Common topics are words or phrases used to develop argument, and commonplaces aid memory or catalyze frames of understanding. When used in argumentation, each may help interested parties more effectively communicate valuable scientific and environment-related information. This article describes 12 modern topics of environmental rhetoric, identified from 125 interviews, and discusses them in relation to their topical fluidity and managerial, generative, and encapsulated utility: “Al Gore,” “balance,” “common sense,” “environment as setting,” “experience,” “extremism,” “man’s achievements,” “pragmatism,” “proof,” “religion,” “recycling,” and “seeing is believing.” Findings suggest that “environment” is a complex topic with many potential implications—using topics common to environmental rhetoric to shape argumentation may facilitate more productive environment-related communication.

Recent scholarship in genre studies has extended its focus from studying single genres to multiple genres, as well as how these genres interact with one another. This essay seeks to contribute to this growing scholarship by adding a new concept, intermediary genre. That is, a genre that facilitates the “uptake” of a genre by another genre. This concept is designed to reveal a particular aspect of multiple genres: that one genre can be used to connect and mobilize two otherwise unconnected genres to make uptake possible. The concept is illustrated in case study of knowledge mobilization, an instance in which scientific research was used in the judicial system to inform public policies on eyewitness handling and police-lineup procedures. The case study shows how intermediary genres emerge, how they connect other genres, and how knowledge circulates as a result of such connections and affects policy decisions.

The aim of this study was to analyze the consequences of emotion during narrative writing in accordance with Hayes’s model. In this model, motivation and affect have an important role during the writing process. Moreover, according to the emotion-cognition literature, emotions are thought to create interferences in working memory, resulting in an increase of cognitive load. Following Cuisinier and colleagues, fourth and fifth graders were instructed to write autobiographical narratives with neutral emotional content, positive emotional content, and negative emotional content. The results did not indicate an effect of emotional instructions on the proportion of spelling errors, but they did reveal an effect on the text length. However, a simple regression analysis showed a correlation between working memory capacity and the number of spelling errors in the neutral condition only. The potential influence of cognitive load created by emotion on the writing process is discussed.

Writers typically produce their writing in bursts. In this article, the authors examine written language bursts in a sample of 33 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment. Comparisons of the children with specific language impairment with an age-matched group of typically developing children ( n = 33) and a group of younger, language skill–matched children ( n = 33) revealed the role of writing bursts as a key factor in differentiating writing competence. All the children produced the same number of writing bursts in a timed writing task. Children with specific language impairment produced a shorter number of words in each burst than did the age-matched group but the same as the language skill–matched group. For all groups, spelling accuracy and handwriting speed were significant predictors of burst length and text quality. The frequency of pauses at misspellings was related to shorter bursts. These results offer support to Hayes’s model of text generation; namely, burst length is constrained by language and transcription skills.

Moment to moment, a writer faces a host of potential problems. How does the writer’s mind coordinate this problem solving? In the original Hayes and Flower model, the authors posited a distinct process to manage this coordinating—that is, the “monitor.” The monitor became responsible for executive function in writing. In two experiments, the current authors investigated monitor function by examining the coordination of two common writing tasks—editing (i.e., correcting an error) and sentence composing—in the presence or absence of an error and with a low or high memory load for the writer. In the first experiment, participants could approach the editing and composing task in either order. On most trials (88%), they finished the sentence first, and less frequently (12%), they corrected the error first. The error-first approach occurred significantly more often under the low-load condition than the high-load condition. For the second experiment, participants were asked to adopt the less-used, error-first approach. Success in completing the assigned task order was affected by both memory load and error type. These results suggest that the monitor depends on the relative availability of working memory resources and coordinates subtasks to mitigate direct competition over those resources.

In Section 1 of this article, the author discusses the succession of models of adult writing that he and his colleagues have proposed from 1980 to the present. He notes the most important changes that differentiate earlier and later models and discusses reasons for the changes. In Section 2, he describes his recent efforts to model young children’s expository writing. He proposes three models that constitute an elaboration of Bereiter and Scardamalia’s knowledge-telling model. In Section 3, he describes three running computer programs that simulate the action of the models described in Section 2.

Although keystroke logging promises to provide a valuable tool for writing research, it can often be difficult to relate logs to underlying processes. This article describes the procedures and measures that the authors developed to analyze a sample of 80 keystroke logs, with a view to achieving a better alignment between keystroke-logging measures and underlying cognitive processes. They used these measures to analyze pauses, bursts, and revisions and found that (a) burst lengths vary depending on their initiation type as well as their termination type, suggesting that the classification system used in previous research should be elaborated; (b) mixture models fit pause duration data better than unimodal central tendency statistics; and (c) individuals who pause for longer at sentence boundaries produce shorter but more well-formed bursts. A principal components analysis identified three underlying dimensions in these data: planned text production, within-sentence revision, and revision of global text structure.

