It has been shown that the language of some scientific disciplines is highly metaphorical, but there is probably no field that uses metaphor quite as pervasively and idiosyncratically as does computer science. One senses that this phenomenon results from a need to compensate for the exceedingly abstract nature of the discipline. The central metaphors do not exist singly. They exist in groups or families, suggesting a deep influence on the way people in computer science write and talk. Such a cluster of deep metaphors can be thought of as a paradigm of the discipline, a set of eyeglasses through which we see our world. This article examines some essential paradigms of computer science. These paradigms are so much a part of the way we think about and talk about computers that it is difficult to imagine computer discourse without them.

If science is conducted within a scientific culture, then the classical concept of epideictic rhetoric should be applicable to internal scientific discourse. A theory of epideictic rhetoric as the “rhetoric of orthodoxies” is presented, along with its five rhetorical functions: education, legitimation, demonstration, celebration, and criticism. Suggestions as to how these concepts might be applied to internal scientific discourse are given, with special attention given to studies of science already completed by philosophers, sociologists, and rhetoricians.

This article explores some of the confusion and sources of that confusion in the research relating parts of clauses to the communicative roles that they play. It proposes that M.A.K. Halliday's system of analyzing a sentence into one or more of three possible kinds of themes and a rheme is a useful system in which the research relating parts of clauses to their communicative roles can be carried out. The article examines and briefly critiques Halliday's system of analysis and then goes on to compare some of Halliday's terms with those used in other systems. The article concludes by discussing some implications that this system might have for understanding aspects of discourse production, structure, or reception.

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.

In this study, we analyzed how students from different interpretive communities shape their academic texts. Prospective educational researchers, prospective reading specialists, prospective teachers, and prospective nurses read an educational research article from which we had deleted the discussion section. After they had read the article, subjects completed it by writing a discussion section. We analyzed subjects' texts in terms of writers' manipulation of both content and procedural knowledge. Our findings suggest that mere participation in an interpretive community without explicit instruction in its ways of writing can enhance students' ability to write in that community. Our findings also suggest that participation in one interpretive community can facilitate writing in another community, provided the communities share discourse conventions.

Perhaps fullest expression of contrast between as a set of rules or as a bureaucratic system and as literature or rhetoric or language' is work of James Boyd White. In a series of books and articles, White has explored a cultural critique of by considering life of to be a kind of discourse that engenders a special kind of ethical and political community.2 While my main intent is critique, I want to begin by celebrating position that underlies what White calls literary or rhetorical character of law: fundamental recognitions that shapes perception and directs action, and that texts create communities. In White's words, law constitutes a world of meaning and action: creates a set of actors and speakers and offers them possibilities for meaningful speech and action that would not otherwise exist; in so doing establishes and maintains a community, defined by its processes of language (White 1990, xiv). While Professor White has been object of a variety of criticisms, I will focus on two criticisms that accept position that is fundamentally discursive, while expressing concerns about White's conception of role of power in communication. First is position represented eloquently by late Robert Cover-that, while is integrally interpretive, differs fundamentally from other interpretive activities because law, unlike literature or poetry or drama, is necessarily coercive.3 Since interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death, wrote Cover, its texts must attend to the conditions of effective domination (Cover 1986, 1601). Even violence of weak judges is utterly real-a naive but immediate reality, in need of no interpretation, no critic to reveal it (1609). A second, related, critique is that White's vision of community is insufficiently attentive to operation of law's ideological power. The problem is not that White ignores power or that, as Richard Posner would seem to have it, literature is but a sidelight to real operations of and legal institutions (Posner 1988). As White notes, whoever controls our languages has greatest power of all (1988, 747). His reaction has been to offer new ways to read and to write of power. My concern is that he does not account for resistance to change that is built into social form and social practice of legal discourse. Linguistic practices run deep;

This essay examines James Boyd White's analysis of legal discourse from the perspective of legal and cultural critic. We commend his observation that jurists have done poor job of communicating their decisions to both legal practitioners and the public community. We ask, however, how his art of translation as constitutes ethical and political communities enabling writers and readers of what White characterizes as law's most central text, the judicial opinion, to participate more constructively the creation of a world of meaning. We have focused our analysis on White's Justice as Translation.' Our focus is appropriate because this essay is the developmental sequel to When Words Lose Their Meaning2 which White announced his method of rhetorical and cultural criticism. His is method for analyzing legal texts systematically to illuminate the meaning of justice and injustice in the relations we establish with our languages and with each other.3 We argue that the forms of discourse addressed to or issued from courts the United States define distinct (in White's terms) of argument. White contributes an approach to this culture which is particularly useful to those extra-legal critics who participate the construction of the meaning of judicial opinion through thoughtful reading, but which provides little guidance to those involved the creation of those texts.4 While we accept that legal discourse is distinct culture of argument with characteristics common with other cultures of argument, including literary

