We argue against the metaphor of the “level playing field” and its natural coercive power; in so doing, we call for an end to the invisibility that the debate over accommodations has imposed on learning disabilities in the past decade. A literature review of LD in composition shows how this invisibility has manifested itself in our field through limited professional discussion of LD. In response, we propose not a level playing field but a new playing field altogether, a visible one that actively promotes alternative assistance for student writers with LD in first-year composition programs. We seek to show how the LD and composition fields could create a powerful partnership by serving students with LD through the principle of the liberal theory of distributive justice.

(2003). Representing Disability Rhetorically. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 154-202.

Since the collapse of Enron Corporation in November 2001, annual reports and corporate financial disclosures have been the focus of government, corporate, and public attention. This article examines the literature written about annual reports between 1989 and 2001 to identify trends in research and determine areas of future study. Articles were categorized as related to SEC regulations and guidelines, summary annual reports, online annual reports, rhetorical analysis of annual reports, readability and accessibility of annual reports, methods of conveying negative information in annual reports, effective annual report writing, use and importance of annual reports, or use of annual reports in business writing classes. Post-Enron, it is likely that the number of articles in this area will dramatically increase over the next five to ten years.

Investigates how disability is discovered, constructed, and performed in a certain type of cultural practice, that is, in a postmodern, undergraduate college classroom. Argues that the implementation of an autobiographical pedagogy must extend beyond the dimensions of race, gender, and sexuality and must include disabled persons in these discussions as well.

I analyze the public and professional discourse of learning disability, arguing that medical models of literacy misdirect teaching by narrowing its focus to remediation. This insight about teaching is not new; resurgent demands for behaviorist pedagogies make understanding their continuing appeal important to composition studies.

The five authors call for increased awareness of disability in composition studies and argue that such an awareness can productively disrupt notions of “writing” and “composing” at the same time it challenges “normal”/“not normal” binaries in the field. In six sections: Brueggemann introduces and examines the paradox of disability’s “in-visibility” White considers the social construction of learning disabilities; Dunn analyzes the rhetoric of backlash against learning disabilities; Heifferon illustrates how a disability text challenged her students; Cheu describes how a disability-centered writing class made disability visible; all five conclude with challenges and directions for composition studies in intersecting with disability studies.

Emphasis on page design, as an aid to visual accessibility, did not receive attention in modern technical writing until the 1970s. However, accounting documents and instructional texts utilized format and document design strategies as early as the twelfth century to enhance the organization of quantitative data and linear bookkeeping entries. Format in text was used to reflect the arrangement used in oral accounting practices and to produce uniform documents. Thus, format was integral to the rise of pragmatic literacy of the commercial reader. During the Renaissance, these early format strategies received impetus from Ramist method. The result was design strategies that attempted to capture the rigid principles of organization fundamental to commercial accounting. These early accounting documents also illustrate the plain style that would become the focus of the later decades of the seventeenth century. Clarity in language paralleled clarity in page design for the sole purpose of eliminating ambiguity on the page and on the sentence level. Plain style was thus nurtured by financial forces long before the advent of natural science.

Within a theoretical context of speech accommodation theory, this study follows Lambert et al.‘s (1960) “matched-guise” technique. Seventy-two African-American students at a mid-south university listened to and evaluated a tape-recorded excerpt of a speech given by Jesse Jackson at the 1996 Democratic National Convention. The first version of the speech was translated into Ebonics. After students listened to the first four-minute speech in Ebonics, students then proceeded to answer a questionnaire concerning the ethos/source credibility and perceived sociability of the speaker. Next, students listened to the same audiotaped speech (given by the same speaker), except the text of the speech was translated (and subsequently delivered) in Standard English. The students then rated this second speaker on those same ethos/source credibility and sociability scales. The speaker who used Standard English was viewed as more credible (i.e., more competent and having a strong character) and sociable than the Ebonics speaker. Both of these scores were significant at the p .05 level. Future research replicating these results is urged across other African-American samples.

Investigates cross-cultural tensions in Western writing pedagogy as reflected in Turkish teachers’ oppositional and accommodative attitudes and how those attitudes played out in classroom interactions. Discusses teachers’ perceptions concerning the effects of Western rhetorical styles on Turkish students’ thinking and identity, assumptions regarding philosophical and instructional objectives of Western approaches, and their views on what counts as good writing.

This article describes how disability studies can be used in a medical and science writing class to critically examine the assumptions of scientific discourse. An emerging, interdisciplinary field, disability studies draws on feminist, postmodern, and post‐colonial theory and extends their critiques to the medicalization of disability. Deconstructing the medical model of disability helps students understand how science is socially constructed. After conceptualizing disability studies, this essay discusses sample disability‐related classroom activities, readings, and writing assignments.

This article examines the communicative categories and linguistic features of university textbook prefaces. The textbook preface is a highly interactive genre, with a double purpose: informative and promotional. The analysis of the genre moves and of their realization reveals that the preface is used by the author both to help the audience use the book and to convince them of the value of the book. This twofold purpose accounts for the most relevant features of prefaces: the frequent use of textual metadiscourse and the pervasive presence of evaluation. The criteria used in the preface to evaluate the textbook are related to the audience's expectations about introductory textbooks: novelty, usefulness, accessibility, comprehensiveness, importance, and interest.

