This experimental study aimed to investigate the relationship between text structure (TS) in argumentations written by Hebrew-speaking primary school children and their reading comprehension (RC) performance. A total of 293 students from second to fifth grade wrote an argumentative text and completed two RC tasks. These tasks consisted of a passage followed by multiple-choice questions targeting different levels of reading comprehension: literal, inferential, evaluative, and gap-filling questions. The students’ scores on the RC tasks were calculated, and their arguments were classified into different levels of complexity based on various structural components. Significant associations were found between text structure and grade level, with the most complex texts produced by students in the highest grade. However, there were fluctuations in the elaboration of text components across different grade levels. Correlations between reading comprehension and text structure were found to be weak and dependent on grade level. Children who scored higher on inferential reading comprehension questions tended to produce texts that were better structured and provided lengthier support for the writer’s claims.

This essay analyzes the rhetorical framing tactics of a group of disability activists to understand how they use key words, topic shifts, and other framing maneuvers to amplify marginalized voices in public debates. Focusing on a town hall meeting and a legislator update meeting between activists and lawmakers, the author uses stasis theory to analyze how these maneuvers (1) create gateways for marginalized voices to enter the discussion and (2) anchor deliberations around topics of importance to the disabled community. This suggests a more complex role for framing in face-to-face deliberative contexts than studies of framing strategies in written texts have traditionally considered. I argue that a multidimensional view of framing uniting consideration of word choice with attention to interactive dynamics is necessary to appreciate how framing maneuvers can not only shape the content of debates but amplify the voices of people excluded by the tacit rules of democratic deliberation.

Guided by argumentation schema theory, we conducted five psychological studies in the United States and China on arguments about vaccination. Study 1 replicated research about arguments on several topics, finding that agreement judgments are weighted toward claims, whereas quality judgments are weighted toward reasons. However, consistent with recent research, when this paradigm was extended to arguments about vaccination (Study 2), claims received more weight than reasons in judgments about agreement and quality. Studies 3 and 4 were conducted in the United States and China on how people process counterarguments against anti-vaccination assertions. Rebuttals did not influence agreement but played a role in argument quality judgments. Both political position (in the United States) and medical education (in China) predicted differences in argument evaluation. Bad reasons lowered agreement (Study 5), especially among participants studying health care. Political polarization apparently heightens the impact of claim side in the argumentation schema, likely to the detriment of public discourse.

Students with disabilities (SWD) in general education science classes are expected to engage in the scientific practices and potentially in the writing of arguments drawn from evidence. Currently, however, there are few research-based instructional approaches for teaching argument writing for these students. The present article responds to this need through the application of an instructional model that promises to improve the ability of SWDs to write scientific arguments. We approach this work in multiple ways. First, we clarify our target group, students with high incidence disabilities (learning disability, ADHD, and students with speech and language impairments), and discuss common cognitive challenges they experience. We then explore the role of argumentation in science, review research on both experts’ (scientists’) and novices’ (students’) argument writing and highlight successful cognitive strategies for teaching argument writing with neurotypical learners. We further discuss SWDs’ general writing challenges and how researchers have improved their abilities to comprehend and evaluate scientific information and improve their domain-general writing. Cognitive apprenticeships appear advantageous for teaching SWDs science content and how to write scientific arguments, as this form of instruction begins with problem solving tasks that connect literacy (e.g., reading, writing, argumentation discourse) with epistemic reasoning in a given domain. We illustrate the potential of such apprenticeships by analyzing the conceptual quality of arguments written by three SWDs who participated in a larger quantitative study in which they and others showed improvement in the structure of their arguments. We end with suggestions for further research to expand the use of cognitive apprenticeships.

In this article, we share what we learned about undergraduates’ struggles in writing quality summaries, comparison texts, and argumentative essays that were components of a unique course, Learning How to Learn. This course was designed to address core psychological issues that impede optimal learning for students from all majors, many of whom are preparing to attend professional or graduate school. Although never intended to be a course devoted to academic writing, the struggles we uncovered made it apparent that without addressing these students’ writing difficulties, especially with argumentation, optimal learning was not achievable. For each form of writing central to the course (i.e., summaries, comparisons, and argumentation), we not only describe the challenges we have documented over the past six years, but also the instructional responses we instituted to counter those challenges. We conclude by sharing insights we have garnered from this experience that may serve others who are confronting similar issues in their students’ writing abilities.

