Dan Seward teaches undergraduate courses in writing and rhetoric, including lower-division composition and technical, business and professional writing. Dan’s other activities include supporting the department’s writing program administration and serving as President of the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators.

In past years, he has presented on writing program assessment, online writing pedagogy and basic writing at the Conference on College Composition and Communication and at the Council of Writing Program Administrators. His publications in composition include the Scott, Foresman Writer (with John Ruszkiewicz, Maxine Hairston and Christy Friend) and, more recently, “Orchestrated Online Conversation” in the peer-reviewed journal Research in Online Literacy Instruction. In the late 1990s, Dan also pioneered the development of interactive electronic writing handbooks, working with Maxine Hairston and John Ruszkiewicz (an OSU alumnus) to publish Rhetoric Online and Coretext Online (both mentioned in this article on early electronic handbooks).

Dan also researches early modern rhetoric, in particular, Tudor and Stuart parliamentary oratory. His conference presentations at the Rhetoric Society of America and International Society for the History of Rhetoric have treated speeches by Elizabeth I, Francis Bacon, Thomas Wilson, Thomas More, Robert Cecil and numerous lesser-known orators. His 2017 study of Bishop John Alcock’s parliamentary oratory earned a high commendation in the annual Richard III Society Research Prize (attached below). 

Selected Publications

• “Parliamentary Rhetoric in Early Modern England.” Handbuch Politische Rhetorik [Handbook of Political Rhetoric], ed. Armin Burkhardt, De Gruyter, 2019.
• “Orchestrated Online Conversation: Designing Asynchronous Discussion Boards for Interactive, Incremental, and Communal Literacy Development in First-Year College Writing.” Research in Online Literacy Education, vol. 1, no. 1, 2018.
• “Bishop John Alcock and the Roman Invasion of Parliament: Introducing Renaissance Civic Humanism to Tudor Parliamentary Proceedings.” The Fifteenth Century: Writing, Records, and Rhetoric, vol. XV, ed. Linda Clark, Boydell & Brewer, 2017.
• “Conversation Starters: Orchestrating Asynchronous Discussion to Build Academic Community among First-Year Writers.” Online Literacies Open Resources, 2017.
• Ruszkiewicz, John, Dan Seward, Christy Friend, and Maxine Hairston. The Scott, Foresman Writer. 1st-5th eds., Longman, 1998-2011.

Curriculum Vitae