Advice about how and when to implement the you-perspective is sometimes vague or contradictory. Many authorities simply advise writers to use the second person pronoun as often as possible, in either subject or object position; others suggest that the first person pronoun may be preferable for certain types of messages such as negative ones. Concepts from speech act theory can be used to clarify the most effective use of first and second person pronouns in two types of structures frequently found in professional communication: commissives and directives.

This article first reviews the role of oral and written discourse within social constructionist theory. The author discusses both the differences and the similarities between oral and written discourse and suggests that writers emphasize the similarities rather than the differences since the implicit rules of conversation have much to offer to the technical writer. In order to apply these conversational principles, however, technical writers need to alter their attitudes toward their audiences. The article concludes with an example of how the principles of conversation can be applied to the process of writing instructions.

This article considers the complex processes involved in readers' and writers' construction of textual meaning: how people construct meaning from texts through reading and for texts through writing. Building meaning through reading entails organizing, selecting, and connecting. Readers use previously acquired knowledge to operate on textual cues, organizing mental representations that include material they select from the text and connect with material they generate. This constructivist characterization of the reading process extends also to literate acts in which people are writers as well as readers, those acts in which they compose texts by drawing from textual sources. To meet their discourse goals, writers perform textual transformations associated with the operations of organizing, selecting, and connecting as they appropriate source material for uses in different communicative contexts. They dismantle source texts and reconfigure content they select from these sources, and they interweave the source material with content they generate from stored knowledge. The article describes the kinds of transformations that occur through reading and writing, and proposes a way to think about tasks that invite writers to transform extant texts. Theoretical issues are raised, and suggestions are made for further research.

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.

This article discusses two sets of neurological case histories, A. R. Luria's The Man with a Shattered World and Oliver Sack's Awakenings, and argues that these histories display two paradigmatic explanations for the mind/brain relation, and that the movement from one paradigm to another also necessitates a movement to different forms of discourse. One explanation comes from the physical sciences and results in logical, quantitative exposition. The other originates in the human sciences and results in narrative. Luria and Sacks wrote these case histories in an explicit attempt to bridge—in understanding and in discourse—this paradigmatic gap; in the process, they redefined what it means to be a neuropsychiatrist. Case histories allow the writer to combine the empirical analysis characteristic of neurological discourse with the individual detail characteristic of psychological narrative.

Persuasive discourse, either as a separate mode of discourse (Kinneavy 1971) or as a distinctive part of argumentative discourse,2 frequendy remains part of the overall writing assignment for our composition students. Although we may disagree as to how to define exactly or teach persuasive discourse in writing classrooms, we have more or less followed the tradition of Western classical rhetoric with respect to our basic understanding of it--although few of us would now restrict ourselves only to discovering in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion (Aristotle 1960: 7). For example, we teach our students different sub-types of persuasive discourse and ask them to apply ethical, emotional (pathetic) and logical proofs to their own persuasive essays; we select political speeches, polemic essays or modern advertising materials as prime examples of how different persuasive strategies and techniques can be most effectively invoked to achieve their respective objectives of winning. To varying degrees, many composition text books have adopted, and thus perpetuated this normal way of doing things with persuasive discourse.3 In so doing, however, we have--perhaps unknowingly--imparted to our students two problematic notions, which underlie much of what has been believed to be persuasive discourse. The first assumes that persuasive discourse is grounded in or predicated on conflict or confrontation, which it aims to overcome or eradicate. The second perceives audience as both external4 and oppositional, whom persuasive discourse is intended to transform or convert. It is these two notions and their probable consequences that I will discuss first in this essay. Following this discussion, I will draw upon, respectively, Grice's cooperative model of conversation (1975; 1989) and Burke's concept of (1962) to propose a new heuristic model5 of persuasive discourse, one that takes cooperation through identification as a core constituent and provides a dynamic setting that is conducive to rhetorical diversities. Finally, I will consider some potentials of this new model in our writing classrooms.

and unethical in many cases (such as in the reign of whites over blacks, Germans over Jews, and now males over females), but it nevertheless persists in our society in any number of relationships. Foucault notes that these power-structured relationships cannot themselves be established, consolidated, nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation, and functioning of (93). It is the purpose of this essay to suggest that discourse is used to promote and protect political relationships in at least two ways: first, it is used to efface the effects of domination, that is, the oppression and exploitation of subordinate groups; and second, it is used to delimit compassion and desensitize the ruling group to the suffering of the subordinate group. Successful effacing and desensitizing rhetorics make it possible for ruling groups to fail to see or be unmoved by the atrocities of domination, even when those atrocities are obvious to subjects who are not members of the ruling group. Rulers produce discourses of truth that efface and justify those atrocities. These discourses are so effective that Millett, for example, rightly incensed by the oppression of females under the patriarchal thumb, apparently failed to notice or was insensitive to the power-structure of the human/non-human animal relationship (a relation-ship in which she is one of the rulers, not one of the ruled). In fact, her very definition of political relationships-whereby one group of is controlled by another-illustrates her blindness to one of the most pervasive birthright reigns ever. We altered Millett's definition by replacing the word persons with beings and have focused our study on the use of language to efface and desensitize in the human/non-human animal relationship, as it parallels the German/Jew relationship of the mid 1800's through the fall of the Third Reich. We have categorized our findings according to Goran Therborn's Three Fundamental Modes of Ideological Interpellation. According to Therborn, ideologies subject and qualify subjects by telling them, relating them to, and making them recognize: what exists and what doesn't, what is good and what's not, and what's possible and what's not (18). Ideology operates as discourse, establishing these three lines of defense: first, arguing that the exploitation of subordinate groups does not exist; next (if the exploitation has to be admitted), arguing that it is night that it should exist; and finally (if it must be admitted that the exploitation is unjust), arguing that it exists because it can't be stopped. Each line of defense attempts to efface exploitation or to desensitize the ruler to the suffering of the ruled.

