Technical books for women of the English Renaissance provide a microcosm for studying connections among the emergence of technical writing as a genre, the rise of literacy, expansion of knowledge and technology, and replacement of orality by textuality as a result of increasing knowledge. These books on Renaissance technologies such as cooking, carving, household “physick,” home management, silkworm production, farming and estate management, midwifery, medical self-diagnosis, and gardening exhibit some differences from technical books written for men. Books for women are shorter and less detailed, but their style is similar to that of books for men. The style does not suggest writers believed that their women readers possessed an inferior reading comprehension level. Content differences seem to suggest that women's work was different from men's with many skills taught by oral transmission. The increasing complexity of the styles of technical books for women during the 16th and early 17th centuries suggests that women's reading skills increased as knowledge increased. Thus the oral style of the early 16th-century technical books disappeared with the need for an analytical style that would better convey growth of knowledge in the English Renaissance.

The style of discourse underlying writing instruction in this country, which has been termed essayist literacy by Scollon and Scollon and others, is grounded historically and culturally in the development of Western civilization. This style of discourse is the register of English used in academic situations, and it also has been found to be characteristic of some educated (especially male) mainstream speakers in other contexts. Because this register often differs from the naturally acquired discourse styles of students from nonmainstream groups, many such students face difficulties in writing instruction that mainstream students do not face. Given the importance of the essayist literacy register in this society, it is important (a) to make the characteristics of this discourse style explicit in order to increase the likelihood that writing instruction will be clear and available to all students, and (b) to learn about other discourse styles that are already known and used by students from a range of communities. A conceptual framework from the ethnography of communication is presented for studying verbal performances in different cultural contexts, and two examples of persuasive oral performances from ongoing research among Mexican immigrants are analyzed within this framework.

Rhetorical studies on experimental research articles in science have focused predominantly on introductions and discussions. The contextual nature of Results sections—the empirical heart of a scientific article—remains largely unexplored, however. What is known about the content of these sections comes from prescriptive style guides, which define Results as purely expository, leaving the argumentation to other sections of the article. This study examines one eminent biochemist's publications over time and a sampling of current articles authored by other biochemists. Six rhetorical moves were identified: (a) justifications for methodological selections, (b) interpretations of experimental results, (c) evaluative comments on experimental data, (d) statements citing agreement with preestablished studies, (e) statements disclosing experimental discrepancies, and (f) statements admitting interpretive perplexities. This investigation demonstrates that biochemists explicitly argue for the validity of their experimental data by employing certain rhetorical moves. Moreover, the findings challenge the traditional lore that Results sections engage in only simple, factual reporting.

Metadiscourse refers to writers' discourse about their discourse—their directions for how readers should read, react to, and evaluate what they have written about the subject matter. In this study the authors divided metadiscourse into textual metadiscourse (text markers and interpretive markers) and interpersonal metadiscourse (hedges, certainty markers, attributors, attitude markers, and commentary). The purpose was to investigate cultural and gender variations in the use of metadiscourse in the United States and Finland by asking whether U.S. and Finnish writers use the same amounts and types and whether gender makes any difference. The analyses revealed that students in both countries used all categories and subcategories, but that there were some cultural and gender differences in the amounts and types used. Finnish students and male students used more metadiscourse than U.S. students and female students. Students in both countries used much more interpersonal than textual metadiscourse with Finnish males using the most and U.S. males the least. The study provides partial evidence for the universality of metadiscourse and suggests the need for more cross-cultural studies of its use and/or more attention to it in teaching composition.

Most commentators on writing instruction—both its history and its present practice—focus on American examples, at least in part because of a lack of information about how other countries organize writing instruction. This article seeks to redress this situation by providing information about how Canadian universities organize writing instruction. The article presents a short orientation to the development of universities in Canada before presenting the results of a national survey of all the universities in Canada who belong to the Association of Universities and Colleges in Canada. The Results and Discussion section is divided into two parts based on the language of instruction in the universities being considered (English or French). The discussion seeks to answer three questions: How widespread is writing instruction? What do we know about the people who teach and research writing at universities? What is the range of instruction?

