Writing scholars interested in stakeholder attitudes need ways to reconstruct them from archives because (a) interview/survey studies are not always feasible (particularly in historical work) and (b) the question/answer format of these studies may exclude key attitudes that emerge in unprompted expressions of opinion. Accordingly, this article argues for filter theory—a pragmatic model of interpretive attitudes—as an effective hermeneutic for archival reception studies. Complementing a previous study of administrative attitudes about the Mexican Wolf Blue Range Reintroduction Project, the present study applies filter theory to a sample of ranchers’ written opinions about the Project. The main findings are as follows: Ranchers and administrators differentially value resident rights versus Project goals; ranchers warrant resistance to the Project based on these misaligned attitudes; nonetheless, both groups value the ideal of a balanced environment and evidence collected on the ground. These findings suggest the need to redefine rhetorical resistance and common ground as arguments warranted by mis/alignments between groups’ interpretive attitudes. They also indicate revisions to initial recommendations for extending rhetorical common ground in the Project.

Writing studies has been an intellectual playground dominated by the “big kids.” If we are to understand how writing becomes “relevant” to children as children, then we must study them, not for who they are becoming, but for who they are in life spaces shared with other children. This essay on the methodology entailed in studying writing in young school children’s worlds rests on a cultural studies perspective on childhoods and plays with a sociocultural perspective on literacy development. The methodological challenges entail (a) researcher positionality that allows a dynamic, multilayered view of classroom contexts; (b) data collection decisions allowing one to trace the trajectories of official and unofficial (child-controlled) communicative practices and their interplay; (c) a socially embedded view of the semiotics and functionality of literacy; and (d) a global consciousness that constrains a long-standing rush to generalization based on observational studies of Western, often privileged children.

New media are having a significant impact on science communication, both on the way scientists communicate with peers and on the dissemination of science to the lay public. Science blogs, in particular, provide an open space for science communication, where a diverse audience (with different degrees of expertise) may have access to science information intended both for nonspecialist readers and for experts. The purpose of this article is to analyze the strategies used by bloggers to communicate and recontextualize scientific discourse in the realm of science blogs. These strategies involve adjusting information to the readers’ knowledge and information needs, deploying linguistic features typical of personal, informal, and dialogic interaction to create intimacy and proximity, engaging in critical analysis of the recontextualized research and focusing on its relevance, and using explicit and personal expressions of evaluation. The article shows that, given the diverse audience of science posts, bloggers display a blending of discursive practices from different discourses and harness the affordances of new media to achieve their rhetorical purposes.

Keystroke logging has become instrumental in identifying writing strategies and understanding cognitive processes. Recent technological advances have refined logging efficiency and analytical outputs. While keystroke logging allows for ecological data collection, it is often difficult to connect the fine grain of logging data to the underlying cognitive processes. Multiple methodologies are useful to offset these difficulties. In this article we explore the complementarity of the keystroke logging program Inputlog with other observational techniques: thinking aloud protocols and eyetracking data. In addition, we illustrate new graphic and statistical data analysis techniques, mainly adapted from network analysis and data mining. Data extracts are drawn from a study of writing from multiple sources. In conclusion, we consider future developments for keystroke logging, in particular letter- to word-level aggregation and logging standardization.

We propose “instructional chaining” as an analytic method for capturing and describing key instructional episodes enacted by expert writing teachers to foster the recontextualization over time of the social practices of argumentative writing through process-oriented instructional approaches. The article locates instructional chaining within a sociocultural framework and argues for conceptualizing learning to write as the recontextualization of social practices of writing in classroom settings. To illustrate the use of instructional chaining to study the effects of teaching on learning argumentative writing, we describe the processes employed to construct an instructional chain for a unit of literary argumentation in a 12th grade English language arts classroom. We conclude with a discussion of two potential uses of instructional chains as units of analysis for both quantitative and qualitative analyses to study patterns of teaching and learning across many classrooms.

