Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish their research in the medium of English. However, little empirical research has explored how the global premium of English influences the academic text production of scholars working outside of English-speaking countries. This article draws on a longitudinal text-oriented ethnographic study of psychology scholars in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal to follow the trajectories of texts from local research and writing contexts to English-medium publications. Our findings indicate that a significant number of mediators, “literacy brokers,” who are involved in the production of such texts, influence the texts in different and important ways. We illustrate in broad terms the nature and extent of literacy brokering in English-medium publications and characterize and exemplify brokers’ different orientations. We explore what kind of brokering is evident in the production of a specific group of English-medium publications—articles written and published in English-medium international journals—by focusing on three text histories. We conclude by discussing what a focus on brokering can tell us about practices surrounding academic knowledge production.

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.

This article analyzes the power of ambiguous metaphors to present scientific novelty. Its focus is a series of papers by the prominent population biologist W. D. Hamilton in which he redefined the meaning of biological altruism. In particular, the article draws on Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad to examine why suggestions of motive are so pervasive in Hamilton’s representation of genetic evolution and what epistemological consequences result from this rhetorical choice. Specifically, the metaphorical language of motive allows Hamilton to represent genes ambiguously and simultaneously as both the agents of evolutionary action and as the agency or mechanism by which organism agents act. The textual ambiguity generated by the agent-agency metaphors both reflects and constructs a conceptual ambiguity in the way evolutionary processes are theorized. Analysis of Hamilton’s rhetoric thus suggests the productive function of ambiguous metaphors in highly technical scientific texts.

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.

The three authors writing on Bakhtin’s essay, “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar”—Farmer, Halasek, and Williams—respond to one another, and Bazerman provides a summative comment in the paragraphs that follow. The responses explore further some of Bakhtin’s thoughts concerning rhetoric and its relation to stylistics and his use of the concept of hero as a grammatical category. The discussion of Bakhtin leads to more general questions of the relation between spontaneous utterance and situationality and the implications for the possibility of a systematic grammar of style. Nonetheless, the commentators agree on Bakhtin’s explicit pedagogy and the interanimation of everyday speech with literary examples. The editor’s final comment notes a tension that informs all these responses, that is, between explicit teaching, on one hand, and avoiding formulaic writing, on the other. Bakhtin’s changing view of the relation of dialectics and dialogue is discussed as well.

When writers plan a document together, they rely on gestures as well as speech and writing in constructing a common representation of their group document. This case study of a student technical writing group explores how group members used gestures to create a conversational interaction space that they then treated like a physical text that they manipulated, wrote on, and pointed at. These gestures suggested a group pretext that helped group members translate abstract goals into concrete plans. However, the close proximity of gesture to the physical act of writing may mislead students into thinking that the tricky work of translating abstract ideas into final written form had already been completed. Gestures and adaptor movements (such as fidgeting with a pen) also seemed to conspire to help individuals control the conversational space and call attention to themselves as writers. Implications for future research on gesture and collaborative writing, gender, and writing technologies are discussed.

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 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 study of English language learners, six Mandarin-speaking and five Spanish-speaking elementary students, revealed that students engaged in a variety of writing practices at home and school. A continuum of attitudes, from positive to negative, characterized students’attitudes toward writing in English and their native languages. Students’ writing practices and attitudes toward writing were influenced by home backgrounds and classroom contexts. Home background influences included parents’ educational backgrounds and income levels, plans for staying in the United States, support for writing at home, and cultural expectations. School and classroom factors included frequency and quality of opportunities for writing and teachers’ expectations for writing tasks. Implications of the study include the necessity to provide multiple opportunities for students to write for purposeful audiences in their native language as well as in English.

This study investigates the roles of biological and psychological gender, as well as assigned discussion topic, in the written language use of nonprofessional writers. University students wrote passages on three specific topics—one socioemotional and descriptive, one functional, and one involving political debate. Effects of biological gender were minimal. Psychological gender played a greater role, particularly when measured explicitly rather than implicitly. Passage topic played the greatest role in language use. Rather than enacting their own gender through their writing, writers used language befitting the passage topic. More female-preferential devices featured in passages involving socioemotional descriptions and more male-preferential features were employed in passages involving political debate. The study demonstrates the relative impacts of gender and contextual constraints on communication.

