This article focuses on supervising professors’ and master’s degree students’ understanding and experiences of supervision practices in a Norwegian university, with focus on differences in text cultures and text norms between and within three academic disciplines. The interview study shows that each discipline is a heterogeneous discourse community with largely unarticulated differences. The findings suggest three supervision models, described as teaching, partnership, and apprenticeship. Dominant trends in supervisory relationships and textual practices are distinguished, and characteristics of each are outlined. Connections are shown between the models supervisors adhere to, the kind of texts they expect from their students, and how they provide feedback. As an example, conflicting attitudes toward exploratory student texts are discussed. The study shows that supervision models and textual expectations are influenced by the disciplinary text cultures in which supervisors and students take part. Finally, some practical implications of the study are suggested.

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.

The article consists of two parts: One introduces the concept of positioning as a framework for inspecting and relating major tendencies regarding research on writing; the other gives a historic outline of how research on writing in Norway first emerged. The triadic semiotics of Bühler, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Halliday are combined, and then related to the concept of positioning, which is used as a framework for the historical part. A triadic understanding of communication and didactics is outlined for the purpose of studying positioning of research on writing. Reviews of didactics, research, and stil are presented before overall developmental patterns of general tendencies in the early research writing are described. Central parts of the framework and the historical part are finally compared to an overview offered by Nystrand, Green, and Wiemelt.

How should the relationship between immediate interaction and verbal convention be understood? The present article argues that dialogism transcends the distinction between interactionist and constructionist social theories of written communication, as presented by Nystrand and colleagues. The theoretical argument is illustrated by a study of one writer who is struggling to learn argumentative writing. In analyzing this writer’s development, the focus is on grounding, specifically, the interplay between foregrounded and backgrounded parts of discourse. The results illustrate that appropriation of conventional resources for grounding is more creative and dyadically contextualized than constructionist theories may invite us to think. Simultaneously, appropriation draws on conventional communicative resources in ways that are hard to explain within interactionist theories. A dialogical model is presented to show that the Bakhtinian “double dialogue” of discourse meets in the “diatope”—that multidimensional (ecological) point of co-constitution where interaction and construction merge into one unified perspective.

This article enters an ongoing discussion about the usefulness of different theories and different research designs in the analysis of classroom writing. Starting with questions about how students interpret the norms of writing and their own selves in school writing, it demonstrates the relevance of an ecological theory of writing, methodologically connected to in-depth case studies—double histories—of the dialogical relationship of student and teacher positionings over time. The related concepts of discourse roles and positionings are discussed in the context of the theories of Bakhtin and Mead. The writing double histories of two students and their teacher over 2 years in a Norwegian upper secondary school are presented. Analysis shows informants positioning themselves dialogically in relation to their ideas about self and the other, the social meaning of their written utterances in various school genres, and their changing interpretations of the social rules of school writing.

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.

Although Toulmin models of argumentation are pervasive in composition textbooks, research on the model's use in writing classrooms has been scarce'typically limited to evaluating how students' essays align with the model's elements (claim, data, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, backing) construed as objective standards. That approach discounts Toulmin's emphasis on context. In contrast, this study of a major university's summer composition program for high school students employs Wenger's notion of communities of practice and Bakhtin's notion of response to trace how classroom contexts mediate students' and teachers' understandings of a Toulmin model. The article presents a case study of a controversy that emerged when participants attempted to identify the main claim in one student's essay. The controversy arose, the analysis suggests, as participants positioned competing tacit and explicit representations of claims with/against other rhetorical terms (for example, thesis), variously interpreted the assigned tasks, and negotiated over tasks and texts.

Using the notion of design developed as part of the New London Group's Multiliteracies Project, this qualitative multicase study examines undergraduate academic literacy as a multimodal achievement game. Retrospective interviews and textual analyses revealed a series of operations on course content that constituted moves in the game. The goal of the game was to find, move, and display content, including not only facts but also concepts and forms of situated knowledge that would gain the highest points on assessments. Better “players” were more aware than their lower achieving counterparts of the game as specific activity different from learning. They also had more nuanced and planned versions of the operations that began with what was expected on assessments and moved backwards toward sources. Findings support forms of preparing students for academic success through the multiliteracies pedagogy that combines consciousness raising through overt instruction with forms of immersion and critical analysis.

