Frequently writing is now no longer the central mode of representation in learning materials—textbooks, Web-based resources, teacher-produced materials. Still (as well as moving) images are increasingly prominent as carriers of meaning. Uses and forms of writing have undergone profound changes over the last decades, which calls for a social, pedagogical, and semiotic explanation. Two trends mark that history. The digital media, rather than the (text) book, are more and more the site of appearance and distribution of learning resources, and writing is being displaced by image as the central mode for representation. This poses sharp questions about present and future roles and forms of writing. For text, design and principles of composition move into the foreground. Here we sketch a social semiotic account that aims to elucidate such principles and permits consideration of their epistemological as well as social/pedagogic significance. Linking representation with social factors, we put forward terms to explore two issues: the principles underlying the design of multimodal ensembles and the potential epistemological and pedagogic effects of multimodal designs. Our investigation is set within a research project with a corpus of learning resources for secondary school in Science, Mathematics, and English from the 1930s, the 1980s, and from the first decade of the 21st century, as well as digitally represented and online learning resources from the year 2000 onward.

This study investigates the influence of students' perceptions of task similarity/ difference on the transfer of writing skills. A total of 42 students from a freshman ESL writing course completed an out-of-class writing task. For half of the students, the subject matter of the writing task was designed to be similar to the writing course; for the other half, it was designed to be different. All students were also interviewed about the writing task. Reports of learning transfer were identified in the interview transcripts, and students' performances on the task and on a recent assignment from the course were assessed. Results indicate that the intended task similarity/difference (i.e., in subject matter) did not have the expected impact on learning transfer; however, students' perceptions of task similarity/difference did influence learning transfer. Implications of these findings for theory, practice, and future research are discussed.

Young children are growing up in a time when literacy practices and textual productions are in flux. Yet literacy curricula, particularly for those deemed “at risk,” are tightly focused on the written language “basics.” What are the potential consequences? In this article, the author considers this question, drawing on an ethnographic study of child writing in an urban school site. Using a sociocultural and dialogic frame, she examines first graders' interpretations and negotiations of official writing practices, detailing how these (a) shaped their written language use, including use of time and space, multimodal tools, and expected voices and modeled ideologies and (b) pushed to the sidelines or left in the unofficial child world aspects of their knowledge and know-how, including a breadth of communicative practices and a diversity of graphological symbols. The author concludes with reflections on instructional links among official writing practices, children's literacy experiences, and the “basics” in contemporary times.

To be effective, writers must understand what knowledge they share with the audience and what they do not. Achieving this understanding is made difficult by the knowledge effect—a tendency of individuals to assume that their own knowledge is shared by others. Understanding the knowledge effect and methods for reducing it is potentially useful for understanding and teaching writing. In Study 1, we explored the impact of an individual's knowledge of technical terms on that person's ability to estimate other people's understanding of those terms. We assessed how individuals' familiarity with technical terms influenced their predictions that college freshmen and college graduates would understand those terms. Results indicate that familiarity with the meaning of technical terms leads to substantial overestimation of others' knowledge. In Study 2, we evaluated an online tutor designed to improve writers' predictions of other's word knowledge by providing them with feedback on the accuracy of their judgments.

According to research in educational psychology, advance organizers lead to better learning and recall of information. In this research, the authors explored advance organizers from a business perspective, where larger documents are read under time pressure. Graphic and verbal advance organizers were manipulated into six versions of an advisory report, read by 159 experienced professional readers in a between-subjects design. Their reading time was limited to encourage selective reading. The results show that graphic advance organizers facilitate selective reading, but they do not enhance recall. Verbal advance organizers introducing a problem enhance recall, and graphic advance organizers moderate the effects on both selective reading and recall.

This study reports about a yearlong study of the initiation of novice grant writers to the activity system of National Institutes of Health grant applications. It investigates the use of cognitive apprenticeship within writing classrooms and that of social apprenticeship in laboratories, programs, departments, and universities, which introduced students to the genre system of National Institutes of Health grant proposals and helped them in moving from peripheral participation to more central participation. While cognitive apprenticeship employs devices such as modeling, scaffolding, coaching, and collaboration to enhance learning in formal settings, social apprenticeship requires socialization, interaction, and collaboration with experts, colleagues, and peers in informal settings to acquire disciplinary knowledge and experiences. The study suggests that writing instructors should acknowledge and incorporate resources in other activity systems in which students participate, i.e., their laboratories and home departments, and teach genre systems rather than specific genres to better facilitate students' enculturation to activity systems of disciplinary discourse communities.

