This article reports a case study of teachers’ enactment of writing instruction for adult learners in Swedish as a second language at lower secondary level in municipal education. It highlights instructional practices and discourses surrounding writing in three classrooms. The analysis centers on literacy events initiated by teachers to support adult learners’ final individual assignments. Data consist of classroom observations (24 hours) and informal interviews with teachers. The findings reveal that teachers adopt different positions in their teaching. There are varying levels of support for students, with varying numbers of literacy events occurring both inside and outside the classroom. Teachers universally adjust their methods based on contextual factors, including diverse student groups, local agreements on content, and time constraints, raising questions about equality. Furthermore, a text-focused approach prioritizes templates and models over content. As a result, writing assignments emphasize genre awareness rather than personal views, thoughts, or experiences. In sum, teachers' pedagogical choices in writing instruction are shaped by their beliefs about writing, learning to write, and contextual factors. These differences in teaching practices seem to provide students with partly unequal opportunities for writing development. This is further elaborated in the discussion.

Drawing upon scholarship on cultural-historical activity theory and writing across difference, this study investigated how students reflect on critical incidents in writing-intensive courses that are expansive by design, that is, spanning courses, semesters, communities, and cultures, and seeking to orient students toward critical incidents as catalysts for expansive learning. Findings indicate that students who reported valuing/understanding critical incidents in developing more expansive conceptualizations of literate activity tended to be further along in their studies, to be enrolled in courses with more reflective writing and semester-long community-engagement projects, and to have assumed significant team responsibilities. Students most frequently reported finding helpful concepts and design elements associated with the expansive-by-design classroom, and least helpful prior knowledge, skills, and experience (or lack thereof). The authors recommend more research into designing and assessing curricula bolstered by a writing across difference framework to illuminate the relationship between agency, sociocritical literacy, critical incidents, and expansive learning.

This mixed-methods study examined the effects of different models of online professional development (PD) on 21 US elementary teachers’ writing instruction, on the teachers’ confidence, and on students’ writing quality. Participants were first-grade teachers who were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Coaching-plus-Manual (C+M), Manual (M), or Business-as-Usual (BAU). All teachers received online-PD but the C+M and the M conditions received PD on genre-based writing-strategy instruction. The M group taught using only the manual of that approach but the C+M also received coaching. Results found that C+M teachers increased the most in their writing confidence, and C+M students wrote papers of better quality at posttest compared to the M and BAU students.

This article explores genres as recurrent acts of positioning that contribute to associating particular positions with the genre users as social actors. As an illustration, the study investigates the positioning of Chinese university presidents in their published opening convocation speeches. By combining rhetorical move analysis with the positioning triangle framework, this study demystifies three positions conventionally used by university presidents in the genre: guiding educator, morale builder, and university representative. These positions, legitimized by the role of the university president, establish specific types of social relations between the president and the students, which function as channels for the transmission of values, particularly collective values, to address relevant social expectations in Chinese society. This study suggests that the genre-based positioning analysis can offer valuable genre knowledge to novice practitioners, enabling them to familiarize themselves with adequate positionings that adhere to the code of conduct within a discourse community, thereby facilitating effective genre realization.

Rhetorical figures of speech provide important analytical frames to chart how arguments operate within genres and within genre ecologies. Varieties of the figure prolepsis allow for the rendering of future time or fact in the present, which can be a powerful rhetorical inducement toward social and political action. In this article, we examine how anticipatory arguments drawn from complex data shape a key genre for public and policy-facing work on the climate crisis—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Synthesis Report’s (SYR) Statement for Policy Makers (SPM). We examine how the rhetorical figure of prolepsis operates within this genre to understand the anticipatory arguments and logics emerging from the synthesis of scientific findings and their reporting. Pairing figural studies and Rhetorical Genre Studies, we further offer an approach to investigate how these patterned operations of language might intersect in their rhetorical workings.

Many genre scholars have focused on how individuals might build genre knowledge, generally understood as the enculturation processes, gradual stages, or ingredients that lead to one’s facility with a genre in context. While genre knowledge describes whether people can engage genres, it does not describe the various factors that shape how people may engage genres. By consolidating scholarship across Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), this article characterizes genre access as the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genre. Furthermore, this article integrates Network Gatekeeping Theory to develop a micro-level analytical approach for explicitly describing genre access. The author demonstrates and develops genre access as a concept and analytical approach with an illustrative example from a larger ethnographic project. Specifically, this illustrative example explores genre access for the Staff Report, a common genre in local government that proposes recommendations from individual departments to their elected City Commissioners for voted approval. Overall, the purpose of this article is (1) to consolidate and extend RGS’s exploration of the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genres; (2) to identify and name genre access as a fundamental aspect of how genres work; and (3) to provide a micro-level analytical language for researchers to tease out the various factors the shape genre access.

