Developing academic literacy involves learning valued content and rhetoric in a discipline. Within history, writing from primary documents to construct an evidenced interpretation of an issue requires students to transform both background and document knowledge, read and interpret historical documents, and manage discourse synthesis. The authors examine the potential of the Advanced Placement Document-Based Question as constructed and presented by an exemplary teacher to engage students in historical reasoning and writing. The authors analyzed how five students responded to four document-based questions over a year, tracing how organization, document use, and citation language indicate the degree to which writers transformed and integrated information in disciplinary ways. Students moved from knowledge telling (listing period and document content as discrete information bits) to knowledge transformation (integrating content as interpreted evidence for an argument). Students had difficulty learning to handle the complex layers of the task. The authors discuss how instruction might mediate this complexity and promote academic literacy.

The relation between writing in formal schooling and writing in other social practices is a central problem in writing research (e.g., critical pedagogy, writing in nonacademic settings, cognition in variable social contexts). How do macro-level social and political structures (forces) affect micro-level literate actions in classrooms and vice versa? To address these questions, the author synthesizes Yrjö Engeström's systems version of Vygotskian cultural-historical activity theory with Charles Bazerman's theory of genre systems. The author suggests that this synthesis extends Bakhtinian dialogic theory by providing a broader unit of analysis than text-as-discourse, wider levels of analysis than the dyad, and an expanded theory of dialectic. By tracing the intertextual relations among disciplinary and educational genre systems, through the boundary of classroom genre systems, one can construct a model of ways classroom writing is linked to writing in wider social practices and rethink such issues as agency, task representation, and assessment.

According to contrastive rhetoric research, Japanese expository prose is characterized by a classical style (ki-sho-ten-ketsu), reader responsibility, and an inductive style with a sudden topic shift. It is claimed that English readers have difficulty comprehending texts written by Japanese writers because of such culturally unique conventions. This article challenges these hypotheses concerning the uniqueness of Japanese texts. It argues that previous studies tend to view language and culture as exotic and static rather than dynamic, and overgeneralize the cultural characteristics from a few specific examples. Also, these characterizations of Japanese written discourse can be challenged by multiple interpretations of ki-sho-ten-ketsu offered by composition specialists in Japan and the linguistic and educational influences from the West on the development of modern Japanese since the mid-19th century. This article suggests that researchers and writing teachers should be wary of stereotyping cultural conventions of writing.

This article compares essays written in Spanish and English by bilingual writers whose prior formal academic writing instruction has been only in English. The authors describe both writers' discourse-organizational and clause-combining strategies, showing that one writer's organizational structure reflects explicit planning, whereas the other employs a more emergent organizational structure for her essays. In each case, these choices are the same for Spanish and English. Analyzing these writers' clause-combining strategies demonstrates that organizational structure at the discourse level is reflected in the types of clause combinations chosen by the writers at the sentence level, with one writer using more simple sentences and embedded clauses and the other using more hypotactic and paratactic clause combinations. The article demonstrates how clauses constitute and reflect the structure of texts and suggests that development of a repertoire of styles and discourse strategies depends on control of a variety of syntactic options.

The author reviews traditional beliefs about creative illness and suggests that their endorsement of euphoric bingeing misleads writers. Productive creativity seems to occur more reliably with moderation of work duration and of emotions, not with the fatigue and ensuing depression of binge writing. The author compares binge writers to a matched sample of novice professors who wrote in brief, daily sessions and with generally mild emotions. Binge writers (a) accomplished far less writing overall, (b) got fewer editorial acceptances, (c) scored higher on the Beck Depression Inventory, and (d) listed fewer creative ideas for writing. These data suggest that creative illness, defined by its common emotional state for binge writers (i.e., hypomania and its rushed euphoria brought on by long, intense sessions of working—followed by depression), offers more problems (e.g., working in an emotional, rushed, fatiguing fashion) than magic. The example of Joseph Conrad supports these findings.