Drawing on the second phase of a 2-year study of students' linguistic and compositional processes, this article describes students' reflections on their online revision processes, those revisions made during the process of translating thoughts into written text. The data collected were from classroom observation and post hoc interviews with 34 students, who were observed during a writing task in the English classrooms and interviewed subsequently to elicit their reflections and understandings of their own revising processes. The analysis indicates that students tend to conceptualize revision as a macro-strategy and as a task that is predominantly undertaken as a posttextual production reviewing activity. It also indicates that students engage in multiple revising activities during writing, including many revisions that are not concerned with simple matters of surface accuracy, and many students are able to talk about these perceptively and with insight.

A number of studies have found that writers produce text in bursts of language. That is, when creating a text, writers produce a few words, pause, produce a few more words, pause, and so on. Chenoweth and Hayes (2003) hypothesized that language bursts occur when writers translate ideas in to new language. This study tested this hypothesis against the following two alternative hypotheses: (a) Language bursts are caused by proposing new ideas rather than by translating ideas in to written language and (b) language bursts depend on the form of the input to the writing process rather than on the translation process. The study employed an editing task in which participants were required to translate a written language input. The alternative hypotheses led to contradictory predictions about writers' performance in this task. The study also explored the impact of working memory restrictions on task performance.

Identifying the approach used by those revision experts par excellence—that is, professional editors—should enable researchers to better grasp the revision process. To further explore this hypothesis, the author conducted research among professional editors, six of whom she filmed as they engaged in their practice. An analysis of their work approach strategies showed their detection strategies to consist in anticipating errors and in comparing the author's text with the editor's knowledge, which appears in a range of states: certitude, uncertainty, and ignorance. Furthermore, the participating editors used problem-solving strategies to automatically solve more than half of the problems encountered in the text. Otherwise, they used immediate or postponed strategies. This description of professional editors in action opens a number of avenues for the further research and development of in-class instruction of self-revision and professional editing.

The impersonalizing role passive voice plays in scientific discourse is well known. Analysis of the Methods sections of nine medical research articles shows that metonymy is another frequent strategy used to create anonymous authors/agents. Discourse agents were categorized into four semantic domains: familial lay, nonfamilial lay, authorial professional, and nonauthorial professional. Agents were investigated in relation to impersonalization and social identity. Results show that although possessive/causative metonyms produce generic participants and reduce most rival researchers to “previous studies,” significant health professionals are often referred to in terms of representational/locative metonyms, highlighting their authoritative social identities. Additionally, authors are either highly visible or, if they choose to disguise themselves, they do so quite drastically using impersonalization devices or agentless passives. In contrast, for other researchers and health professionals, co-occurrence of metonymy and passive voice is generally avoided; nevertheless, these agents are usually more hidden than are the present authors.

The history of writing to learn college science is tied to the development of laboratory methods. Such student-centered learning was widely hailed in the 1890s as student enrollments increased dramatically and a backlash grew against lecture and recitation methods. However, as the author shows using archival examples from Dartmouth College, Amherst College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, science educators have too often relied on reductive measures of students' grasp of content rather than the kind of argument about scientific findings that is the stuff of real scientific writing and of real science. Although some contemporary science educators continue to tout the value of writing to learn science, the laboratory report or research article itself is a genre that dominates student activities but still largely suffers from the ills of its predecessors. Ultimately, the author calls for a renewed focus on laboratory writing, for both science education and writing studies, to fulfill the promise of previous reform efforts.

This study examines the factors influencing language and script choice in instant messaging (IM), a form of real-time computer-mediated communication, in a multilingual setting. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies, the study understands IM as a social practice involving texts, encompassing a range of literacy practices, within which a subset called “text-making practices” is highlighted in this article. Drawing on results from an analysis of chat texts, interviews, and logbooks collected from 19 young people, the author suggests that the text-making practices related to language and writing system choice are guided by the perceived affordances of the IM technology and the available linguistic resources. Seven ecological factors influencing these perceptions have been identified: perceived expressiveness of the language, perceived functions of IM , user familiarity with the language, user identification with the language, technical constraints of inputting methods, speed , and perceived practicality of the writing system. The author argues that these factors often co-occur in real use.

