Composition studies, as a field, has always depended on theoretical constructs and empirical methods from other disciplines. This article looks at interdisciplinary work in the area of composition and computer-mediated communication (CMC). The work on writing and electronic networks has drawn from early experimental studies of CMC in social psychology, the premises of which are at odds with current thinking in both composition studies and social psychology. In recent years, social psychological research on CMC has witnessed changes similar to those in composition: a rethinking of positivistic frameworks and a move to emphasize social constructs. This article reviews the work of four groups conducting social psychological research on CMC. It traces the movement away from theoretical frameworks based in positivism toward those grounded in social constructionism. It concludes by advocating a dialogic relationship between research in computers and composition studies and social psychology.

In this article, the author offers some personal reflections on the origins and continued development of his thinking about the nature of writing and the relationship between writing and cognition. He recounts how his early efforts to understand the unique effects of writing on cognition, which he claimed were different from the effects of speech on cognition, culminated in his controversial theory of “autonomous texts”: namely, that whereas in speech one listens primarily for a speaker's intentions (i.e., what is meant), writing elicits a form of understanding that seeks a more literal interpretation of sentence meaning (i.e., what is actually said). The author acknowledges the merit of several criticisms of his early claims, but defends his core thesis that writing both enables and encourages writers and readers to say and think things differently than does speech; writing entails a unique mode of understanding that divorces form from meaning. He revises his earlier contention that literacy represents a form of cultural progress toward a more cautious view of writing as an instrument of increasing cultural specialization. Finally, the author outlines several unresolved issues that serve to focus his continued efforts at understanding how writing affects cognition.

The authors assessed writing attitudes and epistemologies of 117 first-year and 329 upper-level undergraduates. Attitude scales assessed enjoyment of writing, self-ratings of writing ability, and belief in writing as learnable. Epistemological scales measured absolutism (belief in knowledge as determinably true or false), relativism (belief in the indeterminacy of all claims), and evaluativism (belief that truth can be approximated). Absolutism correlated negatively with writing grades and verbal aptitude, whereas evaluativism exhibited a weak positive correlation with both. Students with higher evaluativism tended to enjoy writing more and to assess themselves as good writers. Upper-level students were less absolutist and marginally more evaluativist than first-year students. Differences in attitudes and epistemologies emerged between men and women and among upper-level students in four disciplinary groups. The authors sketch some implications for writing pedagogy.

Amish-authored nature essays were introduced to the Amish by Samuel Miller, an Amish farmer with an interest in nature study developed at home and in school. Miller's nature essays published in the Amish periodical, Family Life, were the first examples of the nature essay genre that were widely circulated in Amish communities. The acceptance of this new genre was due to Miller's particular manner of appropriation that connected it to the Amish cultural value of closeness to nature and the soil by making the family farm and surrounding countryside the setting of his writing. Other key factors that facilitated the introduction of the genre included Miller's use of personalized knowledge of nature, expressed most clearly in personal narratives, as well as social change within Amish society brought about by the influence of an Amish publishing house. Miller's writing raises issues regarding the genre-mediated construction of identity and the effects of genre in reproducting and altering cultural values.

The purpose of this study is to trace the emergence of authorship in a beginning college writing classroom through two case examples. Three primary questions motivate this study of authorship: (a) What were students' interpretations of writing an essay based on sources? (b) How did these students organize their essays? and (c) What strategies did they use to advance their own ideas? An additional question focused on the instructional context of the course. In particular, how did the instructor represent the task of writing an essay based on different sources of information and the process of writing in the classroom? To answer these questions, each class was audiotaped during a 15-week semester and field notes were taken. Retrospective protocols and cued questions were used in order to understand students' evolving interpretations of the task they were given. The results show that although the instructor tried to foster a sense of engagement and commitment through reading, writing, and talking, the technical difficulty of the task, students' perceptions of their peers' interests, and a legacy of schooling and culture were equally important concerns that shaped the decisions made in writing. Implications for developing a theory of authorship are discussed as well as strategies for teaching.