Informally recognized by the tribal council in 1821, the 86-character Cherokee writing system invented by Sequoyah was learned in manuscript form and became widely used by the Cherokee within the span of a few years. In 1827, Samuel Worcester standardized the arrangement of characters and print designs in ways that differed from Sequoyah’s original arrangement of characters. Using Worcester’s arrangement as their sole source of evidence, however, scholars and Cherokee language learners have misunderstood the syllabary by viewing it through an alphabetic lens. Drawing on 5 years of ethnohistorical research, this article opens with a brief history of Sequoyah’s invention to show the ways Worcester’s rearrangement bent the Cherokee writing system to the orthographic rules of the Latin alphabet, thus obscuring the instrumental logics of the original script. Next, a linguistic analysis of the Cherokee writing system is presented in an effort to recover its instrumental workings. Adding a new perspective to research on American literacy histories in general and scholarship on the Cherokee syllabary in particular, the author argues that the Cherokee language demands a writing system uniquely Cherokee, one practiced outside of an alphabetic influence and capable of representing underlying meaning and sound with each character.

Students are expected to come into the current college classroom already possessing certain skills including the ability to write at the appropriate academic level regardless of discipline and the ability to create well-structured arguments. Research indicates, however, that most students entering college are underprepared in both areas. One strategy that may help students write at a more academic level is teaching students to focus on spending their time on revision. In the current study, we examine two potential sources of difficulty in the revision of argumentative essays: a poorly developed argument schema and a poorly developed global revision task schema. We created and tested the effectiveness of two written tutorials designed to provide college students information to saturate their knowledge base as well as provide them with procedural tasks to complete. We found that without instruction, students focused their revisions on making local wording changes that did not qualitatively improve their essays. An argument tutorial helped students make higher level global changes, include more argument content, and improve the structure of the essay. A global revision tutorial also helped students make more substantive structural changes. Thus, both tutorials helped students improve their revisions, and the tutorials were completed independently by the students successfully.

This article traces the trajectory of one particular scene in the work of three media students writing and filmmaking. The analysis scrutinizes the role of semiotic tools, such as synopsis and storyboard, in students’ filmmaking practice. Moreover, the use of interactional data combined with textual data allows for a rich recording of the activity, aiming to integrate a multimodal analysis into a sociocultural perspective on learners’ composing practices. The findings indicate that the students are not able to transfer their particular meaning from the written mode into the language of moving images because they downplay the role of the semiotic tools available to them in the educational context.

In this article, the authors engage the theoretical lens of multimodality in rethinking the practices and processes of composing in classrooms. Specifically, they focus on how learning new composing practices led some fifth-grade students to author new literate identities—what they call authorial stances—in their classroom community. Their analysis adds to the current research on the production and analysis of multimodal texts through an analysis of the interrelationships between multimodal composing processes and the development of literate identities. They found that by extending the composing process beyond print modalities students’ composing shifted in significant ways to reflect the circulating nature of literacies and texts and increased the modes of participation and engagement within the classroom curriculum.These findings are based on an ethnographic study of a multimodal storytelling project in a fifth-grade urban classroom.

This article, drawing on ethnographic study in a chemical physics research facility, explores how notebooks are used and produced in the conduct of laboratory science. Data include written field notes of laboratory activity; visual documentation of in situ writing processes; analysis of inscriptions, texts, and material artifacts produced in the laboratory and assembled in notebooks; and an in-depth interview with an expert chemist whose research and writing formed the basis of this investigation. Findings from this study suggest that the notebook occupies a negotiated space between the scientist’s contingent response to exigency in the laboratory and the genre-specific strategies that he or she deploys to communicate his or her work outside the laboratory. This text, the author argues, might therefore be understood as a locus in the sense that it facilitates a reflexive process whereby inscriptions are used both to interpret a-perceptual chemical phenomena in time, and, through their inclusion and integration in the notebook, to discipline that interpretation over time. Tracing the way inscriptions move between material synthesis, on the one hand, and text production, on the other, this article ultimately offers a methodical approach for investigating how the material, technical, and symbolic dimensions of writing and text converge in a modern scientific workplace.

