Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder (review)

In Rhetorics for Community Action, Phyllis Mentzell Ryder develops a rich and incisive text that gets to the heart of the rhetorics of publics, community building, and democratic action. Through its approach, the book demonstrates the importance of—and indeed, it was born of—the synergy between teaching and research, practice and scholarship. Ryder spends most of the book unpacking theories and discourses of publics through case studies of community groups in the DC metro area; throughout, she makes it clear that developing our own understanding is beneficial for teaching students. Most chapters close with a section on pedagogical implications (Chapter Three is a particularly robust example), and the book also contains three appendices filled with suggested guidelines for setting up and structuring a public rhetoric course, sample writing assignments, and sample community partnership profiles.

In her introduction, Ryder describes her experiences teaching a service-learning course on social protest to undergraduates at George Washington University and how it led her to reconsider the nature of democracy, public work, and social action. In previous iterations of her course, Ryder had asked students to study theories of the public and social protest and then use those to develop a framework for analyzing the kind of public work being done by partner community organizations. However, Ryder soon found that her “first course designs did not interrogate any of the competing definitions of democracy and public work but assumed that every non profit operated within a grassroots, community-organizing framework” (7). In other words, Ryder discovered that the public work and social protest methods of these non-profits didn’t neatly fit into the scholarship she had asked her students to read. This focus produced similarly narrow understandings in her students of what public formation and writing was, and it “inadvertently taught students to scorn the very organizations [she] had asked them to work with” (7). She realized that she would have to expand her vision of democratic action and public work and began “allow[ing] the theories about the public . . . introduced in this book to emerge from students’ experience working with and studying the rhetorics of public organizations” (82).

As a result of this realization, Ryder developed a broader understanding of public work, an understanding that forms the underlying core of the book. Ryder draws on Bartholomae’s notion of inventing the university to conceptualize her broader vision of public work, arguing “that when people write (or speak or perform) public texts, they invent the public they wish to address—a complicated but powerful rhetorical move” (11). These moves of public formation are complicated and powerful—a “struggle,” Ryder calls it—because organizations must write and work in a space where there are many competing publics fighting for recognition. Ryder rejects the idea that there is one ideal public against which all publics should be measured, and she instead calls for recognizing the innate multiplicity of publics and public writing.

In Chapter Two “Publics Worth Studying,” Ryder uses an article by Keith Morton and Sandra Enos to frame her central argument that too often, scholars work from a narrow a view of what “public” work is and privilege social change organizations as doing the “best” kind of public work. Nonprofits can enact democracy and question the status quo, Ryder argues, because there is more to public agency than “trying to effect change through government” (42): personal decisions and behaviors can change lives, and so “the act of choosing is [also] an act of resistance” (53). What’s especially valuable about this chapter, particularly for Community Literacy’s audience of community practitioners, is the connection Ryder makes between scholarship and larger ideological, historical, and material realities faced by organizations, particularly in the forms of neoliberalism and nihilism.

In Chapter Three “Public Writing in Community Organizations,” Ryder examines the texts of community organizations and outlines some of the major rhetorical challenges they...