Advertising may be the most pervasive form of modern rhetoric, yet the discipline is virtually absent in rhetorical studies. This article advocates a mutually beneficial rapprochement between the disciplines—both in academe and the workplace. Rhetoric, for example, could help address an enduring lacuna in advertising theory. Persuasive communicators since Aristotle have maintained that rhetoric begins with invention, the generation of compelling ideas. Studies of advertising creativity hold that invention begins with the gathering of facts to fuel an association of disparate ideas at the heart of creativity. However, studies of the fact-gathering heuristic in advertising fail to identify a systematic approach for product analysis. In hopes of advancing a rapprochement between rhetoric and advertising, this article demonstrates that Aristotelian causal analysis, long associated with rhetorical invention, can provide a systematic heuristic for product analysis. Rhetoricians can help advertisers strengthen a crucial element—the invention phase—of advertising copywriting.

This article presents a rhetorical analysis of a Mexican woman's oral narrative performance using a discourse studies and interactional sociolinguistics framework. The results of the analysis suggest that the discursive practice of the oral narrative and that of academic discourse share certain rhetorical features. These features are (a) the fashioning of an authoritative voice, (b) the presentation of evidence for support of a claim, (c) the allusion to authorities for support of claims, and (d) the reaching of a general statement concerning the significance of the account. Given the parallels drawn out between this particular nonmainstream oral performance and the discourse of the academy, the assumptions concerning the link between form of expression and cognition must be reassessed to better understand the nature of constrative rhetorics, especially as this affects students of nonmainstream linguistic backgrounds in mainstream writing classrooms.

Researchers studying technology development often examine how rhetorical activity contributes to technologies' design, implementation, and stabilization. This article offers a possible methodology for studying one role of rhetorical activity in technology development: knowledge consolidation analysis. Applying this method to an exemplar case, the author describes how explanations of Project Essay Grade (PEG), the first initiative to computerize student essay assessment, made knowledge available about this technology project. More specifically, technologist Ellis Page and his coauthors reworked a key explanatory argument, a justification of PEG's functioning, during the course of several decades, refining and clarifying its key contrasts and strengthening its presentation for generalist educators in particular. Analysis suggests that late presentations of the argument reveal that knowledge was successfully consolidated about a technical procedure Page and his coauthors called “rating simulation.” The conclusion discusses the key advantages and limitations of the method.

This article examines the uses of oral testimony in writing about literacy in historical context, especially about the literacy traditions of populations “hidden from history”-immigrants, refugees, and undocumented persons-who are entering U.S. schools and workplaces, and whose literacy histories may be unknown or lost. Drawing on testimonies collected from Laotian Hmong refugees, I offer the following propositions: First, that oral testimonies provide information about literacy that may be unavailable in documentary records. Second, that oral testimonies may reveal deeply held values and attitudes about literacy that cannot be derived from the documentary evidence. Third, that oral testimonies disclose the full range of human experience, rational and emotional, and that this may lead to new understandings of literacy. Finally, that oral histories invite collaboration between researcher and informant in writing new histories of literacy-though not always in ways commonly assumed.

From a rhetorical perspective, Mendel’s work and its reception elicit two important questions: (a) why were Mendel’s arguments so compelling to 20th century biologists? And (b) why where they so roundly ignored by his contemporaries? The focus of this article is to examine the latter question while commenting on the former by employing several tactics for rhetorical analysis including historical, textual, and audience analyses. These analyses suggest that Mendel’s argument resembles 20th century biological arguments in its use of mathematical principles and formulae to both inform the design of experiments and support the law-like regularity of conclusions. These procedures, however, were not regarded by his audience of hybridists, botanists, cytologists, and naturalists as sufficiently persuasive or necessarily even legitimate. I will argue that had he taken a more rhetorical tact and considered the position of his audience on the legitimacy of the scope of his conclusions, his methods for making arguments, and his assumptions about heritable characters perhaps his arguments wouldn’t have fallen on deaf ears.

