The study examines the development of the registers of academic writing by African American college-level students through style and grammar: indirection inherent in the oral culture of the African American community and the paratactic functions of because. Discourse analysis of 74 samples of academic writing by 20 African American undergraduate students and of 61 samples by a control group showed that first, only African American subjects used indirection; second, paratactic functions of because were significantly more prevalent among African American students than in the control group; and third, among African American students, those from low-income families showed statistically significant higher frequencies of the use of both indirection and paratactic because. A relationship of hierarchy in the uses of indirection and paratactic because was also evident in the data.

Research Article| October 01 2003 Graduate Education As Education: The Pedagogical Arts of Institutional Critique Virginia Crisco; Virginia Crisco Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Chris W. Gallagher; Chris W. Gallagher Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Deborah Minter; Deborah Minter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Katie Hupp Stahlnecker; Katie Hupp Stahlnecker Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google John Talbird John Talbird Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (3): 359–376. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-3-359 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Virginia Crisco, Chris W. Gallagher, Deborah Minter, Katie Hupp Stahlnecker, John Talbird; Graduate Education As Education: The Pedagogical Arts of Institutional Critique. Pedagogy 1 October 2003; 3 (3): 359–376. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-3-359 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. © 2003 Duke University Press2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Abstract Sound doctoral pedagogy, in addition to other forms of professionalization in PhD work, is essential in nurturing future generations of scholars in composition and rhetoric. Using the comprehensive exam as a focal point, this article identifies absences and contradictions in the field's approach to evaluating the competency of doctoral students.

Although sometimes considered to be only marginally related to the key academic goals of establishing claims and reputations, acknowledgements are commonplace in scholarly communication and virtually obligatory in dissertation writing. The significance of this disregarded “Cinderella” genre lies partly in the opportunities it offers students to present a social and scholarly self disentangled from academic discourse conventions and personally thank those who have shaped the accompanying text. Beyond the role it plays in academic gift giving and self-presentation, however, the textualization of gratitude reveals social and cultural characteristics, an intimation of disciplinary specialization within a broad generic structure. This analysis of the acknowledgements accompanying 240 Ph.D. and M.A. dissertations written by nonnative speakers of English suggests that personal gratitude is mediated by disciplinary preferences and strategic career choices, reflecting one way in which postgraduate writing represents a situated activity.

Argues that the situation of adjunct instructors, particularly those who piece full-time employment from part-time appointments, is appalling and that there is responsibility to be meted out to all the various interests connected to the academy that benefit from it. Explores how adjunct instructors and graduate student can make decisions about their careers based on the prevailing conditions of employment.

gnes Varda's recent documentary Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse explores the modern parallels to the ancient practice of gleaning leftover produce from the fields in the wake of the harvesters. Among the most fascinating individuals Varda comes upon is a young man rescuing spilled fruit and vegetables after a farmers' market in Paris. The man is extremely knowledgeable about the nutritional content of each item; has, in fact, a master's degree in chemistry; makes his living distributing free papers and advertising flyers outside train stations; and as his avocation teaches French to the Senegalese immigrants who share the housing project he lives in. Varda shows one of his classes. He is in love with teaching, has drawn charts with a vast number of careful illustrations of words, has an enchanting rapport with his students. But he does not get paid for his teaching: he has organized his classes for free. He is a gleaner, a rescuer of those who have nothing wrong with them but have been passed over by the system. Varda admires him. Traveling across France like a migrant agricultural worker, making a documentary with a hand-held digital video camera, she is la glaneuse of the film's title. For all the usefulness of their work and the joy they have in it, undoubtedly these gleaners-Varda, the French teacher, and others in the film-exist at the margins of their professions and their society. But for all the marginality of their financial existence, the film makes clear that they have chosen their paths thoughtfully and are happy doing what they do. Ghosts in the Classroom, a recent book of essays by adjunct instructors, makes clear that there are many college teachers in the United States who glean the developmental and introductory classes, lead a marginal financial existence, and are not at J a me s Pa p p is associate director of MLA English Programs and the Association of Departments of English. Most of his writing focuses on issues of university teaching and administration, but he has also published on literature, folklore, and translation and has an article forthcoming on Hungarian revival architecture in communities inside and outside Hungary. He is currently editing a collection of papers on the research of teaching in language, literature, and rhetoric.

