From early romanticism to more recent post-structuralist and post-colonial studies, all the possibilities and impossibilities that are inherent in translation have fueled debate about authorship, intent, readership, functional equivalence, world view, the building of national literatures, power differentials, ethics, and gender issues—among many others. And, of course, about the nature of “meaning,” as the alleged sole legal tender of “all things translation.” Translation has less often been scrutinized as a form of rhetorical transaction: fundamentally, all translations are attempts, in and of themselves, to persuade their readership about some degree of correspondence with their source. However, the relationship between Translation and Rhetoric surpasses this ontological threshold of persuasion and metatextual transcendence in a far more sophisticated way, exceeding also the sheer plane of textual mechanics. This paper seeks to demonstrate how a systematic inclusion of rhetoric-centered approaches in Translation Studies, and vice versa, would cross-fertilize not just those two fields, but how it also would help to shed light on some areas where a monolingual focus has all too often imposed significant limitations to progress. It will also provide a quick overview of what I define as a “Rhetoric of Meaning in Translation Studies,” and will also explore how the study of rhetorical correspondence at the micro level in source and target languages and texts may be substantially hindered by significant structural disparities at the macro level that may have not been systematically or successfully incorporated in the wider theoretical framework of Translation Studies.

Review Article| April 01 2017 Composing at the Threshold: Collaborative Composition and Innovative Form Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. Edited by Adler-Kassner, Linda and Wardle, Elizabeth. Utah State University Press, 2016. 232 pages. Rebecca C. Conklin Rebecca C. Conklin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2017) 17 (2): 359–365. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3770261 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Rebecca C. Conklin; Composing at the Threshold: Collaborative Composition and Innovative Form. Pedagogy 1 April 2017; 17 (2): 359–365. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3770261 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 by Duke University Press2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Background: A shift of focus has been marked in recent years in the development of automated essay scoring systems (AES) passing from merely assigning a holistic score to an essay to providing constructive feedback over it. Despite all the major advances in the domain, many objections persist concerning their credibility and readiness to replace human scoring in high-stakes writing assessments. The purpose of this study is to shed light on how to build a relatively simple AES system based on five baseline writing features. The study shows that the proposed AES system compares very well with other state-of-the-art systems despite its obvious limitations. Literature Review: In 2012, ASAP (Automated Student Assessment Prize) launched a demonstration to benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art AES systems using eight hand-graded essay datasets originating from state writing assessments. These datasets are still used today to measure the accuracy of new AES systems. Recently, Zupanc and Bosnic (2017) developed and evaluated another state-of-the-art AES system, called SAGE, which enclosed new semantic and consistency features and provided for the first time an automatic semantic feedback. SAGE’s agreement level between machine and human scores for ASAP dataset #8 (the dataset also of interest in this study) was measured and had a quadratic weighted kappa of 0.81, while it ranged for 10 other state-of-the-art systems between 0.60 and 0.73 (Chen et al., 2012; Shermis, 2014). Finally, this section discusses the limitations of AES, which come mainly from its omission to assess higher-order thinking skills that all writing constructs are ultimately designed to assess. Research Questions: The research questions that guide this study are as follows: RQ1: What is the power of the writing analytics tool’s five-variable model (spelling accuracy, grammatical accuracy, semantic similarity, connectivity, lexical diversity) to predict the holistic scores of Grade 10 narrative essays (ASAP dataset #8)? RQ2: What is the agreement level between the computer rater based on the regression model obtained in RQ1 and the human raters who scored the 723 narrative essays written by Grade 10 students (ASAP dataset #8)? Methodology: ASAP dataset #8 was used to train the predictive model of the writing analytics tool introduced in this study. Each essay was graded by two teachers. In case of disagreement between the two raters, the scoring was resolved by a third rater. Basically, essay scores were the weighted sums of four rubric scores. A multiple linear regression analysis was conducted to determine the extent to which a five-variable model (selected from a set of 86 writing features) was effective to predict essay scores. Results: The regression model in this study accounted for 57% of the essay score variability. The correlation (Pearson), the percentage of perfect matches, the percentage of adjacent matches (±2), and the quadratic weighted kappa between the resolved scores and predicted essay scores were 0.76, 10%, 49%, and 0.73, respectively. The results were measured on an integer scale of resolved essay scores between 10-60. Discussion: When measuring the accuracy of an AES system, it is important to take into account several metrics to better understand how predicted essay scores are distributed along the distribution of human scores. Using average ranking over correlation, exact/adjacent agreement, quadratic weighted kappa, and distributional characteristics such as standard deviation and mean, this study’s regression model ranks 4th out of 10 AES systems. Despite its relatively good rank, the predictions of the proposed AES system remain imprecise and do not even look optimal to identify poor-quality essays (binary condition) smaller than or equal to a 65% threshold (71% precision and 92% recall). Conclusions: This study sheds light on the implementation process and the evaluation of a new simple AES system comparable to the state of the art and reveals that the generally obscure state-of-the-art AES system is most likely concerned only with shallow assessment of text production features. Consequently, the authors advocate greater transparency in the development and publication of AES systems. In addition, the relationship between the explanation of essay score variability and the inter-rater agreement level should be further investigated to better represent the changes in terms of level of agreement when a new variable is added to a regression model. This study should also be replicated at a larger scale in several different writing settings for more robust results.