This article proposes a method for examining how disciplinary differences in knowledge making are created or reflected at the sentence level. The method focuses on the grammatical subjects of sentences as key indicators of disciplinary knowledge making. Grammatical subjects of all sentences in sample academic journal articles were classified by a system identifying (a) the kind of abstraction or particularism involved and (b) the ways in which the researcher may or may not have foregrounded research methods and warrants. Findings from the sample articles in subfields of psychology, history, and literature indicated that psychology articles were more likely to foreground research methods and warrants and least likely to be particularistic. History articles tended to be intermediate. Literature articles were most likely to be particularistic and least likely to focus on research methods and warrants.

Research by linguists and educators confirms the observation that aspects of the African-American experience are reflected in the grammatical, phonological, lexical, and stylistic features of African-American English and in the patterns of language use, including narrative, found in African-American speech communities. This study goes beyond prior research to investigate and characterize what Hymes refers to as the preferred patterns for the “organization of experience” among African-American adolescents. The results of the study revealed that, although subjects from several ethnic backgrounds stated a preference for using vernacular-based organizational patterns in informal oral exposition, African-American adolescents, in contrast to a group of Hispanic-American, Asian-American, and European-American adolescents, reported a strong preference for using vernacular-based patterns in academic writing tasks as they got older. These findings suggest that the organization of expository discourse is affected by cultural preference and years of schooling and that preference for organizational patterns can be viewed as an obstacle to or as a resource in successful literacy-related experiences.

This study explores the assumption that writing is a way to learn by examining the influence of task interpretation on writing and studying as learning aids. Forty college freshmen performed two tasks: reading-to-write and reading-to-study. Approaches to each task were categorized to test for effects of task interpretation. Students answered passage-specific comprehension questions after each task and gave think-aloud protocols as they worked. To assess learning processes, protocol transcripts were analyzed using a taxonomy of cognitive operations. Writing led to lower scores than studying on two of four comprehension measures. Writing and studying led to different patterns of cognitive operations when students worked with a fact-based source passage, but (a) these differences interacted with task interpretation, and (b) virtually no effects of task were observed on a more abstract passage. Results indicate that task interpretation and the nature of the material to be learned are important mediating variables in the relationship between writing and learning.

This article explores the uses of ethnomethodology in developing a robust sociocognitive theory of writing. Ethnomethodology, a radical movement in sociology that studies people's sense-making practices, has some parallel interests with cognitive-process research in composition. At the same time, because ethnomethodology is attuned to how sense-making involves organizing social structure, it also shares parallel interests with social-constructionist thought in composition. This article uses ethnomethodological perspectives to translate the language of Flower and Hayes's cognitive theory of writing into a more thoroughly social vocabulary as a way of articulating the role of social context and social structure in individual acts of writing.

Since the rise of college-level spelling instruction, pedagogies have been few, based primarily on “demon lists” of spelling words and injunctions to students about developing “informed doubt.” This study examines spelling instruction historically, then describes a large-scale analysis done in 1986 of the spelling errors found in 3,000 nationally gathered and stratified student essays. The result of this research is a new and somewhat unusual “demon list” indicating that the most commonly misspelled words are homophones, spellings based on pronunciation, and visual errors. The study then examines the changes wrought in student spelling by the advent of word processing with and without associated spell-checking, examining 100 word-processed essays with and 100 without spell-checking. This research indicates that word processing greatly increases the number of spelling errors unless spell-checking is used. The study concludes by exploring the question of what the future may hold for spelling pedagogies.

This essay presents a critical case study of how shifts in the style and genre of written communication both reflect and influence historical shifts in political consciousness and action. The field of study is the discourse of environmental advocacy. With increased public support for actions that would forestall environmental degradation, environmental politics has diversified. Formerly a resistance movement directed toward influencing large-scale governmental or industrial actions through the rhetoric of polemical dispute, environmentalism has evolved into several distinct approaches, including a globalist movement and a grass roots movement that share an interest in policy and procedure, the traditional topics of instrumental discourse. A new genre built upon this proactive attitude—the green how-to book—currently dominates the popular literature on environmental problem solving. Capitalizing on the document designs of technical communication, these manuals recommend courses of action ranging from fixing the Environmental Protection Agency to fixing the toilet; they are directed to audiences ranging from the President of the United States to the ordinary householder. They have in common an attempt to break the paralysis of fear associated with realizations about the scale of environmental damage. But—because the instrumental genre tends to obscure relations of agent, action, and effect—covert political agendas may pass unnoticed into the personalist politics of the new literature.

