Writing apprehension (WA) has been identified as an important construct for understanding the factors that influence student development of writing skills. Although the 1975 Daly and Miller scale has dominated the WA investigation, psychometric research has been limited to the identification of question groupings within the measure. All but the 1983 study by Boozer, Lally, and Stacks have presented the WA questions in the order specified on the original scale even though no theoretical basis for the ordering was provided. It is possible that items presented in the same order may consistently produce similar factors because an ordering effect exists rather than separate dimensions. The current study employs factor analysis and comparability analysis to investigate the impact of item order on the number of factors and the underlying factor structure stability of the WA construct. Results indicate that the randomized item factor structure was comparable with the original item order factor structure.

Ethnic and gender differences in classroom conversational styles are explored by comparing student involvement in face-to-face and computer-mediated discussions. The quantity of participation in these two environments is triangulated with student perceptions of the conversations in three undergraduate composition classrooms. White males participated more frequently than other groups in the face-to-face setting, and White women appeared to benefit more than other groups from conversations held in the computer-mediated setting. However, these gender-differentiated participation patterns did not apply to the discourse patterns of Hispanic males and females. Unlike their White female peers, the Hispanic women in this study participated frequently in the face-to-face conversations, spoke more than Hispanic males, and generally disliked the computer-mediated conversations.

This study addressed the question, “How consistently do students perform on holistically scored writing assignments?” Instructors from 13 introductory writing classes at two colleges were asked to provide essay sets written by their students in response to the three to five most important writing assignments in their classes. In all, 796 essays were collected from 241 students. The study drew on a pool of 15 experienced judges to evaluate the essays. Each essay set was scored holistically and independently by 6 of the judges who either ranked or graded the essays in the set. All papers written by a particular student were scored by the same judges. Pairwise correlations of the scores assigned to each essay set were computed for each judge and then averaged across judges. The average of these correlations was 0.16, indicating very low consistency of holistically scored student performance from essay to essay. This result suggests that drawing conclusions from one or even a few writing samples is problematic.

The author explores new conceptions of genre and genre learning: learning genres, learning through genres, and learning about genres. Drawing on the work of Bahktin, she argues that reconceptualizing genres as situated, social, and active, rather than focusing on formal features, can extend and enrich process approaches to writing and enhance learning in the elementary classroom.

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: English composition as we know it began in the early nineteenth century...but why is that important? Why would we care about poorly educated grammar school pedagogues—our distant colleagues!—fingers aching with cold as they parsed sentences, heard recitations, and fed the wood stove during those long wintery terms? Very simply, because their lives, practices, and less frequently, their writings give us back ourselves. Our own problems in teaching writing have recurrently presented themselves in forms that nineteenth-century teachers easily would have recognized. Like them, we sense the ongoing need for hard basics, the primitive core of our profession. Yet like those early teachers, we also dwell within a “reform tradition” that stresses the importance of students' interests and experience and continues to see the writing task as based on what used to be called “synthetic” insights and “self-active” learning. Inspired partly by romantic educational theories from the continent, this tradition grew out of the social and educational reforms of the 1830s and 1840s and provided the basis for the early progressive teaching of the 1890s. Prominent during the 1930s, and reasserting itself powerfully in the 1960s and 1990s, this student-centered approach manifests the continuing vitality of the enlightenment ideas and values and the romantic individualism that first gave it life.

The famous Awk is a well-known designation, but this label does not refer to a well-defined concept. The authors report here on an empirical study of the predominant types and patterns of awkward sentences in student writing. They suggest that four general types of syntactic problems—mismanagement of clause structure in errors of embedding, of syntax shift, of parallel structure, and of direct/indirect speech—are associated with four general patterns of semantic problems—mismanagement of idea structure in errors of subordinating ideas, of starting and finishing ideas, of adding ideas, and of incorporating ideas from sources. The authors argue that awkward sentences arise from a complex combination of semantics and syntax, as student writers struggle to manage the relationships among multiple ideas as well as the relationships among multiple clauses. These findings are used to suggest a number of possible pedagogical approaches to the problem of awkward sentences, including the use of read-aloud editing, the targeted teaching of grammar for syntactic editing, and the separation of ideas from sentence form for semantic editing.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This qualitative study examined the transitions that writers make when moving from academic to professional discourse communities. Subjects were six university seniors enrolled in a special “writing internship course” in which they discussed and analyzed the writing they were doing in 12-week professional internships at corporations, small businesses, and public service agencies in a major metropolitan area. Participant-observer and case-study data included drafts and final copies of all writing that the interns produced on the job (including texts and suggested revisions by other employees), an ethnographic log of data and speculations arising from the group discussions, written course journals from each intern, transcriptions of taped, discourse-based and general interviews with the interns, and a final 15-page retrospective analysis of each intern's writing on the job. Results showed a remarkably consistent pattern of expectation, frustration, and accommodation as the interns adjusted to their new writing communities. The results have important implications for the lateral and vertical transfer of writing skills across different communicative contexts.

