In this article, orientations to text taken by seventh-grade students preparing for a simulation of the 1954 school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education, are compared with those taken by legal professionals in the historical event itself. The author uses Halliday's definition of register to show that meanings are made on several dimensions of social life simultaneously, along with Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia to show that meaning is made from divergent social positions. Textual analysis shows that seventh-grade students rejected what they saw as violations of the conventions of Supreme Court argument, while the winning argument in the actual Supreme Court hearing of Brown plays with conventions by signaling conflicting social positions. The author suggests that teachers might encourage students to reflect on their own positioning within a complex rhetorical context and draw attention to how registers are actually realized in historically significant texts.

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.

Although some consideration has been given to the manner in which academic discourse is culture-bound, how the “nondiscursive” conventions and requirements of academic publishing can serve exclusionary functions has not been adequately explored. Meeting the latter requirements is contingent upon the availability of certain material resources. Reflecting on personal experience in trying to meet such requirements from an under-developed region, the author shows the manner in which they serve to exclude Third World scholars from the academic publication process. Though this detachment from Western academic literacy enables the development of an alternative academic culture, it can also lead to the marginalization of Third World scholarship. The exclusion of Third World scholars impoverishes the production of knowledge not only in the Third World, but internationally. Therefore the article finally considers steps that may be taken to ensure a more democratic and mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge.

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.

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.

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

The evolution of technical communication conventions in America is more anthropologically complex than the traditional linkage to the scientific plain-style tradition suggests. Analysis of leading ideas in early 20th-century engineering writing textbooks and other primary sources demonstrates that disciplinary discourse conventions develop from an intricate nexus of human motivations, beliefs, and social activity. This article explores currents in American social and intellectual history that explain this complex, sophisticated view of language, which combines a rhetorically sensitive formalism with the ideas of professional literacy and cultural reading to facilitate communication with various audiences and to reinforce the status and dignity of the emerging profession.

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.

Amish-authored nature essays were introduced to the Amish by Samuel Miller, an Amish farmer with an interest in nature study developed at home and in school. Miller's nature essays published in the Amish periodical, Family Life, were the first examples of the nature essay genre that were widely circulated in Amish communities. The acceptance of this new genre was due to Miller's particular manner of appropriation that connected it to the Amish cultural value of closeness to nature and the soil by making the family farm and surrounding countryside the setting of his writing. Other key factors that facilitated the introduction of the genre included Miller's use of personalized knowledge of nature, expressed most clearly in personal narratives, as well as social change within Amish society brought about by the influence of an Amish publishing house. Miller's writing raises issues regarding the genre-mediated construction of identity and the effects of genre in reproducting and altering cultural values.

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

Social theories of language (e.g., Vygotsky and Bakhtin) implicate instruction that promotes spoken interaction during the writing process. Such interaction is said to make explicit for students the dialogic relationship between writers and readers that underlies written text. This case study of a “prewriting” class discussion and student writing in a secondary English class suggests that, more than establishing a relationship with readers, students talk and writing invoke a complex of roles that reflect their relationships with one another, the outside world, and their texts. Speaking and writing contexts shape the different roles that students take. The setting of the study is an inner-city classroom in which students' lives bear critical connections to the outside world; such classrooms may be particularly valuable sites for studying students as complex role players in the process of learning to write. In offering a theory of roles and relationships, the study complicates current thinking about how classroom discourse in these and other settings is linked to writing.

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.

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.

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 both 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 carefully 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 his definition of rhetoric and in his treatment of equity in both the Rhetoric and in the Nicomachean Ethics, probably the two most important treatments of the concept in antiquity.

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.

Composition Studies emerged as a scholarly research discipline during the 1970s as (a) empirical methods became available to investigate the problem of meaning in discourse and, concomitantly, (b) the work of an international writing research community became institutionalized in the form of new journals and graduate programs. Distinguishing their efforts from prior histories of the field, the authors argue that the development of composition studies needs to be understood as part of a broader intellectual history affecting linguistics and literary studies, as well as composition. Reviewing basic tenets of formalism, structuralism (including both constructivism and social constructionism), and dialogism as root epistemologies organizing the recent histories of these disciplines, the authors conclude with a discussion of the dominant and often parallel themes that have characterized evolving conceptions of language, text, and meaning in composition, literature, and linguistics since the 1950s.