The almost exclusive reliance on evidence developed from documentary analyses, specifically analyses of textbooks, in composition historiography has resulted in an agonistic, heroes-and-villains image of the history of writing instruction, whereby modern composition scholars have defined themselves in terms of their opposition to what has come to be called “current-traditional rhetoric.” This article promotes the use of oral evidence in composition historiography to guard against overgeneralization and simplistic reduction of composition history to binary oppositions. Oral interviews also can serve as a way of collecting information that would otherwise be lost, of exploring the thoughts, motivations, feelings, and values of informants, and of giving voice to those marginalized politically, socially, and professionally. This article also defends oral data against positivistic attacks on its reliability as evidence and argues that the evidentiary value of any piece of historical data depends not on some abstract ranking of different kinds of evidence but on the historian's understanding of the rhetorical context informing the production of that data.

This study evaluated a method for teaching writers to anticipate readers' comprehension needs. The method, called reader-protocol teaching, involves asking writers to predict readers' problems with a text and then providing them with detailed readers' responses (in the form of think-aloud protocol transcripts) to illustrate how readers construct an understanding of the text. Writers in five experimental classes critiqued a set of ten poorly written instructional texts and then analyzed the protocol transcripts of readers struggling to comprehend these texts. Writers in five control classes were taught to anticipate the reader's needs through a variety of audience-analysis heuristics and collaborative peer-response methods. Pretests and posttests were used to assess improvements in experimental and control writers' ability to anticipate and diagnose readers' comprehension problems. Pretest and posttest materials were expository science texts. Writers taught with the reader-protocol teaching method improved significantly more than did writers in control classes in the number of readers' problems they accurately predicted. In addition, in contrast to writers in control classes, writers taught with the reader-protocol method significantly increased in their ability to (a) diagnose readers' problems caused by textual omissions, (b) characterize problems from the reader's perspective, and (c) attend to global-text problems. Moreover, writers' knowledge of audience acquired in one domain (instructional text) transferred to another (expository science text).

A“cognitive discourse analysis” was employed to analyze instructions for using a word processor written by eighth-grade students. The approach analyzes text structure in order to specify underlying semantic and conceptual knowledge structures. Our analyses revealed that the written instructions produced by the student writers were deficient in providing a reader with the information necessary for performing the task in two distinct ways. First, the group of students as a whole presented insufficient content information in their texts, particularly with respect to the subprocedures required to use the word processor. Second, the organization of students' texts did not parallel the hierarchical structure of the procedures described. These results suggest the importance of looking at writing from the point of view of the knowledge structures being expressed.

Research reported by Daly, Miller, and their colleagues suggests that writing apprehension is related to a number of factors we do not yet fully understand. This study suggests that included among those factors should be the belief that writing ability is a gift. Giftedness, as it is referred to in the study, is roughly equivalent to the Romantic notion of original genius. Results from a survey of 247 postsecondary students enrolled in introductory writing courses at two institutions indicate that higher levels of belief in giftedness are correlated with higher levels of writing apprehension, lower self-assessments of writing ability, lower levels of confidence in achieving proficiency in certain writing activities and genres, and lower self-assessments of prior experience with writing instructors. Significant differences in levels of belief in giftedness were also found among students who differed in their perceptions of the most important purpose for writing, with students who identified “to express your own feelings about something” as the most important purpose for writing having the highest mean level of belief in giftedness. Although the validity of the notion that writing ability is a special gift is not directly addressed, the results suggest that belief in giftedness may have deleterious effects on student writers.