This article examines the poetry, prose, and rap lyrics written by nine low-income, African American and Latino urban youths. The study is based on a 3-year research project using ethnographic methods including field observations, informal interviews, and collection of written artifacts. Part of a larger study of these youths’ writing practices, this article focuses on the ways that they use writing to negotiate gendered and sexual identities in complicated, sometimes conflicting, ways. The article is grounded in the field of new literacy studies, and the author argues that educators and other youth workers can find, in the writing of youths like those in the study, an entrèe into sometimes uncomfortable yet vitally important conversations about gender and sexuality. Through analysis of the writers’ texts and conversations, the author models ways of drawing useful insights from such texts.

Those who focus on the study of visual information continue to search for effective ways to conceptualize that inquiry. However, many visual examples are better categorized as visual/verbal collaboration, complicating analysis. When analysis is based on the assumption that visual and verbal modalities perform in similar ways, important complementary differences are overlooked. Therefore, this investigation presents a series of observations from a perspective rooted in difference, which leads to the argument that visual/verbal messages develop when cohesive and perceptual relationships form between image and text, resulting in four types of loose to tight visual/verbal collaboration. Examples of each can clarify, contradict, or challenge common understanding for a particular audience. Finally, a perspective in difference uncovers another kind of image/text collaboration, which instead of relying solely on actual images and text, depends on a weave of actual with imagined text and images, leading to an untapped rhetorical opportunity.

This study charts the terrain of research on writing during the 6-year period from 1999 to 2004, asking “What are current trends and foci in research on writing?” In examining a cross-section of writing research, the authors focus on four issues: (a) What are the general problems being investigated by contemporary writing researchers? Which of the various problems dominate recent writing research, and which are not as prominent? (b) What population age groups are prominent in recent writing research? (c) What is the relationship between population age groups and problems under investigation? and (d) What methodologies are being used in research on writing? Based on a body of refereed journal articles ( n = 1,502) reporting studies about writing and composition instruction that were located using three databases, the authors characterize various lines of inquiry currently undertaken. Social context and writing practices, bi- or multi-lingualism and writing, and writing instruction are the most actively studied problems during this period, whereas writing and technologies, writing assessment and evaluation, and relationships among literacy modalities are the least studied problems. Undergraduate, adult, and other postsecondary populations are the most prominently studied population age group, whereas preschool-aged children and middle and high school students are least studied. Research on instruction within the preschool through 12th grade (P-12) age group is prominent, whereas research on genre, assessment, and bi- or multilingualism is scarce within this population. The majority of articles employ interpretive methods. This indicator of current writing research should be useful to researchers, policymakers, and funding agencies, as well as to writing teachers and teacher educators.

This article examines writing conference discourse in one English as a Second Language (ESL) basic composition course. The study is based on a 25,000-word corpus of 10 writing conference interactions between the instructor and seven students. Through a microlevel analysis, the authors demonstrate how and to what degree the writing conference can serve as a locus of “emergent agency,” with a particular focus on the second-language writer. The data exhibit patterns in the students’ discourse such that earlier segments in the interactions tend to reflect uncertainty, confusion, negative self-evaluation, and negative other-evaluation. As the sessions progress, the authors note shifts in stance whereby students begin to propose candidate solutions to actual or perceived problems and evince more authorial direction. The authors demonstrate that the practice can serve as an effective pedagogical activity in which novice writers learn to navigate through challenges and obstacles associated with university-level reading and writing tasks.

This article, using data from a year-long study of writing processes in an institutional context, looks at the demands made on writers in workplace environments as they make requests of their colleagues. Building on Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the study takes a view of context as being a key factor in framing requests, in addition subscribing to the notion of context as an ongoing dynamic, or mutually constitutive activity system. Although the variables of relative power and degree of imposition are important factors in the choices writers make, a further consideration is the need to balance their own relational needs with the expectations of the institution as they create texts for multiple audiences. In addition, the linguistic choices writers make in such contexts as they position themselves in relation to their peers and those further up the hierarchy may also serve to define and reinforce their identity within the institution.