An extensive body of scholarship has documented the way disciplinary texts and activities are produced and mediated through their relationship to a wide array of extradisciplinary discourses. This article seeks to complement and extend that line of work by drawing upon Witte’s (1992) notion of intertext to address the way disciplinary activities repurpose, or reuse and transform, extradisciplinary practices. Based on text collection and practice-oriented retrospective accounts of one writer’s processes for a number of textual activities, the article argues that the writer’s developing disciplinary writing process as a graduate student in English literature is mediated by practices she repurposed from previous engagements with keeping a prayer journal as a member of a church youth group and generating visual designs for an undergraduate graphic arts class. Ultimately, the article argues for increased theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical attention to the discursive practices persons recruit and reinvigorate across multiple engagements with reading, writing, making, and doing.

Error analysis involves detecting, diagnosing, and correcting discrepancies between the text produced so far (TPSF) and the writers mental representation of what the text should be. The use of different writing modes, like keyboard-based word processing and speech recognition, causes different type of errors during text production. While many factors determine the choice of error-correction strategy, cognitive effort is a major contributor to this choice. This research shows how cognitive effort during error analysis affects strategy choice and success as measured by a series of online text production measures. Text production is shown to be influenced most by error span, that is, whether the error spans more or less than two characters. Next, it is influenced by input mode, that is, whether the error has been generated by speech recognition or keyboard, and finally by lexicality, that is, whether the error comprises an existing word. Correction of larger error spans is more successful than that of smaller errors. Writers impose a wise speed accuracy trade-off during large error spans since correction is better, but preparation times (time to first action) and production times take longer, and interference reaction times are slower. During large error spans, there is a tendency to opt for error correction first, especially when errors occurred in the condition in which the TPSF is not preceded by an auditory prompt. In general, the addition of speech frees the cognitive demands of writing. Writers also opt more often to continue text production when the TPSF is presented auditorially first.

This article offers a way of using the theory of audience design—how speakers position different audience groups as main addressees, overhearers, or bystanders—for written discourse. It focuses on main addressees, that is, those audience members who are expected to participate in and respond to a speaker’s utterances. The text samples are articles, letters, and editorials on women’s suffrage that were published between 1909 and 1912 in Canadian periodicals. In particular, the author analyzes noun phrases with which suffrageskeptical women are addressed, relying on the theory of constitutive rhetoric to highlight the interpellative force with which the audience design of this public political debate operates.

Genred documents facilitate collaboration and workplace practices in many ways—particularly in the medical workplace. This article represents a portion of a larger grounded investigation of how medical professionals invoke a wide range of rhetorical strategies when deliberating about complex patient cases during weekly, multidisciplinary deliberations called Tumor Board meetings. Specifically, the author explores the role of one key document in oncological practice, the Standard of Care document. Each Standard of Care document (one for every known cancer) presents a set of national guidelines intended to standardize the treatment of cancer. Tumor Board participants invoke these guidelines as evidence for or against particular future action. In order to better understand how genred, generalizable guidelines like Standard of Care documents afford decision making amid uncertainty, the author conducts a temporal and contextual analysis of the document's use during deliberations as well as a modified Toulminian analysis of a representative sample. Results suggest that, while on its own the document achieves an authoritative, charter-like purpose, it fails to make explicit a link between individual patients' experiences and the profession's expectations for how to act. Implications for how genred, generalizable guidelines—given the way they encourage certain ways of seeing over others—organize and authorize work are discussed, and a modified Toulminian approach to understanding the relationship between claim and evidence in multimodal texts is modeled.

Scholars of adult basic literacy curricular materials have argued that the skill-based, deficit-oriented approach of many such materials denies the interests and motivations of adult learners. Exploring why these kinds of curricular materials are prevalent in adult basic literacy education, this article focuses on the case of ProLiteracy, a nongovernmental adult basic literacy organization that grew out of missionary Frank Laubach's work in the 1930s to convert illiterate adults to Christianity and a belief in American-style capitalism. This article argues that the legacy of Laubach's evangelism continues to affect adult literacy instruction in the United States today, through the content of many of the materials in the ProLiteracy catalogue, as well as through the volunteer-based one-to-one tutoring model's positioning of low-literacy adults.

In the research project Literacy Practices in Working Life, the role played by reading and writing in common nonacademic occupations in Sweden was investigated. The results highlight not only some typical ways of using writing to frame units of work but also differences reflecting the main focus of work (“people” or “things”) and overall organizing principles. This article deals with patterns in the use of writing, which may be related to modern ways of organizing work (efficiency and flexibility, personal responsibility, identification with the company, etc.). Case studies show a range of literacy practices—running from extensive and rather complicated uses of writing connected with individual responsibility to very restricted and dependent uses of reading and writing governed by a top-down organization. Examples illustrate how emerging ways of governing work through written discourse, related to the new, knowledge-based work order, create very different roles for workers.