In this study of expert use of anaphoric “this,” six history textbook passages written by composition instructors, text linguists, and professional editors are submitted to cloze procedure for comprehensive analysis. Discrepancies in the predictability of content and function words pinpoint examples of ineffective anaphoric expressions using “this” as a demonstrative pronoun (“unattended this”) or “this” as a demonstrative adjective introducing a noun phrase (“attended this”). The analysis indicates that (a) current stylistic guidelines proscribing unattended “this” are overstated and (b) attended “this” is best employed when synonyms for the antecedent and descriptive adjectives are used to provide the reader new information about the referent. The study's information theory perspective leads to the further generalization that effective written communication is often syntactically predictable and semantically not.

This article describes a set of metadiscourse functions arising from the use of contrastive and non-contrastive connective expressions in academic argumentation. Moving away from descriptions of connectives solely in terms of textual relations, this study describes interpersonal metadiscourse functions of contrastive and non-contrastive connectives within the presentation of claims and counterclaims in argumentative essays. It is proposed that interpersonal uses of non-contrastive and contrastive connectives mitigate counterclaims and emphasize claims based on the assumed roles and responses of writers and readers in an academic discourse community.

Social theories of language (e.g., Vygotsky and Bakhtin) implicate instruction that promotes spoken interaction during the writing process. Such interaction is said to make explicit for students the dialogic relationship between writers and readers that underlies written text. This case study of a “prewriting” class discussion and student writing in a secondary English class suggests that, more than establishing a relationship with readers, students talk and writing invoke a complex of roles that reflect their relationships with one another, the outside world, and their texts. Speaking and writing contexts shape the different roles that students take. The setting of the study is an inner-city classroom in which students' lives bear critical connections to the outside world; such classrooms may be particularly valuable sites for studying students as complex role players in the process of learning to write. In offering a theory of roles and relationships, the study complicates current thinking about how classroom discourse in these and other settings is linked to writing.

Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's theories of social interaction are so general that they are not always useful guides for classroom practice. This study of secondary school classrooms in Great Britain and the United States reveals that when teachers apply similar theories to everyday practice, important pedagogical contrasts remain—both in terms of the ways in which instruction is organized and in terms of what students produce. The theories need elaborating. In everyday practice, social interaction is not binary, that is, either there is interaction or there is not. Rather, participants position themselves along a continuum of involvement—from highly involved to relatively uninvolved. Learners occupy different points within classrooms, from one classroom to another, and for the same student at different times. Also, the social space within the classroom affects student involvement and the teacher's ability to track it. This study found that in classrooms with the most highly involved interactions, students participated in curriculum making and belonged to a close-knit community.

Adult ways of writing—of constructing textual visions of—children are linked to their ways of envisioning themselves and, more broadly, to their perceptions of fully “developed” adults. Thus developmental visions have traditionally taken for granted the social and ideological worlds of privileged adults. This article aims to make problematic such writing by reviewing new visions of language and of development that acknowledge human sociocultural and ideological complexity. Within these visions, children's differentation of ways of using language is linked to their differentiation of their own place—potential or actual—in the social world. To more fully explore these new visions, this article also offers a concrete illustration of writing children as social and ideologically complex beings. It concludes by considering implications for both professional writing and classroom pedagogy.

Student writing in history courses, graded evaluation of that writing, and faculty interviews all reveal a contradiction between the stated and implicit aims of historical discourse. The explicit definition of writing in history is “argumentation”; the implicit expectation, however, is for narrative. This apparent contradiction highlights what the author argues is the central function of academic historical discourse: the establishment of an autonomous subject of meaning who is always speaking from outside history about a distant and objectified past. Students are rarely aware of the importance of this voice, even at an unconscious level, because faculty themselves fail to articulate for students the distinctive nature of their genre or the function of historical discourse generally. This project thus builds on previous studies in rhetoric by using the work of theorists of history to identify more precisely what it is in historical discourse that is hidden from student view—the autonomous, transhistorical voice.