A disquieting aspect of some contemporary public discourse is its seeming indifference to or abandonment of any pretense to truth. Among other things, unsubstantiated and misleading claims have been made about the efficacy of vaccines and other purported treatments for SARS-COVID, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and the January 6, 2021, insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. In addition, a spate of legislation restricting classroom discussion and instruction related to race, bias, privilege, and discrimination has been or is pending passage in U.S. state legislatures. These restrictions are antithetical to core functions of education, which are to inculcate the values, virtues, and advanced literacy skills that support democratic deliberation about controversial issues. This article discusses the increasing political polarization and partisan attacks on the processes of education and the threats to liberal democracy posed by this disregard for the truth. In addition, it reviews the cultural and psychological factors that increase our susceptibility to misinformation and presents a perspective about the pursuit of truth that highlights the educational affordances of disciplinary inquiry, democratic deliberation, and reasonable argumentation. The contemporary challenges are manifestations of long-standing political and cultural divisions, and their mitigation will depend on developing communities of informed citizens that are committed to the values and virtues that are foundational to liberal democracy.

In this article, we explore the uniqueness of argumentation within the field of history, considering whether historians’ processes in crafting an interpretive argument from inexact evidence might provide insights into processes vital for informed civic engagement and civil dialogue in democratic societies. We discuss the role of argumentation in history, taking both historian (expert) and student (novice) perspectives by considering what historical writing is and how it is produced, taught, and learned. Unlike other research on argumentative historical processes, we examine the role of dispositions that complement skills and enrich collaborations as historians grapple with historical problems together. We examine the role that dispositions and historical thinking skills play as students discuss evidence, plan for argumentative writing, and evaluate their peers’ ideas. We propose that the dispositions and skills involved in historians’ reading, writing, and thinking parallel the critical thinking needed for deliberative and collaborative reasoning about complex social issues. Finally, we explore how instruction and experience with deliberative collaboration within historical problem spaces may prepare students for meaningful civic engagement. We call for increased research on these potential connections.

Although authors often create literary texts in order to comment on issues of personhood and human relationships, reading and writing about literary texts in schools is often focused on close analysis of literary elements or exploration of one’s own experience with the text. Thus, students’ written arguments about literature typically do little work in the world toward understanding the human condition. In response, we argue for a theoretical and instructional framework of reading and writing about literature called Dialogic Literary Argumentation. Dialogic literary argumentation asks students and teachers to engage in reading, dialogue, and argumentative writing about how they and others make meaning out of literary texts, what the meaning says about what it means to be human together, and how we might act in and on the worlds in which we live. In this article, we explicate the various elements of this theoretical framework that situates the student’s literary argument within their own cognitive processes, social interactions in classroom events, and broader sociocultural contexts. Students’ composed arguments draw on multiple texts (the literary text, others in and beyond the classroom, their own experiences, the literary discipline, and the world), which are mediated by various classroom dialogues, scaffolds, and supports.

Scholars in the field of writing and rhetorical studies have long been interested in professional writing and the ways in which experts frame their research for disciplinary audiences. Three decades ago, rhetoricians incorporated stasis theory into their work as a way to explore the nature of argument and persuasion in scientific discourse. However, what is missing in these general arguments based on stasis are the particular arguments in science texts aimed at persuasion. Specifically, this article analyzes arguments from the stasis of value in introductions of science research articles. This work is grounded in the Classical topoi, or topics, cataloging types of arguments and identifying seven topoi. I analyzed 60 introductions from articles in three different science journals, totaling the number of value arguments and arguments comprising the topoi. Findings yielded different proportions in types of arguments, sharp disparities among the journals, and widespread use of value arguments. The broader issue at work in this article is how scientists make a case for the importance of their research and how these findings might inform writing and argumentation in the sciences.

