This design-based study occurred within a writing methods course in an urban teacher education program. We designed an intervention to develop student teachers’ meta-composing strategies, critical thinking, and justice-oriented reflexivity by revising a teacher-as-writer course assignment to achieve two pedagogical goals: (1) synthesizing antiracist and pedagogical content from curated source texts, and (2) explicating racial literacy as future writing teachers of K-6 students. Using discourse synthesis as both an instructional and research method, we analyzed the synthesis outputs of student teachers during a writing assignment designed to communicate their learnings to an intended audience. Outputs included graphic organizers, planning documents, and a range of final products. We employed discourse synthesis to analyze source and synthesis texts through propositionalization, template formation, and thematic categorization, identifying idea unit origins, progression, or omission. Additionally, content and thematic analyses evaluated instructional strategies and materials to assess whether pedagogical objectives were met. Results indicated discourse synthesis instruction facilitated student engagement with antiracism content, such as historical events, systemic trends, and awareness of racist practices in schools. Findings also highlighted areas for improvement, including modifying source texts, revising the teacher-as-writer assignment, and reevaluating assessment practices in antiracist writing pedagogy.

Drawing on a larger year-long ethnography at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the Midwestern United States, this article describes the texts students composed in a co-taught sophomore (grade 10) humanities course combining social studies and English language arts. Bringing together sociocultural perspectives on literacy and composition with queer theorizations of time, I argue for the utility of attending not only to time’s multi dimensionality but also its multi directionality. Doing so in writing instruction can help thaw binary polarization and foster more humanizing temporal and in turn ideological movements. To illustrate, I present an ethnographic case of students writing about the history of gendered clothing in 20th-century U.S. society. I examine how different temporal ideologies had consequences for students (not) reproducing antagonistic, polarized binaries with respect to oppressive values, in particular anti-LGBTQIA+ values as they intersect with class, race, and politics. Although my emphasis is how gender and sexuality intertwine with economics, race, and politics, this article suggests that attending to the multidimensionality and multidirectionality of time is a productive site for scholars and educators committed to praxes of justice in writing instruction.

In the past decades, the notion of voice in the theorizing and teaching of academic writing has been the subject of much debate and conceptual change, especially concerning its relation to writer identity. Many newer accounts of voice and identity in academic writing draw on the dialogical concept of voice by Bakhtin. However, some theoretical and methodological inconsistencies have surfaced in the adaptions of the concept. Working from a refinement of the dialogical notion of voice based on the concepts of polyphony and interiorization, this article presents a methodological approach for analyzing voice(s) in writing. The article presents material around the evolution of an early-career researcher’s dissertation synopsis. The material is multilayered, including the writer’s text, transcripts from an interdisciplinary peer-feedback conversation with two colleagues, and a video-stimulated interview with the writer. Excerpts of the material were analyzed to trace the polyphony of interiorized voices that influenced the writing. This focus revealed the multivoicedness of academic texts as an effect of their history of coming into being. This article contributes to the question of voice and identity in academic writing from a dialogical psycholinguistic perspective by presenting a de-reifying notion of voice grounded in an understanding of writing as a polyphonic activity, which also feeds into the formation of a writer’s self.

Writing studies must conduct replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) research to understand the relationship between creativity and writing, including how writers use creative thinking to generate texts and how environmental factors mediate writers’ engagement with creative thinking. This article traces research on creativity from selected writing studies journals since the 2011 release of The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. Through a systematic literature review, the findings show how RAD research supports domain-specific knowledge-building about writers’ creativity, which can help teachers, scholars, and practitioners to understand what counts as originality in writing, how writers produce creative texts, and how educational institutions can teach advanced writing skills that develop students’ creative thinking.

