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David Holmes’s Where the Sacred and Secular Harmonize asks readers to attend to the frequently overlooked rhetoric of key speakers during the 1963 Birmingham mass meetings that contributed to the s...

The first and only time I ever heard Martin Luther King speak I was a college undergraduate. It was in the early sixties and I sat mesmerized in the upper tier of what was then the Charlotte (North...

An essential and highly regulated step in gene expression is transcription initiation. After promoter binding and DNA unwinding (‘bubble opening’) and in the presence of nucleoside triphosphates (NTPs), the RNA polymerase (RNAP)-promoter initial transcribing complex (RPitc) engages in ‘abortive initiation’, a process in which RNAP cycles between synthesis and release of short RNA transcripts. In abortive initiation, RPitc is believed to undergo a sequence of transitions between different initiation sub-states. The kinetics of the production of a full RNA transcript starting at a late initiation sub-state is expected to be similar or faster than the kinetics measured from an earlier initiation sub-state. To test this hypothesis, we developed a novel in vitro single-run quenched kinetics transcription assay based on the detection and quantification of run-off transcripts. Using this assay and corroborating it with gel-based and magnetic tweezer assays, testing two different promoters, we surprisingly found that run-off transcription kinetics starting from late initiation sub-states is slower than kinetics starting from earlier initiation sub-states. When the same kinetic measurements were performed in the presence of the transcription elongation factor GreA, the kinetics starting from a late initiation sub-state was accelerated. Experimental results suggest that as a function of shortage in NTPs RPitc can enter an off-pathway state in which the nascent RNA is in a backtracked, paused position, awaiting incorporation of the missing NTP. Our findings suggest that pausing at distinct stages of transcription initiation could regulate gene expression under stressed conditions.

What do we want students to know, what skills do we want them to have after completing a series of courses in college English? College English ought to provide students with certain communicative skills that enable them to ana lyze rhetorical effect and produce rhetorically effective texts, including those to be read, those to be viewed as images, those to be heard, and those not to be heard. Especially exciting is the expanding body of knowledge centered on visual, aural, and silent texts. Within the past five years, new books on visual rhetoric, the rhetoric of silence, and the rhetoric of listening have joined guides to analysis and production of printed texts (see, e.g., Faigley et al.; Glenn; Ratcliffe). This trend signals increasing recognition of the need to develop nondiscursive communication skills, skills that college English should engage itself in perfecting. I use the term "skills" unapologetically. Although many in English studies are uncomfortable with the idea that we should teach skills?claiming instead that we teach texts or au thors?I think it is just the right word. Ultimately what students remember about

An earlier version of this article was delivered as the Chair's Address at the Opening General Session of the CCCC Convention in New York, March 2003. I review the current mission and position statements of the organization by calling attention to the ways in which our current social and political climate challenges our ability to meet our goals and support our positions. I weave into my text the "voices" of historical black women who called for response in their own time and even in ours.