In this article, the author builds on McHenry and Heath’s study of the “literate” and the “literary” and McHenry’s research on “forgotten readers” by examining the often undocumented literacy traditions and practices of men and women of African descent. First, the author traces the legacy of blended traditions of both written and spoken words in African American writing and activism. Continuing with an examination of Black literary and social movements, the author asserts that the recent renaissance of activities around literacy, such as spoken word poetry events as well as writing collectives, contributes to a historical continuum. Ultimately, the author shows the importance of the inextricable link between history, literacy studies, and the teaching of language arts.

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.

This article undertakes a close rhetorical reading of the speeches given by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Francis Collins, and Craig Venter on June 26, 2000, at the White House ceremony announcing the completion of the Human Genome Project. Specifically, it looks at the metaphors used by each speaker to describe the activity of genomic scientists. Scientific activity regarding the genome was metaphorically compared to such actions as producing a map, opening a frontier, unlocking a vault, drawing a blueprint, reading an instruction manual, and learning a language. This article argues that these metaphors and the way in which they interact with each other can oversimplify the subject matter under discussion and can conflict with the ethical goals that the authors explicitly proclaim. An examination of the interaction between metaphorical vehicles in this particular case study amends some earlier claims that the author made in a theoretical reflection on the problems and the possibilities of mixed metaphors in genomic science.

Scientific popularizations are generally considered translations (often dubious ones) of scientific research for a lay audience. This study explores the role popularizations play within scientific discourse, specifically in the development of chaos theory. The methods included a review of the popular and the semipopular books on chaos theory from 1975 to 1995, interviews with key figures, and an analysis of the citations in scientific research journals to Gleick’s well-known popularization, Chaos: Making a New Science. The results indicate that popularizations take different forms as a scientific revolution develops into normal science. At various points, popularizations are used by scientists to find a broad, interdisciplinary, scientific audience, to show interest in the field, to disseminate lines of inquiry, and to help establish the author’s priority claim.

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.

Genres, although aligning people to joint activity and joint attention, shape the substantive material or information represented within the bounded space of the text. Each genre creates a space that prompts the production of particular kinds of information to populate that space. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 that mandated the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was invented out of a perceived social need for greater information about the effects of human activity on the environment. The EIS has since spawned a constellation of related genres, has created a large informational market to fulfill the requirements of these genres, and has led to a proliferation of information. The set of relations among genre, information, and activity found in this one sphere of environmental information are suggestive of how information is produced and used in generic forms.

Standardization discourse is dominantly linked to tests; yet standardization occurs in practices of everyday social life, too. This research seeks to understand standardization processes involved in the writing done by a class of seventh grade students, half of whom did not do well in school or on tests. Acting as participant observer in a classroom where a civics project resulted in the writing of an essay, the author collected audiotaped classroom and group discussions, student writing, field notes, and texts (a history booklet, a neighborhood-planning book, two videos, census data) students drew from to write a speech which their language arts teacher taught as an essay. One essay/speech was delivered to the school board. The author examined the exchange of ideas, across the 8-week project, to consider how standardization as a process of production, consumption, and distribution played in students' writing. The author found that standardizing forces involved direct teaching, genre memory, and several strategies employed to bring cohesion and unity to diverse ideas.

Although sometimes considered to be only marginally related to the key academic goals of establishing claims and reputations, acknowledgements are commonplace in scholarly communication and virtually obligatory in dissertation writing. The significance of this disregarded “Cinderella” genre lies partly in the opportunities it offers students to present a social and scholarly self disentangled from academic discourse conventions and personally thank those who have shaped the accompanying text. Beyond the role it plays in academic gift giving and self-presentation, however, the textualization of gratitude reveals social and cultural characteristics, an intimation of disciplinary specialization within a broad generic structure. This analysis of the acknowledgements accompanying 240 Ph.D. and M.A. dissertations written by nonnative speakers of English suggests that personal gratitude is mediated by disciplinary preferences and strategic career choices, reflecting one way in which postgraduate writing represents a situated activity.