This article examines the power of special topoi to characterize the discourse of literary criticism, and through emphasis on rhetorical action, it sheds light on the limitations of topos analysis for characterizing research articles in disciplinary discourse more generally. Using an analytical approach drawn both from studies of topoi in disciplinary discourse and rhetorical genre theory, I examine a representative corpus of 21st-century literary research articles. I find that while most of the special topoi recognized by Fahnestock and Secor and Wilder remain prevalent in recent criticism, contemporary literary critics tend to draw on only a select subset of those topoi when making claims about their rhetorical actions. The topoi they use most often— mistaken-critic and paradigm—help identify the ways knowledge-making work is undertaken in literary criticism, a discipline often considered epideictic rather than epistemic. But what the special topoi do not capture is precisely the distinctly motivated, actively epistemic character of this disciplinary rhetoric. Based on these findings, I suggest that special topoi must be seen as functioning in the context of the rhetorical action undertaken by literary research articles. These articles undertake not simply persuasion but the particularly humanistic act I refer to as contributing to scholarly understanding: a rhetorical action worth attending to for scholars of disciplinary discourse, because it is deliberately more concerned with practice than product.

In science disciplines, students need sufficient and well-designed support to successfully gain writing competence along the different stages of their writing development. This study examines effective inquiry-based writing pedagogies and the contextualization of scientific writing instruction for supporting student writers in the scientific community. The researchers first systematically reviewed effective pedagogical practices that can help students gain writing competence through inquiry-based learning, then explicated how scientific writing is situated in inquiry-based writing instruction (IBWI) with respect to text structures using a genre-based approach. A systematic review of 40 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2021 was conducted. The researchers examined the pedagogies, methods, and models that effectively support IBWI and identified some emerging trends that aim to raise undergraduates’ scientific writing communicative competence. Implications for how scientific writing should be situated in IBWI were provided to help disciplinary faculty respond more precisely to science students’ writing needs in tertiary settings.

Genre has long been used by Writing Studies ethnographers as a theoretical orientation and analytical tool to bridge text and context. This article describes how genre-based ethnographies as methodology might get taken up at the level of method. Drawing on a genre-based ethnographic study as an example and guide, this article presents a process of data collection that builds ethnographic sites from genre by emergently identifying chains of data sources and collection techniques emanating from starting genres. Applying a genre orientation at the level of method centers inquiry on writing and mitigates the need to define site boundaries. By articulating how a genre orientation might shape ethnography at the level of method, this article encourages a stronger articulation between research methodologies and methods across the field of Writing Studies. Further, this article can be used as a guide for researchers conducting genre-based ethnographies.

While writing is a critical part of the medical profession, longitudinal studies exploring the social apprenticeship and genre knowledge development of medical practitioners are almost nonexistent. Through interviews and writing samples, this article traces a 10-year journey of one writer’s engagement with the Patient SOAP note, following his experiences from the first year of his undergraduate education to the end of medical school. Drawing upon theories of social apprenticeship and the RIME framework (reporter, interpreter, mediator, educator) from the field of medicine, we offer an in-depth case study of our focal participant’s growing medical expertise as he masters the Patient SOAP note. Through this in-depth analysis, we argue that the SOAP note functions as a “threshold genre” to assist entry into the medical profession. We conclude by offering additional evidence about the role that key threshold genres play in the development of professional expertise and offer implications for genre theory.

Using rhetorical genre theory, the authors theorize the engineering design process as a type of embodied genre enacted through typified performances of bodies engaged with discourses, texts, and objects in genre-rich spaces of design activity. The authors illustrate this through an analysis of ethnographic data from an engineering design course to show how a genred repertoire of embodied routines is demonstrated for students and later taken up as part of their design work. A greater appreciation of the interconnection between genre and design as well as the role of typification in producing embodied genres can potentially transform how writing studies conceives of and teaches both design processes and genres in technical and professional communication settings.