What is the role of interaction, or, more generally, orality, in multiple-audience analysis and adaptation? How does orality relate to literacy in the evolution of corporate documents? A qualitative study of how seven engineers in two divi sions of a large corporation wrote for multiple audiences revealed that, in the more rhetorically successful cases observed, interaction was the central means of analyzing and adapting discourse to multiple audiences, fulfilling rhetorical and social goals, and building and sustaining a corporate culture; and orality was more potent than literacy in the engineers'composing behavior and the au diences' acceptance of the engineers' ideas and documents.

Socrates, of course, does not mean to venerate the art of discourse here. He is telling Phaedrus that there is discourse and there is truth. Once you have gone out and dug up the truth somewhere else, you apply the art of discourse to it and fashion a persuasive argument that will permit others to partake also of the truth. Two immediate implications follow from Socrates' position. First, only when the art of discourse, rhetoric, is put to the task of selling truth to the benighted does it become real. Second, rhetoric is necessary human affairs just to the extent that humans are unable to apprehend truth directly. It is an unfortunate evil, required because we are rationally degenerate creatures. Both positions have remained very popular over the intervening two millenia. Bitzer, for instance, can still say that in the best of all possible worlds there would be communication perhaps, but not rhetoric;'I we get our truth and knowledge somewhere else, and only our lack of perfection prevents us from casting rhetoric out of the garden. But there is an important lesson those two millenia that can help us to see the Spartan's words another light: the sources of truth which rhetoric has been obliged to serve have changed dramatically-from Socrates' dialectic and Aristotle's apodeixis, to Christianity's biblical exegesis and divine revelation, to the current authority on matters of knowledge and truth, Science. This rotation of leading roles while the supporting actress, Lady Rhetoric, remains constant indicates that the real art of discourse is connected with truth not because of human degeneracy, but because of precisely the reverse, because of our spark of perfection, because we are truth-seeking, knowledge-making creatures who sometimes get it right. We occasionally do something important with rhetoric: we find truth and we build knowledge out of it. When we manage the trick, though, we are so eager to dissociate it from all the foul and inane things we also do with rhetoric that we give the process another name. But these other names are clearly just aliases for rhetoric, or for some subset of rhetorical interests. Dialectic, for instance, is essentially questing debate. Apodeixis is distinguished only by the level of rigor Aristotle demands of the argumentation, not by any qualitative difference. Exegesis is rhetorical analysis. The only possible gap to this pattern is divine revelation, whose capacity to generate truth I will leave to more knowledgeable commentators, pausing only to notice that, true or not, reports of revelation usually involve a fair amount of persuasive machinery-burning bushes, hovering spirits, and the like. In any case, science is certainly no exception.

Understanding the effects of readers on writing development requires prior conceptualization of the relationship between writers and readers. Recently two major schools of thought have emerged concerning this relationship: social constructionism and social interactionism. Influenced by Saussure's structuralist concept of la langue as a set of language norms and Durkheim's concept of social fact, social constructionists emphasize normal, standard discourse: Their key principle is empirical consensus, their unit of analysis is the canon, and their level of social analysis is the community. By contrast, social interactionists, following Bakhtin, focus directly on situated, heteroglossic discourse and seek to characterize la parole, or language use, in useful terms: Their key principle is reciprocity between conversants, and their unit of analysis, as well as their level of social analysis, is the communicational dyad (writer-reader pairs; speaker-listener pairs). Because they focus on whole writer-reader communities, social constructionists deal with the effects of readers on writers in general terms, and they typically reify readers into “the Reader” when dealing with individual cases. By contrast, social interactionists, who concern themselves with describing actual, individual writers and readers, often in ethnographic studies, must articulate a principled analysis of writers and readers without analytic access recourse to group norms. This article first contrasts social constructionist and social interactionist approaches to the problem of discourse and then examines recent social interactionist studies concerning the effects of readers on writers' development, including investigations of word-segmentation skills, peer conferencing, and instructional discourse.

Occasional dissent notwithstanding, “expository” prose—usually conceived as depersonalized and decontextualized—continues to be the main focus of most writing instruction at the secondary and college levels. This article critically examines the opposition of objectified exposition and personal narrative posited by rhetorical tradition and maintained by most composition texts and syllabi today. The liveliness of recent cross-disciplinary discussions regarding the narrative as a uniquely rich mode of thought and discourse contrasts rather sharply with the negative and often impoverished assumptions about storied prose held by most composition theorists and teachers. Unsupported by empirical evidence, such assumptions reflect a cultural bias that prefers abstractions to stories and fails to grasp their dynamic interplay. Where writing instruction is concerned, narrative and exposition are best perceived as poles of a dialectic, with personal experience informing one's interest in abstract knowledge beyond the self, the understanding self becoming enlarged as it “takes in” what is “out there.” The best thinking and writing, it is argued, are at once personal and public, both infused with private meaning and focused upon the world beyond the self.