Research Article| October 01 2001 Preparing Graduate Students to Teach Literature: Composition Studies as a Possible Foundation John Schilb John Schilb Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (3): 507–526. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-3-507 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation John Schilb; Preparing Graduate Students to Teach Literature: Composition Studies as a Possible Foundation. Pedagogy 1 October 2001; 1 (3): 507–526. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-3-507 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. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Graduate education in technical communication should provide students with an expansive view of the field. Toward that end, we offer a three-dimensional framework that represents technical communication as a robust, diverse, complex whole. Although the framework aims towards coherence, it embraces contradiction. That is, the framework represents a totality but does not purport to be the only possible representation. Key to the framework is our belief that the gap between theory and practice can actually be productive. Almost all binaries encourage overly simplistic understandings. But we should not allow the goal of remediating the binary to close off the important tensions that can allow the field to advance. This very gap is actually one of the few sites in which new ideas and approaches can be forged.

L2 writing scholars have recently debated the appropriateness of using cultural constructs to enhance the teaching of English. An important aspect of writing, critical thinking, has received considerable attention. Some have suggested that Asians, including Japanese, do not display critical thought in their writing in English. Other researchers claim that Asians display critical thinking abilities differently than Western learners. In addition, they argue that learners from a particular culture are too diverse to make claims about the whole group's thinking abilities. This study proposes a model for assessing critical thinking in the writing of L2 learners to determine whether content familiarity plays a role in critical thinking. Findings of a study of 45 Japanese undergraduate students indicate that the quality of critical thought depended on the topic content, with a familiar topic generating better critical thinking. Results also suggested that differing assumptions between the L1 and L2 culture may lead to misinterpretations of the critical thinking ability of L2 learners.

Describes an internship program at a two-year college in which graduate students from 13 participating area graduate programs teach in the two-year college and receive training addressing pedagogical issues unique to community colleges, thus being immersed in a world of higher within which the rest of their training occurs.

Describes the ongoing problem of graduate level preparation for community college teaching, and the need for such faculty. Describes a program in which two-year college and university faculty collaborate to train graduate students as community college faculty. Discusses getting the program started, implementing it, and taking stock.

Describes the National Center for Community College Education (NCCCE) at George Mason University, which links courses about the history, philosophy, and doctoral student's teaching discipline to prepare community mission of the American Community College with courses within the college professionals. Discusses the university environment, the faculty of NCCCE, the English department and NCCCE, and scholarship and NCCCE graduates.

(2000). The arrival of rhetoric in the twenty‐first century: The 1999 survey of doctoral programs in rhetoric. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 233-242.

Abstract In the last few years, scholars have turned their attention to configuring narratives of rhetoric and composition studies’ disciplinary history. This essay advocates reading the field as a social formation whose move toward professionalization can be understood as a series of rhetorical negotiations. Using the local histories of two institutions that established doctoral programs in English Departments, I consider how local and material factors provide a more nuanced understanding of that field's evolution. This methodology highlights how the current state of a discipline is inextricably bound to the daily work of its members and offers a way to explore the social shapes of rhetoric yet to come.

Gives an account in journal format of the author’s experiences teaching writing and literature at a missionary school in Nigeria. Describes difficulties and conflicts of beliefs encountered over a period of time with her colleagues. Presents a poem from one of her teaching assistants and discusses reactions and meanings involved in the different cultures.

