This article seeks to explore the influence of the knowledge economy on the status of writing and literacy. It inquires into what happens to writers and their writing when texts serve as the chief commercial products of an organization—when such high-stakes factors as corporate reputation, client base, licensing, competitive advantage, growth, and profit rely on what and how people write. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 12 individuals employed in writing-intensive positions, it examines the organization of workplaces for the production of texts, the work of writers as mediational means within the workplace, the growing presence of regulatory controls on the production of writing, and the ways that demands for innovation and change affect writers and their writing. This is an exploratory installment in a larger project that seeks to situate the rise of mass writing in the United States, since about 1960, not only as an economic phenomenon but as a new development in the history of literacy with serious cultural, political, social, and personal implications.

This article documents aspects of the history of support for scholarship by two professional organizations involved with teaching composition at the postsecondary level: the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Evidence is found that for the past two decades, the two organizations have substantially withdrawn their sponsorship of one kind of scholarship. That scholarship is defined as RAD: replicable, aggregable, and data supported. The history of RAD scholarship as published in NCTE and CCCC books and journals, compared to that published elsewhere, is traced from 1940 to 1999 in three areas: teaching of the research paper, gain in writing skills during a writing course, and methods of peer critique. The history of NCTE and CCCC attempts at scholarly bibliography is also traced. Implications are considered for the future of the study of college composition as an academic discipline.

This article reports research that attempts to characterize what is powerful about digital multimodal texts. Building from recent theoretical work on understanding the workings and implications of multimodal communication, the authors call for a continuing empirical investigation into the roles that digital multimodal texts play in real-world contexts, and they offer one example of how such investigations might be approached. Drawing on data from the practice of multimedia digital storytelling, specifically a piece titled “Lyfe-N-Rhyme,” created by Oakland, California, artist Randy Young (accessible at http://www.oaklanddusty.org/videos.php), the authors detail the method and results of a fine-grained multimodal analysis, revealing semiotic relationships between and among different, copresent modes. It is in these relationships, the authors argue, that the expressive power of multimodality resides.

This article traces the historical and conceptual development of what is known as activity theory, from Vygotsky and Luria, to A. N. Leont’ev, to Engeström, in order to illustrate what I see as two problems with the activity theoretic approach, especially as manifest in the work of Leont’ev and Engeström: what I call the boundary and/or focus problem and the unit-of-analysis problem. In the second half of the article, I explore the social semiotic of an everyday artifact, the “speed bump,” and introduce a discovery heuristic for examining how this artifact functions mediationally in human activity. In so doing, I have tried to discover activity through principled analysis, rather than assuming activity or activity system a priori.

This article presents research from a qualitative study of the way that reflective writing is solicited, taught, composed, and assessed within a state-mandated portfolio curriculum. The research situates reflective texts generated by participating students within the larger goals and bureaucratic processes of the school system. The study finds that reflective letters are a genre within the state curriculum that regulates the substance and tone of students’ reflections. At the classroom level, the genre provides a mode that students adopt with the assurance that their reflections will meet state evaluators’ expectations. At the bureaucratic level, the genre helps to continually validate the state’s portfolio curriculum through its strong encouragement of stylized narratives of progress. The study demonstrates the importance of understanding how large-scale assessments shape pedagogy and students’ writing.

This study of English language learners, six Mandarin-speaking and five Spanish-speaking elementary students, revealed that students engaged in a variety of writing practices at home and school. A continuum of attitudes, from positive to negative, characterized students’attitudes toward writing in English and their native languages. Students’ writing practices and attitudes toward writing were influenced by home backgrounds and classroom contexts. Home background influences included parents’ educational backgrounds and income levels, plans for staying in the United States, support for writing at home, and cultural expectations. School and classroom factors included frequency and quality of opportunities for writing and teachers’ expectations for writing tasks. Implications of the study include the necessity to provide multiple opportunities for students to write for purposeful audiences in their native language as well as in English.