Current social perspectives on writing and disciplinary enculturation are generally grounded in theories of discourse communities. Although assumptions underlying these theories have been seriously questioned, few studies of situated writing have applied alternate theories. In this article, I explore a sociohistoric notion of disciplinarity in a case study of how a sociology student's dissertation prospectus is negotiated in a graduate seminar. A microhistorical narrative of a response episode in the seminar and subsequent textual revision is contextualized in histories of local activity. Analysis of the seminar response foregrounds emergent, nonlinear, discursively heterogeneous practices of disciplinary sense-making. Analysis of the text foregrounds practices whereby situated histories of textual production and reception are transformed into purified representations of the discipline and the author. Finally, the analysis details how the disciplinary work of revision in this setting was socially distributed and interactively achieved.

Orality has been a feature repeatedly offered to typify African American language habits. Through anthropological studies of contemporary communities as well as literary portrayals and celebrations of cultural heroes such as preachers and political orators, the strong oral traditions of African Americans have figured prominently in discussions of the contexts of their literary works. This article argues for a balance of this image by laying out historical evidence on the literate values and habits of African Americans since the early 1800s. Literary journals, the Black press, literary writers, and literary societies, especially those of women, between 1830 and 1940 highly valued joint reading groups, creative writing efforts, and the role of literature in the lives of African Americans. Considerable work remains to restore accuracy and cross-class representation of African Americans in English studies, so as to resist tendencies to deny variation in the language habits and values of groups included in multicultural literature.

This article describes an investigation in which I explored an impression that I had developed in earlier work that the grammatical subjects in scientific discourse are markedly long. An examination of a sample of scientific discourse produced evidence that makes a fairly strong case that on the average the grammatical subjects in the sample are markedly long. A stronger case can be made that many of the specific subjects in the sample are very long indeed, probably long enough to draw some attention to themselves in most any kind of discourse. I identify three pressures that I believe operate on scientists to produce very long grammatical subjects: The pressure to be precise, the pressure to be concise, and the pressure to be efficient and progressive in constructing a set of claims that will remain true within a framework of knowledge that has been built up over time. I conclude by exploring some possible connections between both the grammatical subjects in and the overall style of the sample of discourse and what Jerome Bruner calls the paradigmatic mode of thought.

Interest in the social aspects of composing has led writing researchers to examine more closely the contexts in which writing takes place. However, there is little agreement about what constitutes context as a theoretical construct. Because of this lack of agreement, writing researchers have not been able to delineate as fully as possible the interactions between context and composing. This article examines ways in which context has been defined and suggests a reconceptualization of this construct. The argument depends upon analyses of data gathered during a year-long ethnographic study of graduate journalism education. Specifically, results from the analyses of these data suggest that contexts for composing need to take into account individual writers' personal and social histories as they interact with the economic and political circumstances in which writers compose.

This article examines the writing and drawing produced by a group of children during “writing workshop” time throughout their first-grade year. The purpose of the study was to obtain insight into the general question: Do genres “emerge” in ways analogous to other aspects of writing development? While the study is limited to a specific group of first-grade writers, it provides insights which suggest that genre may indeed be “emergent.” Emergence is supported by evidence of the following: Quantitative and qualitative changes in the organization of texts, with genres appearing as adaptations rather than fixed forms or generalized verbal products; an interplay among drawing, talking, reading, and writing in the construction of genres; the influence of the specific recurring social context of Writing Workshop and the genres surrounding and embedded in it; and the impact overall of the socialization into literacy occurring within this specific classroom community.

