This article introduces an interdisciplinary service project performed with undergraduate literature students at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. The project, Literary Flowers, was modeled after New York City's Library Way and challenged students to plant a “literary garden” of formative voices. Further, it encouraged students to consider cultural translatability: how texts—some centuries old—fit into their final narratives today. This article provides a detailed description of the project, a consideration of its place among similar service projects, and examples of student work and response.

Reviewed are: Stylish Academic Writing Helen Sword The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Steven Pinker

ABSTRACTGerald Early's remark that black people are seminally important to the modern world because they created the blues is examined as a contribution to the politics of recognition that deviates from the liberal model that dominates in political theory. Central to this deviation is the politics of honor and Paul Corcoran's distinction between formal and aesthetic recognition. The politics of aesthetic recognition is examined here through Hans-Georg Gadamer's discussion of hermeneutics in Truth and Method as well as through Martin Heidegger's phenomenology and philosophy of Dasein (being-there), inspired by Aristotle's Rhetoric, and his writings on art. The significance of art and specifically of the blues to the politics of recognition goes beyond the representation or the relaying of others' voices, in that it calls forth modes of being-there over against difference.

This article discusses findings from a three-year ethnographic study of an ethnic studies course called Native American literature, which began during the passing of legislation that banned the teaching of ethnic studies in Arizona’s public and charter schools. The data analyzed here explore the ways students use silence as a form of critical literacy “or critical silent literacies” in response to racial microaggressions enacted by their peers, their teachers, or a combination of both. This framing of silence questions common assumptions that Native American students aresilent because of their biological, inherent, and/or cultural “traits” Challenging such assumptions, Native American students in this study reveal that as they attempt to voice their ideas, they are repeatedly silenced because their knowledges counter the dominant settler knowledges taught in public schools. As a result, they discuss how their silence has been used over time as a resistancestrategy to shield themselves, their identities, and their family and community knowledges from dominant, monocultural knowledges with which they did not agree.

In his article “Wine Tasting is Bullshit,” Robbie Gonzalez cites a real wine review that reads, “Overall character is that of a sex-loaded starlet; endowed, jaunty and erotically scented, with ever...

This study examines how a supervisor’s delivery of negative feedback affects employees’ tendency to respond by either voicing their ideas or remaining silent. The results show that approbation, or the use of praise to soften face threat, was the most effective facework message for the supervisor to use when providing negative feedback. When employees felt more threatened, they reported that they would be less likely to use voice to help others and more likely to use silence defensively as a response, but as their perceptions of threat decreased, they generally reported that they were more likely to use voice to help others. The article discusses implications of these results, limitations of the study, and future directions of this research.

A veteran writing teacher asks the question—What keeps teaching fresh and new?—and discovers, in the process of writing a teaching narrative, how her teaching voice and writing voice intertwine, both in the classroom and on the page.

This article uses data from a study of college students’ digital reading and writing to examine the influence of interface on literacy activity within participatory online spaces. While most existing work treats activity within these spaces largely as a function of individual interest in a space’s content, students’ firsthand accounts suggest that interface features and design play a significant role as well, particularly as students transition from one form of engagement or activity to another. Using Teena Carnegie’s framing of the interface as digital exordium, the author argues that, since participatory interfaces and the composition classroom share several central goals, students’ experiences with interface offer important lessons for translating that engagement to an academic setting.

Current historical research is shifting its gaze away from metalevel studies of the field that examine the discipline’s history on the national level toward archival histories and case studies of underrepresented individuals, groups, and movements that aim to shine a light on the darkened corners of our past and provide alternative or parallel narratives of the field’s development while also hinting at the expanse of rhetorical and disciplinary history yet to be uncovered. With this observational frame in mind, the author launches into a rich and detailed review of three recent books on the history of localized populations. Each of these books adds to the field literature on the idea of microhistories; on histories of rhetoric and public voice; on the education and professional preparation of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women; and on race and racism during this same time period.

