Service learning, an expanding pedagogical movement, educates students to volunteer their expertise for the benefit of society. Teachers of business and technical writing can apply this pedagogy by assigning students to write for nonprofits. Such assignments prepare students for both workplace writing and responsible citizenship. To help our profession consider the appropriateness of this pedagogy, this article describes the origins of the movement and proposes a rationale for it in our field. This article then explains sequential projects and teaching methods intended to reduce problems related to collaborative writing for nonprofits. Last, resources are identified to help prepare grant proposals, perhaps the most beneficial kind of document for nonprofits.

RHETORICA 236 Thomas P. Miller, The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997), x + 345 pp. Thomas Miller's excellent work The Formation of College English examines a strand in the development of English studies—the civic domain of rhetoric—neglected in other important histories of the discipline: Gerald Graff's Professing English Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Franklin Court's Institutionalizing English Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), and Robert Crawford's Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). In the role of respondent to the 1997 Conference on College Composition and Communication session "Octalog II: The (Continuing) Politics of Historiography", Miller stressed the "civic sense of the work that lies before us" as historiographers of the discipline of composition and rhetoric. In particular, he praised historical research based on a "civic philosophy of teaching that links critical understanding with collaborative action toward social justice" and applauded archival work "that take[s] up the project of reconstituting the experiences of those who have been erased from accounts of the dominant tradition." In The Formation of College English, Miller "takes up" the little examined "provincial traditions that introduced modem history, politics, rhetoric, literature, and science into the college curriculum as case studies of how the teaching of culture functions as a means of social reproduction and transformation" (p. 19). He offers a comprehensive and unique treatment of territory introduced in recent institutional accounts of the development of American classes in rhetoric/composition, including Nan Johnson's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in American Colleges (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992) and Winifred Bryan Homer's Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric: The American Connection (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Miller asks "from a historical perspective, what then are the practical values of rhetoric and composition?" (p. 285). The answer: studying parallels between "historical situations" leads to Henry Giroux's conception of "teachers as transformative intellectuals" who strive for self-awareness and view "education as a public discourse" (p. Reviews 237 288). Beginning with an examination of the "civic domain, where rhetoric concerns itself with popular values in political action," Miller applies key concepts defining Antonio Gramsci's rhetorical theory ("civil society," "cosmopolitanism," "organic and traditional intellectuals") to his exploration of "how the humanities can prepare students to become productively involved in political debates over popular values in practical action" (p. 7). In the first chapter, Miller points to print economy and the resulting expansion of the reading public as the driving force responsible for effacing rhetoric: "Professors...de-emphasized the composition of public discourse and concentrated on teaching taste to adapt higher education to the mission of instilling a common culture in the reading public" (pp. 60-61). In chapter two, Miller examines the role of professors at the elite English universities, the "antiquarians who divorced the learned tradition from the needs of contemporary learners", in an attempt to preserve English culture against change (p. 64). Conversely, the utilitarian approach to education characteristic of the dissenting academies and subsequently the provincial colleges introduced modem culture into higher education. The new pedagogy at these institutions was based on the belief that "free inquiry would advance liberal reform, economic progress, and rational religion" (p. 85). The next three chapters closely examine the development of the "new rhetoric" at: the Dissenting Academies, which encouraged students to assume a critical perspective on received beliefs; the provincial Scottish Universities, which reformed the university curriculum against a critical reexamination of classicism; and the colonial Irish "contact zones", where outsiders had to teach themselves the proprieties of English taste and usage. Miller's investigation of the classical tradition in Ireland, focusing on the elocutionary movement and English studies outside the university, represents a novel and fascinating contribution to rhetorical studies of this period. Miller devotes the following chapters to closely appraising the contributions to rhetorical theory and practice of perhaps the three most influential figures and movements of the period—Adam Smith and the rhetoric of a commercial society, George Campbell and the "science of man", and Hugh Blair and the rhetoric of belles lettres. In the final chapter, Miller examines the expansion of higher...