Popular accounts of scientific discoveries diverge from scholarly accounts, stripping off hedges and promoting short-term social consequences. This case study illustrates how the “horse-race” framing of popular accounts devalues the collective sharing, challenging, and extending of scientific work. In her best-selling Longitude , Dava Sobel (1996) depicts John Harrison's 18th-century invention of a marine chronometer, a ground-breaking precision instrument that eventually allowed sailors to calculate their longitude at sea, as an unequal race with Harrison as beleaguered hero. Sobel represents the demands of the Board of Longitude to test and replicate the chronometer as the obstructionist machinations of an academic elite. Her framing underreports the feasibility of the chronometer and its astronomical rival, the lunar distance method, which each satisfied different criteria. That readers accept Sobel's framing is indicated by an analysis of 187 reviews posted on Amazon.com, suggesting that popular representation of science fuels cynicism in popular and academic forums.

The purpose of Study 1a was to determine the criteria that differentiate students who perform well and those who perform poorly on a standardized test of university-level writing. Discriminant function analysis revealed that measures of structure, sentencing, paragraphing, and grammar play the most important role in separating these two groups. These results were used in Study 1b to develop a tutorial attended by an independent group of students preparing to write a standardized writing exam. The intervention had a positive effect on their test performance. Participants reported the tutorial to be useful, committed fewer errors on most of the criteria, and had a higher probability of passing the exam. It was concluded that this type of tutorial is beneficial to students who are preparing for such exams and may have wider educational use for those seeking assistance with their writing skills.

The article presents the cultural background, methodological design, theory, and results of a comprehensive research project where the doxa and textual norms of the judges at the national writing exam in Norway were studied. The background of the study is the quite comprehensive reforms in Norway of the way writing is taught in the upper secondary schools, the kind of writing that is encouraged in the schools, the kind of tasks that are used at the national writing exam, and how writing should be assessed in the Norwegian upper secondary schools, as well as the national writing exam. The study is related to comparable studies internationally, first and foremost the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievements (IEA) study of writing.

This article presents evidence that, from selected spectroscopic articles in the earliest volumes of the Physical Review to other selected spectroscopic articles from the same journal in 1980, a shift in sentence style takes place. This shift is from what M.A.K. Halliday calls the dynamic style (which reflects happenings, processes, and actions) to the synoptic style (which reflects things, structures, and categories). The article proposes that the early writers used the dynamic style primarily to set information in a distinct time and thus to avoid giving the impression that the information should be regarded as widely generalizable. It also proposes that the later writers used the synoptic style because it allowed them to represent processes as things, to delineate many fine shades of meaning, and to extend their arguments economically. The article concludes by suggesting areas of future research for students of scientific style and for composition scholars.

In this examination of Mexican-American bilingual college writers, it is argued that implicit language ideologies, common misconceptions about bidialectalism/bilingualism, and the classroom attitudinal domain subvert the success of ethnolinguistic minority students. The author designed and conducted a randomized language attitude survey (N = 195) of 1st-year composition students on the assumption that language attitudes, reflective of the social/ethnic/linguistic polarization of south Texas, exist inside the English classroom. Findings correlate the multiple ethnolinguistic identities of this student population with language myth adherence. Results reveal the tendency among college writers for subscription to various language myths: dialect misconception, English bias, language purity myth, literacy myth, misconception of oral performance.

This article looks at how the discipline of rhetoric may be helpful when thinking about methods for social justice. Specifically, it explores how rhetoric and composition can help those interested in social justice to construct knowledge that is both multidisciplinary and intercultural, to view the constructive processes of research participants, and to develop reflective research methods. One such method may be the Community Problem-Solving Dialogue, a rhetorically strategic method for sharing and building knowledge between the community and university. Specifically, this article studies how students in graduate policy courses both successfully and unsuccessfully used the strategies in the Community Problem-Solving Dialogue in community-university collaborations.

It is not uncommon to find literacy figured as “toxic” in discussions of its power to regulate and discipline social behavior. The author's aim in this article is to move from metaphor to material as he explores the toxicity inherent in the manufacturing processes that make print available for mass consumption. He argues that over the past century, the demand for print in certain regions of the United States, primarily the North and West, spurred the growth of commercial papermaking—and the spread of devastating mill pollution—in the South, where demand for print has historically lagged. He suggests that one result of this pollution has been the weakening of social institutions that typically promote and value normative forms of literate activity. With the industries that enable the mass circulation of print now going global, this pattern of uneven and unjust literacy development may well be repeated.