Fahnestock and Secor’s “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism” characterized literary criticism of the 1970s as conservative and self-celebratory. However, although literary theory has since undergone significant change, few rhetorical analyses of recent literary criticism as the preferred genre of a disciplinary discourse community have been conducted. This analysis of 28 articles of literary criticism published between 1999 and 2001 reveals that because of their flexibility, the stasis and special topoi conventions of earlier literary criticism continue to function. However, the shared values assumed in literary criticism have shifted away from a preference for isolated meditation on textual particulars. Instead, criticism is now portrayed as a conversation in which knowledge about literary texts and their historical contexts is socially negotiated and accumulative. Moreover, this scholarly project is frequently assumed to work toward social justice. The article ends with implications for understanding how knowledge is built within disciplinary communities.

This study investigates the roles of biological and psychological gender, as well as assigned discussion topic, in the written language use of nonprofessional writers. University students wrote passages on three specific topics—one socioemotional and descriptive, one functional, and one involving political debate. Effects of biological gender were minimal. Psychological gender played a greater role, particularly when measured explicitly rather than implicitly. Passage topic played the greatest role in language use. Rather than enacting their own gender through their writing, writers used language befitting the passage topic. More female-preferential devices featured in passages involving socioemotional descriptions and more male-preferential features were employed in passages involving political debate. The study demonstrates the relative impacts of gender and contextual constraints on communication.

This article investigates one aspect of scientific style in French: the use of tenses. It investigates the claims made in the literature that the verb system of scientific French is a temporal. The frequency of tensed finite forms in 10 French language journal articles on biological sciences is examined. The rhetorical function of past and future tenses is examined and six functions of tense choice are isolated. This analysis suggests that tense marking is actually more complex than previous claims have maintained and that tense choice serves to encode (a) temporal, (b) rhetorical, and (c) structural processes in the scientific text. Tense choice is therefore part of the communicative repertoire of the scientific writer, which writers use to create and communicate information, and which is responsive to the rhetorical demands of communicating about science.

This article reports on an empirical study undertaken at the University of the North, South Africa, to test personal classroom observation and anecdotal evidence about the persistent gap between writing and spoken proficiencies among learners of English as a second language. A comparative and contrastive analysis of speech samples in the study showed a significant higher proportion of morpho-syntactic nonstandard forms in the learners’ written compositions and more nonstandard discourse forms in their oral presentations. As a result, it is argued that this gap may be minimized when learners’written interlanguage variety is used productively as a means toward normative writing proficiency. Recommendations for remedial instruction in second-language writing pedagogy, within the framework of Cummins’s conversational abilities and academic language proficiency, are offered for adaptation in comparable situations.

This research analyzed the composing processes of two high school students designing horse ranch plans for a course in equine management and production. The investigation focused on understanding the problems driving the design process, the tools through which the students inscribed and encoded meaning in their compositions, and the integration, representation, and mediation of their emerging identities through the design process. The analysis revealed that the students solved problems suggested by the particular culture surrounding the production of a specific breed of horse and constructed unique problems based on their knowledge of horses and ranch facilities. The tools through which they constructed these texts suggested both the cultural dimensions and narrative inscriptions of their designs. The culturally mediated narratives in particular contributed to students’ construction of identities, especially with respect to their orientation as members of the managerial (Darin) and working (Riley) classes.

Historians generally agree that causality is central to historical writing. The fact that many school history students have difficulty handling and expressing causal relations is therefore of concern. That is, whereas historians tend to favor impersonal, abstract structures as providing suitable explanations for historical events and states of affairs, students often focus on human “wants and desires.” The author argues that linguistic analysis can offer powerful insights into how successful students use grammar and vocabulary to build different types of causal explanations as they move through secondary schooling. In particular, the author shows how functionally oriented linguistic analysis makes it possible to discriminate between “narrative” and “analytical” explanations, to distinguish between “enabling” and “determining” types of causality, and to reveal the value of assessing degrees of causal impact.