Is “the writer's audience always a fiction,” as Walter Ong contends, even when the writing is not poetry or fiction but scientific prose? To demonstrate the usefulness of Ong's approach to audience for analysts of nonfiction prose and for those who wish to empower student writers, we consider from a reader-response perspective two scientific articles on the same general topic written for the same discourse community in the same year. The authors of the two essays (prestigious scientists) directed their readers into two radically different roles. One makes his readers not only into “conventional” scientists but into willing novices who take note of his presentation but who do not take issue with it; the other creates disciplinary nonconformists, inquistive skeptics who have the perspectives necessary to understand the limits of scientific thought. The analysis elaborates the rhetorical nature of scientific discourse, demonstrates that even within the constraints of the journal article scientists have considerable freedom to exercise choices, and explicates how writers use cues to direct readers into fictional roles.

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Writing in the humanities may, typically, be distinguished from writing in the social sciences in its treatments of abstractions. Writing about literature is here characterized as data-driven, in that it begins with a text and proceeds up the ladder of abstraction by interpretive classifications which are likely to diverge from one interpreter to another. Social science writing is described as conceptually driven, in that writers begin with communally defined abstractions which then drive the selection and discussion of data; the divergence between writers' abstractions characteristic of data-driven writing is less likely to occur in conceptually driven writing. This article describes how the difference shows up in professional academic writing, some of the confusion students experience in trying to shift from one kind of writing to another, the strengths and weaknesses of each kind of writing, and the benefits to be gained from alternating between the two kinds.

Personal voice in writing is currently an all-too-subjectively understood notion. Different authors, Coles and Elbow, for example, have drawn appropriate attention to the voice phenomenon, but objective definitions and practical understanding are still lacking. One step toward understanding the workings of voice can be taken, however, by a linguistic analysis of structures that observably cause perception of a personal voice. Examining a limited set of data from professional writing reveals that one clear source of voice is appositive and parenthetical structures. These structures are produced “paragrammatically” by being inserted into a sentence, interrupting its normal flow, with the effect of creating a personal voice. They have a commentative function associated with a second-order “reflective mentality” and can be classified into at least three structural subtypes—displacements, equivalents, and interruptives—correlating with particular commentative functions. This analysis suggests, in general, that distinguishing between a second-order reflective mentality and a first-order factive mentality is central to the perception of voice. The intuitions of compositionists are important in uncovering discourse properties relevant to composition studies, and linguistic analysis is important for successful description of the phenomena and as a basis for pedagogical application.

This article traces the evolution of “Once upon a time” in a child's classroom story writing, drawing upon data collected in a three-year study of writing development in an urban magnet school. The developmental literature on young children's literacy has treated story language as a set of structural routines that children learn from being read to, routines that serve the function of representing imaginary worlds. In contrast, this article assumes that stories are cultural discourse forms that serve multiple functions and that to internalize those forms, children must transform them into tools that are functional within their own social world. Moreover, children's discourse forms and functions are in a dialectical relationships: The initially awkward forms children produce may have limited social meaning—but those forms may elicit social responses that embue them with new functional possibilities and thus lead children to further grappling with forms. In brief, the story forms young children learn from others are not the end products but the catalysts of development.

learning, one that will bring about changes in teaching as well as in student writing. We also need to establish quite clearly that WAC programs certainly do not exclude examinations and more coursework in writing as a means of establishing proficiency, but that WAC is not to be identified solely with writing proficiency. Finally, there is an issue not dealt with directly by my survey, but which has come up in anecdotal comments at the meetings of the National Network of Writing Across the Curriculum Programs and which deserves further study-the matter of change and faculty resistance to it. The idea and the practice of writing to learn goes against the predominant paradigm of education in the university, which valorizes the teacher-centered lecture class. In this paradigm, students are passive rather than active learners; they learn from the expert, not from each other. WAC programs challenge this notion of education, and those of us involved in such programs like to point to the successes we have had in changing faculty attitudes towards writing and learning (See Robert Weiss and Michael Peich, Attitude Change in a Cross-Disciplinary Writing Program, CCC 31 [Feb. 1980): 33-41). But changing attitudes and changing actual classroom practice may be two different things. Faculty resistance to change can be profound, as Deborah Swanson-Owens found in Identifying Natural Sources of Resistance (Research in the Teaching of English 20 [Feb. 1986): 69-97). Such resistance could, over a number of years, gradually wear away even the most firmly established institutional program. But I do not want to end on a negative note. While we need to be aware of the dangers that face the WAC movement in general and second-stage programs in particular, the survey results indicate cause for some cautious celebration. WAC as a movement is strong and is continuing to grow. It is up to all of us involved in such programs to be alert to the dangers, but also to be pleased that we have come this far.

Tullio Maranhao, Therapeutic Discourse and Socratic Dialogue. University of Wisconsin Series in Rhetoric of the Human Sciences. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans, eds. with John W. Wallace and R. J. Schoeck. Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll. Woodbridge, Connecticut: Ox Bow Press, 1989. Rpt. Princeton University Press, 1966. 450 pp. Stephen M. North. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1987. 403.