Oral and Written Communication: Historical Approaches. Edited by Richard Leo Enos. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990. Pp.vi + 264. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Newly Translated, with Introduction, Notes and Appendices by George Kennedy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, xvi + 335 pp. Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge by Greg Meyers. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1990. Ethics in Human Communication by Richard L. Johannesen. 3rd Edition. Waveland Press, 1990. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action by James V. Wertsch. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. 147 pp. + references and name and subject index. Thomas Henry Huxley: Communicating for Science by J. Vernon Jensen. Newark: University of Delaware, 1991. Pp. 253. The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry. Edited by Herbert W. Simons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 388.

Symbols in the prehistoric Middle East - developmental features preceding written communication, Denise Schmandt-Besserat a historical view of the relationship between reading and writing, Edward P.J.Corbett sophistic formulae and the emergence of the Attic-Ionic grapholect - a study in oral and written composition, Richard Leo Enos the auditors' role in Aristotelian rhetoric, William M.A.Grimaldi a sophistic strain in the medieval ars praedicandi and the scholastic method, James L.Kinneavy the illiterate mode of written communication - the work of the medieval scribe, Denise A.Troll rhetoric, truth and literacy in the Renaissance of the 12th century, John O.Ward Quintillian's influence on the teaching of speaking and writing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, James J.Murphy l'enseignement de l'art de la premiere rhetorique - rhetorical education in France before 1600, Robert W.Smith technological development and writer-subject reader immediacies, Walter J.Ong a rhetoric of mass communication - collective or corporate discourse, Lynette Hunter.

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.

Through the use of case study portraits, this article examines naturally occurring one-to-one writing conference conversations between a ninth-grade English teacher and three students in his class. Suggesting a broadened model of effective writing conference instruction, the article considers composing processes that appear to be privileged in the conference context when different students are learning to write. The focus is on the dialogic nature of markedly contrasting conversations, demonstrating that while dialogue wears many guises and while the give and take between teacher and student can be fleeting and “forgettable,” the conversational context contributes to a deliberative process critical to the process of composing. Methodology for the research on which this article is based drew on ethnographic techniques combined with discourse analysis of writing conference conversation.

On-line computer conferences have been of increasing interest to teachers of composition who hope to provide alternative forums for student-centered, collaborative writing that involve all members of their classes in active learning. Some expect them to provide sites for discourse that are more egalitarian and less constrained by power differentials based on gender and status than are face-to-face discussions. These expectations, however, are largely unsupported by systematic research. The article describes an exploratory study of gender and power relationships on Megabyte University, one particular on-line conference. While the results of the study are not definitive, they do suggest that gender and power are present to some extent even in on-line conferences. During the two 20-day periods studied, men and high-profile members of the community dominated conference communication. Neither this conference domination nor the communication styles of participants were affected by giving participants the option of using pseudonyms.

Patricia P. Matsen, Philip Rollinson, Marion Sousa, eds. Readings from Classical Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. viii + 382 pages. Roderick P. Hart. Modern Rhetorical Criticism. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman/Little Brown, 1990. iv + 542 pages. Susan Miller. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 267 pages. Bruce Lincoln. Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 238 pages. Gregory Clark. Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation: A Social Perspective on the Function of Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. xix + 93 pages. Lawrence J. Prelli. A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. xi + 320 pages. Kathleen E. Welch. The Contemporary Reception of Classical Rhetoric: Appropriations of Ancient Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990. 186 pages.

neither my stories of teaching nor those of many of my feminist colleagues. These practitioners, along with many women and men writing about composition studies today, urge us to design curricula to empower women and other students marginalized in relation to the dominant discourse. In their stories we see them empowering those women, who experience life and the academy from a marginal perspective, to write. Moving away from the developmental theories of William H. Perry and Jean Piaget, these researchers cite studies by women about the different ways women know and write to justify the ways they encourage their female students' literacy.2 But these feminists do not describe the nonmarginalized students many of the rest of us meet in our classes-those men, women, and culturally different ones who already belong in the academy. How many of those of us who are feminists and composition teachers interact only with students eager to be transformed by the political agendas of feminist, or for that matter, even composition pedagogy? The affirmation in the first part of my title gives away the ending of my story,

