This article explores how public writers view rhetorical decisions in their use of quantitative information to educate, inform, and move audiences toward action. Using the concept of “statistical framing” to describe how writers signal evaluations of numbers to their readers, we set out to learn how these writers connected their rhetorical goals to how they framed quantitative information. We interviewed 14 writers using the discourse-based interview method and found that, for various reasons, writers valued speeding up and slowing down evaluations of numbers.

This study responds to claims in the popular press and within everyday academic life about the effects of modality and the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning. We analyzed grade data from a semester (Fall 2021) in which the institution we studied had nearly all first-year writing (FYW) students randomized and evenly distributed among fully on-campus, fully online, and hybrid FYW sections. We also analyzed grade data prior to the pandemic (2015–2019) and during the pandemic (2020–2021). We used binary logistic regression to see if course modality and/or the pandemic timeframe influenced student grades. Results were mixed, with little evidence that modality had an effect and more evidence that the pandemic time period may have had an effect. A more consistent finding was that the grading history of instructors was nearly always significant and meaningful regardless of modality or time period. Race, gender, extra academic support, and section type also had significant effects.

Ida B. Wells uses what critical race theorists call counterstory to expose contradictions in majoritarian assumptions about race in her statistical rhetoric. By using rhetorically forceful characteristics of the African American Verbal Tradition in counterstories about the victims of lynching, Wells leverages embodiment and emotion to amplify statistics of lynching. This essay examines the rhetorical properties of different versions of statistics of Black victims of lynchings from 1883 to 1891 that Wells used in the early 1890s to show how Wells’s approach to amplification in quantitative rhetoric honors and advocates for the people that can make up a statistic.

A statistic can be a powerful rhetorical tool in political discourse, but it can also be quickly dismissed by a resistant audience. This article argues that the statistic’s association with Aristotelian inartistic proof (in Greek: pisteis atechnoi, Lat. probationes inartificiales) can, counterintuitively, encourage resistant audiences to be dismissive, to think that statistics “lie.” By drawing from the concept of framing in media studies, I explore how the language used around a calculation can better serve readers when it is more explicit about the statistic’s creation from a social process—that it is invented rather than used in argument. If statistics rely on interpretation, rhetors should invite their audience to interpret rather than insist on an interpretation. I use examples from news articles covering immigration in the United States to explore a frame that does such insisting and a frame that invites.