This study draws on the perceptions and experiences of upper-division students enrolled in writing-intensive (WI) classes in their majors at a large state university. During extended interviews, students reported confidence in dealing with the writing requirements of their majors and predicted success in future job-related writing situations. The primary bases for this confidence are their experiences with a significant number of WI assignments and their ability to engage a variety of resources and use the knowledge thereby obtained. Students particularly valued research-related writing assignments in the major as opportunities for professional skills development and identity building. The authors discuss findings as they relate to the ideologies of writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines. The authors argue for greater attention to students' readiness to make connections across assignments, courses, and disciplines; they also suggest greater attention to a field's inquiry methods and strategies for solving problems.

Commentary: When this essay first appeared more than 10 years ago, it built on a small but substantial body of scholarship that declared scientific writing an appropriate field for rhetorical analysis. In the last 10 years, studies of scientific writing for both expert and lay audiences have increased exponentially, drawing on the long-established disciplines of the history and philosophy of science. These newer studies, however, differ widely in approach. Many take the perspective of cultural critique (e.g., the work of Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar), whereas others use the tools of discourse analysis (e.g., Greg Myers, M.A.K. Halliday, and J. R. Martin). But, application of rhetorical theory also thrives in the work of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, Charles Bazerman, Jean Dietz Moss, Lawrence J. Prelli, Carolyn Miller, and many others. Randy Allen Harris offers a useful introduction to this field in Landmark Essays on Rhetoric in Science (1997). “Accommodating Science” applies ideas from classical rhetoric and techniques of close reading typical of discourse analysis to the question of what happens when scientific reports travel from expert to lay publications. This change in forum causes a shift in genre from forensic to celebratory and a shift in stasis from fact and cause to evaluation and action. These changes in genre, audience, and purpose inevitably affect the material and manner of re-presentation in predictable ways. Two concerns informed this study 10 years ago: the impact of science reporting on public deliberation and the nature of technical and professional writing courses. These concerns have, if anything, increased (e.g., the campaign on global warming), warranting continued scholarly investigation of the gap between the public's right to know and the public's ability to understand.

Commentary: When “Ethos Versus Persona” was published in 1988, I was aware that these constructs easily transcend their ancient roots and that their richness and complexity have wide-ranging implications for contemporary rhetorical analysis and criticism. But I had no idea I was exploring concepts that would prove useful a decade later in understanding the political and legal travails of President Bill Clinton. As of this writing (March 1998), the president of the United States is caught in a firestorm of controversy surrounding alleged sexual improprieties and possible illegal acts (perjury, subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice). The national media are operating at a fever pitch to supply instantaneous information and analysis. And the American public, even if they might want to, cannot escape the deluge. By all accounts, the president's approval ratings should be sinking like a rock. Yet commentators from all sides of the political spectrum are astounded that his ratings have soared to an all-time high. At the heart of this conundrum is the question of character and how audiences (or readers or voters) judge character. High-minded conservative pundits such as George Will are railing that this presidency has become so tawdry that, for the sake of national integrity, it must be terminated. Mr. Will apparently subscribes to the (decidedly modernist) theory that a person must not just seem good but be good in order to be credible. But do the approval ratings suggest that the American people have adopted the more postmodern (but also ancient amoral) view that politics is not just about appearances - it is appearances? Maybe. Or has the public - perhaps subscribing to Will's ontology after all - concluded that the taciturn special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, has employed questionable tactics in obtaining evidence and that, by comparison, the president's character does not seem so bad after all? Regardless of what theories may or may not be reflected in public opinion polls, have the president and his handlers been successful (thus far) in maintaining his image as a credible figure? Or is it just the economy, stupid? “Ethos Versus Persona” does not provide answers to these questions, of course. But it might yield some interesting ways to think about rhetoric and presidential politics as we close out the century. In any event, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Washington and its players for a months-long morality play enacting the tensions that energize ethos and that become even more apparent in any juxtaposition of ethos and persona. I could not have written a better or more timely script myself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

This study examines the monitoring strategies eleventh-grade students employ in analytic and summary writing. Ten high and ten average ability writers each took part in two composing-aloud sessions, writing one analytic, thesis/support essay and one chronological summary essay based upon their reading of history passages. Students' composing-aloud protocols were broken down into individual communication units, which were examined for the kinds of monitoring, self-regulatory behaviors students engaged in to guide themselves through the composing process. The study analyzed students' monitoring at different points in the composing process and for the process as a whole. Multivariate analysis of variance procedures were used to study results of the protocol analyses. The study found that, while writing analyses, students devoted considerable attention to figuring out the demands of the writing task, to examining their own understanding of the topic and its significance, and to assessing the effectiveness of their own writing strategies. However, while writing summaries, students did far less monitoring of their composing processes and reflecting about their subject matter, spending most of their time mainly paraphrasing the readings. Results suggest that both high and average ability student writers employ a wide range of metacognitive strategies in writing, and that students vary those strategies both across writing tasks and at different points within the writing process.

Holistic reading is widely used to assess the proficiency of non-native-speaking (NNS) writers. However, ESL professionals, who have been profoundly influenced by the notion that attention to the NNS author's message is an integral part of teaching the writing process, have questioned how well native-speaking (NS) raters comprehend NNS texts, given that the task of decoding NNS prose is even further complicated by the time constraints of the holistic scoring process itself. This article describes a study that investigated the extent to which NS holistic raters comprehend NNS texts. After rating several practice compositions, subjects rated one of two qualitatively distinct essays, and then wrote recall protocols to test their comprehension. Data analysis revealed that readers of the better written text recalled significantly more than did readers of the less well written text, indicating that NS holistic raters attend to meaning when evaluating NNS writing proficiency.

Donald Graves has achieved wide recognition for propounding a method for teaching elementary students how to write that stresses unstructured expression of personal experiences. He uses his case study of sixteen New Hampshire children as a research base providing proof of the efficacy of this method. However, his observations from this study qualify as reportage more than research. The work of the Graves team in New Hampshire represents a demonstration of teaching ideas that work well under favorable circumstances. Because he never considers negative evidence for the hypotheses he is testing, his work does not constitute research.

A critical area in the advancement of literacy is the production of textbooks that reflect recent insights on language and discourse. However, this project is problematic within the established procedures whereby textbooks are reviewed and approved. This article presents an ethnography of one author's experience and suggests some guidelines whereby rational criteria might be widely established.