Writing instructors often assign collaborative writing activities as a way to foster reflective thinking; many assume that the very act of explaining and defending ideas in the presence of a responsive audience actually forces writers to take critical positions on their own ideas. This article questions this assumption by examining the role of critical reflection in one particular writing context—that of collaborative planning. The authors' observations address three questions: (a) When students collaborate on plans for a paper do they necessarily reflect critically on their own ideas and processes, as many advocates of collaboration might expect? (b) If and when students engage in reflection, does it make a qualitative difference in their writing plans? And finally, (c) how do student writers engage in and use reflection as they develop plans? Twenty-two college freshmen audio-taped themselves as they planned course papers with a peer. Transcripts were coded for reflective comments and were holistically rated for quality. The analysis revealed a significant correlation between amount of reflective conversation and the quality of students' plans. Students used reflection to identify problems, to search for and evaluate alternative plans, and to elaborate ideas through the process of justification. This problem solving was most effective when reflection was sustained over many conversational turns. Collaboration did not guarantee reflection, however. Some sessions contained no reflective comments and some students used collaboration in a way that undermined reflective thinking. This study suggests that how students represented collaboration and the writing assignment itself determined whether and how they reflected on their own ideas.

This article, based on a year-long project in an urban K/1 classroom offers a case study of a young child who used school writing activities to perform rather than simply to communicate. A performer differs from a mere communicator in both the nature of language produced and in the kind of stance taken toward an audience. Although the child's language resources contributed to his success with written language, they did not always fit comfortably into the “writing workshop” used in his classroom; in fact, his assumptions about written language and texts conflicted in revealing ways with those undergirding a workshop approach. Thus, the study helps make explicit many unexamined assumptions of current written language pedagogies, particularly those involving the nature of literary sense, the relationship between writers' “audience” and their “helpers,” and most important, the links between oral performance, literacy pedagogy, and the use of the explicit, analytic language valued in school.

This article takes the position that teaching writing effectively to diverse students of non-English background will require an examination of existing views about the nature of writing and a critical evaluation of the profession's ability to work with bilingual individuals of different types. In order to explain this view, the article is divided into three parts. Part 1 describes the nature of bilingualism, identifies the population of students who can be classified as American bilingual minorities, and suggests that existing compartmentalization within the composition profession cannot address the needs of this particular population. Part 2 of the article reviews trends in current scholarship in second-language writing and points out that most of this research has focused on ESL students rather than on fluent/functional bilinguals. Finally, Part 3 lists and discusses a number of research directions in which the involvement and participation of mainstream scholars would be most valuable. In presenting an outline of questions and issues fundamental to developing effective pedagogical approaches for teaching writing to bilingual minority students, this final section argues that involvement in research on non-English-background populations of researchers who generally concentrate on mainstream issues would do much to break down the compartmentalization now existing within the English composition profession. It further argues that by using bilingual individuals to study questions of major theoretical interest, the profession will strengthen the explanatory power of existing theories about the process and practice of writing in general.

The evolution of page design to improve the readability of technical writing can be traced to improvements in typography and also to the influence of Peter Ramus. Ramus's logic used bracketed outlines to show the relationships among ideas within larger concepts. Used by legal writers and Puritan theologians to analyze concepts, Ramist method was also used by English physicians who sought to create medical texts that could be easily read and remembered by students and practitioners. Texts that used Ramist method illustrate their writers' awareness of the importance of making information visually accessible by use of white space, headings that reveal hierarchies of ideas, and bracketed dichotomies and partitions to reveal content for selective reading.

This Qualitative study sought to determine whether four high- and four low-apprehensive first-year college writers responded differently as peer evaluators of writing in a face-to-face group versus a group that communicated via an electronic-mail network. An analysis of recorded group “conversations” revealed that high apprehensives exhibited different strategies than low apprehensives for informing group members about writing during both face-to-face and e-mail sessions. Furthermore, high apprehensives during e-mail sessions participated more and offered more directions for revision than during face-to-face meetings. When revising subsequent to group meetings, high apprehensives reported relying more on group comments received during e-mail sessions than group comments received during face-to-face sessions.

These studies investigated the degree to which prompts and topic types affect the writing performance of college freshmen. The students (N = 3,452) taking the 1989 and 1990 Manoa Writing Placement Examination (MWPE) were required to write in response to two types of topics (for a total of 6,904 essays): one in response to a reading passage and another in response to a question based on personal experience. Ten such prompt sets were used in this study. Study 1 indicated that the MWPE testing procedures were reasonably reliable and consistent across semesters but that student responses to individual prompts and prompt sets were significantly different from each other. Study 2 showed that if two topic types and a large number of prompts are involved, the differences that arise in the performance on prompts or topic types can be minimized by examining the students' mean scores and changing the pairings so that the prompt sets are more equitable in subsequent administrations.