Emerging from the development of a workplace literacy program for entry-level tax examiners, this case study examines ways in which conflicts between management and workers over the division of labor are textually enacted in the two kinds of manuals that govern the work of tax examiners in an IRS Service Center. The first kind of manual, called an IRM, is the official government manual operationalizing the procedures for interpreting tax law and IRS regulations. The second, called a Desk Reference, is intended as an unofficial “translation” of the former. Closer analysis, using a critical application of systemic linguistics, reveals that systematic differences between the two manuals project contradictory views of the tax examiners' work. Consequently, tax examiners are put into the impossible position of attempting to be the compliant subjects of two opposing discourses.

Stories have often been rewritten for children. Children themselves are onlookers to the “chain of communication” that unfolds, as stories are rewritten by perceived ideological conservatives and, in turn, by perceived ideological liberators. In this article, I both present and dialogize this vision of children as receptors of adults' ideological messages. I begin by reviewing examples of adults' rewriting for children, drawing primarily on the rewriting of folk stories. Then, using ethnographic data collected in a study of urban school children's use of common story material (from the poplar media), I reconstruct one branch of a classroom chain of communication. The chain features a girl-next-door figure from a film well-known by the children. In so doing, I illustrate the dialogic process through which children's rewriting becomes a mediator of their ideological concerns. The article concludes with a discussion of the classroom conditions that seemed to support the activation of such a dialogic event.

This article presents the results of a study into revision skills of 32 elementary students in Grades 5-6 (van Gelderen & Blok, 1989). Their task consisted of improving an expository text, experimentally composed on the basis of several texts written by students of the same age as the subjects. The subjects were asked to think aloud and to give explicit evaluations, diagnoses, and suggestions for improvement of the text. Quantitative data are supplemented with a qualitative analysis of the revision activities. Reformulations and verbalizations during the process are analyzed. The analysis aims at the students' potentials for revision on the level of communicative content. Explanations based on a model of the revision process by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) are explored. This model specifies the most important cognitive steps in revision: compare, diagnose, and operate (CDO). Quantitative analysis of revision behavior showed that the subjects did possess the necessary skills to carry out each of the steps under experimental conditions designed to facilitate the revision process. The qualitative analysis, however, showed that many difficulties had yet to be overcome. The study concludes that it would be worthwhile to direct more explicit attention to further development of revision skills of primary students than is the case in current writing instruction at schools.

In this article we (a) argue that mainstream composition studies is at present too narrow in its scope and limited in its perspective and (b) offer some thoughts, from our unique interdisciplinary position, that we feel could help mainstream composition professionals improve this situation. In our article, we first provide evidence that we feel suggests an unfortunate pattern of neglect in mainstream composition studies of writing in English as a second language (ESL) and writing in languages other than English. We then introduce a number of concepts from second language studies (primarily from second language acquisition and second language writing instruction) that we believe could help mainstream composition studies address its limitations; develop a more global and inclusive understanding of writing; and thus avoid being seen as a monolinguistic, monocultural, and ethnocentric enterprise.

This article elaborates and evaluates a sociolinguistic framework for the study of writing. The first part of the article discusses different sociolinguistic concepts and theories and introduces the two concepts of communicative community and communicative group, which encompass speech and writing, as well as communication of both local and distant and public and private types. For the purposes of these concepts, written and spoken discourse are assumed to be intermingled in the communicative process and steered by similar sociocognitive conditions. The second part of the article discusses the application of the theoretical framework to a specific case, the writing that takes place at a local government office. The study comprises analyses of the organizational structure and its effects on writing at work, the communicative process and the role of spoken discourse and collaboration in the construction of documents, and the social dimension of writing at work. This workplace is found to constitute a communicative group of the local-public type, which means that communication at the office is part of a socially based and hierarchically structured set of communicative activities, with a close intertwinement of spoken and written discourse.

