This study examines how supervisor-candidate coauthoring collaborations contribute to doctoral students’ writer identity. Three candidates’ coauthorship experiences with their supervisors were investigated in depth using a multiple-case study design. Interviews, written reflections, and email correspondence between coauthors enabled thick descriptions of these candidates’ writer identity formation. Guided by Burgess and Ivanič’s framework of writer identity, the multiple-case study showed how the candidates’ autobiographical selves, discoursal selves, authorial selves, and perceived writer were influenced through the experience of coauthoring with supervisors. Notably, the candidates benefited from supervisor-candidate coauthorship by engaging in scholarly collaborations, bolstering their confidence as academic writers, and strengthening their authorial voice and rhetorical awareness. This study also reveals potential pitfalls or challenges of such collaborations, highlighting key considerations for supervisors and candidates considering coauthorship.

ChatGPT and other LLMs are at the forefront of pedagogical considerations in classrooms across the academy. Many studies have spoken to the technology’s capacity to generate one-off texts in a variety of genres. This study complements those by inquiring into its capacity to generate compelling texts at scale. In this study, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyze a small corpus of generated texts in two genres and gauge it against novice and published academic writers along known dimensions of linguistic variation. Theoretically, we position and historicize ChatGPT as a writing technology and consider the ways in which generated text may not be congruent with established trajectories of writing development in higher education. Our study found that generated texts are more informationally dense than authored texts and often read as dialogically closed, “empty,” and “fluffy.” We close with a discussion of potentially explanatory linguistic features, as well as relevant pedagogical implications.

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.

Given Wikipedia’s breadth of coverage, social impact, and longevity as an impactful open knowledge resource, the encyclopedia has been the subject of considerable interdisciplinary research. Building on scholarship related to collaboration, authorship, ownership, and editing in Wikipedia, this study sought to better understand Wikipedians as writers, paying specific attention to their sense of ownership. While previous research has shown that editors engage in individualist editing practices at times, often ignoring community-mediated policy regarding ownership, findings from a mixed-method survey of 117 editors demonstrate the existence of both “individual” and “community” notions of ownership that often reinforce, or mutually inform, each other. This study adds clarity to these issues by demonstrating how feelings of individual ownership, voice, and pride in writing often occur in collaborative circumstances. This research ultimately extends our understanding of collaborative writing in what is one of the most well-known collaborative websites. Despite contemporary theoretical strides advocating for relinquishing ownership concepts in favor of distributed or ecological frameworks, the concept of ownership remains prevalent within digital writing communities, exemplified by Wikipedia.

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.

Research abstracts are an increasingly important aspect of research articles in all knowledge fields, summarizing the full article and encouraging readers to access it. Graetz suggests that four main features contribute to this purpose—the use of past tense, third person, passive, and the non-use of negatives, although this claim has never been confirmed. In this article, we set out to explore the extent to which these forms are used in the abstracts of four disciplines, the functions they perform and how their frequency has changed over the past 30 years. Drawing on a corpus of 6,000 abstracts taken from the top 10 journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we found high but decreasing frequencies of past tense and passives, an increasing number of third person forms, and more than one negation every two texts. We also noted a remarkable decrease of past tense and passives in the hard sciences and an increase in applied linguistics, with sociologists making greater use of negation. These results suggest that abstracts have developed a distinctive argumentative style, rhetorically linked both to their communicative function and to the changing social contexts in which academic writing is produced and consumed.