Although studies of writing and literary understanding have demonstrated the value of analytic essay writing for enhancing story understanding, these studies have focused on student's initial interpretations without considering the effects of a teacher's support and direction. The purpose of this study was to explore how 9th- (n = 6) and 11th- (n = 6) grade students reformulated and extended their initial written analyses of two short stories through revisions fostered by two different kinds of between-draft written comments. After revising initial drafts in two response modes (directive and dialogue), the students wrote paragraph-length responses to posttest questions of story understanding. Results indicated significant (p < .05) main effects for response condition and grade level, with the dialogue condition enhancing story understanding more than the directive condition, and the 11th graders attaining higher posttest scores than the 9th graders. Data from composing-aloud protocols revealed that the dialogue condition supported the students' reformulation of their own interpretations constructed in the initial drafts, while the directive condition seemed to shift the students away from their own initial interpretations of the stories.

Based on a year-long ethnographic study, this article presents a case study of a fourth-grade student, Kenya, who learned to participate in the literacy community of her classroom—in her terms “to be good”—by writing letters. It was through these letters, which began as daily written interactions about (mis)behavior, that Kenya gained confidence and skill as a writer. The genre of letters allowed Kenya to construct her identity as a writer in the classroom community, at the same time that she retained her identity as a member of a group of four, frequently defiant African American girls. In this classroom, teachers used writing to forge collaborative relationships with students—relationships that often were built around struggle and conflict—to encourage students' growth as writers. This study has implications for a new pedagogy of writing, one that provides a rich and challenging curriculum for all students, even those who might in other circumstances be considered “remedial,” and one which alters our conceptions of the roles of and relationships between teachers and students in a writing classroom.

That writing has unique powers for promoting learning has become a given among many composition teachers and researchers. Peircean semiotics suggest that writing is one of many forms of composing available for mediating thought and activity, and that the value of any form of mediation depends on the context in which it takes place. The present study used stimulated recall to elicit a retrospective account from an alternative school student following his production of an artistic text representing his view of the relationship between the two central characters in a short story. The student's account indicates that in composing his text he (a) initiated his interpretation by empathizing with one of the characters, (b) produced a graphic representation and transformation of the relationship between the two central characters, (c) situated his text in an intertext, and (d) produced a text that both shaped and was shaped by his thinking. Furthermore, the “text” he produced through the stimulated recall interview likely involved a reconsideration as well as re-representation of the graphic text he had drawn, thus enmeshing the investigative method itself with the student's growing realization of the meaning of his work. His account suggests that nonlinguistic texts—when part of an environment that broadens the range of communication genres available to students—can help students construct meanings that are appropriate to school activities and learning.

This article argues that historians of literacy, including Carl Kaestle, Harvey Graff, Suzanne de Castell, and Allan Luke, have not taken into account America's Hispanic literacy legacy. Drawing examples from historical accounts, diaries, and Spanish civil law, the author illustrates the depth and breadth of Hispanic contributions to American literacy. The article sharply contrasts the (relatively recent) image of “literacy deficient” Hispanic Americans with the rich legacy of their forebearers, who brought a new world of literacy to early America.

A composition researcher and psychiatrist report findings from their 3-year study of the revision of the most important book in the mental health profession: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). This 500-page diagnostic taxonomy defines some 250 mental disorders, and it functions for the field as a charter document, shaping the way mental illness is understood, treated, and studied. The revision project, which culminates in 1994 with the publication of DSM-IV, is a 6-year project involving some 1,000 psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. In this study the authors examine the DSM revision using three methodologies: in Part I they trace the history of the DSM classification system; in Part II they analyze published accounts of the revision by project leaders; and finally, in Part III they observe the revision process as it was actually carried out in one of the 13 work groups. The authors conclude that the revision of DSM functions less to change the text than to achieve certain social and political effects. They find the revision works to further entrench the biomedical model of mental disorder, to maintain the dominance of psychiatry within the mental health field, and to enhance the prestige of psychiatry in relation to other medical specialties.