The authors' goal was to model the role played by the relationship between a writing teacher and her students in the feedback and revision cycle they experienced in an English-as-a-foreign-language context. Participants included a nonnative teacher of English and 14 students enrolled in her English writing class in a Korean university. Data came from formal, informal, and text-based interviews; semester-long classroom observations; and students' drafts with teacher comments. Findings showed that caring was enacted in complex and reciprocal ways, influenced by interwoven factors from the greater society, the course, the teacher, and the student. Students' level of trust in the teacher's English ability, teaching practices, and written feedback, as much as the teacher's trust in particular students based on how they revised their drafts, played a great role in the development of a caring relationship between them.

One privilege enjoyed by new-media authors is the opportunity to realize representations of Self that are rich textual worlds in themselves and also to engage the wider world, with a voice, a smile, imagery, and sound. Still, closer investigation of multimedia composition practices reveals levels of complexity with which the verbal virtuoso is unconcerned. This article argues that while technology-afforded multimedia tools make it comparatively easy to author a vivid text, it is a multiplicatively more complicated matter to vividly realize and publicize an authorial intention. Based on analysis of the digital story creation process of a youth named “Steven,” the authors attempt to demonstrate the operation of two forces upon which the successful multimodal realization of the author's intention may hinge: “fixity” and “fluidity.” The authors show how, within the process of digital self-representation, these forces can intersect to influence multimodal meaning making, and an author's life, in consequential ways.

Many recent studies on computer-mediated communication (CMC) have addressed the question of orality and literacy. This article examines a relatively recent subgenre of CMC, that of written online sports commentary, that provides us with written CMC that is clearly based on firmly established oral genres, those of radio and television sports commentary. The examples analyzed are from two English, two French, and two Spanish online football (soccer) commentaries. The purpose of the study is to examine oral traits and genre mixing in online football commentaries in the three languages and carryover from the spoken genres of radio and television commentaries to this developing genre, following Ferguson. Special attention is paid to Web page design. The study reveals that form and content of online football commentaries are strongly affected by the style of the online newspaper.

This is a qualitative case study of two students' composing processes as they developed a documentary video about the Dominican Republic in an urban, public middle school classroom. While using a digital video editing program, the students moved across multiple media (the Web, digital video, books, and writing), drawing semiotic resources from each as they did so. Using sociosemiotic and dialogic-intertextual theoretical frameworks, the author examines how the interface of the video editing program influenced the students' composing by making new types of semiotic resources available and new means of combining these resources. As they moved across these media in a nonlinear fashion, the students created an interactive context for composing that transcended the individual possibilities of each respective medium. This suggests that multimedial composing environments offer a rich intertextual landscape and unique ways of making meanings.

Frequently writing is now no longer the central mode of representation in learning materials—textbooks, Web-based resources, teacher-produced materials. Still (as well as moving) images are increasingly prominent as carriers of meaning. Uses and forms of writing have undergone profound changes over the last decades, which calls for a social, pedagogical, and semiotic explanation. Two trends mark that history. The digital media, rather than the (text) book, are more and more the site of appearance and distribution of learning resources, and writing is being displaced by image as the central mode for representation. This poses sharp questions about present and future roles and forms of writing. For text, design and principles of composition move into the foreground. Here we sketch a social semiotic account that aims to elucidate such principles and permits consideration of their epistemological as well as social/pedagogic significance. Linking representation with social factors, we put forward terms to explore two issues: the principles underlying the design of multimodal ensembles and the potential epistemological and pedagogic effects of multimodal designs. Our investigation is set within a research project with a corpus of learning resources for secondary school in Science, Mathematics, and English from the 1930s, the 1980s, and from the first decade of the 21st century, as well as digitally represented and online learning resources from the year 2000 onward.

This study investigates the influence of students' perceptions of task similarity/ difference on the transfer of writing skills. A total of 42 students from a freshman ESL writing course completed an out-of-class writing task. For half of the students, the subject matter of the writing task was designed to be similar to the writing course; for the other half, it was designed to be different. All students were also interviewed about the writing task. Reports of learning transfer were identified in the interview transcripts, and students' performances on the task and on a recent assignment from the course were assessed. Results indicate that the intended task similarity/difference (i.e., in subject matter) did not have the expected impact on learning transfer; however, students' perceptions of task similarity/difference did influence learning transfer. Implications of these findings for theory, practice, and future research are discussed.