As with On the Origin of Species, we find that the work to be considered here-The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs-demonstrates Darwin's use of hedges to project the ethos of a cautious scientist. Hedges are linguistic elements such as perhaps, might, to a certain degree, or it is possible that. When people use hedges, they signal that they are taking a cautious stance on the truth-value of the referential matter they seek to convey. Hedges are a type of metadiscourse, a level of writing in which authors draw attention to the very art of writing itself-they discourse about their discourse (Crismore, Talking to Readers). This metadiscursive trait, however, represents only one aspect of Darwin's rhetoric. In Coral Reefs, he sculpts a key chapter into a Ciceronian form so pure that one might have to return to the Renaissance to find a parallel, and within this larger form, he strategically places hedges and other metadiscourse. He, further, employs visuals (drawings, diagrams, and maps) for persuasion at those points were the tension between his audiences preconceptions and the new theory being presented threatens to reach a dangerous level. The visuals and the metadiscursive commentary about them, also, help to establish his ethos and to build the argument for his theory of coral reefs. These elements, so perfectly embodied in Coral Reefs, were the rhetorical tools of an extremely sophisticated scientific mind which has much to pass down to our own conception of scientific writing. All too many of today's professional, academic, and textbook writers view exposition of findings as being all that is needed-and other parts of the written document, including visuals, can be handled even more perfunctorily: facts by themselves are enough, after all, according to this view. Darwin, however, believed that bald facts and blunt explanations were insufficient, as he clearly indicates in his A utobiography. There, he writes that in Origin he had first presented a short and rather vague discussion of his own innovative idea in the area of embryology. Later, other scientists got the for the new idea. Darwin felt no bitterness, for he knew that the fault had been his alone and that this fault was a rhetorical one: I failed to impress my readers; and he who succeeds in doing so deserves, in my opinion, all the credit (Barlow 125). Facts and blunt explanations were not enough-rhetorical strategies were needed to impress the reader-even (and we have some reason to say especially) professional scientists. Since, even granting the A utobiography, there will always remain a question about the precise nature of the intended audience for Origin, and since, moreover, a cloud of non-scientific, anachronistic controversy hangs over its theory of natural selection, we have turned to Darwin's work on coral reefs: this work was unquestionably intended for the professional scientists, and yet it also, like Origin, sets forth a theory that involves a historical development measured in geological time. Coral Reefs has, we think, some

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Conversations on the WrittenWord: Essays on Language and Literacy, Jay L. Robinson John Schilb Expressive Discourse, Jeannette Harris Douglas Hesse The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg Theresa Enos Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 3rd ed., Edward P. J. Corbett Cheryl Glenn Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede John Trimbur Learning to Write in Our Nation’s Schools: Instruction and Achievement in 1988 at Grades 4, 8, and 12, Arthur N. Applebee et al. Paul W. Rea The Future of Doctoral Studies in English, Andrea Lunsford, Helen Moglen, and James F. Slevin Joseph J. Comprone

The more we read and respond to student writing, the more we are likely to become interested not so much in what students say as in what it is they don't say.What they say, after all, is generally what has gotten them, by in the past: the well-composed, polished exposition of received truths we all have come to know variously as themewriting or canned prose.The sheer quantity and repetition of this kind of common-sense, prepackaged discourse has increasingly led many of us to focus on those moments in the texts when something else can be said to happen: those moments when writers fall silent, refuse or fail to develop certain lines of thinking, or try to smooth over contradictions in their papers.By putting pressure on these places in their papers, we try, instead, to drive a wedge into the cracks of an otherwise closed structure, to make a space for thinking to take place, not only about their subject matter, but about the processes of writing and reading.In the last ten years, a great deal of composition research into the writing process has resulted in efforts to teach students how to generate material in early drafts of their papers, material that will help them resist settling too soon for closure in their writing.1 And even the most traditional models for responding to student papers have tried to address the appearance of "gaps" and contradictions in student papers, even if it be by simply telling the student to "DEV" a sentence or by placing question marks next to the most egregious contradictions.But one reason why traditional marginal comments have often failed in the past is that students invariably read them as directives to tighten up their closed fictions even more, usually by reducing complexity rather than increasing it.2What seems called for, then, is a way of discussing and responding to student texts which would take advantage of what we now know about textual production: a method which would help students rethink

