ABSTRACT
James Jasinski’s Sourcebook on Rhetoric, Herbert W. Simons notes in the work’s foreword, began as an eight-page mimeograph Jasinski prepared to distribute to his contemporary rhetorical theory classes. Years later, he used the inventory of key terms as the basis for the proposal he submitted to Sage Publications’ series in Rhetoric & Society, each book to be approximately 200 pages in length. Later still, scholars and students in rhetoric have before them a resource consisting of a 30-page introduction, a 602-page glossary of concepts, and a nearly 40-page index. The book is an important addition to such works as Bryant’s “Rhetoric: Its Function and Its Scope,” Ehninger’s “On Systems of Rhetoric,” Bitzer and Black’s The Prospect of Rhetoric, Fisher’s Rhetoric: A Tradition in Transition, Horner and Leff’s Rhetoric and Pedagogy, and Lucaites, Condit, and Caudill’s Contemporary Rhetorical: A Reader.1 Though divergent in their purposes and approaches, these works and others in a similar tradition are unified by a focus on discerning key concepts, themes, ideas, and theories that define the rhetorical tradition, primarily from the perspective of research in communication studies. Jasinski’s contribution to this tradition, to adapt Simons’s words, is “a very odd but extremely useful reference work.”2 So it is. But in my view, it is much more useful than odd.