Scholars in discourse studies have defined legitimation as the justification (and critique) of powerful institutions and their practices. In moments of crisis, legitimation tactics often shift. This article considers how such shifts are incited by unauthorized information leaks. Leaks, I argue, constitute freshly available texts that reveal privileged institutional information presented in a specialized rhetorical style. To explore how leaks are harnessed by institutional critics, I examine the 2013 Snowden/National Security Agency (NSA) crisis. Combining corpus analysis with discourse analysis, I explore how Snowden’s NSA leaks affected the online writing of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I also consider overlaps between the rhetorical patterns in the leaked NSA documents and those in the ACLU’s post-leaks writing. Findings from my analysis of legitimation and style categories suggest that, prior to the leaks, ACLU writers primarily used a character- and narrative-based style to delegitimize the NSA’s policies as illegal and secretive, and to push for their reform. After the leaks, though, the ACLU mainly used an informationally dense style rife with academic terms and vocabularies of strategic action, portraying NSA surveillance as massive and complex. As the documents moved from the NSA’s secret, technical discourses to public, critical discourses, the latter came to resemble the former rhetorically. These findings raise crucial questions about how critics can make use of leaks without necessarily relegitimizing institutional power.

Scholarship has shown that writing groups are important sites of authority negotiation for student writers, yet little empirical research has examined how groups negotiate authority through conversation or how these negotiations influence students’ developing expertise. Drawing on observations and interviews of an undergraduate thesis and a graduate dissertation writing group, I use the concept of “presentification” to analyze conversational moments in which group members referenced advisors, “making present” advisor authority to influence group collaborations. Specifically, I analyze these moments to show how writing groups can serve as low-stakes communities in which students negotiate their emerging sense of authority. I found that whereas less experienced writers looked to advisors to solve writing problems and used advisor authority to stand in for disciplinary expertise, more experienced writers voiced advisor guidance to help pose writing problems and negotiate their own stance as disciplinary experts. This study thus theorizes one process through which student writers negotiate emerging authority across sites of literate practice and in collaboration with others who may not themselves be members of the same disciplinary community.

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.

Research has shown that collaboratively produced texts are better in quality compared with individually written texts. However, no study has considered the role of collaboration in authorial voice, which is an essential element in current writing curricula. This study analyzes the effects of collaborative task performance in the quality of L2 learners’ argumentative texts and in their authorial voice strength. A total of 306 upper-intermediate L2 learners were selected and divided into independent ( N = 130) and paired ( N = 176) groups. Each learner/pair was asked to write one argumentative text. The quality of writings was determined by a quantitative analysis that included three measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). Participants’ authorial voice strength was assessed by two raters using an analytic voice rubric. Comparison of means revealed that pairs outperformed independent writers in all CAF measures. However, the results for the role of collaboration in authorial voice were mixed: While pairs were more successful than independent writers in manifesting their ideational voice, independent writers outperformed pairs with regard to affective and presence voice dimensions and holistic voice scores. The article concludes that, despite its positive implications for L2 writing, collaborative writing may pose challenges for learners’ authorial stance taking.

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.

People communicate through language as well as visual embodied actions like gestures, yet audio remains the default recording technology in interview-based writing research. Given that texts and writing processes are understood to involve semiotic resources beyond language, interview talk should receive similar treatment. In this article, I synthesize research that examines how visual embodied actions reveal and construct embodied knowledge and stance, and I apply these lenses to my own study, showing how visual embodied actions are essential to understanding three writers’ experiences with particular writing styles. I conclude by discussing the benefits of videorecording for writing research, offering guidance on how video can help researchers explore the interview as a social practice, and suggesting ways to design the consent process with transparency and democratic practice in mind. Ultimately, this article serves as a guide for writing researchers who wish to challenge the audio default when conducting interviews.

This article reports on a study that explored cross-disciplinary variation in the use of metadiscourse markers in advanced-level student writing, put forward as a realistic target for novice writers. Starting from the stance and engagement categories included in Hyland’s model, we first conducted a comprehensive quantitative analysis of interactional metadiscourse across disciplines. For this analysis, we used an automated processing tool that generates quantity scores for each metadiscourse category. We then carried out a detailed qualitative analysis of selected items that contributed significantly to these category scores. The data for our analyses come from a corpus of 829 student papers from 16 different disciplines. The results showed notable differences in students’ use of metadiscourse features across academic divisions and disciplines. We suggest that this offers evidence of advanced students’ ability to express interactional strategies that are in line with disciplinary expectations. We also found, however, that disciplines that fall into the same academic division were not necessarily similar in their use of interactional metadiscourse, which calls into question the usefulness of existing disciplinary groupings. The findings of this study offer insights into how to build an appropriate writerly stance in different academic communities.