What aspects of writing are doctoral students metacognitive about when they write research articles for publication? Contributing to the recent conversation about metacognition in genre pedagogy, this study adopts a qualitative approach to illustrate what students have in common, across disciplines and levels of expertise, and the dynamic interplay of genre knowledge and metacognition in learning to write for research. 24 doctoral students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) were recruited from subsequent runs of a genre-based writing course and were interviewed within a 2-year period when they submitted an article for publication, 3 to 11 months after course completion. Over time and across disciplines, doctoral students’ metacognition converges on four main themes: genre analysis as a “tool” to read and write, audience and the readers’ mind, rhetorical strategies, and the writing process. Furthermore, these themes are extensively combined in the students’ thinking, confirming conceptualizations of expertise as an integration of knowledge types. Metacognition of these themes invoked increased perceived confidence and control over writing, suggesting key areas where metacognitive intervention may be promising.

Increased attention to genre in writing studies has brought a proliferation of new terms and concepts for capturing the complexity of writers’ knowledge about genres, including genre knowledge, genre awareness, recontextualization, conditional knowledge, and metacognition. Definitions of these concepts have at times conflicted, and their interrelationships are often unclear. Furthermore, scholarship has tended to overlook the role of multiple languages in writers’ genre knowledge. In this article, we first trace the use of related terminology and demonstrate the need for theoretical clarity. We then propose a theoretical framework that articulates key layers of genre knowledge and their interrelations, presuming a multilingual writer. Finally, we share examples of how this proposed framework may be used in teaching and researching genre knowledge. Ultimately, we aim to contribute to ongoing theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical explorations and applications of knowing and learning genres.

At a multinational company, daily written communication between staff, supervisors, customers, and suppliers is frequently conducted using digital tools (e.g., emails, smartphones, and texting applications) often across multiple nationally, linguistically, and conceptually defined borders. Determining digital tools’ impact on intercultural encounters in professional environments like these is difficult but important given the sheer volume of digital contact in technical and professional environments and the ongoing global struggle to broker peace and productivity amid communities’ many perceived differences. Using examples drawn from a case study of binational manufacturing sister companies, I build on recent work in professional, networked written communication to analyze two WhatsApp exchanges, one between a central study participant and his customer, another between the participant and an employee. This study shows how asynchronous digital communication tools created complex “silences” in writing between participants. In these silences (e.g., a lack of or delayed response to a text) individuals try to explain others’ actions for themselves. Drawing on a combination of third-generation activity theory and Latourian actor-network theory, I show that while explaining others’ actions in writing with whatever cultural shorthand is available may remain a common part of everyday life and research, it can be a poor guide for explaining others’ actions, especially in digital writing. My study shows how research of, and instruction in, digital tool use in intercultural writing contexts requires attention to the material conditions and objectives potentially shaping one’s own as well as others’ composition choices.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports are becoming a widespread corporate discourse practice and are often considered corporate image-building documents. The present study examines forward-looking statements in CSR reports from a genre-based perspective, aiming to better understand the textual practices of reporting genres in a globalized context and to raise awareness about ways they are used to shape perception of corporate activity. Using a corpus of 90 CSR reports in Chinese, English, and Italian and a subcorpus annotated with the “previewing future performance” move, the study combines a focus on genre-related contextual features and rhetorical patterns of CSR reports with a corpus-based study of future markers. The analysis reveals some cross-cultural variation in the distribution of the move, while its commissive function marks a common trend. Words indicating change ( miglior*/提升/improv*) are found to be frequently used for future reference in all three languages, suggesting that future discourse, though regarded as an optional element of the genre, is widely exploited by companies in actual practice to promote a committed corporate image in CSR. Based on this analysis, the study puts forward the notion of “writing conformity,” a general feature of many reporting genres, which may turn out to pose new and important challenges for professional writers.

The Internet has helped to change who writes about science in the news, how news is written, and how it is taken up by different audiences. However, few studies have examined how these changes have impacted the uptake of scientific claims in online news writing. This case study explores how online news genres take up knowledge claims from a research article on climate change over a period of one year and shows how shifting boundaries between rhetorical communities affect genre uptake. The study results show that online news writers predominantly use the news report genre to cover research findings for 48 hours, after which they predominantly use the news editorial genre to engage these findings. Analysis suggests that the news report genre uses the press release and the article abstract as intermediary genres, but the news editorial uses only the abstract. I argue that the switch between genres repositions the scientist, the journalist, and the public epistemologically, a reorientation that favors uptake in news media outlets supporting action to mitigate climate change and its effects.