There has been much interest recently in researching the changes editors, supervisors, and other language brokers make to the writing of L2 researchers who are attempting to publish in English. However, studies focused on the presubmission proofreading of students’ university essays are rarer. In this study of student proofreading, 14 UK university proofreaders all proofread the same authentic, low-quality master’s essay written by an L2 speaker of English to enable a comparison of interventions. Proofreaders explained their interventions by means of a talk aloud while proofreading and at a post-proofreading interview. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data reveals evidence of widely differing practices and beliefs, with the number of interventions ranging from 113 to 472. Some proofreaders intervened at the level of content, making lengthy suggestions to improve the writer’s essay structure and argumentation, while others were reluctant to do more than focus on the language. Disturbingly, some proofreaders introduced errors into the text while leaving the writer’s errors uncorrected. I conclude that the results are cause for deep concern for universities striving to formulate ethical proofreading policies.

Argumentation schema theory guided four experiments on the processing of plausible and implausible reasons and warrant statements testing the hypothesis that most reasons produce greater agreement with claims than when claims are presented without support. Another hypothesis was that leaving warrants unstated often produces greater agreement than when the warrant is made explicit. In Study 1, American participants were more likely to agree with claims after they read arguments than beforehand—even those with implausible reasons and warrants. In Study 2, American history and environmental science majors read brief arguments and agreed more with implausible arguments than claims alone. Study 3, with Chinese participants, replicated some but not all earlier results. In Study 4, with Chinese participants, blatantly false claims supported by bogus reasons yielded marginally greater agreement than unsupported claims. These findings suggest that many people have uncritical argumentation schemata with low support thresholds, making them vulnerable to weak and bogus arguments.

In this study, I present a qualitative analysis of 11 writing portfolios drawn from a yearlong instructional program designed to apprentice students into the practices of argumentative writing typical of early-college coursework in the United States. The students’ formal and informal writings were parsed into utterances and coded along two developmental dimensions: reciprocity, or the extent to which each utterance answered to the immediate context in which it was generated; and indexicality, or the extent to which each utterance evidenced modes of reasoning that reflect the conventions of academic argumentation. My analysis found that although students’ writing evidenced a high degree of reciprocity, they frequently employed nonacademic modes of reasoning. Focusing on a subset of utterances, I show how their tacit orientations toward the concepts of fact and opinion limited the extent to which their reasoning satisfied the evidentiary expectations of formal academic discourse. This discovery suggests that students’ development as writers of academic arguments is closely linked to their formal instruction in argumentative writing as well as to their tacit understandings of concepts fundamental to argumentation. Moreover, these findings highlight important distinctions between formal and informal reasoning and how those distinctions may be implicated in both curriculum and instruction.

It is in the interest of scholarly journals to publish important research and of researchers to publish in important journals. One key to making the case for the importance of research in a scholarly article is to incorporate value arguments. Yet there has been no rhetorical analysis of value arguments in the literature. In the context of rhetorical situation, stasis theory, and Swales’s linguistic analysis of moves in introductions, this article examines value arguments in introductions of science research articles. Employing a corpus of 60 articles from three science journals, the author analyzes value arguments based on Toulmin’s definition of argument and identifies three classes of value arguments and seven functions of these arguments in introductions. This analysis illuminates the rhetorical construction of value in science articles and provides a foundation for the empirical study of value in scholarship.

In most assessments of students’ argumentive writing and in most research on the topic, students write on topics for which they have no specific prior preparation. We examined development in the argumentive writing urban middle school students did as part of a two-year dialogic-based intervention in which students engaged deeply with a series of topics and participated in various kinds of electronic and verbal dialogic activities related to the topic. Students’ achievements exceeded those typical of the extemporaneous expository writing of middle school students. The gradual developments observed over time included ones in (a) addressing and seeking to weaken the opposing position, (b) identifying weaknesses in a favored position and strengths in an opposing one, (c) connecting and integrating opposing arguments, and (d) using evidence to weaken as well as support claims. In addition to identifying a trajectory of what develops in the development of argumentive writing, these analyses support the claim of dialogic argumentation as a productive bridge to individual argumentive writing and highlight the contribution of deep engagement with the topic in enhancing writing.

This article reports instruction supporting the development of fifth grade English learners’ argumentative writing in an English language arts setting. Arguments analyzed for the study were produced by the same students on two occasions, roughly 3 months apart. In the first instance, students discussed the source text in detail, but were given no genre-specific support for writing. Following professional development, the teacher introduced students to the stages, or structural elements, expected in argumentation, with genre-specific scaffolds. Classroom data illustrate how the teacher scaffolded students’ argumentative writing. Analysis of writing data identifies the text- and stage-level features of students’ responses, with particular attention paid to students’ construction of the reason stage, in which writers must explain why textual evidence supports their overall position on a question about a character or theme. Findings describe the range of responses and point to characteristics of texts and prompt that may influence children’s written argumentation.