This article explores the mobile and material dimensions of a writing practice we call pocket writing. Emergent in our 6-year ethnographic fieldwork at a public high school, this practice involved adolescents composing and carrying their self-sponsored writing close to their bodies. We consider the pocket both a physical artifact—the place from which writing emerged at the right moment—and a metaphor describing how youth created small, portable boundaries around their writing to facilitate its invisibility and mobility. Using a transliteracies lens, we worked alongside youth to trace the circulatory pathways such writing took relative to the official institution of school. These high school students made agentive rhetorical choices, sometimes deliberately disconnecting their writing from school as an everyday resistance practice—an effort to keep school in its place. In theorizing pocket writing as a mobile and embodied extension of writing (for) the self, we argue its “pocketed” nature is key to its transformative power.

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.

Drawing on discussions of (de)coloniality and translanguaging, this article reports findings from a classroom-based ethnographic study, focusing on how a self-identified Latina bilingual student resists colonial constructs of language and literacies in her multimodal project. Based on an analysis of the student’s multimodal composition, other classroom writings, and a semistructured interview, I examine how she creatively and critically draws on her entire language and literacy repertoire in her multimodal composing. More specifically, I demonstrate how she draws from and builds on her lived experiences of linguistic injustices and racialization and transforms such experiences into embodied knowledge making and sharing through her multimodal composing. I argue that students’ engagement with multimodality can and should be cultivated, sustained, and amplified as a site of translingual activism and justice with decolonial potential, and I suggest, further, that such a shift requires a change in approaching, reading, and valuing students’ multimodal meaning making.

Most U.S. colleges and universities expect students to improve their writing ability by taking first-year composition (FYC) courses. In such courses, non-native English (L2) writers with diverse language backgrounds study alongside their native English (L1) speaking peers. However, it is not clear how different these populations are in terms of their language development over time, leaving questions unanswered about whether L2 writers develop more or less than L1 writers in an FYC curriculum. To investigate, we compared 75 L1 and L2 students’ written accuracy, fluency, and lexical and syntactic complexity over the semester of an FYC course. Data showed that L2 students had significantly higher rates of language error and less fluent and lexically complex writing compared to L1 writers. Moreover, L2 student writing became less grammatically accurate over 14 weeks despite showing greater fluency and syntactic complexity. These results suggest a need for plurilingual pedagogies in FYC that embrace diversity and inclusion while also providing L2 writers with instruction on socially powerful and dominant linguistic forms.

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.

The process of responding to supervisory feedback requires student writers to position themselves toward both the provider and content of that feedback, indicating their stance in the interaction and their evolving disciplinary competence. How positionings are discursively shaped, developed, and enacted to influence thesis revisions, however, has been relatively unexplored. In this article, we trace how two master’s students construct their positions in supervisory interactions and in the subsequent revisions of their literature review drafts. Through discourse and intertextual analyses, we propose three dimensions of interpersonal positioning ( cooperative, self-assertive, explorative) that are co-constructed to reinforce local supervisory cooperation and modify conceptualizations of the research work. We highlight scaffolded, responsive, and reflexive types as concrete expressions of mediated positioning which help regulate the ways students orientate to their writing and their discipline.

This article centers on Faith, a Latinx bilingual student who, because of her failure to pass a standardized exam in English language arts, had to repeat 11th-grade English. Despite this stigma of being a “repeater,” during the year-long ethnographic study I conducted in her classroom, Faith proved to be an insightful and critical reader and self-described poet who shared her writing with her peers as well as with other poets in online forums. Drawing from that more expansive classroom study, this article features Faith’s metacommentary on language and her own writing process and explores how her insights (1) disrupt monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies by highlighting the disconnect between her sophisticated understandings of language and the writing process and her status as a “struggling” student; (2) draw attention her wayfinding, which chronicles her navigation of those ideologies that complicate her search for a writerly identity and obscure the translingual nature of all texts and all writers; and (3) can move teachers and researchers of writing to reimagine the writing classroom so that it (re)positions students like Faith as “writers in residence,” whose existing translingual writing practices and wayfinding can serve as mentors and guides for others.

