Participants in a qualitative case study of nonacademic R&D authors were uncomfortable with the idea of persuasion in their writing. The participants thought their reports were more informative than persuasive. Three definitions for “persuasion” emerged: discourse intended to push a reader toward an action; discourse written in a clear, compelling style; and shady, manipulative discourse. When asked whether they owed a greater debt to their audience or to their subject matter, most participants chose subject matter. However, some participants argued that my question posed a false dichotomy, in that serving subject matter was the best way to serve audience.

The move from theorizing difference to dealing with difference in an intercultural collaboration creates generative conflicts for educators and students. This article tracks the conflicting discourses, alternative representations, and political consequences the construct “Black English” had for Black and White mentors, teenage writers, and instructors in a Community Literacy Center collaboration. Comparing the accounts offered by resistance, conversation, and negotiation theory, it examines the dilemmadriven process of constructing a new negotiated meaning in the face of conflicting forces, voices, and representations. Dealing with difference in such collaboration means not only interpreting diverse verbal and nonverbal signifying systems based on values, experience, and competing discourses but constructing a new negotiated representation in the face of conflict that offers an (at least provisional) ground for action.

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The evolution of technical communication conventions in America is more anthropologically complex than the traditional linkage to the scientific plain-style tradition suggests. Analysis of leading ideas in early 20th-century engineering writing textbooks and other primary sources demonstrates that disciplinary discourse conventions develop from an intricate nexus of human motivations, beliefs, and social activity. This article explores currents in American social and intellectual history that explain this complex, sophisticated view of language, which combines a rhetorically sensitive formalism with the ideas of professional literacy and cultural reading to facilitate communication with various audiences and to reinforce the status and dignity of the emerging profession.

There is much debate and confusion about the use of the passive voice in texts in general, and in computer manuals in particular. For example, it is often stated that the passive should be avoided, but on the other hand, it may also have a clear function in a text. The aim of this article is to provide clarity by presenting a straightforward principle for the use of the passive voice in computer manuals. This “alternation principle,” in which active voice is used for user actions and the passive voice for automatic computer, is backed by results from recent functional and cognitive linguistic research. It is illustrated by means of fragments from several computer manuals, including some (apparent) counter-examples.

This study compares the effectiveness of five leading grammar/style analysis software packages in analyzing business students' writing. The software exhibited considerable differences in the following areas: correctly identifying various mechanical and style errors, avoiding annoying and misleading false error messages, and providing helpful remedial advice. No prior research study has empirically compared grammar/style analysis software along all these important dimensions. PowerEdit was found to be the overall superior package, demonsrating proficiency in detecting errors in punctuation, sentence structure, passive voice, and weak wording. The results have significant implications for utilizing grammar/style analysis software to improve students' writing.

This article reports on a study of the relationship between classroom context and the revisions of student writers. Specifically, the study examined the nature of the instructional context of the writing in one senior high school classroom and explored potential connections between particular features of the teacher’s approach to writing instruction and the frequency and types of revisions students in that class made to their essays. Drafts of students’ essays were coded for revisions, and results of the coding were examined with reference to specific features of the instructional method and related features of classroom context. Results of the study indicate that students in the present study, like students in some previous studies of revision, focused their revisions on surface and stylistic concerns. The study suggests that specific features of the classroom context, particularly the workshopstyle structure of the course, the interactions among students and the teacher regarding the students’ writing, and the nature of the teacher’s strategies for responding to and evaluating students’ writing, may have reinforced the teacher’s and students’ traditional views of writing quality and revision and may have thus contributed to the students’ focus on lower-level concerns in revision.

This article describes German correspondence styles in order to assist American managers. In the coming years, more and more American managers will find that they must correspond with their German counterparts either as colleagues within international organizations or as associates representing collaborative and competing businesses. The article explains typical conventions of both memo and letter formats, emphasizing the need to appreciate differences between formal and informal modes of communication. American managers who know and respect these differences can communicate more clearly and persuasively with their German contacts.