The personal statement written for graduate school admission has been a genre virtually ignored by rhetoricians but one that deserves attention. Not only a document of pragmatic importance for applicants, the personal statement is an indicator of disciplinary socialization. The discipline studied here is clinical psychology. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the author analyzed a corpus of statements to identify features distinguishing statements of admitted applicants from those of rejected applicants. The findings showed that successful applicants attended more to projecting their future research endeavors and demonstrating their commitments to scientific epistemology. Thus, the author argues that the modifier personal needs qualification, because successful applicants tend to emphasize their public identities as apprentice scientists.

In this article, the author builds on McHenry and Heath’s study of the “literate” and the “literary” and McHenry’s research on “forgotten readers” by examining the often undocumented literacy traditions and practices of men and women of African descent. First, the author traces the legacy of blended traditions of both written and spoken words in African American writing and activism. Continuing with an examination of Black literary and social movements, the author asserts that the recent renaissance of activities around literacy, such as spoken word poetry events as well as writing collectives, contributes to a historical continuum. Ultimately, the author shows the importance of the inextricable link between history, literacy studies, and the teaching of language arts.

Following the scientific revolution, the modern perception of discourse assumed that text can and should reflect, in a literal way, objective reality as observed in the real world. This perception is radically different from a traditional religious perception of discourse in general and from the Jewish perception in particular. The Jewish traditional perception was based upon intertextual (and not empirical) models of inquiry and endeavored to uncover concealed levels within texts through analytical-philological methods. It is argued that the revival of Hebrew as a secular language went hand in hand with the adoption of the modern perception of discourse. This adoption involved a change in the relationship between text, knowledge, and reality within Jewish society, which found explicit expression in the Hebrew journals established in the middle of the 19th century.

This study examines how first language and the type of writing task affect undergraduates’ word usage from source readings in their English writing. Of 87 participating university undergraduates, 39 were native English speakers from a 1st-year writing course in a North American university, whereas 48 were 3rd-year Chinese students learning English as a second language in a university in China. Using two preselected source texts, half of the students in each group completed a summary task; the other half completed an opinion task. Students’ drafts and the source texts were compared to identify exact or near verbatim retention of strings of words from sources with or without acknowledgement. A two-way ANOVA indicated that both task and first language had an effect on the amount of words borrowed. The study found that students who did the summary task borrowed more words than those who wrote the opinion essays, and Chinese students used source texts mostly without citing references for either task.

Chinese characters are often viewed as a premodern or incomplete form of literacy. Authors with an autonomous view of literacy view Chinese as a concrete, homeostatic language inadequate for use in abstract thought and movement toward mass literacy. Even those with an ideological model framework propose that the intrinsic nature of Chinese characters identifies it as an elite language of gentry and political rulers. This study reexamines this view of Chinese characters as a protoliteracy by investigating recent national literacy rates, economic trends, and relevant literature for East Asian nations that use Chinese characters as an integral part of their written language. The author argues for caution in using the protoliteracy paradigm for Chinese language reform because modern Chinese is associated with high levels of mass literacy and economic prosperity. In addition, recent cognitive and historical literature suggests Chinese characters are used in languages because of their advantages for abstract thought.

Drawing on existing work on popularizations, this investigation of book-length scholarly essays by practicing scientists across three disciplines reveals a hybrid genre that is neither popularization nor research report. The study utilizes both textual analysis and personal commentary from the writer-researchers to achieve a three-way comparison between the popularization, research article, and the book-length scholarly essay that clarifies how these essays contribute to the authors’ academic agendas. Writing for both a general audience and a jury of their peers, these academics employ an argumentative generic structure. Such argumentation develops a rhetoric of rational inquiry, where understanding how answers to perplexing problems are arrived at is just as important as the answers themselves. This genre also suggests the possible resurfacing of the essayist tradition in the sciences, as these practicing researchers engage with wider audiences in theoretical and philosophical speculation.