ABSTRACTUnder the influence of a reading style that Avital Ronell has called “narcoanalysis,” this article performs a reading of addiction and humility through David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest. Exploring both addiction and humility through the vector of habit, I argue that both habits indicate the non-self-sufficiency of a subject exposed to affection from outside. But while I position addiction alongside humility, both as habits, I also argue that humility parasitizes the totalizing logic of addictive habit. Neither identical to nor simply the opposite of addiction, humility exploits addiction's structure of uncontrollable relationality. Even addiction depends on the affectability or rhetoricity of a subject always already exposed in language. Humility holds this rhetoricity open.

Steven Pinker has written a potent prescription against the outdated and pedantic manual Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White (Boston: Pearson, 2014), the alarmist manifesto Eats, Sh...

Professional communication scholars have critiqued the idea that visual styles derived from cognitive theories of human perception can be universally understood by all people and thus effective in all rhetorical situations. Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts that influence how individuals make decisions, provide a framework for reconciling the perceptual features of visualizations with the cultural and contextual features of particular rhetorical situations. This article analyzes information graphics using the heuristics of representativeness, availability, and affect, applying this analysis to a techne of visual design that accounts for both intuitive and contextual reasoning.

Faced with the need to educate women collectively about politics and government, Jane Croly established the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) in 1890. Based on archival documents from the GFWC, this article seeks to address the following research questions: What do the patriotic pageants sponsored by the GFWC illustrate about civic education in the Americanization era? What can we learn about civic education and the use of particular rhetorical forms from twentieth-century pageants and organizations such as the GFWC? By exploring the organization’s contribution to civic education alongside other pageants in the same era, it is possible to better contextualize the competing histories of civic education for ourselves and our students. This article also focuses on the patriotic pageants that club women used to develop a model of social change rooted in education, which had contradictory results. The GFWC both supported and resisted whiteness as the position of authority in its promotion of pageants. Embracing the contradictions of pageants and their role in civic education in the Americanization era allows for a more nuanced and accurate picture of the history of civic education.

In this article, I report on the results of a case study of two students with self-identified Asperger Syndrome (AS) in first-year university writing courses. After exploring existing conversations that tend to ignore the voices of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), I propose a methodology based on the concept of ASD as insight, rooted in critical disability studies, in which the perspectives of neurodiverse students are prioritized. My findings reveal the neurotypical assumptions of some traditional writing pedagogies, such as those based on a process model and the understanding of writing as a social activity. These approaches often do not value the critical literacies and social activities involved in writing done by neurodiverse students outside the classroom. Drawing from my participants’ insights, I explore the potentials of critical pedagogy for valuing the neurodiverse social literacies of ASD students. I demonstrate how a critical pedagogy better attuned to neurodiversity can support the alternative social literacies of neurodiverse students and resist stereotypes of ASD writers as asocial.

Preview this article: Emerging Voices: Emissaries of Literacy: Representations of Sponsorship and Refugee Experience in the Stories of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/77/5/collegeenglish27174-1.gif

Roughly over the last twenty years or more, critical race theorists and whiteness theorists have magnetized considerable attention in the academy. Many scholars, including numerous critical race th...

As I read and reread Young’s text for this review, I was struck by news of the activist and professor Cornel West stating, during an October 12 speech at the “Faith in Ferguson” rally, “I didn’t co...

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard, the founder and former director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum (CPAAM), was deceased. Because oral history is narrator-driven, Gilyard’s death required us to remain especially attentive to the epistemic value of his voice.

This article shows how brief psycholinguistic reading experiments can illustrate the effects of various grammatical features, pique students’ interest, and position them to construct their own understanding of English grammar, separate from the teacher’s dictates.

While there is consensus that dialogic teaching should involve a repertoire of teaching and learning talk patterns and approaches, authorities who enjoin teachers to engage in dialogic teaching generally characterize classroom dialogue in terms of surface features such as open questions. But dialogic teaching is not defined by discourse structure so much as by discourse function. When teachers adopt a dialogic instructional stance, they treat dialogue as a functional construct rather than structural, and classroom oracy can thrive. Our research finds that dialogic talk functions to model and support cognitive activity and inquiry and supportive classroom relations, to engage multiple voices and perspectives across time, and to animate student ideas and contributions. Employing narrative analysis and cross-episodic contingency analysis, we tell a story in three episodes about how oracy practices promote dialogic functions in a third-grade classroom. We unpack how a particular teaching exchange—one we have selected specifically for its nondialogic surface appearance—reflects dialogic teaching. Findings show how supportive epistemic and communal functions of classroom talk are more important to successful dialogic teaching and learning than are surface dialogic features. We argue it is necessary to look beyond interactional form and unpack function, uptake, and purpose in classroom discourse. There is no single set of teaching behaviors that is associated with dialogism. Rather, teachers can achieve dialogic discourse in their classrooms through attention to underlying instructional stance.

