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.

This article focuses on supervising professors’ and master’s degree students’ understanding and experiences of supervision practices in a Norwegian university, with focus on differences in text cultures and text norms between and within three academic disciplines. The interview study shows that each discipline is a heterogeneous discourse community with largely unarticulated differences. The findings suggest three supervision models, described as teaching, partnership, and apprenticeship. Dominant trends in supervisory relationships and textual practices are distinguished, and characteristics of each are outlined. Connections are shown between the models supervisors adhere to, the kind of texts they expect from their students, and how they provide feedback. As an example, conflicting attitudes toward exploratory student texts are discussed. The study shows that supervision models and textual expectations are influenced by the disciplinary text cultures in which supervisors and students take part. Finally, some practical implications of the study are suggested.

The article presents the cultural background, methodological design, theory, and results of a comprehensive research project where the doxa and textual norms of the judges at the national writing exam in Norway were studied. The background of the study is the quite comprehensive reforms in Norway of the way writing is taught in the upper secondary schools, the kind of writing that is encouraged in the schools, the kind of tasks that are used at the national writing exam, and how writing should be assessed in the Norwegian upper secondary schools, as well as the national writing exam. The study is related to comparable studies internationally, first and foremost the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievements (IEA) study of writing.

This article offers a theoretical account of school literacy development that foregrounds the symbolic and social resources of childhood cultures. Drawing upon ethnographic data collected in an urban school site, this article illustrates how the playful childhood practices of a small group of young school children shaped their entry into school literacy. A child-named “drinking god” is used to capture the energizing force of the group’s developmental “remix” processes, through which they stretched, reorganized, and rearticulated their everyday cultural resources in their travels into school literacy. That god messes up any unitary pathway, renders visible the multiple communicative experiences that potentially intersect with literacy learning, and bequeaths to each child, in the company of others, the right to enter school literacy grounded in the familiar practices of their own childhood.

The article consists of two parts: One introduces the concept of positioning as a framework for inspecting and relating major tendencies regarding research on writing; the other gives a historic outline of how research on writing in Norway first emerged. The triadic semiotics of Bühler, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Halliday are combined, and then related to the concept of positioning, which is used as a framework for the historical part. A triadic understanding of communication and didactics is outlined for the purpose of studying positioning of research on writing. Reviews of didactics, research, and stil are presented before overall developmental patterns of general tendencies in the early research writing are described. Central parts of the framework and the historical part are finally compared to an overview offered by Nystrand, Green, and Wiemelt.

How should the relationship between immediate interaction and verbal convention be understood? The present article argues that dialogism transcends the distinction between interactionist and constructionist social theories of written communication, as presented by Nystrand and colleagues. The theoretical argument is illustrated by a study of one writer who is struggling to learn argumentative writing. In analyzing this writer’s development, the focus is on grounding, specifically, the interplay between foregrounded and backgrounded parts of discourse. The results illustrate that appropriation of conventional resources for grounding is more creative and dyadically contextualized than constructionist theories may invite us to think. Simultaneously, appropriation draws on conventional communicative resources in ways that are hard to explain within interactionist theories. A dialogical model is presented to show that the Bakhtinian “double dialogue” of discourse meets in the “diatope”—that multidimensional (ecological) point of co-constitution where interaction and construction merge into one unified perspective.

This article enters an ongoing discussion about the usefulness of different theories and different research designs in the analysis of classroom writing. Starting with questions about how students interpret the norms of writing and their own selves in school writing, it demonstrates the relevance of an ecological theory of writing, methodologically connected to in-depth case studies—double histories—of the dialogical relationship of student and teacher positionings over time. The related concepts of discourse roles and positionings are discussed in the context of the theories of Bakhtin and Mead. The writing double histories of two students and their teacher over 2 years in a Norwegian upper secondary school are presented. Analysis shows informants positioning themselves dialogically in relation to their ideas about self and the other, the social meaning of their written utterances in various school genres, and their changing interpretations of the social rules of school writing.

