

The Rome Olympics in 1960 initially appeared a triumph in the wake of the upheaval of the 1940s and 1950s but the IOC was burdened with the political question of South Africa’s participation. The South African National Olympic Committee (SANOC) was prohibited from sending a team to the 1964 Games in Tokyo as a result of its failure to demonstrate a change in official apartheid policy as it related to sports. Other African nations, such as Egypt and Ethiopia were admitted during the 1960s as South Africa was slowly forced out of Olympic participation. Despite unsatisfactory evidence of SANOC’s compliance with IOC regulations, the committee voted early in 1968 to invite South Africa to the Summer Games in Mexico City. Immediately after the decision was announced, Algeria and Ethiopia threatened to boycott the Games. Within a few weeks, nations within the Organization of African Unity, the Carribean, the Middle East and Soviet Union all threatened to withdraw from the Games if South Africa’s invitation was not withdrawn.
Black athletes in the United States also demanded the expulsion of South Africa from the IOC. In 1968, several collegiate athletes and their mentor, a San Jose State sociology instructor named Harry Edwards, organized a boycott movement. Their demands included the restoration of Muhammad Ali’s title and right to box in this country, the removal of Avery Brundage from his position of leadership within the IOC, the appointment of Black coaches and Black USOC members, and the total desegregation of the New York Athletic Club (NYAC). Like African Americans throughout America, the Black student athletes and other members of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) were disappointed by the lack of change accompanying social, economic, and institutional reforms. They viewed the plight of Black Americans as a cause worthy of international attention and had successfully used sport as political leverage in the past (Edwards, 1969).

In the fall of 1967, San Jose State University (then San Jose State College) was forced to cancel a football game against UTEP (then Texas Western) after protests by a recently formed campus organization called United Black Students for Action (UBSA) led to rumors of arson and boycott. Spearheaded by Harry Edwards and Ken Noel, UBSA sought the total desegregation of the San Jose State University campus and the surrounding student housing facilities. Their demands included public commitments from the San Jose State University Administration and campus organizations to enforce the desegregation of fraternities, sororities, housing, and all campus activities and groups. They also argued for minority recruitment, inclusion in student government and administrative decision making relevant to minorities, and reform of the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics (Edwards, 1969).
Particularly striking in the rhetoric of the UBSA was their demand for proof from campus organizations and university institutions that they had “ceased all racist discrimination at SJS” (Edwards, 1969, p. 45). Requiring proof that racial discrimination has ceased placed the UBSA in the politically convenient and powerful position of deciding what constituted evidence of egalitarianism. UBSA effectively shifted the burden of proof from the victimized to the victimizers. In the past, it would have been incumbent upon members of the UBSA to prove that campus organizations and housing facilities were, in fact, discriminating on the basis of race. By asserting an alternate logic, one that assumed the racism of such organizations and demanded proof of their commitment to equality, UBSA subverted the structural and rhetorical practices of domination imposed by the university institution. A similar shift in logic can be seen in contemporary affirmative action discourses that assert an historically contingent, uneven playing field rather than the level field presumed by naïve theories of meritocracy.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that UBSA’s rhetorical ingenuity would have succeeded without their strategic use of popular and profitable sports as leverage. Working explicitly against the popular and racist White establishment view that Black athletes should be grateful for what sport has given them, young men such as Tommie Smith, Otis Burrell, Lew Alcindor, and Lee Evans assessed what they had given sport and found the returns lacking. These four, and numerous other Black athletes and activists, gathered at the Los Angeles Black Youth Conference to announce the organization of the Olympic Project for Human Rights.

On the 23rd of November, the OPHR officially announced the unanimous endorsement of, and participation in, a boycott of the 1968 Olympic Games by “Black men and women athletes” (Edwards, 1969, p. 55). At a press conference in December of 1967, Edwards presented the OPHR’s official position as a list of demands:
1. Restoration of Muhammed Ali’s title and right to box in this country.
2. Removal of the anti-semitic and anti-Black personality Avery Brundage from his post as Chairman of the International Olympic Committee.
3. Curtailment of participation of all-White teams and individuals from the Union of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia in all United States and Olympic athletic events.
4. The addition of at least two Black coaches to the men’s track and field coaching staff appointed to coach the 1968 United States Olympic team. (Stanley V. Wright is a member of the coaching team but he is a devout Negro [sic] and therefore is unacceptable.)
5. The appointment of at least two Black people to policy making positions on the United States Olympic Committee.
6. The complete desegregation of the bigot dominated and racist New York Athletic Club. (Edwards, 1969, pp. 58-59)

Negative publicity denouncing the OPHR and its aims contributed to frequent harassment of those involved in the boycott and the Youth Conference meeting (Carlos, 2000; Edwards, 1969). Like the radical Black activists that inspired them, however, the Black athletes and OPHR organizers were committed to social and material equality by any means necessary. The successful boycott of a New York Athletic Club (NYAC) indoor track meet at Madison Square Garden in early part of 1968 fueled both the OPHR and media interest in the Olympic boycott movement (Edwards, 1969). In order to use the mass media to their advantage, Harry Edwards and other members of the OPHR adopted much of the visual display that had proven effective for community and campus radicals. Reflecting on the boycott movement in his autobiography, Edwards (1980) admits, “It was [Louis] Lomax’s flair for the dramatic and his abiding appreciation for the character and power of the electronic media that led him to advise me to discard my suit and tie” (p. 168). In their stead, he donned a black beret, dark sunglasses, a scarf, and black leather jacket. Drawing upon the militant style of the Black Panthers, Edwards captured the media’s attention long enough to convince many Americans that the boycott was a reality, despite a lack of consensus among Black athletes. In much the same way, the OPHR became popularly affiliated with radical Black identity. As a result, African American Olympians, regardless of their involvement with the OPHR, were positioned as the arbiters of Black identity and U.S. American nationalism. Like the boycott of the 1936 Berlin Games, the Black boycott movement raised social consciousness about the plight of minorities, particularly those of African descent, in the United States and abroad. The OPHR urged collective moral liability for discrimination against African Americans in the United States, denying the efficacy of the model of individual achievement underlying athletic, and to a lesser extent Olympic, ideology.

Also like the Berlin boycott, the Black boycott of 1968 failed, but the aims of the OPHR were expressed in a silent demonstration by African American 200-meter medallists Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Standing on the medals platform, Smith and Carlos raised black-gloved fists during the playing of the national anthem in what was popularly described in the U.S. American press as a “black power salute.” The raised fist demonstration by Smith and Carlos exemplifies the radical possibilities of resistance within a social justice framework premised on McGary’s (1999) theory of collective moral liability. By working within the oppressive system in order to radically challenge its assumptions, the two athletes articulated a strategy for the articulation of sport and social justice.
Brosio (2001) argues that the answers to the problems posed by social justice research reside in grassroots community organizing revitalized by identity politics. I argue that the 1936 and 1968 Olympic boycott movements provide a basis for considering what shape those forms of organizing may take. Specifically, I consider the ways in which a complicity theory of discrimination, informed by the theory of collective moral liability, positions us all as decision-makers about our collective social and political practices. Choosing not to act in response to reasonable knowledge about relations of domination and oppression is not an option, within this model, because it simply indicates tacit approval and assent for the practice of domination. Thus, we must look to the past, and to popular spheres such as the Olympic Games, in order to find strategies for disassociating from, and undermining, oppressive ideological and political structures.
In closing, I agree with McPhail (2002) that the problem of this century may, indeed, be “the conscience line” and that a reconsideration of “responsibility” and “character” must accompany any critical engagement of contemporary social and political formations (p. 199). I urge a consideration of complicity and implicature that takes into account McGary’s (1999) call for collective moral liability and coalitional politics. The two Olympic boycott movements discussed here provide the groundwork for the development of strategies of disassociation, for the refusal of personal enrichment as a result of a morally faulty practice, and for covert collaboration “with a tyrannical power” (p. 90) for the purposes of dismantling it. Moreover, they highlight the important role that popular sport, and the Olympic Games in particular, can play in appeals for social justice. Future critics and activists should consider the ways such strategies can be used to call attention to social injustice, such as the alleged human rights abuses, censorship, and denial of freedom of religion and assembly that marred the 2008 Chinese Olympic bid (Abrahamson, 2001).