In this article, orientations to text taken by seventh-grade students preparing for a simulation of the 1954 school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education, are compared with those taken by legal professionals in the historical event itself. The author uses Halliday's definition of register to show that meanings are made on several dimensions of social life simultaneously, along with Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia to show that meaning is made from divergent social positions. Textual analysis shows that seventh-grade students rejected what they saw as violations of the conventions of Supreme Court argument, while the winning argument in the actual Supreme Court hearing of Brown plays with conventions by signaling conflicting social positions. The author suggests that teachers might encourage students to reflect on their own positioning within a complex rhetorical context and draw attention to how registers are actually realized in historically significant texts.

This article examines the linguistic processes through which a projected event (that is, an event that a group of spokespersons alleges will occur in the future) is constructed within factual discourse. Critical linguistic analysis is used to examine the New York Times and Washington Post coverage of the 1990 Persian Gulf conflict. This study makes two contributions. First, it expands on work in critical linguistics by explicating how a projected event is constructed as a discrete and autonomous event unfolding in the social world. Second, this study demonstrates how the political interests underlying the newspaper accounts were “naturalized” through linguistic transformations that constructed politically situated assertions as unmediated and presupposed information. This study is important for understanding the constructive nature of language practices because it demonstrates how seemingly arhetorical linguistic constructions can be examined for their rhetorical features, features that play an important role in actively constructing representations of the social world.

This study examines the reading and writing strategies of one student, Yuko, over a 3-year period and traces the process she went through to acquire college-level academic literacy in English, her second language. Multiple data sources included interviews with the student and two of her political science professors, classroom observations, and texts from 10 courses in three disciplines—including course materials and the student's writing, with instructors' comments. The investigation was enriched by a cross-cultural perspective, for Yuko described learning strategies in two languages and learning environments in two countries, Japan and the United States. Data analysis suggests that her educational background shaped her approach to U.S. academic discourse practices and the way she theorized about those practices. Her theory and her analysis of her own experience changed over time, raising questions about cross-cultural interpretations of student learning.

The different emphases that theorists and teachers place on the product and process of writing in their accounts of how writers construct meaning have been influenced by different traditions of Western thought that have historically been at odds: Whereas the designative tradition focuses on the ways in which artifacts of speech mediate people's thinking, the expressive tradition focuses on the transformation of inner speech to public speech, thus emphasizing the ways in which the activities of speaking and writing promote changes in consciousness. In this article, through the analysis of the writing of a high school senior, it is argued that these two positions are not mutually exclusive, but rather are complementary aspects of a semiotic view on writing. The primary data set is a “situated protocol”—that is, a think-aloud protocol, including both concurrent and retrospective accounts of writing process, conducted over a 4-month period. Through the protocol analysis and analysis of related data, I examine the ways in which this student's writing experiences reveal the interrelated roles of both designative and expressive functions of writing. The analysis also reveals that the writer found the situated protocol itself to be an enduring means of development and reflection and a tool for meditation.

Data analysis and representation are important political acts in the research process. The types of data we select for study, the analysis we draw, and our textual and graphic representations of data all contribute to the ways in which the people involved in our research are positioned as subjects and the degree of individual and collective agency that can be constructed through the research process itself. It is because of the potential effects of our research on others that we need to demystify the research we do through laying bare our epistemological positions and opening our methods and methodologies to public criticism. Further, in the case of empowering research, it is important to include the research participants in the development of our research projects. This necessitates explorations into postmodern conceptions of subjectivity, knowledge formation, collaboration, and resistance as they relate to empirical research as well as redefining notions of validity and reliability.

Although some consideration has been given to the manner in which academic discourse is culture-bound, how the “nondiscursive” conventions and requirements of academic publishing can serve exclusionary functions has not been adequately explored. Meeting the latter requirements is contingent upon the availability of certain material resources. Reflecting on personal experience in trying to meet such requirements from an under-developed region, the author shows the manner in which they serve to exclude Third World scholars from the academic publication process. Though this detachment from Western academic literacy enables the development of an alternative academic culture, it can also lead to the marginalization of Third World scholarship. The exclusion of Third World scholars impoverishes the production of knowledge not only in the Third World, but internationally. Therefore the article finally considers steps that may be taken to ensure a more democratic and mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge.