Drawing on fieldwork, this article examines nursing students’ design and use of a patient health record during clinical simulations, where small teams of students provide nursing care for a robotic patient. The student-designed patient health record provides a compelling example of how simulation genres can both authentically coordinate action within a classroom simulation and support professional genre uptake. First, the range of rhetorical choices available to students in designing their simulation health records are discussed. Then, the article draws on an extended example of how student uptake of the patient health record within a clinical simulation emphasized its intertextual relationship to other genres, its role mediating social interactions with the patient and other providers, and its coordination of embodied actions. Connections to students’ experiences with professional genres are addressed throughout. The article concludes by considering initial implications of this research for disciplinary and professional writing courses.

This study extends a line of inquiry established by researchers using narrative theory to investigate the discourses of psychiatry. Drawing primarily on theories of narrative and genre, the study analyzes a series of autobiographical books intended for an audience of youth suffering from mental illness. Our research investigates how the rhetorical design of the books harnesses the discursive affordances of autobiographical narrative to encourage a particular uptake on the part of a reader suffering from mental illness. Performing an analysis of four of the books in the series, we found them to exhibit a design in which autobiographical narrative is used to prompt an anticipated uptake by the reader: motivation to commit to therapy and engage in lifelong self-care. The study offers insights to authors producing texts intended to support psychiatric practitioners in guiding youth toward recovery from mental illness.

Scholars have recently begun to conceive of literacy practices as drawing from resources that are simultaneously situated and extracontextual. In particular, studies of transnational literacy affirm the importance of both locality and movement in literacy studies. Continuing this inquiry into the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy, the author investigates the distinct effects that shuttling between national contexts have on the accumulation and use of genre knowledge. Specifically, through a case study of one Third Culture Kid student writer, the author reports on how her genre knowledge develops in response to transnational relocations between Italy and the United States and the way this transnational genre knowledge informs her writing of a high-stakes in-school genre. This case illustrates the value of rhetorical genre studies for understanding the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy and begins to outline the distinctiveness of transnational boundary-crossing practices.

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

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

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

Using rhetorical genre theory and research on reported speech, this study investigates the citation practices in 81 forensic letters written by paediatricians and nurse practitioners that provide their opinion for the courts as to whether a child has experienced maltreatment. These letters exist in a complex social situation where a lack of clarity exists as to which professional group (healthcare providers, police, social workers) is primarily responsible for gathering accounts of children’s injuries. Yet physicians need these accounts into order to compare them to actual injuries. The study documents the direct and indirect citations that occur in the letters, observes documentation strategies, notes the instances in which partial breakdowns in citation occur, and points to the linguistic factors contributing to these breakdowns.

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.

This article traces the historical and conceptual development of what is known as activity theory, from Vygotsky and Luria, to A. N. Leont’ev, to Engeström, in order to illustrate what I see as two problems with the activity theoretic approach, especially as manifest in the work of Leont’ev and Engeström: what I call the boundary and/or focus problem and the unit-of-analysis problem. In the second half of the article, I explore the social semiotic of an everyday artifact, the “speed bump,” and introduce a discovery heuristic for examining how this artifact functions mediationally in human activity. In so doing, I have tried to discover activity through principled analysis, rather than assuming activity or activity system a priori.

This article is concerned with characterizing literacy activity as it is practiced in professional workplaces. Its starting point is activity theory, which grew out of the work of Vygotsky and has been subsequently elaborated in Russia and elsewhere. First, the authors propose that existing versions of activity theory are unable to account adequately for practical human activity in contemporary workplaces, and present a revised perspective that opens the way for new theoretical developments. Second, they elaborate two new constructs, task and work ensemble, and apply them to a short collaborative writing sequence collected in the field. Both constructs are seen to account in a substantive way for the structure of the composing activity carried out by the collaborators. They close with a discussion of the complementarity and theoretical advantages of the two constructs.

In this article, I describe four interrelated analytical concepts useful for studying the discursive practices of professional writers: intertextuality, interdiscursivity, genre systems, and recontextualization. Drawing on structuration theory and neo-Vygotskyan activity theory to provide a framework for the above concepts, I present three theoretical assumptions: (a) genre systems play an intermediate role between institutional structural properties and individual communicative action, (b) a central means for identifying texts in a genre system is their intertextual activity, and (c) the concept of “genre systems” enables the analyst to foreground the discursively salient components of human activity systems. An elaboration of each of these assumptions is followed by an illustration of genre systems at work in one psychotherapist's session notes and the process I call rhetorical recontextualization.