The article explores the purpose and methods of teaching the personal narrative in foreign language classrooms. Following a cross-cultural comparison of the history, purpose, and form of autobiography in first-language contexts in the United States and Japan; a review of the place of personal narrative in second- and foreign-language compo sition theory and practice; and the results from survey research involving 160 Japanese freshman students about high school writing instruction in English, a rationale and methodology for teaching personal narrative to Japanese college students of English is presented. The five-paragraph, thesis-driven personal essay presented in English as a second language/English as a foreign language textbooks is critiqued, with recommendations for a more organic form synthesizing story and essay, as in Barrington's concept of “scene, summary and musing.” The limitations of peer editing are discussed, and the bundan writing workshop is described as an effective alternative.

Historically, annotations have provided a means for discussing texts and teaching students about reading practices. This study argues that giving students annotated readings can influence their perceptions of the social context of a writing-from-sources task. Over 120 students read variously annotated letters to the editor, wrote response essays, and answered recall and attitude questionnaires. Evaluative annotations influenced students'perceptions of the text: Passages annotated with positive evaluations were rated as more persuasive than identical passages without annotations; passages annotated with negative evaluations were perceived as less persuasive. Students' global attitudes to the issue were unaffected. Evaluative annotations seemed to decrease student writers' reliance on summary and encourage advanced engagement with source materials. However, some annotations appeared to have negative impacts on essays, causing students to include irrelevant information. Ahypothesis that the perceived position of the annotator shapes students'conceptions of the rhetorical task is advanced and lent limited support.

This article presents evidence that, from selected spectroscopic articles in the earliest volumes of the Physical Review to other selected spectroscopic articles from the same journal in 1980, a shift in sentence style takes place. This shift is from what M.A.K. Halliday calls the dynamic style (which reflects happenings, processes, and actions) to the synoptic style (which reflects things, structures, and categories). The article proposes that the early writers used the dynamic style primarily to set information in a distinct time and thus to avoid giving the impression that the information should be regarded as widely generalizable. It also proposes that the later writers used the synoptic style because it allowed them to represent processes as things, to delineate many fine shades of meaning, and to extend their arguments economically. The article concludes by suggesting areas of future research for students of scientific style and for composition scholars.

In this examination of Mexican-American bilingual college writers, it is argued that implicit language ideologies, common misconceptions about bidialectalism/bilingualism, and the classroom attitudinal domain subvert the success of ethnolinguistic minority students. The author designed and conducted a randomized language attitude survey (N = 195) of 1st-year composition students on the assumption that language attitudes, reflective of the social/ethnic/linguistic polarization of south Texas, exist inside the English classroom. Findings correlate the multiple ethnolinguistic identities of this student population with language myth adherence. Results reveal the tendency among college writers for subscription to various language myths: dialect misconception, English bias, language purity myth, literacy myth, misconception of oral performance.

This study describes the extent to which shared assumptions of literary scholars form part of an introductory literature course. Fahnestock and Secor, in The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism, describe five special topoi of literary criticism (appearance/reality, paradigm, ubiquity, contemptus mundi, and paradox) that characterize the warrants of literary criticism appearing in a sample of major literary studies journals. This study triangulates ethnographic data of a class's meetings, analyses of students' essays, and questionnaires to discover whether these topoi are communicated to students in a survey course, whether students recognize and use them, and whether students are rewarded for using them. The special topoi of literary criticism appear in the discourse of instructors and students. Though textual analysis did not reveal a connection between using the special topoi in writing assignments and receiving a higher grade, questionnaires revealed that students adept at recognizing literary values and discourse conventions were more successful.

Although Toulmin models of argumentation are pervasive in composition textbooks, research on the model's use in writing classrooms has been scarce'typically limited to evaluating how students' essays align with the model's elements (claim, data, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, backing) construed as objective standards. That approach discounts Toulmin's emphasis on context. In contrast, this study of a major university's summer composition program for high school students employs Wenger's notion of communities of practice and Bakhtin's notion of response to trace how classroom contexts mediate students' and teachers' understandings of a Toulmin model. The article presents a case study of a controversy that emerged when participants attempted to identify the main claim in one student's essay. The controversy arose, the analysis suggests, as participants positioned competing tacit and explicit representations of claims with/against other rhetorical terms (for example, thesis), variously interpreted the assigned tasks, and negotiated over tasks and texts.