We designed and piloted a technical communication course for software engineering majors to take concurrently with their capstone project course in software design. In the pilot, one third of the capstone design course students jointly enrolled in the writing class. One goal of the collaborative courses was to use writing to improve the usability of students’ software. We studied the effects of writing on students’ user‐centered beliefs and design practices and on the usability of their product, using surveys, document analyses, expert reviews, and user test results. When possible, we compared the usability processes and products of teams who did and did not take the writing class. Our findings suggest that the synergy of this interdisciplinary approach effectively sensitized students to user‐centered design, instilled in them a commitment to it, and helped them develop usable products.

Addresses problems and possibilities in development of practitioner research stemming from a semester-long master’s level research course. Presents course context; outlines the four classroom studies that examined journal writing; explores commonalities among studies; shares conversations among researchers on issues of systematic inquiry, ownership, collaboration, and professional sharing of the research; and problematizes inquiry research as part of coursework.

Narrates effects of a 10-week literacy project, a collaboration between Latino English-as-a-Second-Language students and at-risk Anglo counterparts in a rural high school in the upper midwest. Highlights "treasures" of their experience as they gather to read Spanish- and English-language literature, to write stories and poems, and to revise each other’s work.

This article is comprised of a collage of small segments of email conversation between the authors; it also includes fragmented quotes and diagrams. Consequently, it defies encapsulation in a typical abstract. Below is an excerpt that is perhaps the closest one might get to an abstract of this essay. This method of collaboration-which we are arguing is one in a panoply of others-is best represented by a text’s replicating it. This text speaks to its author/s’ collective intelligence, attempts to give it some definition by reference to the claims made here and the ways those claims were developed. The text, we might say, embodies collective intelligence and some of the ways, at least, that such intelligence is created. (Yancey and Spooner 60-61)

Now that intranets have become the new model for information technology systems, we can expect that more organizations will adopt online document review and editing procedures. This may be problematic for technical editors. Survey studies published in 1992 and 1995 found that most technical editors were still editing on paper most of the time even though an overwhelming percentage of them had access to computers and expressed a positive attitude toward using computers for editing-related tasks. In this article I review discussions of online editing in the technical communication literature to understand how online editing has been constructed within the discipline and why many technical editors remain loyal to traditional paper-based procedures. I discuss a recent call for emulating handwritten mark-up and author queries electronically and compare this “technical fix” with the collaborative online editing affordances of the latest word processors. I then discuss studies of online reading and composition whose results suggest that the materiality of hard-copy editing procedures may contribute to some inherent advantages over online emulations of such procedures, or at least foster the widespread perception that certain advantages exist for hard-copy editing. I conclude by urging an open-minded and flexible but also critical perspective toward online editing technology. Such a perspective should help make the move to online editing a more positive experience for technical editors. It might also help them define a higher-level role for editing in the information and document development process.

Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Johndan Johnson‐Eilola. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997. 272 pages. Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over Lotus Marketplace and the Clipper Chip. Laura J. Gurak. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1997. 181 pages. Fundable Knowledge: The Marketing of Defense Technology. A. D. Van Nostrand. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997. 241 pages. Rhetoric and Pedagogy, Its History, Philosophy, and Practice: Essays in Honor of James J. Murphy. Ed. Winifred Bryan Horner and Michael Leff. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. 337 pages. Of Problematology: Philosophy, Science, and Language. Michel Meyer. Trans. David Jamison, in collaboration with Allan Hart. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 310 pages.

This article examines the critical perspective as an alternative to our current descriptive, explanatory research focus. The critical perspective aims at empowerment and emancipation. It reinterprets the relationship between researcher and participants as one of collaboration, where participants define research questions that matter to them and where social action is the desired goal. Examples of critical research include feminist, radical educational, and participatory action research. Adopting the critical perspective would require that scholars in professional communication rethink their choices of research questions and sites, their views of the ownership of research results, and the types of funding they seek for research initiatives.