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When the sun arose over Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, occupants and nearby residents of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building experienced the horror of a bomb blast that killed 168 and injured 500 members of their community. Following a lengthy trial, the jury convicted Timothy McVeigh of the bombing. After hearing thirty-eight victims testify about the impact of the bombing on their lives and that of their loved ones, the jury sentenced McVeigh to death. The victim’s arguments, called victim impact statements (VIS), convinced jurors that McVeigh should receive the death penalty rather than life imprisonment. Federal legal authorities executed McVeigh on June 11, 2001. This essay:
1. explains the origin and history of victims’ arguments in the courts in the United States,
2. describes this type of argumentation as a distinct genre of legal discourse by using Mikhail Bakhtin’s explanations of content, stylistics, and speech plans, and
3. discusses the implications of the study for research about legal argument.

1. Origin and History of Victims’ Arguments
Victim impact statements are a unique genre of legal argumentation. The use of victims’ arguments in the McVeigh trial evolved as part of a two-decade struggle for victims’ rights in the United States (McDonald, 1976; Carrington & Nicholson, 1984; Roland, 1989). This struggle began in the late 1970s and achieved legislative success with the 1982 Victim and Witness Protection Act. Temporary setbacks in victims’ rights took place when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Booth v. Maryland (1987) and South Carolina v. Gathers (1989) that victims’ impact testimony was unduly prejudicial to jurors because it could not be refuted by the defense and because defendants generally did not know who their victims were when they committed their crimes. In 1991 the victims’ rights movement gained new momentum when both of these decisions were overturned in Payne v. Tennessee. Even more voice was given to victims in 1994 through The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act which permitted both the use of the death penalty and VIS in federal trials.U.S. v. Timothy James McVeigh (1997) was the one of first federal capital cases to be tried under this statute.
Victims (often with the assistance of attorneys) justify the death penalty for a defendant because of the suffering they have experienced as a result of a crime. Some VIS are presented to the judge in the form of written arguments; others are read to jurors by a court official. Still others are both written and presented orally to the judge and jurors. In general, victims state their names, describe economic losses or physical injuries, identify changes in their physical or psychological well being, and/or explain the general effects of an offense (Schneider, 1992). The arguments from victims provide evidence about “any harm, including financial, social, psychological and physical harm, done to or loss suffered” by a victim at the hands of the accused (Victim and Witness Protection Act, 1982, 32).

Additionally, the arguments provide the witnesses with two kinds of witnessing; they give eyewitness testimony to the effects of a crime, and they also allow victims to bear witness to the grief and emotional hardships that cannot be seen (Oliver, 2001, 16). In other words, the arguments have both an outer voice that addresses a jury and an inner voice that gives agency to their subjective experiences and allows them to work through their grief. VIS are personal accounts of the harm suffered by victims that “particularizes” experience and “invites empathic concern” in ways that other legal arguments do not. The witnessing of the victims offers a silenced minority the opportunity to relate their grief in the guise of an argumentative form. In ways similar to literary genres, victim impact arguments are generative bundles of borrowed and reconstituted prosaic (everyday) utterances that speakers socially construct to express their intentions in specific contexts (Bakhtin, 1986). Genres eventually achieve relative stability, but they are never completely replicable or “never perfectly designed,” because the speakers who create them “make do with the resources they have at hand.” Additionally, genres have unpredictable qualities that develop from “unforeseen byproducts” in “unexpected ways” (Morson & Emerson, 1990, 45). The lack of replicability and predictability of genres outlined by Bakhtin (1986) applies to legal discourse since each trial results from similar indictments litigated by different participants in courts operated under diverse rules and procedures.
Even though some in the legal community promote this kind of testimony, many others question its use. For example, Talbert (1988) claims the emotional content of VIS has the potential to inflame the jury and to upset the legal norm of treating similar crimes with similar sentences (210). Clark and Block (1992) also object to the use of VIS because this kind of argumentation can lead to personalized and arbitrary sentences, the victims “are unintended or unknown” by the offender (49), and the sentencing process creates a “mini-trial” in which irrefutable evidence is presented by the government (50). In the McVeigh trial, judges and attorneys agreed that the VIS should contain limited emotional content, describe the victims’ pain and suffering, be presented in an objective manner, and  prove the aggravating factors alleged by the government. Aggravating circumstances are justifications for the death penalty. Specifically, prosecutors argued that McVeigh caused the 269 deaths and hundreds of injuries after planning and premeditating the bombing and that he killed federal law enforcement officers through his criminal actions. From the perspective of the law, the goal of the impact statements was to promote moral reasoning among jurors based on weighing the evidence about aggravating factors, such as premeditation, intent, viciousness, and lack of remorse, against mitigating factors, such as a difficult upbringing that may have led the defendant to commit the crime. The family of the defendant did not persuade the jury that legitmate mitigating factors led to McVeigh’s crime.

2. The Genre of Victim Impact Arguments
Victims created the content of their testimony by piecing together conversations and recollections from their everyday experiences. Bakhtin (1986) refers to these fragments of everyday conversation as “the prosaic.” More specifically, Morson and Emerson (1990) conclude, “The everyday is a sphere of constant activity. The source of all social change and individual creativity, the prosaic is truly interesting and the ordinary is what is interesting” (23). This prosaic discourse consists of fragments that the speakers have heard from others. When speakers piece together these fragments in ways that achieve their goals in a particular speech situation, they create new genres. Specifically Bakhtin (1986) concludes that genres result from speakers combining the prosaic informal speech of greetings, conversations, vocalized memories, and expressions of feeling with the formal utterances of reports, speeches, and letters. Similarly, the VIS presented at the McVeigh trial combined the informal utterances from victims’ conversations and experiences with formal utterances they had learned from the media and other public speakers. In this way, the victims in the McVeigh trial reconstituted ordinary discourse to achieve their extraordinary goal of promoting the death penalty. In the McVeigh trial, the victims appropriated and then reconstituted various kinds of prosaic utterances. One cluster of VIS came from the parents of children who died in the daycare center at the Murrah Federal Building. One mother, Sharon Coyne, spoke about the death of her baby on the day of the bombing. Prosecutor Hartzler asked questions to structure this victim’s narrative. Coyne began by establishing the circumstances and background, and then she quickly moved to her recollections of her deceased child. As she presented her statements of grief, Coyne borrowed descriptions and images from previous contexts:
Hartzler: It’s true that you had a daughter… And her name was Jaci Rae?… And can you tell the jury a little bit about Jaci?
Coyne: Jaci – Jaci was (sic) blue eyes, big blue eyes, blond hair. Well, she had very, very little hair. Beautiful smile. She just – she didn’t have but two teeth.  She waited kind of late to cut teeth. She was a serious ham. She loved to be in front of the camera… And she never knew a stranger. I think that the most distinguishing characteristic about Jaci was her unconditional love for me. . . . She loved to cuddle.
(U.S. v. Timothy James McVeigh, 1997, June 5; all subsequent victim impact statements come from the trial transcripts and are cited by date).

The prosecutor followed Coyne’s descriptive recollection by projecting photographs of Jaci Rae with her family on huge screens for jurors to see. Coyne’s testimony appropriated words and phrases from everyday information that a mother tells her friends and family about her child:
Hartzler: How old was Jaci in April of 1995?
Coyne: Jaci was 14 months.
H: Could she talk?
C: She could. She said “Momma” and “Dada.” We were working very, very, very hard on “Grandpa and Grandma”…
H: Could she walk?
C: She could; she’d been walking for about four months. I think if she had her way, she would have been running; but I was very overprotective. And she basically walked the straight and narrow, always on flat surfaces. And usually, if we got to anything difficult, I always picked her up…

Coyne concluded with explanations of the death of her child and the suffering it caused her, reporting dates, times, and personal physical and psychological effects. The testimony continued:
H: And I know that you were at work that morning, and you heard and felt the explosion… I want you, if you will now Miss Coyne, to tell the jury what impact Jaci’s death had on you and your family.
C: There’s a lot of different things, different aspects. There’s one physical aspect, which, as you know, my hair is falling out, my teeth (are) chipped off. I have a horrible memory loss when things get pretty stressful, but that’s really nothing compared to constantly missing her… And I think in the end, by the time they finally told us that they found her body, it had been seven days, and I was just so incredibly thankful that they found her at all; and I felt lucky that I got to hold her wrapped in a beautiful receiving blanket made by my friend, Joyce. And that’s the last thing that I held (1997, June 5).