This article looks at how the discipline of rhetoric may be helpful when thinking about methods for social justice. Specifically, it explores how rhetoric and composition can help those interested in social justice to construct knowledge that is both multidisciplinary and intercultural, to view the constructive processes of research participants, and to develop reflective research methods. One such method may be the Community Problem-Solving Dialogue, a rhetorically strategic method for sharing and building knowledge between the community and university. Specifically, this article studies how students in graduate policy courses both successfully and unsuccessfully used the strategies in the Community Problem-Solving Dialogue in community-university collaborations.

Critical discourse analysis of a 75,000-word corpus of newspaper articles, editorials, and letters to the editor reveals the presence of a cosmopolitan worldview-frame and its effects on representations of gun owners in the United States. This cosmopolitan worldview, which includes cultural frames of reliance on others, specialization, risk avoidance, and government responsibility for risk reduction, results in the marginalization of gun owners and the silencing of frames and information that would counter it. This study demonstrates that the frames news media adopt in covering contentious social issues can not only silence participants in public debate but hamper efforts to find common ground on those issues. Socially responsible news media should instead explore and report on the variety of frames in play regarding a range of social issues in an effort to educate their audiences and, in so doing, promote public debate.

It is not uncommon to find literacy figured as “toxic” in discussions of its power to regulate and discipline social behavior. The author's aim in this article is to move from metaphor to material as he explores the toxicity inherent in the manufacturing processes that make print available for mass consumption. He argues that over the past century, the demand for print in certain regions of the United States, primarily the North and West, spurred the growth of commercial papermaking—and the spread of devastating mill pollution—in the South, where demand for print has historically lagged. He suggests that one result of this pollution has been the weakening of social institutions that typically promote and value normative forms of literate activity. With the industries that enable the mass circulation of print now going global, this pattern of uneven and unjust literacy development may well be repeated.

Using the notion of design developed as part of the New London Group's Multiliteracies Project, this qualitative multicase study examines undergraduate academic literacy as a multimodal achievement game. Retrospective interviews and textual analyses revealed a series of operations on course content that constituted moves in the game. The goal of the game was to find, move, and display content, including not only facts but also concepts and forms of situated knowledge that would gain the highest points on assessments. Better “players” were more aware than their lower achieving counterparts of the game as specific activity different from learning. They also had more nuanced and planned versions of the operations that began with what was expected on assessments and moved backwards toward sources. Findings support forms of preparing students for academic success through the multiliteracies pedagogy that combines consciousness raising through overt instruction with forms of immersion and critical analysis.

Much of the literature concerning participant relationships in academic writing has discussed features that project the stance, identity, or credibility of the writer, rather than examining how writers engage with readers. In contrast, this article focuses on strategies that presuppose the active role of addressees, examining six key ways that writers seek explicitly to establish the presence of their readers in the discourse. Based on an analysis of 240 published research articles from eight disciplines and insider informant interviews, the author examines the dialogic nature of persuasion in research writing through the ways writers (a) address readers directly using inclusive or second person pronouns and interjections and (b) position them with questions, directives, and references to shared knowledge. The analysis underlines the importance of audience engagement in academic argument and provides insights into how the discoursal preferences of disciplinary communities rhetorically construct readers.

This article modifies Donna Haraway's concept of (counter) myth building as a way to facilitate social action. Counter myth building, as both a resource and a process, recognizes limitations on individual agency but foregrounds the productive capacity to be more than a social and historical construct. Because myths are multiple and enactments are unpredictable, both building and enacting counter myths are at best complicated. GirlZone and RadioGirl provide two sites for investigating these complications. As grassroots projects, GirlZone and RadioGirl are explicitly devoted to building counter myths as part of an activist agenda for social change. These sites illustrate how the complex semiotic and material processes of myth building may provide potential resources for these and other activists.