This article reports a study of the writing experience of 40 eleventh-grade writers and examines the social and pedagogical circumstances that contributed to limited concentration and limited motivation for their writing. Methodology included in-depth phenomenological interviewing, composing aloud exercises, and classroom observation; the data were analyzed using qualitative procedures. The study (a) defines and describes four different ways in which emotion disrupts cognition to intrude on concentration in writing, (b) investigates social issues and contextual events that precipitate this struggle with concentration, and (c) explores the effect that this struggle has on writing motivation. Pedagogy is discussed as it was experienced by the participants and as it related to concentration and motivation.

This article discusses the work of two American ecologists of the first half of the twentieth century, F. E. Clements and H. A. Gleason, who differed in terms of their understanding of community succession—that is, how ecological communities change over time. Clements's and Gleason's debate about the nature of ecological communities demonstrates, first, that in considering questions of succession, ecologists are constructing and testing plausible narratives. Second, it suggests that the structures of scientific narratives resemble structures of other cultural narratives in depending, at least to some extent, on cultural assumptions and values. The presence of these competing stories about ecological data thus calls attention to the importance of narrative as an interpretive and rhetorical strategy in scientific discourse.

This article explores some of the confusion and sources of that confusion in the research relating parts of clauses to the communicative roles that they play. It proposes that M.A.K. Halliday's system of analyzing a sentence into one or more of three possible kinds of themes and a rheme is a useful system in which the research relating parts of clauses to their communicative roles can be carried out. The article examines and briefly critiques Halliday's system of analysis and then goes on to compare some of Halliday's terms with those used in other systems. The article concludes by discussing some implications that this system might have for understanding aspects of discourse production, structure, or reception.

Theoretical and pedagogical interest in writing in academic disciplines and other discourse communities has grown in the last decade, but few studies have looked at advanced levels of disciplinary enculturation. In this study, I examine the contexts for writing and response in a graduate education seminar with fifteen students, including eight nonnative speakers of English. I consider how the professor explicitly and implicitly communicated expectations for the form and content of writing assignments; how the students understood, negotiated and undertook these tasks; and how the professor evaluated and responded to students' final written texts. Finally, I argue that the students' writing tasks occur in a complex, multidimensional historical field of personal and social contexts and that advanced levels of disciplinary enculturation are marked by a specific set of issues revolving around students' emerging authority and conflicts inherent in disciplinary microsocieties.

In this study, we analyzed how students from different interpretive communities shape their academic texts. Prospective educational researchers, prospective reading specialists, prospective teachers, and prospective nurses read an educational research article from which we had deleted the discussion section. After they had read the article, subjects completed it by writing a discussion section. We analyzed subjects' texts in terms of writers' manipulation of both content and procedural knowledge. Our findings suggest that mere participation in an interpretive community without explicit instruction in its ways of writing can enhance students' ability to write in that community. Our findings also suggest that participation in one interpretive community can facilitate writing in another community, provided the communities share discourse conventions.

In this article, interviews with a Vietnamese-speaking science student who has repeatedly failed a required English competency examination are presented. Topics relating to this examination include prompt type, essay content, rhetorical organization, student preparation for writing, and audience. Questions are raised regarding the purposes, development, and evaluation of writing competency tests.

Through the use of case study portraits, this article examines naturally occurring one-to-one writing conference conversations between a ninth-grade English teacher and three students in his class. Suggesting a broadened model of effective writing conference instruction, the article considers composing processes that appear to be privileged in the conference context when different students are learning to write. The focus is on the dialogic nature of markedly contrasting conversations, demonstrating that while dialogue wears many guises and while the give and take between teacher and student can be fleeting and “forgettable,” the conversational context contributes to a deliberative process critical to the process of composing. Methodology for the research on which this article is based drew on ethnographic techniques combined with discourse analysis of writing conference conversation.