Coyne’s testimony imported descriptive imagery, conversational phrases from her child, and factual reports from her past family experiences into the content of her argument.With the help of the attorney’s questions, she restructured and reconstituted this content to achieve the purpose of VIS. Not only did she recreate the content, Coyne added a distinctive style using the words of her child so that her argument had multiple authors. She presented oral testimony that reflected her inner suffering. She also gave the dead baby a “voice within” her own voice, a process Bakhtin (1986) calls “echoing” (88). The echoing of the baby’s words had a dual persuasive effect. First, it allowed jurors to imagine the personality and the innocence of the baby as a victim. Second, it permitted the mother to use a double voice, showing the physical suffering of her baby and the subjectivity of her own psychological pain.

In addition to the borrowing of prosaic utterances, themes, stylistics, and speech plans illuminate the distinctive properties of this argumentative legal genre. Bakhtin (1986) explains:
Thematic content, style, and compositional structures (speech plans) are inseparably linked to the whole of the utterance and are equally determined by the specific natures of the particular sphere of communication. Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable type of these utterances. These we may call speech genres. (60)

Any new genre, according to Bakhtin (1986), combines simple utterances into more complex ones. When complex utterances subsume simple ones, a new genre evolves. In this case, speakers recreate a new discourse from borrowed audiences by adopting different themes, adding new stylistics, and implementing speech plans. This kind of argument permits the victims to “work through” their grief by explaining it in subjective terms to others.

Themes. Speakers create themes that respond to the needs of a particular context. In the McVeigh trial, the victims used common themes and made similar claims about their experiences. The predominant themes of the victims’ arguments in the McVeigh trial were the physical devastation caused by the bombing and the pain and suffering of the survivors. Prosecutors chose different types of victims to emphasize the three themes. Seven rescue workers emphasized the devastation theme. Two medical observers identified victims and gave technical data about their injuries. Three survivors described their injuries and recovery, and two videotapes graphically portrayed injuries to children. All other arguments came from relatives of those who died.
Themes differed according to speakers’ experiences. Themes about the personal consequences of their loved one’s death provided common content in the testimony of the relatives of the deceased. For example, Sonia Diane Leonard, wife of a deceased secret service agent, claimed, “I feel my heart looks like that building. It has a huge hole that can never be mended” (1997, June 4). Pam Whicher, wife of deceased Secret Service Agent Alan Whicher, lamented, “It is a little bit like learning to live without your arm. You still do what you do, but everything is changed” (1997, June 5). Each person used prosaic metaphors to bear witness to their personal suffering.
Rescue workers highlighted the devastation in their arguments. This testimony pointed to the extent and the brutality of the crime, an aggravating factor that justifies the death penalty. For example, Allan Prokop, a police officer, described the street scene immediately after the bombing:
There were people running from the building toward us injured, very bloody, crying, and screaming… There were people standing in the windows screaming for help… There were wires sparking inside, a real thick and heavy dust, a cloud. It was strangely quiet, except for the moans and cries from inside of the building (1997, June 5).

The other most poignant themes of physical harm and suffering came from victims who survived the bombing and continued to live with negative physical and psychological effects. For example, Clifford Gayle, an employee of Housing and Urban Development, described his injuries in this way: “The left side of my face was crushed. It had a hole in… the skull – in the membrane between the skull and the brain. I had glass and concrete in my neck here, just barely missed an artery and a vein. My eye was hanging out, cut in five pieces” (1997, June 5). Other victims talked about fractures, collapsed lungs, long hospitalization, and reconstructive surgery. The VIS allowed them to speak the unspeakable.

Victims particularized their pain and suffering and, in doing so, recreated the bomb scene, put a face on the victims, and allowed jurors to hear, feel, and see the human impact of the bombing. Even a year after the trial ended, juror Vera Chubb recalled, “I needed to hear those people. I needed to touch them. I needed to hug them.” Fighting back tears, she told reporters, “I knew it was going to be a hard day, but I didn’t think this hard” (Romono, 1998, June 13, A1). Unlike most trial testimony, the victims’ arguments provided facts, symbolize the affect, and thereby created strong emotional bonds between victims and jurors. According to Bakhtin (1996), the completion of a message occurs when the audience acts on the themes. The McVeigh victims finalized their theme twice, once at the sentencing hearing when the jurors stated that McVeigh should receive the death penalty and again a year after the trial when jurors met and greeted the victims. The victims’ arguments created logical and affective connections with jurors that allowed their themes to justify the death penalty.

Stylistics. In addition to the themes, a second component of victims’ arguments is what Bakhtin (1981) calls “stylistics,” the language and tone of a discourse. Speakers choose words from earlier contexts and from other people in their immediate or past history. The style of any speaker is an accumulation of the “thinking and the language of other people (living and dead) whose ideas and words are part of the store of ideas in the language-user’s head” (259). In the McVeigh trial, the victims chose words from everyday conversations, words of grief likely expressed or heard by them during the mourning process, phrases they heard from medical personnel, and language that they borrowed from stories in the media. The exact origins of the language cannot always be determined, but the process of appropriating words from others characterizes how genres are generally formed (Bakhtin, 1981, 242-59). Since the trial occurred two years after the bombing, victims had read and heard many different utterances about the tragedy and therefore could, and probably did, borrow from that content. The victims used a tone that conveyed both their personal experience and public emotions about the bombing. The tone creates “an imprint of individuality” (Morson & Emerson, 1990, 134) because it expresses the emotional and evaluative attitudes of speakers, accentuates the speaker’s personal experience, and achieves a ‘stylistic aura’ ” (139). Many of the victims accentuated their content by echoing the emotions they experienced privately and by restating the feelings conveyed by those who observed the experience from the outside. This echoing of personal and public sentiments and the direct expressions of the victims’ own experience constitute “the verbal vestments” of the discourse (Bakhtin, 1986, 88). In this trial, victims borrowed some of their style, both language and tone, from interpersonal conversations, feature stories in the media, and their knowledge of the appropriate speech content of eulogies and tributes.

Many of the victims imported the language and conveyed a tone characteristic of interpersonal conversations that name personal characteristics of others, refer to social routines, and make disclosures that give information about personal relationships (Ratcliffe & Hudson, 1988, 1-2). Sonia Leonard adopted this style when she referred to a work routine, identified personal characteristics, and disclosed information about her relationship with her husband:
I remember the Saturday before the bombing, he and I were working in the backyard and took a break for lunch, and I was stupidly complaining about what I thought had been a hard week–the week before. And what he said to me was, “Everything is attitude, attitude, attitude. And if you approach anything with the right attitude, it will be easier. And I’ve clung to those words the last two years, and they’ve helped a lot”  (1997, June 4).
Leonard not only borrowed the interpersonal language from her previous experience, but she also adopted the “verbal vestments” of her husband’s objective and rational tone.

Other victims reported observations as if they were feature stories borrowed from the news media. A feature is a human interest story in which journalists establish a setting, character, action, and a moral as they report their observations about an event (Garrison, 1990, 349-55). In contrast to a news story, a feature conveys the subjective interpretations of the reporter and engages the sentiment of the reader. This type of style characterized part of Officer Don Browning’s story about an incident at the bombsite:
A man and his little girl approached us and, of course, they were talking to us and they came up; and the father was thanking us for being there. The little girl was wearing a guardian angel pin on her blouse. She was probably five or six years old; and at that moment, I couldn’t really understand what she was saying… And eventually her father helped me understand that she was saying the angel was a pin that she was wearing for her friends and that she was due to arrive at the daycare center at the Murrah Building at approximately 11:00 (on the day of the bombing). And we all gave her a little hug and told her how glad we were that she was okay. And she asked me if she could pet my dog. And she grabbed “Gunny” around his neck and hugged him close… and told him, “Mr. Police Dog, will you find my friends?”

Browning instantiated the qualities of a feature story; that is, he subjectively interpreted this experience to establish human interest for the courtroom audience, echoed the words of the little girl, and highlighted the child’s uplifting character and hopeful dialogue as it had taken place in the tragic setting of the bombing rescue.