It is noted that communication scholars and teachers agree that the first step in joining a community is to learn the conventions of discourse of the target discipline. But argument in public policy arenas often involves multiple disciplines and must address ethical as well as technical issues. The authors term such discourse forums 'noncongruent sites' and explore the problem of how to determine when the field-specific discourse convections of specialists appropriately give way to ethical argument. It is argued that engineers must be educated to take a more than purely technical perspective on public issues. The curriculum at one institution is examined, and examples of courses and projects which tend to promote a broader perspective are given.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Based on a 70,000-word sample of eight journal articles and four textbook chapters, this article examines the communicative value of anticipatory- it clauses in scientific and technical texts. The main discourse function of the 205 clauses appears to be to provide author comment, with the meaning of the verb or the meaning of the adjective determining the particular type of comment. Many of these comments are evidential; that is, they are concerned primarily with the reliability or source of knowledge. Anticipatory- it clauses are also used to mark the introduction of a topic, to forecast, to summarize, and to direct the reader in interpreting a graphic or recognizing the most salient points in an argument. Rather than being a structure to avoid, the anticipatory- it clause is probably one whose effective use indicates academic acculturation.

This article describes an audience analysis exercise that offers a striking series of examples of how one business communication textbook has been adapted over the years by its authors to accommodate these authors' changing perceptions of their audience. The exercise also attempts to make students aware of their own involvement in various discourse communities by means of a letter-writing activity and subsequent classroom discussion. Additionally, this article argues for the need to help students become aware of how the values and presuppositions of discourse communities affect communications within those communities.

The alleged death of rhetoric in nineteenth century, so often cited by historians of discipline, has always seemed paradoxical to Victorian scholars familiar with social conflicts of that century and volumes of deliberative discourse to which they gave rise. These comments on demise of rhetoric generally construe it as an academic discipline or as use of stylistic devices-definitions which have so limited research that Donald C. Stewart remarked in 1983 that the most notable feature of scholarship in nineteenth-century rhetoric is its relative absence (153).1 However, recent studies by James Berlin and Susan Jarratt have broadened investigation of rhetoric's history to include discussions of relationship between language, knowledge, and society.2 Jarratt's proposed revisionary history would investigate implicit theories of rhetoric in any texts which explore relation of knowledge to language as well as roles of community and authority in establishing truth and prescribing ethical behavior (Toward 11-14; Naming). In this essay, I wish to trace a theory of rhetoric and its ideological implications in work of Victorian prophet Thomas Carlyle.3 When estrangement between upper and lower classes caused by rise of capitalism became central subject of deliberative discourse, Carlyle gained a large readership through his incisive social criticism.4 His writing influenced an entire generation which included John Stuart Mill, Charles

Text transmitted electronically through computer-mediated communication networks is an increasingly available yet little documented form of written communication. This article examines the syntactic and stylistic features of an emergent phenomenon called Interactive Written Discourse (IWD) and finds that the concept of “register,” a language variety according to use, helps account for the syntactic reductions and omissions that characterize this historical juxtaposition of text format with real-time and interactive pressures. Similarities with another written register showing surface brevity, the note taking register, are explored. The study is an empirical examination of written communication from a single discourse community, on a single topic, with a single recipient, involving 23 experienced computer users making travel plans with the same travel advisor by exchanging messages through linked computers. The study shows rates of omissions of subject pronouns, copulas, and articles and suggests that IWD is a hybrid, showing features of both spoken and written language. In tracing variable use of conventions such as sentence initial lower case and parentheses, the study shows that norms are gradually emerging. This form of written communication demands study because, as capabilities expand, norms associated with this medium of communication may come to influence or even replace those of more traditional writing styles.

