Because of the recent emphasis on rhetorical context in business and technical writing (BTW) instruction, the problem-solving case has become a staple in BTW classrooms. However, a number of critics have voiced concerns about the use of the rhetorical case. These concerns recall an ancient debate among Roman rhetoricians over an early case-study method called declamation. For contemporary theorists, the debate over case study revolves around its value as a stimulant to problem-solving skills, its ability to imitate the realistic circumstances of professional BTW, and its emphasis on persona and audience along with its deemphasis of the teacher. A full spectrum of arguments on these and other issues in the case-study debate indicates that the discipline is entering a new phase in its deliberations over the role of problem-solving and pragmatics in the BTW classroom.

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Computer programs for analyzing writing style have grown in number and sophistication over the past decade, and the coming decade will see more and more of them. In order to know the capabilities and limitations of such programs and to decide if any of them are right for you, it is important to understand how they work. In this article, the author draws on his background in computational linguistics to explain how computerized style analyzers accomplish the things that they do.

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

(1989). Voice merging and self‐making: The epistemology of “I have a dream”. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 23-31.

Modern professionals commonly write documents to be signed by superiors, but are seldom taught how to do this. If students are successfully to fulfill everyday organizational writing tasks, they must learn to master skills of impersonating viewpoint, style and even personality. To teach such skills, we can adapt the ancient exercise of prosopopoeia or impersonation, either by varying the personas of standard textbook exercises, or by making use of the technical writing case study, or by having students impersonate professionals who were involved in famous (or infamous) current events.

Early American science writers used the Puritan plain style sermon as a readily available prose model. From the sermon they derived an organization divided into doctrine and uses, a format using sectional divisions and heads, the use of simple language, and a concern for the needs of their audiences. Essays on comets by two early American scientists, Samuel Danforth and John Winthrop, illustrate the sermon's influence. The doctrine and uses organization employed in these essays may be seen as analogous, in some senses, to the Results and Discussion organization of the modern research report.

Technical writers need a historical perspective in order to distinguish between enduring and transitory writing standards, to understand the variety of past styles in building future styles, and to give the profession a better sense of self-identity. To overcome the problems in developing a historical perspective, such as a dearth of artifacts to examine and the peculiarities in rhetorical time and place which undercut attempts to generalize on historical information, the 200 year-old federal collection of patents is offered as a solution. This collection of patents is also very often the only remaining written work of the ordinary mechanic of the nineteenth century, and this collection truly reflects technical not legal, business, or science writing.

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Introspection suggests that both writers and readers experience auditory imagery of intonation, accents, and hesitations. The suggestion here is that certain important aspects of this “covert prosody” of written language are reflected in punctuation. In order to study systematically the degree to which punctuation reflects the covert prosody of written language, one would like to find independent ways of uncovering that prosody. Two such ways are explored here: reading aloud and “repunctuating” (inserting punctuation in passages from which the author's punctuation has been removed). The article focuses especially on the relation between “punctuation units” (stretches of language between punctuation marks) and the “intonation units” of speech, and the variations in this relation that are found among different authors and different styles. It explores the degree to which different pieces of writing are prosodically spokenlike, and the degree to which they capture the prosodic imagery of ordinary readers. “Close” and “open” punctuation are discussed, as are selected grammatical sites at which there is a discrepancy between punctuation and prosody. It is suggested that an awareness of prosodic imagery is an important ingredient of “good writing.”

In their freshman year in college, Puerto Rican students take composition courses in both Spanish and English. Although the rhetorical structure of the final product, the composition, may respond to national writing styles in the two languages, studies show the composition process to be similar. Writing instructors in either language find similar problems in student compositions, regardless of the language code used. One of the difficulties students have in both languages is blocking, or apprehension about writing. Although some aspects of the composition process may be universal, we assumed that in bilingual writers the source of writing block depended on the language used. This article presents the results of a questionnaire designed to determine the sources of bilingual students' apprehension in writing by considering three groups of bilingual writers: graduate students in English, freshman English composition students, and freshman Spanish composition students. The results suggest some insights on the nature of blocking in a native language (Spanish) and a second language (English), which may then lead to ways of helping bilingual students to overcome blocking.