Using the theoretical perspective offered by recent genre studies, this study compares student and professional discourse within the same field through a set of case studies written for a third-year course in financial analysis—writing that was conceived and designed by the instructor to simulate workplace discourse. Observational and textual analyses revealed the radically distinct social action undertaken in this student writing as compared to related workplace discourse, despite the simulation. Social motives, exigent rhetorical contexts, social roles, and reading practices were all distinct in ways that profoundly affected both discourse processes and products. At the same time, certain commonalities were apparent in the student and workplace writing. These shared features point to ways in which student writing enables and enacts entry into sociocultural communities.

Traditionally, invention has been regarded as relatively unimportant in technical writing because of the widely held notion that technologists generate their ideas prior to writing. It has recently been argued, however, that studies of situated writing encounter difficulties due to restricted ideas of writing and text. For instance, if writing means only transcribing extended pieces of prose, then it is difficult to account for the way invention is performed in technical writing. The wider idea of writing allows us to look differently at this instance of situated writing. Using this wider idea, a study of 3 engineering students engaged in a real-world project shows that the technical work of the project and invention for the students' final report were actually simultaneous rather than sequential activities. Moreover, writing in the form of notes and lists contributed to technical work and served to make knowledge communal among group members. In the technical writing examined here, invention for writing, invention through writing, and technical invention itself heavily overlapped.

This longitudinal study examines the reading processes and practices of one college student, Eliza, through eight semesters of undergraduate postsecondary education. Specifically, the study traces the development of this student's beliefs about literate activity—focusing not only on changes in her reading and writing activities per se, but also on her views about those activities, her representations of the nature of texts, and her understanding of the relationship between knowledge and written discourse within her disciplinary field of biology. Multiple data sources—including extended interviews, reading/writing logs, observations and field notes, texts, and read-and-think-aloud protocols—were used to explore Eliza's rhetorical development over her 4 college years. Results of various analyses together suggest that Eliza's conceptions of the function of texts and the role of authors—both as authors and as scientists—grew in complexity. A number of possibly interrelated factors may account for Eliza's expanding notions of authors and of texts: increased subject matter knowledge, instructional support, “natural” development, and mentoring in an internship situation.

This study proceeds from the assumption that computers do not function as independent variables in classrooms, but rather as part of a complex network of social and pedagogical interactions. It examines the integration of computers into the writing practices of a remedial English class in an urban high school. Computers and word processors were introduced midway into the school year. The class was observed and recorded daily throughout the academic year, and all written work was collected. Six students were selected for in-depth focus as they carried out writing tasks. Analysis focuses on how classroom writing practices were structured and carried out and how students participated in writing tasks before and after the computers arrived. Although many changes accompanied the use of computers, the study concludes that the teacher's structuring of writing instruction had the greatest impact on both student writing and the ways computers entered into that writing.

Many authorities have come to recognize the critical importance of the Greek notion of kairos (right timing and due measure) in contemporary rhetoric. But Aristotelian scholars have generally ignored or demeaned Aristotle's use of kairos in his rhetoric, often contrasting it especially to Plato's full treatment in the Phaedrus. This lack of attention has been partially due to faulty indexes or concordances, which have recently been corrected both by Wartelle and programs like PERSEUS and IBICUS. Secondly, no one has hitherto attempted to go beyond the root kair- and examine the concept as expressed in other terms. This article will attempt to meet both of these concerns. It will first examine carefully the 16 references to kairos in the Rhetoric and show that the term is an integral element in Aristotle's own act of writing, in his concept of the pathetic argument, and in his handling of maxims and integration. There are also important passages using kairos in his treatment of style, often in conjunction with his use of the notion of propriety or fitness (to prepon). Possibly the two most important indirect uses of the concept of kairos can be seen in his definition of rhetoric and in his treatment of equity in both the Rhetoric and in the Nicomachean Ethics, probably the two most important treatments of the concept in antiquity.