Recent studies indicate that scientific research is part of prewriting in the scientific writing process. This article argues that since invention in scientific research is discovery of the unknown of the scientific community and invention in writing is discovery of ideas within existing knowledge, scientific research cannot be part of prewriting in the scientific writing process. Researchers should be aware that inventional heuristics introduced in freshman composition courses, which serve to discover ideas within existing knowledge, are not always applicable in real-life situations where scientific writing occurs, because the content of discourse is sometimes given in these situations.

Because of the recent emphasis on rhetorical context in business and technical writing (BTW) instruction, the problem-solving case has become a staple in BTW classrooms. However, a number of critics have voiced concerns about the use of the rhetorical case. These concerns recall an ancient debate among Roman rhetoricians over an early case-study method called declamation. For contemporary theorists, the debate over case study revolves around its value as a stimulant to problem-solving skills, its ability to imitate the realistic circumstances of professional BTW, and its emphasis on persona and audience along with its deemphasis of the teacher. A full spectrum of arguments on these and other issues in the case-study debate indicates that the discipline is entering a new phase in its deliberations over the role of problem-solving and pragmatics in the BTW classroom.

Consonant with a trend toward investigating professional writing in naturalistic settings, this discourse-analytical study of a corpus of “suggestion letters” written in a Big Eight accounting firm demonstrates how auditors use negative politeness strategies to meet the complex demands of potentially threatening interactional situations. The study substantiates Brown and Levinson's claim that politeness is a linguistic universal by showing that the same politeness strategies found in speech also occur in written communication. Analysis of negative message strategies in ten leading textbooks shows that business communication pedagogy needs to modify strictures on the use of passives, nominalizations, expletive constructions, and hedging particles in light of research on the exigencies of real-world linguistic interaction.

The metaphor has gained much importance as of late. No longer simply a decorative feature of discourse, the trope has obtained an epistemological and ontological dimension. No longer merely a figural flourish of prose, the metaphor has acquired an important role in the study of human understanding. Hence, thanks to theoretical rehabilitation and philosophical reconsideration, metaphorical analysis has become an important and popular pursuit for many disciplines--philosophy, literary theory, linguistics, rhetoric, et al.2 While the insights generated and the discoveries made by metaphorical analysis are significant and worthy of much study, we will take as our point of departure the limits of such critical inquiry. This essay offers another perspective, a sort of theoretical intervention which examines from another angle the study of discourse. Rhetorical theory, it will be reasoned, benefits from a perspective which considers the metonymical features of discourse. As such, the comparative advantages of either metaphorical or metonymical analysis are not measured by which one is true, but rather by which one is most useful for a given project. Simply put, a metonymical perspective can recognize and explain a terrain outside the scope of metaphorical analysis. The change we consider in this essay does not render useless or inadequate previous explanations, but rather opens a space or a zone from which to critically evaluate what has been previously overlooked. As noted, the popularity and importance of the metaphor has never been greater. Whether it be conceived as function, cluster, or nature, the research has sought, and continues to seek, the habitation of the metaphor within all symbolic discourse. Indeed, it may be safe to assume that the study of metaphors remains an important and integral component of contemporary rhetorical theory. As a result of theoretician diligence and persistence, a wide array of techniques exist for the study of metaphors within discourse. For examples of such metaphorical research we turn briefly to the work of I.A. Richards, Max Black, Edwin Black, and Paul Ricoeur. Perhaps no one should figure more prominently than I.A. Richards in the reappraisal of the trope. Using the metaphor, his New Rhetoric, seeks to recover meaning, to stabilize and neutralize the somewhat figural moments of discourse.

Robert de Beaugrande, Critical Discourse: A Survey of Literary Theorists. Norwood: New Jersey, 1988. 472 pp. Jasper Neel, Plato, Derrida, and Writing: De construction, Composition and Influence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 256 pp. Chris M. Anson, ed. Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1989. 371 pp. John T. Harwood, ed. The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Gerald Else, Plato and Aristotle on Poetry. Edited with an introduction by Peter Burian. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986. xx + 221 pp. Donald Weber, Rhetoric and History in Revolutionary New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 207 pp.

The five canons, parts, faculties, or functions of rhetoric are among the most constant features in the systematic treatment of the art (Scaglione 14). In many respects, they constitute the basic pattern of all theoretical and critical investigations into rhetorical art and practice (Thonssen 86). The five--invention (content, discovery), disposition (arrangement, organization), style (diction, elocution), memory, and delivery (presentation)--were canonized in Latin rhetoric as inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio or actio. They were important in Greek rhetoric as heurisis, taxis, lexis, mneme, and hypocrisis. While the exact origin of the canons is unknown, the five recur in rhetorical theory from antiquity to the present, where they command attention individually and collectively. Studying rhetoric, most agree, requires studying its canons. They are the sub-disciplines of the main, the lesser arts of the greater (Connors 64). They allow separate analysis and study of a complete five-part system (Murphy 83). They are the aspects of composing which work together in a recursive, synergistic, mutually dependent relationship (Welch Paradox 5-6). In part, the very history of rhetoric consists in changing relationships and interrelationships between them (Mahony 14). The canons apply to both encoding and decoding, forming a complete system for both generating and analyzing discourse (Welch Ideology 270). They represent not only the concepts with which the rhetor must deal and which he must master, but also the aspects of the rhetorical act which the critic examines and evaluates (Thonssen 86). In speech studies, minor changes in the meanings of the five terms have been developed in various treatises, but the pattern remains the same (Thonssen 86). In composition studies, the five canons are one of two prmary theories which dominate the discipline (Welch Ideology 269). The structure which has dominated both disciplines' textbooks, however, is a truncated one. Rarely has the five-part scheme been presented completely and explicitly. In speech studies, the fourth canon--memory--has virtually been dropped and usually receives incidental treatment (Thonssen 87). In composition studies, the first three canons--invention, arrangement, style--organize the vast majority of current textbooks, but the last two--memory and delivery--are typically deleted without a word of explanation (Welch Paradox 5, Ideology 270). This deletion, when explained, has been attributed to changed conditions in the law courts (Kennedy 105), to memory's absorption under disposition (Kennedy 210; Mahony 14) and, most often, to the western world's shift from orality to literacy. The tendency has been for modern rhetorical theory to abandon, remove, neglect, limit, or misunderstand both memory and delivery. On the other hand,