In this study, we trace the development of ideas explored during reading lessons in children's writings from one transitional bilingual fourth-grade classroom. Using transcripts from audio- and videotaped lessons, we describe the ways in which the reading lessons, designed to facilitate discussions to enhance student reading comprehension, turned into an anchoring activity for the negotiation of joint meaning. They served as a springboard for joint exploration and the generation of intersubjective and co-constructed ideas that bridged the worlds of home and school. We trace the development of these ideas in representative pieces from five student portfolios. Discussions served to display a number of important literacy processes, and ideas and interpretations from these discussions reappeared in the students' writings. This study is of particular interest to educators concerned both with understanding better the influence of classroom discourse on student writing and with finding ways to incorporate students' cultural backgrounds into classroom practices.

The article offers a fresh perspective on semiotic approaches to writing. It endorses recent arguments for more study of writing that shapes and directs the production of material artifacts and for considering writing as one semiotic mode among others. The main purpose, however, is to consider a case of nonwritten symbolic production, architectural design, for what it may suggest for the study and the teaching of writing. A constructivist account is proposed whereby the design (like equivalent written texts) not only proposes and foreshadows a new object in the world but creates one, bringing into existence, through acts of representation, a virtual object that is real in its social effects. Transcripts from design conversations are drawn on to elucidate the characteristics of such virtual artifacts, and implications for writing are drawn.

The research reported investigated how 32 undergraduate students in an upper-level sociology course wrote critiques and how their texts were evaluated by 4 professors in the discipline. Students represented different majors and education levels. Features associated with critique were tested for their relationship to the professors' summed holistic quality scores. Student's status as major and their educational level were also tested for their relationship to the summed scores. Results indicate that (a) students were more likely to receive higher scores if they found weaknesses in the source article, basing their judgments on disciplinary knowledge and employing an integrated text configuration, and (b) neither major nor educational level was a strong predictor of quality. Findings suggest that current pedagogy that promotes personal evaluation of texts may not lead to the type of writing valued in particular disciplinary communities, where evaluative commentary may be more linked to unique disciplinary standards.

To change the mind of a reader, authors compose written persuasion according to a set of rhetorical features. This article describes the features of persuasive texts and reviews research results to explore whether adults indeed change their minds after reading persuasion. Toulmin's (1958) model of argument and Aristotle's model of persuasive content characterize the structure and content of well-written persuasion. Research in social psychology and text comprehension shows that adults typically build a case for their own prereading belief rather than process a persuasive text mindfully, weigh evidence, and change their beliefs. An important contract between author and reader is typically broken. Research on designing text to disabuse students of scientific misconceptions points to text features that authors could use to encourage readers to read persuasion mindfully.

This study explores features of conference proposals submitted to the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in 1989, 1990, and 1992. In total, 345 abstracts were examined for generic and formal features, discourse features, and topical features. These features were contrasted among high-rated and low-rated abstracts. Throughout this period (a) successful abstracts were more likely to follow generic qualities associated with “unsolicited proposals”; (b) foundational discourse remained prominent throughout the abstracts, but discourse associated with a nonfoundationalist epistemological stance appeared to increase among the proposals; and (c) abstracts appeared to be increasingly expansionary, discussing various rhetorical strategies in other disciplines or discursive sites. Results suggest that written communication can be seen as an important contributor to disciplinary formation within the CCCC. Results also suggest that text features like jargon, citations, acronyms, and nominalizations can be productively viewed as important carriers of “insider” or “privileged” discourse within organizations.

This article presents descriptions of and examples from qualitative case studies of 3 high school classrooms in Norway and the United States. The focus is on how classroom discourse and writing interact with each other and provide an important and unique instructional resource. The teachers in 2 of the classrooms consistently elicited, overtly valued, and helped develop student opinions and ideas. In this process, authentic questions and uptake were common, and a great diversity of voices was heard. Bakhtin's and Rommetveit's dialogical framework is used as the basis of analysis, as is Lotman's theory about the functional dualism of texts. The main argument is that the interaction of oral and written discourse increased dialogicality and multivoicedness and therefore provided more chances for students to learn than did talking or writing alone. In this way, the texts, both oral and written, were used to generate thoughts and opinions.