This article modifies Donna Haraway's concept of (counter) myth building as a way to facilitate social action. Counter myth building, as both a resource and a process, recognizes limitations on individual agency but foregrounds the productive capacity to be more than a social and historical construct. Because myths are multiple and enactments are unpredictable, both building and enacting counter myths are at best complicated. GirlZone and RadioGirl provide two sites for investigating these complications. As grassroots projects, GirlZone and RadioGirl are explicitly devoted to building counter myths as part of an activist agenda for social change. These sites illustrate how the complex semiotic and material processes of myth building may provide potential resources for these and other activists.

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.

This study explores the relation between fluency in writing and linguistic experience and provides information about the processes involved in written text composition. The authors conducted a think-aloud protocol study with native speakers of English who were learning French or German. Analysis reveals that as the writer's experience with the language increases, fluency (as measured by words written per minute) increases, the average length of strings of words proposed between pauses or revision episodes increases, the number of revision episodes decreases, and more of the words that are proposed as candidate text get accepted. To account for these results, the authors propose a model of written language production and hypothesize that the effect of linguistic experience on written fluency is mediated primarily by two internal processes called the translator and the reviser.

Though scholars have begun to explore how texts mediate design, little is known about rhetorical invention in design. To investigate how heuristics used for rhetorical invention and design might be related, the author analyzed how one disciplinary design heuristic, the information system cliché, influenced the production of both a computer system and a specification text for the system. The cliché was used to generate design proposals, which designers evaluated using at least three criteria: projected context of use, correspondence between the proposals and their textual inscriptions, and system coherence. Results indicate that disciplinary heuristics and rhetorical topics overlap in design; however, the rhetorical character of disciplinary heuristics is obscured in textual representations of the design. Both types of heuristic serve as interpretive instruments and are used dialogically to develop the parts of a design or text within the context of the whole.

Most discussions of qualitative research organize research methodologies according to their place in a set of research paradigms identified by epistemological and ontological commitments. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, the authors argue for a theory of research as social practice in which researchers' purposes are determined not by philosophical paradigms but by their commitments to specific forms of social action. The authors offer a model of research practices organized according to their relationship to social power rather than abstract paradigms. From this perspective, the dilemmas presented by recent postmodern critiques of representation, the inclusion and co-optation of participants' voices, and validity become a question of ethics. The authors explore the problems of postmodern ethics and qualitative research through the work of Bauman.

Rhetorical studies of genre have investigated the complex relationships between a range of genre activities and their social, historical, and institutional contexts. However, the temporal dimensions of these contexts require further specification and explicit examination. This article offers a first step toward conceptualizing the temporal dimensions of rhetorical contexts and considering the interplay between those dimensions and genre activity. First, the author reviews how temporality has figured in rhetorical studies of genre through the notions of kairos and temporal exigence. She then presents two models of time, “clock time” and “process time,” as a means for representing the temporal dimensions of rhetorical contexts and genre activity. Finally, the author examines the interplay between these temporal models and genre by analyzing a nurse practitioner's communicative interaction with two patients. By conceptualizing and examining the relationship between time and genre, this article adds to our understanding of genre as situated social action.

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.

Commentary: It is easier to articulate the issues addressed in this piece today than it was when Written Communication first published it in 1985; we now have the familiar idioms of postmodernism, cultural studies, and reception theory to help illuminate the paradigm that we were arguing governs everyday communication behavior in organizations. In particular, while terms such as contingency, intersubjectivity, shared understandings, social construction of meaning, and discourse communities were familiar enough at the time in the fields of philosophy and critical theory, they had not yet influenced textbooks in organizational communication. Instead, these textbooks were dominated by the human resource and social systems models of the organization at work and by prescriptive approaches to writing. We drew on the work of contemporary theorists (Polanyi, Popper, Kuhn, Toulmin, Perelman, and others) to support the notion that, like scientific communities, organizational communities are “rational enterprises” that develop rules and protocols for the admission and analysis of evidence—criteria which individual practitioners internalize unevenly, imperfectly, and tacitly, and which evolve over time in response to new situations, but which govern the construction of meaning. Through the analysis of a particular case of strategic communication (and one that was deliberately ordinary, not exceptional), we were interested in demonstrating how important the larger context is in shaping communication, how meaning is negotiated by writer and audience, how “good writing” depends less on transmitting a “message” or even adapting a specific format than on tapping (or reenvisioning) shared but tacit recognitions about what is important in the organizational context. Looking back, we are gratified that these observations now seem commonplace, and also that we addressed them in humanistic, cognitive, and philosophical terms to argue the centrality—and complexity—of consensus making. One of the closing sentences still seems like an appropriate call to continue such an inquiry: “In a world marked by divergent values, galloping change, and the need for ethical approaches to problem solving, a rhetoric that both acknowledges the human complexity of decision making and suggests a practical rationale for producing consensus is needed.”

