Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication (RSTC) Plan B Research Papers

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    “The Golden Years” – Narratives of Aging on the AARP Website
    (2022-03-23) Kapinos, Aaron
    With the number of seniors over the age of 65 projected to grow rapidly over the coming decades, the conversation about aging will become ever more important. AARP, one of the largest media companies targeting seniors, will play a large role in shaping narratives of aging. As such, the case study that follows is an important contribution to the conversation about aging. I explore the narratives of aging related to the topic of health which currently exist on the AARP website, following in the footsteps of Bowen and Anderson, the only published articles studying AARP’s narratives of aging. My methods include a content inventory and thematic analysis of a sample of “Health” articles from the AARP website. My results show that there is no single dominant narrative of aging regarding health in AARP’s “Health” articles; AARP seems to use multiple narratives to approach their senior audience as agents with a moderate amount of agency.
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    "What We Now Believe is the Truth": Apologia, Presence, and Narrative in This American Life's "Retraction" Episode
    (2013-07) Leem, Susan
    This thesis explores This American Life's "Retraction" episode as a unique type of apologia, a retraction in the journalistic sense, which uses narrative to correct an earlier broadcast episode containing factual errors. Host Ira Glass attempts not only to set the record straight (and provide a new radio experience to replace the offending one), but also to repair his image, and assert the status of his show as a serious journalistic program. To do so, he uses elements of William Benoit's image restoration strategies to distance himself from Mike Daisey's fictional storytelling, and uses stylistic choices within his narrative to create presence for the audience that reflect values of journalism such as the principle of "eyewitnessing."