Occasional dissent notwithstanding, “expository” prose—usually conceived as depersonalized and decontextualized—continues to be the main focus of most writing instruction at the secondary and college levels. This article critically examines the opposition of objectified exposition and personal narrative posited by rhetorical tradition and maintained by most composition texts and syllabi today. The liveliness of recent cross-disciplinary discussions regarding the narrative as a uniquely rich mode of thought and discourse contrasts rather sharply with the negative and often impoverished assumptions about storied prose held by most composition theorists and teachers. Unsupported by empirical evidence, such assumptions reflect a cultural bias that prefers abstractions to stories and fails to grasp their dynamic interplay. Where writing instruction is concerned, narrative and exposition are best perceived as poles of a dialectic, with personal experience informing one's interest in abstract knowledge beyond the self, the understanding self becoming enlarged as it “takes in” what is “out there.” The best thinking and writing, it is argued, are at once personal and public, both infused with private meaning and focused upon the world beyond the self.

Personal voice in writing is currently an all-too-subjectively understood notion. Different authors, Coles and Elbow, for example, have drawn appropriate attention to the voice phenomenon, but objective definitions and practical understanding are still lacking. One step toward understanding the workings of voice can be taken, however, by a linguistic analysis of structures that observably cause perception of a personal voice. Examining a limited set of data from professional writing reveals that one clear source of voice is appositive and parenthetical structures. These structures are produced “paragrammatically” by being inserted into a sentence, interrupting its normal flow, with the effect of creating a personal voice. They have a commentative function associated with a second-order “reflective mentality” and can be classified into at least three structural subtypes—displacements, equivalents, and interruptives—correlating with particular commentative functions. This analysis suggests, in general, that distinguishing between a second-order reflective mentality and a first-order factive mentality is central to the perception of voice. The intuitions of compositionists are important in uncovering discourse properties relevant to composition studies, and linguistic analysis is important for successful description of the phenomena and as a basis for pedagogical application.

Consonant with a trend toward investigating professional writing in naturalistic settings, this discourse-analytical study of a corpus of “suggestion letters” written in a Big Eight accounting firm demonstrates how auditors use negative politeness strategies to meet the complex demands of potentially threatening interactional situations. The study substantiates Brown and Levinson's claim that politeness is a linguistic universal by showing that the same politeness strategies found in speech also occur in written communication. Analysis of negative message strategies in ten leading textbooks shows that business communication pedagogy needs to modify strictures on the use of passives, nominalizations, expletive constructions, and hedging particles in light of research on the exigencies of real-world linguistic interaction.

In their freshman year in college, Puerto Rican students take composition courses in both Spanish and English. Although the rhetorical structure of the final product, the composition, may respond to national writing styles in the two languages, studies show the composition process to be similar. Writing instructors in either language find similar problems in student compositions, regardless of the language code used. One of the difficulties students have in both languages is blocking, or apprehension about writing. Although some aspects of the composition process may be universal, we assumed that in bilingual writers the source of writing block depended on the language used. This article presents the results of a questionnaire designed to determine the sources of bilingual students' apprehension in writing by considering three groups of bilingual writers: graduate students in English, freshman English composition students, and freshman Spanish composition students. The results suggest some insights on the nature of blocking in a native language (Spanish) and a second language (English), which may then lead to ways of helping bilingual students to overcome blocking.

This article argues that the Given-New research done by linguists on texts can be used effectively in process approaches to teaching composition. Current theories define coherence as an integrative meaning formed cognitively by writers and readers. Cohesion refers to the means of combining surface text elements for retention in the reader's short-term memory. In this study, college students were taught Given-New cohesive principles as guides for invention, arrangement, and revision, and as cues to aid the reader's coherent processing of their intended meaning.