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.

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.

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.

This study explores how different kinds of arguments are situated in academic contexts and provides an analysis of undergraduate writing assignments. Assignments were collected from the schools of business, education, engineering, fine arts, and interdisciplinary studies as well as the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences in the College of Arts and Science. A total of 265 undergraduate writing assignments from 71 courses were analyzed. Assignments were reliably categorized into these major categories of argumentative writing: explicitly thesis-driven assignments, text analysis, empirical arguments, decision-based arguments, proposals, short answer arguments, and compound arguments. A majority of writing assignments (59%) required argumentation. All engineering writing assignments required argumentation, as did 90% in fine arts, 80% of interdisciplinary assignments, 72% of social science assignments, 60% of education assignments, 53% in natural science, 47% in the humanities, and 46% in business. Argumentation is valued across the curriculum, yet different academic contexts require different forms of argumentation.

Using archival admissions records and case histories of patients at a British asylum from the 1860s to the 1870s, the authors examine the medical certification process leading to the asylum confinement of individuals judged to be “of unsound mind.” These institutional texts are, the authors suggest, “occult genres” that function as complex acts of argumentation, whose illocutionary force depends on the success of their felicity conditions. Through the lens of Austin’s concept of “uptake,” the authors analyze the role of medical certification in the admissions history of two patients at Ticehurst House Asylum in the 1860s-1870s. The authors contend that historical genre analysis plays an important role in the rhetoric of medicine and health, shedding light on the performative power of medical certification, an act essential to the practice of psychiatry.

At a search marketing company, each search engine optimization (SEO) specialist writes up to 10 to 12 complex 20-page monthly reports in the first ten business days of each month. These SEO specialists do not consider themselves to be writers, yet they generate these structurally and rhetorically complex reports as a matter of course, while negotiating a constantly changing landscape of a contingent, rapidly changing business sector. Under these conditions, how did the SEO specialists manage to write these reports so quickly and so well? What is the standing set of transformations that they enact in order to develop and produce these reports? And given the multiple contingencies, rapid changes, and high individual discretion at this organization—seemingly a recipe for discohesive practices—how did they maintain and develop this standing set of transformations in order to turn out consistent reports? In this article, I draw on writing, activity, and genre research (WAGR) to examine how Semoptco’s SEO specialists produced monthly reports, specifically in terms of their constant networking, audience analysis, and ethos building. Finally, I draw implications for applying WAGR to knowledge work organizations.

Genred documents facilitate collaboration and workplace practices in many ways—particularly in the medical workplace. This article represents a portion of a larger grounded investigation of how medical professionals invoke a wide range of rhetorical strategies when deliberating about complex patient cases during weekly, multidisciplinary deliberations called Tumor Board meetings. Specifically, the author explores the role of one key document in oncological practice, the Standard of Care document. Each Standard of Care document (one for every known cancer) presents a set of national guidelines intended to standardize the treatment of cancer. Tumor Board participants invoke these guidelines as evidence for or against particular future action. In order to better understand how genred, generalizable guidelines like Standard of Care documents afford decision making amid uncertainty, the author conducts a temporal and contextual analysis of the document's use during deliberations as well as a modified Toulminian analysis of a representative sample. Results suggest that, while on its own the document achieves an authoritative, charter-like purpose, it fails to make explicit a link between individual patients' experiences and the profession's expectations for how to act. Implications for how genred, generalizable guidelines—given the way they encourage certain ways of seeing over others—organize and authorize work are discussed, and a modified Toulminian approach to understanding the relationship between claim and evidence in multimodal texts is modeled.