Researchers studying science communication often examine how texts addressed to different audiences contribute to the formation of knowledge on a given issue. This article examines how arguments on scientific issues travel from text to text by considering how certain figures of speech persist from version to version. It uses a specialized genre of articles appearing in Science and Nature that introduces research reports appearing later in the issue. These pieces refer explicitly to a research report in the same issue, and in addition to their own agendas, re-present the researchers’ claims and supporting evidence. To investigate how the core of an argument survives, the expression claims and lines of support in epitomizing figures are compared. The articles sampled suggest that the figure antithesis, embodyingsingle-difference arguments,often persists from version to version. But in the process of perfecting a figured expression, arguments may be subtly changed in subsequent versions.

This article undertakes a close rhetorical reading of the speeches given by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Francis Collins, and Craig Venter on June 26, 2000, at the White House ceremony announcing the completion of the Human Genome Project. Specifically, it looks at the metaphors used by each speaker to describe the activity of genomic scientists. Scientific activity regarding the genome was metaphorically compared to such actions as producing a map, opening a frontier, unlocking a vault, drawing a blueprint, reading an instruction manual, and learning a language. This article argues that these metaphors and the way in which they interact with each other can oversimplify the subject matter under discussion and can conflict with the ethical goals that the authors explicitly proclaim. An examination of the interaction between metaphorical vehicles in this particular case study amends some earlier claims that the author made in a theoretical reflection on the problems and the possibilities of mixed metaphors in genomic science.

In 1996, New York University professor of physics Alan Sokal wrote a parody of an academic article he titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” This parody escaped detection by the editors and was published in the journal Social Text. Sokal outed his own hoax in the academic magazine Lingua Franca, after which prolonged discussion about the hoax took place in both academic and popular venues. This article explores the rhetorical dimensions of Sokal’s hoax, defining the hoax as a rhetorical genre, relating the Sokal hoax to some 19th-century American scientific hoaxes, explaining why this hoax inspired such intense reactions, and identifying some of the stylistic and the generic exaggerations. The impassioned discussion of this hoax may be explained by the dynamics of its rhetorical context, which drew in Social Text ’s editors as it flattered their professional vanity and revived the debate over the culture wars. But the textual dynamics of Sokal’s hoax have been largely ignored, even though closer attention to genre, style, and argument might have prevented the hoax. Rhetorical understanding thus requires attention to both texts and contexts.

Scientific popularizations are generally considered translations (often dubious ones) of scientific research for a lay audience. This study explores the role popularizations play within scientific discourse, specifically in the development of chaos theory. The methods included a review of the popular and the semipopular books on chaos theory from 1975 to 1995, interviews with key figures, and an analysis of the citations in scientific research journals to Gleick’s well-known popularization, Chaos: Making a New Science. The results indicate that popularizations take different forms as a scientific revolution develops into normal science. At various points, popularizations are used by scientists to find a broad, interdisciplinary, scientific audience, to show interest in the field, to disseminate lines of inquiry, and to help establish the author’s priority claim.

Written communication scholarship has shown that successful social change requires discursive stability. This study was designed to investigate how this stability is created. Critical discourse analysis of 30 corporate university articles investigated claims authors made about the expansion of market-based values into contexts of organizational learning and academic higher education. In total, 243 claims were examined for uses of modality, hedging, presupposition, and the progressive aspect. Results claim that articles used modality, hedging, and the progressive aspect to create strategic ambiguity that was resolved ideologically through presuppositions that reflect the assumptions of “the new capitalism.” Results indicate that discursive stability is not solely a semantic issue but may occur pragmatically and syntactically as texts are structured to displace existing knowledge within contested spaces. Results also indicate that a heavy reliance on pragmatic features may characterize technologized texts, texts designed to create social change without input, democratic participation, or consensus building.