This study describes the roles and responsibilities of three editors employed in the publications unit of a large government agency. Along with the story of each editor, the article presents generalizations about the editing process in this particular organization. The description suggests that editing is a complex, meaning-making process. The three editors seem to make changes in the documents they edit based on their expert knowledge of writing, their empathy for readers, and their assumption of authority over a document. Although they all make rule-based changes that rely on external authorities, such as style manuals, they vary greatly in their readiness to use their personal authority in interpreting the needs of an audience. The editors gain the authority they need to make reader-based changes by assuming the role of language specialists and by enhancing the teaching role important in their organization.

A newly developed instrument, the Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ), provides scales that measure seven different aspects of readers’ orientation toward literary texts: Insight, Empathy, Imagery Vividness, Leisure Escape, Concern with Author, Story-Driven Reading, and Rejection of Literary Values. The present report presents evidence that each of these scales possesses satisfactory internal consistency, retest reliability, and factorial validity. Also, a series of five studies provided preliminary evidence that each scale may be located in a theoretically plausible network of relations with certain global personality traits (e.g., Absorption), with aspects of cognitive style (e.g., Regression in the Service of the Ego), and with some of the learning skills that are relevant to effective work in the classroom (e.g., Elaborative Processing). In a variety of teaching and research settings, the LRQ may be a useful measure of individual differences in readers’ orientation toward literary texts.

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

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The value of formal writing conventions has been diminished in mainstream composition scholarship; although research on occupational writing suggests that formal conventions are important, these findings are hard to generalize. This study, a content analysis of 12 professional style manuals, achieves generalizability by elucidating the institutional norms of disciplinary writing (a subset of occupational writing to which much scientific and technical writing belongs). Formal conventions prove to be highly valued. More important, the use of formal conventions often is justified on rhetorical grounds, suggesting that the dichotomy between formalist and rhetorical axiologies posited in composition scholarship is false.

This article describes an investigation in which I explored an impression that I had developed in earlier work that the grammatical subjects in scientific discourse are markedly long. An examination of a sample of scientific discourse produced evidence that makes a fairly strong case that on the average the grammatical subjects in the sample are markedly long. A stronger case can be made that many of the specific subjects in the sample are very long indeed, probably long enough to draw some attention to themselves in most any kind of discourse. I identify three pressures that I believe operate on scientists to produce very long grammatical subjects: The pressure to be precise, the pressure to be concise, and the pressure to be efficient and progressive in constructing a set of claims that will remain true within a framework of knowledge that has been built up over time. I conclude by exploring some possible connections between both the grammatical subjects in and the overall style of the sample of discourse and what Jerome Bruner calls the paradigmatic mode of thought.

This article examines the frequency and discourse functions of 752 active transitive clauses in a 66,500-word corpus of sixteen research articles in the physical sciences. The overall rate of actives was only 34 percent; the rates were lowest in the Methods (12%) and Abstracts (27%), higher in Introductions (41%) and Results (40%), and highest in Discussions (44%) and Conclusions (52%). The active was often required because of the principle of end-weight. Throughout the research article actives with “real world” grammatical subjects were used to state “scientific truths.” The most prominent other functions tended to vary from section to section and to correlate somewhat with the semantic subcategory of the grammatical subject. Active clauses with human subjects were used to cite research and to introduce metadiscourse, while ones with discourse subjects were used to introduce graphics, and ones with research process subjects and research product subjects were used to make evidential statements about results.

In earlier centuries, authors of medical works intended for popular readers defended their use of the vernacular against potential criticism from their learned colleagues. Scholars have shown that by the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries such defence reflected rhetorical posturing more than political reality. This article examines self-help medical literature in 19th-century Canada, revealing that authors adopted a similar stance in writing for the public. Not only did this rhetorical convention continue, but it also did not assure adoption of the plain style advocated. Moreover, a comparison of their style with that of medical textbook authors reveals few real differences.

