Acknowledgements

Much of the credit for this book belongs to Dahliani Reynolds, who has been a kind and thoughtful leader. She created a generous spirit of collaboration that carried all of us through the long hours and hard work of writing, revision, peer review, more revision, and editing.  We are beyond grateful for her enthusiastic inspiration and tireless encouragement.

Thanks go to Catherine Forsa and Brian Hendrickson for running the student focus groups with Dahliani that set this project in motion.  A loud shout of thanks goes to members of the committee who developed and, brought to fruition, Thinking Rhetorically: Writing in Professional and Public Contexts: Jennifer Campbell, Catherine Forsa, Brian Hendrickson, Christian Pulver, and Mel Topf. Particularly, we would like to acknowledge Jennifer Campbell for setting the perfect tone and vision of the book in her introduction “Writing about Problems that Matter.” We are grateful to Catherine Forsa and Christian Pulver for their invaluable insights when giving the book its shape and coherence.  Many thanks to Mel Topf, who, without missing a beat, stepped up as editor to prepare the manuscript for publication.

This work would not have been possible without the support of our chair, Paul Bender, who always asks the right questions with wit and foresight. We also appreciate the support of our deans:  Cynthia Scheinberg, Dean, School of Arts, Humanities, and Education, and Jason Jacobs, Associate Dean of General Education.

Thinking Rhetorically: Writing in Professional and Public Contexts has been produced under the auspices of the OER Faculty Fellows Program, chaired by assistant professor Lindsey Gumb, Scholarly Communication Librarian.  We greatly appreciate Lindsey’s role in shepherding us through the process of selecting a publication platform and choosing licensing options. We would like to acknowledge the Center for Scholarship, Assessment, Learning, Teaching and Technology, which funded this fellowship.

Finally, we would like to thank our students for putting their faith in us.

Kate Mele