The media, which includes editorials, have been shown to play an important role in thedefinition of priorities in public agenda. In the domain of international matters, thepublic relies heavily on the media, and editorials play an even greater role. This articleexamines how explicit mentions of external sources of information function in theargumentative structure of editorials to achieve a persuasive effect. Acorpus of 40 editorials dealingwith Russia (taken fromLe Monde andThe New York Times between August 1999and March 2000) has been studied using a cognitive-based linguistic model of discourseanalysis. It is shown how under the guise of bringing some objectivity to the editorials’argumentation, external sources of information facilitate and enhance their subjectivity.

This article is concerned with characterizing literacy activity as it is practiced in professional workplaces. Its starting point is activity theory, which grew out of the work of Vygotsky and has been subsequently elaborated in Russia and elsewhere. First, the authors propose that existing versions of activity theory are unable to account adequately for practical human activity in contemporary workplaces, and present a revised perspective that opens the way for new theoretical developments. Second, they elaborate two new constructs, task and work ensemble, and apply them to a short collaborative writing sequence collected in the field. Both constructs are seen to account in a substantive way for the structure of the composing activity carried out by the collaborators. They close with a discussion of the complementarity and theoretical advantages of the two constructs.

Explanation as a genre may support children’s reasoning and understanding particularly effectively. In this study, 20 fourth graders were given the task of explaining the effects of a pollutant on an ecosystem to third graders. Before writing, they completed a commercially developed science unit, instruction in reading and writing an explanation, and text reading. An analysis of their writings revealed that all children used rhetorical devices to connect with third-grade readers. Sixteen children synthesized text content with personal experiences to compose subexplanations that reported information, gave examples, and presented scenarios and that were logically ordered to enhance reader understanding. Nine of these children explicitly used the scientific model to explain phenomena. Outcomes suggested that writing explanations supported children’s reasoning about and understanding of an important scientific model.

Genres, although aligning people to joint activity and joint attention, shape the substantive material or information represented within the bounded space of the text. Each genre creates a space that prompts the production of particular kinds of information to populate that space. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 that mandated the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was invented out of a perceived social need for greater information about the effects of human activity on the environment. The EIS has since spawned a constellation of related genres, has created a large informational market to fulfill the requirements of these genres, and has led to a proliferation of information. The set of relations among genre, information, and activity found in this one sphere of environmental information are suggestive of how information is produced and used in generic forms.

Standardization discourse is dominantly linked to tests; yet standardization occurs in practices of everyday social life, too. This research seeks to understand standardization processes involved in the writing done by a class of seventh grade students, half of whom did not do well in school or on tests. Acting as participant observer in a classroom where a civics project resulted in the writing of an essay, the author collected audiotaped classroom and group discussions, student writing, field notes, and texts (a history booklet, a neighborhood-planning book, two videos, census data) students drew from to write a speech which their language arts teacher taught as an essay. One essay/speech was delivered to the school board. The author examined the exchange of ideas, across the 8-week project, to consider how standardization as a process of production, consumption, and distribution played in students' writing. The author found that standardizing forces involved direct teaching, genre memory, and several strategies employed to bring cohesion and unity to diverse ideas.

Although sometimes considered to be only marginally related to the key academic goals of establishing claims and reputations, acknowledgements are commonplace in scholarly communication and virtually obligatory in dissertation writing. The significance of this disregarded “Cinderella” genre lies partly in the opportunities it offers students to present a social and scholarly self disentangled from academic discourse conventions and personally thank those who have shaped the accompanying text. Beyond the role it plays in academic gift giving and self-presentation, however, the textualization of gratitude reveals social and cultural characteristics, an intimation of disciplinary specialization within a broad generic structure. This analysis of the acknowledgements accompanying 240 Ph.D. and M.A. dissertations written by nonnative speakers of English suggests that personal gratitude is mediated by disciplinary preferences and strategic career choices, reflecting one way in which postgraduate writing represents a situated activity.