This book constitutes an interesting guide to recent developments in vocabulary studies. As will be made clear below, this review addresses researchers and others interested in issues concerning computational morphology and lexicography in a Machine Translation (MT) environment. For this reason we focus more on relevant chapters of the book than on those which concern pure language teaching and language learning issues. The book is divided into three parts. Part one contains four chapters devoted to the analysis of lexis with a particular emphasis on its role in discourse contexts. Part two consists of three chapters dealing mostly with issues related to language learning, language teaching and lexicography. Part three includes two case studies in lexical stylistics based on informant analyses. Chapter 1 explores the notion of word. A definition based on orthographic criteria (i.e. a word viewed as a sequence of letters bound on either side by a space or a punctuation mark) is taken into consideration. Nevertheless, it is observed that such a definition is violated by the existence of a great number of multi- word units (e.g. instead of, post box, etc.). On the other hand, the phonological criterion for defining a word as a string of phonemes containing only one stress is also not felicitous, firstly because it only concerns spoken language and secondly because a stress can be used as a demarcator of strings for emphatic purposes. Other problems relate to the existence of several forms for only one lexical meaning (e.g. verbal allomorphs of the same inflectional paradigm: bring, brings, brought, bringing), as well as to the appearance of the same form for different meanings (e.g. the different meanings of the word/a/r). The case of idioms (e.g. to kick the bucket) involving more than one text word which, semantically, can be substituted by a single word is also problematic. In attempting to provide a good criterion for defining a word, Carter uses the valuable concept of lexeme which helps to override most of the problems mentioned above (e.g. the existence of different form variants for the same word). He correctly observes that are the basic contrasting units of vocabulary in a language. When we look up in a dictionary we are looking up lexemes rather than words (p. 7).

A qualitative study using reading protocols suggests that when readers of informative documents understand conveyed information satisfactorily, they make direct confirmations and positive comprehension evaluations. When readers are uncertain about the accuracy of their understanding, they guess, make assumptions, or render the text's language into their own words. When readers' understanding is impaired, they ask for more clearly established links or relationships in the text, or they pinpoint some ambiguity or lack of resolution. When readers' understanding is unsatisfactory but not impaired, they request additional information. In addition, readers make evaluative suggestions that introduce, focus, emphasize, or reiterate their other comprehension-related responses. The response patterns isolated in this qualitative study indicate the need for specific quantitative research and suggest some directions for developing reader-based heuristics for informative writing.

Each year a large number of students enter American higher education unprepared for the reading and writing tasks they encounter. Labeled “remedial,”“nontraditional,”“developmental,”“underprepared,”“nonmainstream,” these students take special courses and participate in special programs designed to qualify them to do academic work. Yet, we do not know very much about what it is that cognitively and socially defines such students as remedial. This article describes a research project on remediation at the community college, state college, and university levels designed to provide such information. We focus on a piece of writing produced by a student in an urban community college, examining it in the context of the student's past experiences with schooling, her ideas about reading and writing, the literacy instruction she was receiving, and her plans and goals for the future. Our analyses suggest that the student's writing, though flawed according to many standards, demonstrates a fundamental social and psychological reality about discourse—how human beings continually appropriate each other's language to establish group membership, to grow, and to define themselves in new ways.

The environmental impact statement (EIS) was created by the National Environmental Policy Act in 1969 as a means of ensuring careful study of possible effects on the environment of projects involving public lands and as an aid to effective decisions regarding such projects. This article presents a case study involving the reading of several EISs produced by one government agency, the Bureau of Land Management. An analysis of these documents reveals that, to answer the leading question of rhetoricians in the field of technical writing—Is the document effective?—we must consider the social and cultural context of the EIS as well as the characteristics of the text, its organization and style. Simple notions of purpose and audience are ruled out. We must account for pragmatics as well as syntactics and semantics. The very category of “effectiveness” is conditioned by the historical and political forces that shape the EIS. An approach through genre theory is recommended.