Scholarship on trajectories of becoming with literate activities is of growing interest in Writing Studies, particularly in accounts of writing grounded in cultural-historical and dialogic approaches, and in lifespan accounts of writing. The research reported here contributes to those conversations by tracing trajectories of becoming that are dynamically nonlinear, necessarily messy, and predicated on exceptionally complex streams of times, places, life experiences, artifacts, and literate activities. I draw from one case study with Alex, once a deeply faithful Christian who, over complex trajectories of semiotic becoming, lost her faith and was left to make sense of drastic perspectival shifts, in large part, through literate activity. Weaving analyses of talk across 2 years, 15 interviews, and multiple texts and textual interactions, I trace a narrative of Alex’s trajectories of unbecoming/becoming. I argue that Writing Studies needs flexible, theoretically grounded methods to trace becoming across lifespan trajectories and I address this imperative by showcasing one approach— dialogic animation protocols coupled with dialogic analyses.

The writing of transnational youth has continued to emerge as a promising area of research in writing and literacy studies, and yet despite the breadth of this work, few studies have examined transnational students’ writing about social and racial justice. Drawing on theoretical contributions of coloniality, this article highlights the experiences of one immigrant adolescent’s participation in a secondary ethnic studies course in California. In this study, photovoice was used as a mutually informing classroom writing pedagogy and research methodology to understand how students in an ethnic studies course problematize the dominance of Whiteness in school. I specifically analyze field notes and a focal student’s writing and interviews to demonstrate (a) her understandings of her participation in this course and (b) the ways in which her writing of self was a form of curricular justice that spanned school and home. These findings help to amplify writing as a tool for social justice and remind us that literacy and students’ histories are inextricably linked.

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.

This article examines how three African American girls, ages 10 to 18, used journaling and interviews to better understand science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as part of their literate identities. Drawing on prior work about literate identities, the authors introduce the concept of literate intersectional identities, which describes how participants’ diverse histories, literacies, and identities traverse categories, communities, genres, and modes of meaning within the context of a STEAM workshop. The authors employed open and thematic coding to analyze the girls’ journal entries in an effort to answer a question: In what ways do African American girls’ journal writings and interviews about STEM reflect and influence their literate identities in a digital app coding workshop? Findings reveal how their writings about race, access, and the underrepresentation of women of color in STEM helped them make sense of their self-assurance, self-awareness, and agency as girls of color interested in STEM careers.

This article outlines findings from a case study investigating attitudes toward English as the dominant language of scientific research writing. Survey and interview data were collected from 55 Latin American health and life scientists and 7 North American scientific journal editors connected to an intensive scholarly writing for publication course. Study findings point to competing perceptions (scientists vs. editors) of fairness in the adjudication of Latin American scientists’ research at international scientific journals. Adopting a critical, plurilingual lens, I argue that these findings demand a space for more equity-driven pedagogies, policies, and reflective practices aimed at supporting the robust participation of plurilingual scientists who use English as an additional language (EAL). In particular, if equity is indeed a shared goal, there is a clear need for commitment to ongoing critical self-reflection on the part of scientific journal gatekeepers and research writing support specialists.

In this qualitative study, the authors apply Callon’s sociology of translation to examine how new technology entrepreneurs enact material arguments that involve the first two moments of translation—problematization (defining a market problem) and interessement (defining a market and the firm’s relationship to it)—which in turn are represented in a claim, the value proposition. That emergent claim can then be represented and further changed during pitches. If accepted, it can then lead to the second two moments of translation: enrollment and mobilization. Drawing on written materials, observations, and interviews, we trace how these value propositions were iterated along three paths to better problematize and interesse, articulating a problem and market on which a business could plausibly be built. We conclude by discussing implications for understanding value propositions in entrepreneurship and, more broadly, using the sociology of translation to analyze emergent, material, consequential arguments.