Popular accounts of scientific discoveries diverge from scholarly accounts, stripping off hedges and promoting short-term social consequences. This case study illustrates how the “horse-race” framing of popular accounts devalues the collective sharing, challenging, and extending of scientific work. In her best-selling Longitude , Dava Sobel (1996) depicts John Harrison's 18th-century invention of a marine chronometer, a ground-breaking precision instrument that eventually allowed sailors to calculate their longitude at sea, as an unequal race with Harrison as beleaguered hero. Sobel represents the demands of the Board of Longitude to test and replicate the chronometer as the obstructionist machinations of an academic elite. Her framing underreports the feasibility of the chronometer and its astronomical rival, the lunar distance method, which each satisfied different criteria. That readers accept Sobel's framing is indicated by an analysis of 187 reviews posted on Amazon.com, suggesting that popular representation of science fuels cynicism in popular and academic forums.

Via a Speak Aloud and Write protocol methodology, this study investigated the characteristics of the wording formulation process of a select group of 7 African American students in freshman composition who claimed nonstandard features were active at least 30% to 40% of the time while they composed their papers. Control of rhetorical context was established in terms of tone (formal), purpose (to explain or argue), audience (English instructor), and the time-place context (“simultaneously” spoken-written at one sit-ting). Two Speak Aloud and Write transcripts per participant were analyzed for grammatical and “pronunciation-related” nonstandard feature dynamics in reference to consequences on the page, given the requirements of freshman composition. Findings indicate complex dynamics at work in the form of 7 feature dynamic patterns and 19 variations, with particularly marked activity in relation to a consonant cluster reduction feature and to specific verbal nonconcord features. Also, students who shared feature dynamics pattern characteristics generally shared literacy background characteristics.

This article investigates children's evaluation/selection of ideas in writing-related tasks. The critical dimension being considered was to what extent the communicative goal that defines argumentation establishes basic criteria with which children decide whether to include counterargument in a text. Data analysis focused on participants' decisions and, most important, the rationales they present for their decisions. Two constraints seem to drive evaluation/selection processes. First, the content constraint, whereby a writer focuses on agreement with the idea itself; second, the rhetorical constraint, defined as a writer's perception of an idea's value in increasing the acceptability of his or her point of view. Counterargumentation must be perceived as a valuable rhetorical strategy if specific counterarguments are to be incorporated into a text; otherwise, counterargumentation remains part of the process of selection/evaluation without becoming explicit in the product of such a process—the text.

The emphasis on the individual in Western culture has blinded us to how social relationships affect literacy acquisition and, conversely, how literacy transforms these relationships. This article deals with the literacy practices, specifically, letter writing, of Lithuanian immigrants who arrived in the United States during the end of the 19th century. For these immigrants, reading and writing were collaborative activities, not the individual, solitary acts that we often assume them naturally to be. Individuals often turned to more literate neighbors for assistance in tasks involving reading and writing, an extension of the concept of talka, the Lithuanian tradition of collective assistance. Parents also frequently engaged the help of sons and, especially, daughters in writing letters to relatives in Lithuania. Letter writing thus not only fostered solidarity between immigrant and their relatives in Lithuania but also between Lithuanian immigrant parents and their increasingly literate, Americanized children.

The purpose of Study 1a was to determine the criteria that differentiate students who perform well and those who perform poorly on a standardized test of university-level writing. Discriminant function analysis revealed that measures of structure, sentencing, paragraphing, and grammar play the most important role in separating these two groups. These results were used in Study 1b to develop a tutorial attended by an independent group of students preparing to write a standardized writing exam. The intervention had a positive effect on their test performance. Participants reported the tutorial to be useful, committed fewer errors on most of the criteria, and had a higher probability of passing the exam. It was concluded that this type of tutorial is beneficial to students who are preparing for such exams and may have wider educational use for those seeking assistance with their writing skills.