The footnote, being dead, bears studying. Debilitated by disuse and misunderstanding, and finally euthanized in 1984 by Modern Language Association, footnotes in scholarly prose are gone with breezes that blow through English departments these days. The various subtleties and textures of referential and discursive footnotes, intricate interlockings of notes and texts, revelations of authorial intent-all terminated now, and quietly mummified. Therefore, since literary scholars need be wary of living art forms, which are inclined to twitch suddenly and knock over even most carefully constructed of critical hypotheses, footnote now becomes appropriate as a subject, rather than a method, of scholarly commentary. The footnote was a writer's direct address to reader, a message slipped under door, a whispered aside in counterpoint to formal discourse of text. Footnotes could elucidate, castigate, praise, blame, and crow. Notes might wander off on scenic side-trips, discurse eloquently on stuff and nomenclature, and run happily on for pages and pages until reader quite forgot she was supposed to be back at text by dinnertime. Material could slip into a footnote that simply would not fit body of work: Joseph Thomas, for example, in his sprightly 1985 history of College English Association, Sansculotte, appropriately published by that organization, used a footnote to present his wife's graduate-school recipe for roast bologna. Mary-Claire van Leunen's wise and witty Handbook for Scholars, a gift in 1978 from Alfred Knopf to a generation of perplexed students, attributed academic propensity for footnotes to soapbox phenomenon, wherein the footnote permits scholar to say another word, just one other word, just one word more, before he has to stop (8). Her discussion of content footnote was cautionary:

A belief shared by teachers of writing, one that we fervently try to inculcate in our students, is that revision can improve writing. This notion, that revision generally results in better text, often pairs up with another assumption, that revision occurs as we work through separate drafts. Thus, hand in your working drafts tomorrow and the final ones next Friday is a common assignment, as is the following bit of textbook advice: the draft is completed, a good critical reading should help the writer re-envision the essay and could very well lead to substantial rewriting (Axelrod and Cooper 10). This textbook advice, hardly atypical, is based on the rationale that gaining distance from a piece of discourse helps the writer to judge it more critically. As evidence for this assumption, Richard Beach's 1976 study of the self-evaluation strategies of revisers and nonrevisers demonstrated that extensive revisers were more capable of detaching themselves and gaining aesthetic distance from their writing than were nonrevisers. Nancy Sommers' later theoretical work on revision also sensitized us to students' need to re-see their texts rather than to view revision as an editing process at the limited level of word changes. A logical conclusion, then, is to train student writers to re-see and then redraft a piece of discourse. There are other compelling reasons for helping students view first or working drafts as fluid and not yet molded into final form. The opportunities for outside intervention, through teacher critiques and suggestions or peer evaluation sessions, can be valuable. And it is equally important to help students move beyond their limited approaches and limiting tendency to settle for whatever rolls out on paper the first time around. The novice view of a first draft as written-in-stone (or fast-drying cement) can preclude engaging more fully with the ideas being expressed. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that there are advantages in being able, where it is appropriate, to master the art of one-draft writing. When students write essay exams or placement essays and when they go on to on-the-job writing where time doesn't permit multiple drafts, they need to produce first drafts which are also coherent,

The author reviews the research on the effectiveness of graphics in instruction and then proposes a framework for developing a theory that accounts for the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of graphics. His goal is to lay the groundwork for developing prescriptive guidelines for the design of effective graphics in training documents. He stresses that further research needs to be done in order that a theory of learning from graphics can be developed in sufficient detail for design prescriptions to be provided and that prescriptive theory for graphic design is necessary.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Common technical graphics terms table, graph, chart, and diagram share a parallel logical structure with the four common types of technical graphics that the terms typically refer to. In the system of terminology as in the system of graphics types, four logical categories result from the possible permutations of two features. The abstract semantic features which underlie the meanings of the terms are in this discussion labeled as [UNITS] and [PROPERTIES]; likewise the significant features which distinguish the graphics types are here labeled as “units” and “properties.” These proposed semantic features reflect a fundamental semantic relation common to all meaningful statements, the attribution of a property (a predicate) to an object (a subject). The connection between term-features ([UNITS] and [PROPERTIES]) and type-features (“units” and “properties”) is a variable but systematic sense-reference relation. Consequently the terminology used to refer to the various graphics types varies systematically according to the markedness relationships among the terms. Principled explanations of the best uses for each graphics type follow from the proposed logical relations between them.

Theoretical studies in scientific and technical communication have begun to explore what they call discourse communities in the sciences and engineering on grounds that these communities provide the norms and practices for communication in these fields. The theoretical literature on which these studies are based develops two views of what a discourse community might be, an institutional and a social view. The first of these views has been the more influential, but both views may and should be brought to the study and the pedagogy of scientific and technical communication.

Amplification is the set of rhetorical techniques by which a discourse is elaborated and extended to enhance its appeal and information value. Even in the manual, long considered the most laconic of the genres of technical communication, amplification has its place. Drawing on the theory of classical and modern rhetoric, this article shows how amplification tends to increase and improve the coverage, rationale, warnings, behavioral alternatives, examples, previews, reviews, and general emphasis of technical manuals.