This study examined multiple measures of written expression as predictors of narrative writing performance for 362 students in grades 4 through 6. Each student wrote a fictional narrative in response to a title prompt that was evaluated using a levels of language framework targeting productivity, accuracy, and complexity at the word, sentence, and discourse levels. Grade-related differences were found for all of the word-level and most of the discourse-level variables examined, but for only one sentence-level variable (punctuation accuracy). The discourse-level variables of text productivity, narrativity, and process use, the sentence-level variables of grammatical correctness and punctuation accuracy, and the word-level variables of spelling/capitalization accuracy, lexical productivity, and handwriting style were significant predictors of narrative quality. Most of the same variables that predicted story quality differentiated good and poor narrative writers, except punctuation accuracy and narrativity, and variables associated with word and sentence complexity also helped distinguish narrative writing ability. The findings imply that a combination of indices from across all levels of language production are most useful for differentiating writers and their writing. The authors suggest researchers and educators consider levels of language measures such as those used in this study in their evaluations of writing performance, as a number of them are fairly easy to calculate and are not plagued by subjective judgments endemic to most writing quality rubrics.

Delivery has often been treated as an afterthought of the “real work” of writing. This article demonstrates how writers in some contexts must think very carefully about delivery from the very beginning of their process. Tracking collaborative writers’ talk, this article demonstrates how a group of writers works to anticipate delivery by repeatedly constructing delivery narratives—that is, stories about the future handoff of their document to audiences. In a complex case of LGBT policy advocacy, the writers weave together multiple delivery narratives in order to achieve consensus, revealing the influence of discursive voices, perspectives, personal and institutional histories, and disciplinary training on the group’s rhetorical strategies. This article also considers how an experienced administrative lawyer constructs delivery narratives, revealing an expert’s strategy to try to get a legitimate hearing for a novel legal interpretation.

There is increasing usage of creative writing in the ESL/EFL classroom based on the argument that this pedagogy develops writer’s voice, emotional engagement, and ownership. Within the context of teaching poetry writing to second language learners, the current article develops a scientific approach to ways in which voice can be measured and then empirically explores the claim that voice is present within poetry written by second language learners. The study explored this question: Do second language poetry writers have a discernable voice in their written poetry? This issue was investigated in two different ways: (a) utilizing human reader ratings of the likelihood that two poems were written by the same poet and (b) using computational linguistic methodology to explore systematic differences in specific linguistic features in poetry written by second language poets. The data presented here show that poetry written by the same L2 writer is more readily recognized as such and that relevant linguistic items have patterns of frequency of usage that are different for different poets. Together the two studies provide a compelling case that voice is measureable and present in the poetry written by second language learners.

This study identifies multiple profiles of successful essays via a cluster analysis approach using linguistic features reported by a variety of natural language processing tools. The findings from the study indicate that there are four profiles of successful writers for the samples analyzed. These four profiles are linguistically distinct from one another and demonstrate that expert human raters examine a number of different linguistic features in a variety of combinations when assessing writing proficiency and assigning high scores to independent essays (regardless of the scoring rubric considered). The writing styles in the four clusters can be described as action and depiction style, academic style, accessible style, and lexical style. The study provides empirical evidence that successful writing cannot be defined simply through a single set of predefined features, but that, rather, successful writing has multiple profiles. While these profiles may overlap, each profile is distinct.

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

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

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.