This article describes a cognitive argumentation schema for written arguments and presents three empirical studies on the “myside” bias—the tendency to ignore or exclude evidence against one's position. Study 1 examined the consequences of conceding, rebutting, and denying other-side information. Rebuttal led to higher ratings of agreement and quality and better impressions of the author than when the same arguments excluded other-side information (i.e., exhibited the myside bias). In Study 2, claims had a significantly greater impact on agreement ratings and reasons had a significantly greater impact on quality ratings. When participants were given myside reasons supporting other-side claims, they acknowledged argument strength while making relatively minor changes in agreement. In Study 3, the authors found that a brief, theoretically motivated written tutorial was effective in improving undergraduate students' written argumentative essays by significantly increasing the precision of claims, improving the elaboration of reasons, and reducing the myside bias.

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.

Drawing on existing work on popularizations, this investigation of book-length scholarly essays by practicing scientists across three disciplines reveals a hybrid genre that is neither popularization nor research report. The study utilizes both textual analysis and personal commentary from the writer-researchers to achieve a three-way comparison between the popularization, research article, and the book-length scholarly essay that clarifies how these essays contribute to the authors’ academic agendas. Writing for both a general audience and a jury of their peers, these academics employ an argumentative generic structure. Such argumentation develops a rhetoric of rational inquiry, where understanding how answers to perplexing problems are arrived at is just as important as the answers themselves. This genre also suggests the possible resurfacing of the essayist tradition in the sciences, as these practicing researchers engage with wider audiences in theoretical and philosophical speculation.

The media, which includes editorials, have been shown to play an important role in thedefinition of priorities in public agenda. In the domain of international matters, thepublic relies heavily on the media, and editorials play an even greater role. This articleexamines how explicit mentions of external sources of information function in theargumentative structure of editorials to achieve a persuasive effect. Acorpus of 40 editorials dealingwith Russia (taken fromLe Monde andThe New York Times between August 1999and March 2000) has been studied using a cognitive-based linguistic model of discourseanalysis. It is shown how under the guise of bringing some objectivity to the editorials’argumentation, external sources of information facilitate and enhance their subjectivity.

This article investigates children's evaluation/selection of ideas in writing-related tasks. The critical dimension being considered was to what extent the communicative goal that defines argumentation establishes basic criteria with which children decide whether to include counterargument in a text. Data analysis focused on participants' decisions and, most important, the rationales they present for their decisions. Two constraints seem to drive evaluation/selection processes. First, the content constraint, whereby a writer focuses on agreement with the idea itself; second, the rhetorical constraint, defined as a writer's perception of an idea's value in increasing the acceptability of his or her point of view. Counterargumentation must be perceived as a valuable rhetorical strategy if specific counterarguments are to be incorporated into a text; otherwise, counterargumentation remains part of the process of selection/evaluation without becoming explicit in the product of such a process—the text.

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

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 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 care-fully 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 Aristotle's definition of rhetoric and in his treatment of equity in both the Rhetoric and the Nichomachean Ethics, probably the two most important treatments of the concept in antiquity.

The issues of authentic context and authoritative ethos are explored through a study of a graduate student learning to write for mathematics within the context of an English for academic purposes (EAP) course. The student faced conflicts about audience, purpose, and content knowledge as she was required to write math texts within what she perceived was an inauthentic context, an English as a second language (ESL) course. She questioned the purpose of the writing tasks as well as why an ESL instructor was teaching her to write for math, and she addressed the conflicts by writing for the instructor's discourse community and expectations, rather than her own, to earn a grade for the course. The text the student created was thus inauthentic within her own discourse community and lacked her voice of authority. These findings question the validity of EAP courses and raise several issues, especially in terms of the transferability of skills from EAP to content courses.

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

In the first section, the author addresses the most theoretical criticism of private writing as a false or misleading concept—that writing is inherently or essentially social. The author distinguishes and explores the various forms or senses in which this claim is true; in doing so, the author explores the limitations of certain kinds of totalistic forms of argumentation. In the second section, the author also addresses criticisms that acknowledge the existence of private writing but asserts that it is misguided or harmful. In the final section, the author suggests possibilities for empirical research that might not only throw light on theoretical disputes about the nature of private writing but also provide some concrete help to teachers of writing.