Of all the bruising confrontations between the capitalist and communist power blocks perhaps none was so staggering as the Cuban missile crisis. Most Americans patriotically rallied around our determined young president in this great moment of crisis, but there were other Americans who spoke with a different voice then who presumed to disagree with the dominant opinion. These were the voices from the left, now the old left. Their rhetorical response is my subject. By concentrating on several specimens written from a leftist perspective in response to a single event, I create a framework for analyzing the discourse of an ideology to demonstrate the influence of that ideology on and argument, together with the usefulnesses of an analytic method. Antecedent to this analysis are particular considerations about style, argument and method which lead to other considerations peculiar to the relation of political discourse to the world. Because the event focused opinion strongly, and time gives perspective, I have chosen written and oral reactions to the Cuban missile crisis. In addition to selections of written from three leftist newspapers, the National Guardian, The Weekly People, and The Catholic Worker, I have included speech samples on the same topic from Dean Rusk, then Secretary of State, as a contrast to the rhetoric of the left. To analyze this discourse I use Walker Gibson's style machine as he calls it developed to account for distinctions...in the voices addressing (115), distinctions which he breaks down into tough, sweet and stuffy talkers. Gibson's machine, consisting of sixteen grammatical-rhetorical qualities, is appended (A). Other available descriptions or classifications of or argument are Huntington Brown's deliberative, expository and prophetic, Edwin Black's exhortation and argument, and Aristotle's topics. Brown and Black analyze thought methodology with some consideration of style. The neo-Aristotelians, on the other hand, consider and thought combined into argumentative methods. I follow the classical topics in considering rhetorical argument (Rhetoric chs. 22, 23, 24; Corbett 94-132). My particular assumptions are that belief influences style, that while prose styles can be typed individual differences remain, that includes varieties of diction, syntax, and argument Further, I seek an attitude towards language, an attitude, however, influenced not by cultural or individual psychology, but by political belief. Because political writers argue, their arguments common to all rhetoric can also be typed. Argument creates patterns which shapes. For Gibson is a matter of sheer individual will, a desire for a particular kind of self-definition no matter what the circumstances (24). Political belief can condition will. For both Marie H. Nichols (75), and Edwin Black (Persona) reveals distinctive political personalities. In selecting a usable analytical methodology I had either to invent my own, or use an existing one. I chose Gibson's because we share similar concerns. I want to know what kind of voice speaks. What does the use of that voice imply? How do I determine trust? I also want to know the attitude of that voice towards subject and audience. If Gibson can help to answer these questions, then I accept his work saving the necessity of inventing yet another method, concentrating instead on the results produced. In general, stylistics seems more of a discourse on method than on results. Although we want to know what ails us, naming is not enough. To know that Dorothy Day talks tough does not suffice. We know there are other names than tough, sweet or stuffy. The point is not just to label, but to penetrate into the thought behind the voice aided by a given point of view. Gibson describes his work as primitive. Primitive, yet legitimate because applied he yields insight His method reveals attitude just as psychiatric categories, which might also be called primitive, reveal motive. If the arguments which pattern are traditional and discernible, their correlations with are not as clear. The advertiser, for example, speaks sweetly with recognizably dubious argument. Those political voices purring and storming at us must also be judged by how they argue so their trustworthiness can be determined. We can uncover falsehood by showing how a statement varies from reality--plain lying. We can discover understanding of mental illness by probing the discordance the aberrant mind creates

Chapman/Tate descriptive survey of 38 doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition has given us valuable information about these programs, which, for the most part, have sprung up only within the last ten years. survey, published in the Spring 1987 Review (124-86), revealed our programs' deep structure; it also has raised some questions about the definition, development and direction of our doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition. Few of the 38 programs that sent written materials for the survey listed classical rhetoric as core requirement, and almost half listed no history of rhetoric courses. However, 35 of the 38 programs listed theories of composition course. Because the availability of, as well as the teaching approach to, classical rhetoric can show the foundations on which our programs are built and the theoretical directions they may be taking, I prepared questionnaire on the classical rhetoric course offered in English departments, mailed it to 41 doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition, and eventually received 37 completed questionnaires. survey results not only reveal some foundations and direction of our programs in rhetoric and composition but also point out areas for further study. Does the program offer course in classical rhetoric and, if so, is the course part of the core requirement were two of the primary survey questions. Twenty-eight out of the 37 programs (76%) that sent written materials reported they offer course either in classical rhetoric or wherein substantial part is devoted to classical Eight (23%) do not offer the course, but in six of these eight the course is offered in Speech Communication. Two programs reported that the course is listed but not taught. And two programs reported the course is not offered at all. Four programs reported that the course offered in the English Department is also offered in Speech Communication. 76 percent of programs offering the course differ from the Chapman/Tate percentages because some of the 28 programs defined theirs as course in classical rhetoric where only one-third, about five weeks, or less, is devoted to classical These courses are, in the words of one respondent, a rush through rhetoric. Some courses, titled Rhetoric and (or Composition and Rhetoric), are actually topic courses that can take any focus. In one program it depends on who teaches the course whether it is history of rhetoric or the teaching of composition. Course names are quite varied. Only six are called History of Rhetoric, and two are named History and Theories. (The naming of one course title, survey respondent told me, has long and hilarious story. In 1976 the course had been The of Rhetoric, but that's the title of Richards' book, so the title was changed to Philosophy of Composition, which became the title of Hirsch's book, so the program changed it to its present title, The Rhetorical Tradition and the Teaching of Composition, at which point Knoblauch and Brannon appeared.) Other course titles are Theory and Practice of Rhetoric, Classical and Modern Discourse, Major Rhetorical Texts, Historical Studies, Rhetoric of Written Discourse. I was somewhat surprised that more of the course names didn't have the word written in the title to distinguish the course from the one offered in Speech for the last 75 years. Perhaps crossing departmental lines in the teaching of rhetoric is not the problem it was in the 70's. This subject itself would make an interesting study. classical rhetoric course is core requirement in 50 percent of the programs in contrast to the 91 percent of programs requiring composition theory. (In one program classical rhetoric is required, but it's offered only in Speech Communication.) These percentages suggest that we cannot assume the study of classical rhetoric as foundational for composition studies in our doctoral programs. In fact, it is possible for student to have Ph.D. specialty in rhetoric and composition without having had course in classical question here for further study is, then, how are we to define the rhetoric/composition speialist? next series of survey questions I asked focused on the frequency of the course offering, length of time it has been offered in the program, qualifications of the faculty who teach it, average enrollment and area of stuident specialty. In the majority of programs, the course is offered every other year and has been offered only within the last ten years. Usually, only one person teaches the course, faculty