This article describes five political scientists’ interview-based accounts of appropriate and inappropriate use of the pronouns I and we in academic writing. The informants talked about pronoun use with reference to one of their own journal articles and also by referring to other informants’ texts. Beliefs about appropriate and inappropriate use varied widely, and it was emphasized that the discipline encompasses a number of subdisciplines, which helps account for these differing pronoun preferences. The insights and implications of the study are discussed, and a heuristic that combines corpus-based and interview-based approaches to the investigation of pronouns is proposed. The corpus-based part of the heuristic provides the researcher with data on typical disciplinary patterns of pronoun use, whereas the interview-based part provides accounts of informants’ motivations and intentions that inform their pronoun use. It is argued that the heuristic could be adapted to investigate other linguistic features in academic writing.

This article builds upon the concept of hybridity to affirm the relevance of poetry, music, and other forms of popular culture in the lives of urban youth. Its focus examines the blending of seemingly disparate forms to understand how young people, in particular young people of color, negotiate their multilayered social worlds. One of these worlds is that of Antonio’s, a 17-year old African American male, whose interest and practice of creating poetry within and outside of classrooms offers a lens into a growing community of youth poets in U.S. cities. An analysis of Antonio’s case suggests how intersecting literacy practices served as viable building blocks for realizing and expanding his ability to write. Central to the argument is the notion of hybrid literacy learning and why it is important to recognize youth’s cultural and literacy practices that both excite and engage them while continuing to develop their reading, writing, and other communicative skills.

This research analyzed the composing processes of one high school student as she designed the interiors of homes for a course in interior design. Data included field notes, an interview with the teacher, artifacts from the class, and the focal student’s concurrent and retrospective protocols in relation to her design of home interiors. The analysis revealed that the object of activity in this setting included aspects of the motive (including the teacher’s constructed environment and attendant expectations, the teacher’s governing logic and common sense with respect to interior design, and the broader field of interior design as interpreted and implemented in the class) and both fixed and emergent goals. The student’s object-related problem-solving involved a hierarchy of problem-solving decisions and employed a variety of tools in solving these problems, particularly those derived from culture, reliant on knowledge from a discipline or field, and following from images such as narratives.

The introduction of seminars to university teaching marks the onset of a new teaching philosophy and practice in which writing is used to make students independent learners and researchers. Although the beginnings of writing pedagogy at American universities are well documented, little is known about its origins in Germany. The article tracks the history of seminar teaching back to its roots and reviews its historical development from the very beginnings to the point when seminars became the pedagogical flagship of the Humboldtian research university. Twenty seminar regulations from Prussian universities, written between 1812 and 1839, are reviewed with respect to the prescriptions they contain about writing. They reveal that a writing-to-learn pedagogy was elaborated as early as about 1820. The most important claim of the article is that an early concept of writing in the disciplines was central to the development of the Humboldtian research university.

How do comments on student writing from peers compare to those from subject-matter experts? This study examined the types of comments that reviewers produce as well as their perceived helpfulness. Comments on classmates’ papers were collected from two undergraduate and one graduate-level psychology course. The undergraduate papers in one of the courses were also commented on by an independent psychology instructor experienced in providing feedback to students on similar writing tasks. The comments produced by students at both levels were shorter than the instructor’s. The instructor’s comments were predominantly directive and rarely summative. The undergraduate peers’ comments were more mixed in type; directive and praise comments were the most frequent. Consistently, undergraduate peers found directive and praise comments helpful. The helpfulness of the directive comments was also endorsed by a writing expert.

Although the rhetoric of expertise stemming from the hard and social sciences has been well researched, the scholarship has not tended to focus on acts of public expertise by scholars from the humanities. This article reports a case study in the rhetorical practices of a theologian, acting as a public expert, first attempting to affect decision making in the Waco conflict in 1993 and then attempting to participate in and shape the public debates that followed it. To compare the practices of this humanities scholar to expectations from research on the rhetoric of expertise, a rhetorical analysis was conducted on the context, style, genre, and argument in the scholar’s public writings. This article discusses (a) the role of kairos in the policy cycle in determining the scholar’s bids for acceptance as an expert, (b) the use of narrative as a generic hybrid of intra- and interdisciplinary practice, and (c) the role of “understanding” asa special topic.