Books reviewed: Naming What We Know:Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies First-Year Composition: From Theory to Practice

When Hawthorne traveled north to Niagara Falls, he was on a journey of self-discovery as much as he was on a writer’s journey to see America and sketch its beauty. In June, 2016, I journeyed 740+ miles roundtrip to see Niagara Falls for one brief day. My journey was both similar to, and monumentally different from, Hawthorne’s.As many have said, the Horseshoe Falls of Canada—undoubtedly more splendid than the American Falls, which are stunning in themselves—are nearly indescribable. When Hawthorne went to Niagara in search of the sublime and the grand in America, he dramatically restrained himself from immediately viewing the falls, worried they would not meet the expectations set by numerous authors’ tour books he had read or that his experience would be tainted by that of others who had not yet seen the falls for themselves. He first listened to their roar. Then, when he allowed himself to see the falls, he spent days and nights trying to apprehend them for himself. His final view of the falls was from the famed Table Rock on the Canadian side. While Hawthorne struggled with tasteful tourism and criticized tourists who viewed the falls through others’ eyes (ah, he would have had a few problems with me thinking about him and his trip), or who consider manmade feats more admirable, he seemed to most want to just be with the falls—sitting alone, contemplating, and communing with them. By the end of his visit, Hawthorne was able to meditate deeply on the falls despite the presence of other people. He simply “got it,” as we might say.The Niagara Falls that both Hawthorne and I saw are majestic and amazing. What words really can describe them? I spent hours simply looking: snapping some photos (while Hawthorne could only sketch with words), sitting and staring, or closing my eyes to muse by its roar. For nearly two hours, I watched the late afternoon sun-bow shift with my position and perspective, coloring the scene through the mist.Nonetheless, the Niagara Falls that I viewed are vastly different from those Hawthorne experienced. For example, only in the eighteenth century had Table Rock, on which he and other nineteenth century tourists sat, emerged from the water itself—part of the erosive power natural to waterfalls. In 1818, 1828, and 1829, parts of Table Rock broke off in minor rock falls. Hawthorne sat upon their remnant. In 1850, nearly a third of Table Rock collapsed, thundering into the gorge (“Table Rock, Niagara Falls”). Today, after other rock falls and a dynamite blast in 1939, there remains only a bronze tablet marking the mid-point of Table Rock, pointing visitors to its remains—and Hawthorne’s seat—below (see Photo 1). Photo 1.The author at Table Rock.The falls themselves also changed. In the early nineteenth century, both the American and the Horseshoe Falls were much closer to Table Rock, which their water flow had shaped over tens of thousands of years. For example, according to “Online Niagara,” the Horseshoe Falls eroded approximately 3.8 feet annually from 1842 (the first year of official study) to 1905. The erosion changed to 2.3 feet annually until 1927, after which the diversion of water through hydroelectric power stations diminished the erosion to approximately 1 foot annually. (By contrast, the American Falls now are eroding at a mere 3–4 inches annually, although their erosion rate was once much higher.) Today, one must walk over one hundred yards further in approaching the threshold of the falls. When Hawthorne watched the falls from Table Rock, unencumbered by the railings and fences that marked my journey, he sat at the edge of the falls themselves. Did his feet kick stones to the mist below?Water treaties between America and Canada were instituted in 1909 and 1950 (“A River Diversion”). They continue to regulate boundaries and the sharing of water for power; sanitary and domestic means; water navigation; and, of course, to preserve the natural wonder of the falls. Hence, the waterfalls continue to thunder, but their intensity has been diminished—not that we would see or feel that diminishment, never having experienced them differently—as hydroelectric power companies on both the American and Canadian sides divert some of the water that used to rush over the falls. At nighttime, the flow over the Horseshoe Falls is cut by half. The daytime flow of approximately 600,000 gallons per second is left higher for tourists, yet it is still not equal to the brute power Hawthorne witnessed in 1832 (“Facts about Niagara Falls”). Indeed, the powerful water with which Hawthorne communed was likely more than twice that which I experienced in 2016.Today, people can view the combined Niagara Falls from the air by a touring helicopter or from the water by one of four boats—two from each side—that leave from their docks every quarter hour in a carefully orchestrated dance. On the American side, one can either take an elevator up to an observation tower to look over the falls, or take an elevator down to experience the “Cave of the Winds,” in the process becoming soaked with splashing water and experiencing some of the falls’ true power. On the Canadian side, although one can no longer climb down to the base behind the Horseshoe Falls, the “Journey Behind the Falls” uses an elevator set deep in the rock to deposit tourists to a different viewpoint at the base of the falls. Thus, by air, river, elevator, and stairs, the falls are accessible in ways Hawthorne could not have dreamed. He had never seen an airplane, let alone a helicopter. Hawthorne cautiously climbed up and down rocks to his views. I imagined him using the curled maple staff with carved fish and snake images, the craft of a Tuscarora Native American, to steady his feet on the slippery rocks (Hawthorne 56–57). What boats in his time would risk the trip into the mist of the thundering water, and, indeed, why would they? He had never imagined the ubiquitous tourists, taking selfies at every view of the falls; yet, with Hawthorne’s devotion to experiencing the falls for himself turning over in my mind, I could picture him shaking his head, penning critiques of their shortsighted, sightseeing eyes—eyes that failed to perceive what he had spent days attempting to apprehend.Despite all the wonders I have experienced that Hawthorne had not—from traveling by jet to scuba diving to gazing at the Hubble’s views of the cosmos—the falls held me: beautiful, amazing, awesome. I was mute. Almost two centuries ago, Hawthorne used words to describe the same-yet-different falls that I viewed. I have only a few words to add. Not one drop of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that falls per second will pass through the falls again in the same exact form. Every drop of water that falls is in exactly the right place at the right time of its existence. As was Hawthorne. As was I.