Other victims borrowed a eulogistic form that names the deceased persons’ achievements, stresses their positive traits, uses stories to illustrate how they lived life, and conveys an attitude of respect toward the deceased (Ehninger, Gronbeck, McKerrow & Monroe, 1982, 363). An illustration of the eulogistic content appeared in the argument of Glenn Cetyl when he incorporated a letter written by his ten-year-old son Clint about his deceased mother:
I miss my mom. We used to go for walks. She would read to me. We would go to Wal-Mart. Sometimes at school maybe a kid will bring something up – and he was talking about show and tell – something new that he got and someone would ask him or her where they got it. And they usually say, ‘My mom got it,’ and that makes me sad. After the bomb, everyone went to my aunt’s house, and my grandma took me to the zoo – my cousin and I to the zoo. While we were at the zoo, I bought my mom a ring. I bought it for whenever they found her. Sometimes at school around the holidays, I will still make my mom Mothers’ Day and Valentine’s cards like the other kids (do) (1997, June 6).

The statement names the positive experiences Clint had with his mother, echoes what his classmates sat about their mothers, indicates how the victim lived her life, and expresses personal sorrow and lamentation. The effect of this touching tribute evidenced the facts of the child’s grief as well as the voice of his psychological suffering.
The tone of victims’ arguments at the McVeigh trial varied with speakers’ choices of phrases and content. For example, when victims spoke about the productive lives of those killed, their tone was cheerful and positive. When they recollected events that typified their family members’ traits, they used tones of humor, happiness, as well as sadness and longing. When victims stated the impact that the bombing had on them, they expressed a somber and sometimes angry tone. Some survivors and relatives of victims expressed hopefulness and the intent to get on with their own lives, and others related their experiences with personal depression and emphasized that their lives were forever changed by the effects of the bombing.

The stylistics of the McVeigh’s victims provided an emotional imprint on jurors about the loss, pain, and suffering of the victims. The style often switched from objective reports of the victim’s background and experiences to subjective accounts of their relationships with victims. The style also changed from factual and causal sequences that detailed events and actions to reflective and subjective accounts of those facts that pointed to personal suffering. Even though the attorneys encouraged victims to provide only factual reports, the language and tone of the speakers created sympathy and often evoked tears from jurors. Because the content necessarily focused on the victims, the style never was dispassionate. The stylistic component of the VIS achieved the goal outlined by the majority opinion in Payne v. Tennessee (1991); that is, the testimony of victims should encourage empathy and allow the victims to have a voice in the legal system. In this case the victims seemed not so much to gain empathy as to “perform” their testimony in a way that they brought a voice to unspeakable experiences. Oliver (2001) calls this process “witnessing,” a  process of “testifying to both something you have seen with your own eyes and something that you cannot see” (86). The witnessing created a style for the victims’ arguments that clearly energized and emotionalized the content with verbal vestments that contained the signature of personal victimage.

Speech Plans. Speakers promote their themes and convey their style through what Bakhtin (1986) calls “speech plans” or compositional features. He explains that speakers create genres according to
1. the topic about which they are speaking,
2. the “addressees” to whom they are speaking, and
3. the expectations of how they will be understood (p. xvii).
Attorneys affected the composition of the victims’ arguments in the McVeigh trial through three different kinds of questions that allowed victims to identify themselves, describe how deaths or injuries occurred, and state how the bombing incident adversely affected their lives.

The trial audience for the VIS was complex. Even though the jury seemed to be the primary audience, the goal of the victims’ arguments was take into account human moral standards. Bakhtin describes audiences as “addressees.” He notes that addressees are a composite of several different interpretive perspectives. One type of addressee was the speaker that uses his or her discourse to express and inner voice and to reflect personally on the content and themes presented in the speech. The victims’ themes and evidence recalled the facts of the crime and reflected on the impact the crime has had on their lives. The second type of addressee is the audience that decides or acts upon the discourse. In this case, the post-trial remarks of jurors to the press indicated they believed and acted as the victims wanted. A third type, the “superaddressee,” consists of an ideal audience possessing the knowledge and the insight to understand the meanings the speaker sought to convey (Morson & Emerson, 1990, 135). In this case, victims viewed the superaddressee as a moral authority that shared their belief in the guilt of McVeigh, desired his punishment, and accepted death as a moral solution for the crime.

VIS are a unique genre of trial argumentation that involves testimony about what victims “have seen with their own eyes,” the horror created by the crime, and “bearing witness to something that cannot be seen,” the subjective experience of their suffering (Oliver, 2001, 18). Effective victims’ arguments, in ways similar to other speech genres, create self reflection, induce action from designated decision makers, and seek morally grounded actions. The victims in this trial created speech plans in several stages. First, they formulated their statements by conversations with self, answering questions about what should be said, how it should be phrased, and what moral conclusions should be drawn. Next, victims made additional adjustments creating themes and choosing a style to accommodate the expectations of attorneys and the judge and to dialogue with the jurors about the meaning of their suffering. The legal rules permitted victims to create arguments within specific parameters of weighing aggravating and mitigating circumstances and of engaging in moral reasoning. Finally, the victims designed their statements for a superaddressee, an omniscient judge, who understood their sorrow and suffering perfectly and agreed about how justice should be done. In this way, the victim’s conception of the addressees likely affected their ability to perform this legal genre of victim impact arguments.

Survivor Susan Urbach’s arguments conveyed different themes and styles and showed that she was speaking to all of the audiences described above. At the time of the bombing, Urbach worked as the regional director of the Oklahoma Small Business Development Center, located in the Journal Record Building across the street from the Murrah Federal Building. Prosecutor Beth Wilkinson conducted the examination, asking Urbach to recollect the day of the bombing.
Wilkinson: Tell us what happened to you at 9:02 on April 19.
Urbach: Well, at 9:02 I was standing in the doorway of my office. The appointment was running late, and we were kind of making bets on whether or not he’d actually show… And the woman who was… going to be doing the seminar was standing next to me… And another of my staff members was in the office…
W: Did you feel the explosion?…
U: And the building just shook so badly that you couldn’t even stand.  And at that point in time, I started feeling things fall on me. I had a very, very large blow to the head that hurt, and rubble – things were falling on me. The concrete wall fell on me, and the window exploded into my back and then the ceiling came crashing down all over me…
W: Were you able to dig yourself out of the rubble eventually?
U: Yes. I got some very unusual strength to be able to dig myself up out of the rubble, and we didn’t stop to look at anything. I mean we just immediately headed for the door…
W: And on what side of your face were you wounded?
U: Everything was on the left side. There is like a half swastika kind of wound that started underneath the eye and goes down to my laugh line, several large lacerations that went from like my ear to my chin. My ear was totally cut in half all the way through the cartilage… (1997, June 5).

The testimony began with prosaic descriptions of office work presented in a conversational tone, but proceeded next to a feature-story-like description of the physical effort of digging herself out of rubble and then to the graphic imagery of personal suffering – lacerations and swastika-like cuts. Her remarks mixed the formal terminology she had heard from medical practitioners with personal and informal language characteristic of interpersonal conversations. She addressed her attorney by identifying her profession and the location of her job to the bombsite. Her testimony about what she saw and what she could not see adopted the point of view, language, and tone of a victim.

For example, the last segment of Urbach’s testimony conveyed the moral meaning she had attached to her experience. She reflected through a kind of inner speech about the personal meaning of her experience and established ideals for her external addressees about how other victims should perceive their scars and healing:
W: And how do you feel about your scar today on your face?
U: Well, it’s my badge of honor.
W: What do you mean “badge of honor”?
U: Well, to me you see, a scar – and any scar, tells a story. And the story it tells is… a story of a wounding and healing that goes along with that wounding. And the more deeply you’re wounded, the more healing that must come your way, that you must experience for that wound to close up and for you to get your scar. I mean, you don’t get your scar unless you’ve been wounded and you have been healed. And I’ve got my scar.
W: So you’re proud of your scar.
U: Yes  (1997, June 5).

Urbach’s speech plan showed how she used self reflection and an inner voice to understand her pain, persuaded jurors about the horror of the bombing, and addressed an  ideal audience who righteously could judge her suffering. Unlike some of the other victims, Urbach provided an explicit moral interpretation and an idealized understanding of her experience. The style of victims’ statements, in ways similar to other argumentative discourse, depends on the knowledge and verbal sophistication of the speaker.Victims with high levels of knowledge and education, credentials Urbach had, likely expressed their victimage with more complex and reflective content than victims without such training. Nonetheless, all of the victims’ arguments borrowed some utterances, themes,and stylistics from others in order to formulate their own discourses.