This article proposes a method for examining how disciplinary differences in knowledge making are created or reflected at the sentence level. The method focuses on the grammatical subjects of sentences as key indicators of disciplinary knowledge making. Grammatical subjects of all sentences in sample academic journal articles were classified by a system identifying (a) the kind of abstraction or particularism involved and (b) the ways in which the researcher may or may not have foregrounded research methods and warrants. Findings from the sample articles in subfields of psychology, history, and literature indicated that psychology articles were more likely to foreground research methods and warrants and least likely to be particularistic. History articles tended to be intermediate. Literature articles were most likely to be particularistic and least likely to focus on research methods and warrants.

Research by linguists and educators confirms the observation that aspects of the African-American experience are reflected in the grammatical, phonological, lexical, and stylistic features of African-American English and in the patterns of language use, including narrative, found in African-American speech communities. This study goes beyond prior research to investigate and characterize what Hymes refers to as the preferred patterns for the “organization of experience” among African-American adolescents. The results of the study revealed that, although subjects from several ethnic backgrounds stated a preference for using vernacular-based organizational patterns in informal oral exposition, African-American adolescents, in contrast to a group of Hispanic-American, Asian-American, and European-American adolescents, reported a strong preference for using vernacular-based patterns in academic writing tasks as they got older. These findings suggest that the organization of expository discourse is affected by cultural preference and years of schooling and that preference for organizational patterns can be viewed as an obstacle to or as a resource in successful literacy-related experiences.

Since the rise of college-level spelling instruction, pedagogies have been few, based primarily on “demon lists” of spelling words and injunctions to students about developing “informed doubt.” This study examines spelling instruction historically, then describes a large-scale analysis done in 1986 of the spelling errors found in 3,000 nationally gathered and stratified student essays. The result of this research is a new and somewhat unusual “demon list” indicating that the most commonly misspelled words are homophones, spellings based on pronunciation, and visual errors. The study then examines the changes wrought in student spelling by the advent of word processing with and without associated spell-checking, examining 100 word-processed essays with and 100 without spell-checking. This research indicates that word processing greatly increases the number of spelling errors unless spell-checking is used. The study concludes by exploring the question of what the future may hold for spelling pedagogies.

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.

Writing instructors often assign collaborative writing activities as a way to foster reflective thinking; many assume that the very act of explaining and defending ideas in the presence of a responsive audience actually forces writers to take critical positions on their own ideas. This article questions this assumption by examining the role of critical reflection in one particular writing context—that of collaborative planning. The authors' observations address three questions: (a) When students collaborate on plans for a paper do they necessarily reflect critically on their own ideas and processes, as many advocates of collaboration might expect? (b) If and when students engage in reflection, does it make a qualitative difference in their writing plans? And finally, (c) how do student writers engage in and use reflection as they develop plans? Twenty-two college freshmen audio-taped themselves as they planned course papers with a peer. Transcripts were coded for reflective comments and were holistically rated for quality. The analysis revealed a significant correlation between amount of reflective conversation and the quality of students' plans. Students used reflection to identify problems, to search for and evaluate alternative plans, and to elaborate ideas through the process of justification. This problem solving was most effective when reflection was sustained over many conversational turns. Collaboration did not guarantee reflection, however. Some sessions contained no reflective comments and some students used collaboration in a way that undermined reflective thinking. This study suggests that how students represented collaboration and the writing assignment itself determined whether and how they reflected on their own ideas.

This article takes the position that teaching writing effectively to diverse students of non-English background will require an examination of existing views about the nature of writing and a critical evaluation of the profession's ability to work with bilingual individuals of different types. In order to explain this view, the article is divided into three parts. Part 1 describes the nature of bilingualism, identifies the population of students who can be classified as American bilingual minorities, and suggests that existing compartmentalization within the composition profession cannot address the needs of this particular population. Part 2 of the article reviews trends in current scholarship in second-language writing and points out that most of this research has focused on ESL students rather than on fluent/functional bilinguals. Finally, Part 3 lists and discusses a number of research directions in which the involvement and participation of mainstream scholars would be most valuable. In presenting an outline of questions and issues fundamental to developing effective pedagogical approaches for teaching writing to bilingual minority students, this final section argues that involvement in research on non-English-background populations of researchers who generally concentrate on mainstream issues would do much to break down the compartmentalization now existing within the English composition profession. It further argues that by using bilingual individuals to study questions of major theoretical interest, the profession will strengthen the explanatory power of existing theories about the process and practice of writing in general.