In this article we propose a Janus-faced approach to survey design—an approach that encourages researchers to consider how they can design and implement surveys more effectively using the latest web and database tools. Specifically, this approach encourages researchers to look two ways at once; attending to both the survey interface (client side; what users see) and the database design (server side; what researchers collect) so that researchers can pursue the most dynamic and layered data collection possible while ensuring greater participation and completion rates from respondents. We illustrate the potentials of a Janus-faced approach using a successfully designed and implemented nationwide survey on the writing lives of professional writing alumni. We offer up a series of questions that a researcher will want to consider during each stage of survey development.

As the scope of rhetorical inquiry broadens to cover intersemiotic and intertextual phenomena, scholars are increasingly in need of new, defensible analytic procedures. Several scholars have suggested that methods of discourse analysis could enhance rhetorical criticism. Here, I introduce a discourse-based method that is empirical, delicate, and adaptive to the complexities of intertextual and multimodal rhetoric. Specifically, I argue that rhetorical scholars can productively integrate systemic-functional linguistics, multimodal text analysis, and micro-intertextual comparison. I illustrate how this micro-rhetorical toolkit can be employed to investigate the recontextualization of written political discourse in video journalism.

Against the backdrop of proliferating research on multimodality in the fields of literacy and writing studies, this article considers the contributions of two prominent theoretical perspectives—Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Situated Literacies—and the methodological tensions they raise for the study of multimodality. To delineate these two perspectives’ methodological tensions, I present an analysis of selected recent literature from both approaches and then analyze these tensions further as they emerge in two empirical studies published in this journal illustrating each approach. Despite the fact that SFL and Situated Literacies share some underlying theoretical assumptions and are sometimes drawn upon in concert by scholars, I illustrate how they differ in their treatment of multimodal texts and practices—as well as their methodologies—research design, data collected, analytic methods, and possible implications. This article thus seeks to outline the respective contributions of SFL and Situated Literacies to ongoing research on multimodality in literacy and writing studies and to encourage a conversation across theoretical and methodological borders.

This interpretive case study investigated how a fifth-grade teacher’s social practices with visual and linguistic signs positioned her students (10- and 11-year-olds) to take up particular modes as they constructed digital compositions. The context of the study was a suburban public school in the northeastern United States. Analysis was threefold. The discourse surrounding multimodal composition was analyzed via inductive analysis. Students’ use of semiotic resources in the HyperStudio composition was analyzed with Unsworth’s image-language intermodal framework. Then, teacher-student conversations related to visual and linguistic signs were triangulated with students’ compositions. Findings show that a classroom teacher’s limited content knowledge as related to metafunctions and metalanguage of visual and linguistic sign systems affected the information taught to the students and, ultimately, their use of visual and linguistic signs. Students demonstrated tacit knowledge of image-language relations beyond what was taught but lacked the explicit knowledge to more strategically use visual and linguistic signs. Implications include the importance of creating opportunities for teachers to develop more substantive content knowledge of the metalanguages and metafunctions of various sign systems.

Based on eighth-grade writing assessment data from the 1998 ( N = 20,586) and 2007 ( N = 139,900) National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), this study examines the relationships among students’ writing attitudes, learning-related behaviors, and gender in relation to writing performance. Overall, the effects of attitudes were slightly larger than the effects of learning behaviors on writing performance, and gender differences were more prominent in attitudes than learning behaviors related to writing. Perhaps the most surprising finding from the 2007 NAEP data was that females with the most negative attitudes toward writing outperformed males with the most positive attitudes (i.e., writing scores based on two measures of attitudes: females, 157 and 161; males, 151 and 149). Overall, a similar pattern was observed with learning behaviors and gender differences in writing scores. Furthermore, medium effect sizes of gender difference in writing scores (females scoring substantially higher than males) were present even though the students reported to be at the same level in terms of writing attitudes and learning behaviors. The present study demonstrates that gender disparity in students’ writing performance is persistent and strong; it cannot be explained by gender differences in attitudes or behavior alone or in attitudes and behavior combined.

Recently, scholars have suggested that “second-language writers” are made up of two distinct groups: Generation 1.5 (long-term U.S.-resident language learners) and more traditional L2 students (e.g., international or recently arrived immigrants). To investigate that claim, this study compares the first-year composition writing of Generation 1.5 students to the writing of their classmates to determine whether textual markers distinguish demographically identified groups. Results indicate no significant textual differences between Generation 1.5 and L1 (English as a first language) students but do indicate significant differences between Generation 1.5 and L2 students, suggesting that Generation 1.5 writers (broadly defined) may not be second-language writers.

