Aer they are admitted, many students find actually joining the university to be disorienting and even daunting, especially those whose socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or educational worlds differ markedly from the academic world they encounter in college. We know that writing centers play a key role in helping students make this transition, serving as crucial conduits of adjustment for otherwise marginalized students. But exactly how we help tutors to help these students is less familiar ground. Tutors are not usually considered when composition scholars characterize the ways in which writing professionals help students belong. Nevertheless, tutors as well as teachers are party to a process seen variously as assimilation, accommodation, separatism, acculturation, translation, or repositioning (Severino; Bruffee-, Lu, ''Writing as Repositioning"), and the students tutors work with must undergo a process that can be positively characterized as "going native" (Bizzell, "Cognition" 386), quizzically understood as invention (Bartholomae), or negatively viewed as conversion 0-Harris io3; Lu, "Conflict") or initiation (T. Fox). Clearly, there is no consensus among these many "camps"; rather, what we have is provocative, useful discussion on the pedagogical processes of belonging. But many a tutor who finds herself on the frontlines with a lost student will not have the benefit of knowing this discussion. As a writing center administrator who has worked in two urban institutions with ethnically and linguistically diverse student populations, I have struggled to formulate tutor training that urges tutors to consider the complexities of belonging. I believe the tutor needs to understand the paradoxical ways in which writing and academic literacy more generally are instruments of belonging that can constrain as well as liberate.

This essay examines the issue of learning disabilities among the incarcerated population. Studies show that approximately eleven percent of U.S. prison inmates self-report a learning disability, a rate nearly four times greater than that of the general U.S. population. The paper 1) addresses the obstacles in meeting this population’s needs, and 2) argues for the importance of quality educational programming that includes services to those with learning disabilities both to improve rehabilitation for incarcerated individuals while imprisoned and to decrease recidivism upon release.

The author recalls her struggles and adaptations—to school, to anti-Semitism, to her family’s history, to her feelings for other women, to her learning disability—before there were terms to make what she experienced a familiar part of our discourse. She suggests that,because the words that might have exempted her from effort or locked her into one category or another were never spoken, she found ways to do what was required and methods of coping that have served her well in life.

Scientist-writers Rachel Carson and Loren Eiseley use a variety of narrative strategies to describe natural phenomena and explain scientific concepts. These techniques also contribute to an incisive yet balanced critique of science, one rooted in an ethical approach to nature, a rejection of anthropocentrism, and a healthy suspicion of the blind faith in scientific and technological progress. This article analyzes their use of metaphor and perspective, construction of narrative personae, emotional appeals, and invocations of the imagination.

Research Article| April 01 2003 Jerry's Blind Spot Jane Tompkins Jane Tompkins Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (2): 250–252. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-2-250 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jane Tompkins; Jerry's Blind Spot. Pedagogy 1 April 2003; 3 (2): 250–252. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-2-250 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2003 Duke University Press2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Symposium You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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

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

Abstract This article explores the shift from observation of users to participation with users, describing and investigating three examples of user-centered design practice in order to consider the new ethical demands being made of technical communicators. Pelle Ehn's participatory design method, Roger Whitehouse's design of tactile signage for blind users, and the design of an online writing program are explored for the creation of a dialogic design ethic. The development of effective collaborative design methods requires meaningful communication between users and designers, and dialogic ethics can guide the development of effective and humane technological design methods.

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

1 Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, socialists could claim they had done a better job of uniting theory and practice than capitalists. Socialists had generally succeeded in raising the welfare of the bottom end of their societies, typically at the cost of lowering it at the top end. And that is exactly as the socialists would have wanted it. For, even if not all socialists held the rich personally responsible for the plight of the poor, all were in agreement that the rich constituted a structural obstacle in the struggle to overcome mass poverty. In contrast, capitalists have found it more difficult to square their own theory and practice. In theory, everyone should flourish with the liberalization of markets. Yet, in practice, even when the poor increased their income, it was never enough to catch up with the increases in wealth made by the rich. The result was an intensification of existing class divisions, or "relative deprivation," which capitalist theorists could only attempt to explain away by invoking such ad hoc factors as the lack of a work ethic among the poor or the unpredictability of markets. Poroi, 1, 1, January, 2001 can be added through will and effort to one's genetic endowment. In this sense, Singer remains deaf to the quest for recognition, at least in the human species and probably others as well.