This article explores some of the confusion and sources of that confusion in the research relating parts of clauses to the communicative roles that they play. It proposes that M.A.K. Halliday's system of analyzing a sentence into one or more of three possible kinds of themes and a rheme is a useful system in which the research relating parts of clauses to their communicative roles can be carried out. The article examines and briefly critiques Halliday's system of analysis and then goes on to compare some of Halliday's terms with those used in other systems. The article concludes by discussing some implications that this system might have for understanding aspects of discourse production, structure, or reception.

It has recently been argued that researchers should pay increased attention to the ways in which critical thinking processes are stimulated when students can determine their own types and sequences of reading and writing activities. This argument underscores the need to look more closely at the research process for the research paper, probably the best means that teachers have for fostering independent critical thinking. Remarkably, only a few studies touch on what students do as they select and narrow a topic, locate sources, sift through these sources, and develop a central research question or thesis statement. Nevertheless, much can be learned from these few studies, especially with respect to the intellectual significance of when and how a thesis or controlling idea is formulated. This article examines these studies in detail, notes the limitations of a related body of research focusing on other kinds of academic writing, and raises a number of conceptual and methodological issues for researchers to address in future research on the research process.

This article describes episodes of concurrent metalinguistic and ideational thinking in the verbal reports of 23 adult ESL learners composing on two tasks, then relates these descriptions to claims about the value of composition writing for second language learning. Three kinds of thinking episodes, appearing in about 30% of the decisions reported by learners while composing, show potential value for incidental learning of the second language: (a) searching out and assessing appropriate wording, (b) comparing cross-linguistic equivalents, and, much less frequently, (c) reasoning about linguistic choices in the second language. Multivariate analyses indicated that the frequency of these thinking episodes is significantly related to learners' writing expertise in their mother tongue. Implications are drawn for refining Swain's 1985 notion of “comprehensible output” in view of other theories of cognitive learning and second language acquisition, a necessary preliminary to empirical assessment of this hypothesis.

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.

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.

This article considers the complex processes involved in readers' and writers' construction of textual meaning: how people construct meaning from texts through reading and for texts through writing. Building meaning through reading entails organizing, selecting, and connecting. Readers use previously acquired knowledge to operate on textual cues, organizing mental representations that include material they select from the text and connect with material they generate. This constructivist characterization of the reading process extends also to literate acts in which people are writers as well as readers, those acts in which they compose texts by drawing from textual sources. To meet their discourse goals, writers perform textual transformations associated with the operations of organizing, selecting, and connecting as they appropriate source material for uses in different communicative contexts. They dismantle source texts and reconfigure content they select from these sources, and they interweave the source material with content they generate from stored knowledge. The article describes the kinds of transformations that occur through reading and writing, and proposes a way to think about tasks that invite writers to transform extant texts. Theoretical issues are raised, and suggestions are made for further research.

Understanding the effects of readers on writing development requires prior conceptualization of the relationship between writers and readers. Recently two major schools of thought have emerged concerning this relationship: social constructionism and social interactionism. Influenced by Saussure's structuralist concept of la langue as a set of language norms and Durkheim's concept of social fact, social constructionists emphasize normal, standard discourse: Their key principle is empirical consensus, their unit of analysis is the canon, and their level of social analysis is the community. By contrast, social interactionists, following Bakhtin, focus directly on situated, heteroglossic discourse and seek to characterize la parole, or language use, in useful terms: Their key principle is reciprocity between conversants, and their unit of analysis, as well as their level of social analysis, is the communicational dyad (writer-reader pairs; speaker-listener pairs). Because they focus on whole writer-reader communities, social constructionists deal with the effects of readers on writers in general terms, and they typically reify readers into “the Reader” when dealing with individual cases. By contrast, social interactionists, who concern themselves with describing actual, individual writers and readers, often in ethnographic studies, must articulate a principled analysis of writers and readers without analytic access recourse to group norms. This article first contrasts social constructionist and social interactionist approaches to the problem of discourse and then examines recent social interactionist studies concerning the effects of readers on writers' development, including investigations of word-segmentation skills, peer conferencing, and instructional discourse.