3. Implications
Victim impact statements are a distinct genre of courtroom argument. The victims’ arguments in the McVeigh case evolved first from the social movement for victim’s rights, became part of specific legal statutes and opinions, and finally entered into the immediate legal and personal situations of the trial participants. The type of legal argument provides a double sense of testifying about what the victims observed and what others could not observe. To constitute this genre of legal argument, victims appropriated utterances from other contexts to achieve a specific goal. They developed their arguments by formulating their themes and style after a reflective dialogue with self; then they adjusted their testimony to the rules and expectations of their legal audience of the judge, attorneys, and jurors; and finally, they reflectively and subjectively interpreted their experiences in the terms of morality and justice accepted by the ideal audience of the superaddressee. At the same time, these complicated speech plans made vivid and factual contrasts between how the victims lived before the bombing and their present lives. This kind of argument contains facts and causal explanations dressed in the verbal vestments of suffering and hope in order to facilitate the moral reasoning of the jurors about the death penalty and to provide a voice for the victims. Even though legal standards try to preclude passion and feeling, the testimony of the victims necessarily is subjective and evokes affective responses because the victims carefully borrow themes and stylistics and create speech plans that allow them to witness through both an outer voice of objective fact reporting and an inner voice of subjective reflection. This study highlights the difficulty of moral reasoning in death penalty cases.Victims’ rights advocates view the use of impact statements in the McVeigh trial as proof of the success of the movement. In contrast, some legal scholars (Bandes, 1996) continue to see victims’ statements as a controversial type of formal legal argument because the emotional features have the potential to trump the factual and logical argumentation. This essay takes the position that victims’ arguments are persuasive because they allow arguers to give witness to the seen and the unseen, combine logical and emotional proof, and express multiple personal and social voices through the borrowing and reconstituting of themes and stylistics and the adoption of innovative speech plans that appeal to jurors’ assumptions about justice and morality.

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Abstract
Calls to action in environmental on-line networks reveal hortatory persuasion tactics used in new media discourse. Arguments of empowerment found in such electronically linked communities as environmental news digests, and email listservs of environmentalist groups, invoke a proactive audience. Hortatory elements of argument distinguish communication aimed at persuasion of beliefs and attitudes from arguments that are calls to action. Environmentalist discourse of on-line networks emphasizes the urgency of environmental crises, by placing blame and responsibility on humanity. Particularly in an era of civil society connected by global networks, hortatory arguments are crucial rhetorical devices for effective environmental social movements.
Globalization has pervaded the human experience. Indeed, in this media saturated world, it is difficult to ignore the interconnectedness of global events, ideas and cultures. As economic integration and political transformation influence international relations, individuals are responding to globalization through their own activities. “The study of argumentation is experiencing – and in turn reflects – many senses of the globalization concept…. The globalization of communication, and particularly of the Internet, has made questions about the influence of culture perhaps even more important than is usually recognized” (Klumpp, Hollihan, and Riley, 2001). A civil society is emerging as individuals identify and actualize common bonds, forming coalitions across traditional state and institutional boundaries (Wapner, 1998). One of the ways this is happening is through the creation of networks based on information and communication technologies (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). Some of the most prolific of these communication networks are environmental advocacy networks. The argumentation strategies of groups who communicate their positions on these networks are unique because they exhibit qualities of hortatory rather than simply descriptive discourse. These networks are distinct from informational or traditional news sources because they present environmental news as calls to action. This paper is a case study of several environmental news digests and email listservs of environmental groups and explores what the arguments of these networks tell us about how globalization is changing argumentation practices. I am interested in what the hortatory arguments of environmental on-line networks reveal about how technology affects the intent and purpose of arguers.

From the Latin, hortari, to encourage, exhortation can be broadly described as “the use of rhetorical means to encourage ongoing moral reformation or, more immediately, to encourage morally significant action on the basis of common experience, conviction or hope” (Avram, 2001, p. 279). Marked by strong urging, encouraging or inciting, hortatory discourse attempts to persuade the addressee to do something or to act in a certain way – to fulfill commands given by the arguer. In this way, exhortation is different than mere persuasion, which is rhetoric used to simply convince an audience of some truth (See Herrick, 1998). As a goal of argument, action is significant because it requires more of a commitment than simply changing beliefs; it induces people to demonstrate – publicly and visibly – their commitment. Hortatory arguments ask their audiences to act on their convictions, rather than just attesting to them. This takes resources: effort, energy, money and time, all of which present obstacles in persuading people toward action.
Black (1965) addresses exhortation, which he describes as that discourse in which the “stirring of an audience’s emotions is a primary persuasive force” (1965, 142). Action is prompted by strong emotional impetus. “The power of exhortation lies, first, in its capacity for evoking intense emotion, and second, in its capacity of legitimatizing the emotional experience with appropriate convictions” (Black, 1965, 45). The dual nature of hortatory persuasion illustrates Aristotle’s notions of ethos and pathos. The elements of the hortatory arguments of these environmental networks are distinct, yet they are interrelated as the convictions based on ethos and the emotional obligation of pathos are warrants for each other.

While the explicit treatment of exhortative discourse is sparse in contemporary argumentation theory, all arguments may be in some ways hortatory[i]. Burke describes rhetoric as symbolic action (1966). Symbols have meaning within context of audiences’ experience and Burke (1950) notes that “the basic function of rhetoric, [is] the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents” (41). So, in that rhetoric is persuasive, it is hortatory. Some would argue that all language or persuasive rhetoric is hortatory. Even in the act of naming, we are urging, and giving reason or compelling to action. Rhetoric forms and induces – this is its call to action. Burke distinguishes descriptive rhetoric from hortatory rhetoric, noting that the latter “is not just trying to tell how things are, in strictly ‘scenic’ terms; it is trying to move people” (1950, 41). He conceives of language and thought as “modes of action rather than as a means of conveying information” (1950, 41). Burke argues that rhetoric is an action imbued with “consciousness or purpose” (1945,14) and capable of bringing something and someone to actuality (1966, 52-54). What Burke tells us about the hortatory nature of argument is that such rhetoric provides motives for action. In this case, the motives are the environmental problems that warrant attention – and action.

The study of environmental rhetoric has been growing since the early 1990s (Waddell, 1998, xi). A brief survey of this literature reveals that while not explicitly named as such, environmental rhetoric is often hortatory. This case study analyzes hortatory arguments in environmental on-line networks from two environmental email listservs, and on-line news digests. There are hundreds of such lists and news sources. I chose the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) based on the size of their subscriber base, and on the hortatory nature of their arguments. Both groups have astounding success at attracting members. “Between 1985 and 1990 membership in the Environmental Defense Fund doubled, then doubled again between 1990 and 1991. The Natural Resources Defense Council grew 2.7 times between 1985 and 1990” (Keck and Sikkink, 1998, 128). “The Natural Resources Defense Council is a non-profit environmental organization with 500,000 members nationwide and a staff of scientists, lawyers and environmental experts (Legislative Watch, 30 May, 2002)[ii]. Their mission is to “protect the world’s natural resources and improve the quality of the human environment” (NRDC, 18 February, 1999). Environmental Defense has over 300,000 members nationwide (EDFNEWS, 1999) and describes itself as “a remarkable and unique nonprofit organization. Guided by science, we work to create practical solutions. These solutions win lasting political and economic support. Why? Because they are nonpartisan, cost effective and fair. We are dedicated to protecting the environmental rights of all people” (EDFNEWS, 13 December 2000). Both NRDC and EDF take litigation and regulatory negotiation approaches (Keck and Sikkink, 1998, 128) and in doing so make arguments about why people should participate in democratic discourse. These exhortative approaches reveal how globalization is changing the democratic nature of argumentation.

I studied two of National Research Defense Council’s four email bulletin listservs from February 1999-June 2002 – Earth Action and Legislative Watch. Earth Action is “the bulletin for environmental activists” published on-line by the NRDC approximately every two weeks and “calls out urgent environmental issues requiring grassroots action” (NRDC, 18 February, 1999). Legislative Watch is a similar on-line digest, but focuses on legislative actions that concern environmental activists. “Legislative Watch is sent biweekly when Congress is in session and tracks environmental bills moving through the federal legislature” (NRDC, 22 February, 2001). Environmental Defense Fund offers a news digest[iii], which I also observed from February 1999 – June 2002. EDF Dispatch is EDF’s environmental news digest that is published every week and generally has links to other websites for readers to learn more about these topics. From these three listservs, I performed a rhetorical analysis drawing from a sample of 600 messages. Many of these had narratives or news in the content of the message, others direct readers to websites for full stories. While very different issues were covered, several hortatory themes emerged which are significant for the study of environmental communication, and technologically-linked activist networks. First, I explore the use of ethos to establish credence for the claims of the specific aspects of the environmental crisis. Second, I explore the use of pathos to turn emotional appeals into reasons to act[iv]. Third, I discuss the notion of an active audience as conceptualized in the arguments of these environmental networks. I conclude by analyzing the implications for the hortatory arguments of environmental on-line networks on the state of democracy in an era of globalization.