One lesson to be learned from the fatal decision to launch Challenger is that effective technical and group communication requires more than the fidelious exchange of information. This article examines testimony gathered by the Presidential Commission on the Challenger Accident and reveals communication failures in four dimensions of group differentiation—clarity, interrelatedness, centrality, and openness. The article illustrates all four dimensions with excerpts from the Commission Hearings and identifies communication problems peculiar to highly technical groups.

Hedges, which signal writers' tentative assessments of referential information, were added to a passage from both a science and a social studies textbook. The hedges appeared in either personal or impersonal voice; in the first half, second half, or both halves of the passages; and in either a low-intensity condition or a high-intensity condition. A measure of what subjects learned from reading the passages showed that they learned most when the hedges appeared in personal voice, the second half of a passage, and low intensity. Some extensions of the implications of this work to practices in composition classes—particularly practices of evaluating whether or not material should be hedged—are recommended in order to broaden students' critical-thinking abilities and their views of language.

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In the new world of writing across the curriculum, English departments are still trying to find their role. They have been in charge of writing instruction for so long that they often feel that they should institute, or at least lead, writingacross-the-curriculum programs. But I want to argue that the English department should have no special role in writing across the curriculum-no unique leadership role and no exclusive classes to teach-not even freshman composition. Instead, a writing-across-the-curriculum program should be designed, administered, and taught equally by all departments. True writing across the curriculum should be based on dialogue among all the departments, and, in this dialogue, the English department should be only one of the voices.

This article is concerned with reviews, surveys, tests, and other formal procedures used in writing for the computer industry that are designed to provide authors and publications managers with information about the quality and nature of documentation. The literature in this area reveals a number of problems with feedback in hightech writing, including the lack of a consistent definition of feedback processes. The article investigates various types of reviews, theoretical aspects of feedback, and elements of feedback specific to hightech writing. This investigation yields three consistent perspectives on feedback: management, style and rhetoric, and research.

This article surveys and analyzes the contemporary reception of Plato's rhetorical theory in contemporary rhetoric and composition studies by examining the response from three current perspectives: (1) presenting Plato as completely against rhetoric; (2) leaving Plato out of rhetoric altogether; and (3) interpreting Plato's work as raising issues central to classical and contemporary rhetoric. The discussion of the first two responses to Plato's relationship to rhetoric reveals a reductive, or formulaic, presentation of classical rhetoric. The discussion of the third perspective shows that it is the most accurate interpretation. Plato's rhetoric is related to the traditional five canons that were prominent in Greek rhetoric and explicitly systematized in Roman rhetoric, beginning with the Rhetorica Ad Herennium. If Plato's extensive contribution to the last two of the classical canons of rhetoric, memory and delivery, were more commonly included in the historicizing of rhetoric, then the five canons would work in the fullness of their interaction, rather than as the three-part system (invention, arrangement, and style) that dominates much current interpretation of classical rhetoric. Examples of reintegration of Plato into classical rhetoric (the third perspective) leads to a conclusion that Plato's rhetoric is central to contemporary interpretations of classical rhetoric.

We evaluated scientists' abilities to process two writing styles, active and nominal in comprehension and reading speed, and determined their preferences for these styles. International scientists (with English as a first, second, or third language) were tested. Results show scientists comprehend nominal style as well as active style but process nominal style more slowly. Scientists with lower levels of English experience have proportionately greater difficulty processing nominal style than active style. Scientists prefer active writing to nominal writing and rate scientists who write actively higher than those who write nominally. Scientists should use more active style and technical editors should apply a heavy hand to nominal style.