Currently, African American girls are being depicted as overly sexual, violent, or confrontational, are judged by physical features, or are invisible across mainstream media and within school classrooms. Few investigations have explored how they respond to and interpret such imposed representations. Nor, for the most part, have studies examined how girls represent themselves among a society of others pathologizing and defining who they are. This inquiry investigated self-representations in the writings of eight African American adolescent girls ages 12–17 who participated in a historically grounded literacy collaborative. Coupling sociohistorical and critical sociocultural theories, I organized and analyzed their writings through open, axial, and selective coding. Findings show that the girls wrote across platforms similar to those African American women have addressed historically, which included writing to represent self, writing to resist or counter ascribed representations, and writing toward social change. The girls wrote multiple and complex representations, which included ethnic, gender, intellectual, kinship,—sexual, individual, and community representations. These findings suggest their writings served as hybrid spaces for the girls to explore, make sense of, resist, and express different manifestations of self. The representations the girls created in their writings did not fall into static notions of culture or identity. Instead, their self-representations were socially constructed and were responsive to their lives. This study extends the extant research by offering wider views of representations from the girls’ voices, as well as a broadened historical lens to view their reading and writing with implications for how English language arts educators can reconceptualize the roles of writing in classrooms.

The authors invite English studies faculty to reconsider traditional graduate seminar pedagogies in light of the changing academy and evolving professional identities. Recommendations include balancing currently conventional methods that may emphasize lecturing, content coverage, or scholarly production with a workshop-style focus on writing, teaching, and metacognition. Examples from several graduate classroom experiences are provided.

There is increasing usage of creative writing in the ESL/EFL classroom based on the argument that this pedagogy develops writer’s voice, emotional engagement, and ownership. Within the context of teaching poetry writing to second language learners, the current article develops a scientific approach to ways in which voice can be measured and then empirically explores the claim that voice is present within poetry written by second language learners. The study explored this question: Do second language poetry writers have a discernable voice in their written poetry? This issue was investigated in two different ways: (a) utilizing human reader ratings of the likelihood that two poems were written by the same poet and (b) using computational linguistic methodology to explore systematic differences in specific linguistic features in poetry written by second language poets. The data presented here show that poetry written by the same L2 writer is more readily recognized as such and that relevant linguistic items have patterns of frequency of usage that are different for different poets. Together the two studies provide a compelling case that voice is measureable and present in the poetry written by second language learners.

This essay discusses the competing rhetorical styles of two volumes that appeared in the 1880s to remember Abraham Lincoln. One volume, edited by Alan Thorndike Rice, remembered Lincoln in a refined-official style. A second volume, by William Herndon and Jesse Weik, captured Lincoln in a middling-vernacular style. Using automatic coding and close reading, the authors show that Herndon-Weik’s middling-vernacular style put a focus on the “personal” Lincoln. Rice’s essayists, instead, featured an “official” Lincoln set apart from the everyday man. The authors argue that these contrasts were a contributing factor to the different critical reception they received.

With neither national nor local-level discussions of Senate Bill 1070 adequately addressing bottom line issues such as marginalization, access, and civic engagement, an exploration of marginalized rhetorical acts can provide an informative lens for understanding challenges among marginalized people, their rhetorical tools, and their relations to public spheres. Through an exploration of anti-Senate Bill 1070 graffiti, this article examines how the practice of graffiti points to difference manifesting and playing out in the wider public sphere. It calls for scholars and activists to recognize graffiti as a rhetorical tool worthy of study and cross-cultural discourse.