This analysis of 83 scoring rubrics and grade definitions from writing programs at U.S. public research universities captures the current state of the struggle to define and measure specific writing traits, and it enables an induction of the underlying theoretical construct of “academic writing” present at these writing programs. Findings suggest that writing specialists have managed to permeate U.S. first-year writing assessment with certain progressive assumptions about writing and writing instruction, but they also indicate critical areas for revision, given such documents’ critical gatekeeping role at postsecondary institutions. The study also raises a broader question about the difficulties of rhetorically constructing “writing ability” in a way that is consistent with the contextualist paradigm dominant in contemporary writing studies.

Beyond mechanics and spelling conventions, academic writing requires progressive mastery of advanced language forms and functions. Pedagogically useful tools to assess such language features in adolescents’ writing, however, are not yet available. This study examines language predictors of writing quality in 51 persuasive essays produced by high school students attending a linguistically and ethnically diverse inner-city school in the Northeastern United States. Essays were scored for writing quality by a group of teachers, transcribed and analyzed to generate automated lexical and grammatical measures, and coded for discourse-level elements by researchers who were blind to essays’ writing quality scores. Regression analyses revealed that beyond the contribution of length and lexico-grammatical intricacy, the frequency of organizational markers and one particular type of epistemic stance marker (i.e., epistemic hedges) significantly predicted persuasive essays’ writing quality. Findings shed light on discourse elements relevant for the design of pedagogically informative assessment tools.

The case study reported here explores the processes involved in producing a written synthesis of three history texts and their possible relation to the characteristics of the texts produced and the degree of comprehension achieved following the task. The processes carried out by 10 final-year compulsory education students (15 and 16 years old) to produce their syntheses, including the integrations they verbalized while performing the task, were examined in detail with a double-analysis system. The results revealed a tendency for the students who engaged in more elaborative patterns to make more integrations and produce better texts. These students seemed to benefit more from the task in terms of comprehension. Conversely, the students who followed a more reproductive pattern by and large copied ideas from the source texts and achieved low levels of comprehension.

Common topics are words or phrases used to develop argument, and commonplaces aid memory or catalyze frames of understanding. When used in argumentation, each may help interested parties more effectively communicate valuable scientific and environment-related information. This article describes 12 modern topics of environmental rhetoric, identified from 125 interviews, and discusses them in relation to their topical fluidity and managerial, generative, and encapsulated utility: “Al Gore,” “balance,” “common sense,” “environment as setting,” “experience,” “extremism,” “man’s achievements,” “pragmatism,” “proof,” “religion,” “recycling,” and “seeing is believing.” Findings suggest that “environment” is a complex topic with many potential implications—using topics common to environmental rhetoric to shape argumentation may facilitate more productive environment-related communication.

Recent scholarship in genre studies has extended its focus from studying single genres to multiple genres, as well as how these genres interact with one another. This essay seeks to contribute to this growing scholarship by adding a new concept, intermediary genre. That is, a genre that facilitates the “uptake” of a genre by another genre. This concept is designed to reveal a particular aspect of multiple genres: that one genre can be used to connect and mobilize two otherwise unconnected genres to make uptake possible. The concept is illustrated in case study of knowledge mobilization, an instance in which scientific research was used in the judicial system to inform public policies on eyewitness handling and police-lineup procedures. The case study shows how intermediary genres emerge, how they connect other genres, and how knowledge circulates as a result of such connections and affects policy decisions.

This study considers how adolescents compose historical arguments, and it identifies theoretically grounded predictors of the quality of their essays. Using data from a larger study on the effects of a federally funded Teaching American History grant on student learning, we analyzed students’ written responses to document-based questions at the 8th grade ( n = 44) and the 11th ( n = 47). We report how students use evidence (a hallmark of historical thinking), how students structure their historical arguments, and what kinds of argumentative strategies they use when writing about historical controversies. In general, better writers cite more evidence in their arguments than weaker writers, and older students demonstrate how to situate evidence in ways that are consistent with the discipline. Both the structure of students’ arguments and their use of evidence were predictive of the overall quality of their essays. Finally, students’ use of argumentation strategies revealed patterns relevant to the historical topic and sources in question, as well as to differences related to writing skill. In our sample, better writers used strategies based on facts and evidence from the documents more so than weaker writers and demonstrated the capacity to contextualize and corroborate evidence in their arguments.