Allan Bloom's controversial book The Closing of American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished Souls of Today's Students2 has attracted popular attention to a position that already had been gaining currency among critics of American higher education. These critics charge that we educators are failing our students individually and our community collectively by failing to teach morality--by failing to attend to role our disciplines play for students and practitioners in formation of their character. But questions as complicated and momentous as whether education in a discipline should aim to develop moral character, how it should do so, and how it can do so without damaging spirit and skills of free inquiry are hardly such simple questions as they are often depicted, including by Bloom. This is especially true for a discipline so frequently accused of complicity with evil, or even inherent immorality, as rhetoric. Indeed question of rhetoric's role in formation of character presents a genuine dilemma, one that is often corrupted in public controversies about moral education. On one hand, professors of rhetoric have no apparent special training in such ethical issues, nor is it clear why they would have special obligations. One does not have to be Allan Bloom or Carnegie Commission or even William Bennett to believe that all educators have some general obligation to influence their students for better, but it is not clear why or how this should devolve in a special way on teachers of reading, writing and speaking. It could do so only if ethical issues were found to be somehow intrinsic to rhetoric itself, to what we must teach if we are to succeed in teaching rhetoric at all--intrinsic, perhaps, to its evolution as a discipline and a practice, or to one of its fundamental functions. But how can this be squared with our notions of rhetoric as a neutral instrument? On other hand, contemporary rhetoricians have made it at least as clear that rhetoric has inescapable connections to human character, that these connections by their nature may be objects of distinctively rhetorical inquiry, that such inquiry may sustain and extend critical discourse, and that it may produce knowledge, including moral knowledge. For as Kenneth Burke has taught us, rhetoric is essentially involved in the definition of man, and admits of analysis in terms of those motives through which human characters are constituted and realized.3 Moreover, as Wayne Booth has explained, formation of self occurs in a field of selves; we are made of, as we make, company we keep.4 If our character is so significantly at stake in our rhetoric, then process of understanding rhetoric better would seem to hold some possibilities for better understanding of character. Or put more practically: if character realizes and reveals itself significantly in rhetoric, knowledge achieved in rhetorical education and critical discourse arising from it may make some issues in formation of our characters more a matter of our informed, free, ethically charged choice. But what does all this have to do with our alleged responsibility to inculcate a particular morality?

This essay reappraises conventional distinctions between oral-like and literate-like discourse, particularly Tannen's (1985) distinction between involvement focus and message focus. Rather than seeing message in tension with involvement, this query treats message as an embodiment of involvement. Cohesion particularly is treated as an aspect of a developing writer-reader relationship, an outgrowth of a thickening commitment to a mutual orientation. Speculations are offered for rethinking what is called “literate orientation.”

This program evaluation was undertaken to assess the broad, measurable effects of using computers to teach introductory college composition. In total, 24 classes were studied—12 control classes and 12 experimental—with the experimental computer classes meeting in the lab for half of their instructional time. Data on the success of the program were collected from a range of sources: pre- and posttests of student writing under both impromptu and take-home conditions; pre- and posttests of writing anxiety; records on attendance, tardiness, withdrawals, and homework and essay assignment completion; end-of-term course evaluation by both teachers and students; and self-report data collected from teacher meetings and teacher logs. Results favored the use of computers, with computer students revising and improving their posttest essays (especially discourse-level features) at levels significantly better than those of regular students. Those students in experimental sections who chose to compose on computers at the end of the term outperformed the group as a whole and performed significantly better than those experimental students who chose to compose with pen and paper. Attitudinal data from both students and teachers also favored the use of computers.

In this decade, writing researchers have shown increasing interest in the social aspects of written communication. This interest has largely been stimulated by interest in writing-across-the-curriculum programs and dialogue journal keeping, as well as such pressing issues as the relationships of process to text and to the social contexts of writing, and the problem of genre. This article outlines a social-interactive model of written communication, highlighting the writer's role in negotiations with readers in the medium of text. Formalist theories of text meaning (meaning is in the text) and idealist theories of meaning (meaning in the reader) are reviewed and challenged. In social-interactive theories of discourse, which are proposed as an alternative to formalist and idealist theories, meaning is said to be a social construct negotiated by writer and reader through the medium of text, which uniquely configures their respective purposes. In the process of communicating, writers and readers may be said to make various “moves,” which achieve progressive and sequential “states” of understanding between them. Writers make three essential kinds of moves: They (1) initiate and (2) sustain written discourse, which they accomplish by means of (3) text elaboration. The rules for writers' moves are spelled out in a fundamental axiom and seven corollaries.