Shepley believes rhetorical ecologies the following implications:
- “To examine such factors, we look for signs of influence over time, during and after the writing of the texts, and we treat the student writer and his or her writing as susceptible to change. For Cooper and other scholars explain that thinking ecologically means seeing various factors as continually dynamic, as themselves changed by their interaction with other people, texts, and ideas. A writer, then, is transformed by her incorporation of readers’ suggestions on a draft; a text acquires new uses and meanings once it encounters multiple sources of scrutiny or elaboration.”
- “Although Edbauer Rice engages minimally with Richard Vatz’s critique of the rhetorical situation, her use of rhetorical ecologies extends Vatz’s interest in the individual rhetor’s agency… Thus, room exists in which to see rhetorical ecologies as a more social, dynamic version of the rhetorical activity that Vatz alludes to when he writes, “[T]he rhetor is responsible for what he [sic] chooses to make salient” (158). Edbauer Rice might update Vatz’s position by saying: the rhetor or several rhetors are responsible for what they choose to contribute to a text’s meanings and effects.”
Finally, using rhetorical ecologies as a methodology for historical archival work:
- challenges the notion that history consists of that which happened long ago. Historical texts become identifiable as texts that affected audiences and that now affect new audiences.
- shifts attention from the immediate purpose of a piece of writing (what did its writer intend to accomplish?) to the rhetorical work of a piece of writing (in the service of whose goals has the writing been used?), work that is done whenever someone sees fit to support and make visible the writing in question. The latter emphasis directs attention to the cooptation and recirculation of student writing.
- opens up possibilities to compare historical evidence across institutional sites