Ethos: Concrete Description And Environmental Expertise
Ethos is an Aristotlean concept[v] that refers to the “persuasive potential of the speaker’s character or credibility” (Herrick, 1998, 88). Ethos concerns the credibility of character that a speaker is knowledgeable, trustworthy and has the audience’s best interests at heart (Herrick, 1998, 88). In the case of environmental networks – this credibility concerns the existence of an environmental crisis. “The first task of exhortation is, ironically, not suasory but didactic: the problem of being understood. Two attributes of the style of exhortation bear upon the matter of clarity. One of these attributes is the extensive use of concrete description; the other is the frequent substitution of is or will be for should or should be” (Black, 1965, 143). In this way, the ethos of environmental exhortation includes both the credibility of the shared vision of what should be (i.e. environmental sustainability), and concrete description of the environmental crisis as proof of the need for action. Thus, I analyze two primary qualities of ethos in the rhetoric of environmental on-line networks. First, NRDC and EDF establish their ethos as environmentalists. Second, the use of concrete description helps NRDC and EDF to assert their credibility as sources for environmental news.
The state of the environment is the subject of notable scientific debate. From global warming to water supply, environmental debates produce scientific evidence supporting all sides (See Porter and Brown, 1991 and Ray, 1993 e.g.). This is true of the numerous environmental issues presented by the EDF and NRDC, who use scientific evidence to help establish their credibility. This takes the form of studies or findings that establish the authority of NRDC and EDF as reliable sources on specific issues. Significantly, the audiences of these groups are subscribers, they sign up for these listservs to get information about environmental issues. In this way, the persuasive task of these environmental networks is nuanced because the audience is already convinced of the need to receive information about environmental causes and events. The NRDC and EDF have already established credibility for their audience because individuals turn to them for information about environmental issues. Thus NRDC and EDF work to spin their credibility as qualified sources for environmental news into reasons for their subscribers to take action on environmental issues.

One of the ways environmental networks establish their credibility is to frame their arguments with an ethos as environmentalists. The networks exemplify a self-defined community whose rhetoric relies on common values. Both communicators and audience members identify as environmentalists, and have a shared vision of ecological sustainability. “Exhortation takes a high stake in appeals from ethos, which may be built on the represented authority of a third person, a shared theological, philosophical, or social vision, common experience, or agreed on religious, military, political, or other purpose” (Avram, 2001, 280). NRDC and EDF have tapped into a segment of society based in environmental action and thus already active audience[vi]. Thus the groups couch specific actions in broad, general values. The emails I studied use language that is appealing to those who share environmental beliefs and values. A social vision for a sustainable environment becomes a warrant for action toward a shared goal of establishing environmental protections.
NRDC and EDF take care to cultivate this notion of a community and its shared vision. Most emails encourage audiences to become more involved in various causes, and even become informed about the groups themselves. “Take a look at what we do: Curious to know exactly what the Environmental Defense Fund does with its 170-person staff and 300,000 members nationwide? A series of new pages on our website, entitled ‘What We Do,’ will make it easier for you to learn about your favorite environmental program and get involved” (EDFNEWS, 16 March 1999). Environmental activist networks strive to make it easy for audience members to get involved, by eliminating barriers to action such as time and energy. Furthermore, EDF and NRDC are careful to reference the qualifications of their 170 person staff as well as their active member base, thus establishing the audience as part of the organization’s successful efforts for environmental protection. Phrases such as “get the facts,” “consult the experts,” and listen to an “authority on oceans” (EDFNEWS, 20 July 2000) are indicative of how these groups assert themselves as qualified sources on environmental issues, and their audience as powerful when armed with the information they provide. EDF and NRDC also publish progress reports to demonstrate their successful efforts to their audience. This works to encourage members to participate in these projects to contribute to the community’s ongoing success. These groups point to how actions have worked, and situations have improved, thus establishing credibility of groups and their members as successful activists.

The second quality of hortatory ethos evident in environmental networks is the use of concrete description to establish the need for action. Concrete description is important to hortatory arguments in general because arguers must give their audiences a reason to act. It is also important to environmentalists who operate on the existence of a crisis, or a need to call attention to environmental causes. Such concrete description helps environmental groups establish their knowledge and trustworthiness to their audience regarding specific issues. “Concrete description, more readily grasped than abstractions would be, offers no hindrances to the understanding and, at the same time, serves to stimulate emotionally charged responses. The tone of prophecy gives a greater sense of urgency to the exhortation than would the tone of advising or moralizing” (Black, 1965, 144). Descriptions of environmental crises provide proof of the need for action. “Hard numbers” or facts can help define the problem, and present motives for action by providing incontrovertible evidence that environmental destruction or injustice is happening. Verifiable proof, sometimes visual, can help clinch the need for action. Two examples point to different ways they do this: EDF’s feature regarding car pollution, and their satellite images of fires in the Brazilian Amazon.

“‘Tailpipe tally’ totes up your car’s pollution. Concerned about the environmental impact of your vehicle? This new interactive feature calculates the pounds of pollutants your make and model sends into the air each year” (EDFNEWS 10 August, 1999). A survey of tailpipe toxicity tests the amount of emissions a reader’s car produces. This provides people with the dirty facts of their driving habits – information urging EDF’s audience to change their behaviors by driving less, and thus lessen their personal environmental impact. Assigning quantifiable emission numbers to someone’s personal lifestyle can help them realize the impact of their actions and answers sentiments that one person cannot really make a difference. This motivates individuals by emphasizing the shared responsibility of pollution reduction. Environmental impacts become personal as each person, even if they do not take the test, becomes aware that they emit pounds of pollution each year by driving.
A second way that the networks use concrete description is with visual evidence of the environmental crisis. One vivid example of this is the satellite images of the burning Brazilian Amazon rainforest. “See the fires burning the Amazon rainforest. The average number of fires per day in the Amazon rainforest has been increasing dramatically since 1996. The scope of the burning is revealed in actual satellite images of sections of two Brazilian states taken last year” (EDFNEWS, 2 March 1999). By giving incontrovertible evidence that this environmental destruction is happening – it is harder for people in developed countries to ignore the plight of indigenous communities in developing countries that suffer at the expanse of development. Part of this environmentalist ethos involves the naming of the environmental crisis, that is naming specific practices or situations as environmental threats. By providing provocative visual images of the fires as evidence of this environmental threat, EDF vividly names the Amazon fires as part of the environmental crisis. This demonstrates the importance of concrete description for environmental networks. Hortatory arguments employ strong emotional appeals for action, provoking their audience with visual images to make an environmental threat far removed from their own experience seem closer and more threatening.

Pathos: Temporal Urgency Of Health Harms And Species Extinction
As described by Aristotle, pathos is “putting the audience in the right frame of mind” (Herrick, 1998, 86). It refers to “the affective or emotional appeals that give persuasive messages their power to move an audience to action” (Herrick, 1998, 87). Exhortative arguments indicate the “disposition of people to accept, sometimes even to seek, beliefs as a consequence of emotional experiences” (Black, 1965, 141). Environmental issues are fundamentally emotional to environmentalists whose frustration/sorrow/fear about the state of the Earth creates a belief in the need for action. “Exhortation is normally marked by an appeal to belief and action congruent with moral principles, social vision, or religious experience already shared by speaker and audience” (Avram, 2001, 279). Exhortation is therefore a call for “a moral turning” characterized by a “dynamic of preservation, perseverance, or return to good conscience” (Avram, 2001, 279). As discussed earlier, environmental exhortation is typically seeking to reinforce general notions of an environmental crisis with specific appeals of threats to humans and their environment. “Exhortation might be described metaphorically as persuasion aimed toward the heart and hands rather than the head and eyes. It is concerned with arousing a hearer’s emotional bond to shared knowledge and identifying that bond with recommended practice” (Avram, 2001, 279). In the case of environmental networks, both arguer and audience believe there is an environmental crisis, which means EDF and NRDC use pathos to get their audiences to mobilize around a particular issue. Environmental pathetic appeals involve notions of community and temporal urgency that are seen in two thematic appeals of environmental networks. First, NRDC and EDF use the existence of human suffering – most notably threats to children’s health and indigenous livelihoods – as reasons for action. Second, these environmental groups call to save endangered species, which are symbolic of the tragic state of the environment as a whole.
Human suffering is a common emotional theme of environmental networks to persuade their audiences of the impact of environmental problems on their own lives. Health harms are frequently cited in EDF and NRDC’s listservs. Descriptions of these health harms include concrete evidence including numbers at risk and the pervasiveness of these harms. “Unclean water kills four million people a year worldwide” (EDF News, 19 May, 2000). NRDC’s campaign against arsenic in drinking water is a telling example of how these environmental networks construct their pathetic appeals to incite their audiences to action.