The tradition of rhetoric established 2,500 years ago emphasizes the imperative of speech as a defining characteristic of reason. But in her new book Lend Me Your Ear, Brenda Jo Brueggemann exposes this tradition s effect of disallowing deaf people human identity because of their natural silence. Brueggemann s assault upon this long-standing rhetorical conceit is both erudite and personal; she writes both as a scholar and as a hard-of-hearing woman. In this broadly based study, she presents a profound analysis and understanding of this rhetorical tradition s descendent disciplines (e.g., audiology, speech/language pathology) that continue to limit deaf people. Next to this even-handed scholarship, she juxtaposes a volatile emotional counterpoint achieved through interviews with Deaf individuals who have faced rhetorically constructed restrictions, and interludes of her own poetry and memoirs. The energized structure of Lend Me Your Ear galvanizes new thought on the rhetoric surrounding Deaf people by posing basic questions from a rhetorical context: How is deafness constructed as a disability, pathology, or culture through the institutions of literacy education and science/technology, and how do these constructions fit with those of deaf people themselves? The rhetoric of deafness as pathology is associated with the conventional medical and scientific establishments, and literacy education fosters deafness as disability, both dependent upon the premise that speech drives communication. This kinetic study demands consideration of deafness in terms of the rhetoric of Deaf culture, American Sign Language (ASL), and the political activism of Deaf people. Brueggemann argues strenuously and successfully for a reevaluation of the speech model of rhetoric in light of the singular qualities of ASL poetry, a genre that adds the dimension of space and is not disembodied. Ironically, without a word being spoken or printed, ASL poetry returns to the fading, prized oral tradition of poets such as Homer. The speech imperative in traditional rhetoric also fails to present rhetorical forms for listening, or a rhetoric of silence. These and other break-out concepts introduced in Lend Me Your Ear that will stimulate scholars and students of rhetoric, language, and Deaf studies to return to this intriguing work again and again.

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

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

This article examines the ideological functions of seventeenth-century ceremonial oratory by distinguishing between two related rhetorical strategies: textual image and propaganda, defined as the promotion of a policy. This distinction helps characterize the particular nature of Louis XIV's régime, instead of anachronistically equating it with modern totalitarianism. If pursued in other contexts it can serve to illuminate the mechanisms of personality cult in general. Fashioning an image of the ruler with the help of an institutional apparatus which varies with the régime is a way to create public confidence in his/her ability. A well-established absolutist monarchy should not require propagandistic discourse; yet it was ubiquitous in Louis XIV's global design for government. This suggests a dialectical interpretation. When belief in the monarch's greatness fails to produce blind faith in his/her infallibility, propaganda may take over to bolster persuasion. When counter-propaganda, or facts, become insistently present, image may again appear as an expedient alternative.

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

Investigates, in a longitudinal study, the spelling development of young deaf children in the context of an integrated process writing classroom. Identifies/categorizes the spelling strategies employed by deaf writers as print-based, speech-based, and sign-based. Provides insights into the nature of cognitive processes in the deaf child.

This study examines theoretical conceptions of community and how current communitarian theories either explain or are challenged by the emergence of electronic discussion groups in the computer-mediated communication (CMC) medium. It is a study of the power to monitor what is said, to authorize who may speak, and even to determine what is and is not knowable within the context of discourse communities and, furthermore, seeks to test the claim that CMC may serve as an agency for communal change by enabling the formation of resisting subjectivities. A poststructuralist analysis of approaches to "community" is used to show how communitarian theories are often caught in a binary between subjectivities which are able to resist interpellation into a community by appealing to universals outside the community versus subjectivities which are forced to accommodate the discursive practices of the community because they are constituted by it. In order to better understand the process of subject formation within communities, the discursive practices of an electronic discussion group known as PURTOPOI are examined. Utilizing observations based on the examination of PURTOPOI and using insights from feminist standpoint theory, this project ultimately argues for a revised view of subjectivity within discourse communities. It is impossible to avoid the discursive practices of particular communities; yet, resistance and conflict are, paradoxically, required to maintain group unity. Thus, communities are both unified and sites of struggle. Communities are never unities because as soon as they become unified, as soon as they realize total consensus, they cease to function as communities; there's no communication within them any longer so that the forces which bind their members together into a community are gone. Thus, there can never be a community which is completely successful in forcing its members to accommodate its discursive practices, nor can there ever be a community which is completely without hegemony. Both resistance and accommodation must be present in order for there to be a community. This calls into question the claim that CMC may serve as an agency for communal change by enabling the formation of resisting subjectivities because it suggests that CMC is too indebted to the discursive practices of other established media to produce radical new subjectivities.