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: When “Thucydides and the Plague in Athens: The Roots of Scientific Writing” was written in 1988, genre analysis was an emerging area for scholarship. Thucydides' Historiae, which includes numerous political speeches in context, provides a rich resource for exploring the ancient roots of rhetorical genres. Thucydides' text also sheds light on the origin of a specific scientific genre - the medical case history. In describing a devastating plague in Athens, Thucydides uses the Hippocratic approach, following an ancient genre or form that is remarkably similar to the modern medical case history. Thucydides' case history of the Athenian plague enabled 20th-century epidemiologists to establish a diagnosis of the illness (influenza plus toxic shock syndrome), predict its return, and validate their diagnosis during a 1987 flu epidemic. Although “Thucydides and the Plague in Athens” only hints at Thucydides' genre knowledge, his case history of the plague and his presentation of speeches display considerable insight into the social construction and function of these recurring forms. In explaining the speeches in his text, for example, Thucydides says, “[M]y habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions” (1.22). He prefaces his account of the plague with a statement of purpose: to help future scholars recognize future outbreaks of the same illness. These remarks, viewed in the context of genre theory today, suggest that Thucydides not only knew how to use genres but also understood their social origin and purposes.

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 investigated differences among student writers at three grade levels (6, 8, and 10) and between expert writers and students in terms of the uses and complexity of arguments presented in their persuasive texts. To analyze argument, a model was developed that could account for structural variations occurring across a range of writing situations. The characteristics of this model were defined using categories derived from a model of semantic representation in discourse. The structural analysis revealed that (a) argument was the predominant organizational structure for all writers, (b) more than 80% of students produced arguments involving some form of opposition, (c) embedded arguments identified in expert texts functioned primarily as countered rebuttals and in student texts as subclaims or reservations, and (d) expert texts contained relatively higher frequencies of warrants, countered rebuttals, and modals, and student uses of these substructures increased with grade.

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.

The authors report an investigation of the discourse practices of the “affiliated professions” of software engineering design. Lists of design issues generated by students in computer science and technical communication were compared to lists produced by experts affiliated with software engineering and by students entering an unaffiliated profession. The results suggest that (a) the affiliated experts addressed a more balanced set of issues, (b) the students in computer science looked more like the affiliated experts in their attention to technical issues and more like the unaffiliated students in their attention to human issues, and (c) the students in technical communication looked more like the affiliated experts in their attention to the human issues and more like the unaffiliated students in their attention to the technical issues. The results are discussed in terms of a landscape of highly clustered, fractured, and stratified affiliated professions over which students travel during their educational and professional careers.

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.

According to contrastive rhetoric research, Japanese expository prose is characterized by a classical style (ki-sho-ten-ketsu), reader responsibility, and an inductive style with a sudden topic shift. It is claimed that English readers have difficulty comprehending texts written by Japanese writers because of such culturally unique conventions. This article challenges these hypotheses concerning the uniqueness of Japanese texts. It argues that previous studies tend to view language and culture as exotic and static rather than dynamic, and overgeneralize the cultural characteristics from a few specific examples. Also, these characterizations of Japanese written discourse can be challenged by multiple interpretations of ki-sho-ten-ketsu offered by composition specialists in Japan and the linguistic and educational influences from the West on the development of modern Japanese since the mid-19th century. This article suggests that researchers and writing teachers should be wary of stereotyping cultural conventions of writing.

The author reviews traditional beliefs about creative illness and suggests that their endorsement of euphoric bingeing misleads writers. Productive creativity seems to occur more reliably with moderation of work duration and of emotions, not with the fatigue and ensuing depression of binge writing. The author compares binge writers to a matched sample of novice professors who wrote in brief, daily sessions and with generally mild emotions. Binge writers (a) accomplished far less writing overall, (b) got fewer editorial acceptances, (c) scored higher on the Beck Depression Inventory, and (d) listed fewer creative ideas for writing. These data suggest that creative illness, defined by its common emotional state for binge writers (i.e., hypomania and its rushed euphoria brought on by long, intense sessions of working—followed by depression), offers more problems (e.g., working in an emotional, rushed, fatiguing fashion) than magic. The example of Joseph Conrad supports these findings.

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.