Our profession's recent focus on the social construction of knowledge and the roles that discourse and community play in this construction have made some of us aware of disturbing characteristics in our classrooms. We now notice, for instance, that the traditional forums comprising these classrooms-group discussions, lectures, teacher-student conferences, written assignments-generally support a traditional hegemony in which teachers determine appropriate and inappropriate discourse. We notice, further, that this political arrangement encourages intellectual accommodation in students, discourages intellectual resistance, and hence may seriously limit students' understanding of, and effective use of, language. As a result, we have begun to recognize the need for non-traditional forums for academic exchange, forums that allow interaction patterns disruptive of a teacher-centered hegemony. These forums should encourage students to use language to resist as well as to accommodate and should enable individuals to create internally persuasive discourse as well as to adopt discourse validated by external authority. In creating such non-traditional forums to supplement the work now going on in our classrooms, we tacitly argue for the importance of discourse in learning, the importance of students talking and writing to one another as well as to the teacher as they attempt to come to terms with the theories and concepts raised in their courses. This particular kind of learning does not take place often enough within the forums characteristic of our traditional classrooms, where interaction-at least the approved kind of interaction-is all too often dyadic, emphasizing the role of the all-knowing teacher discussing a topic with quiet, attentive students who may respond to the teacher but not directly to one another. Socrates tells Phaedrus that this is the ideal learning situation: lucidity and completeness and serious importance belong only to those lessons on justice and honor and goodness

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The English Coalition Conference: Democracy through Language, Richard Lloyd-Jones and Andrea A. Lunsford S. Michael Halloran and John Hollow Developing Successful College  Writing Programs, Edward M. White Louise Wetherbee Phelps Advanced Placement English.: Theory, Politics, and Pedagogy, Gary A. Olson, Elizabeth Metzger, and Evelyn Ashton-Jones David W. Chapman Creating Writers: Linking Assessment and Writing Instruction, Vicki Spandel and Richard J. Stiggins Karen L. Greenberg A Program Development Handbook for the Holistic Assessment of Writing, Norbert Elliot, Maximino Plata,and Paul Zelhart Edward M. White Programs That Work: Models and Methods for Writing Across the Curriculum, Toby Fulwiler and Art Young Disciplinary Perspectives on Thinking and Writing, Barbara S. Morris Joseph F. Trimmer Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, Bruce Lincoln Joseph Harris

Students usually compose adequate descriptive abstracts, but many confuse summary abstracts with short paraphrases or descriptive abstracts. Textbooks define a summary abstract ambiguously, as a “mini-paper” and/or as a mere statement of an article's topic and conclusions; most textbooks maintain the conceptual distinction between summary and descriptive abstracts even though differences between the two types are blurred in practice. These irregularities are accounted for by a hypothesis: in all levels of discourse, from sentences to extended texts, general and specific components conserve the “shape” of information. Intermediate discourse components (e.g., sentential tense, the syllogistic middle term, or the body of a text) may be deleted to create a smaller equivalent discourse structure. The two polar abstract types represent polar (general vs. specific) text components. Common abstracting errors arise from two sources: failure to distinguish between an abstract as “mini-paper” and a short paraphrase from the body of a long text, but also failure to distinguish between general topical information and the specific claims of a text, attributed to students' usual lack of acquaintance with other literature on a topic, besides the article they attempt to abstract.

Harris argues that linguistic theory is useful for solving certain problems encountered in technical writing theory and pedagogy [1]. However, he undermines his purpose by introducing irrelevant distinctions between competing syntactic theories (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar and Transformational Grammar) and by failing to exploit the full potential of the few applications he mentions. The passive rule is a case in point. It not only constitutes an operational test for identifying passive sentences, it also contributes to the flow of discourse by rearranging both thematic roles (e.g. agent and patient) and given/new information. The passive rule is only one of a class of noun phrase-moving operations that technical writing specialists may find useful.

The widespread use of irony in academic writing raises issues not considered in most psychological, linguistic, or literary approaches to irony: How is irony signalled in a written text? What are the constraints of politeness within academic discourse that govern the use and interpretation of irony? This essay considers the interpretation of one kind of irony—ironic quotation—in a controversy between linguists and artificial intelligence researchers. Irony in these published exchanges is then compared to irony in conference discussions and unpublished papers in linguistics and to irony in other disciplines. Although the analysis follows psychological and linguistic accounts of irony as echoic mention in which the same words can be reused with a different intention, it begins with the rhetorical relation of the quoting writer, the quoted writer, and the reader as members of disciplinary communities. The instances of irony that are considered both define these relations and assume them as a basis for interpretation. This analysis suggests that the study of irony can serve as a means of understanding disciplines and of examining our own taken-for-granted assumptions as academic writers.