Using a single-subjects-with-replicates design, this study investigated conference influence on first graders' knowledge about revision as well as revision activity. Sixteen children participated in group writing conferences with a teacher, in a natural classroom setting, every other week from February through June. Data from three baseline points and seven conference points were summarized. At conference data collection points, students wrote, conferred in groups with a teacher, were interviewed about potential revisions, and revised work in progress. At baseline points, the same events occurred, but there were no conferences. Two main variables were used to evaluate knowledge of the revision process: number of spots suggested for revision and average specificity of suggested changes. The main variable for actual revision activity was total number of revisions made. Final drafts were also rated for quality. Conferences did influence revision knowledge and revision activity for many children. However, the extent of conference influence was mediated by certain entry level student characteristics. Generally, the most positive effects occurred for students who began with the least amount of knowledge about revision, who were initially doing the least amount of revision, and who were initially writing pieces judged among the lowest in quality.

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

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

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.

This study examines the monitoring strategies eleventh-grade students employ in analytic and summary writing. Ten high and ten average ability writers each took part in two composing-aloud sessions, writing one analytic, thesis/support essay and one chronological summary essay based upon their reading of history passages. Students' composing-aloud protocols were broken down into individual communication units, which were examined for the kinds of monitoring, self-regulatory behaviors students engaged in to guide themselves through the composing process. The study analyzed students' monitoring at different points in the composing process and for the process as a whole. Multivariate analysis of variance procedures were used to study results of the protocol analyses. The study found that, while writing analyses, students devoted considerable attention to figuring out the demands of the writing task, to examining their own understanding of the topic and its significance, and to assessing the effectiveness of their own writing strategies. However, while writing summaries, students did far less monitoring of their composing processes and reflecting about their subject matter, spending most of their time mainly paraphrasing the readings. Results suggest that both high and average ability student writers employ a wide range of metacognitive strategies in writing, and that students vary those strategies both across writing tasks and at different points within the writing process.

Holistic reading is widely used to assess the proficiency of non-native-speaking (NNS) writers. However, ESL professionals, who have been profoundly influenced by the notion that attention to the NNS author's message is an integral part of teaching the writing process, have questioned how well native-speaking (NS) raters comprehend NNS texts, given that the task of decoding NNS prose is even further complicated by the time constraints of the holistic scoring process itself. This article describes a study that investigated the extent to which NS holistic raters comprehend NNS texts. After rating several practice compositions, subjects rated one of two qualitatively distinct essays, and then wrote recall protocols to test their comprehension. Data analysis revealed that readers of the better written text recalled significantly more than did readers of the less well written text, indicating that NS holistic raters attend to meaning when evaluating NNS writing proficiency.

The environmental impact statement (EIS) was created by the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969 as a means of ensuring careful study of possible effects on the environment of projects involving public lands and as an aid to effective decisions regarding such projects. This article presents a case study involving the reading of several EISs produced by one government agency, the Bureau of Land Management. An analysis of these documents reveals that, to answer the leading question of rhetoricians in the field of technical writing—Is the document effective?—we must consider the social and cultural context of the EIS as well as the characteristics of the text, its organization and style. Simple notions of purpose and audience are ruled out. We must account for pragmatics as well as syntactics and semantics. The very category of “effectiveness” is conditioned by the historical and political forces that shape the EIS. An approach through genre theory is recommended.

This study uses de Beaugrande's (1980) concept analysis system to analyze a group of children's written narratives. In addition to ascertaining the potential of this system as a means of assessing coherence, the purpose of this study was to describe how 20 third graders employed narrative concepts at the local and global levels. An analysis of a maximum of nine writing samples from each child produced in response to a weekly request to write a story revealed that (1) most children were able to establish coherence consistently at a local level, (2) children varied in their establishment of coherence across samples, (3) writing reflected degrees of coherence on a continuum from less to more coherent samples, and (4) a minority of children wrote narratives that were consistently coherent at the global level. The study also supported the value of the concept analysis system as one means of assessing coherence in written narratives.