This study investigates the practice of presenting multiple supporting examples in parallel form. The elements of parallelism and its use in argument were first illustrated by Aristotle. Although real texts may depart from the ideal form for presenting multiple examples, rhetorical theory offers a rationale for minimal, parallel presentation. The form for presenting data can also influence the way it is observed and selected, as the case of the Linnaean template for species grouping illustrates. Parallel presentation is not limited to verbal phrasing. Arranging data in tables, typical in scientific discourse, satisfies the same requirements for minimal, equivalent presentation of evidence. Arranging representational or iconic images in rows or arrays is yet another mode for the parallel presentation of evidence, although this mode has a recent history. A cognitive rationale can perhaps explain the use of parallelism to present multiple supporting examples.

Contrastive rhetoric scholarship researches rhetorical structures across languages to predict the difficulties experienced by students learning to write essays in a second language. The paradigmatic contrast is between Western languages (e.g., English) that are said to exemplify “linearity” and “directness” and Eastern languages (e.g., Chinese, Japanese) that are said to exemplify “nonlinearity” and “indirectness.” The prime examples in English-language contrastive rhetoric scholarship of Asian essay structure are the four-part Chinese qi cheng zhuan he and Japanese ki sho ten ketsu, whose third steps are said to represent a “turn.” The author's research into Chinese and Japanese-language scholarship on these two structures finds that the “turn” is not a rhetorical move of “circularity” or “digression” as commonly assumed but rather serves as the occasion to develop an essay further by alternative means. The implication for second-language writing is recognition of greater similarities in essayist literacy across these languages than previously supposed.

This study examines the extent to which a teacher’s level of expertise in the subject of a technical paper affects the teacher’s reading and evaluation of it. Four engineering teachers and four writing teachers were asked to read aloud the same three student papers and to say aloud their thoughts as they read. The engineering teachers read papers on familiar and unfamiliar subjects. This method allowed direct comparison of the responses of (a) engineering teachers with relevant expertise in a paper’s subject, (b) engineering teachers without such expertise, and (c) writing teachers. The comparison indicates that technical expertise helps teachers evaluate validity and engage with the text but has a more ambiguous effect on evaluations of rhetorical appropriateness. The article also examines the teachers’ differing attitudes toward the importance of having technical expertise when evaluating and recommends approaches for teacher-training programs (in engineering and composition) based on the results.

This study explores the connection between writing and working memory, specifically the role of the subvocal articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice). The authors asked the 18 participants to type sentences describing 24 multipanel cartoons. In some conditions, the participants were required to repeat a syllable continuously while writing. This activity, called articulatory suppression, interferes with the articulatory rehearsal process. Results indicated that interfering with the articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice) interferes with writing by slowing the rate of writing, increasing mechanical errors, changing the temporal microstructure of text production, and increasing the perceived difficulty of the writing task. The authors applied their model of written text production to provide a theoretical account for these results.

This case study of a Chinese undergraduate nursing student focuses on her literacy experiences in her nursing major. Although traditional academic writing played some role in her education, the unusual demands of nonacademic, disciplinary documents, particularly nursing care plans (NCPs), played a more significant and more intractable role in her education and in the difficulties she faced. This investigation of features of academic literacy across the curriculum also embeds this student’s experience in broader concerns of the nursing curriculum and nursing regulatory agencies, further complicating the role of disciplinary literacy acquisition.

For many researchers, grant proposals are a high-stakes genre crucial to their work; this pivotal genre does not exist in isolation but as part of a complex reticulation of genres that interact to form a genre system. This article explores the genre system of academic research funding in terms of the following questions: (a) What is the nature of the genre system of grant funding? (b) What are the roles and functions of that system? and (c) What does exploration of the system reveal about genre knowledge and how writers develop such knowledge? Findings suggest that grant writing is fundamentally a social activity, that the intertextual networks of the genre system serve to navigate writers through that system and to build the writers’ knowledge of the system, and that knowledge of a genre system may differ in important ways from knowledge of an isolated genre.