Writing centers, in the most general terms, provide tutoring to help students develop and organize writing assignments. Certainly, a writing center also encompasses other roles and responsibilities. Students mostly see it as a "safe place," a positive, supportive, and collaborative environment where tutors encourage and work with students on a one-onone basis (see also Murphy; Harris; Fitzgerald). Most writing centers also make sure that tutors don't judge student work and don't put a grade on the paper. While policies differ from center to center, students, in most cases, are also promised that their visits are confidential, and that generally instructors do not have access to the information collected in the writing center.

A project in writing-across-the curriculum was launched within a nationally ranked baccalaureate degree program in accountancy at a Boston area college. The project team, which comprised faculty from accountancy and technical communication, attempted to integrate technical communication skills, principally writing, into an accounting information systems course. To improve student writing in this way, the team had to determine what kinds of writing activities would successfully introduce accounting students to the discourse of their profession, and had to select, from all the communication skills that might be taught, only those that should be taught to complement the specialized content of the accounting information systems course. The team's collaborative process produced three critical planning decisions that greatly simplified the integration: 1) establishing Joseph Juran's TQM notion of fitness-for-use for evaluating the quality of student communications; 2) selecting only those forms of communication used in the profession's discourse community in assignments; and 3) teaching only those communication skills that support and enrich the principal technical skills taught in the accounting course. This strategy demonstrates that communication skills can be integrated within a technical course so as to enhance the students' understanding of technical content while improving the students' proficiency in written communication.

Effective citizens do more than interpret the world around them - they change it. In Between the Lines, John Schilb shows the role composition could play in enabling students to intervene in civic affairs by suggesting ways they can create their own discourses. When instructors understand and put into practice the latest in theory, they can help students learn how to read and write the lines to initiate change. In addition to looking at the line between the academy and the world at large, Schilb examines traditional barriers within English Departments. He argues that many of them have used theory to reinforce a separation of composition studies and literary studies in both theory and instruction. The book offers a thorough, accessible review of recent developments in both composition and literary theory as well as a fruitful comparison of their respective uses and understandings. The chapters in Part One discuss how composition studies and literary studies have differed in their interpretations of the term rhetoric. Part Two examines the ways in which each has handled the ideas of postmodernism. In Part Three, Schilb compares their new shared interest in personal writing, their different attitudes toward collaboration, and issues that arise when literary theories travel into composition. With this book, readers will benefit from an enriched understanding of the theoretical perspectives, institutional conditions, and pedagogical strategies involved in teaching English.

Group class exercises have the potential to provide important lessons for students. However, in completing these exercises, business students may not be getting all of the benefits from group work that a team experience could provide. The challenge to business educators is to provide a meaningful team experience within the limitations presented by the class environment. This article describes organizational communication and marketing classes that applied team formation and team-building exercises to enrich the team experience and differentiate it from typical group work.

This article uses the cross-cultural concepts of context and time to examine the rhetoric of German university students in an English business writing course. This participant-observer account, which includes numerous student examples and observations, provides a fresh perspective for American teachers in increasingly multinational, multicultural classrooms. It also suggests how Aristotle's concepts of ethos, logos, and pathos together with the case method and group work can help teachers respond to the challenges in such classrooms. The article concludes by suggesting that understanding the rhetoric of culture is an important step in accepting and negotiating cultural differences.