Pulling data from a year-long case study into a Division II men’s basketball team, this article suggests how threshold concepts as currently conceptualized and implemented in first-year composition pedagogy and curriculum could more directly consider unique forms of literacies student-athletes bring into the classroom.

This article makes two arguments. First, the article argues that threshold concepts provide a useful lens for thinking about how faculty learn service-learning pedagogy. Second, the article illustrates how particular kinds of support can help faculty learn the pedagogy’s threshold concepts by helping them make sense of the challenges they face in teaching through service-learning. The author uses autoethnography to trace her thinking throughout a yearlong fellows program, during which she developed and taught a new service-learning writing curriculum. She describes how the fellows program helped her to turn several challenges into threshold experiences that resulted in key shifts in thinking.

Situated in the literature on threshold concepts and transfer of prior knowledge in WAC/WID and composition studies, with particular emphasis on the scholarship of writing across difference, our article explores the possibility of re-envisioning the role of the composition classroom within the broader literacy ecology of colleges and universities largely comprised of students from socioeconomically and ethno- linguistically underrepresented communities. We recount the pilot of a composi- tion course prompting students to examine their own prior and other literacy values and practices, then transfer that growing meta-awareness to the critical acquisition of academic discourse. Our analysis of students’ self-assessment memos reveals that students apply certain threshold concepts to acquire critical agency as academic writ- ers, and in a manner consistent with Guerra’s concept of transcultural repositioning. We further consider the role collective rubric development plays as a critical incident facilitating transcultural repositioning.

ABSTRACT This article situates the extraordinary events of 1989 within the symbolic and politicoeconomic context of Reform-era China. It sees 1989 as a threshold moment for the political culture and a turning point for the collective ethos. The article argues that the vitalistic 1980s made for an ethical existence for the demos, culminating in the “poetics” of 1989, while the post-1989 era witnessed a homogenization of the Chinese ethical imaginary. The latter is the very exigency that drives this study. Drawing on the ethical understandings of Deleuze and Burke, the article calls for the return and fusion of the ethical and the political, and points to a reason for pietas toward the world and the demos. The article is informed by a genealogical understanding of history and a ritualistic-dramatistic understanding of political life. Its central concern is the retransformation of the soul of the Chinese people in the here and now.

