UEC Urban Forestry Practitioners Share All!

Urban forestry is one important way of connecting cities to the environment, so it’s appropriate that the Urban Ecology Collaborative’s Urban Forestry workgroup should be featured in this Special Issue of Cities and the Environment

Teaching Public Speaking as Composition

The public speaking course has changed little during the past two decades, despite the rapid and profound changes that have occurred in rhetorical scholarship. By contrast, the basic composition course in English Departments has undergone transformations that more closely reflect the development of the scholarship. One reason for this difference may rest in our failure to regard the public speaking course as a serious part of our mission as teachers and scholars. By concentrating on the rhetoric of composition. we might not only generate innovative and theoretically interesting approaches to pedagogy, but we might improve our rhetorical scholarship by connecting it more directly with our common experience as teachers of public speaking

Argument by Anecdote

Argumentation textbooks typically dismiss the anecdote as an inferior type of evidence. We argue that it deserves more serious attention because it serves three important purposes: (1) Anecdotes function as synecdoches capable of revealing insights unobtainable through statistical norms. (2) Their narrative form lends vivacity and presence to an argument. (3) They often enact or portray the arguer’s character. Anecdotes, then, coordinate evidentiary, representational, narrative and ethotic elements of argumentation and are not always trivial

Abundance of Planktonic Virus-Like Particles in Lake Erie Subsurface Waters

Author Institution: Department of Biological Sciences, Kent State University - Trumbull Campus ; Department of Biological Sciences and Water Resources Research Institute, Kent State UniversityAbundance of virus-like particles (VLP) was determined in Lake Erie subsurface water. The relationship between VLP and the bacterial and phytoplankton communities were investigated. Viral and bacterial numbers were determined using nucleic acid stains and epifluorescent microscopy. Phytoplankton abundance was estimated by chlorophylls extraction. Viral abundance averaged 1.05 x 106 VLP/ml and the ratio of viral to bacterial number was less than 1.0 across most sampling sites and dates. Viral abundance was not correlated with either bacterial abundance or chlorophyll a concentration. Viral abundance was found to be most similar to other Great Lakes and marine systems and dissimilar to other freshwater systems