Acknowledgments Introductions Standard at the University of Texas by Alan W. Friedman Political Correctness, Principled Contextualism, Pedagogical Conscience by Evan Carton Canonicity, Subalternity, and Literary Pedagogy Pedagogy and the Canon Controversy by Jacqueline Bacon A Multicultural Curriculum: Diversity or Divisiveness? by Helena Woodard Rereading Texas History: Cultural Impoverishment, Empowerment, and Pedagogy by Louis Mendoza English Literature, the Irish, and The Norton Anthology by Rachel Jennings The Thumb of Ekalavya: Postcolonial Studies and the Third World Scholar in a First World Academy by S. Shankar Reclaiming the Teaching Assistant: Dissent as a Pedagogical Tool by Jean Lee Cole and Jennifer Huth Reading, Writing, Teaching: Principles and Provocations Warranting a Postmodernist Literary Studies by Gordon A. Grant III Knowledge, Power, and the Melancholy of Studies by Robert G. Twombly Collaborative Learning in the Postmodern Classroom by Jerome Bump Professionalism and the Problem of the We in Composition Studies by Nancy Peterson An Accidental Writing Teacher by Sara E. Kimball Having Students Write on Moral Topics: Legal, Religious, and Pedagogical Issues by James L. Kinneavy Bodies, Sexualities, and Computers in the Classroom Desire and Learning: The Perversity of Pedagogy by Kathleen Kane Learning and Desire: A Pedagogical Model by Edward Madden Gender and Trauma in the Classroom by Margot Backus Type Normal Like the Rest of Us: Writing, Power, and Homophobia in the Networked Composition Classroom by Alison Regan Rethinking Pedagogical Authority in Response to Homophobia in the Networked Classroom by Susan Claire Warshauer Here, Queer, and Perversely Sincere: Lesbian Subjects in the Department by Kim Emery Works Cited Index

This article elaborates and evaluates a sociolinguistic framework for the study of writing. The first part of the article discusses different sociolinguistic concepts and theories and introduces the two concepts of communicative community and communicative group, which encompass speech and writing, as well as communication of both local and distant and public and private types. For the purposes of these concepts, written and spoken discourse are assumed to be intermingled in the communicative process and steered by similar sociocognitive conditions. The second part of the article discusses the application of the theoretical framework to a specific case, the writing that takes place at a local government office. The study comprises analyses of the organizational structure and its effects on writing at work, the communicative process and the role of spoken discourse and collaboration in the construction of documents, and the social dimension of writing at work. This workplace is found to constitute a communicative group of the local-public type, which means that communication at the office is part of a socially based and hierarchically structured set of communicative activities, with a close intertwinement of spoken and written discourse.

Examines the roles of collaboration in the sciences and humanities by focusing on the complicated relationship between syntax and semantics. Uses scholarship on the social study of science to discuss strategies for collaboration in the humanities. Discusses why those studying language and literature are in a particularly good position to understand the nature of intellectual collaboration and its benefits.

Groupware software promises to increase productivity by providing users with a common interface from which they may access a variety of software programs that they may then work with in a variety of ways. While groupware technology can perform the many tasks it is designed to do, it is more difficult for people to become comfortable and productive with new technological tools. This is especially true for groupware because it is more than a just new tool: groupware fundamentally changes the way an organization works and communicates. The corporate culture must either be ready for groupware or adapt itself to address the cultural premises of groupware (shared effort, cooperation, collaboration) that the software is designed to enhance. The commentary describes the experience of one organization as it struggled to re-engineer itself using groupware.

Serial collaboration promotes the many possibilities of developing and revising student texts.

Data analysis and representation are important political acts in the research process. The types of data we select for study, the analysis we draw, and our textual and graphic representations of data all contribute to the ways in which the people involved in our research are positioned as subjects and the degree of individual and collective agency that can be constructed through the research process itself. It is because of the potential effects of our research on others that we need to demystify the research we do through laying bare our epistemological positions and opening our methods and methodologies to public criticism. Further, in the case of empowering research, it is important to include the research participants in the development of our research projects. This necessitates explorations into postmodern conceptions of subjectivity, knowledge formation, collaboration, and resistance as they relate to empirical research as well as redefining notions of validity and reliability.

Reviews of 6 books: Writing With: New Directions in the Collaborative Teaching, Learning, and Research, ed. by Sally Barr Reagan, Thomas Fox, and David Bleich reviewed by Howard Tinberg; Opening Arguments: A Brief Rhetoric with Readings, by Erik Muller reviewed by June Hadden Hobbs; Ideology, by Mike Cormack reviewed by Libby Allison; Images in Language, Media, and Mind, ed. by Roy F. Fox reviewed by David J. Cranmer; Understanding Ourselves: Readings for Developing Writers, by Ellen Andrews Knodt reviewed by Audrey Roth; Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy, by Miles Myers reviewed by Smokey Wilson.