Hedges, which signal writers' tentative assessments of referential information, were added to a passage from both a science and a social studies textbook. The hedges appeared in either personal or impersonal voice; in the first half, second half, or both halves of the passages; and in either a low-intensity condition or a high-intensity condition. A measure of what subjects learned from reading the passages showed that they learned most when the hedges appeared in personal voice, the second half of a passage, and low intensity. Some extensions of the implications of this work to practices in composition classes—particularly practices of evaluating whether or not material should be hedged—are recommended in order to broaden students' critical-thinking abilities and their views of language.

Explaining difficult concepts to lay readers is an important discursive goal, and yet frequently the quality of explanatory writing is poor. One reason for this poor quality is that the discursive form itself is not well understood. Some studies have identified textual features of effective explanations; however, theoretical characterizations of explanatory discourse are either unnecessarily narrow or overly general. Consequently, this essay offers a new theory of explanatory discourse that is intended to guide analyses of and stimulate improvements in explanations designed for mass audiences. The theory defines explanatory discourse in terms of a particular goal; promoting understanding for lay readers of some phenomenon. This goal is distinguished from those of promoting awareness of new information, proving a claim, or encouraging agreement with a claim. The utility of the theory is demonstrated by showing how it (1) identifies those research literatures most relevant to improving the quality of written explanations, (2) organizes existing findings on explanatory effectiveness in a way that resolves controversies in the literature, and (3) suggests principles for pedagogy pertaining to explanatory writing.

This article discusses one student's persistence in misunderstanding her teacher's written comments on her papers, even when these comments are accompanied by other response channels that serve, in part, to clarify the written comments. It presents the idea that student and teacher each bring to the written response episode a set of information, skills, and values that may or may not be shared between them, and it is the interplay of these three elements that feeds the student's reading and processing of teacher written comments and that leads to misunderstandings. This happened even for a high-achieving student in an otherwise successful classroom. An in-depth look at one student and the classroom context in which she learns to write, focusing on her grappling with her teacher's written comments, reveals the complexity of the teaching-learning process in the high school writing class.

R. M. Gagné's distinction between lateral and vertical transfer can be elaborated for written composition: (a) the lateral transfer of mechanical and formal skills and (b) the vertical transfer of higher-order knowledge in the domain of rhetoric and writing. Vertical transfer of writing skills is situational: a function of the context and content of a specific rhetorical situation. Success in a situational writing task depends on two types of domain-specific knowledge being operational: (a) knowledge of the specific content of the subject matter and (b) knowledge of the domain of rhetoric and writing. The theory of lateral and vertical transfer as applied to writing is compatible with current conceptions of declarative and procedural cognitive processes and with a balanced pedagogy of both student-centered and direct, content-oriented instruction. Two appendixes present practical procedures based on transfer theory for improving general program goals and classroom instruction of writing.

This pilot study investigated relationships between individual differences in levels of writing skills and proficiencies at simultaneous and successive cognitive processing. Data from a group of 46 subjects indicate that scores on successive processing tasks were able to predict final grades in an introductory English composition course (p<.01). This suggested both the possibility and importance of investigating further how simultaneous and (especially) successive processing relate to writing skills. With three subjects used for pilot data, low scores in successive processing showed relationships with sentence-level errors and with the ability to develop sequences of ideas in writing. Low scores in simultaneous processing correlated with an inability to indicate clear relationships between sentences and paragraphs. Planning, a third cognitive factor, was found to be a powerful influence in organizing content. In the interaction of planning and simultaneous processing, lack of planning ability may interfere with the writer's ability to survey and thus organize his or her material.

Students in grades 5, 7, 9, 11, and college were first taught to play a board game by watching a demonstration film and then were given the task of writing directions for the game. These written explanations were analyzed to examine grade-related changes in the overall informativeness of the explanations, in the kinds of elements that students tended to explain adequately, in the extent to which students included orienting information for their readers, and in the degree to which students adopted elements of a formal (or “official”) approach when explaining the game. The results provide a rich description of the growth of students' informative writing skills between the upper-elementary grades and the beginning of college.

At least seven types of summaries have emerged in common usage, especially during the past 250 years. They may be classified as either sequential summaries that retain the original order in which information was presented or synthesizing summaries that alter this sequence to achieve specific objectives. Each type of summary developed in response to challenges facing professions, government, business, and ordinary citizens-all of whom have sought to absorb increasing quantities of information being generated in a society that is becoming more complex. This taxonomy offers a definition and brief history for each of the seven techniques, describes the growth of corporations or other organizations that can be considered leading practitioners, and comments on the potential continuing role for each type of summary. The article also focuses on several contemporary issues that will affect future research, classroom writing instruction, and information management in modern computerized offices.