This study examined the problems that four international graduate students of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds encountered in the process of adapting to the requirements of discipline-specific written discourses during their first year of studies in the United States. Qualitative data including participant and faculty interviews, observations, analysis of written samples, and reflective journals kept by the participants were collected. The results of the study suggest that international students, who bring different writing experiences with them to U.S. classrooms, need assistance to adjust more easily to the requirements of the new academic environment. This assistance, however, depends on international students and U.S. faculty alike learning to address explicitly how academic writing conventions differ across cultures.

Articulates “romantic intellectualism” of what graduate work in English might mean and be. Avoids giving a detailed description of a doctoral program. Intends to convey something that might best be called visioning or dreamwork, and offers it in the hope that it may be helpful to others in their individual and collective visioning and dreaming.

Calls for historians of rhetoric to return to the archives. Argues that it is the neglect of training graduate students in standard research methodologies that prevents the field from writing “better” histories of rhetoric. Argues for archival training similar to that given to graduate students in history departments, training tailored to recovering the history of rhetorical practices and instruction.

The authors twice replicated C. Haas and L. Flower's 1988 think-aloud reading study, which found that graduate students used “rhetorical” reading strategies to interpret a passage, whereas first-year college students used such strategies hardly at all. Rhetorical reading strategies use suppositions about the social, cultural, and historical context of the writing. The main intent of the replications was to see whether different outcomes might be found if the passage read dealt with a topic more familiar to first-year students. With the original passage, the results roughly supported Haas and Flower. But with the more familiar topic, the undergraduates generated substantially more rhetorical comments than they did with the Haas and Flower passage. Personal narrative and value-laden commentary were also measured, with older students far outproducing first-year students. The caution for researchers and teachers is to avoid hasty assumptions about underlying language competence without considering contextual factors.

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This article reports on how three English-speaking advisors and their non-native English-speaking doctoral students used citations and related writing techniques to make new knowledge claims in science dissertation writing. The study focuses on the introductory chapter of the dissertations. The research data consist of drafts of the students’ dissertations, analysis of the draft texts, observations during writing conferences and lab meetings, background interviews, and in-progress interviews. The study investigated: 1) the selection of cited works; 2) how the students and their advisors contextualized their research and made claims to novelty; 3) how the advisors inducted their students into the disciplinary culture and its citation practices; and 4) the influence of language and cultural differences on the students and their advisors. The findings revealed that the academic advisors played an important role in helping their three graduate students learn how to construct new knowledge claims. The study also found no negative influence from the students’ native language and culture on their acquisition of academic language and conventions.

Like its predecessor, the third edition of Academic Writing for Graduate Students explains understanding the intended audience, the purpose of the paper, and academic genres; includes the use of task-based methodology, analytic group discussion, and genre consciousness-raising; shows how to write summaries and critiques; features language focus sections that address linguistic elements as they affect the wider rhetorical objectives; and helps students position themselves as junior scholars in their academic communities. Among the many changes in the third edition: * newer, longer, and more authentic texts and examples * greater discipline variety in texts (added texts from hard sciences and engineering) * more in-depth treatment of research articles * greater emphasis on vocabulary issues * revised flow-of-ideas section * additional tasks that require students to do their own research * more corpus-informed content The Commentary has also been revised and expanded.

The research reported investigated how 32 undergraduate students in an upper-level sociology course wrote critiques and how their texts were evaluated by 4 professors in the discipline. Students represented different majors and education levels. Features associated with critique were tested for their relationship to the professors' summed holistic quality scores. Student's status as major and their educational level were also tested for their relationship to the summed scores. Results indicate that (a) students were more likely to receive higher scores if they found weaknesses in the source article, basing their judgments on disciplinary knowledge and employing an integrated text configuration, and (b) neither major nor educational level was a strong predictor of quality. Findings suggest that current pedagogy that promotes personal evaluation of texts may not lead to the type of writing valued in particular disciplinary communities, where evaluative commentary may be more linked to unique disciplinary standards.