This volume marks a unique collaboration by internationally distinguished scholars in the history, rhetoric, philosophy, and sociology of Converging on the central issues of rhetoric of science, the essays focus on figures such as Galileo, Harvey, Darwin, von Neumann; and on issues such as the debate over cold fusion or the continental drift controversy. Their vitality attests to the burgeoning interest in the rhetoric of science.

Contents: C. Murphy, J. Law, Introduction: Landmark Essays on Writing Centers (1994). Part I:Historical Perspectives. R.H. Moore, The Writing Clinic and the Writing Laboratory (1950). L. Kelly, One-on-One, Iowa City Style: Fifty Years of Individualized Instruction in Writing (1980). M. Harris, What's Up and What's In: Trends and Traditions in Writing Centers (1990). P. Carino, What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Our Metaphors: A Cultural Critique of Clinic, Lab and Center (1992). G. Olson, E. Ashton-Jones, Writing Center Directors: The Search for Professional Status (1984). J. Simpson, What Lies Ahead for Writing Centers: Position Statement on Professional Concerns (1985). J. Summerfield, Writing Centers: A Long View (1988). Part II:Theoretical Foundations. S.M. North, The Idea of a Writing Center (1984). K.A. Bruffee, Peer Tutoring and the Conversation of Mankind (1984). L. Ede, Writing as a Social Process: A Theoretical Foundation for Writing Centers? (1989). A. Lunsford, Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center (1991). C. Murphy, Writing Centers in Context: Responding to Current Educational Theory (1991). A.M. Gillam, Writing Center Ecology: A Bakhtinian Perspective (1991). M. Cooper, Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers (1994). Part III:Writing Center Praxis. J. Simpson, S. Braye, B. Boquet, War, Peace, and Writing Center Administration. D. Healy, A Defense of Dualism: The Writing Center and the Classroom (1993). R. Wallace, The Writing Center's Role in the Writing Across the Curriculum Program: Theory and Practice (1989). R. Leahy, Writing Centers and Writing-for-Learning (1989). H. Kail, J. Trimbur, The Politics of Peer Tutoring (1987). A. DiPardo, Whispers of Coming and Going: Lessons From Fannie (1992). M. Woolbright, The Politics of Tutoring: Feminism Within the Patriarchy (1992).

Person 1-I'm trying something new in my intro to literature course this year. I decided not to lecture any more. So I've been trying to have more discussion, more group work, give the students more responsibility for the course. And you know what's happened? In their journals, they say they want me to lecture; they've actually asked me to lecture. Person 2-When you get right down to it, all the theory about collaboration and shared responsibility is great if you've got students who want that sort of thing. But my students say they've paid their fees to find out what I have to say. Frankly, when I've got group work scheduled for a period, a lot of them just don't come.

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Discovery of Competence shows how the writing classroom can be reconceived as an environment for collaborative inquiry by students and teachers. It presents new ways of thinking about program design, redefines the nature of writing assessment, and offers alternative conceptions of multicultural curriculums. Drawing on students' writing and research, it suggests how teachers can recognize their students' competence and help them build on it systematically. While the book speaks to all teachers of writing, it will be of considerable interest to those who work with diverse student populations, including ESL students. The authors make it clear that the writing classroom is a place where both students and their teachers may build on their competence and realize their possibilities as writers and learners.

Recent studies identify gendered differences in communication and collaboration styles which suggest consequences for professional writing classrooms. If, indeed, men tend to stereotype women as clerks, prefer hierarchical collaboration, and value product over process, and, too, if gendered differences tend to increase counterproductive dissent, then the gender balance of writing groups might affect their dominant styles in those respects. However, when I analyzed the behaviors of over sixty student groups in my professional writing classes, I did not find gender balancing to have such effects. Instead, however, I observed other gender-related effects on collaboration: tendencies to stereotype men as technical experts and to self-segregate into gendered working teams. These findings suggest new perspectives on the role of gender for collaborative groups in professional writing classrooms.