L2 writing scholars have recently debated the appropriateness of using cultural constructs to enhance the teaching of English. An important aspect of writing, critical thinking, has received considerable attention. Some have suggested that Asians, including Japanese, do not display critical thought in their writing in English. Other researchers claim that Asians display critical thinking abilities differently than Western learners. In addition, they argue that learners from a particular culture are too diverse to make claims about the whole group's thinking abilities. This study proposes a model for assessing critical thinking in the writing of L2 learners to determine whether content familiarity plays a role in critical thinking. Findings of a study of 45 Japanese undergraduate students indicate that the quality of critical thought depended on the topic content, with a familiar topic generating better critical thinking. Results also suggested that differing assumptions between the L1 and L2 culture may lead to misinterpretations of the critical thinking ability of L2 learners.

The assessment of students' writing skills through essays is a common practice in educational institutions. Scoring of essays requires considerable judgment on the part of those who rate the response. When raters assign different scores to an essay, testing practitioners must resolve the discrepancy before computing an operational score to report to the examinee. This study investigated five forms of score resolution that were reported in a national survey of state department of education-testing agencies. The study examined the effect that each form of resolution has on the reliability of the resulting operational scores. It is shown that some methods of resolution can be associated with higher interrater reliability than can others. It is also shown that the choice of resolution can affect the magnitude of the reported score as well as the final passing rate of an assessment.

This study by a philosophy professor and a compositionist focuses on the progress of an ESL student in the philosopher's writing-intensive Intro course. In it, the authors answer calls for examination of instructional supports that help ESL students in their college classes across the curriculum. Their report is divided into three parts. In the first, the philosophy professor explicates his classroom aims and expectations, rooting them in the educational approaches of Dewey, Freire, and Gramsci. In the second, the compositionist offers an account of the ESL pupil's experiences in this philosophy classroom, describing the pedagogies that promote her progress toward achieving the professor's goals. In the final section, the authors, acknowledging the contested nature of “progress” in this context, describe the ideological conflicts behind their different interpretations of the successes and failures of this ESL student.

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

The category of preliterate has been applied to cultures in which reading and writing practices are said to be nonexistent or restricted. This article argues that preliterate can be understood as a rhetoric or a socially constructive narrative (a) that devalues the cultures and peoples to whom it is applied by situating them within a 19th-century narrative of primitiveness and (b) that mystifies understandings of how literacy develops by representing the absence of literacy as an expression of inherent cultural values rather than an outcome of relationships among cultures of unequal power. This article considers the case of the Hmong of Laos, a people commonly described as preliterate, to illustrate that the widespread absence of written language in Hmong culture is not an expression of cultural values but an outcome of Hmong relationships with the Chinese, French, and Laotian governments and the United States Central Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam War.

The issues of authentic context and authoritative ethos are explored through a study of a graduate student learning to write for mathematics within the context of an English for academic purposes (EAP) course. The student faced conflicts about audience, purpose, and content knowledge as she was required to write math texts within what she perceived was an inauthentic context, an English as a second language (ESL) course. She questioned the purpose of the writing tasks as well as why an ESL instructor was teaching her to write for math, and she addressed the conflicts by writing for the instructor's discourse community and expectations, rather than her own, to earn a grade for the course. The text the student created was thus inauthentic within her own discourse community and lacked her voice of authority. These findings question the validity of EAP courses and raise several issues, especially in terms of the transferability of skills from EAP to content courses.

This study examined the problems that four international graduate students of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds encountered in the process of adapting to the requirements of discipline-specific written discourses during their first year of studies in the United States. Qualitative data including participant and faculty interviews, observations, analysis of written samples, and reflective journals kept by the participants were collected. The results of the study suggest that international students, who bring different writing experiences with them to U.S. classrooms, need assistance to adjust more easily to the requirements of the new academic environment. This assistance, however, depends on international students and U.S. faculty alike learning to address explicitly how academic writing conventions differ across cultures.

