This essay presents a critical case study of how shifts in the style and genre of written communication both reflect and influence historical shifts in political consciousness and action. The field of study is the discourse of environmental advocacy. With increased public support for actions that would forestall environmental degradation, environmental politics has diversified. Formerly a resistance movement directed toward influencing large-scale governmental or industrial actions through the rhetoric of polemical dispute, environmentalism has evolved into several distinct approaches, including a globalist movement and a grass roots movement that share an interest in policy and procedure, the traditional topics of instrumental discourse. A new genre built upon this proactive attitude—the green how-to book—currently dominates the popular literature on environmental problem solving. Capitalizing on the document designs of technical communication, these manuals recommend courses of action ranging from fixing the Environmental Protection Agency to fixing the toilet; they are directed to audiences ranging from the President of the United States to the ordinary householder. They have in common an attempt to break the paralysis of fear associated with realizations about the scale of environmental damage. But—because the instrumental genre tends to obscure relations of agent, action, and effect—covert political agendas may pass unnoticed into the personalist politics of the new literature.

The almost exclusive reliance on evidence developed from documentary analyses, specifically analyses of textbooks, in composition historiography has resulted in an agonistic, heroes-and-villains image of the history of writing instruction, whereby modern composition scholars have defined themselves in terms of their opposition to what has come to be called “current-traditional rhetoric.” This article promotes the use of oral evidence in composition historiography to guard against overgeneralization and simplistic reduction of composition history to binary oppositions. Oral interviews also can serve as a way of collecting information that would otherwise be lost, of exploring the thoughts, motivations, feelings, and values of informants, and of giving voice to those marginalized politically, socially, and professionally. This article also defends oral data against positivistic attacks on its reliability as evidence and argues that the evidentiary value of any piece of historical data depends not on some abstract ranking of different kinds of evidence but on the historian's understanding of the rhetorical context informing the production of that data.

The evolution of page design to improve the readability of technical writing can be traced to improvements in typography and also to the influence of Peter Ramus. Ramus's logic used bracketed outlines to show the relationships among ideas within larger concepts. Used by legal writers and Puritan theologians to analyze concepts, Ramist method was also used by English physicians who sought to create medical texts that could be easily read and remembered by students and practitioners. Texts that used Ramist method illustrate their writers' awareness of the importance of making information visually accessible by use of white space, headings that reveal hierarchies of ideas, and bracketed dichotomies and partitions to reveal content for selective reading.

This article discusses the work of two American ecologists of the first half of the twentieth century, F. E. Clements and H. A. Gleason, who differed in terms of their understanding of community succession—that is, how ecological communities change over time. Clements's and Gleason's debate about the nature of ecological communities demonstrates, first, that in considering questions of succession, ecologists are constructing and testing plausible narratives. Second, it suggests that the structures of scientific narratives resemble structures of other cultural narratives in depending, at least to some extent, on cultural assumptions and values. The presence of these competing stories about ecological data thus calls attention to the importance of narrative as an interpretive and rhetorical strategy in scientific discourse.

In this article, interviews with a Vietnamese-speaking science student who has repeatedly failed a required English competency examination are presented. Topics relating to this examination include prompt type, essay content, rhetorical organization, student preparation for writing, and audience. Questions are raised regarding the purposes, development, and evaluation of writing competency tests.

Computer conversation provides a writing context in which both process and product are mediated via the computer terminal and the product is semipermanent. This 8-month study of the use of computer conversation by an IBM project manager and his colleagues identifies the cognitive and contextual strategies used to accommodate this particular task environment. When planning, writers chose among the available communication media, changed goals in a shifting rhetorical context, and organized parallel processes. When translating, they remembered the text constructed thus far and the knowledge shared with the reader and chose surface structures ad hoc to fit the technology. When reviewing, they revised with the goal of comprehensibility and evaluated writing-in-production against incoming information. This particular writing process illustrates the cognitive consequences of context for writing.