Through its analysis of birth plans, documents some women create to guide their birth attendants' actions during hospital births, this article reveals the rhetorical complexity of childbirth and analyzes women's attempts to harness birth plans as tools of resistance and self-education. Asserting that technologies can both silence and give voice, the article examines women's use of technologies of writing to confront technologies of birth. The article draws on data from online childbirth narratives, a childbirth writing survey, and five women's birth plans to argue that women's silencing, or rhetorical disability, during childbirth both prompts and limits the birth plan as an effective communicative tool. The data suggest that the birth plan is not consistently effective in the ways its authors intend. Nonetheless, this analysis also demonstrates that the rhetorical failure of the birth plan can be read as, and thereby transformed into, rhetorical possibility.

Studies of blind manuscript review have illustrated that readers often form impressions of or speculate about unknown authors' identities in the manuscript review task. In this article, the authors extend that work by examining the discursive and nondiscursive features that play a role in readers' active construction of author voice. Through a survey completed by 70 editorial board members of six journals in applied linguistics and rhetoric and composition, the authors identify quantitative and qualitative trends in reviewers' practices regarding voice construction. Findings indicate that many readers do build impressions of an author's identity when reviewing anonymous manuscripts and that the rhetorical nature of the review task may lead readers to attend more to some discursive features than to others.

Scholars of adult basic literacy curricular materials have argued that the skill-based, deficit-oriented approach of many such materials denies the interests and motivations of adult learners. Exploring why these kinds of curricular materials are prevalent in adult basic literacy education, this article focuses on the case of ProLiteracy, a nongovernmental adult basic literacy organization that grew out of missionary Frank Laubach's work in the 1930s to convert illiterate adults to Christianity and a belief in American-style capitalism. This article argues that the legacy of Laubach's evangelism continues to affect adult literacy instruction in the United States today, through the content of many of the materials in the ProLiteracy catalogue, as well as through the volunteer-based one-to-one tutoring model's positioning of low-literacy adults.

One privilege enjoyed by new-media authors is the opportunity to realize representations of Self that are rich textual worlds in themselves and also to engage the wider world, with a voice, a smile, imagery, and sound. Still, closer investigation of multimedia composition practices reveals levels of complexity with which the verbal virtuoso is unconcerned. This article argues that while technology-afforded multimedia tools make it comparatively easy to author a vivid text, it is a multiplicatively more complicated matter to vividly realize and publicize an authorial intention. Based on analysis of the digital story creation process of a youth named “Steven,” the authors attempt to demonstrate the operation of two forces upon which the successful multimodal realization of the author's intention may hinge: “fixity” and “fluidity.” The authors show how, within the process of digital self-representation, these forces can intersect to influence multimodal meaning making, and an author's life, in consequential ways.

Many recent studies on computer-mediated communication (CMC) have addressed the question of orality and literacy. This article examines a relatively recent subgenre of CMC, that of written online sports commentary, that provides us with written CMC that is clearly based on firmly established oral genres, those of radio and television sports commentary. The examples analyzed are from two English, two French, and two Spanish online football (soccer) commentaries. The purpose of the study is to examine oral traits and genre mixing in online football commentaries in the three languages and carryover from the spoken genres of radio and television commentaries to this developing genre, following Ferguson. Special attention is paid to Web page design. The study reveals that form and content of online football commentaries are strongly affected by the style of the online newspaper.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article investigates one aspect of scientific style in French: the use of tenses. It investigates the claims made in the literature that the verb system of scientific French is a temporal. The frequency of tensed finite forms in 10 French language journal articles on biological sciences is examined. The rhetorical function of past and future tenses is examined and six functions of tense choice are isolated. This analysis suggests that tense marking is actually more complex than previous claims have maintained and that tense choice serves to encode (a) temporal, (b) rhetorical, and (c) structural processes in the scientific text. Tense choice is therefore part of the communicative repertoire of the scientific writer, which writers use to create and communicate information, and which is responsive to the rhetorical demands of communicating about science.