This article examines the production of new history textbooks that appeared after the breakup of the Soviet Union. It is argued that the radical revisions in official history in this context are shaped by the Bakhtinian process of “hidden dialogicality,” whereby new, post-Soviet narratives respond to earlier Soviet narratives in various ways. It is argued that different forms of hidden dialogicality are employed to revise official accounts of the Russian Civil War and World War II. In the former case, new texts respond to their Soviet precursors through processes of “re-emplotment,” whereas in the case of World War II, the plot is left largely unchanged, but the main characters are changed. Although many political, cultural, and economic forces play a role in the revision of any official history, it is argued that the importance of hidden dialogicality between narrative forms needs to be taken into account as well.

Rhetoric continues to struggle to theorize the simultaneous existence of pattern and contingency. Responses to this issue have been couched in elaborations of genre theory and, more recently, of Vygotskian activity theory. Activity theory offers two advantages in theorizing how change and continuity can coexist: It expands our ability to see how text and context influence one another and it encourages us to see that lack of unity is normal in any activity system. This study exemplifies these advantages by looking at four entry-level engineers who produced a genre they called documentation in their first 4 years at work. They defined documentation as writing that describes events to establish a common understanding of completed or promised actions. Documentation was one of the tools the participants used to create and maintain the activity system of their workplace and to reshape it as well.

This article describes an assessment carried out in collaboration with the administrators of a large freshman English course. The assessment team worked with instructors to identify course goals and to design tasks that the instructors felt would fairly assess the extent to which the students achieved the goals. Students who did and did not take the course were both pre- and posttested on five central goals: critical reading, argument identification, differentiation of summary and paraphrase, understanding of key terms used in the course, and practical strategies for writing academic papers. Results of the assessment failed to indicate any substantial improvement on any of the five course goals for students who took the course. These results contrasted with positive outcomes obtained by the same assessment team with introductory history and statistics courses. The article concludes with reflections on why instructors may fail to recognize that their courses are not working.

A structural analysis of an explanatory text written by a 12-year-old pupil is discussed to demonstrate how the PISA technique (the Procedures for Incremental Structural Analysis; Sanders & Van Wijk, 1996a) may contribute to the understanding of conceptual processes in writing. First, the validity of PISA is supported by showing that the hierarchical text structure corresponds with the (idiosyncratic) punctuation conventions of the writer. Then, it is explained how the writer's strategies and procedures can be reconstructed from the text structure. Evidence for the validity of these inferred cognitive plans is obtained from the distribution within the text of spelling errors, language errors, and self-corrections. Finally, the generalizability of these results is discussed together with the desirability of combining this off-line method with on-line techniques such as pause measurements.

This is a piece about language and how we evaluate the work of young writers as they learn to express themselves in writing. The authors' focus is on current reforms in writing assessment, including the brief life of the California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) writing portfolios, and how they rarely address the vibrant role of language—the work and play of words—in students' writing. Through audio taped interviews with two elementary and two middle school students and their teachers, as well as the written artifacts in the students' portfolios, we analyzed the patterns of the students' writing and the comments of teachers and peers on their work. In this article, language in writing is metaphorically compared to “the clay that makes the pot,” emphasizing that young writers want to startle, want to engage readers with refreshing and surprising language—but few are provided the guidance for how to do it. The authors' central point is that writing revolves around criticism, but if the assessment stays on the surface and encourages word substitution over content revision, then the criticism may not be helpful in pushing the generative aspect of writing: the work of language.

This article examines the behavioral differences of essay scorers who demonstrate different levels of proficiency for a psychometric scoring task. The authors compare three proficiency groups to identify differences in (a) essay features they consider, (b) their understanding of the scoring rubric, and (c) their decision-making procedures. Results indicate scorers with different levels of proficiency do not focus on different essay features when making evaluative decisions but their understandings of the scoring criteria may vary. Proficient scores are more likely to focus on general features of an essay when making evaluative decisions and to adopt values espoused by the scoring rubric than are less proficient scorers. Also, proficient scorers make evaluations by reading the entire essay and then reviewing its content, whereas less proficient scorers may interrupt the reading process to monitor how well the essay satisfies the scoring criteria. Finally, the authors discuss implications for scorer selection and training.

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

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

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.