The widespread use of irony in academic writing raises issues not considered in most psychological, linguistic, or literary approaches to irony: How is irony signalled in a written text? What are the constraints of politeness within academic discourse that govern the use and interpretation of irony? This essay considers the interpretation of one kind of irony—ironic quotation—in a controversy between linguists and artificial intelligence researchers. Irony in these published exchanges is then compared to irony in conference discussions and unpublished papers in linguistics and to irony in other disciplines. Although the analysis follows psychological and linguistic accounts of irony as echoic mention in which the same words can be reused with a different intention, it begins with the rhetorical relation of the quoting writer, the quoted writer, and the reader as members of disciplinary communities. The instances of irony that are considered both define these relations and assume them as a basis for interpretation. This analysis suggests that the study of irony can serve as a means of understanding disciplines and of examining our own taken-for-granted assumptions as academic writers.

The authors recount their attempt to analyze a case study in terms of two conflicting rhetorics: a collectivist rhetoric that values most the contributions individuals make to an ongoing collective project and an individualist rhetoric that values most the original and autonomous voice. These two rhetorics conflict in the experience of one writer working concurrently in a literature seminar within a university English department and in the public relations office of a reproductive services agency. This conflict, centering on different rhetorical ethics, had less to do with competence than with commitment: the writer's commitment to the individualist ethics practiced in the writing she did in the literature seminar prevented her from valuing the writing she did at the agency that worked toward a collectivist end. The authors then examine how this analysis is problematized by alternative interpretations of this case that demonstrate that the collectivist rhetoric practiced by researchers and theorists of writing itself involves the interaction of conflicting individualist assertions. This analysis suggests that the most useful theoretical insights any case might provide into the question of how writing ought to be taught are embodied in the exchange of interpretations that case provokes and in the confrontation of diverse arguments that emerge from that exchange.

In the first three medical reports on AIDS which were published in 1981 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the writers' primary rhetorical agenda was to argue that a new medical discovery had been made. A secondary agenda was to offer etiological explanations for the new problem. To establish the new disease entity as deserving serious attention, the writers built a sense of mystery by confronting established medical knowledge about immunodeficiency and emphasizing the inability of modern medicine to diagnose and treat the problem. When they explained the phenomenon in etiological terms, rather than confronting the disciplinary matrix, the writers relied on established medical knowledge of infection rates in homosexual males as well as prevailing social views about the dangerous nature of male homosexual activity; consequently, they were able to imply that nothing was mysterious or surprising about immunodeficiency in homosexual males.

Explaining difficult ideas to lay readers is an important and frequently needed writing skill. When explaining, writers must recognize and overcome the confusions that lay readers may experience in learning abstract concepts. To date, there has been little study of this demanding writing skill. Consequently, this article identifies a particular class of explanatory discourse and proposes working hypotheses about the types of knowledge likely to be associated with skill in this genre. These hypotheses are explored through a study of individual differences in explanatory writing skill among 169 college students. The results of the study showed that variations in the accuracy and adaptiveness of the students' explanations were partially accounted for by measures of topic knowledge, social cognition, and discourse knowledge. A discourse knowledge index and a topic knowledge index were correlated with explanatory writing skill. Cognitive complexity, a measure of social cognition, was associated with adaptiveness in explaining but not accuracy. These findings suggest that explanatory skill is a function of several types of knowledge and that it may be as dependent on discourse or rhetorical knowledge as it is on topical expertise.

This study analyzed the persuasive essays of high school juniors and seniors to determine the specific rhetorical and linguistic features that contributed to raters' holistic judgments about the overall quality of the essays. Essays written by a random sample of an ethnically, socially, and economically diverse population of high school writers were analyzed using an array of rhetorical and linguistic measures: overall quality, use of a five-paragraph structure, coherence, three types of persuasive appeals, and sentence-level errors. The relationships between the variables and the holistic scores were examined using a correlation analysis. A forward stepwise regression analysis was also used to estimate the amount of variance contributed by each variable. Results indicate that use of logical appeals, five-paragraph structure, coherence, and number of words were strongly correlated with the overall quality ratings.

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

Is “the writer's audience always a fiction,” as Walter Ong contends, even when the writing is not poetry or fiction but scientific prose? To demonstrate the usefulness of Ong's approach to audience for analysts of nonfiction prose and for those who wish to empower student writers, we consider from a reader-response perspective two scientific articles on the same general topic written for the same discourse community in the same year. The authors of the two essays (prestigious scientists) directed their readers into two radically different roles. One makes his readers not only into “conventional” scientists but into willing novices who take note of his presentation but who do not take issue with it; the other creates disciplinary nonconformists, inquistive skeptics who have the perspectives necessary to understand the limits of scientific thought. The analysis elaborates the rhetorical nature of scientific discourse, demonstrates that even within the constraints of the journal article scientists have considerable freedom to exercise choices, and explicates how writers use cues to direct readers into fictional roles.