Although notions of literacy tend to be dominated by images of solitary readers and writers, collaboration and assistance with reading and writing are widespread practices. This article presents a detailed description of a scribe and his client in Mexico producing a letter through joint composition, a term used to refer to letter-writing episodes involving two or more active participants. Through an examination of the discussions that occurred between the scribe and the client, the analysis illustrates how both actors contributed to the final outcome. This article discusses how the participants negotiated their points of view and pooled their knowledge to produce a specific type of document in accordance with their expectations and purposes. The analysis suggests that joint composition is the outcome of multiple contextual elements: authority, gender, and literacy competency. It further concludes that scribing is a complex, heterogeneous literacy activity.

Hedging refers to linguistic strategies that qualify categorical commitment to express possibility rather than certainty. In scientific writing, hedging is central to effective argument: Hedging is a rhetorical means of gaining reader acceptance of claims, allowing writers to convey their attitude to the truth of their statements and to anticipate possible objections. Because hedges allow writers to express claims with precision, caution, and modesty, they are a significant resource for academics. However, little is known about the way hedging is typically expressed in particular domains or the particular functions it serves in different genres. This article identifies the major forms, functions, and distribution of hedges in a corpus of 26 molecular biology research articles and describes the importance of hedging in this genre.

In this article, the four authors reflect back on their work as writing teachers in a neighborhood adult literacy center, in order to understand better the potential “violence” of literacy learning, to reassess assumptions of expressivist pedagogy, and to turn to Bakhtin and Foucault as interpretive frames for theorizing adult literacy learning. The authors propose “co-authoring” as the concept that emerged as central to the writing classes they designed and taught. In this essay they explore co-authoring as process, principle, and theoretical problem.

Publishing in professional journals requires the author to display disciplinarity and yet to say something novel. This article approaches this familiar rhetorical problem from a novel perspective by analyzing disciplinarity as a kind of orthodoxy. Four elements of orthodoxy (narrative knowledge, assumptions and methodologies, hierarchy, and doctrinal knowledge) are identified. Then, the article argues that an orthodox ethos is created by signaling allegiance to a plurality of these elements. An example of an article that displays disciplinarity, David Raup's “Cohort analysis of generic survivorship,” is analyzed, showing the author establishes his orthodox ethos by challenging only one of the elements of orthodoxy while simultaneously signaling allegiance to the others.

This article examines the experiences and rhetorical actions of key medical scientists and physicians who have treated, studied, and written about Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome since the beginning of the epidemic. Those first to describe the disease report that the rhetorical challenge was convincing their audience to accept the novel idea of acquired immune deficiency and to see the cases they described as an emerging medical catastrophe. The biological, social, and linguistic complications of AIDS and the failure of traditional treatments forced the professionals interviewed to develop new care practices such as more horizontal communication with patients and a holistic view of a patient's needs. Responding to the need to educate and persuade peers and the public about appropriate actions in treating and preventing the disease, these professionals participated in rhetorical action that negotiated between “old” practices and attitudes and “new” problems that required changes in practice and attitudes.

This article offers a personal view of some developments in science and technology studies that may be important to researchers on writing and to writing teachers. The field has emerged from laboratory studies to engagement with broader issues of power and change. Frameworks developed in the sociology of scientific knowledge have been applied to the analysis of things (not just people and facts), of social boundaries (not just specialist disciplines), and of organizations (not just individual writers). The article draws on approaches from critical discourse analysis to show how we might read noun phrases, clause structure, discourse representation, and discourse practices in terms of this new perspective on texts. Throughout the article, the implications are illustrated with the example of a news article reporting the temporary shutdown of a nuclear power plant.