Three studies examined the “myside bias” in reasoning, evaluating written arguments, and writing argumentative essays. Previous research suggests that some people possess a fact-based argumentation schema and some people have a balanced argumentation schema. I developed reliable Likert scale instruments (1-7 rating) for these constructs and conducted an evaluation of instrument validity and reliability. A myside bias in argumentative essays was predicted by the fact-based and balanced argumentation schema instruments using these individual-difference measures. Strength of opinion predicted the myside bias in generating reasons but not in writing argumentative essays. There was a weak but significant correlation between the myside bias in generating reasons and writing argumentative essays. In evaluating written arguments, the fact-based schema instrument predicted agreement and quality ratings for claims supported by factual but not nonfactual reasons. Ratings of the quality of rebutted arguments were predicted by the measures of individual differences in argumentation schemata.

The aim of this study was to analyze the consequences of emotion during narrative writing in accordance with Hayes’s model. In this model, motivation and affect have an important role during the writing process. Moreover, according to the emotion-cognition literature, emotions are thought to create interferences in working memory, resulting in an increase of cognitive load. Following Cuisinier and colleagues, fourth and fifth graders were instructed to write autobiographical narratives with neutral emotional content, positive emotional content, and negative emotional content. The results did not indicate an effect of emotional instructions on the proportion of spelling errors, but they did reveal an effect on the text length. However, a simple regression analysis showed a correlation between working memory capacity and the number of spelling errors in the neutral condition only. The potential influence of cognitive load created by emotion on the writing process is discussed.

Writers typically produce their writing in bursts. In this article, the authors examine written language bursts in a sample of 33 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment. Comparisons of the children with specific language impairment with an age-matched group of typically developing children ( n = 33) and a group of younger, language skill–matched children ( n = 33) revealed the role of writing bursts as a key factor in differentiating writing competence. All the children produced the same number of writing bursts in a timed writing task. Children with specific language impairment produced a shorter number of words in each burst than did the age-matched group but the same as the language skill–matched group. For all groups, spelling accuracy and handwriting speed were significant predictors of burst length and text quality. The frequency of pauses at misspellings was related to shorter bursts. These results offer support to Hayes’s model of text generation; namely, burst length is constrained by language and transcription skills.

Moment to moment, a writer faces a host of potential problems. How does the writer’s mind coordinate this problem solving? In the original Hayes and Flower model, the authors posited a distinct process to manage this coordinating—that is, the “monitor.” The monitor became responsible for executive function in writing. In two experiments, the current authors investigated monitor function by examining the coordination of two common writing tasks—editing (i.e., correcting an error) and sentence composing—in the presence or absence of an error and with a low or high memory load for the writer. In the first experiment, participants could approach the editing and composing task in either order. On most trials (88%), they finished the sentence first, and less frequently (12%), they corrected the error first. The error-first approach occurred significantly more often under the low-load condition than the high-load condition. For the second experiment, participants were asked to adopt the less-used, error-first approach. Success in completing the assigned task order was affected by both memory load and error type. These results suggest that the monitor depends on the relative availability of working memory resources and coordinates subtasks to mitigate direct competition over those resources.

In Section 1 of this article, the author discusses the succession of models of adult writing that he and his colleagues have proposed from 1980 to the present. He notes the most important changes that differentiate earlier and later models and discusses reasons for the changes. In Section 2, he describes his recent efforts to model young children’s expository writing. He proposes three models that constitute an elaboration of Bereiter and Scardamalia’s knowledge-telling model. In Section 3, he describes three running computer programs that simulate the action of the models described in Section 2.

