Rhetorical figures of speech provide important analytical frames to chart how arguments operate within genres and within genre ecologies. Varieties of the figure allow for the rendering of future time or fact in the present, which can be a powerful rhetorical inducement toward social and political action. In this article, we examine how anticipatory arguments drawn from complex data shape a key genre for public and policy-facing work on the climate crisis-the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Synthesis Report's (SYR) Statement for Policy Makers (SPM). We examine how the rhetorical figure of prolepsis operates within this genre to understand the anticipatory arguments and logics emerging from the synthesis of scientific findings and their reporting. Pairing figural studies and Rhetorical Genre Studies, we further offer an approach to investigate how these patterned operations of language might intersect in their rhetorical workings.

U.S. print news coverage of Covid vaccine hesitancy represents a departure from previous depictions of vaccine skepticism as a problem of wrong belief. This article reports on a mixed methods study of 334 texts about Covid nonvaccination and vaccine hesitancy published between December 2020-December 2021. Texts were analyzed for common themes and compared with prior media depictions of vaccine skepticism. Findings show that texts published during phased Covid vaccine distribution framed nonvaccination as a response to structural inequities, while later texts returned to blaming individuals for their hesitancy. These findings attest to the durability of individualistic framings of health while also illustrating possibilities of alternative frames.

In this study, we examined burst length and its relation with working memory, attentional control, transcription skills, discourse oral language, and writing quality, using data from English-speaking children in Grade 2 ( = 177; = 7.19). Results from structural equation modeling showed that burst length was related to writing quality after accounting for transcription skills, discourse oral language, working memory, and attentional control. Burst length completely mediated the relations of attentional control and handwriting fluency to writing quality whereas it partially mediated the relations of working memory and spelling to writing quality. Discourse oral language had a suppression effect on burst length but was positively and independently related to writing quality. Working memory had an indirect relation to burst length via transcription skills whereas attentional control had a direct and indirect relation. These results suggest roles of domain-general cognitions and transcription skills in burst length, and reveal the nature of their relations to writing quality.

Handwritten texts carry significant information, extending beyond the meaning of their words. Modern neurology, for example, benefits from the interpretation of the graphic features of writing and drawing for the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and disorders. This article examines how handwriting analysis can be used, and has been used historically, as a methodological tool for the assessment of medical conditions and how this enhances our understanding of historical contexts of writing. We analyze handwritten material, writing tests and letters, from patients in an early 20th-century psychiatric hospital in southern Germany (Irsee/Kaufbeuren). In this institution, early psychiatrists assessed handwriting features, providing us novel insights into the earliest practices of psychiatric handwriting analysis, which can be connected to Berkenkotter's research on medical admission records. We finally consider the degree to which historical handwriting bears semiotic potential to explain the psychological state and personality of a writer, and how future research in written communication should approach these sources.