Technical periodicals and proceedings have been important instruments for transmitting news about scientific and technological discoveries for more than 300 years. The first such publications appeared amidst the birth of modem science when, for the first time, emphasis was placed on experiment as the basis for advancement of knowledge. Discussed in this article are the origin of the technical periodical and proceedings and their characteristics up to the end of the 18th century and the analysis of the writing style in an important technical paper written by Isaac Newton and published in 1672.

This article draws upon data collected in a five-month study of primary grade writers to illustrate dimensions of variation in how young children orchestrate or manage the complex writing process. The observed children, all members of an integrated urban public school classroom, varied in the degree to which they focused on the diverse message forming and encoding demands of the writing activity and in when they maintained that focus. These differences may have existed, in part, because of differences in how the children made use of the available sources of support for their composing; that is, they differed in the degree to which other symbolic media (pictures and talk) and other children shaped their individual writing efforts. The children's composing behaviors were consistent with their apparent intentions and with their styles as symbolizers and socializers in their classroom. Viewing differences in children's ways of composing from the perspective of linear or uniform conceptions of writing growth may mask the holistic sense of each child's behavior.

Twenty-three stimulating papers, including essays by Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, and William Strong, selected from the more than sixty presented at the Second Miami University Conference on Sentence Combining and the Teaching of Writing.Sentence combining has not only survived the paradigm shift in the teaching of writing but continues to stimulate provocative, creative thinking about the writing process itself. No longer an end in itself, but a tool, sentence combining has become a method of teaching about ways of thinking, of perceiving, and of organizing reality.

Two studies investigated the editing strategies used by college basic writing (BW) students as they went about correcting sentence-level errors in controlled editing tasks. One study involved simple word processing, and a second involved an interactive editor that supplemented the word-processing program, giving students feedback on their correction attempts and helping them focus on the errors. In both studies BW students showed two clearly different editing strategies, a consulting strategy in which grammatical rules were consulted and an intuiting strategy in which the sound of the text was assessed for “goodness” in a rather naturalistic way. Students consistently used their intuiting strategies more effectively; however, errors requiring consulting strategies showed a larger improvement after intervention by the interactive editor. Cognitive implications of the editing strategies are discussed in terms of the requisite knowledge involved in successful application of each strategy.

Introductions to research articles (RAs) have become an important site for the analysis of academic writing. However, analysts have apparently not considered whether RA introductions typically include statements of principal findings. In contrast, this issue is often addressed in the manuals and style guides surveyed, most advocating the desirability of announcing principal findings (APFs) in RA introductions. Therefore, a study of actual practice in two leading journals from two different fields (physics and educational psychology) was undertaken. In the Physical Review 45% of the introductions sampled contained APFs (with some increase in percentage over the last 40 years), while in the Journal of Educational Psychology the percentage fell to under 7%. These figures are at variance with the general trend of recommendations in primary and secondary sources. Thus preliminary evidence points to (a) a mismatch between descriptive practice and prescriptive advice and (b) diversity in this rhetorical feature between the two fields.

the writer's audience. Writing involves moving material from the inside the outside. We need only consult a few recent composition texts see how this inner/outer metaphor shapes the language we use talk about teaching writing. We tell students that the writer's mind is a kind of a box-a storehouse or reservoir, a pool of thoughts, filled with tremendous reserves draw upon. We speak of student writers opening the lid of the mind in order free what is stored inside. As teachers of writing, we want help students tap these sources, sift through your memory, and dredge up ideas. We want help students overcome writer's block, to unlock your mind and release information.' To make this happen, we talk about brainstorming, in which we make a frontal assault open the stronghold of the mind. And when this happens, we call the effect linguistic fluency, the flowing outward of inner speech from the reservoir of the mind. The dualism of this inner/outer metaphor, moreover, permeates much of the discourse of composition studies. Writing, many teachers, researchers, and theorists assume, begins inside, in the inner speech of private verbal thought, and is only gradually transformed into the outer written speech of public text. We habitually think of the process of composing as a movement from monologue, where writers address primarily themselves, dialogue, where writers address others. In this view composing transforms what is inside the writer's head into an external text that can stand by itself. Composing, that is, converts the associative, idiosyncratic, self-referential language that writers use talk themselves into autonomous texts that supply the interpretive contexts, logical connections, and explicit meanings readers expect of public discourse. James Britton's expressive and transactional functions, Janet Emig's reflexive and extensive modes of writing, and Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose, however they may differ in conception and formulation, all assume the polarity of private and public language and an inner-to-outer directionality in composing, a movement, as Flower puts it, from thinking in code