On-line computer conferences have been of increasing interest to teachers of composition who hope to provide alternative forums for student-centered, collaborative writing that involve all members of their classes in active learning. Some expect them to provide sites for discourse that are more egalitarian and less constrained by power differentials based on gender and status than are face-to-face discussions. These expectations, however, are largely unsupported by systematic research. The article describes an exploratory study of gender and power relationships on Megabyte University, one particular on-line conference. While the results of the study are not definitive, they do suggest that gender and power are present to some extent even in on-line conferences. During the two 20-day periods studied, men and high-profile members of the community dominated conference communication. Neither this conference domination nor the communication styles of participants were affected by giving participants the option of using pseudonyms.

It has recently been argued that researchers should pay increased attention to the ways in which critical thinking processes are stimulated when students can determine their own types and sequences of reading and writing activities. This argument underscores the need to look more closely at the research process for the research paper, probably the best means that teachers have for fostering independent critical thinking. Remarkably, only a few studies touch on what students do as they select and narrow a topic, locate sources, sift through these sources, and develop a central research question or thesis statement. Nevertheless, much can be learned from these few studies, especially with respect to the intellectual significance of when and how a thesis or controlling idea is formulated. This article examines these studies in detail, notes the limitations of a related body of research focusing on other kinds of academic writing, and raises a number of conceptual and methodological issues for researchers to address in future research on the research process.

This article analyzes “Timestyle” in order to identify the persona in the Nation and World sections of Time, a weekly newsmagazine. The sample for the study consisted of articles by 30 staff writers, articles that were randomly selected from Time' s 1988 issues. These articles were analyzed in six categories adapted from Walker Gibson's Style Machine: (a) word size and familiarity, (b) subject words and pronouns, (c) verbs, (d) modifiers, (e) sentence length and subordination, and (f) other effects of tone. The analysis suggests that Time' s narrative voice is a powerful one. The narrator has the power to put us at ease, engage our feelings, secure our trust, and divert our attention.

A review of a range of usage handbooks reveals that many manuals advise against the use of words, phrases, and sentence types on the basis of commonly held beliefs rather than of empirical studies of the characteristics of the items and the ways in which professional writers actually use them. One element castigated by the manuals is expletive it, particularly when followed by a form of the verb be. This study distinguishes three constructions which begin with it is (extrapositive, cleft, and inferential), examines their linguistic characteristics, notes differences in meaning and function between them and their expletiveless counterparts, and explores the uses made of them by writers of fiction and nonfiction. The study demonstrates that although conventionally meaningless, expletive it is introduces sentence types with pragmatic and textual properties of considerable value to writers. The constructions are associated with specific interpretations beyond their conventional meanings. These interpretations provide writers with resources for creating subtle and significant local textual effects.

This study examined the effects of computer network technologies on teacher-student and student-student interactions in a writing course emphasizing multiple drafts and collaboration. Two sections used traditional modes of communication (face-to-face, paper, and phone); two other sections, in addition to using traditional modes, used electronic modes (electronic mail, bulletin boards, and so on). Patterns of social interaction were measured at two times: 6 weeks into the semester and at the end of the semester. Results indicate that teachers in the networked sections interacted more with their students than did teachers in the regular sections. In addition, it was found that teachers communicated more electronically with less able students than with more able students and that less able students communicated more electronically with other students.

Computer conversation provides a writing context in which both process and product are mediated via the computer terminal and the product is semipermanent. This 8-month study of the use of computer conversation by an IBM project manager and his colleagues identifies the cognitive and contextual strategies used to accommodate this particular task environment. When planning, writers chose among the available communication media, changed goals in a shifting rhetorical context, and organized parallel processes. When translating, they remembered the text constructed thus far and the knowledge shared with the reader and chose surface structures ad hoc to fit the technology. When reviewing, they revised with the goal of comprehensibility and evaluated writing-in-production against incoming information. This particular writing process illustrates the cognitive consequences of context for writing.