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

Commentary: When “Ethos Versus Persona” was published in 1988, I was aware that these constructs easily transcend their ancient roots and that their richness and complexity have wide-ranging implications for contemporary rhetorical analysis and criticism. But I had no idea I was exploring concepts that would prove useful a decade later in understanding the political and legal travails of President Bill Clinton. As of this writing (March 1998), the president of the United States is caught in a firestorm of controversy surrounding alleged sexual improprieties and possible illegal acts (perjury, subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice). The national media are operating at a fever pitch to supply instantaneous information and analysis. And the American public, even if they might want to, cannot escape the deluge. By all accounts, the president's approval ratings should be sinking like a rock. Yet commentators from all sides of the political spectrum are astounded that his ratings have soared to an all-time high. At the heart of this conundrum is the question of character and how audiences (or readers or voters) judge character. High-minded conservative pundits such as George Will are railing that this presidency has become so tawdry that, for the sake of national integrity, it must be terminated. Mr. Will apparently subscribes to the (decidedly modernist) theory that a person must not just seem good but be good in order to be credible. But do the approval ratings suggest that the American people have adopted the more postmodern (but also ancient amoral) view that politics is not just about appearances - it is appearances? Maybe. Or has the public - perhaps subscribing to Will's ontology after all - concluded that the taciturn special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, has employed questionable tactics in obtaining evidence and that, by comparison, the president's character does not seem so bad after all? Regardless of what theories may or may not be reflected in public opinion polls, have the president and his handlers been successful (thus far) in maintaining his image as a credible figure? Or is it just the economy, stupid? “Ethos Versus Persona” does not provide answers to these questions, of course. But it might yield some interesting ways to think about rhetoric and presidential politics as we close out the century. In any event, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Washington and its players for a months-long morality play enacting the tensions that energize ethos and that become even more apparent in any juxtaposition of ethos and persona. I could not have written a better or more timely script myself.

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.

Publishing in professional journals requires the author to display disciplinarity and yet to say something novel. This article approaches this familiar rhetorical problem from a novel perspective by analyzing disciplinarity as a kind of orthodoxy. Four elements of orthodoxy (narrative knowledge, assumptions and methodologies, hierarchy, and doctrinal knowledge) are identified. Then, the article argues that an orthodox ethos is created by signaling allegiance to a plurality of these elements. An example of an article that displays disciplinarity, David Raup's “Cohort analysis of generic survivorship,” is analyzed, showing the author establishes his orthodox ethos by challenging only one of the elements of orthodoxy while simultaneously signaling allegiance to the others.

This article describes a set of metadiscourse functions arising from the use of contrastive and non-contrastive connective expressions in academic argumentation. Moving away from descriptions of connectives solely in terms of textual relations, this study describes interpersonal metadiscourse functions of contrastive and non-contrastive connectives within the presentation of claims and counterclaims in argumentative essays. It is proposed that interpersonal uses of non-contrastive and contrastive connectives mitigate counterclaims and emphasize claims based on the assumed roles and responses of writers and readers in an academic discourse community.

Student writing in history courses, graded evaluation of that writing, and faculty interviews all reveal a contradiction between the stated and implicit aims of historical discourse. The explicit definition of writing in history is “argumentation”; the implicit expectation, however, is for narrative. This apparent contradiction highlights what the author argues is the central function of academic historical discourse: the establishment of an autonomous subject of meaning who is always speaking from outside history about a distant and objectified past. Students are rarely aware of the importance of this voice, even at an unconscious level, because faculty themselves fail to articulate for students the distinctive nature of their genre or the function of historical discourse generally. This project thus builds on previous studies in rhetoric by using the work of theorists of history to identify more precisely what it is in historical discourse that is hidden from student view—the autonomous, transhistorical voice.

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.

Rhetorical studies on experimental research articles in science have focused predominantly on introductions and discussions. The contextual nature of Results sections—the empirical heart of a scientific article—remains largely unexplored, however. What is known about the content of these sections comes from prescriptive style guides, which define Results as purely expository, leaving the argumentation to other sections of the article. This study examines one eminent biochemist's publications over time and a sampling of current articles authored by other biochemists. Six rhetorical moves were identified: (a) justifications for methodological selections, (b) interpretations of experimental results, (c) evaluative comments on experimental data, (d) statements citing agreement with preestablished studies, (e) statements disclosing experimental discrepancies, and (f) statements admitting interpretive perplexities. This investigation demonstrates that biochemists explicitly argue for the validity of their experimental data by employing certain rhetorical moves. Moreover, the findings challenge the traditional lore that Results sections engage in only simple, factual reporting.

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

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

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

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