The different emphases that theorists and teachers place on the product and process of writing in their accounts of how writers construct meaning have been influenced by different traditions of Western thought that have historically been at odds: Whereas the designative tradition focuses on the ways in which artifacts of speech mediate people's thinking, the expressive tradition focuses on the transformation of inner speech to public speech, thus emphasizing the ways in which the activities of speaking and writing promote changes in consciousness. In this article, through the analysis of the writing of a high school senior, it is argued that these two positions are not mutually exclusive, but rather are complementary aspects of a semiotic view on writing. The primary data set is a “situated protocol”—that is, a think-aloud protocol, including both concurrent and retrospective accounts of writing process, conducted over a 4-month period. Through the protocol analysis and analysis of related data, I examine the ways in which this student's writing experiences reveal the interrelated roles of both designative and expressive functions of writing. The analysis also reveals that the writer found the situated protocol itself to be an enduring means of development and reflection and a tool for meditation.

Data analysis and representation are important political acts in the research process. The types of data we select for study, the analysis we draw, and our textual and graphic representations of data all contribute to the ways in which the people involved in our research are positioned as subjects and the degree of individual and collective agency that can be constructed through the research process itself. It is because of the potential effects of our research on others that we need to demystify the research we do through laying bare our epistemological positions and opening our methods and methodologies to public criticism. Further, in the case of empowering research, it is important to include the research participants in the development of our research projects. This necessitates explorations into postmodern conceptions of subjectivity, knowledge formation, collaboration, and resistance as they relate to empirical research as well as redefining notions of validity and reliability.

In this study, we trace the development of ideas explored during reading lessons in children's writings from one transitional bilingual fourth-grade classroom. Using transcripts from audio- and videotaped lessons, we describe the ways in which the reading lessons, designed to facilitate discussions to enhance student reading comprehension, turned into an anchoring activity for the negotiation of joint meaning. They served as a springboard for joint exploration and the generation of intersubjective and co-constructed ideas that bridged the worlds of home and school. We trace the development of these ideas in representative pieces from five student portfolios. Discussions served to display a number of important literacy processes, and ideas and interpretations from these discussions reappeared in the students' writings. This study is of particular interest to educators concerned both with understanding better the influence of classroom discourse on student writing and with finding ways to incorporate students' cultural backgrounds into classroom practices.

The article offers a fresh perspective on semiotic approaches to writing. It endorses recent arguments for more study of writing that shapes and directs the production of material artifacts and for considering writing as one semiotic mode among others. The main purpose, however, is to consider a case of nonwritten symbolic production, architectural design, for what it may suggest for the study and the teaching of writing. A constructivist account is proposed whereby the design (like equivalent written texts) not only proposes and foreshadows a new object in the world but creates one, bringing into existence, through acts of representation, a virtual object that is real in its social effects. Transcripts from design conversations are drawn on to elucidate the characteristics of such virtual artifacts, and implications for writing are drawn.

To change the mind of a reader, authors compose written persuasion according to a set of rhetorical features. This article describes the features of persuasive texts and reviews research results to explore whether adults indeed change their minds after reading persuasion. Toulmin's (1958) model of argument and Aristotle's model of persuasive content characterize the structure and content of well-written persuasion. Research in social psychology and text comprehension shows that adults typically build a case for their own prereading belief rather than process a persuasive text mindfully, weigh evidence, and change their beliefs. An important contract between author and reader is typically broken. Research on designing text to disabuse students of scientific misconceptions points to text features that authors could use to encourage readers to read persuasion mindfully.

Although notions of literacy tend to be dominated by images of solitary readers and writers, collaboration and assistance with reading and writing are widespread practices. This article presents a detailed description of a scribe and his client in Mexico producing a letter through joint composition, a term used to refer to letter-writing episodes involving two or more active participants. Through an examination of the discussions that occurred between the scribe and the client, the analysis illustrates how both actors contributed to the final outcome. This article discusses how the participants negotiated their points of view and pooled their knowledge to produce a specific type of document in accordance with their expectations and purposes. The analysis suggests that joint composition is the outcome of multiple contextual elements: authority, gender, and literacy competency. It further concludes that scribing is a complex, heterogeneous literacy activity.