When teachers talk about the good qualities of student writing, one of their favorite terms is voice. Good student writing has it; bad student writing doesn't. Voice is sometimes a sign of control, of ethos, of style. It is often associated with persona or mask. But it is also often associated with something Peter Elbow in Writing with Power calls juice-a combination of magic potion, mother's milk, and electricity (286). When we read writing that has this juice, we feel the pulse of a writer churning over the facts the world presents (Ruszkiewicz, Well Bound Words 67); we sense the energy, humor, individuality, music, rhythm, pace, flow, surprise, believability (Murray, Write to Learn 144); we hear the voice of a real person speaking to real people (Lannon, The Writing Process 14). And while this voice-as-juice seems to have gained a considerable amount of respectability lately, it brings with it a kind of evangelical zeal that may not do us any good at all.

Scientists and engineers have to present technical information effectively. But when they do it, they face language difficulties which are beyond formal grammar as taught at school. To overcome this problem, we designed a systematic course for technical writing aimed at breaking such language barriers by planned channeling of the scientific message. The course was designed to improve the communication skills of scientists and engineers. In keeping with this goal effective writing criteria were defined and formal presentation conventions were described. Because Hebrew is the common language in Israel, problems of Hebrew structures were presented. The massive infiltration of vocabulary and syntactic elements from foreign languages into scientists' Hebrew style were addressed. An evaluation apparatus was also applied and future prospects of the course were discussed.

Although engineering departments were dissatisfied with early twentieth-century technical writing teaching methods, those methods were not simply a result of “anti-science” attitudes. In fact, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composition teachers tried to accommodate the influx of applied science students by teaching correctness and clarity of style and stressing the expository modes of writing. Emphasis on “clarity” was a legacy of rhetoricians like Hugh Blair of the eighteenth century. Emphasis on expository modes was a legacy of the nineteenth-century rhetoricians' interest in the inductive methodology of “pure” science, a method which implied invention by “observation” and made conclusions “self-evident”: argument was unnecessary since observations and methods only need to be explained to “convince.” Applied science departments were, in reality, dissatisfied with teaching methods based on “pure” rather than “applied” science methodology.

This essay examines narrative choices in experimental (interpretive) and traditional (analytical) ethnographies. The material covered includes probability in quantitative and qualitative research; ethnographic narratives as ways of knowing and telling about the world; perspective as a consequence of both narrative stance and narrative voice; and the economics of producing interpretations and analyses in academic prose. Underlying the argument is the assumption that decisions ethnographers make about what to tell and how to tell it are influenced by to whom they plan to tell it and under what circumstances. Hence the ethnographer's narrative dilemma glosses over the epistomological crisis that authorship raises for the social sciences, namely, whether the researcher or the research method is telling the story.

As a concept of rhetoric in technical writing, relevance involves an awareness of time. The report deals with the past; the manual, with the present; the proposal, with the future. To be considered relevant, however, all the modes of technical writing must relate to the present reality of the audience. Writers must recognize this need not only as it influences grammar and style but also as it affects larger concerns of organization and tone. Realizing that the temporal classification of modem reports, manuals, and proposals correlates with Aristotle's designation of forensic, epideictic, and deliberative discourse, technical writers can discover a body of rhetorical theory on which to base choices about selection, arrangement, and presentation of subject matter.