The present study investigates the experiences of 17 children—all designated by school evaluators as “remedial” readers—as they interpreted and performed text through classroom theatre. Through participant observation, audio and video recording, artifacts, and interviews, the patterns of children’s text interpretation were analyzed to show how these children learned to take on the roles of actor, character, and critic in planning, performing, and evaluating their performances. As actors, the children were provided with opportunities to shoulder the “mantle of expertise,” experiencing the creative and critical features of a dramatic curriculum. As critics, the children learned to emphasize the roles of rules, resources, and the bases for common knowledge in their dramatic interpretations. As characters, they shifted perspective from self to other through voice, physical action, and connection to other characters. This year-long study details how these children moved from a perception of drama as uninhibited expression much influenced by media experiences to a perception of the bounded and negotiated nature of theatrical production influenced by careful text interpretation.

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Complex noun phrases, although key elements in technical writing for linguistically mature readers, also present major comprehension difficulties for others. This article establishes many important ways of paraphrasing complex noun phrases into simpler structures, and identifies the differences in meaning, style, is tone, and emphasis created by the paraphrases. Whereas many complex noun phrases at the start of the sentence can be easily paraphrased, those at the end of the sentence or embedded within the sentence present greater challenges. Similarly restrictive post-modifiers are easier to paraphrase than those that define. The principles are applied to a short legal text.

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 investigation sought to determine how the active meaning-making process of 10 sixth-grade students with above average reading and writing ability was reflected in their written responses to four books of realistic fiction. Students kept literature response journals to record their ongoing thoughts and reflections during the reading process. The nine-point categorization scheme that emerged from the content of students’ responses was used to analyze the journals of 4 of these students in order to determine individual response styles. Further analysis revealed the sequence of response for these 4 students during each quarter of their reading and writing. The study suggests how complex and unique response to literature is for even upper elementary and middle school students

What is the role of conventions in business writing? Too often, textbook samples of business writing are removed from their original contexts. If we invite students to analyze these models for specific textual features, we teach them methods of formalist evaluation, but we fail to teach them ways in which they can learn to analyze and respond to specific contexts, see the subtle ways in which texts are inflected with many voices, and actively participate in the cultural conversation of the business community. This article moves from a critique of conventions to theories of context and intertext; these theories are applied to case studies of both professional and student business writing practices to analyze how rhetorical exchanges shape conventions and communication.

Rhetorical voice is rarely discussed in business, professional, or technical communication textbooks, despite its strategic importance in aligning writer and audience so that persuasion can occur. This article identifies those aspects of the rhetorical situation that shape voice and presents a heuristic that writers can use to identify the components of voice and to construct their personae.

This article discusses two conflicts occurring during the first decade of the Royal Society (1660–1670). One conflict concerned the proper method of scientific experimentation, the other the proper writing style for communicating scientific knowledge. Following the method proposed by taxonomists, language would be a vehicle for representing the order of reality in its undisturbed state. Following the method proposed by conjecturalists, language would be a means for constructing a theory and arguing for its validity. Members of the Society were divided over these crucial questions, as evident in scientific documents of the period as well as in Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society. Parallels to this division are present in contemporary issues in technical writing, and this article closes by discussing some implications for teaching, practice, and theory.

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The roles of physicians and nurses working in trauma centers are mirrored in their writing. Physicians must focus intensely on patients' injuries if lives are to be saved. Their professional prose is correspondingly, and appropriately, focused, with attention given to injuries and their repair. The doctors' partners in the admitting area, trauma nurses, adopt a holistic view, caring for patients' physiologic and psychologic stability. Nurses tend to be more comprehensive in their writing, describing patients as individuals, the families involved, and the threatening and encouraging events that emerge during recovery. Although the distance and impersonal nature of medical writing, as a subset of technical writing, is criticized by technical writing scholars, published works by trauma surgeons may require exactly those characteristics. Perhaps a reflection of that disparity, medical publishers give mixed messages regarding style to physicians and nurses who choose to be authors.

Technical books for women of the English Renaissance provide a microcosm for studying connections among the emergence of technical writing as a genre, the rise of literacy, expansion of knowledge and technology, and replacement of orality by textuality as a result of increasing knowledge. These books on Renaissance technologies such as cooking, carving, household “physick,” home management, silkworm production, farming and estate management, midwifery, medical self-diagnosis, and gardening exhibit some differences from technical books written for men. Books for women are shorter and less detailed, but their style is similar to that of books for men. The style does not suggest writers believed that their women readers possessed an inferior reading comprehension level. Content differences seem to suggest that women's work was different from men's with many skills taught by oral transmission. The increasing complexity of the styles of technical books for women during the 16th and early 17th centuries suggests that women's reading skills increased as knowledge increased. Thus the oral style of the early 16th-century technical books disappeared with the need for an analytical style that would better convey growth of knowledge in the English Renaissance.