Teachers of professional writing should try to integrate legal literacy into undergraduate writing courses in order to provide students with the kinds of literacies that many instructors and researchers want to promote in classes today. On one level, the almost complete exclusion of legal writing from most undergraduate professional writing classes should be reconsidered. This practice fails to meet the needs of a significant number of students who are considering careers in the legal profession. This neglect allows the legal system to remain a mystery to our students. This article analyzes how current literacy theory supports the integration of legal writing into the undergraduate curriculum and examines some of the relationships between rhetoric and legal writing pedagogy.

In summer of 1987, Donald Stewart began a survey of English departments, attempting to uncover changes in curriculum that had resulted from changes in discipline. Stewart reported results of his survey in a 1989 CCC article, is an English Major, and What Should It Be? Stewart acknowledged limitations of his study: he was considering only 194 colleges, and only 108 of these actually responded to his request for information beyond catalogue description. Furthermore, many of respondents indicated that their curriculum was constantly being revised. Still, survey provided an important window on English major, particularly with regard to options in creative writing and rhetoric/composition. Stewart found that only 74 of 194 colleges surveyed, or 38%, offered students chance to specialize in some aspect of writing in addition to literature. The majority of English departments surveyed by Stewart (55%) offered only literature emphases, with optional electives from other areas of English. Based on his findings, he made a call for the establishment, in all departments, of options in creative writing, linguistics (where departments of linguistics do not exist), and composition and (193). In our survey of writing concentrations or majors within English departments, we wanted to follow up on Stewart's survey to see if more undergraduates were able to specialize in composition and rhetoric.1 The initial impetus for this survey came from an e-mail discussion among writing program directors about concentrations in writing and rhetoric being offered in their departments. After several writing program directors informally announced new courses and writing concentrations, we thought a review of these changes

(1995). Revising for publication: Advice to graduate students and other junior scholars. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 25, No. 1-4, pp. 237-246.

Although there is much literature that describes collaborative writing projects in undergraduate courses, little is reported about such projects for graduate students. This article reports the results of a collaborative writing project in a graduate course in usability testing. Because the graduate students were sophisticated practitioners in career positions in technical and professional communication, the instructor made the assumption that the normal requirements of journal checks, conferences, and self- and group-assessment tools would not be needed. The results proved otherwise. An analysis of the two teams' efforts—both product and process—establishes the need for structure and guidance for graduate collaborative writing projects, regardless of the audience's professional experience.

This article describes a team-based project developed for undergraduate students in both business communication and business statistics classes in a small, midwestern college. More than 94% of the students endorsed the usefulness of the project, which was designed to help them develop communication competencies in multiple areas: working in teams, writing collaboratively, participating in meetings, and giving and receiving constructive criticism. The project presents a model of collaboration between instructors in business departments.

Current social perspectives on writing and disciplinary enculturation are generally grounded in theories of discourse communities. Although assumptions underlying these theories have been seriously questioned, few studies of situated writing have applied alternate theories. In this article, I explore a sociohistoric notion of disciplinarity in a case study of how a sociology student's dissertation prospectus is negotiated in a graduate seminar. A microhistorical narrative of a response episode in the seminar and subsequent textual revision is contextualized in histories of local activity. Analysis of the seminar response foregrounds emergent, nonlinear, discursively heterogeneous practices of disciplinary sense-making. Analysis of the text foregrounds practices whereby situated histories of textual production and reception are transformed into purified representations of the discipline and the author. Finally, the analysis details how the disciplinary work of revision in this setting was socially distributed and interactively achieved.

The results of our recent survey of the membership of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, Associated Writing Programs, and the Council of Writing Program Administration indicate the relative health of undergraduate writing programs (major, concentration, or certificate programs, not service courses) in American four-year universities and colleges. During the past five years there has been a significant increase in the number of undergraduate writing programs, including technical and professional writing. But responses to our survey also suggest that while undergraduate technical and professional writing programs comprise the second largest group of programs (behind creative writing) they are not increasing as rapidly as a new kind of undergraduate writing program—a broad-based program that students can complete by taking a wide range of creative writing, composition, journalism, and technical and professional writing courses. The future seems unclear for traditional undergraduate technical and professional writing programs, and faculties need to examine their options in designing or redesigning their programs.