Drawing from a year-long ethnographic study that follows four early adolescent girls (two sets of self-proclaimed best friends and their larger circle of girlfriends) from May of their sixth-grade year through the completion of seventh grade, this article examines how (a) focal students comply with and resist official institutional expectations, (b) participation in the classroom is influenced by the underlife present within the school, and (c) one's membership within groups regulates literate practices. The author argues that students' performances within the classroom cannot be free from sociopolitical tangles. As newcomers to junior high, these girls had limited ways in which to assert identity or seek power. Literacy proved a tangible means by which to document social allegiances, claim status, and challenge authority. In conclusion, this study challenges many of the commonly held assumptions about appropriate pedagogy for adolescents.

The move from theorizing difference to dealing with difference in an intercultural collaboration creates generative conflicts for educators and students. This article tracks the conflicting discourses, alternative representations, and political consequences the construct “Black English” had for Black and White mentors, teenage writers, and instructors in a Community Literacy Center collaboration. Comparing the accounts offered by resistance, conversation, and negotiation theory, it examines the dilemmadriven process of constructing a new negotiated meaning in the face of conflicting forces, voices, and representations. Dealing with difference in such collaboration means not only interpreting diverse verbal and nonverbal signifying systems based on values, experience, and competing discourses but constructing a new negotiated representation in the face of conflict that offers an (at least provisional) ground for action.

This project investigated the effects of training for peer response in university freshman composition classes over the course of one 15-week semester. Eight sections of composition (total n = 169) participated. Students in the experimental group, composed of four sections, were trained via teacher-student conferences in which the teacher met students in groups of three to develop and practice strategies for peer response. Students in the control group, also four sections, received no systematic training aside from viewing a video example. The experimental and the control groups were compared with respect to the quantity and quality of feedback generated on peer writing as well as student interaction during peer response sessions. Analyses of data indicated that training students for peer response led to significantly more and significantly better-quality peer feedback and livelier discussion in the experimental group.

Introductions in scientific journal articles invite the community to read, accept, and build on new ideas. Often they open with standard moves that bid readers to attend to new findings that fill a serious gap in the literature on an important topic, thus connecting shared communal ideas and new ideas. How do these moves apply to “revolutionary” disciplines that lack a shared literature? Do introductory moves influence scientists' reading strategies? In a two-stage study, we analyzed introductions of four articles on chaos theory and then asked 12 scientists to think aloud while reading them. To investigate effects of disciplinary maturity, we chose two recent and two early articles. The early “revolutionary” articles differed strikingly from the more conventional recent articles in space devoted to old versus new information, use of citations and equations, and the nature of opening appeal. Scientific readers reacted differently to the recent and early articles, commenting more on new information in the recent articles. Across articles, however, they commented more on shared information than on new ideas. These results underscore the importance of connecting new ideas to the literature even when using unusual techniques to introduce radically new ideas.

The evolution of technical communication conventions in America is more anthropologically complex than the traditional linkage to the scientific plain-style tradition suggests. Analysis of leading ideas in early 20th-century engineering writing textbooks and other primary sources demonstrates that disciplinary discourse conventions develop from an intricate nexus of human motivations, beliefs, and social activity. This article explores currents in American social and intellectual history that explain this complex, sophisticated view of language, which combines a rhetorically sensitive formalism with the ideas of professional literacy and cultural reading to facilitate communication with various audiences and to reinforce the status and dignity of the emerging profession.

What sort of approach should we use to teach writing skills in today's classrooms? Many socially oriented scholars think we should teach context-specific writing skills that address the text's social milieu, whereas cognitively inclined scholars think we should teach more general models that can be adapted to a wide variety of writing contexts. As a number of composition theorists (e.g., Carter, 1990; Flower, 1994; Nystrand, 1989) have argued, a genuine synthesis between the cognitive theorists' general knowledge perspective and the social theorists' local knowledge perspective is necessary if we wish to teach students of diverse backgrounds how to write successfully in a variety of present and future contexts. This article attempts to bridge the misleading dichotomy between local knowledge and general knowledge by applying what cognitive psychologists have discovered about memory, expertise, and the transfer-of-learning to the question of appropriate composition pedagogy.