The authors suggest that writing should be conceived of not only as a verbal activity but also as a visuospatial activity, in which writers process and construct visuospatial mental representations. After briefly describing research on visuospatial cognition, they look at how cognitive researchers have investigated the visuospatial dimension of the mental representations and processes engaged in writing. First, they show how Hayes’s research integrated the visuospatial dimension of writing. Second, they describe how the written trace can serve as a visual resource. Third, they focus on the visuospatial processes involved in constructing an overall representation of the text and its physical layout. Finally, they review findings on the visuospatial demands that planning places on working memory. All the data and theories presented in this article support the idea that writing is indeed a visuospatial activity.

Although keystroke logging promises to provide a valuable tool for writing research, it can often be difficult to relate logs to underlying processes. This article describes the procedures and measures that the authors developed to analyze a sample of 80 keystroke logs, with a view to achieving a better alignment between keystroke-logging measures and underlying cognitive processes. They used these measures to analyze pauses, bursts, and revisions and found that (a) burst lengths vary depending on their initiation type as well as their termination type, suggesting that the classification system used in previous research should be elaborated; (b) mixture models fit pause duration data better than unimodal central tendency statistics; and (c) individuals who pause for longer at sentence boundaries produce shorter but more well-formed bursts. A principal components analysis identified three underlying dimensions in these data: planned text production, within-sentence revision, and revision of global text structure.

This study examines the relationship between patterns of cognitive self-regulatory activities and the quality of texts produced by adolescent struggling writers ( N = 51). A think-aloud study was conducted involving analyses of self-regulatory activities concerning planning, formulating, monitoring, revising, and evaluating. The study shows that the writing processes of adolescent struggling writers have much in common with “knowledge telling” as defined by Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987). Nevertheless, there are interesting differences among the individual patterns. First, it appears that adolescent struggling writers who put more effort in planning and formulation succeed in writing better texts than do their peers. Furthermore, self-regulation of these better-achieving writers is quite varied in comparison to the others. Therefore, it seems that within this group of struggling writers, self-regulation does make a difference for the quality of texts produced. Consequently, some recommendations can be made for the stimulation of diverse self-regulatory activities in writing education for this special group of students.

This article proposes a novel approach to the investigation of student academic writing. It applies theories of metacognition and self-regulated learning to understand how beginning academic writers develop the ability to participate in the communicative practices of academic written communication and develop rhetorical consciousness. The study investigates how this awareness changes over time and how it relates to students’ perceptions of the writing task, metacognitive awareness of strategic choices, and evaluation of their writing. Through a constructivist grounded theory approach, journals collected throughout a semester from students of beginning academic composition were analyzed to determine qualitative changes. The data suggest a link between task perception and students’ conditional metacognitive awareness —their understanding of how to adapt writing strategies to specific rhetorical requirements of the task and why—and performance evaluation. Metacognitive awareness also seems to have a reciprocal relationship with self-regulation and students’ development of individual writing approaches.

This article explores the indexicality (the ideological process that links language and identity) of “standard” edited American English and the ideologies (specifically, standard language ideology and Whiteness) that work to create and justify common patterns that associate privileged White students with written standardness and that disassociate underrepresented—especially African American—students from “standard” edited American English. Drawing on interviews with composition instructors about their readings of anonymous student texts, the author argues that indexicality and standardness are mutually informative: The non/standard features of student texts operate as indexicals for student-author identities just as perceived student-author identities influence the reading of a text as non/standard. Ultimately, this article offers inroads to challenging destructive and enduring indexical patterns that offer unearned privilege to some students at the expense of others and, in the process, perpetuate race- and class-based privilege.AQ Note that APA style capitalizes Black and White.

This article investigates an emerging practice in palliative care: dignity therapy. Dignity therapy is a psychotherapeutic intervention that its proponents assert has clinically significant positive impacts on dying patients. Dignity therapy consists of a physician asking a patient a set of questions about his or her life and returning to the patient with a transcript of the interview. After describing the origins of dignity therapy, the authors use a rhetorical genre studies framework to explore what the dignity interview is doing, how it shapes patients’ responses, and how patients improvise within the dignity interview’s genre ecology. Based on a discourse analysis of the interview protocol and 12 dignity interview transcripts (legacy documents) gathered in two palliative care settings in Canadian hospitals, the findings suggest that these patients appear to be using the material and genre resources (especially eulogistic strategies) associated with dignity therapy to create discursive order out of their life events. This process of genre negotiation may help to explain the positive psychotherapeutic results of dignity therapy.