L2 writing scholars have recently debated the appropriateness of using cultural constructs to enhance the teaching of English. An important aspect of writing, critical thinking, has received considerable attention. Some have suggested that Asians, including Japanese, do not display critical thought in their writing in English. Other researchers claim that Asians display critical thinking abilities differently than Western learners. In addition, they argue that learners from a particular culture are too diverse to make claims about the whole group's thinking abilities. This study proposes a model for assessing critical thinking in the writing of L2 learners to determine whether content familiarity plays a role in critical thinking. Findings of a study of 45 Japanese undergraduate students indicate that the quality of critical thought depended on the topic content, with a familiar topic generating better critical thinking. Results also suggested that differing assumptions between the L1 and L2 culture may lead to misinterpretations of the critical thinking ability of L2 learners.

Information is humanly created for human purposes in specific historical situations. This study examines how an anti-nuclear test activist group in the Cold War period, to foster public opposition to government policy, asserted an alternative understanding of information against centralized governmental definitions of information. Such citizen information, validated by citizen scientists to serve the needs and concerns of citizens, pervaded the antiwar, environmental, and consumer movements of the second half of the 20th century. An enthymematic analysis of the newsletter of the Greater St. Louis Citizens' Committee for Nuclear Information and successor journals reveals multiple assumptions embodied in beliefs and practices of citizen information. These beliefs and practices concern threats to everyday life, orientation toward threat-reducing action, large interested institutions that limit access to relevant information, science as an independent and objective source of information, and the responsibilities of a citizen to be informed.

A researcher (Schwebke), in collaboration with her supervisor (Medway), investigated the production and reception of a corpus of documentary exchanges in which condominium owners voiced their opposition to renovations proposed by their board of directors. During the course of the research, which included textual analysis, interviews with owners and management, and readings with disinterested outside parties, the texts became radically unsettled, changing their meaning with each fresh stage of the process. The social reality that underlay and was referred to by the texts became equally indeterminate. Encounters with both texts and everyday readers were pervasively intertextualized; each new conversation was felt to be conducted in the presence of a growing collection of eavesdroppers. The two sets of outside readers—a group of “ordinary folks” and an academic—became virtual participants in the ongoing construction of meaning, with academic and everyday perspectives merging in unusual combinations. The analysis draws on Bakhtinian and poststructuralist perspectives to elucidate this experience.

Texts function as both means and motive for human activity in the same way that other technological objects function: They move from private mediational means to public motive as part of the shifting consciousness that sustains the everyday life of complex organizations. In complex organizations, the status of text, the condition of public visibility, is an achievement rather than a given. Seeing texts as objects calls our attention to a range of textual phenomena associated with the advent of information technologies. In infomated environments, the virtual states of textual objects are becoming ever more ubiquitous and consequential. A sample analysis of the texts produced and used in the context of the new technology of personal digital assistants (PDAs) suggests, for example, that such “ITexts” may facilitate the migration of the documentary reality of the workplace into the home.

In this article, I describe four interrelated analytical concepts useful for studying the discursive practices of professional writers: intertextuality, interdiscursivity, genre systems, and recontextualization. Drawing on structuration theory and neo-Vygotskyan activity theory to provide a framework for the above concepts, I present three theoretical assumptions: (a) genre systems play an intermediate role between institutional structural properties and individual communicative action, (b) a central means for identifying texts in a genre system is their intertextual activity, and (c) the concept of “genre systems” enables the analyst to foreground the discursively salient components of human activity systems. An elaboration of each of these assumptions is followed by an illustration of genre systems at work in one psychotherapist's session notes and the process I call rhetorical recontextualization.

The assessment of students' writing skills through essays is a common practice in educational institutions. Scoring of essays requires considerable judgment on the part of those who rate the response. When raters assign different scores to an essay, testing practitioners must resolve the discrepancy before computing an operational score to report to the examinee. This study investigated five forms of score resolution that were reported in a national survey of state department of education-testing agencies. The study examined the effect that each form of resolution has on the reliability of the resulting operational scores. It is shown that some methods of resolution can be associated with higher interrater reliability than can others. It is also shown that the choice of resolution can affect the magnitude of the reported score as well as the final passing rate of an assessment.