Young children are growing up in a time when literacy practices and textual productions are in flux. Yet literacy curricula, particularly for those deemed “at risk,” are tightly focused on the written language “basics.” What are the potential consequences? In this article, the author considers this question, drawing on an ethnographic study of child writing in an urban school site. Using a sociocultural and dialogic frame, she examines first graders' interpretations and negotiations of official writing practices, detailing how these (a) shaped their written language use, including use of time and space, multimodal tools, and expected voices and modeled ideologies and (b) pushed to the sidelines or left in the unofficial child world aspects of their knowledge and know-how, including a breadth of communicative practices and a diversity of graphological symbols. The author concludes with reflections on instructional links among official writing practices, children's literacy experiences, and the “basics” in contemporary times.

To be effective, writers must understand what knowledge they share with the audience and what they do not. Achieving this understanding is made difficult by the knowledge effect—a tendency of individuals to assume that their own knowledge is shared by others. Understanding the knowledge effect and methods for reducing it is potentially useful for understanding and teaching writing. In Study 1, we explored the impact of an individual's knowledge of technical terms on that person's ability to estimate other people's understanding of those terms. We assessed how individuals' familiarity with technical terms influenced their predictions that college freshmen and college graduates would understand those terms. Results indicate that familiarity with the meaning of technical terms leads to substantial overestimation of others' knowledge. In Study 2, we evaluated an online tutor designed to improve writers' predictions of other's word knowledge by providing them with feedback on the accuracy of their judgments.

According to research in educational psychology, advance organizers lead to better learning and recall of information. In this research, the authors explored advance organizers from a business perspective, where larger documents are read under time pressure. Graphic and verbal advance organizers were manipulated into six versions of an advisory report, read by 159 experienced professional readers in a between-subjects design. Their reading time was limited to encourage selective reading. The results show that graphic advance organizers facilitate selective reading, but they do not enhance recall. Verbal advance organizers introducing a problem enhance recall, and graphic advance organizers moderate the effects on both selective reading and recall.

This study reports about a yearlong study of the initiation of novice grant writers to the activity system of National Institutes of Health grant applications. It investigates the use of cognitive apprenticeship within writing classrooms and that of social apprenticeship in laboratories, programs, departments, and universities, which introduced students to the genre system of National Institutes of Health grant proposals and helped them in moving from peripheral participation to more central participation. While cognitive apprenticeship employs devices such as modeling, scaffolding, coaching, and collaboration to enhance learning in formal settings, social apprenticeship requires socialization, interaction, and collaboration with experts, colleagues, and peers in informal settings to acquire disciplinary knowledge and experiences. The study suggests that writing instructors should acknowledge and incorporate resources in other activity systems in which students participate, i.e., their laboratories and home departments, and teach genre systems rather than specific genres to better facilitate students' enculturation to activity systems of disciplinary discourse communities.

This study examines the factors influencing language and script choice in instant messaging (IM), a form of real-time computer-mediated communication, in a multilingual setting. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies, the study understands IM as a social practice involving texts, encompassing a range of literacy practices, within which a subset called “text-making practices” is highlighted in this article. Drawing on results from an analysis of chat texts, interviews, and logbooks collected from 19 young people, the author suggests that the text-making practices related to language and writing system choice are guided by the perceived affordances of the IM technology and the available linguistic resources. Seven ecological factors influencing these perceptions have been identified: perceived expressiveness of the language, perceived functions of IM , user familiarity with the language, user identification with the language, technical constraints of inputting methods, speed , and perceived practicality of the writing system. The author argues that these factors often co-occur in real use.

Advertising may be the most pervasive form of modern rhetoric, yet the discipline is virtually absent in rhetorical studies. This article advocates a mutually beneficial rapprochement between the disciplines—both in academe and the workplace. Rhetoric, for example, could help address an enduring lacuna in advertising theory. Persuasive communicators since Aristotle have maintained that rhetoric begins with invention, the generation of compelling ideas. Studies of advertising creativity hold that invention begins with the gathering of facts to fuel an association of disparate ideas at the heart of creativity. However, studies of the fact-gathering heuristic in advertising fail to identify a systematic approach for product analysis. In hopes of advancing a rapprochement between rhetoric and advertising, this article demonstrates that Aristotelian causal analysis, long associated with rhetorical invention, can provide a systematic heuristic for product analysis. Rhetoricians can help advertisers strengthen a crucial element—the invention phase—of advertising copywriting.