This study gauges workers’ degree of openness to significant changes in the organization, style, and design of a written report by analyzing metaphors that emerge from their talk about their report-reading and decision-making tasks. Workers at two work sites—in Maryland and in Washington DC—responded to two typical work reports: one written in the style currently in use and another in a fundamentally different style exhibiting features that make documents easy to read and understand. The dominant metaphor that the Maryland workers used was “the whole-man” approach, which represented the workers’ flexible approach toward work tasks that resulted in their willingness to accept the fundamentally different report. In contrast, Washington DC workers used the metaphors “paint by the numbers” and “stay within the lines” when describing their work. These metaphors suggest the workers’ adherence to organizational routines and uncomfortableness with change that caused them not only to reject the new reports but also to have strong emotional reactions toward them. These results indicate that assessing organizational talk, particularly the metaphors people use, is a useful tool in gauging workers’ perceptions about and degree of openness toward communication change.

This article addresses the challenge of teaching voice in the introductory composition classroom, using graphic narrative to make voice visible for students as they identify and rhetorically compose their own voices.

Prior work in education, broadly, and in L2 education, more specifically, has documented both the difficulty and importance of integrating conversation into the language classroom, where conversation is both the means and end of language learning. Yet to be described is how the teacher plays an active role in engineering such integration and how he or she navigates a delicate balance between formal classroom talk and more casual conversation. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, I describe how one particular instructor manages to maintain an open and yet structured space that fosters connection without sacrificing control in an adult ESL classroom. In particular, I show how the balance between control and connection is achieved by embedding a conversational frame within an institutional one or reestablishing the institutional frame in the midst of talk about conversational matters. Findings of this study expand our current understanding of how learner voice may be promoted within the institutional structure of a classroom, and in particular, how conversation may be integrated into the language classroom without abandoning teacher control.

Drawing on an earlier study that views CEO communication as an important strategic tool, this study analyzes the content of CEO messages on Web sites of major corporations in Greater China to reveal their extratextual and intratextual characteristics. The study suggests that the language style employed in these messages, including the linguistic characteristics, regional themes, and interlingual themes, is associated with a corporate communication strategy that is underpinned by CEOs’ beliefs and rooted in cultural values. The findings enhance our understanding of how CEOs view their stakeholders and the content that they include in their messages to stakeholders in order to compete in this digital age.

Abstract This essay defines and describes the atheistic voice. Drawing from Thomas Lessl’s “voice” metaphor (“The Priestly Voice”), the logology of Kenneth Burke, and the literary insights of Mikhail Bakhtin, I map out the rhetorical tropes of the atheistic voice by analyzing the rhetoric of Christopher Hitchens, which exemplifies the atheistic voice as a rhetorical ideal. Hitchens demonstrates that the rhetorical strategies of burlesque and grotesque rejection are the atheistic voice’s primary means of ridiculing and tearing down the god-terms of priestly and bardic discourses. After analyzing these strategies, I point to concerns—some perennial, some contemporary—that the ebb and flow of atheistic voices in a democratic public sphere present.

Abstract Rhetorical scholarship and cultural commentary have demonstrated that environmentalist voices are consistently associated with apocalyptic rhetoric. However, this association deflects attention from the apocalyptic rhetoric that comes from industry and countermovements to environmentalism. This essay seeks to remedy that oversight by proposing the concept of “industrial apocalyptic” as a significant rhetorical form in environmental controversy. Based on analysis of the rhetoric of the U.S. coal industry, we find that these industrial apocalyptic narratives rely on a burlesque frame to disrupt the categories of establishment and outsider and thus thwart environmental regulation. Ultimately, we argue that industrial apocalyptic co-opts environmentalist appeals for radical change in the service of blocking such change and naturalizes neoliberal ideology as the commonsense discourse of the center.

My bookcase holds many contemporary books on “style”—or to use the Aristotelian term, lexis—in written communication. They are largely concentrated on such matters as clarity, conciseness, and cons...

This article explores how three writers in ecology understand and enact a disciplinary writing style. To accomplish this, it draws on theoretical approaches to style from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, as well as analyses of drafts of coauthored texts and video-recorded literacy history and discourse-based interviews. This study finds that metaphor and embodied actions such as gestures are valuable sites for comparing writers’ stylistic understandings and practices. The three writers expressed broad agreement when describing the qualities of good scientific writing, using similar verbal and gestural metaphors, such as Communication as Journey and entailments of the Conduit Metaphor. Yet in discourse-based interviews, specific stylistic choices provoked conflicting preferences not only between writers but even within them over time, as they sometimes changed their minds about what they had preferred over a year earlier. These conflicting and changing views, and the writers’ arguments for them, complicate popular notions of writing style: that a particular discipline has a style uniformly shared among experts and that experts’ mastery of their own style is stable and absolute. The finding that stylistic disagreements are undergirded by similar metaphors in language and gesture highlights the ways our stylistic understandings are tied to life histories and are also deeply embodied. Working from a sociocultural perspective, I provide a richer, more complex empirical and theoretical understanding of what it means to command a particular disciplinary style.