Drawing on interviews with writing teachers, this article highlights some of the affective responses that may arise for students, community partners, and teachers when we situate our pedagogies in public sites beyond the classroom. I analyze a teacher-narrated moment of student distress to demonstrate how theories of transformative learning might help us productively theorize affect in service-learning and community-based education. To conclude, I offer a reciprocal model of care that employs tenets of feminist pedagogy, such as transparency and decentering of authority, and that acknowledges the valid emotions students, teachers, and community members may experience. I call for community literacy practitioners to see the power of all participants to both give and receive care in transformative education.

In his 1959 Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," C. P. Snow warned of a gulf that had opened between literary intellectuals and natural scientists, across which existed a mutual incomprehension that threatened to undermine the university's ability to solve the world's most pressing problems.Reflecting on his experience as both a novelist and a research scientist, Snow appealed for a greater understanding between what he saw as two distinct cultures, yet he also asserted the importance of the sciences over literature for securing humanity's future prosperity.According to Snow, literary intellectuals were natural Luddites, and the university needed to prioritize the training of scientists and engineers in order to accelerate global industrialization and thereby raise standards of living.His privileging of the sciences drew a scathing rebuke from the literary critic F. R. Leavis, who pilloried Snow's understanding of literature and his faith in technological progress.For Leavis, bringing the Industrial Revolution to impoverished areas of the globe could indeed improve the material conditions of humankind, but such a project ungoverned by the values conveyed through literature, especially those insights of D. H. Lawrence and other novelists into the dehumanizing effects of industrial labor, would lead to a future divested of any real quality of life.Leavis insisted, therefore, that the university revolve around English studies as its "centre of human consciousness" (2013, p. 75).This dispute between Snow and Leavis touched off "the two cultures controversy," which has been an important point of reference amid the shifting terrain of higher education.The phrase has come to denote a gulf that opens between any disciplines bound to "common attitudes, common standards and patterns of behavior, common approaches and assumptions" (Snow, 1998, p. 9) that divide them into opposing cultures and inhibit crossdisciplinary understanding.Buller (2014), for example, described the two cultures in terms of those who believe the purpose of colleges and universities is to educate "the whole person" versus those who believe it is to train students for the workforce.The latter culture, according to Buller, tends to include governors, legislators, and trustees who are inclined to divert resources away from the social sciences, arts, and humanities to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.Their assumption is that the STEM disciplines will best prepare students for careers offering the greatest return on their investment in a college education.The opposing culture, most often composed of faculty and administrators, argues that a well-rounded education produces graduates who are better informed, challenge assumptions more readily, participate more fully in society and civil discourse, and in general live healthier and more productive lives.Buller observed that "the two sides are not so much talking to one another as shouting past one another, each contingent building its case on a set of assumptions that it regards as universally true and that is dismissed by its opponents as the result of blindness, hypocrisy, or both" (p.2).This situation stands in contrast to the lack of engagement Halsted (2015) observed between the culture of academia and that of the tech industry.He pointed out that although a number of the most significant

Spontaneous writing observed in chats, instant messengers, and social media has become established as productive modes of communication and discourse genres. However, they remain understudied from the perspective of writing process research. In this paper, we present an empirical study wherein keystrokes made by chat users in a game were recorded. The distributions of the inter-key intervals were analyzed and fitted with ex-Gaussian distribution equation, and an argument for psycholinguistic interpretation of the distribution parameters is presented. This analysis leads to establishing a threshold of 500 ms for the identification of pauses in spontaneous writing. Furthermore, we demonstrate that pauses longer than 1.2 s may correspond to higher-level linguistic processing beyond a single propositional expression (functional element of the discourse).

In this article, we investigate disparate impact analysis as a validation tool for understanding the local effects of writing assessment on diverse groups of students. Using a case study data set from a university that we call Brick City University, we explain how Brick City’s writing program undertook a self-study of its placement exam using the disparate impact process followed by the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education. This three-step process includes analyzing placement rates through (1) a threshold statistical analysis, (2) a contextualized inquiry to determine whether the placement exam meets an important educational objective, and (3) a consideration of less discriminatory assessment alternatives. By employing such a process, Brick City re-conceptualized the role of placement testing and basic writing at the university in a way that was less discriminatory for Brick City’s diverse student population.