Rhetoric continues to struggle to theorize the simultaneous existence of pattern and contingency. Responses to this issue have been couched in elaborations of genre theory and, more recently, of Vygotskian activity theory. Activity theory offers two advantages in theorizing how change and continuity can coexist: It expands our ability to see how text and context influence one another and it encourages us to see that lack of unity is normal in any activity system. This study exemplifies these advantages by looking at four entry-level engineers who produced a genre they called documentation in their first 4 years at work. They defined documentation as writing that describes events to establish a common understanding of completed or promised actions. Documentation was one of the tools the participants used to create and maintain the activity system of their workplace and to reshape it as well.

Commentary: When “Thucydides and the Plague in Athens: The Roots of Scientific Writing” was written in 1988, genre analysis was an emerging area for scholarship. Thucydides' Historiae, which includes numerous political speeches in context, provides a rich resource for exploring the ancient roots of rhetorical genres. Thucydides' text also sheds light on the origin of a specific scientific genre - the medical case history. In describing a devastating plague in Athens, Thucydides uses the Hippocratic approach, following an ancient genre or form that is remarkably similar to the modern medical case history. Thucydides' case history of the Athenian plague enabled 20th-century epidemiologists to establish a diagnosis of the illness (influenza plus toxic shock syndrome), predict its return, and validate their diagnosis during a 1987 flu epidemic. Although “Thucydides and the Plague in Athens” only hints at Thucydides' genre knowledge, his case history of the plague and his presentation of speeches display considerable insight into the social construction and function of these recurring forms. In explaining the speeches in his text, for example, Thucydides says, “[M]y habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions” (1.22). He prefaces his account of the plague with a statement of purpose: to help future scholars recognize future outbreaks of the same illness. These remarks, viewed in the context of genre theory today, suggest that Thucydides not only knew how to use genres but also understood their social origin and purposes.

The relation between writing in formal schooling and writing in other social practices is a central problem in writing research (e.g., critical pedagogy, writing in nonacademic settings, cognition in variable social contexts). How do macro-level social and political structures (forces) affect micro-level literate actions in classrooms and vice versa? To address these questions, the author synthesizes Yrjö Engeström's systems version of Vygotskian cultural-historical activity theory with Charles Bazerman's theory of genre systems. The author suggests that this synthesis extends Bakhtinian dialogic theory by providing a broader unit of analysis than text-as-discourse, wider levels of analysis than the dyad, and an expanded theory of dialectic. By tracing the intertextual relations among disciplinary and educational genre systems, through the boundary of classroom genre systems, one can construct a model of ways classroom writing is linked to writing in wider social practices and rethink such issues as agency, task representation, and assessment.

This article presents descriptions of and examples from qualitative case studies of 3 high school classrooms in Norway and the United States. The focus is on how classroom discourse and writing interact with each other and provide an important and unique instructional resource. The teachers in 2 of the classrooms consistently elicited, overtly valued, and helped develop student opinions and ideas. In this process, authentic questions and uptake were common, and a great diversity of voices was heard. Bakhtin's and Rommetveit's dialogical framework is used as the basis of analysis, as is Lotman's theory about the functional dualism of texts. The main argument is that the interaction of oral and written discourse increased dialogicality and multivoicedness and therefore provided more chances for students to learn than did talking or writing alone. In this way, the texts, both oral and written, were used to generate thoughts and opinions.

Using the theoretical perspective offered by recent genre studies, this study compares student and professional discourse within the same field through a set of case studies written for a third-year course in financial analysis—writing that was conceived and designed by the instructor to simulate workplace discourse. Observational and textual analyses revealed the radically distinct social action undertaken in this student writing as compared to related workplace discourse, despite the simulation. Social motives, exigent rhetorical contexts, social roles, and reading practices were all distinct in ways that profoundly affected both discourse processes and products. At the same time, certain commonalities were apparent in the student and workplace writing. These shared features point to ways in which student writing enables and enacts entry into sociocultural communities.

This article argues for an activity-based theory of genre knowledge. Drawing on empirical findings from case study research emphasizing “insider knowledge” and on structuration theory, activity theory, and rhetorical studies, the authors propose five general principles for genre theory: (a) Genres are dynamic forms that mediate between the unique features of individual contexts and the features that recur across contexts; (b) genre knowledge is embedded in communicative activities of daily and professional life and is thus a form of “situated cognition”; (c) genre knowledge embraces both form and content, including a sense of rhetorical appropriateness; (d) the use of genres simultaneously constitutes and reproduces social structures; and (e) genre conventions signal a discourse community's norms, epistemology, ideology, and social ontology.

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