In the light of previous studies of features of spoken and written language, this study examined the opening months of an informal computer conversation among novice computer users who had not previously known each other. To establish the sequence of conversational utterances in the absence of physical and temporal proximity, participants used personal names and lexical referents. Linguistic features often found in oral conversation—indicators of personal involvement, disfluencies, and representations of paralinguistic elements—occurred frequently in this corpus. The graphic representation of normally oral language features may account in part for the participants' sense of intimacy and community with one another.

Text transmitted electronically through computer-mediated communication networks is an increasingly available yet little documented form of written communication. This article examines the syntactic and stylistic features of an emergent phenomenon called Interactive Written Discourse (IWD) and finds that the concept of “register,” a language variety according to use, helps account for the syntactic reductions and omissions that characterize this historical juxtaposition of text format with real-time and interactive pressures. Similarities with another written register showing surface brevity, the note taking register, are explored. The study is an empirical examination of written communication from a single discourse community, on a single topic, with a single recipient, involving 23 experienced computer users making travel plans with the same travel advisor by exchanging messages through linked computers. The study shows rates of omissions of subject pronouns, copulas, and articles and suggests that IWD is a hybrid, showing features of both spoken and written language. In tracing variable use of conventions such as sentence initial lower case and parentheses, the study shows that norms are gradually emerging. This form of written communication demands study because, as capabilities expand, norms associated with this medium of communication may come to influence or even replace those of more traditional writing styles.

This article describes episodes of concurrent metalinguistic and ideational thinking in the verbal reports of 23 adult ESL learners composing on two tasks, then relates these descriptions to claims about the value of composition writing for second language learning. Three kinds of thinking episodes, appearing in about 30% of the decisions reported by learners while composing, show potential value for incidental learning of the second language: (a) searching out and assessing appropriate wording, (b) comparing cross-linguistic equivalents, and, much less frequently, (c) reasoning about linguistic choices in the second language. Multivariate analyses indicated that the frequency of these thinking episodes is significantly related to learners' writing expertise in their mother tongue. Implications are drawn for refining Swain's 1985 notion of “comprehensible output” in view of other theories of cognitive learning and second language acquisition, a necessary preliminary to empirical assessment of this hypothesis.

This article contrasts writing-as-transcribing and writing-as-composing, arguing that true composing requires conceptual reformulation and speculating that contradictions in studies of composing with computers may be partly explained as a confusion between transcribing and composing. The article also reviews what we know of predraft planning and writing, or note-making, and claims that note-making is at once a monitoring process and a planning strategy and as such may be particularly valuable for composing. Following this, a descriptive study examines the note-making activities of a group of experienced writers and contrasted the same writers' note-making in pen and paper and word processing conditions. A four-part classification scheme accounted for virtually all notes that writers generated; the four kinds of note were content, structure, emphasis, and procedural notes. Early writing sessions and note-making patterns of individual writers are examined in detail, revealing important differences in note-making between writers. Further, individual writers also had distinctly different note-making patterns when writing in different technological contexts—with pen and paper and with word processing. This research shows note-making, and accompanying predraft planning, to be a critical juncture in the composing process and supports the notion that writers' composing, or at least their early composing, may be markedly different when working with traditional and with computer writing tools.

The widespread use of irony in academic writing raises issues not considered in most psychological, linguistic, or literary approaches to irony: How is irony signalled in a written text? What are the constraints of politeness within academic discourse that govern the use and interpretation of irony? This essay considers the interpretation of one kind of irony—ironic quotation—in a controversy between linguists and artificial intelligence researchers. Irony in these published exchanges is then compared to irony in conference discussions and unpublished papers in linguistics and to irony in other disciplines. Although the analysis follows psychological and linguistic accounts of irony as echoic mention in which the same words can be reused with a different intention, it begins with the rhetorical relation of the quoting writer, the quoted writer, and the reader as members of disciplinary communities. The instances of irony that are considered both define these relations and assume them as a basis for interpretation. This analysis suggests that the study of irony can serve as a means of understanding disciplines and of examining our own taken-for-granted assumptions as academic writers.