Dianne Fallon responds to Blaauw-Hara’s article in this issue.

This essay provides a brief overview of transfer theory and threshold concepts and discusses how they can be applied to general-education writing courses.

The 2013 Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year's award recipients, Maureen Kendrick, Margaret Early, and Walter Chemjor, for their article Integrated Literacies in a Rural Kenyan Girls' Secondary School Journalism Club, which appeared in the May 2013 issue of RTE (Vol. 47, No. 4). This qualita- tive study examines an after-school journalism club held at an all-girls school in Kenya and reveals the ways that literacy practices can foster professionalization and identity formation for students. Kendrick et al. apply Turner's (1967) notion of liminality the realm of pure possibility (qtd. p. 395) to understand the transformation they witnessed in the students, especially in relation to the pres- ence of such materials as digital voice recorders and press passes. These items, in terms of Blommaert's (2003) theorizing of placed resources, assume a particular, local, situated meaning within the context of the club: they empower the students to do investigative journalism in their school and community. The intersection of a liminal space with placed resources allowed the girls to move from performance to competence in their journalistic roles, resulting in transformed identities. This study pushes all educators to consider the classroom as liminal space in order to locate and support such transformative literacy practices and opportunities.We applaud the authors' self-reported shift from a sole emphasis on the po- tential of the donated digital communication to facilitate students' acquisi- tion of digital literacies (p. 393) to the wider exploration of the journalism club as a resource-infused place that afforded the development of integrated literacy practices and experimentation along with new writer identities of empowerment (p. 394). Such a move celebrates the persistent agency of students and teachers who, together in their given space, make sense of the tools available-be they digital recorders, press passes, books, or standardized tests. Further, Kendrick et al. suggest that in making sense of those tools and how they might authentically be put to use, the teacher and his students also make sense of themselves as users of these ideologically rich tools.We particularly appreciate Kendrick et al.'s description of the students' meaning-making process as play; they take interest in students' experimentation with the resources made available to them and with the identities associated with those tools. In this conceptualization of what happens in the journalism club, the students and their play are ultimately more important than the particular tools with which they play. …

In this Retrospective, we revisit our 2007 College Composition and Communication article in order to clarify our primary argument, address some questions and critiques that have arisen, and consider anew the value of composition courses that study writing. We review our core argument that engaging students with the research and ideas of writing studies, building declarative and procedural knowledge of writing, improves learning transfer. Now, using the example of Jan Meyer and Ray Land’s notion of threshold concepts, we argue for the field to better name its knowledge and conceptions and to decide what portion is suitable for first-year students. We clarify the distinction between this broad underlying goal and our personal approaches to accomplishing it, emphasizing the diversity of approaches that have come to embody the study of writing in first-year composition. While maintaining that writing studies lacks recognition of itself as a field and of the value of its specialized knowledge to writing instruction, we revise our original argument to show how writing instructors from other fields and with other expertise can build familiarity with writing studies research without extensive, specialized study. Ultimately, we continue to advocate teaching our field’s knowledge in first-year composition, while expanding our sense both of how to prepare instructors to do so and of the value of such teaching.

Writing in higher educational settings is regarded as problematic for all but the most dedicated people (Silva, 2007). Many of the problems come from psychological states (internal-censors, fears, perfectionism, procrastination) deeply rooted in writing experiences (Boice, 1990). However, the literature addressing this is generally missing. A survey of writing-books, manuals, and research studies indicate that most approach writing from linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical perspectives (Silva, 2007). This study attempted to fill this gap by examining a group of graduate students attending a writing workshop which specifically addressed psychological barriers to productive writing (Boice, 1990). The eight-week workshop consisted of classroom sessions in the first week and then moved to an online course management platform. The primary aim of the study was to note the changes in the students using data from their weekly writing reflections and discussion board comments in several forums and 8-month follow-up interviews. Findings indicate that the workshop had immediate effects on the writers but as the time passed the effects faded. The study looked to Threshold Concepts Theory (Meyer & Land, 2005) as a possible theoretical explanation for the loss of the temporary positive workshop results.

