Dr. Krista Ratcliffe calls jazz a perfect metaphor for teaching rhetorical writing. You know the tune, but how you play, or how you teach, depends on your audience. She asks her students to give the same care to writing, and she invokes the unlikely duo of Toni Morrison and Aristotle to press the point. One teaches the sensibilities of pragmatism and logic, and how emotion can alter communication. The other helps students understand the impact history, race, gender and class have on the way we communicate with others — and how they receive our message.

“Bottom line, it’s important to pay attention to language, it’s more than a tool we use to communicate our thoughts,” she says. “Language is culturally grounded; words have history. Writing with that awareness can become a habit of mind and a way to see the world. But if we take language for granted and use it as if it doesn’t have consequences, we can offend people. I’m not worried about offending people in the ‘PC’ way, but I am worried about how we foster genuine communication. People talk about the failure of rhetoric at the global level as war. That can become a metaphor for individual communication, too, when you don’t think about language and how it’s received by other people.”