Researchers studying technology development often examine how rhetorical activity contributes to technologies' design, implementation, and stabilization. This article offers a possible methodology for studying one role of rhetorical activity in technology development: knowledge consolidation analysis. Applying this method to an exemplar case, the author describes how explanations of Project Essay Grade (PEG), the first initiative to computerize student essay assessment, made knowledge available about this technology project. More specifically, technologist Ellis Page and his coauthors reworked a key explanatory argument, a justification of PEG's functioning, during the course of several decades, refining and clarifying its key contrasts and strengthening its presentation for generalist educators in particular. Analysis suggests that late presentations of the argument reveal that knowledge was successfully consolidated about a technical procedure Page and his coauthors called “rating simulation.” The conclusion discusses the key advantages and limitations of the method.

From a rhetorical perspective, Mendel’s work and its reception elicit two important questions: (a) why were Mendel’s arguments so compelling to 20th century biologists? And (b) why where they so roundly ignored by his contemporaries? The focus of this article is to examine the latter question while commenting on the former by employing several tactics for rhetorical analysis including historical, textual, and audience analyses. These analyses suggest that Mendel’s argument resembles 20th century biological arguments in its use of mathematical principles and formulae to both inform the design of experiments and support the law-like regularity of conclusions. These procedures, however, were not regarded by his audience of hybridists, botanists, cytologists, and naturalists as sufficiently persuasive or necessarily even legitimate. I will argue that had he taken a more rhetorical tact and considered the position of his audience on the legitimacy of the scope of his conclusions, his methods for making arguments, and his assumptions about heritable characters perhaps his arguments wouldn’t have fallen on deaf ears.

This article examines the poetry, prose, and rap lyrics written by nine low-income, African American and Latino urban youths. The study is based on a 3-year research project using ethnographic methods including field observations, informal interviews, and collection of written artifacts. Part of a larger study of these youths’ writing practices, this article focuses on the ways that they use writing to negotiate gendered and sexual identities in complicated, sometimes conflicting, ways. The article is grounded in the field of new literacy studies, and the author argues that educators and other youth workers can find, in the writing of youths like those in the study, an entrèe into sometimes uncomfortable yet vitally important conversations about gender and sexuality. Through analysis of the writers’ texts and conversations, the author models ways of drawing useful insights from such texts.

Those who focus on the study of visual information continue to search for effective ways to conceptualize that inquiry. However, many visual examples are better categorized as visual/verbal collaboration, complicating analysis. When analysis is based on the assumption that visual and verbal modalities perform in similar ways, important complementary differences are overlooked. Therefore, this investigation presents a series of observations from a perspective rooted in difference, which leads to the argument that visual/verbal messages develop when cohesive and perceptual relationships form between image and text, resulting in four types of loose to tight visual/verbal collaboration. Examples of each can clarify, contradict, or challenge common understanding for a particular audience. Finally, a perspective in difference uncovers another kind of image/text collaboration, which instead of relying solely on actual images and text, depends on a weave of actual with imagined text and images, leading to an untapped rhetorical opportunity.

This research analyzed the composing processes of one high school student as she designed the interiors of homes for a course in interior design. Data included field notes, an interview with the teacher, artifacts from the class, and the focal student’s concurrent and retrospective protocols in relation to her design of home interiors. The analysis revealed that the object of activity in this setting included aspects of the motive (including the teacher’s constructed environment and attendant expectations, the teacher’s governing logic and common sense with respect to interior design, and the broader field of interior design as interpreted and implemented in the class) and both fixed and emergent goals. The student’s object-related problem-solving involved a hierarchy of problem-solving decisions and employed a variety of tools in solving these problems, particularly those derived from culture, reliant on knowledge from a discipline or field, and following from images such as narratives.

Genres embody typified discursive activity that is situated in an ecology of texts, people, and tools. Within these settings, genres help writers compose recognizable information artifacts. Increasingly, however, many professions are becoming mobile, and mobile technologies (e.g., personal digital assistants [PDAs]) are creating problems of translation as writers attempt to make genres work across contexts. Mobile devices uproot genres from their native contexts, undercutting their ability to mediate discursive activity. The semantically reduced design of PDA-accessible information magnifies these problems by obscuring, but not erasing, genre characteristics that tie information to its native context. Readers must assume the burden of composing meaningful information artifacts, work otherwise offloaded to genres. The author explores the nature of this composition burden in a case study of veterinary students. He finds that context and the degree of mobility both influence student perception of this composition burden.

This article examines the appropriation of academic biliteracy by three French-speaking students at an English-medium university in the Canadian province of Québec. Drawing on Hornberger’s continua model of biliteracy, Bourdieu’s critical social theory, and philosophical hermeneutics, the author conceptualizes individual biliterate development as a subjective and intersubjective evaluative response to social contexts of possibilities for biliteracy. Case study data were collected during 2 ½ years and included autobiographical and text-based interviews, inventories and analyses of academic writing in English and French, classroom-based observations, field notes, and documentation of the legal, historical, institutional, and demographic contexts. Analyses of the participants’ negotiations and trajectories of bilingual academic writing development reveal the challenges and resources of bilingual writers to uphold their commitment to academic biliteracy within English-dominant institutional and disciplinary contexts. Implications for the advancement of multilingual academic literacies are drawn.