Using "threshold concepts" (Meyer and Land) as a lens, this article examines several issues related to learning within and across two general education courses—one in writing and one in history—in which students were concurrently enrolled. Analysis of data from students and instructors (of the history course) suggests threshold concepts that are shared among history and writing courses; however, the data also indicate that the extent to which these shared concepts are enacted through instruction is somewhat inconsistent. The article ultimately suggests that threshold concepts might prove a productive frame through which to consider questions related to writing and transfer, and also to general education more broadly.

The study reported here is based on an extensive questionnaire distributed to about 650 students at three French universities and one Belgian university in five disciplines. The main objective of the study was to describe the links between university writing and the disciplines by inventorying the kinds of university writing students do (academic and scientific/research-based writing) and identifying the thresholds they cross. The main result was that the pieces of writing considered as representative varied considerably according to the university discipline. We found both a pronounced disciplinary specificity with regard to the writing cited as being representative of their courses by the students, at degree level, and a clear dichotomy between the pieces of writing required at degree level and at master’s level. From these two main results, it can be verified that the disciplines are frameworks for the students’ perceptions of university writing practices. Our findings argue for the learning of writing at the university as an ongoing activity at liminal points, as students negotiate in between secondary/post-secondary, in between earlier and later years of the undergraduate cycle, in between that cycle and the master’s cycle, in between disciplines, and in between internalized personal norms and norms (perceived) of faculty.

The following set of three papers, ‘University Literacies: French Students at a Disciplinary “Threshold”?’ by Isabelle Delcambre and Christiane Donahue, ‘Modeling Multivocality in a U.S.-Mexican Collaboration in Writing across the Curriculum’, by Mya Poe and Jennifer Craig, and ‘Perceptions and Anticipation of Academic Literacy: “Finding Your Own Voice”’, by Claire Woods and Paul Skrebels, represents some of the ongoing practice-oriented research of the ‘Antwerp Group’, so called because the members came together as teacher-researchers with shared interests in student writing in Antwerp in 2006.

This essay considers how Virginia Woolf's personal and social anti-Semitism disrupts creation of a stable ethos in her political tract, Three Guineas. The article uses De Man's concept of blindness and insight to interrogate Woolf's own ideological blindness and forwards liminality as a frame within which to understand ethos in this work.

Abstract This article calls for close attention to the current moment when many technologies are becoming routine, occupying a space between "unknown and unnoticed," and for formation of a digital rhetoric that addresses software's liminality, ubiquity, and exteriority. It briefly examines the emerging discourse of the Free and Open Source Software movements and suggests that a closer alignment with software studies in coming years will be mutually beneficial to both fields.

Subject matter experts, under the influence of modernist notions of authorship, often view technical writers as mere grammar and punctuation specialists and marginalize them as their ignorant “other. ” Technical writers, on the other hand, as rhetoricians occupying a liminal space between different disciplines, can understand different disciplinary rhetorics. If subject matter experts, instead of marginalizing technical writers, would view them as liminal subjects who are knowledgeable in different disciplinary rhetorics, then technical writers, through liminal practice, may be able to use their knowledge of audience and rhetoric to improve the quality of documentation.

In the first half of On Demosthenes, Dionysius of Halicarnassus' mature critical essay, he presents the case that Isocrates, Plato and represent the three finest stylists when it comes to speaking with the diction approved by audiences. In the process of making an argument for the Demosthenic ideal, Dionysius needed to find commensurate speeches by Isocrates and Plato to compare with Demosthenes. For Isocrates, he compared the most elegant portion of On the Peace with a portion of an epideictic from Demosthenes' Third Olynthiac. It was a good choice. However, for Plato, finding an appropriate speech in the philosopher's writing proved more difficult. Of course, we would readily assume that by the first century BCE Dionysius should have felt compelled to use the Apology as the Platonic exemplar. It clearly ranks as one of the impressive speeches in all of history. For his part, were he not to use it, Dionysius was well aware critics would complain that the Apology presents itself as the ideal choice for this kind of analysis. So in anticipation of this objection and his otherwise obscure choice to use Socrates' funeral oration in the Menexenus, he dismisses Plato's Apology as something other than a true forensic and therefore not a viable candidate. He offers the following tantalizingly cryptic reason: There is one forensic by Plato, the Apology of Socrates; but this never saw even the threshold of a law-court or an open assembly, but was written for another purpose and belongs to the category neither of oratory nor of dialogue. I therefore pass over it. (On Dem. 23). Within his own lifetime Dionysius already felt compelled to respond to charges of impiety for committing the sin of suggesting that one could find infelicities in Plato's compositional style. In a letter responding to Gnaeus Pompeius' complaint that, You should not have exposed the faults of Plato when your purpose was to praise Demosthenes (Gn. Pomp. 1), Dionysius responded that had he not objectively compared the best discourses of Isocrates and Plato with those of his argument would have been unpersuasive as well as a criti