Previous studies of the professional discourse of literary studies have focused solely on published scholarly articles and have produced contradictory evidence regarding the knowledge-building function of literary argument. In this study, 9 English department faculty members use a “think-aloud” procedure to read four lyric poems and compose a short text proposing a hypothetical conference talk about them for a professional conference. Data are analyzed using the commonplaces, or “special topoi,” of literary argument. Results show that (a) different topoi are used when scholars read literary texts and in constructing written arguments and (b) some special topoi are used for communal knowledge building and others are used as audience appeals that may not reflect a commitment to knowledge building. The author concludes by comparing the findings of the study to those of other researchers of literary argument andto those of researchers of scientific argument construction.

Genres embody typified discursive activity that is situated in an ecology of texts, people, and tools. Within these settings, genres help writers compose recognizable information artifacts. Increasingly, however, many professions are becoming mobile, and mobile technologies (e.g., personal digital assistants [PDAs]) are creating problems of translation as writers attempt to make genres work across contexts. Mobile devices uproot genres from their native contexts, undercutting their ability to mediate discursive activity. The semantically reduced design of PDA-accessible information magnifies these problems by obscuring, but not erasing, genre characteristics that tie information to its native context. Readers must assume the burden of composing meaningful information artifacts, work otherwise offloaded to genres. The author explores the nature of this composition burden in a case study of veterinary students. He finds that context and the degree of mobility both influence student perception of this composition burden.

Generally, researchers agree that that verbal working memory plays an important role in cognitive processes involved in writing. However, there is disagreement about which cognitive processes make use of working memory. Kellogg has proposed that verbal working memory is involved in translating but not in editing or producing (i.e., typing) text. In this study, the authors used articulatory suppression, a technique that reduces working memory to explore this question. Twenty participants transcribed six texts from one computer window to another, three of the texts with articulatory suppression and three without. When participants were in the articulatory suppression condition, they transcribed significantly more slowly and made significantly more errors than they did in the control condition. Implications for Kellogg’s proposal are discussed.

This article examines the influence of genre and gender on comments written by 108 sixth-grade teachers in response to two narrative and two persuasive papers. There were significant genre differences. Process, conventions, artistic style, and format were the focus of significantly greater numbers of comments directed to narrative writing. In contrast, meaning, organization, effort, and ideology were emphasized to a greater degree when teachers responded to persuasive writing. Teachers tended to indicate and make greater numbers of corrections and to provide more criticisms and lessons, explanations, and suggestions when the work was attributed to a male writer. Female teachers generally wrote greater numbers of comments and tended to indicate and make more corrections. Generally, teachers were reluctant to engage with the ideologies in students’ writing. There was a correlation between convention errors and the number and types of comments.

This article presents findings from case studies of two Latina bilingual high school writers engaged in a year-long research and writing project. Both young women demonstrated unique patterns related to their approaches to inquiry and performance of literacy practices. By using an ecological framework to integrate a multiple literacies perspective into the study, the author argues that both young women engaged in “hidden literacies” that indicated potential toward the development of academic English. The article closes with suggestions for a reframing of common approaches to the study of academic English.

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

The study examines the development of the registers of academic writing by African American college-level students through style and grammar: indirection inherent in the oral culture of the African American community and the paratactic functions of because. Discourse analysis of 74 samples of academic writing by 20 African American undergraduate students and of 61 samples by a control group showed that first, only African American subjects used indirection; second, paratactic functions of because were significantly more prevalent among African American students than in the control group; and third, among African American students, those from low-income families showed statistically significant higher frequencies of the use of both indirection and paratactic because. A relationship of hierarchy in the uses of indirection and paratactic because was also evident in the data.

This article examines the appropriation of academic biliteracy by three French-speaking students at an English-medium university in the Canadian province of Québec. Drawing on Hornberger’s continua model of biliteracy, Bourdieu’s critical social theory, and philosophical hermeneutics, the author conceptualizes individual biliterate development as a subjective and intersubjective evaluative response to social contexts of possibilities for biliteracy. Case study data were collected during 2 ½ years and included autobiographical and text-based interviews, inventories and analyses of academic writing in English and French, classroom-based observations, field notes, and documentation of the legal, historical, institutional, and demographic contexts. Analyses of the participants’ negotiations and trajectories of bilingual academic writing development reveal the challenges and resources of bilingual writers to uphold their commitment to academic biliteracy within English-dominant institutional and disciplinary contexts. Implications for the advancement of multilingual academic literacies are drawn.

