ABSTRACT
My argument in Procedural Habits has been fairly straightforward. To date, our field’s efforts to engage emerging mediums is largely marked by a preference for expressive texts and the exclusion of mundane ones. Beyond a mere subjective preference, I have sought to demonstrate that these exclusions often reflect a preference for certain types of theoretical assumptions about rhetoric and writing as well (expressive/mundane, discourse, social construction). As a result, rhetoric and composition studies continues to have difficulty in addressing the presence of mundane habit-shaping design elements or genres that often function rhetorically at levels of nonconscious behavior reinforcement. In turn, my efforts here are to recast these related sets of preferences for the expressive by using mundane habit-shaping elements and genres of videogames to reach some more fundamental conclusions about habit’s role in rhetoric in general.