Revising instructions for clients of health care facilities provides students with valuable practice in good technical communication techniques: organizing information for maximum accessibility, analyzing the audience's needs, using formatting and graphics to enhance communication, and clarifying sentence structure and diction. Suitable for both individual and team work, the project offers experience in both revising instructions for a lay audience and writing persuasively. It also emphasizes the accountability of technical writers to the users of their documents.

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Imitation has long been a method and theoretical basis for rhetorical instruction. It has also enjoyed a complex, if not always glorious, history-a lineage which extends from the apprenticeship of sophists in Plato's Greece to the moral education of orators in Quintilian's Rome; from the nurturing of abundant expression in a Renaissance text by Erasmus to the cultivation of taste in an Enlightenment text by Hugh Blair. In the last few decades, however, we have witnessed dramatic changes in how we look upon imitation-changes largely influenced, we think, by the process movement, with its various emphases on invention and revision, expression and discovery, cognition and collaboration. In the wake of shifting so much of our attention to writing processes, we might well expect imitation to have been pronounced as dead as Nietzche's God was a century ago. But if the literature reviewed here is any indication, rumors of imitation's death have been greatly exaggerated. Most of the studies in our survey are favorablyand surprisingly-disposed to imitation's continued practice. Such studies typically call for a revised understanding of imitation, a novel approach which reveals the proponent's understanding of the need to somehow demonstrate imitation's acceptability to a community which presumably resists its use. Why? Most likely because imitation turns on assumptions about writing and learning which many find discomforting, if not altogether objectionable. There are, of course, fairly complex historical, cultural, and theoretical reasons for our current aversion to imitation, many of which we explore later in our review. But the important point for us is that those who argue for imitation-however much they may differ in their various arguments-share an awareness that its use must be justified in answer to, and anticipation of, its critical refusal by the community at large. What we infer from this awareness is the community's largely tacit rejection of imitation. That's not to say, of course, that explicit criticism of imitation is wholly absent from the literature.' But in a context where many readily assent to the idea that almost any form of direct imitation leads to a distortion of the writing process, there is little urgency to speak against its use in the writing classroom (Judy and Judy 127). Indeed, only those who desire a reevaluation of imitation need

This research report examines the roles of convention, conflict, and conversation in the formation of audience constructs. One group of construction engineers and another group of design architects and engineers, both working in a bureaucratic setting, relied on disciplinary and institutional conventions while constructing, addressing, and invoking audiences. Incongruities among contextual conventions restricting audience analysis resulted in inappropriate textual features and necessitated conversation during corporate training. This conversation focused on redefining problems of audience analysis and accommodation. The problem solving associated with analyzing situational audiences during the composing process was possible only when writers understood the problem-posing conventions of their discourse communities.

This qualitative study examined the transitions that writers make when moving from academic to professional discourse communities. Subjects were six university seniors enrolled in a special “writing internship course” in which they discussed and analyzed the writing they were doing in 12-week professional internships at corporations, small businesses, and public service agencies in a major metropolitan area. Participant-observer and case-study data included drafts and final copies of all writing that the interns produced on the job (including texts and suggested revisions by other employees), an ethnographic log of data and speculations arising from the group discussions, written course journals from each intern, transcriptions of taped, discourse-based and general interviews with the interns, and a final 15-page retrospective analysis of each intern's writing on the job. Results showed a remarkably consistent pattern of expectation, frustration, and accommodation as the interns adjusted to their new writing communities. The results have important implications for the lateral and vertical transfer of writing skills across different communicative contexts.

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This article studies the fate of scientific observations as they pass from original research reports intended for scientific peers into popular accounts aimed at a general audience. Pairing articles from two AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) publications reveals the changes that inevitably occur in “information” as it passes from one rhetorical situation to another. Scientific reports belong to the genre of forensic arguments, affirming the validity of past facts, the experimental data. But a change of audience brings a change of genre; science accommodations are primarily epideictic, celebrations of science, and shifts in wording between comparable statements in matched articles reveal changes made to conform to the two appeals of popularized science, the wonder and the application topoi. Science accommodations emphasize the uniqueness, rarity, originality of observations, removing hedges and qualifications and thus conferring greater certainty on the reported facts. Such changes could be formalized by adopting the scale developed by sociologists Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar for categorizing the status of claims. The alteration of information is traced not only in articles on bees and bears, and so on, but also on a subject where distortions in reporting research can have serious consequences—the reputed mathematical inferiority of girls to boys. The changes in genre and the status of information that occur between scientific articles and their popularizations can also be explained by classical stasis theory. Anything addressed to readers as members of the general public will inevitably move through the four stasis questions from fact and cause to value and action.

Requirements of accuracy in technical writing overwhelm considerations of stylistic grace. Analysis of the resulting technical style, however, often reveals a discrepancy between technical and verbal accuracy. The object of verbal form is an accommodation between grace and accuracy. Several avenues to achieve this accommodation are presented from Martin Buber's I and Thou to psycholinguist theorists such as George Miller and Walter Kintsch. Linguistic theory and literacy analysis can also provide means of reestablishing grace, not as replacement, but in contention with technical accuracy. The aims of technical discourse, like that of all other discourse, should include the gracefulness of one human being speaking to another.