This article examines the logic and rhetoric of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. in Cultural Literacy, attempts to answer the question of how intellectual failure guarantees success in the marketplace, and concludes with an alternative vision of the American society that Hirsch glowingly describes and with the suggestion that Hirsch's cultural literacy is in fact cross-culturalilliteracy. The subsequent publication of the Hirschian Dictionary of Cultural Literacy occasions a postscript that examines the mindset of a comfortable white gerontocracy as it manifests itself in the Dictionary's comic arrogance yet trivial accomplishement.

Authorial newness or innovation has become a subject of growing interest in the sociology of science. We review some of this literature and elaborate constituents of a theory of authorial novelty. We also discuss some parameters that account for the changing assumptions of novelty across disciplinary communities. Finally, we show that many of the insights required in a parameterized theory of newness have not yet made their way into theories of rhetoric or written composition.

Texts reflect the conditions under which they are produced. This means that the writing process can favor or counteract a comprehensible text. In this article, problems of law text comprehensibility are related to the legislative writing process. The drafting of three pieces of Swedish consumer legislation was observed at different stages, and the results of this study are summarized and analyzed in relation to rhetorical and sociolinguistic theories of writing. Law writing can roughly be described by a rhetorical model as regards the role of the main phases in the process. It is, however, found to be less reader-oriented and more oriented toward the speech community than the rhetorical model prescribes.

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

This article explores the usefulness of identifying the stasis of an argument, that is, whether it concerns an issue of fact, definition, cause, value, or action. The stasis of an argument can be seen as a component that has to be justified. An author must either assume or overtly appeal to the value of addressing a particular audience on a topic in a particular stasis. Once this principle of rhetorical analysis is in place, it is especially useful as an approach in the current enterprise of analyzing the rhetoric of the disciplines. While arguments in public forums naturally exploit the full stases, arguments in disciplinary contexts usually concern only the first two. “Exemplary” arguments in representative issues of Science and PMLA are then analyzed for their stasis and how they justify arguing over the issues they address. While science articles open and reopen questions of fact, classification, and cause while assuming the value of their enterprise, articles in literary criticism are problematic. They concern issues of value that are to a great extent already granted by their audience.

Although many writers depend on guidelines for help in using language properly and effectively, those guidelines typically lack empirical justification and, as a result, are sometimes oversimplified or even misconceived. In this article, we illustrate this point by examining the guideline that tells writers not to use the existential, or “empty,” there. A 100,000-word survey of good writing shows that expert writers apparently ignore this guideline. Using a discourse-sensitive form of linguistic analysis, we explain why these violations of the rule occur. Expert writers use there for important linguistic and rhetorical purposes: to assert existence, to present new information, to introduce topics, and to summarize. Based on our findings, we claim that there is little justification for having a prescriptive rule against the existential there. We argue further that the methodology employed here, which relies on quantitative and qualitative analysis rather than on conventional wisdom, can and should be extended to other handbook rules.

This essay examines self-portrayal in fictional and nonfictional written discourse. The essay focuses on various treatments of self-representation in rhetorical and literary critical theory in an effort to overcome the conceptual and terminological confusion that has arisen across time and disciplinary specialties in the discussion of self-portrayal. The essay argues that two common terms for describing self-representation—ethos and persona— are often conflated but that there are good historical and conceptual grounds for maintaining a distinction between them. Such a distinction refines our critical vocabulary for analyzing the multidimensional nature of self-representation in writing.

Two famous passages in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War illustrate the origins of scientific writing and shed further light on the relationship between scientific writing and epideictic rhetoric. Thucydides' account of the plague in Athens in 430 B.C. uses a structure based on the Hippocratic approach, as well as “scientific” medical terminology. The report of the plague is immediately followed by Pericles' Funeral Oration. Similar themes appear in both segments, but the rhetorical strategies are markedly different. This article analyzes the juxtaposed examples of scientific and epideictic discourse by applying theories from rhetoric and sociology advanced by Perelman, Fahnestock, Havelock, and Durkheim, as well as schema theory and reader-response theories.