In “Dialogic Origin,” Mikhail Bakhtin—as teacher-researcher and theorist—presents readers with a remarkable essay on teaching grammar and style to 7th-year students (roughly equivalent to 10thgraders in the U.S. educational system). In doing so, Bakhtin employs some of his most notable concepts (among them dialogism and “hero”)as informing and generative principles of writing pedagogy. Modern readers will find much to value as Bakhtin illustrates contextualized grammar instruction, defines grammar as an element of style, proposes innovative teaching methods, and advocates for theory-based pedagogy. Despite these significant similarities, the essay relies exclusively on stylistics, ignoring the demonstrable rhetorical effects of the stylistic choices illustrated in the pedagogy he outlines. In perhaps his most illuminating move, Bakhtin introduces his notion of hero directly into the language arts classroom, illustrating the concept as fundamental even to the grammar and style of language in everyday and academic (not simply literary) contexts.

This article examines the dialectical nature of Mikhail Bakhtin’s developmental understanding of language learning. In particular, the author discusses the pedagogically illuminating relationship between literary style and everyday style, especially as the latter emerges from and returns to lived life. Drawing parallels with other related oppositions, such as Vygotsky’s spontaneous and scientific concepts, as well as Bakhtin’s early antithesis of life and art, the author emphasizes Bakhtin’s interest in relational (dialogical) rather than formal understandings of grammar, style, and literature. The author concludes with three possible implications of Bakhtin’s pedagogical essay for writing teachers: (a) that we acknowledge the creative expression already present in the everyday speech of our students, (b) that we reconsider the specifically dialogical use of linguistic and literary models, and (c) that we attend to the performative aspect of style and the teaching of style.

This article reports research that attempts to characterize what is powerful about digital multimodal texts. Building from recent theoretical work on understanding the workings and implications of multimodal communication, the authors call for a continuing empirical investigation into the roles that digital multimodal texts play in real-world contexts, and they offer one example of how such investigations might be approached. Drawing on data from the practice of multimedia digital storytelling, specifically a piece titled “Lyfe-N-Rhyme,” created by Oakland, California, artist Randy Young (accessible at http://www.oaklanddusty.org/videos.php), the authors detail the method and results of a fine-grained multimodal analysis, revealing semiotic relationships between and among different, copresent modes. It is in these relationships, the authors argue, that the expressive power of multimodality resides.

This article traces the historical and conceptual development of what is known as activity theory, from Vygotsky and Luria, to A. N. Leont’ev, to Engeström, in order to illustrate what I see as two problems with the activity theoretic approach, especially as manifest in the work of Leont’ev and Engeström: what I call the boundary and/or focus problem and the unit-of-analysis problem. In the second half of the article, I explore the social semiotic of an everyday artifact, the “speed bump,” and introduce a discovery heuristic for examining how this artifact functions mediationally in human activity. In so doing, I have tried to discover activity through principled analysis, rather than assuming activity or activity system a priori.

This article presents research from a qualitative study of the way that reflective writing is solicited, taught, composed, and assessed within a state-mandated portfolio curriculum. The research situates reflective texts generated by participating students within the larger goals and bureaucratic processes of the school system. The study finds that reflective letters are a genre within the state curriculum that regulates the substance and tone of students’ reflections. At the classroom level, the genre provides a mode that students adopt with the assurance that their reflections will meet state evaluators’ expectations. At the bureaucratic level, the genre helps to continually validate the state’s portfolio curriculum through its strong encouragement of stylized narratives of progress. The study demonstrates the importance of understanding how large-scale assessments shape pedagogy and students’ writing.

This research analyzed the composing processes of two high school students designing horse ranch plans for a course in equine management and production. The investigation focused on understanding the problems driving the design process, the tools through which the students inscribed and encoded meaning in their compositions, and the integration, representation, and mediation of their emerging identities through the design process. The analysis revealed that the students solved problems suggested by the particular culture surrounding the production of a specific breed of horse and constructed unique problems based on their knowledge of horses and ranch facilities. The tools through which they constructed these texts suggested both the cultural dimensions and narrative inscriptions of their designs. The culturally mediated narratives in particular contributed to students’ construction of identities, especially with respect to their orientation as members of the managerial (Darin) and working (Riley) classes.