(1994). Constructing a doctoral program in rhetoric and composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 392-397.

(1994). Doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition: A catalog of the profession. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 240-389.

Most discussions of disciplinarity start by claiming an emerging group as constituting a discipline or a profession and authorizing that group by locating appropriate research foci, programs for graduate education and undergraduate certification, professional societies, and central professional meetings. Our discussion examines the field of professional writing, focusing not so much on defining it as a discipline as on working out its curricular geography, an activity that will affect its status in both academy and industry. To that end, we explore the status of professional writing within the department of English by (a) briefly examining the problem of defining professional writing; (b) reviewing several theoretical positions within English that have provided a status for professional writing—literature, rhetoric/composition, business and technical writing—to expose the competition for control of the term and to surface the implications of accepting these various groups on their own terms; and (c) considering the curricular status to which professional writing might aspire by sketching a geography that positions professional writing in a new space within English.

Theoretical and pedagogical interest in writing in academic disciplines and other discourse communities has grown in the last decade, but few studies have looked at advanced levels of disciplinary enculturation. In this study, I examine the contexts for writing and response in a graduate education seminar with fifteen students, including eight nonnative speakers of English. I consider how the professor explicitly and implicitly communicated expectations for the form and content of writing assignments; how the students understood, negotiated and undertook these tasks; and how the professor evaluated and responded to students' final written texts. Finally, I argue that the students' writing tasks occur in a complex, multidimensional historical field of personal and social contexts and that advanced levels of disciplinary enculturation are marked by a specific set of issues revolving around students' emerging authority and conflicts inherent in disciplinary microsocieties.

To explore how writers with extensive experience and learning in an academic discipline used both topical and rhetorical knowledge to construct synthesis essays, 40 graduate students equally representing the two disciplines of psychology and business wrote synthesis essays on either supply-side economics or rehearsal in memory. Half of the writers completed think-aloud protocols, and their composing processes were analyzed for different qualities and frequencies of elaborations and rhetorical awareness and for task representation. Their written products (40 essays) were analyzed for the importance and origin of information and for the quality of key rhetorical moves. Analyses of variance revealed that high-knowledge writers evidenced more local and evaluative elaborations as well as an awareness of rhetorical contexts. They also included more new information in their essays in the top levels of essay organizations. Low-knowledge writers elaborated less but did rely on structural and content-based awareness to compose, factors which also were influenced by specific topics and disciplines, and they included comparable amounts of borrowedimplicit information in their essays. Intercorrelations of process and product features revealed that evaluative elaborations and awareness of rhetorical context corresponded with the presence of new information in essays for all 40 writers, suggesting that prior knowledge of an academic topic may take the form of a complex, situational strategy for composing. The findings confirm the interrelatedness of comprehension and composing processes and illustrate how writers, with varying levels of topic familiarity, use both their knowledge of disciplinary topics and their experience as readers and writers to compose synthesis essays.

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Empirical studies of gender-based language differences have provided con flicting, discreet conclusions that have little relevance for business- communications instruction. This paper presents informally collected obser vations of male and female students in undergraduate and graduate business- and technical-communication courses. Calling for future formal studies to verify its findings, this study concludes that people-intensive work experience modifies gender-based language differences in written business communica tions of undergraduate and graduate students. However, instruction in audi ence analysis, tone, content design, and style also modify these gender differences. If formally supported, these observations would help teachers argue for the value of business-communications instruction in helping stu dents develop varied and androgynous communication styles important for job-related communications.