This article reviews recent studies of legal discourse and nonacademic writing and presents the results of a historical case study of an environmental public policy. The author examined the rhetoric of public sector communication to show how an Indiana water quality standards administrative law was socially constructed as it was written collaboratively in two cycles by members of a text-centered legal discourse community. Key findings describe a dynamic discourse community with changing writing roles among government employees, lay members of the audience, and water pollution control board members. The social and political context surrounding this collaborative effort delayed formal adoption of the water quality standards in the public sector. Controversial provisions of the law stimulated social and political actions, including legislation, and in the process delayed rulemaking.

Although notions of literacy tend to be dominated by images of solitary readers and writers, collaboration and assistance with reading and writing are widespread practices. This article presents a detailed description of a scribe and his client in Mexico producing a letter through joint composition, a term used to refer to letter-writing episodes involving two or more active participants. Through an examination of the discussions that occurred between the scribe and the client, the analysis illustrates how both actors contributed to the final outcome. This article discusses how the participants negotiated their points of view and pooled their knowledge to produce a specific type of document in accordance with their expectations and purposes. The analysis suggests that joint composition is the outcome of multiple contextual elements: authority, gender, and literacy competency. It further concludes that scribing is a complex, heterogeneous literacy activity.

The paper argues that virtual communication spaces such as the World Wide Web (WWW) offer unique opportunities for collaboration within technical writing classrooms. Three common types of project scenarios are identified, along with the discourse communities and collaborative relationships that are supported and emphasized by each project scenario. A technical writing assignment is described that emphasizes the benefits of students collaborating within the WWW, an emerging, real world discourse community. In describing this assignment, we redefine collaboration to include activities used by WWW site developers and designers.

Practitioners of research in a particular field have extensive knowledge of how to operate successfully in that field and communicate effectively with others, within the boundaries of their own language and culture. However, when it comes to inducting novice researchers into these skills, difficulties are often encountered, and more so when the novice comes from a different language and cultural background. At the same time, specialists in English teaching or cross-cultural communication aiming to prepare novices to enter such a research environment often lack access to the details of how things are really done there. At The University of Adelaide, South Australia, this situation is being addressed through a new program for international postgraduate students in their first semester of enrolment. This Integrated Bridging Program (IBP) relies on collaboration between the discipline specialist researcher and language and learning specialists and is informed by the perspectives of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). This paper presents an overview of the IBP, followed by details of its operation in the Faculty of Engineering. Information is included on outcomes of the collaboration in specific instances, and how SFL theory has been applied to develop a flexible and effective induction which is highly valued by both staff and student participants.

The paper discusses applying computer networks to cooperative distance learning for technical communication education. It first outlines applications of communication technologies employed in distance learning, and describes the design strategies of the applications. The paper's main focus is on the CORAL (Cooperative Remotely Accessible Learning) system for promoting cooperative distance learning currently under development in Taiwan. The CORAL system is a collective and collaborative project intended to integrate four major components in concept and construction: an interactive learning environment, educational foundations and implications, domain knowledge; and research efforts. One of CORAL system's goals is to aid science and engineering students in learning communication technology courseware. The CORAL development process, including its design approach, structure, courseware, and evaluation, is reported. Research issues are also addressed.

While Australia is positioning itself politically to capitalize on the strengths of its multiculturism and many ethnic identities, the nation is also vigorously addressing companion language needs to support workplace interaction, cooperation, collaboration and negotiation. The paper discusses the implementation of the genre approach in Australia. The approach is a new paradigm that emphasizes content, structure and sequence.

From both a technological and educational perspective, cyber education creates a multitude of challenges for students and instructors. Both novice and experienced computer users alike must master the use of Internet tools quickly, while also working to overcome conceptual misunderstandings about the technology and its root metaphors. The technology also makes commenting on student documents cumbersome but does have the benefit of creating a digitized record of students' writing processes, while also allowing for the online publication of students' work. Other benefits include more active learning and better interactive collaboration. Preliminary assessments further indicate that, despite critics' concerns about the rigor and quality of distance learning, for a variety of technical and social reasons, student work is equal to and sometimes better than that of on-campus students.