In 1996, New York University professor of physics Alan Sokal wrote a parody of an academic article he titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” This parody escaped detection by the editors and was published in the journal Social Text. Sokal outed his own hoax in the academic magazine Lingua Franca, after which prolonged discussion about the hoax took place in both academic and popular venues. This article explores the rhetorical dimensions of Sokal’s hoax, defining the hoax as a rhetorical genre, relating the Sokal hoax to some 19th-century American scientific hoaxes, explaining why this hoax inspired such intense reactions, and identifying some of the stylistic and the generic exaggerations. The impassioned discussion of this hoax may be explained by the dynamics of its rhetorical context, which drew in Social Text ’s editors as it flattered their professional vanity and revived the debate over the culture wars. But the textual dynamics of Sokal’s hoax have been largely ignored, even though closer attention to genre, style, and argument might have prevented the hoax. Rhetorical understanding thus requires attention to both texts and contexts.

This study explores the connection between writing and working memory, specifically the role of the subvocal articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice). The authors asked the 18 participants to type sentences describing 24 multipanel cartoons. In some conditions, the participants were required to repeat a syllable continuously while writing. This activity, called articulatory suppression, interferes with the articulatory rehearsal process. Results indicated that interfering with the articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice) interferes with writing by slowing the rate of writing, increasing mechanical errors, changing the temporal microstructure of text production, and increasing the perceived difficulty of the writing task. The authors applied their model of written text production to provide a theoretical account for these results.

This article presents evidence that, from selected spectroscopic articles in the earliest volumes of the Physical Review to other selected spectroscopic articles from the same journal in 1980, a shift in sentence style takes place. This shift is from what M.A.K. Halliday calls the dynamic style (which reflects happenings, processes, and actions) to the synoptic style (which reflects things, structures, and categories). The article proposes that the early writers used the dynamic style primarily to set information in a distinct time and thus to avoid giving the impression that the information should be regarded as widely generalizable. It also proposes that the later writers used the synoptic style because it allowed them to represent processes as things, to delineate many fine shades of meaning, and to extend their arguments economically. The article concludes by suggesting areas of future research for students of scientific style and for composition scholars.

A researcher (Schwebke), in collaboration with her supervisor (Medway), investigated the production and reception of a corpus of documentary exchanges in which condominium owners voiced their opposition to renovations proposed by their board of directors. During the course of the research, which included textual analysis, interviews with owners and management, and readings with disinterested outside parties, the texts became radically unsettled, changing their meaning with each fresh stage of the process. The social reality that underlay and was referred to by the texts became equally indeterminate. Encounters with both texts and everyday readers were pervasively intertextualized; each new conversation was felt to be conducted in the presence of a growing collection of eavesdroppers. The two sets of outside readers—a group of “ordinary folks” and an academic—became virtual participants in the ongoing construction of meaning, with academic and everyday perspectives merging in unusual combinations. The analysis draws on Bakhtinian and poststructuralist perspectives to elucidate this experience.

Ethnic and gender differences in classroom conversational styles are explored by comparing student involvement in face-to-face and computer-mediated discussions. The quantity of participation in these two environments is triangulated with student perceptions of the conversations in three undergraduate composition classrooms. White males participated more frequently than other groups in the face-to-face setting, and White women appeared to benefit more than other groups from conversations held in the computer-mediated setting. However, these gender-differentiated participation patterns did not apply to the discourse patterns of Hispanic males and females. Unlike their White female peers, the Hispanic women in this study participated frequently in the face-to-face conversations, spoke more than Hispanic males, and generally disliked the computer-mediated conversations.

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.

Most discussions of qualitative research organize research methodologies according to their place in a set of research paradigms identified by epistemological and ontological commitments. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, the authors argue for a theory of research as social practice in which researchers' purposes are determined not by philosophical paradigms but by their commitments to specific forms of social action. The authors offer a model of research practices organized according to their relationship to social power rather than abstract paradigms. From this perspective, the dilemmas presented by recent postmodern critiques of representation, the inclusion and co-optation of participants' voices, and validity become a question of ethics. The authors explore the problems of postmodern ethics and qualitative research through the work of Bauman.