Researchers have frequently examined the effects of sentence combining (SC) practice upon writing and found positive results. Researchersh ave also investigatedt he effects of writing practice on reading comprehension. But these results have been mixed because of problems in design, the measures used, instructional variables, and the lack of a theoretical base to explain divergent outcomes. The purpose of the current study was to identify effects of SC practice upon reading comprehension and to determine whether cohesion knowledge would be augmented and, if so, whether enhanced cohesion knowledge would affect comprehension. Sixty- five grade 4 students met with a researcherf or 16 instructional sessions. Students in the experimental group devised narratives from sets of cued and uncued kernel sentences, while the control group read compiled narratives developed by the experimental group and then completed crossword puzzles, a “placebo” treatment. The study found statistically significant results on the Stanford Reading Test, positive results approaching significance on cloze passages with structure /function word deletions, but no positive results on passages with content word deletions. These results indicate that SC practice may have enhanced cohesion knowledge and general comprehension. They also suggest that children may effectively learn to attend to semantic and syntactic repetitions that form “chains of cohesion” following SC practice but not after merely reading the same texts.

Advice for writers of business communication implies that certain stylistic conventions will contribute to the effectiveness of that communication. The case for improved readability and comprehension which arose from high-impact style is well made; however, a comprehensive review of the literature reveals little consideration as to the impact of the effect of writing style on behavior. To test the effect of writing style on compliance with instructions, the authors operationalized effectiveness as compliance with written instructions and conducted a field test involving 129 military officers. Instructions inviting subjects to obtain certain study materials were prepared in accordance with high-impact, low-impact, and high-impact with bottom line last prescriptions, and were provided to each of three randomly formed groups. Subjects in the group who received high-impact instructions complied with those instructions at a significantly higher rate than the group which received instructions in the low-impact style. Compliance data collected in the study also indicates that high-impact style elicits more timely compliance with instructions and that bottom-line first instructions may be more effective than other styles. The study generally validates the presumption that high-impact writing style is positively correlated with effectiveness in eliciting a desired behavioral response.

This article analyzes postaccident investigation reports from a feminist perspective to show (a) how the conventions of public discourse privilege the rational (male) objective voice and silence human suffering, (b) how the notion of expertise excludes women's experiential knowledge, (c) how the conventions of public discourse sanction the exclusion of alternative voices and thus perpetuate salient and silent power structures, and (d) how interpretation strategies that fail to consider unstated assumptions about gender, power, authority, and expertise seriously compromise the health, safety, and lives of miners—and in a broader sense—all of those who are dependent on technology for their personal safety.

Technical writing theory and research about communication in large organizations mostly ignore from-the-top control of rhetoric. The usual emphasis on an individual writer negotiating with a known audience and generally free to decide on matters of style, organization, and so on can hide the ways that power relations often silently control internal rhetoric. Conclusions are based on two case studies: In the later Middle Ages, professional letters had to conform to a rhetorical format that necessarily foregrounded unequal power relations. In a contemporary nuclear power station, similar power relations purposely obscure writer and audience while procedures dictate format and content.

The style of discourse underlying writing instruction in this country, which has been termed essayist literacy by Scollon and Scollon and others, is grounded historically and culturally in the development of Western civilization. This style of discourse is the register of English used in academic situations, and it also has been found to be characteristic of some educated (especially male) mainstream speakers in other contexts. Because this register often differs from the naturally acquired discourse styles of students from nonmainstream groups, many such students face difficulties in writing instruction that mainstream students do not face. Given the importance of the essayist literacy register in this society, it is important (a) to make the characteristics of this discourse style explicit in order to increase the likelihood that writing instruction will be clear and available to all students, and (b) to learn about other discourse styles that are already known and used by students from a range of communities. A conceptual framework from the ethnography of communication is presented for studying verbal performances in different cultural contexts, and two examples of persuasive oral performances from ongoing research among Mexican immigrants are analyzed within this framework.