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.

Few, if any, studies on collaboration examine interactions between software manual writers and graphic designers. This study analyzes these collaborations, inquiring into the ways in which writers' and designers' processes of collaboration directly affect the form and substance of a finished manual. We argue that when these developers have dialogue, draft iteratively, and jointly make decisions, they produce manuals that could not possibly be developed through linear, assembly-line collaborative processes. We characterize three possible models of collaboration—assembly line (linear drafting), swap meet (iterative drafting and joint problem solving), and symphony (codevelopment in every aspect)—and use as a case study our own collaboration in developing a manual, detailing the concerns that writers and designers bring to a manual project. Analyzing our collaboration as an example of a swap-meet model, we examine four design problems that we faced and explain the ways in which our collaborative processes uniquely shaped our solutions to these problems.

Despite increasing interest in collaborative writing in industry, little is known about the writing done in companies adopting team-based organizational designs. In such settings, teams organized to produce special documents may include members who do little or no writing for their regular jobs and thus lack experience in generating and selecting ideas, particularly in group settings. In the case study discussed here, the issue of authority provided a subtle but powerful undercurrent during the lifespan of one writing project. The collective and individual voices of team members indicated a constant tug between deep-seated expectations born of traditional systems of hierarchy in organizations and the new responsibilities of making contributions in team settings. Although environmental supports for authentic involvement seemed to be in place, those supports alone could not guarantee the sharing of authority.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

This paper examines the written genres of a group of six children in a first grade classroom. Using the dual lenses of sociocognitive constructivism and emergent literacy, it explores relationships among the children’s genres and between these genres and the social context of the classroom in which the children’s written discourse is situated. Analysis of naturalistic data (using an integrated functionalformal analysis which considered substance, intention, form and context as interrelated dimensions of genre) resulted in a classification scheme which encompassed all genres in the children’s writing. Analyses of the classroom discourse revealed the children to be active participants in the social dialogue within their classroom. They constructed their written genres in response to the texts with which they engaged during collaborative reading and writing tasks and in response to the ways in which the teacher structured the writing tasks. They acted upon their world by writing about their personal experiences, creating imaginary worlds through drawing and writing and playing with words and ideas. The genres the children employed came from the morning news, from stories and poems, and from genres that were embedded in their literacy environment or constructed by them in collaboration with their teacher and each other. Both constructiona nd appropriationw ere seen as active processeso n the part of the child rather than as passive imitation or copying from models.

This article reports the results of survey research designed to determine how students feel about peer assistance and group writing. In general, the results are quite favorable, although more problems surface regarding fully collaborative projects than peer criticism. Statistical analysis of both objective and open-ended items yields suggestions for design and management of collaborative projects in technical communication classes.

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.

Socializing technology is the rhetorical goal of technology transfer. Specialists from all walks of the technical communications profession can participate in this goal by involving themselves in key processes such as developing market awareness, creating inreach and outreach programs, and facilitating collaborative ventures. By broadening the market for our services in the technology transfer movement, we will increase the scope and value of our skills in a high-visibility endeavor that will be on the national agenda for years to come.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Richard A. Lanham. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. xv + 285 pp. $22.50 (cloth). Also available as a Chicago Expanded Book. 2 high‐density Macintosh disks. $29.95. Edward Schiappa, ed. Landmark Essays on Classical Greek Rhetoric. Landmark Essays Volume Three. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1994. xiv + 256 pages. $15.95 paper. Michael G. Moran, ed. Eighteenth‐Century British and American Rhetorics and Rhetoricians: Critical Studies and Sources. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994. 318 pages. Barry Brummett, ed. Landmark Essays on Kenneth Burke. Davis: Hermagoras Press, 1993. xix + 290 pages. $15.95. Geoffrey A. Cross. Collaboration and Conflict: A Contextual Exploration of Group Writing and Positive Emphasis. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1994. 182 pages. $18.50 paper. Alice Glarden Brand and Richard L. Graves, eds. Presence of Mind: Writing and the Domain Beyond the Cognitive. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1994.