Writing studies scholarship has long understood the need for context-based studies of student writing. Few studies, however, have closely examined how students use intertextual relationships in the context of learning to compose argumentative essays. Drawing on a 17-day argumentative writing unit in a ninth-grade humanities classroom, this article uses the concept of “intertextual trace” to explore how students make intertextual connections in their writing and negotiate the social dynamics of classroom learning. Intertextual analysis of students’ final essays revealed overlapping tracings and resonances across multiple resources, showing how and the ways in which students create arguments and respond to exigencies within a classroom setting. Analysis of thematic, structural, and lexical tracings also showed students making intertextual connections through repeating, reordering, responding to, and extending the texts offered by their teacher and peers. In so doing, students served as curators—shaping ideas, curricular offerings, and language into final argumentative essays—who were able to develop agency in and through their writing.

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

Thus far, professional editing has not been researched extensively in writing research. This article zooms in on sub-editing in newswriting as a form of professional editing, addressing three research questions: (a) What are the ways in which a news article’s text is altered?, (b) Are some types of news article altered more significantly than others?, and (c) Are certain news article sections more prone to alterations? Merging the contextualized insights of fieldwork with a corpus-based discourse analytic research perspective, we trace the differences (viz. additions, deletions, translocations, replacements) between the “initial” (right before sub-editing) and “final” (published) version of six different types of news article, (frontpage, headline, long, medium, short, and news wire article) in a corpus sample of 30 broadsheet articles. Our findings are first that—contrary to popular belief that sub-editors mainly “hack away” at news stories, or merely “trim the fat”—additions prevail. Second, we found that most interventions occur in high-stakes articles. Third, we discovered the largest number of interventions in the “entry points” of an article, that is, where—according to eye-tracking research—readers stop scanning and start reading. We discuss our findings in the light of training for professional newswriters.

Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations? Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to (a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and (b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie, on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.

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

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

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

The present study documents everyday adult writing by type of text and medium (computer or paper) in an in vivo diary study. The authors compare writing patterns by gender, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, age and working status. The study results reveal that (a) writing time varied with demographic variables for networkers, but these variations disappear for workers; (b) all demographic groups spent more time writing documents than prose; (c) most demographic groups spent an equal amount of time writing using computers and paper, but younger and higher educated groups spent more writing time on the computer, while older and less educated groups spent more time writing using paper than the computer; and (d) workers spent more time writing using computers than paper. Implications of the study findings are discussed, and suggestions for future research are also given.

This article traces the trajectory of one particular scene in the work of three media students writing and filmmaking. The analysis scrutinizes the role of semiotic tools, such as synopsis and storyboard, in students’ filmmaking practice. Moreover, the use of interactional data combined with textual data allows for a rich recording of the activity, aiming to integrate a multimodal analysis into a sociocultural perspective on learners’ composing practices. The findings indicate that the students are not able to transfer their particular meaning from the written mode into the language of moving images because they downplay the role of the semiotic tools available to them in the educational context.

This article documents aspects of the history of support for scholarship by two professional organizations involved with teaching composition at the postsecondary level: the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Evidence is found that for the past two decades, the two organizations have substantially withdrawn their sponsorship of one kind of scholarship. That scholarship is defined as RAD: replicable, aggregable, and data supported. The history of RAD scholarship as published in NCTE and CCCC books and journals, compared to that published elsewhere, is traced from 1940 to 1999 in three areas: teaching of the research paper, gain in writing skills during a writing course, and methods of peer critique. The history of NCTE and CCCC attempts at scholarly bibliography is also traced. Implications are considered for the future of the study of college composition as an academic discipline.

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.