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

This study examined developmental differences in adolescents' and adults' use of rhetorical strategies in memos written during a role-play session. Ninth graders, twelfth graders, college juniors, and adult graduate students chose 1 of 11 roles within the context of the role-play situation and exchanged memos persuading each other to adopt a position regarding a policy for off-campus lunch privileges. Five memos written by each of 11 randomly selected participants at each grade level were categorized by t-unit on the basis of a system of 17 rhetorical strategies. Analyses determined the relationship between grade level and memo length, rhetorical strategies (in each of four initial t-units), rhetorical focus, and participants' perceptions of their audiences' “power” before and after the session. Results show that college students and adults were more likely than younger participants to focus their memos on presenting their roles and establishing a relationship with their audience. The memos of younger participants were more likely to use “assertive” or “conditional” rhetorical strategies. Across all grade levels, however, writers were more likely to focus initial memos on establishing relationships and later memos on articulating their positions.

The renewed interest in rhetorical studies during past twenty years has caused many scholars to look back to beginnings of education in English as such programs were developed during latter half of nineteenth century. Most would probably agree with William Riley Parker that it was teaching of freshman composition that quickly entrenched English departments in college and university structure (347), and that freshman program continues to account for size and power of most English departments. But in spite of this, until recently graduate education in English has been focused almost exclusively on literary study. Even as progressive a thinker as Richard Ohmann was at one point moved to write, Literature is our subject matter, and, this being so, an inquiry into state of profession must ask how we stand vis-a'-vis literature (Structure of an Academic Field 359). Although Ohmann subsequently repudiated his statement (English in America 20), such an outlook is revealing of climate existing in most English departments for greater part of twentieth century. By seventies, however, scattered voices began to protest pattern and purpose of graduate training in English. John Gerber argued that traditional literary ignored realities of profession, and that graduate education should be devoted to the acquisition of skills, not merely subject matter (315). He specifically encouraged both M.A. and Ph.D. candidate . . . to make writing, theories of writing, and theories of teaching writing an area of specialization (316). Gerber doubted that such a reform in curriculum would come to pass, and, in fact, traditional literary study has changed little since his article appeared in 1977. But reform has taken place, not by revamping entire curriculum, but by opening up new programs in rhetoric-what is still usually termed option (as opposed to mainstream of literary studies). By 1980 William Covino, Nan Johnson, and Michael Feehan were able to identify twenty graduate programs in English offering a concentration in rhetoric (although some of these programs were

Summaries of expository texts were obtained from undergraduate students and examined for the nature of text-to-summary mapping by asking judges to identify the text sentences of origin for every summary sentence. The analysis revealed that simple omission and one-to-one mapping of text sentences into summary sentences were the most favored strategies. Following these in order of frequency were the combining of pairs, triples, and longer runs of text sentences that were predominantly adjacent in the texts, showing a strong tendency to preserve the original order of text sentences. Although writers did not select the same text sentences for omission, it was possible to identify a core set of text sentences that was always preserved in summaries of the larger texts. These sets, when compared with randomly selected sets in their original order, appeared as meaningful and coherent “mini-texts” to independent judges. The results are discussed in the light of Brown, Day, &amp; Jones's (1983) identification of a “mature” summarizing strategy in which narrative texts are reorganized and condensed by combining text sentences across paragraphs. It is suggested that the “mature strategy” does not appear in these results because the structure of expository text resists easy reorganization, and because a severe length constraint was not imposed.

A group of graduate students in English and language education were given a series of instructor-designed and self-designed reading and writing tasks. They wrote formal papers in response to these tasks and kept retrospective journals describing their reading and writing strategies. The study looks at the nature of introspective accounts and the usefulness of such accounts in studies of the composing process. Several writing tasks are described and analyzed, and three brief case studies are presented. The study concludes that retrospective journal accounts are a rich source of information because they permit consideration of the complex context within which composing occurs.

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Questionaire responses from faculty members in 190 academic departments at 34 universities were analyzed to determine the writing tasks faced by beginning undergraduate and graduate students. In addition to undergraduate English departments, six fields were surveyed: electrical engineering, civil engineering, computer science, chemistry, psychology, and master of business administration programs. Results indicated considerable variability across fields in the kinds of writing required and in preferred assessment topics.