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

Using a method of topical rhetorical analysis, inspired by K. Burke, to discuss the Ebonics debate, this article demonstrates that conversations about education, particularly writing instruction, have adopted a market rhetoric that limits teachers’ agency. However, reappropriation of this market rhetoric can help writing teachers to imagine and actuate a more empowered and long-sighted agency for themselves. Rhetorical analysis can therefore help educators to understand how local language practices shape their interaction with the rapidly changing material environment of fast capitalism.

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School.” In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every grammatical form is a representation of reality and needs to be taught in relation to stylistic choices; otherwise, grammar instruction is pedantic and leads students to write in a deadening bookish style. Bakhtin describes and analyzes a lesson on the stylistic force of parataxic sentences. He asks students to identify the voice and psychological expression conveyed in examples from Pushkin and Gogol, so they may recover the liveliness in their expression that they had in their younger grades, but at a higher level of cultural development. He finds that after instruction, students use more parataxic sentences, increasing the liveliness of their writing.

Researchers studying science communication have criticized the sensationalism that often appears in journalistic accounts of science news. This article looks at the linguistic sources of that sensationalism by analyzing the journalistic coverage of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study of hormone replacement research, which was abruptly canceled in July 2002 and became the subject of many news articles. The article uses a coding system to analyze seven magazine and newspaper articles that appeared shortly after the WHI study was halted. The coding shows a high incidence of concrete nouns in the journalistic accounts and looks at the ways the syntax of their attributions are ordered to emphasize vivid nouns, the ways their verbs contribute to narrative, and some of the narrative devices employed in the journalistic reporting.

Bakhtin claims that students must learn to write lively prose, but they will not until teachers have a grammar of style that links syntax to stylistic qualities such as “lively” and “creative.” It is, however, unlikely that such a grammar could be written, because particular rhetorical effects too often depend on context, perceived intention, and so on. Moreover, such a grammar will not be written until language describing a writer or a writer’s style can be translated into language describing a reader’s response. Even so, some stylistic effects can be linked to some syntactic structures, and parataxis is one of them. Bakhtin’s method of teaching—showing how the same content expressed in different ways can have contrasting rhetorical effects—is sound. Although he focuses on pedagogy, his own language suggests a larger aim: the replacement of bureaucratic language with the language of the people, perhaps even the liberalization of Soviet society.

In “Dialogic Origin,” Mikhail Bakhtin—as teacher-researcher and theorist—presents readers with a remarkable essay on teaching grammar and style to 7th-year students (roughly equivalent to 10thgraders in the U.S. educational system). In doing so, Bakhtin employs some of his most notable concepts (among them dialogism and “hero”)as informing and generative principles of writing pedagogy. Modern readers will find much to value as Bakhtin illustrates contextualized grammar instruction, defines grammar as an element of style, proposes innovative teaching methods, and advocates for theory-based pedagogy. Despite these significant similarities, the essay relies exclusively on stylistics, ignoring the demonstrable rhetorical effects of the stylistic choices illustrated in the pedagogy he outlines. In perhaps his most illuminating move, Bakhtin introduces his notion of hero directly into the language arts classroom, illustrating the concept as fundamental even to the grammar and style of language in everyday and academic (not simply literary) contexts.

This article examines the dialectical nature of Mikhail Bakhtin’s developmental understanding of language learning. In particular, the author discusses the pedagogically illuminating relationship between literary style and everyday style, especially as the latter emerges from and returns to lived life. Drawing parallels with other related oppositions, such as Vygotsky’s spontaneous and scientific concepts, as well as Bakhtin’s early antithesis of life and art, the author emphasizes Bakhtin’s interest in relational (dialogical) rather than formal understandings of grammar, style, and literature. The author concludes with three possible implications of Bakhtin’s pedagogical essay for writing teachers: (a) that we acknowledge the creative expression already present in the everyday speech of our students, (b) that we reconsider the specifically dialogical use of linguistic and literary models, and (c) that we attend to the performative aspect of style and the teaching of style.

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

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