This article investigates turn-of-the-century agricultural journals as mediums of composition education that taught readers the discoursal goals and values of the agricultural press. Editors of Maine Farmer and Ohio Farmer, in particular, argued that advanced composition skills needed to be connected to rural contexts and practices. They also ultimately offered readers an identity to assume as writers: teachers in a community of farming professionals. That these publications were critical of the pedagogies that did not empower rural voices, and were simultaneously so intent on sponsoring new rural writers, demonstrates that more current concerns with rural literacy have a long history.

This study identifies multiple profiles of successful essays via a cluster analysis approach using linguistic features reported by a variety of natural language processing tools. The findings from the study indicate that there are four profiles of successful writers for the samples analyzed. These four profiles are linguistically distinct from one another and demonstrate that expert human raters examine a number of different linguistic features in a variety of combinations when assessing writing proficiency and assigning high scores to independent essays (regardless of the scoring rubric considered). The writing styles in the four clusters can be described as action and depiction style, academic style, accessible style, and lexical style. The study provides empirical evidence that successful writing cannot be defined simply through a single set of predefined features, but that, rather, successful writing has multiple profiles. While these profiles may overlap, each profile is distinct.

Abstract The years following the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) witnessed energetic debate at all levels of Mexican society concerning the future of the nation. Utilizing the notion of “political fictions,” in this article I claim that a tension between two competing political fictions was laid bare and can usefully be examined through analysis of manifestos from this period. Building upon previous scholarship on this genre, I show how manifestos arose from institutional crisis and served as both the voice of the oppressed and as the bully pulpit of political elites in Mexico. I conclude by analyzing an artistic manifesto, the Comprimido Estridentista (1921), which is an early attempt to synthesize these two political fictions. Foreshadowing one of the central concerns of the postrevolutionary state, this unusual text attempts to institutionalize the promises of the Mexican Revolution.

Book Review| March 01 2014 Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies. Edited by Karma R. Chávez and Cindy L. Griffin. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012; pp. xxiii + 217. $80.00 cloth; $29.95 paper. Valerie N. Wieskamp Valerie N. Wieskamp Indiana University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2014) 17 (1): 183–186. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.1.0183 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Valerie N. Wieskamp; Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2014; 17 (1): 183–186. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.1.0183 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| March 01 2014 Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion. By Jeanne Fahnestock. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011; pp. 464. $99.00 cloth; $39.95 paper. Andrew C. Hansen Andrew C. Hansen Trinity University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2014) 17 (1): 189–193. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.1.0189 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Andrew C. Hansen; Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2014; 17 (1): 189–193. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.17.1.0189 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article draws from ethnographic research to explore the interplay between Western capital (both monetary and cultural), the English language, and Indonesian religious identity at the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies, an “inter-religious, international Ph.D. program” in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. After discussing research methodology and positioning the program’s local-global religious identity within the larger Indonesian geopolitical context—which highlights English’s complicated role as both the language of Western imperialism and the language of global academic connection—this article explores how two Muslim PhD students negotiate this contact zone as they write. These student portraits, in turn, highlight the importance of acknowledging (1) religious identities as resources in our increasingly global US classrooms; (2) that identity negotiation occurs both textually and extratextually as multilingual writers reformulate and circulate information they draw from English publications to foment social change in their local communities; and (3) the contributions that non-Western voices can make in academic conversations long dominated by the West.