In this article, the author builds on McHenry and Heath’s study of the “literate” and the “literary” and McHenry’s research on “forgotten readers” by examining the often undocumented literacy traditions and practices of men and women of African descent. First, the author traces the legacy of blended traditions of both written and spoken words in African American writing and activism. Continuing with an examination of Black literary and social movements, the author asserts that the recent renaissance of activities around literacy, such as spoken word poetry events as well as writing collectives, contributes to a historical continuum. Ultimately, the author shows the importance of the inextricable link between history, literacy studies, and the teaching of language arts.

Popular accounts of scientific discoveries diverge from scholarly accounts, stripping off hedges and promoting short-term social consequences. This case study illustrates how the “horse-race” framing of popular accounts devalues the collective sharing, challenging, and extending of scientific work. In her best-selling Longitude , Dava Sobel (1996) depicts John Harrison's 18th-century invention of a marine chronometer, a ground-breaking precision instrument that eventually allowed sailors to calculate their longitude at sea, as an unequal race with Harrison as beleaguered hero. Sobel represents the demands of the Board of Longitude to test and replicate the chronometer as the obstructionist machinations of an academic elite. Her framing underreports the feasibility of the chronometer and its astronomical rival, the lunar distance method, which each satisfied different criteria. That readers accept Sobel's framing is indicated by an analysis of 187 reviews posted on Amazon.com, suggesting that popular representation of science fuels cynicism in popular and academic forums.

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.

Arguing that the immediate historical context of desegregation is vital to an understanding of Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words, this article reports on materials from the archives of Heath's research housed at the Dacus Library of Winthrop University. What emerges from reading Heath's letters and other materials at the time she was researching Ways with Words is a portrait of an ethnographer trying to negotiate existing stereotypes and raw tensions in the scholarly and public discourse on race while attempting to adhere to the tenets of the ethnographic approach of the 1970s. Taking a critical race theory approach, the article suggests that these materials indicate that Ways with Words could most fruitfully be read at this point as a story of the persistence of prejudice—a story that suggests the failure of the arguments in favor of desegregation to broker lasting reforms toward equity, and one that reveals the different and racialized meanings literacy acquires in response to historical shifts.

This article explores literacy sponsorship at an early 19th-century academy that schooled young Native American men near Lexington, Kentucky. In doing so, it presents two case studies based on the correspondence of J. N. Bourassa (Potawatomi) and Adam Nail (Choctaw), both advanced students at the academy who turned their literacy lessons toward a critique of their living and learning conditions. In examining their letters to federal authorities, it is possible to discern how the students moved beyond the limited literacy sponsored by the academy to embrace liberatory practices reserved by the White elites who managed the institution.

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.

This study examines the reading and writing strategies of one student, Yuko, over a 3-year period and traces the process she went through to acquire college-level academic literacy in English, her second language. Multiple data sources included interviews with the student and two of her political science professors, classroom observations, and texts from 10 courses in three disciplines—including course materials and the student's writing, with instructors' comments. The investigation was enriched by a cross-cultural perspective, for Yuko described learning strategies in two languages and learning environments in two countries, Japan and the United States. Data analysis suggests that her educational background shaped her approach to U.S. academic discourse practices and the way she theorized about those practices. Her theory and her analysis of her own experience changed over time, raising questions about cross-cultural interpretations of student learning.

In this study, we trace the development of ideas explored during reading lessons in children's writings from one transitional bilingual fourth-grade classroom. Using transcripts from audio- and videotaped lessons, we describe the ways in which the reading lessons, designed to facilitate discussions to enhance student reading comprehension, turned into an anchoring activity for the negotiation of joint meaning. They served as a springboard for joint exploration and the generation of intersubjective and co-constructed ideas that bridged the worlds of home and school. We trace the development of these ideas in representative pieces from five student portfolios. Discussions served to display a number of important literacy processes, and ideas and interpretations from these discussions reappeared in the students' writings. This study is of particular interest to educators concerned both with understanding better the influence of classroom discourse on student writing and with finding ways to incorporate students' cultural backgrounds into classroom practices.