Tell the Clinton administration to get the arsenic out of our water. According to a 1999 study by the National Academy of Sciences, arsenic in drinking water causes bladder, lung and skin cancer, harms the central and peripheral nervous systems, as well as heart and blood vessels, and causes serious skin problems…. 34 to 56 million Americans drink tap water supplied by systems containing arsenic at average levels that pose unacceptable cancer risks (Earth Action, 25 February 2000).
This description exemplifies how environmental networks evoke pain and suffering to indicate the seriousness of the risk of arsenic, which can even be fatal. NRDC includes the scope of the threat – millions of Americans are an “unacceptable” risk. These rhetorical qualities indicate how environmental networks rely on concrete description couched in shared concerns for human and community health. As discussed in the section on ethos, they use scientific studies to prove the established risk, and add emotional appeal with vivid description of the personal impact of this risk. A majority of these emotional appeals emphasize threats to children:
In October 1999, the EPA reviewed the hazards of Dursban [chlorpyrifos], and concluded that many uses of the pesticide expose people, and especially children, to higher levels of the chemical than the agency considers safe (studies find Dursban levels in indoor air to be almost four times more concentrated at floor level, where small children play, than at two feet above the floor). Moreover, carpets, furniture, and house dust are long-term reservoirs for pesticides, and studies show that risks to toddlers and others in homes or schools often remain above EPA levels of concern even days after the chemical is applied (Earth Action, 19 April, 2000).
NRDC relies on the emotional appeal of innocent children to call for stronger protections from chemicals and pesticides that are more likely to harm infants and children than adults (Earth Action, 25 February 2000). Children are seen as particularly vulnerable because they do not have the knowledge or immune systems to resist toxins. Children are seen as innocent, not complicit in causing environmental harms, and needing protection, which is a particularly emotional appeal to the maternal and paternal instincts of audience members. Environmental networks construct pathetic appeals by emphasizing the greater risk of exposure to children, and their susceptibility to harmful substances, so that their audiences feel personally affected by environmental threats.

The environmental networks I studied also make environmental appeals that are not within the personal experience of their predominantly American audiences. The health harms cited by NRDC and EDF also include narratives of indigenous suffering. “The claim about harm is a distinctive feature of advocacy networks. The environmental issues that most easily lend themselves to such portrayals involve displacement of traditional peoples or destruction of their livelihoods. These make for powerful appeals, and not surprisingly some of the best-known transnational networks have arisen to oppose deforestation and/or large dams” (Keck and Sikkink, 1998, p. 132). EDF and NRDC use the emotional salience of indigenous and impoverished people, who are framed as needing protection from undemocratic governments or dominant corporate interests. “Environmental problems affect all of us. But some communities, especially communities of color and poorer communities, are likely to suffer disproportionate impacts from environmental degradation. The Environmental Defense Fund is committed to finding equitable solutions for all” (EDFNEWS, 27 July, 1999). In this way, appeals to alleviate indigenous suffering emphasize equality in environmental protection. “Children in the desperately poor Denver neighborhood of Globeville know exactly what a Superfund site is. They live in one. To reach school, they pass through a grid of factories belching toxic chemicals” (EDFNEWS, 19 May, 2000). The appeals to children are supplemented by their impoverished state, which indicates they lack lobbying power and are held hostage to corporate interests. This email evokes images of factories continuously “belching” billows of toxic chemicals, daily poisoning school children. Environmental advocacy networks frame impoverished communities as victims of industrial pollution, deserving help from environmental activists.
The second pathetic theme that emerges in environmental on-line networks is the plight of endangered species. While there are many types of environmental arguments that concern species, what is significant for the study of hortatory arguments is the sense of temporality. All environmental discourse encompasses a thematic level of temporal concerns… the future and the past are presented as immanent in the present. Only in teleological framing does the very idea of the implementation of ‘green’ policy now make sense… temporal references become moral assessments, and expressions of time are mingled with aesthetic values” (Harré, Brockmeier and Mühlhäusler, 1999, p. 7). Hortatory arguments imbue a sense of urgency because they indicate the need for immediate action. Often the pressure of time becomes persuasive when seen on a continuum of evolution or history. Present concerns in the context of historical trends reveals that the current environmental crisis has escalated into a severe rupture in the normal processes of evolution. That is, humans are disrupting the balance of the ecological function of the earth, and this becomes a reason for action:

Help save endangered salmon in the Columbia River Basin. Just 200 years ago, the Columbia River Basin was the largest fish-producing river in the world, with 10-16 million salmon and steelhead running up the river every year…. Today, all four types of salmon that still spawn in the Snake River are on the endangered species list. These fish are central to Native American culture, once supported thriving local businesses and fisheries, and for centuries brought nutrients upstream from the ocean to fuel the growth of animals and plants far inland (Earth Action, 25 February, 2000).
Populations of fish are viewed in a historical context that compares the status quo to historical environmental situations. Furthermore, NRDC links the decline of species to the destruction of the culture and livelihoods of Native Americans indicative of themes of indigenous suffering discussed earlier. In this way, species are symbolic of how both culture and the environment are threatened by continued progress.
A sense of urgency is also emphasized by environmental networks that face time pressures because their campaigns are often directly in contention with ongoing campaigns of resource extraction. This is exemplified in NRDC’s efforts for protection of British Columbia’s Spirit Bear. “While logging companies continue to clearcut their way across British Columbia at the rate of one acre of ancient forest every 66 seconds…. NRDC and other environmentalists have launched a massive campaign to bring U.S. consumer pressure to bear on the logging companies themselves and the large corporate lumber consumers that purchase their products” (Earth Action, 21 November, 2000). NRDC is careful to indicate the urgency of the crisis – logging companies are destroying forests at such a rate that the bear’s habitat is in danger of disappearing completely. This incites people to act because of the urgency of this call to action, which is persuasive because people feel that they should act before it is too late to act.
NRDC’s Spirit Bear campaign exemplifies how urgent calls to action can be persuasive. Their lobbying efforts helped pressure the premier of British Columbia to sign an agreement that immediately prohibited or defered logging in 3.5 million acres of the ancient Great Bear Rainforest, that comprises the habitat of the Spirit Bear (Earth Action, 11 April, 2001). NRDC heralds this agreement as “an uncommon example of successful collaboration among industry, environmentalists, native peoples, rural communities, and government… and a major victory for NRDC and our partners, members and activists” (Earth Action 11 April, 2001). This success speaks to the persuasiveness of temporal description that exists in many environmental calls, and are particularly vivid in the arguments studied here. The urgency of the environmental crisis is illustrated by specific examples of habitat destruction, and human suffering that are symbolic of larger unsustainable practices that portend planetary extinction.

Active Audience In Environmental Appeals
The importance of understanding the audience in evaluating argumentation is widely noted (See Perleman and Olbrecht-Tyteca, 1969, Bitzer, 1968, Black, 1970, and Wander, 1984, e.g.). The ethos and pathos in environmental appeals involve the audience through their identification as environmentalists and strong emotional reactions. “An exhortation rests an appeal to action on the pathos of an audience’s desire to participate in the shared ethos represented” (Avram, 2001, 280). Audience participation in environmental activism called for in the on-line networks because their participation is cast as furthering a shared vision. This section looks at how ethos and pathos work together to invoke an active audience in environmental on-line networks.
Argumentation presumes the existence of a civil society and democratic deliberation (Klumpp, Hollihan and Riley 2001). The regulatory and negotiation approaches of the environmental on-line networks I studied reveal some of the ways that globalization influences our view of democracy – and the nature of democratic deliberation. An emerging civil society is empowered by new technology, and exemplifies how individuals and non-institutional groups are traversing domains previously occupied by state governments and other institutions. This contextualizes the ways that environmental groups can be persuasive – they must empower individuals to take action that furthers the group or cause as a whole. The globalization of new technology plays a key role in this persuasive ability because it produces a community of geographically distant like-minded people. NRDC and EDF invoke an audience in a few ways.