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.

This interpretive study of two fifth-grade students' intrinsic motivation for writing examines the ways in which children who self-sponsor writing express “flow” experiences associated with writing. Considering a sense of flow seems to address why some children persevere when faced with challenging tasks and why they spend so much time and effort engaged in activities they find interesting. In addition to the challenge of writing, the social context of the classroom influenced opportunities for student-controlled writing. Flow experiences described by the boys occurred when each controlled important aspects of writing, such as ownership, genre, style, and length—although the social context of the two classrooms varied widely. The boys featured in this report demonstrated that elementary students identified as avid writers can differentiate between flow experiences and nonflow experiences associated with writing, and they describe flow experiences in terms similar to those reported in studies on adolescents and adults.

This article explores the possible grounds for a research program in cognitive rhetoric that aims to forge a tight link between the structures of meaning and structures of brain, body, and world. In section one, I outline a theory of human meaning-making in terms of pragmatic, epistemic, and symbolic actions as they relate to the principles of intentionality, projection, publicity, and materiality. In section two, I consider recent global theories of mind and brain to assess the theory's neurological plausibility. The common link between these two sections is the phrase, “tombstone technology,” taken from the voice-over narration from a television show about plane crashes. I first analyze this construction in terms of its effects on attention, value, categorization, and memory; I then use it to speculate on the neurophysiological processes subtending our ability to use symbolic resources to make inferences and decisions. I conclude with some suggestions for future research in discourse production and comprehension.

This study examines the numbers of relative clauses and the percentages of subordinate clauses they comprise in two sets of research reports from the Physical Review, one from the earliest years (1893-1901) and one from 1980. It finds only a slight decrease in percentages of relative clauses from the first set of articles to the second, but it also finds some striking differences in patterns of what the relative clauses modify, particularly in references to experimental instruments and materials, experimental results or products, and equations. This study also shows evidence of a stylistic shift between the two sets of articles, from what Halliday (1987a) calls the dynamic style (that reflects processes, happenings, and actions) to the synoptic style (that reflects structures, categories, and hierarchies). It speculates that this shift would have been motivated by later physicists' wish to use tenseless expressions and to communicate effectively in an increasingly built-up web of information.

According to contrastive rhetoric research, Japanese expository prose is characterized by a classical style (ki-sho-ten-ketsu), reader responsibility, and an inductive style with a sudden topic shift. It is claimed that English readers have difficulty comprehending texts written by Japanese writers because of such culturally unique conventions. This article challenges these hypotheses concerning the uniqueness of Japanese texts. It argues that previous studies tend to view language and culture as exotic and static rather than dynamic, and overgeneralize the cultural characteristics from a few specific examples. Also, these characterizations of Japanese written discourse can be challenged by multiple interpretations of ki-sho-ten-ketsu offered by composition specialists in Japan and the linguistic and educational influences from the West on the development of modern Japanese since the mid-19th century. This article suggests that researchers and writing teachers should be wary of stereotyping cultural conventions of writing.

This article compares essays written in Spanish and English by bilingual writers whose prior formal academic writing instruction has been only in English. The authors describe both writers' discourse-organizational and clause-combining strategies, showing that one writer's organizational structure reflects explicit planning, whereas the other employs a more emergent organizational structure for her essays. In each case, these choices are the same for Spanish and English. Analyzing these writers' clause-combining strategies demonstrates that organizational structure at the discourse level is reflected in the types of clause combinations chosen by the writers at the sentence level, with one writer using more simple sentences and embedded clauses and the other using more hypotactic and paratactic clause combinations. The article demonstrates how clauses constitute and reflect the structure of texts and suggests that development of a repertoire of styles and discourse strategies depends on control of a variety of syntactic options.