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

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This article quantifies specific elements of technical writing style in five award winning technical manuals where combined averages for the style elements are calculated. When these results are compared to what is generally regarded as good technical writing, the results show that the elements of style vary widely between the individual manuals examined. While attempting to define a good technical writing style, the value of such studies must be commented on.

This article proposes a method for examining how disciplinary differences in knowledge making are created or reflected at the sentence level. The method focuses on the grammatical subjects of sentences as key indicators of disciplinary knowledge making. Grammatical subjects of all sentences in sample academic journal articles were classified by a system identifying (a) the kind of abstraction or particularism involved and (b) the ways in which the researcher may or may not have foregrounded research methods and warrants. Findings from the sample articles in subfields of psychology, history, and literature indicated that psychology articles were more likely to foreground research methods and warrants and least likely to be particularistic. History articles tended to be intermediate. Literature articles were most likely to be particularistic and least likely to focus on research methods and warrants.

Teachers of writing regularly face the task of advising students about their work-in-progress. The task is problematic because it raises many practical and theoretical issues. Not least is the ethical issue of rights and responsibilities with respect to texts. Researchers recommend that a teacher must somehow make it possible for students to take control of their own writing. A responsible teacher, then, would be a responsive reader, one who helps students identify and solve writing problems but, in the course of suggesting how they might do so, avoids unwittingly appropriating the draft. Responsible students would, in turn, be their own best readers, taking responsibility for solving writing problems of their own making. Therefore, among the many important questions faced by teachers and raised by researchers is how to make comments that respect the differences between a teacher's and a student's responsibility to an emerging text.

Rhetorical criticism, as it has developed over the past five decades or so, has taken on many agendas-for example, neo-Aristotelian criticism, movement studies, dramatistic criticism, genre criticism-all of which have been attempts to apply, reconstruct, or improve on a long tradition. What is striking about this body of critical literature is that none of it takes very seriously one of the paramount concerns of that tradition-namely, style. Indeed, a survey of the periodical literature shows that there persists a fundamental neglect of in both the theory and the practice of rhetorical criticism.1 Various theoretical and critical practices represented in this body of literature suggest that is a frustratingly elusive and amorphous creature, stubbornly resisting description. Most of the material does not venture much beyond theory and is, for the critic, consequently inadequate, for it falls short of a level of analysis that would reveal how rhetoric works. As a result, rhetorical criticism does not provide a useful critical approach to reading a discursive text. In one respect, this shows that some incisive remarks about the importance of in criticism and the neglect thereof which Donald Bryant made over thirty years ago have been either disregarded or forgotten. Moreover, I argue that both the interpretation of discourse (criticism) and the production of discourse (composition) can profit from careful attention to rhetorical style. For if, as Bryant2 has suggested, style is the final elaboration of meaning, then surely is the initial encounter through which auditors apprehend meaning. Does it not seem reasonable that ought play a major role in the critical act of the analysis of discourse? However, granting that has been neglected, I now must explain what I mean by style. To begin, Bryant has urged us to regard it not as the mere department of elocutio but that in dispositio and even inventio participate. Bryant argues: It is difficult at best to consider the functioning language of discourse without becoming involved at once with the ordering of the discourse. Furthermore, if we go beyond the static idea of disposition as arrangement, to the potentially dynamic idea of disposition as disposing, as Wagner thought necessary, we may conclude that for the critic the two names signify the two lenses for a stereopticon view of a

Prescriptions for scientific writing about jargon and the passive voice are based on principles of writing presumed to be universal. They do not take into account that language varies with rhetorical setting, that scientists report their research to peer scientists, and that simplification of scientific language is more often translation than synonymy. Jargon, i.e., scientific terminology, is essential for designating new entities for which the language has no name. It makes for economy and for the accuracy and precision required in scientific research. The passive voice is unavoidable because scientists focus on the subject of their research as objects. The proscription of the passive voice and scientific jargon is rooted in the expectation that scientists write so as to be understood by the general reader.