First, networks place an emphasis on individual communication, building on the environmental ethos discussed earlier. These arguments empower the audience to become an informed audience, and act on their knowledge of the environmental crisis.
EDF proclaims its listserv provides “news you can use in your everyday life. At Environmental Defense we have plenty of ideas about ways you can help the environment” (EDFNEWS, 24 February, 2000). NRDC and EDF invest in the capability of their audiences by portraying activism as essential, but also easy. “Contacting us just got easier. Want to write to us, e-mail us, order a report, download a banner? We’ve gathered all the ‘Contact EDF’ information on a single convenient page of addresses and links. Find what you’re seeking without wasting time” (EDFNEWS, 23 March, 1999). This exemplifies how networks seek to utilize new technology to diminish the impediments of time, effort and resources discussed in the introduction. NRDC and EDF tailor their messages to specific groups within these environmental communities. They offer ways for people with different interests to become involved. NRDC provides sample letters in their calls for constituents to write their congresspersons for certain causes. In this way, individuals can see how their personal communication is political participation that can help make a difference.
Second, NRDC and EDF’s focus on diverse individual interests promotes a community of informed citizens. Both groups urge their audience to “learn and decide.” This rhetoric evokes the notion of democratic deliberation that is emphasized in argumentation. These environmental networks provide individuals with knowledge and the ability to be active within a community of environmentalists.“Donate to EDF’s oceans program. EDF Oceans staff work on everything from aquaculture to overfishing. Find out more about what they do, and then decide if you’d like to help support their work” (EDFNEWS, 30 March, 1999). Similarly, NRDC and EDF showcase green car choices which show consumers all they need to know about buying greener cars – EDF urges its members to take the green car pledge – promising to make their next car an environmentally friendly one (EDFNEWS, 4 May, 1999). Environmental networks offer ways that everyone can find a way to become involved that appeals to their interests with different programs and pledges.

NRDC and EDF emphasize notions of community to invoke the obligations of their audience for fellow citizens. “Online guides serve as tools for communities. How can people living near vehicle assembly plants, oil refineries, and steel mills find the facts they need to ensure a cleaner, healthier future? Answer: by looking at our new industrial-sector community guides” (EDF NEWS, 6 July 1999). This community is linked by new technology, and in this way EDF and NRDC use the Internet to promote democratic participation. Twice a week, the poor children of Globeville discussed earlier “enter a computer classroom provided by Environmental Defense where they log on to a special Internet site and learn how to cajole the polluting factories to clean up their emissions.
By promoting the Internet in such communities, we recently won an important concession from America’s most powerful chemical companies” to voluntarily screen thousands of their chemicals for possible health hazards (EDF NEWS 19 May 2000). Here, pathos that creates a sense of community and thus promotes an active audience as NRDC and EDF urge other members of the global community to work to help protect these members who are helping themselves using the Internet.
Third, NRDC and EDF reveal the changing nature of activism in an era of globalization. The rhetoric of these networks points to the distinctions between hortatory arguments and other arguments, which address a relatively non-active audience who is not urged to demonstrate that they have been persuaded. However, new technology blurs the lines between attitudes and action, because communication is action. EDF and NRDC urge their audience to communicate their support for environmental causes to lawmakers. The chronicles of success of NRDC and EDF show that it is working. “About a year ago, NRDC began an aggressive effort to convince the president to confer monument status on the sequoias, and we asked you to help.You responded in unprecedented numbers – more than 10,000 of you faxed the White House supporting our monument proposal – and the result once again demonstrates the power we have to make a difference when we join forces to protect our nation’s natural treasures” (Earth Action, 19 April, 2000). This evidence shows that these environmental networks have the capacity to transform the meaning of activism – and it works, because the communication pressures political groups to legislate around environmental problems. In this way, the meaning of action changes as new technology makes it easier for people to voice their concerns about environmental issues. Networks increase communication in the political process through campaigns to sway public opinion through the communiques of their members. Activist audiences are empowered to continue to contribute to environmental campaigns when they see the success of their efforts verified by the networks.

Conclusions
This study has shown how environmental networks use new technology to increase democratic participation. The rhetoric of NRDC and EDF show how environmental groups use hortatory arguments to empower individuals and inform public opinion, creating a lobbying group sympathetic to their causes. Klumpp, Hollihan and Riley (2001) describe three challenges globalization poses for argumentation that the environmental networks I studied address. “The study of argumentation practice has developed out of a sense of commitment to a democratic process of deliberation, organized and institutionalized debate, and then political action” (Klumpp, Hollihan and Riley, 2001, 579). “The foundations of a civil society that are often taken for granted in argumentation scholarship are thus almost completely unformed in the new global era”(Klumpp, Hollihan and Riley, 2001, 579). NRDC and EDF work to reestablish infrastructure of civil society through communication networks. They invoke an active audience that invigorates environmental activism in an era of globalization. New technology gives people the tools to be active, and participate in public deliberation that responds to the changing sense of local community in an era of globalization. Second, “the representatives of these different knowledge regimes… have no systematic means of talking, let alone reasoning across their own unique problem areas or constituencies” (Klumpp, Hollihan and Riley, 2001, 580). The networks create a community to discuss environmental issues, providing a communication outlet for like-minded people to become informed. Third, “the entire global deliberative process lacks the transparency that democratic argumentation theory assume” (Klumpp, Hollihan and Riley, 2001, 580). The focus on informed citizens emphasizes the use of the Internet and other new technologies to increase the transparency of government. “Using the Freedom of Information Act, our Scorecard website has obtained unpublicized government information about local levels of toxic air pollution and made it available on the Internet. Find out about YOUR air” (EDFNEWS, 13 July, 1999). The activism promoted by EDF and NRDC work to increase the transparency of government processes, perhaps most explicitly in Legislative Watch which tracks environmental bills through Congress. Also, by providing information, these networks increase awareness of the environmental impacts of individual actions and international development policies. In this way, this study has shown how environmental on-line networks respond to the challenges posed by globalization.

“A recent article in ‘The Economist’ begins: ‘There is a lot of blather about how the Internet interfaces with democracy, but some things make it all seem real. www.scorecard.org is as real as hotdogs’” (EDF NEWS, 14 April, 1999). While commentary about the “realness” of hotdogs exceeds the scope of this paper, this reveals the ways that these environmental networks use technology to influence public participation in political and legislative processes. The communication networks of NRDC and EDF give environmentalist groups a voice that helps in lobbying policy makers. NRDC and EDF’s calls to action show how the meaning of action changes when individuals are networked through information and communication technologies. New technologies change what it means to be activist, and by making it easier to participate, ultimately increase democratic deliberation. Hortatory arguments of environmental on-line networks are persuasive because the individual has ways to take meaningful action in globalized world. In this way, hortatory rhetoric is critical to social change, because in this globalized world, individual action is key to garnering support for causes. In many ways, by emphasizing arguments other than strictly environmental appeals, emphasize how individuals are part of a global community. NRDC and EDF promote democratic participation by inciting activism through hortatory appeals that emphasize the obligations to human and non-human members of that community.

NOTES
[i] While argumentation scholars perhaps all write about hortatory arguments in some way, scholarship articulating argument theory explicitly dealing with exhortation is not prolific. Many theorists have written about rhetoric that prompts people to action. See for example, Fulkerson’s (1979) article on Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham jail.
[ii] Interestingly, during the course of this study, NRDC’s membership rose from 300,000 to 500,000 over the course of three years, which I observed from the estimates included in their emails.
[iii] Due to a name change in the middle of this study, this listserv is referred to as both EDF Dispatch and EDF News here.
[iv] It warrants mentioning logos, the third Aristotelian appeal. I do not explore this persuasive rhetorical element because it is not utilized in hortatory arguments, which, as Black (1965) notes, are primarily persuasive through emotional appeals, and thus logos is not exhibited as vividly as ethos and pathos in the networks I studied.
[v] Both ethos and pathos are referred to here as discussed by Aristotle, in Book II of Rhetoric (ca 340-335 B.C.). See Herrick (1998) p. 75.
[vi] See Wapner, (1998), Lipschutz and Conca (1993), and Kamieniecki, (1991) for further discussion of environmental civil society.

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