Composition studies, as a field, has always depended on theoretical constructs and empirical methods from other disciplines. This article looks at interdisciplinary work in the area of composition and computer-mediated communication (CMC). The work on writing and electronic networks has drawn from early experimental studies of CMC in social psychology, the premises of which are at odds with current thinking in both composition studies and social psychology. In recent years, social psychological research on CMC has witnessed changes similar to those in composition: a rethinking of positivistic frameworks and a move to emphasize social constructs. This article reviews the work of four groups conducting social psychological research on CMC. It traces the movement away from theoretical frameworks based in positivism toward those grounded in social constructionism. It concludes by advocating a dialogic relationship between research in computers and composition studies and social psychology.

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

A composition researcher and psychiatrist report findings from their 3-year study of the revision of the most important book in the mental health profession: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). This 500-page diagnostic taxonomy defines some 250 mental disorders, and it functions for the field as a charter document, shaping the way mental illness is understood, treated, and studied. The revision project, which culminates in 1994 with the publication of DSM-IV, is a 6-year project involving some 1,000 psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. In this study the authors examine the DSM revision using three methodologies: in Part I they trace the history of the DSM classification system; in Part II they analyze published accounts of the revision by project leaders; and finally, in Part III they observe the revision process as it was actually carried out in one of the 13 work groups. The authors conclude that the revision of DSM functions less to change the text than to achieve certain social and political effects. They find the revision works to further entrench the biomedical model of mental disorder, to maintain the dominance of psychiatry within the mental health field, and to enhance the prestige of psychiatry in relation to other medical specialties.

This longitudinal study examines the reading processes and practices of one college student, Eliza, through eight semesters of undergraduate postsecondary education. Specifically, the study traces the development of this student's beliefs about literate activity—focusing not only on changes in her reading and writing activities per se, but also on her views about those activities, her representations of the nature of texts, and her understanding of the relationship between knowledge and written discourse within her disciplinary field of biology. Multiple data sources—including extended interviews, reading/writing logs, observations and field notes, texts, and read-and-think-aloud protocols—were used to explore Eliza's rhetorical development over her 4 college years. Results of various analyses together suggest that Eliza's conceptions of the function of texts and the role of authors—both as authors and as scientists—grew in complexity. A number of possibly interrelated factors may account for Eliza's expanding notions of authors and of texts: increased subject matter knowledge, instructional support, “natural” development, and mentoring in an internship situation.

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.

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 evolution of page design to improve the readability of technical writing can be traced to improvements in typography and also to the influence of Peter Ramus. Ramus's logic used bracketed outlines to show the relationships among ideas within larger concepts. Used by legal writers and Puritan theologians to analyze concepts, Ramist method was also used by English physicians who sought to create medical texts that could be easily read and remembered by students and practitioners. Texts that used Ramist method illustrate their writers' awareness of the importance of making information visually accessible by use of white space, headings that reveal hierarchies of ideas, and bracketed dichotomies and partitions to reveal content for selective reading.

This article traces the evolution of “Once upon a time” in a child's classroom story writing, drawing upon data collected in a three-year study of writing development in an urban magnet school. The developmental literature on young children's literacy has treated story language as a set of structural routines that children learn from being read to, routines that serve the function of representing imaginary worlds. In contrast, this article assumes that stories are cultural discourse forms that serve multiple functions and that to internalize those forms, children must transform them into tools that are functional within their own social world. Moreover, children's discourse forms and functions are in a dialectical relationships: The initially awkward forms children produce may have limited social meaning—but those forms may elicit social responses that embue them with new functional possibilities and thus lead children to further grappling with forms. In brief, the story forms young children learn from others are not the end products but the catalysts of development.

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.

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.

Most rhetorical history has concerned itself with the theory of argumentative discourse as it developed from classical to modern times. This essay 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 Aristotle's Rhetoric through the beginnings of a theory of written discourse in the American nineteenth century. A later continuation of this essay will trace explanatory rhetoric into modern times.