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 this decade, writing researchers have shown increasing interest in the social aspects of written communication. This interest has largely been stimulated by interest in writing-across-the-curriculum programs and dialogue journal keeping, as well as such pressing issues as the relationships of process to text and to the social contexts of writing, and the problem of genre. This article outlines a social-interactive model of written communication, highlighting the writer's role in negotiations with readers in the medium of text. Formalist theories of text meaning (meaning is in the text) and idealist theories of meaning (meaning in the reader) are reviewed and challenged. In social-interactive theories of discourse, which are proposed as an alternative to formalist and idealist theories, meaning is said to be a social construct negotiated by writer and reader through the medium of text, which uniquely configures their respective purposes. In the process of communicating, writers and readers may be said to make various “moves,” which achieve progressive and sequential “states” of understanding between them. Writers make three essential kinds of moves: They (1) initiate and (2) sustain written discourse, which they accomplish by means of (3) text elaboration. The rules for writers' moves are spelled out in a fundamental axiom and seven corollaries.

Introspection suggests that both writers and readers experience auditory imagery of intonation, accents, and hesitations. The suggestion here is that certain important aspects of this “covert prosody” of written language are reflected in punctuation. In order to study systematically the degree to which punctuation reflects the covert prosody of written language, one would like to find independent ways of uncovering that prosody. Two such ways are explored here: reading aloud and “repunctuating” (inserting punctuation in passages from which the author's punctuation has been removed). The article focuses especially on the relation between “punctuation units” (stretches of language between punctuation marks) and the “intonation units” of speech, and the variations in this relation that are found among different authors and different styles. It explores the degree to which different pieces of writing are prosodically spokenlike, and the degree to which they capture the prosodic imagery of ordinary readers. “Close” and “open” punctuation are discussed, as are selected grammatical sites at which there is a discrepancy between punctuation and prosody. It is suggested that an awareness of prosodic imagery is an important ingredient of “good writing.”

Theoretically, the persistence of surface error in student writing may be understood, at least in part, as a normal side effect of development in writing skill. Language tactics newly attempted by a writer increase the likelihood that new mistakes will be made, or old mistakes made anew. This theory, that the context of writing improvement helps explain writing error, is tested by comparing the impromptu essay performance of college freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, and of postcollege employees. Eight surface errors were measured: misinformation of possessives, faulty predication, faulty pronoun reference, faulty syntactic parallelism, mispunctuation of final free modifiers, sentence fragments, comma splices, and misspellings. For each, four error rates were constructed in order to compare different ways of visualizing the relation of error to other aspects of writing. Generally, the findings support the theory: The college students here do measurably improve their writing and do continue making mistakes at about the same rate, but mistakes allied to the improvement. An implication is that undue efforts by teachers to prevent the mistakes may hinder the improvement.

Literary criticism of the last decade has developed a new emphasis: the study of a work's reader alongside the more traditional study of literary texts. Some critics have suggested that literary works imply and project an audience. Drawing upon this body of criticism, as well as upon social commentary and advertising theory, this article attempts to demonstrate how composition textbook advertisements suggest, project, and perhaps even create an audience. Examining a series of composition textbook advertisements from 1982 to 1987 in addition to a number of works of art, this article proposes four different audience-related elements of the ad-object: context (the extrinsic circumstances that the advertisement connotes); genre (the kind of text or object the advertisement masquerades as); borrowings (the sources that the ad-object draws upon); and reflexivity (the image of the viewer mirrored by the advertisement). Each of these, while not entirely discrete, serves to imply and project certain features of the viewing audience. The article's conclusion speculates on the nature of this audience projected by the contemporary composition textbook ad and how this image is important to us as consumers of the ads and purveyors of the products they promote.

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.

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.

The purposes of this study were to identify the types of misspellings made in student writing during the first eight years of school, to determine at what grade level these problems emerged, and to identify any developmental changes in the kinds of errors committed over the years. Among some of the important findings were the facts that the total number of spelling errors increases from the first grade through the fourth and then begins to decline. The deletion of letters is by far the major problem area, accounting for practically 40% of the errors throughout the eight years. Although the percentage of vowel deletions declines steadily, the percentage of consonant deletions, even though erratic, remains relatively high. The article concludes with an explanation of the results and ideas for future research.