An important element of written and other technological forms of communication is that they accommodate “distance” between sender and receiver in a way proximate communication does not. Despite its importance, the notion of distance has remained pretty much undeveloped in theories of written communication, and the reference points for developing it have remained scattered across various, often noninteractive, literatures such as social theory, network theory, knowledge representation, and postmodernism. Synthesizing across these diverse literatures, we formulate a set of concepts and axioms that lays down some baselines for the general communication context, proximate or at a distance. Our baseline concepts include, among others, relative similarity, signature, reach, and concurrency. We then move beyond these baselines to concepts and axioms that accommodate the specialized distance characteristics of written (also print and electronic) communication. These concepts include asynchronicity, durability, and multiplicity. We conclude by discussing how these concepts and axioms matter to (a) the theoretical modeling of proximate and written systems of communication (including print and electronic systems); and (b) the educational challenge of teaching communication at a distance in the proximate space of the writing classroom.

Interdisciplinary research is often described as the recasting of disciplinary boundaries, suggesting that interdisciplinary writing might require a “boundary rhetoric”—one that negotiates the borders between the various disciplinary rhetorics involved. An example of such a boundary rhetoric can be found in the work of S. E. Jelliffe, a prominent physician-writer who proposed an innovative and controversial theory of psychosomatic medicine that offers to unite neurology and Freudian psychoanalysis. Jelliffe's work—in both its successes and failures—suggests some of the textual and conventional ways in which a boundary rhetoric can operate. At its most successful, Jelliffe's boundary rhetoric blurs the generic conventions and expectations of his constituent fields and “translates” the values and principles of one discipline into the language and discourse forms of the other. Given the increasing interdisciplinary character of much modern scholarship, Jelliffe's case is important in helping to illuminate potential problems and possibilities inherent in boundary rhetorics.

Composition theory generally has ignored grammar over the past 15 years, focusing instead on what has been described as “classifications of texts and relations among writers, readers, and subject matter.” Nevertheless, composition has been and continues to be strongly influenced by the model of language that is implicit in modern grammar. This model proposes that language is rule governed and, as a result, is deterministic. Transformational-generative grammar is the most well-known articulation of the model among composition specialists. This article describes the general features of the model and discusses some of the ways it has influenced composition. After assessing the various weaknesses of the rule-governed model, the article outlines a new model of language that is being developed in cognitive science by David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and others working in parallel distributed processing. This alternative model is associational and probabilistic and is grounded in connectionist theory and research. An association model of language provides composition specialists new perspectives on writers, research, and theory. The article concludes by suggesting possible ways to reconsider the act of composing and related theories.

This article argues for an activity-based theory of genre knowledge. Drawing on empirical findings from case study research emphasizing “insider knowledge” and on structuration theory, activity theory, and rhetorical studies, the authors propose five general principles for genre theory: (a) Genres are dynamic forms that mediate between the unique features of individual contexts and the features that recur across contexts; (b) genre knowledge is embedded in communicative activities of daily and professional life and is thus a form of “situated cognition”; (c) genre knowledge embraces both form and content, including a sense of rhetorical appropriateness; (d) the use of genres simultaneously constitutes and reproduces social structures; and (e) genre conventions signal a discourse community's norms, epistemology, ideology, and social ontology.

Although social psychologists have studied how people form impressions of others either through viewing them, listening to them speak, or reading written descriptions of them, researchers have not looked extensively at the ways in which readers form impressions of writers' personalities while reading their texts. This article reports on a series of studies in which different groups of readers were asked to respond to essays written by high school students applying for college admission. Our findings suggest that independent readers' impressions of writers' personalities overlap far more than would be expected by chance, that readers' impressions of writers' personalities can have practical consequences for writers, and that texts can be revised so as to influence, in predicted ways, the types of personality traits that readers are likely to infer.

The entry of ethnography and ethnographic methods into writing research, particularly during the 1980s, has been highly productive. However, this research continues to ignore many of the doubts concerning ethnography that anthropologists themselves have been raising for a number of years. This article (a) outlines more than a decade of civil war among anthropologists, (b) considers the relevance of that debate to writing researchers working ethnographically, (c) argues for more experimental ethnographic texts in contrast to the entrenched models that currently rule the field and despite the institutional resistance that experimental texts are bound to generate, and (d) suggests in cursory fashion the fate of “postmodernist” discourse in the context of the more normative discourse of institutional life. Along the way, the article analyzes some of the rhetoric of the ethnographic work of writing researchers, including Heath's Ways With Words.