Hedging refers to linguistic strategies that qualify categorical commitment to express possibility rather than certainty. In scientific writing, hedging is central to effective argument: Hedging is a rhetorical means of gaining reader acceptance of claims, allowing writers to convey their attitude to the truth of their statements and to anticipate possible objections. Because hedges allow writers to express claims with precision, caution, and modesty, they are a significant resource for academics. However, little is known about the way hedging is typically expressed in particular domains or the particular functions it serves in different genres. This article identifies the major forms, functions, and distribution of hedges in a corpus of 26 molecular biology research articles and describes the importance of hedging in this genre.

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.

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.

In this article, the author offers some personal reflections on the origins and continued development of his thinking about the nature of writing and the relationship between writing and cognition. He recounts how his early efforts to understand the unique effects of writing on cognition, which he claimed were different from the effects of speech on cognition, culminated in his controversial theory of “autonomous texts”: namely, that whereas in speech one listens primarily for a speaker's intentions (i.e., what is meant), writing elicits a form of understanding that seeks a more literal interpretation of sentence meaning (i.e., what is actually said). The author acknowledges the merit of several criticisms of his early claims, but defends his core thesis that writing both enables and encourages writers and readers to say and think things differently than does speech; writing entails a unique mode of understanding that divorces form from meaning. He revises his earlier contention that literacy represents a form of cultural progress toward a more cautious view of writing as an instrument of increasing cultural specialization. Finally, the author outlines several unresolved issues that serve to focus his continued efforts at understanding how writing affects cognition.

Orality has been a feature repeatedly offered to typify African American language habits. Through anthropological studies of contemporary communities as well as literary portrayals and celebrations of cultural heroes such as preachers and political orators, the strong oral traditions of African Americans have figured prominently in discussions of the contexts of their literary works. This article argues for a balance of this image by laying out historical evidence on the literate values and habits of African Americans since the early 1800s. Literary journals, the Black press, literary writers, and literary societies, especially those of women, between 1830 and 1940 highly valued joint reading groups, creative writing efforts, and the role of literature in the lives of African Americans. Considerable work remains to restore accuracy and cross-class representation of African Americans in English studies, so as to resist tendencies to deny variation in the language habits and values of groups included in multicultural literature.

This article describes an investigation in which I explored an impression that I had developed in earlier work that the grammatical subjects in scientific discourse are markedly long. An examination of a sample of scientific discourse produced evidence that makes a fairly strong case that on the average the grammatical subjects in the sample are markedly long. A stronger case can be made that many of the specific subjects in the sample are very long indeed, probably long enough to draw some attention to themselves in most any kind of discourse. I identify three pressures that I believe operate on scientists to produce very long grammatical subjects: The pressure to be precise, the pressure to be concise, and the pressure to be efficient and progressive in constructing a set of claims that will remain true within a framework of knowledge that has been built up over time. I conclude by exploring some possible connections between both the grammatical subjects in and the overall style of the sample of discourse and what Jerome Bruner calls the paradigmatic mode of thought.

Although studies of writing and literary understanding have demonstrated the value of analytic essay writing for enhancing story understanding, these studies have focused on student's initial interpretations without considering the effects of a teacher's support and direction. The purpose of this study was to explore how 9th- (n = 6) and 11th- (n = 6) grade students reformulated and extended their initial written analyses of two short stories through revisions fostered by two different kinds of between-draft written comments. After revising initial drafts in two response modes (directive and dialogue), the students wrote paragraph-length responses to posttest questions of story understanding. Results indicated significant (p < .05) main effects for response condition and grade level, with the dialogue condition enhancing story understanding more than the directive condition, and the 11th graders attaining higher posttest scores than the 9th graders. Data from composing-aloud protocols revealed that the dialogue condition supported the students' reformulation of their own interpretations constructed in the initial drafts, while the directive condition seemed to shift the students away from their own initial interpretations of the stories.

That writing has unique powers for promoting learning has become a given among many composition teachers and researchers. Peircean semiotics suggest that writing is one of many forms of composing available for mediating thought and activity, and that the value of any form of mediation depends on the context in which it takes place. The present study used stimulated recall to elicit a retrospective account from an alternative school student following his production of an artistic text representing his view of the relationship between the two central characters in a short story. The student's account indicates that in composing his text he (a) initiated his interpretation by empathizing with one of the characters, (b) produced a graphic representation and transformation of the relationship between the two central characters, (c) situated his text in an intertext, and (d) produced a text that both shaped and was shaped by his thinking. Furthermore, the “text” he produced through the stimulated recall interview likely involved a reconsideration as well as re-representation of the graphic text he had drawn, thus enmeshing the investigative method itself with the student's growing realization of the meaning of his work. His account suggests that nonlinguistic texts—when part of an environment that broadens the range of communication genres available to students—can help students construct meanings that are appropriate to school activities and learning.