This study examined developmental differences in adolescents' and adults' use of rhetorical strategies in memos written during a role-play session. Ninth graders, twelfth graders, college juniors, and adult graduate students chose 1 of 11 roles within the context of the role-play situation and exchanged memos persuading each other to adopt a position regarding a policy for off-campus lunch privileges. Five memos written by each of 11 randomly selected participants at each grade level were categorized by t-unit on the basis of a system of 17 rhetorical strategies. Analyses determined the relationship between grade level and memo length, rhetorical strategies (in each of four initial t-units), rhetorical focus, and participants' perceptions of their audiences' “power” before and after the session. Results show that college students and adults were more likely than younger participants to focus their memos on presenting their roles and establishing a relationship with their audience. The memos of younger participants were more likely to use “assertive” or “conditional” rhetorical strategies. Across all grade levels, however, writers were more likely to focus initial memos on establishing relationships and later memos on articulating their positions.

This article surveys and analyzes the contemporary reception of Plato's rhetorical theory in contemporary rhetoric and composition studies by examining the response from three current perspectives: (1) presenting Plato as completely against rhetoric; (2) leaving Plato out of rhetoric altogether; and (3) interpreting Plato's work as raising issues central to classical and contemporary rhetoric. The discussion of the first two responses to Plato's relationship to rhetoric reveals a reductive, or formulaic, presentation of classical rhetoric. The discussion of the third perspective shows that it is the most accurate interpretation. Plato's rhetoric is related to the traditional five canons that were prominent in Greek rhetoric and explicitly systematized in Roman rhetoric, beginning with the Rhetorica Ad Herennium. If Plato's extensive contribution to the last two of the classical canons of rhetoric, memory and delivery, were more commonly included in the historicizing of rhetoric, then the five canons would work in the fullness of their interaction, rather than as the three-part system (invention, arrangement, and style) that dominates much current interpretation of classical rhetoric. Examples of reintegration of Plato into classical rhetoric (the third perspective) leads to a conclusion that Plato's rhetoric is central to contemporary interpretations of classical rhetoric.

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

Introductions to research articles (RAs) have become an important site for the analysis of academic writing. However, analysts have apparently not considered whether RA introductions typically include statements of principal findings. In contrast, this issue is often addressed in the manuals and style guides surveyed, most advocating the desirability of announcing principal findings (APFs) in RA introductions. Therefore, a study of actual practice in two leading journals from two different fields (physics and educational psychology) was undertaken. In the Physical Review 45% of the introductions sampled contained APFs (with some increase in percentage over the last 40 years), while in the Journal of Educational Psychology the percentage fell to under 7%. These figures are at variance with the general trend of recommendations in primary and secondary sources. Thus preliminary evidence points to (a) a mismatch between descriptive practice and prescriptive advice and (b) diversity in this rhetorical feature between the two fields.

This essay constructs frameworks for understanding how organizations may function as rhetorical contexts. Initially, traditional and modern approaches to rhetorical context are compared and conclusions are drawn about where organizations, as a form of context, may fit within each. Then two approaches to organizational theory that have implications for the study and practice of writing are elaborated.

This article studies the fate of scientific observations as they pass from original research reports intended for scientific peers into popular accounts aimed at a general audience. Pairing articles from two AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) publications reveals the changes that inevitably occur in “information” as it passes from one rhetorical situation to another. Scientific reports belong to the genre of forensic arguments, affirming the validity of past facts, the experimental data. But a change of audience brings a change of genre; science accommodations are primarily epideictic, celebrations of science, and shifts in wording between comparable statements in matched articles reveal changes made to conform to the two appeals of popularized science, the wonder and the application topoi. Science accommodations emphasize the uniqueness, rarity, originality of observations, removing hedges and qualifications and thus conferring greater certainty on the reported facts. Such changes could be formalized by adopting the scale developed by sociologists Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar for categorizing the status of claims. The alteration of information is traced not only in articles on bees and bears, and so on, but also on a subject where distortions in reporting research can have serious consequences—the reputed mathematical inferiority of girls to boys. The changes in genre and the status of information that occur between scientific articles and their popularizations can also be explained by classical stasis theory. Anything addressed to readers as members of the general public will inevitably move through the four stasis questions from fact and cause to value and action.