Writing performance of a complex recommendation report produced by student teams for an actual client during a 15-week semester was compared in a writing-intensive Agronomy 356 course and in paired Agronomy 356/ English 309 courses. The longitudinal study investigated differences that existed between reports produced for each learning environment in terms of argument effectiveness, document usability, and professionalism. Three agronomy and three professional communication raters ranked the 12 lengthy reports in the sample. The study found that all top-rated reports were generated in the paired courses and all lowest-rated reports were generated in the stand-alone agronomy course. Four pedagogical factors appear influential in this result: working in dual problem-solving spaces, pushing the boundaries on problem solving, incorporating workplace realities, and using just-in-time teaching.

This empirical study surveyed academic staff at a Swedish university about their experiences and perceptions of the use of English in their academic fields. The objective was to examine how the influence of English in disciplinary domains might affect the viability of Swedish in the academic sphere and to investigate how it might disadvantage Swedish scholars. The data findings were analyzed quantitatively and are complemented with a qualitative content analysis, outlining perception and attitude patterns in the responses. Findings suggest power asymmetry between English and Swedish, as the data contain indications of perceived unequal opportunities between native and nonnative speakers in the international academic community. Swedish scholars highlighted the nuanced expressions of academic discourse found in social science writing as creating particular difficulty when writing in English.

This article tracks the socialization of a Chinese intern into a Hong Kong PR company and considers the factors that enabled her to move toward acquiring the discourse of the profession. Taking a case study approach, the research is based on a detailed daily journal written by the intern during her internship, and two interviews. Over the 3-month period of the internship, her written discourse changed considerably, revealing the extent of her socialization into the organization. Specifically, the intern’s writing changed from detailed general descriptions of her activity to discourse resembling that of PR practitioners. The study demonstrates the power of the workplace as a context for learning, yet data show that the academy, by providing tools for understanding and reflecting on organizational culture, also has a role to play in socialization processes.

This article reports the results of an interview-based study which investigated the citation behavior in the assignment writing of two second-language postgraduate business management students, Sofie and Tara. Discourse-based interviews were used to elicit the students’ own perspectives on their citation behavior in two of their assignments. Citations were one of the ways in which Sofie and Tara enacted performance (Goffman, 1959), aiming to create a favorable impression on the assignment markers. Both students made sure they cited key sources on their reading lists, whether they found the texts helpful or not, because they understood that lecturers required evidence that these sources had been consulted. Both writers also cited a large number of sources, whether they had read these sources carefully or not, to perform the industrious student who reads widely. By ensuring the same sources which had been discussed in class were cited in her writing, Tara was able to perform the attentive student who listened carefully to lectures and seminars. Sofie sometimes tailored what she cited to fit her markers’ perceived interests and ideological standpoints, in an attempt to align her own stance with what she felt would be the stance of her markers and thus gain their favor. Implications of using Goffman’s notion of performance to explore student writers’ citing behavior are discussed. The pedagogical implications of the study for subject-specific lecturers and for EAP teachers are also addressed.

This article discusses challenges involved in contrastive discourse analysis that emerged while carrying out a follow-up study into a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) program in Spain. Reversing the focus on English of much contrastive rhetoric work, the study investigates the effect of second-language-English on first-language-Spanish writing. The motivation for this focus and the choice of tools from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) for genre and clause analysis are discussed. Reflecting on the difficulties involved in contrastive discourse analysis, in particular the challenges of comparing texts, it is suggested that contrastive work benefits from a more differentiating analytical method and a more dynamic conception of language. The implications of an influence from English are also considered, with the theses of hybridity and of homogeneity contributing to indicate a role for language awareness work in schools.