This article argues that historians of literacy, including Carl Kaestle, Harvey Graff, Suzanne de Castell, and Allan Luke, have not taken into account America's Hispanic literacy legacy. Drawing examples from historical accounts, diaries, and Spanish civil law, the author illustrates the depth and breadth of Hispanic contributions to American literacy. The article sharply contrasts the (relatively recent) image of “literacy deficient” Hispanic Americans with the rich legacy of their forebearers, who brought a new world of literacy to early America.

A composition researcher and psychiatrist report findings from their 3-year study of the revision of the most important book in the mental health profession: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). This 500-page diagnostic taxonomy defines some 250 mental disorders, and it functions for the field as a charter document, shaping the way mental illness is understood, treated, and studied. The revision project, which culminates in 1994 with the publication of DSM-IV, is a 6-year project involving some 1,000 psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. In this study the authors examine the DSM revision using three methodologies: in Part I they trace the history of the DSM classification system; in Part II they analyze published accounts of the revision by project leaders; and finally, in Part III they observe the revision process as it was actually carried out in one of the 13 work groups. The authors conclude that the revision of DSM functions less to change the text than to achieve certain social and political effects. They find the revision works to further entrench the biomedical model of mental disorder, to maintain the dominance of psychiatry within the mental health field, and to enhance the prestige of psychiatry in relation to other medical specialties.

Using the theoretical perspective offered by recent genre studies, this study compares student and professional discourse within the same field through a set of case studies written for a third-year course in financial analysis—writing that was conceived and designed by the instructor to simulate workplace discourse. Observational and textual analyses revealed the radically distinct social action undertaken in this student writing as compared to related workplace discourse, despite the simulation. Social motives, exigent rhetorical contexts, social roles, and reading practices were all distinct in ways that profoundly affected both discourse processes and products. At the same time, certain commonalities were apparent in the student and workplace writing. These shared features point to ways in which student writing enables and enacts entry into sociocultural communities.

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.

Interdisciplinary research is often described as the recasting of disciplinary boundaries, suggesting that interdisciplinary writing might require a “boundary rhetoric”—one that negotiates the borders between the various disciplinary rhetorics involved. An example of such a boundary rhetoric can be found in the work of S. E. Jelliffe, a prominent physician-writer who proposed an innovative and controversial theory of psychosomatic medicine that offers to unite neurology and Freudian psychoanalysis. Jelliffe's work—in both its successes and failures—suggests some of the textual and conventional ways in which a boundary rhetoric can operate. At its most successful, Jelliffe's boundary rhetoric blurs the generic conventions and expectations of his constituent fields and “translates” the values and principles of one discipline into the language and discourse forms of the other. Given the increasing interdisciplinary character of much modern scholarship, Jelliffe's case is important in helping to illuminate potential problems and possibilities inherent in boundary rhetorics.

Composition theory generally has ignored grammar over the past 15 years, focusing instead on what has been described as “classifications of texts and relations among writers, readers, and subject matter.” Nevertheless, composition has been and continues to be strongly influenced by the model of language that is implicit in modern grammar. This model proposes that language is rule governed and, as a result, is deterministic. Transformational-generative grammar is the most well-known articulation of the model among composition specialists. This article describes the general features of the model and discusses some of the ways it has influenced composition. After assessing the various weaknesses of the rule-governed model, the article outlines a new model of language that is being developed in cognitive science by David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and others working in parallel distributed processing. This alternative model is associational and probabilistic and is grounded in connectionist theory and research. An association model of language provides composition specialists new perspectives on writers, research, and theory. The article concludes by suggesting possible ways to reconsider the act of composing and related theories.

The entry of ethnography and ethnographic methods into writing research, particularly during the 1980s, has been highly productive. However, this research continues to ignore many of the doubts concerning ethnography that anthropologists themselves have been raising for a number of years. This article (a) outlines more than a decade of civil war among anthropologists, (b) considers the relevance of that debate to writing researchers working ethnographically, (c) argues for more experimental ethnographic texts in contrast to the entrenched models that currently rule the field and despite the institutional resistance that experimental texts are bound to generate, and (d) suggests in cursory fashion the fate of “postmodernist” discourse in the context of the more normative discourse of institutional life. Along the way, the article analyzes some of the rhetoric of the ethnographic work of writing researchers, including Heath's Ways With Words.