The authors recount their attempt to analyze a case study in terms of two conflicting rhetorics: a collectivist rhetoric that values most the contributions individuals make to an ongoing collective project and an individualist rhetoric that values most the original and autonomous voice. These two rhetorics conflict in the experience of one writer working concurrently in a literature seminar within a university English department and in the public relations office of a reproductive services agency. This conflict, centering on different rhetorical ethics, had less to do with competence than with commitment: the writer's commitment to the individualist ethics practiced in the writing she did in the literature seminar prevented her from valuing the writing she did at the agency that worked toward a collectivist end. The authors then examine how this analysis is problematized by alternative interpretations of this case that demonstrate that the collectivist rhetoric practiced by researchers and theorists of writing itself involves the interaction of conflicting individualist assertions. This analysis suggests that the most useful theoretical insights any case might provide into the question of how writing ought to be taught are embodied in the exchange of interpretations that case provokes and in the confrontation of diverse arguments that emerge from that exchange.

Rhetoric as a college-level discipline entered the nineteenth century as one of the most respected fields in higher education. The teacher of rhetoric at that time was an honored and respected figure, often occupying a chaired position like Edinburgh's Regius Professorship or Harvard's Boylston Chair. When, however, we look at the teacher of rhetoric a mere century later, what a sad change we find. Rhetoric has changed in a hundred years from an academic desideratum to a grim apprenticeship, to be escaped as soon as practicable. Instead of being an esteemed intellectual figure in community and campus, the rhetoric teacher of 1900 is increasingly marginalized, overworked, and ill-paid. Instead of being a senior professor, he, or she, is an instructor or a graduate student. Instead of being sought by students, rhetoric courses are despised and sneered at, and their teachers have fallen from the empyrean of named chairs to the status of permanent underclass teachers: oppressed, badly paid, ill-used, and secretly despised. In this essay I want to examine some of the issues of labor and status that have surrounded the composition underclass, which is with us today in forms that would be all too familiar to the writing teachers of 1900. The creation of the composition underclass cannot be understood without examining an essential change that took place in America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the shift from oral to written discourse within rhetorical training, with its result an incredible rise in the amount of individual academic work that each teacher of rhetoric must do. This overwork, along with the increasing bureaucratization of the universities, allowed the formation of permanent low-status jobs in composition which were not filled by upwardly mobile scholars, who increasingly gravitated to literary work, which was easier, offered a lighter load, and was given more respect.

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Riley has recently applied some speech act strategies of indirectness to textbook instructions on being both clear and polite in professional letter writing. Based on results from two experiments with college senior students, the present project aims to account for those strategies and to discuss four principles generated from the experimental data about each strategy: 1) its value index, 2) its writer/addressee orientation, 3) its linguistic characterization, and 4) its location in a sentence. The professional writer can achieve the desired degree of indirectness by consulting those four features about any strategy used in any context.

Researchers and teachers are joining in a movement to introduce more collaborative work in language arts classrooms. While collaborative learning and writing are valuable activities in any classroom, not enough is understood about what happens when collaborative activities are introduced into a traditional classroom discourse structure. This study analyzes a collaborative activity, both as a traditional classroom event and as a collaborative event. The results of the analysis suggest that, even when the activity is explicitly collaborative and students are experienced collaborators, patterns of traditional classroom discourse dominate their communicative choices.

Explaining difficult ideas to lay readers is an important and frequently needed writing skill. When explaining, writers must recognize and overcome the confusions that lay readers may experience in learning abstract concepts. To date, there has been little study of this demanding writing skill. Consequently, this article identifies a particular class of explanatory discourse and proposes working hypotheses about the types of knowledge likely to be associated with skill in this genre. These hypotheses are explored through a study of individual differences in explanatory writing skill among 169 college students. The results of the study showed that variations in the accuracy and adaptiveness of the students' explanations were partially accounted for by measures of topic knowledge, social cognition, and discourse knowledge. A discourse knowledge index and a topic knowledge index were correlated with explanatory writing skill. Cognitive complexity, a measure of social cognition, was associated with adaptiveness in explaining but not accuracy. These findings suggest that explanatory skill is a function of several types of knowledge and that it may be as dependent on discourse or rhetorical knowledge as it is on topical expertise.

(1990). Positional historiography and Margaret Fuller's public discourse of mutual interpretation. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 233-239.