This essay situates the phenomenon of writing and learning in historical, pedagogical, and theoretical frameworks to isolate write-to-learn methods derived from the “British model” of language and learning. Writing as a mode of learning has maintained its status partly because of the rise of rhetoric and composition as a specialized field and because cross-curricular writing instruction has been offered as one answer to alleged “crises” of literate standards and competence in public and higher education. Generally, the author claims that typical accounts of writing as a unique tool for promoting learning ignore the complexities of cultures, classrooms, assignments, and other media that might equally facilitate learning. The author's reading of 35 studies of writing and learning is that they do not provide the long-sought empirical validation of writing as a mode of learning. He argues that this research is grounded in the same assumptions about language and learning as are common in the lore and practice of “writing across the curriculum” (WAC) and writing process approaches, and as a result, the issue of writing and learning has been framed wrongly. The confounds within this body of research are many of the cognitive and situational variables that would support a model of writing and learning that is compatible with the diverse discourses and experiences within and across institutions.

Composition Studies emerged as a scholarly research discipline during the 1970s as (a) empirical methods became available to investigate the problem of meaning in discourse and, concomitantly, (b) the work of an international writing research community became institutionalized in the form of new journals and graduate programs. Distinguishing their efforts from prior histories of the field, the authors argue that the development of composition studies needs to be understood as part of a broader intellectual history affecting linguistics and literary studies, as well as composition. Reviewing basic tenets of formalism, structuralism (including both constructivism and social constructionism), and dialogism as root epistemologies organizing the recent histories of these disciplines, the authors conclude with a discussion of the dominant and often parallel themes that have characterized evolving conceptions of language, text, and meaning in composition, literature, and linguistics since the 1950s.

This study reworks the concept of genre from rhetorical, dialectical, and dialogic perspectives. From these perspectives, genre is redefined as a stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough site of social and ideological action. This definition is then applied to a specific literacy practice—medical record keeping—evolving in a specific context—a veterinary college. Data were gathered during a 6-month ethnographic study of the college. The larger research project focused on the teaching and learning practices that constituted literacy, i.e., the ways of speaking, reading, writing, and listening characteristics of veterinary medicine. The project consisted of interviews, observation, and document collection. Triangulation was achieved both within and between methods. Data were analyzed using Glaser and Strauss's “grounded theory” techniques. When the concept of genre is applied to medical record keeping, the complexity of this literacy practice becomes apparent. A specific record-keeping system—the Problem Oriented Veterinary Medical Record (POVMR) system—was the site of intense controversy at the college. The system articulated a set of values that one group of faculty and clinicians espoused and another group rejected. The system itself was embedded in the exam structure of the college, and a good deal of evidence emerged that the POVMR itself was promoting certain types of literacy abilities and making others less likely.

Recent trends in gender and writing research avoid or ignore the issue of essentialism while attempting to formulate a theory of “composing as a woman” that might rely on essentialist assumptions. Codifying the characteristics of “writing like a woman” or “writing like a man” can result in a limited—and limiting—conception of gender and its effect on writing. To illustrate this argument, this article uses as an example of I'écriture féminine the writing of Kenneth Burke and as an example of writing like a man the prose of Julia Kristeva. It argues for conceptualizing and studying gender as a secondary factor affecting writing rather than the principal factor.

This article presents insights about writing development of urban college students that can be gleaned from longitudinal research that examines both personal and academic histories. Factors in students' lives, revealed through ongoing interviews and classroom observations, influence both students' abilities to respond to certain types of reading and writing tasks and their potential to develop as successful college students. A set of categories developed by Larson is used to analyze the texts produced by a basic writing student in her first 3½ years of college to illustrate the richness and complexity of analysis available through longitudinal research.