This article reports on an international study of the teaching of undergraduate mathematics in seven countries. Informed by rhetorical genre theory, activity theory, and the notion of Communities of Practice, this study explores a pedagogical genre at play in university mathematics lecture classrooms. The genre is mediational in that it is a tool employed in the activity of teaching. The data consist of audio/video-recorded lectures, observational notes, semistructured interviews, and written artifacts collected from 50 participants who differed in linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds; teaching experience; and languages of instruction. The study suggests that chalk talk, namely, writing out a mathematical narrative on the board while talking aloud, is the central pedagogical genre of the undergraduate mathematics lecture classroom. Pervasive pedagogical genres, like chalk talk, which develop within global disciplinary communities of practice, appear to override local differences across contexts of instruction. Better understanding these genres may lead to new insights regarding academic literacies and teaching.

This article provides quantitative data to establish the relative, perceived burden of writing research articles in English as a second language. Previous qualitative research has shown that scientists writing English in a second language face difficulties but has not established parameters for the degree of this difficulty. A total of 141 Mexican, Spanish-speaking scientists from a range of scientific disciplines participated in a survey which directly compared writing scientific research articles in Spanish and English as a second language. The survey questions defined burden in relation to perceived difficulty, dissatisfaction, and anxiety. The results revealed that the experience of writing a scientific research article in English as a second language is significantly different than the experience writing in a first language and that this writing process was perceived as 24% more difficult and generated 11% more dissatisfaction and 21% more anxiety. The findings suggest that the use of English as a second language is the cause of this increased burden.

This study examines how Japanese students perceive the qualities of written arguments that were constructed to have different forms. Based on the theoretical dimensions of verbal communication styles that Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey (1988) proposed, the research questions asked whether the respondents would perceive direct arguments to be of higher quality than indirect arguments. They also asked whether they would perceive elaborate arguments to be of higher quality than succinct arguments. Japanese college students voluntarily responded to a questionnaire. The results revealed that they gave higher ratings to direct arguments than to indirect arguments for both of the two indicators, and higher ratings to elaborate arguments than to succinct arguments for two indicators out of the three. The results were discussed and implications were offered.

While transnationalism has emerged as a growing area of interest in Writing Studies, the field has not fully examined how migrants’ movement across national borders shapes their literacy practices. This article offers one answer to this question by reporting on an ethnographic study of the transnational religious literacies of a community of undocumented Brazilian immigrants in a former mill town in Massachusetts. A grounded theory analysis of (a) participants’ accounts of their literacy experiences before and after migration, (b) their writing, and (c) ethnographic observations reveals the following: As participants crossed a border and were excluded from state documentary projects, they began to write within other literacy institutions, namely, transnational churches, that have historically documented subjects and whose reach extends across national borders. The author concludes that as the field of Writing Studies continues to explore transnational literacies, it would do well to take into account the materiality of national borders, which can shape possibilities for written communication in a global context.

While longitudinal research within the field of writing studies has contributed to our understanding of postsecondary students’ writing development, there has been less attention given to the discursive resources students bring with them into writing classrooms and how they make use of these resources in first-year composition courses. This article reports findings from a cross-institutional research study that examines how students access and make use of prior genre knowledge when they encounter new writing tasks in first-year composition courses. Findings reveal a range of ways student make use of prior genre knowledge, with some students breaking down their genre knowledge into useful strategies and repurposing it, and with others maintaining known genres regardless of task.

Informally recognized by the tribal council in 1821, the 86-character Cherokee writing system invented by Sequoyah was learned in manuscript form and became widely used by the Cherokee within the span of a few years. In 1827, Samuel Worcester standardized the arrangement of characters and print designs in ways that differed from Sequoyah’s original arrangement of characters. Using Worcester’s arrangement as their sole source of evidence, however, scholars and Cherokee language learners have misunderstood the syllabary by viewing it through an alphabetic lens. Drawing on 5 years of ethnohistorical research, this article opens with a brief history of Sequoyah’s invention to show the ways Worcester’s rearrangement bent the Cherokee writing system to the orthographic rules of the Latin alphabet, thus obscuring the instrumental logics of the original script. Next, a linguistic analysis of the Cherokee writing system is presented in an effort to recover its instrumental workings. Adding a new perspective to research on American literacy histories in general and scholarship on the Cherokee syllabary in particular, the author argues that the Cherokee language demands a writing system uniquely Cherokee, one practiced outside of an alphabetic influence and capable of representing underlying meaning and sound with each character.