This article examines the highly specific problems of roof support in coal mines to construct a theoretical framework that describes how texts represent information that is embodied, sensory, and uncertain. As this analysis suggests, workers in risky environments may follow instructions and still fail as situations change. Engineering and management approaches also may fail unless they reflect the kinds of embodied sensory information decision makers need to assess risk in local contexts. This analysis then raises ethical questions about (a) textbook notions of instructions as systematic procedures designed to produce predictable outcomes, (b) limits of particular types of information as signs or indexes of risk, (c) the role of generalized knowledge in uncertain environments, (d) the role of texts in representing knowledge that is sensory and uncertain, and (e) the locus of responsibility for safety if knowledge exists outside of written texts.

This study examines the numbers of relative clauses and the percentages of subordinate clauses they comprise in two sets of research reports from the Physical Review, one from the earliest years (1893-1901) and one from 1980. It finds only a slight decrease in percentages of relative clauses from the first set of articles to the second, but it also finds some striking differences in patterns of what the relative clauses modify, particularly in references to experimental instruments and materials, experimental results or products, and equations. This study also shows evidence of a stylistic shift between the two sets of articles, from what Halliday (1987a) calls the dynamic style (that reflects processes, happenings, and actions) to the synoptic style (that reflects structures, categories, and hierarchies). It speculates that this shift would have been motivated by later physicists' wish to use tenseless expressions and to communicate effectively in an increasingly built-up web of information.

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.

Although the writing needs of English as a Second Language (ESL) students in U.S. higher education have been increasing as the number of ESL students continues to rise, institutional practices that are responsive to the unique needs of ESL writers are yet to be developed. The relative lack of attention to ESL issues in writing programs may be related to how the field of ESL writing has been defined in relation to its related disciplines: Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) and composition studies. This study attempts to construct a view of the field that meets the needs of ESL writers. For this purpose, I present three models of ESL writing in relation to TESL and composition studies and discuss their implications.

Developing academic literacy involves learning valued content and rhetoric in a discipline. Within history, writing from primary documents to construct an evidenced interpretation of an issue requires students to transform both background and document knowledge, read and interpret historical documents, and manage discourse synthesis. The authors examine the potential of the Advanced Placement Document-Based Question as constructed and presented by an exemplary teacher to engage students in historical reasoning and writing. The authors analyzed how five students responded to four document-based questions over a year, tracing how organization, document use, and citation language indicate the degree to which writers transformed and integrated information in disciplinary ways. Students moved from knowledge telling (listing period and document content as discrete information bits) to knowledge transformation (integrating content as interpreted evidence for an argument). Students had difficulty learning to handle the complex layers of the task. The authors discuss how instruction might mediate this complexity and promote academic literacy.

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.

Stories have often been rewritten for children. Children themselves are onlookers to the “chain of communication” that unfolds, as stories are rewritten by perceived ideological conservatives and, in turn, by perceived ideological liberators. In this article, I both present and dialogize this vision of children as receptors of adults' ideological messages. I begin by reviewing examples of adults' rewriting for children, drawing primarily on the rewriting of folk stories. Then, using ethnographic data collected in a study of urban school children's use of common story material (from the poplar media), I reconstruct one branch of a classroom chain of communication. The chain features a girl-next-door figure from a film well-known by the children. In so doing, I illustrate the dialogic process through which children's rewriting becomes a mediator of their ideological concerns. The article concludes with a discussion of the classroom conditions that seemed to support the activation of such a dialogic event.

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.

This article elaborates and evaluates a sociolinguistic framework for the study of writing. The first part of the article discusses different sociolinguistic concepts and theories and introduces the two concepts of communicative community and communicative group, which encompass speech and writing, as well as communication of both local and distant and public and private types. For the purposes of these concepts, written and spoken discourse are assumed to be intermingled in the communicative process and steered by similar sociocognitive conditions. The second part of the article discusses the application of the theoretical framework to a specific case, the writing that takes place at a local government office. The study comprises analyses of the organizational structure and its effects on writing at work, the communicative process and the role of spoken discourse and collaboration in the construction of documents, and the social dimension of writing at work. This workplace is found to constitute a communicative group of the local-public type, which means that communication at the office is part of a socially based and hierarchically structured set of communicative activities, with a close intertwinement of spoken and written discourse.