The authors recount their attempt to analyze a case study in terms of two conflicting rhetorics: a collectivist rhetoric that values most the contributions individuals make to an ongoing collective project and an individualist rhetoric that values most the original and autonomous voice. These two rhetorics conflict in the experience of one writer working concurrently in a literature seminar within a university English department and in the public relations office of a reproductive services agency. This conflict, centering on different rhetorical ethics, had less to do with competence than with commitment: the writer's commitment to the individualist ethics practiced in the writing she did in the literature seminar prevented her from valuing the writing she did at the agency that worked toward a collectivist end. The authors then examine how this analysis is problematized by alternative interpretations of this case that demonstrate that the collectivist rhetoric practiced by researchers and theorists of writing itself involves the interaction of conflicting individualist assertions. This analysis suggests that the most useful theoretical insights any case might provide into the question of how writing ought to be taught are embodied in the exchange of interpretations that case provokes and in the confrontation of diverse arguments that emerge from that exchange.

The reliability of secondary students' scores from a previously published measure of attitudes toward writing, Daly and Miller's Writing Apprehension Scale (WAS), and a newly developed Attitudes Toward Writing with the Computer Scale (ATWCS) were appraised and validity evidence gathered in two separate studies. Data came from 354 7th through 10th graders in seven school districts and from 658 10th graders in one school district. Alpha coefficients were .94 and above for the WAS and .86 and above for the ATWCS. Construct validity indicators were (a) low correlations between WAS and ATWCS scores and substantiating interview data; (b) higher correlations between WAS and holistic writing scores than between ATWCS and holistic writing scores; (c) greater sensitivity of the ATWCS to the effects of participation in a computer writing lab; and (d) independent factorial structures for the two scales. A three-factor solution was obtained for the WAS, contrary to Daly and Miller's unifactor solution.

In the first three medical reports on AIDS which were published in 1981 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the writers' primary rhetorical agenda was to argue that a new medical discovery had been made. A secondary agenda was to offer etiological explanations for the new problem. To establish the new disease entity as deserving serious attention, the writers built a sense of mystery by confronting established medical knowledge about immunodeficiency and emphasizing the inability of modern medicine to diagnose and treat the problem. When they explained the phenomenon in etiological terms, rather than confronting the disciplinary matrix, the writers relied on established medical knowledge of infection rates in homosexual males as well as prevailing social views about the dangerous nature of male homosexual activity; consequently, they were able to imply that nothing was mysterious or surprising about immunodeficiency in homosexual males.

To understand the ways that teachers adapt writing instruction to a microcomputer classroom, the researchers observed and recorded activities minute-by-minute in four classes for a full semester of introductory composition. Two experienced teachers each taught two classes: one traditional class and one class that met for half of its time in a microcomputer classroom. This report contrasts their classes, calling attention to (a) the time pressures created by teaching with computers, (b) issues in training students to be proficient at word processing and revising, (c) ways a microcomputer classroom can foster workshop approaches to teaching writing, (d) the need for carefully structured classroom activities, and (e) the importance of teachers sharing with students common values for learning with computers in a group setting.

Researchers and teachers are joining in a movement to introduce more collaborative work in language arts classrooms. While collaborative learning and writing are valuable activities in any classroom, not enough is understood about what happens when collaborative activities are introduced into a traditional classroom discourse structure. This study analyzes a collaborative activity, both as a traditional classroom event and as a collaborative event. The results of the analysis suggest that, even when the activity is explicitly collaborative and students are experienced collaborators, patterns of traditional classroom discourse dominate their communicative choices.

Explaining difficult ideas to lay readers is an important and frequently needed writing skill. When explaining, writers must recognize and overcome the confusions that lay readers may experience in learning abstract concepts. To date, there has been little study of this demanding writing skill. Consequently, this article identifies a particular class of explanatory discourse and proposes working hypotheses about the types of knowledge likely to be associated with skill in this genre. These hypotheses are explored through a study of individual differences in explanatory writing skill among 169 college students. The results of the study showed that variations in the accuracy and adaptiveness of the students' explanations were partially accounted for by measures of topic knowledge, social cognition, and discourse knowledge. A discourse knowledge index and a topic knowledge index were correlated with explanatory writing skill. Cognitive complexity, a measure of social cognition, was associated with adaptiveness in explaining but not accuracy. These findings suggest that explanatory skill is a function of several types of knowledge and that it may be as dependent on discourse or rhetorical knowledge as it is on topical expertise.