This study by a philosophy professor and a compositionist focuses on the progress of an ESL student in the philosopher's writing-intensive Intro course. In it, the authors answer calls for examination of instructional supports that help ESL students in their college classes across the curriculum. Their report is divided into three parts. In the first, the philosophy professor explicates his classroom aims and expectations, rooting them in the educational approaches of Dewey, Freire, and Gramsci. In the second, the compositionist offers an account of the ESL pupil's experiences in this philosophy classroom, describing the pedagogies that promote her progress toward achieving the professor's goals. In the final section, the authors, acknowledging the contested nature of “progress” in this context, describe the ideological conflicts behind their different interpretations of the successes and failures of this ESL student.

In this study, the author examines the ways a small group of students and their teacher from an intermediate-level university writing class use the texts they create to negotiate private and shared public understandings of the complex interactional contexts of their work together. The author begins by examining some of the competing goals and motives that energize the participants' classroom efforts. To understand the sources of those diverse purposes and how they serve to shape and sustain subsequent classroom interactions, the author develops an activity-based framework of analysis that draws extensively from dialogical and functional-linguistic approaches to language, context, and interaction. Writing and written communication are portrayed as linguistically mediated and interactively structured processes of contextualization. Implications for how we conceptualize and organize classroom interactions, such as intensive peer review and student-teacher conferencing, and the central role that talk and writing must play in operationalizing those interactional contexts are discussed.

This study explores the relation between fluency in writing and linguistic experience and provides information about the processes involved in written text composition. The authors conducted a think-aloud protocol study with native speakers of English who were learning French or German. Analysis reveals that as the writer's experience with the language increases, fluency (as measured by words written per minute) increases, the average length of strings of words proposed between pauses or revision episodes increases, the number of revision episodes decreases, and more of the words that are proposed as candidate text get accepted. To account for these results, the authors propose a model of written language production and hypothesize that the effect of linguistic experience on written fluency is mediated primarily by two internal processes called the translator and the reviser.

In spite of the continuing influence of Aristotle's Rhetoric on the discipline of rhetoric, no widespread agreement exists about whether the text is a systematic treatise about the tekhne (art) of rhetoric or a disconnected set of lecture notes. A significant piece of the puzzle belongs to Aristotle's metaphorical definitions of rhetoric in Book I of that text. Although scholarly efforts to interpret these definitions have informed our understanding of the text, they have done so without fully addressing how these definitions function within the text. This article affers a new approach to investigating these statements, one that considers them from Aristotle's own perspective on such linguistic matters: the author uses Aristotle's theory of metaphor as a measure of his practice in these definitions. The outcome indicates that Aristotle's practice in this situation does not match his theory, a circumstance that has certain consequences for our reading of the Rhetoric.

Writing apprehension (WA) has been identified as an important construct for understanding the factors that influence student development of writing skills. Although the 1975 Daly and Miller scale has dominated the WA investigation, psychometric research has been limited to the identification of question groupings within the measure. All but the 1983 study by Boozer, Lally, and Stacks have presented the WA questions in the order specified on the original scale even though no theoretical basis for the ordering was provided. It is possible that items presented in the same order may consistently produce similar factors because an ordering effect exists rather than separate dimensions. The current study employs factor analysis and comparability analysis to investigate the impact of item order on the number of factors and the underlying factor structure stability of the WA construct. Results indicate that the randomized item factor structure was comparable with the original item order factor structure.

This article details study results comparing e-mail and synchronous conferencing as vehicles for online peer response. The study draws on Clark and Brennan's theory of communicative “grounding,” which predicts that participants use different techniques for achieving mutual knowledge depending on the type of media being used. Content analysis of transcripts from both types of response sessions showed that when using e-mail, students made significantly greater reference to documents, their contents, and rhetorical contexts than when using synchronous conferencing. Students made greater reference to both writing and response tasks using synchronous chats than when using e-mail. Students' individual media preferences showed no significant differences in terms of message formulation, reception, and usefulness of comments in aiding revision. However, in a forced comparison scale, students rated e-mail more serious and helpful than chats, which were then rated more playful than e-mail. Implications of the study's results and areas for future research are also discussed.