When it was first published in 1989, Susan Miller s Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric the Writer established a landmark pedagogical approach to composition based the importance of the writer the act of writing in the history of rhetoric. Widely used as an introduction to rhetoric composition theory for graduate students, the volume was the first winner of the W. Ross Winterowd Award from JAC and is still one of the most frequently cited books in the field.This first paperback edition includes a new introductory chapter in which Miller addresses changes in the field since the first edition, outlines new research, surveys positions she no longer supports. A new foreword by Thomas P. Miller assesses the proven impact of Rescuing the Subject on the field of rhetoric composition.Situating modern composition theory in the historical context of rhetoric, Miller notes that throughout the eighteenth century, rhetoric referred to oral, not written, discourse. By contrast, her history of rhetoric contends oral written discourse were related from the beginning. Taking a thematic rather than chronological approach, she shows how actual acts of writing comment both rhetoric composition. Miller also asserts that contemporary composition study is the necessary cultural outcome of changing conditions for producing discourse, describing the history of rhetoric as the gradual unstable relocation of discourse in conventions that only written language can create. She maintains teachers historians of rhetoric must recognize that the contemporary writing they analyze teach demands their attention to a textual rhetoric that allows theorizing the writer as always symbolically a student of situated meanings.

The American Community College, Arthur M. Cohen and Florence B. Brawer Nell Ann Pickett Rescuing the Subject.: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer, Susan Miller The Written World: Reading and Writing in Social Contexts, Susan Miller Joseph Harris Writing as Social Action, Marilyn M. Cooper and Michael Holzman Deborah Brandt The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations, David Bleich Joyce Irene Middleton Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research, Chris M. Anson Anne Ruggles Gere Technical and Business Communication: Bibliographic Essays for Teachers and Corporate Trainers, Charles H. Sides Alice Philbin Writing and Technique, David Dobrin Deborah H. Holdstein Worlds of Writing. Teaching and Learning in Discourse Communitieast Work, Carolyn B. Matelene Stephen A. Bernhardt Creative Writing in America. Theory and Pedagogy, Joseph M. Moxley D. W. Fenza

I recently attended a conference previously unknown to me and to most college English faculty: The Assessment Forum of American Association for Higher Education (AAHE). (I was there to give a paper on measurement of writing ability and on evaluation of writing programs.) The experience of that conference ought to have been routine; after all, I have directed a variety of large-scale writing programs and I have been speaking and publishing on writing assessment for over fifteen years; I have also spent many years as chair of an English department and as a writing program administrator. But experience of hearing papers and discussions at that conference was not at all routine; it was both troubling and enlightening, as well as quite new in unexpected ways. My first reaction to sessions on writing measurement at AAHE was that I had entered a new world. The papers not only made different assumptions about writing than I, as a writing teacher, writer, and researcher, normally make, but came out of a wholly different scholarly community of discourse, one that calls itself the assessment movement. The references were entirely unfamiliar, procedures were different, and approach to subject struck me as insensitive to what writing is all about. But all of these differences seemed to center on way people spoke (and hence thought) about measurement: I was in a foreign country, language was different, and that difference changed everything. I had entered a new discourse community in a field in which I was a well-published specialist, and none of my knowledge or experience seemed to matter. And yet discourse was about measuring writing ability and evaluating writing programs, that is, about what has (however accidentally) become my specialty. I felt disoriented. When I returned home from AAHE I found a flier from Jossey-Bass, publisher of my 1985 book, Teaching and Assessing Writing. I don't expect book to appear on every flier marketing division puts out, but this little

Drawing on scholarship in a variety of disciplines - philosophy, political theory, sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary theory, rhetoric - the authors outline an approach to the study of literacy that does not neglect the cognitive or individual aspects of literacy but rather sees them as largely shaped by the social forces of our political, economic, and educational systems. Ranging from the first-year writing class to adult literacy programs, the essays point the way to effective teaching strategies, program design, and research opportunities.Seven new chapters - on such topics as collaborative writing, discourse communities, women's literacy, and functional literacy - and eight previously published ones make up the book, providing a comprehensive theory of writing as social action.

Just before the roundtable began, in Seattle, my friend John Trimbur asked me something about foundationalism. When I asked did he mean Ford, Carnegie, or Rockefeller, John said, patiently, that I really ought to read more of the current literature on discourse communities. I responded, a bit defensively, that I had tried but couldn't get past the counter-hegemonic language. When Min Lu heard that, she raised her eyebrows, Pat Bizzell looked suspicious, Lil Brannon said Really? and Joe Harris wondered, no doubt, what I was doing on the panel in the first place. I explained that I really couldn't read some of that stuff any more than I could write or speak it, and if that meant the revolution would have to go on without me, that was OK. These words among friends were not, in any way, angry-and probably didn't even happen, though they seemed to.