A study was undertaken both to evaluate how medical students are taught to write patient records and to examine the writing done by doctors. Typical medical records, written by medical doctors, were also evaluated. A single questionnaire was sent to eighty-four medical school professors, twenty law school faculty, and five practicing attorneys. The questionnaire asked how medical records were used and what the legal implications were in authoring a patient record. The medical professionals were also asked how their schools taught medical writing. The questionnaire pointed out that most medical schools teach less than ten hours of medical writing in their curricula and that patient records are not written with an understanding of the various audiences, purposes, and uses for medical documents. Two radiology reports are discussed in terms of their clarity and usefulness for medical and extra-medical readers. The study concludes that medical students should be taught a composing process so that they will understand the audience, purpose, and use for the patient records they write.

This pilot study investigated relationships between individual differences in levels of writing skills and proficiencies at simultaneous and successive cognitive processing. Data from a group of 46 subjects indicate that scores on successive processing tasks were able to predict final grades in an introductory English composition course (p&lt;.01). This suggested both the possibility and importance of investigating further how simultaneous and (especially) successive processing relate to writing skills. With three subjects used for pilot data, low scores in successive processing showed relationships with sentence-level errors and with the ability to develop sequences of ideas in writing. Low scores in simultaneous processing correlated with an inability to indicate clear relationships between sentences and paragraphs. Planning, a third cognitive factor, was found to be a powerful influence in organizing content. In the interaction of planning and simultaneous processing, lack of planning ability may interfere with the writer's ability to survey and thus organize his or her material.

(1986). The current‐traditional theory of style: An informal history. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 233-250.

Two hypotheses are outlined about the reasons for obscurity in expository writing. Neither accounts adequately for the general results of an exploratory study of the writing of postgraduates nor for the individual cases I present by way of illustration. A crucial factor, I suggest, is a person's implicit model of expository writing. Many of our subjects assume that the purpose of technical writing is to compress thought. I argue, on the contrary, that clarity is achieved through expansion.

Some theoreticians and practitioners view editing as a superficial task, often no more than the mindless following of a set of prescriptive rules for grammar, syntax, and style. In addition, the editor-author relationship is typically perceived as an interaction between an editor and words. However, drawing upon rhetoric and cognitive psychology, I argue in this article for the complexity and importance of the editing process and the writer-editor relationship. This perspective is tentatively supported by a study of the revising and editing patterns of professional and experienced writers. The study suggests that revising and editing may be equally complex tasks. Further, the complexity increases if editors and authors discuss their changes as opposed to legislating them. Several methods for imparting this perspective and related knowledge to students are discussed.

Stylistic analysis of scientific and technical prose reveals that technical and non-technical expository prose share a number of common characteristics; consequently, common assumptions about a clear stylistic separation between scientific and literary writing are faulty. Technical prose, moreover, possesses a number of rhetorical features which further increase its likeness to literary writing. Both style and rhetoric of technical writing thus point toward non-referential functions in scientific discourse, including the operation of significant cultural codes.

By studying a selection of business and technical texts, one can determine the functions of and the interactions between passive voice, nominalizations, and expressions of agency. One discovers that the distinction between dynamic and stative uses of verbs is crucial for understanding the various functions of passive sentences and nominalizations in business and technical writing. Then the functions of passive sentences and nominalizations are enumerated and illustrated with sentences from business and technical texts before discussing the various devices for expressing agency in passive and nominalized sentences. Only by understanding the various functions of these sentence types can instructors of business and technical writing offer specific and practical advice.

Although George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language” offers good advice to writers, the technical writer's situation and use of language are more effectively discussed in 1984 and its Appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak.” The technical writer must make use of some Newspeak principles, such as limiting vocabulary and narrowing the definition of words; conversely, the writer must try to keep his expression of a corporate point of view and his limitations on wording from finally serving to limit the range of thought itself. Orwell considers these points much more important than “good prose style.”