ABSTRACTReason, religion, and public culture have been of significant interest recently, with critics reevaluating modernity's conception of secularism and calling for a “postsecular” public discourse. Simultaneously, one sees rising religious fundamentalisms and a growing style of antirationalism in public debate. These conditions make a reconceptualization of public reason necessary. The main goals of this article are to establish agnostic public reason as the conceptual guide and normative ethic for public debate in liberal democracies by considering the secular/religious reason boundary explicitly and to argue that this ethic of public reason requires a commitment to reason giving and a particular epistemic attitude but that it does not, nor should it, take precedence over first-order judgments. An ethics of citizenship based on the process of reason giving with the appropriate epistemic stance might be one step toward rectifying the problem of an increasing separation between enclave publics, even if, by design, it cannot solve fundamental disagreement.

ABSTRACT Following recent scholarship, this article investigates the relationship among Adam Smith's lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, his Wealth of Nations, the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and his lectures on jurisprudence. According to Smith, the rhetorical theory regarding genre and style improves practical judgment that is central to both economic and legal affairs. Though Smith's lectures on rhetoric feature no overt mention of these legal or commercial applications, when we read these lectures alongside his lectures and writings on jurisprudence and economics, we see that Smith had developed numerous applications for the practical judgment that he taught his students when, under his guidance, they analyzed literary texts. Noting the interrelation among Smith's work on rhetoric, law, and economics allows us to see that others in the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Hugh Blair and Henry Home Lord Kames, similarly found connections among jurisprudence, political economy, and rhetorical theory.

This paper discusses the teaching of writing within the competing and often contradictory spaces of high-stakes testing and the practices and priorities around writing pedagogy in diverse school communities. It uses sociospatial theory to examine the “real-and-imagined” spaces (Soja, 1996) that influence and are influenced by teachers’ pedagogical priorities for writing in two linguistically diverse elementary school case studies. Methods of critical discourse analysis are used to examine rich data sets to make visible the discourses and power relations at play in the case schools. Findings show that when teachers’ practices focus on the teaching of structure and skills alongside identity building and voice, students with diverse linguistic backgrounds can produce dramatic, authoritative, and resonant texts. The paper argues that thirdspaces” (Soja, 1996) can be forged that both attend to accountability requirements and also give the necessary attention to more complex aspects of writing necessary for students from diverse and multilingual backgrounds to invest in writing as a creative and critical form of communication for participation in society and the knowledge economy.

Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, China's first comprehensive medical book, served as the key link between Yi Jing, which initiated China's high-context culture, and the high-context style of modern Chinese technical communication. In the form of dialogues between Yellow Emperor and his minister, its 24 fascicles cover four major topics of the organs, diagnosis, diseases, and treatments. While examining the body and discussing various diseases and treatments, the book expands on Yi Jing's philosophy through integrating three interrelated concepts: Tao, Yin and Yang, and Five Elements (word, fire, soil, metal, and water). In this way, the book, for the first time in Chinese history, explicitly treated humans and their behaviors as individual events conditioned by the natural context, emphasizing context as the conditioning force. This emphasis on context is manifest in modern Chinese technical communication as two textual devices of establishing personal relationships and creating ideal physical environments.

Present Tense is happy to announce that two of our Editors have taken tenure-track positions this last year. Alexandra Hidalgo, our Multimedia Editor, is now at Michigan State University, and Jessica E. Clements, our Style Editor, is at Whitworth University.

Curriculum designers and literacy policymakers sometimes assume that variation in teaching practices can be minimized using scripted and standardized curriculum. While standards and common understandings can be helpful, scripted curricula ignore the fact that curriculum is an enacted practice orchestrated by individuals. While reading scholars have studied this issue, it has yet to be examined in writing studies. In a four-month ethnographic study, I examined how a kindergarten teacher interpreted scripted writing curriculum through enacted lessons. The interpretation problematizes the ideologies embedded within curricular scripts, including emphases on genre, mechanics, and printed texts. Analysis of child writing revealed a socially constructed practice in which genre, mechanics, and letters were tied to social intentions and meanings. While scripted curricula can confine teachers’ abilities to make responsive decisions, I document how the focal teacher translated curricular materials with students, thus creating space for official curriculum, teaching practices, and children’s writing to coexist. Such flexible spaces make room for both teacher and student voices in innovative and inventive writing pedagogies.

This issue is our most multimodal collection to date, including our first slidecast essay (“The Quiet Country Closet”) and our first full audio essay (“Voices in Egypt”), as well as a number of other essays that incorporate images, video, and additional modes beyond alphabetic text.