This study explored the collaborative writing processes of a group of computer software company executives. In particular, the study focused on the year-long process that led to the writing of a vital company document. Research methods used included participant/observations, open-ended interviews, and Discourse-Based Interviews. A detailed analysis of the executive collaborative process posits a model that describes the reciprocal relationship between writing and the organizational context. The study shows the following: (1) how the organizational context influences (a) writers' conceptions of their rhetorical situations, and (b) their collaborative writing behavior; and (2) how the rhetorical activities influence the structure of the organization.

Although the Amphiareion of Oropos is virtually unmentioned by ancient authors, epigraphical evidence reveals that for centuries this sanctuary was a frequent site of rhetorical and literary contests as well as a repository of written communication on these events. Based upon field work in Greece and archaeological reports, inscriptions are examined with other archaeological evidence to reconstruct the nature and duration of these events. This study illustrates that even a relatively small site can yield findings of major importance for the history of rhetoric and emphasizes that scholars should engage in such primary research.

The social sciences and humanities bring different attitudes and methods to the problem of meaning. From the “scientismic” point of view, meaning is quantifiable and is largely what Tulving called “verbal” knowledge. The scientismic view, however, is flawed in three ways: its failure to account adequately for “episodic” knowledge, to view language as an event, and to understand modes. The literarist view of meaning is equally flawed. However, the scientismists have most of the political power; hence, the literarists are losing the battle for their set of values and their versions of literacy. A realignment of literary studies under the aegis of rhetoric is necessary.

Traditional views of organizational communication have fallen short because they misapprehended and oversimplified the realities of rhetorical behavior in organizations and because they offered weak theoretical underpinnings for the study of business communication. Recent developments in rhetorical theory spearheaded by the work of Toulmin, Perelman, Polanyi, and others offer a coherent, theoretically sound, and productive way of analyzing discourse in organizations. Applying constructs of the “new rhetoric” to the study of sample documents from a representative organizational situation illustrates the importance of consensus building as a tacit communication purpose, reveals the decision-making process involving the text's audience, and demonstrates the central role of context or situation in shaping discourse. Rhetoric in organizations, just as in other “rational enterprises” (such as the disciplines of science and law), reveals underlying paradigms that are determined by the nature of communal behavior and by the nature of thinking man.

Experts on style agree that writers frequently have trouble using the unattended anaphoric this clearly. Few, however, have proposed explicit guidelines for sorting appropriate from inappropriate uses. This article examines the limitations of a recent classification proposed by Moskovit (1983), and then suggests an alternate classification relying on concepts from functional grammar. In particular, Moskovit's distinction between demarcational, syntactic, and semantic reference is found not to predict actual readers' judgments. In its place, the authors suggest a classification based on the functional notions of topic and focus. The unattended this is shown to be English's economical routine for moving the focus of a discourse from nominal topics to clausal predications relating those topics. Before deciding to employ this routine, however, writers are warned to evaluate its consequences on clarity and rhetoric.

Most rhetorical history has concerned itself with the theory of argumentation discourse as it developed from classical to modern times. This article traces a parallel but much less investigated strand of rhetorical history: the theory and practice of explanation. The slow growth of a body of knowledge about how information could best be communicated without necessary reference to overt persuasion is followed from Henry Day's Art of Rhetoric through contemporary explanatory rhetoric.

Most rhetorical history has concerned itself with the theory of argumentative discourse as it developed from classical to modern times. This essay traces a parallel but much less investigated strand of rhetorical history: the theory and practice of explanation. The slow growth of a body of knowledge about how information could best be communicated without necessary reference to overt persuasion is followed from Aristotle's Rhetoric through the beginnings of a theory of written discourse in the American nineteenth century. A later continuation of this essay will trace explanatory rhetoric into modern times.

Three studies investigated the knowledge gained by students, ranging from grade 3 to graduate level, from exposure to single examples of literary types. Types were suspense fiction, the journalistic restaurant review, and an invented fictional genre. Students of all ages showed evidence of some pick up of rhetorical knowledge, although of limited complexity. The learning process involved is distinguished from that involved in more gradual learning from exposure to literary models.