Offering an emancipatory response to the widening fissure between day-to-day experience and institutional conventionality, [Kurt] Spellmeyer [in Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition] concludes with ideal of classroom practice that maintains a balance of communicative that silences no one, teachers or students (22-23). If freshman paper, for instance, were seen as threshold between two distinct contexts of social life and meaning, teachers could stop serving as initiatory gate-keep[ers], barring the way to pollution by the 'nonacademic.' (Bloom 846) Spellmeyer's reported view, seemingly endorsed by reviewer Lynn Z. Bloom, is that to eschew gatekeeping-at least in first-year college writing courses-is utopian aim, but in the good sense: the shimmering ideal at the horizon of current practice, the thing to keep moving toward. Gatekeeping is all caught up in power imbalances, silencings, the imposition of one value system (the academic) on another and presumably more natural one-an imposition seen as part of misguided and perhaps even fetishistic concern for purity (and consequent anxiety over pollution). Compared to such practice, any ideal is better, even one that's bit pie-inthe-sky. Views like these are such commonplaces that they are rarely defended in detail, or even fully articulated. Bits of explication, however, lie here and there in any

Research suggests that children in sixth grade are at an important threshold in developing basic skills for interpreting metaphoric language in poetry. However, there is also evidence to suggest that children, because of their dependence on concrete operations, need special forms of cuing in learning how to approach the interpretations of poems.This study investigates the effectiveness of three instructional support systems for cuing sixth grade children in interpreting metaphoric language of poetry. The first support system (Treatment A) involved regular classroom teachers who applied their own verbal cuing. The second system (Treatment B) included external instructional support through given media and the teachers' verbal cuing. The third system (Treatment C) provided internal support through the use of poets. The underlying assumption here is that the teacher who is a practicing poet brings to the classroom a unique set of writing experiences that assist in cuing. A special control group (Treatment D) who received no instruction in responding to metaphoric language in poetry was also used..Subjects in this study were taken from sixth grade classes in three different school corporations in Tippe- canoe County, Indiana. Through a method of randomization and matching within school systems, the investigator limited the number of subjects from 720 to 272 in 12 intactclasses. Each treatment had 68 children and three classes. The independent variable in this study was the method of instructional support. The dependent variables were the raw scores of children's responses to Form B of "A Look at Literature," particularly 11 critical items that dealt specifically with the interpretation of metaphor in poetry.All three poetry-instruction groups were given the same instructional approach model and the same set of 24 poems from which the teachers selected 16 poems for instruction over an eight day period.An analysis of the pre-test scores for Form A of "A Look at Literature" indicated no significant differences among treatments. An analysis of post-test scores showed no significance among treatments in the children's responses to a wide range of reading skills but that there were significant differences among treatments in the children's responses that dealt specifically with the interpretation of metaphoric language in poetry. As a result of the scores for the "11 Critical Items Measurement," the following rank order of mean scores was observed: Treatment C, Poets (highest); Treatment B, Media and Teachers; Treatment D, control; Treatment A, Teachers (lowest). The Newman- Keuls test indicated that differences between Treatments A and B and between A and C were significant at the .05 level. All other differences among treatments were not significant.The findings suggest that children learned more in classes with internal or external support than in classes with no unique system of support. From data supplied by poets and teachers, it became apparent that Treatments B and C provided more experiential types of activities, whereas Treatment A provided more referential activities in approaching poetry. Teachers in Treatment B were given two films, twenty slides, and sixteen transparencies to prime children to interpret images as symbols and to experience tension in the poems through contrasting images. The poets in Treatment C were caught up with the dynamics of interchange in discussing levels of meaning, frequently shifting between the literal, and the symbolic, constantly weaving webs of meaning based on experience. Approaches used by the teachers were often based on referential guidance, with the teachers frequently limiting and sometimes telling the responses.