Following the scientific revolution, the modern perception of discourse assumed that text can and should reflect, in a literal way, objective reality as observed in the real world. This perception is radically different from a traditional religious perception of discourse in general and from the Jewish perception in particular. The Jewish traditional perception was based upon intertextual (and not empirical) models of inquiry and endeavored to uncover concealed levels within texts through analytical-philological methods. It is argued that the revival of Hebrew as a secular language went hand in hand with the adoption of the modern perception of discourse. This adoption involved a change in the relationship between text, knowledge, and reality within Jewish society, which found explicit expression in the Hebrew journals established in the middle of the 19th century.

Chinese characters are often viewed as a premodern or incomplete form of literacy. Authors with an autonomous view of literacy view Chinese as a concrete, homeostatic language inadequate for use in abstract thought and movement toward mass literacy. Even those with an ideological model framework propose that the intrinsic nature of Chinese characters identifies it as an elite language of gentry and political rulers. This study reexamines this view of Chinese characters as a protoliteracy by investigating recent national literacy rates, economic trends, and relevant literature for East Asian nations that use Chinese characters as an integral part of their written language. The author argues for caution in using the protoliteracy paradigm for Chinese language reform because modern Chinese is associated with high levels of mass literacy and economic prosperity. In addition, recent cognitive and historical literature suggests Chinese characters are used in languages because of their advantages for abstract thought.

Written communication scholarship has shown that successful social change requires discursive stability. This study was designed to investigate how this stability is created. Critical discourse analysis of 30 corporate university articles investigated claims authors made about the expansion of market-based values into contexts of organizational learning and academic higher education. In total, 243 claims were examined for uses of modality, hedging, presupposition, and the progressive aspect. Results claim that articles used modality, hedging, and the progressive aspect to create strategic ambiguity that was resolved ideologically through presuppositions that reflect the assumptions of “the new capitalism.” Results indicate that discursive stability is not solely a semantic issue but may occur pragmatically and syntactically as texts are structured to displace existing knowledge within contested spaces. Results also indicate that a heavy reliance on pragmatic features may characterize technologized texts, texts designed to create social change without input, democratic participation, or consensus building.

The media, which includes editorials, have been shown to play an important role in thedefinition of priorities in public agenda. In the domain of international matters, thepublic relies heavily on the media, and editorials play an even greater role. This articleexamines how explicit mentions of external sources of information function in theargumentative structure of editorials to achieve a persuasive effect. Acorpus of 40 editorials dealingwith Russia (taken fromLe Monde andThe New York Times between August 1999and March 2000) has been studied using a cognitive-based linguistic model of discourseanalysis. It is shown how under the guise of bringing some objectivity to the editorials’argumentation, external sources of information facilitate and enhance their subjectivity.

Explanation as a genre may support children’s reasoning and understanding particularly effectively. In this study, 20 fourth graders were given the task of explaining the effects of a pollutant on an ecosystem to third graders. Before writing, they completed a commercially developed science unit, instruction in reading and writing an explanation, and text reading. An analysis of their writings revealed that all children used rhetorical devices to connect with third-grade readers. Sixteen children synthesized text content with personal experiences to compose subexplanations that reported information, gave examples, and presented scenarios and that were logically ordered to enhance reader understanding. Nine of these children explicitly used the scientific model to explain phenomena. Outcomes suggested that writing explanations supported children’s reasoning about and understanding of an important scientific model.

This study investigates the practice of presenting multiple supporting examples in parallel form. The elements of parallelism and its use in argument were first illustrated by Aristotle. Although real texts may depart from the ideal form for presenting multiple examples, rhetorical theory offers a rationale for minimal, parallel presentation. The form for presenting data can also influence the way it is observed and selected, as the case of the Linnaean template for species grouping illustrates. Parallel presentation is not limited to verbal phrasing. Arranging data in tables, typical in scientific discourse, satisfies the same requirements for minimal, equivalent presentation of evidence. Arranging representational or iconic images in rows or arrays is yet another mode for the parallel presentation of evidence, although this mode has a recent history. A cognitive rationale can perhaps explain the use of parallelism to present multiple supporting examples.

This study explores the connection between writing and working memory, specifically the role of the subvocal articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice). The authors asked the 18 participants to type sentences describing 24 multipanel cartoons. In some conditions, the participants were required to repeat a syllable continuously while writing. This activity, called articulatory suppression, interferes with the articulatory rehearsal process. Results indicated that interfering with the articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice) interferes with writing by slowing the rate of writing, increasing mechanical errors, changing the temporal microstructure of text production, and increasing the perceived difficulty of the writing task. The authors applied their model of written text production to provide a theoretical account for these results.