These essays by Old Dominion University students deal with two questions: What impact do their own race, class, gender, and ethnic identities have upon them as students? How do their culture and the university culture interact to affect their ability to learn?The focus of these essays is on the overlap between the students identities as students and their identities based on gender, race, class, and ethnic origin. The project began as an assignment in a women s studies class at Old Dominion University in 1993, when students in a mixed graduate and undergraduate course were asked to write a brief analysis of themselves as students, accounting for the impact of gender, race, and social class on what they studied, what they heard in class, how they were treated in the classroom, how they treated others there, and what their level of comfort in the university was. Invited to add other variables, such as religion, nationality, age, sexual orientation, or disability if they considered these significant to their identities as studentsthe students were urged to consider not only the disadvantages these various identities gave them but also the privileges and advantages.The resulting essays stimulated great interest in what students had to say and led to the formation of The Broad Minds Collectivemade up of four students from the class as well as its instructorwhich set about the task of soliciting and collecting additional essays. Although most essays contain overlapping themes, the editors detected four motifs that encompass virtually every essay included in the book. the section Cultural Perceptions and Assumptions, students show their awareness of how culturally defined categories affect education.Essays in Belonging and Alienation in the Classroom discuss the students level of comfort in the classroom and the degree to which they feel they belong at the university. The essays in Making Sense of Our Lives Through Education reveal the students use of education to learn more about the forces that shape them. In Search of an Education highlights students efforts to wrest what they feel they need from a college education.Rather than presenting a multicultural educational theory or conducting a sterile sociological study, The Broad Minds Collective has allowed students to speak for themselves. Abstraction is replaced by stories of personal conflict, struggle, and victory.

Reviews 339 preachers' macaronic compositions, recently well-documented by Siegfried Wenzel. All ingeniously augment the means of sharing Christian wisdom among the laity. Georgiana Donavin Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, The Empty Garden: the Subject of Late Milton (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) xvii + 515 pp. Sharon Achinstein Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) xv + 272 pp. Hardly any student of modem American politics would fail to agree that the mass media—specifically television—play a key role in structuring political discourse. Whether or not individual politicians and their media representatives actually formally study mass communication, all know the forms, demands, and constraints of television. Failure to master the medium usually results in failure to win an election or carry the day in a discussion of public policy. Further, the medium creates a series of expectations in viewers, expectations that must be met or consciously manipulated and subverted by any political writer or speaker. Now, imagine reading a scholarly book on modem political discourse that may mention television but does not examine its characteristics as a medium or the viewing habits or demographics of the audience, and yet claims to study "media". Such is frequently the situation in current studies of the literature, politics, and political discourse of seventeenth-century England. The word "rhetoric" often appears in titles, and indeed in authors' arguments, but, on inspection, a reader hoping to find discussion of the ars bene dicendi as an epistemic approach to structuring political language will be disappointed. Too often "rhetoric" simply becomes a synonym for "language" or "trope", rather than a means of inquiry into the workings of argument. 340 RHETORICA The reasons for scholarly attention to political language in the period are manifest. The century claims what for many historians is the first modern revolution, complete with a nascent public sphere, people beginning to perceive themselves as public actors, and, most importantly, a free press that empowered both. It claims many writers engaged in pamphleteering who at any time would rank with the best in the language, from William Prynne and John Lilbume to Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. Milton's stature as a poet guarantees attention to his political prose and to the politics of his great poems. Moreover, without question, the educational practice of the century, beginning in the grammar school, was relentlessly rhetorical. Rhetoric thus saturated seventeenth-century writers and readers as much as television does the modern political nation. The period is thus ripe for rhetorical analysis. I examine here two recent exemplars of Milton studies that illustrate the gulf between "rhetorical study" and knowledge of rhetoric that pervades current seventeenth-century scholarship. Both books have been extensively, and largely favorably, reviewed in reputable journals. One received the James Holly Hanford Award from the Milton Society of America as the best book on Milton published in 1994. Both are learned and engaging, and both offer valuable insights into Milton's work. But the arguments of both are compromised by the writers' apparent unfamiliarity with the entire field of the history of rhetoric. In one case, the author's knowledge of rhetoric is limited; in the other, the author lacks any comprehension of rhetorical theory, principle, or practice. My purpose here is to highlight the ways in which this blind spot affects the theses of these two otherwise powerful books, and to call attention to two recent studies of other periods that admirably achieve, through their grasp of rhetoric, what the Miltonists attempt. In The Empty Garden, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy offers a study of the Jesus of Paradise Regained as founder of a religious culture that offers a "new way of knowing and a new way of being" (xi) through self-knowledge gained by "reading", broadly defined as interpreting both the written word and the "text" of the world. Through his creation of Jesus, and his contrast of that Jesus to the Samson of the companion work Samson Agonistes, Milton becomes Reviews 341 a powerful cultural critic, ultimately arguing that the relationship between self-knowledge and self-representation may best be negotiated through politics. As Rushdy makes abundantly clear in his first chapter, "'Confronting the Subject: The Art of...

One of the few authors to define and focus on feminist theories of rhetoric, Krista Ratcliffe takes Bathsheba s dilemma as her controlling metaphor: I have the feelings of a woman, says Bathsheba Everdene in Hardy s Far from the Madding Crowd, only the language of men. Although women and men have different relationships to language and to each other, traditional theories of rhetoric do not foreground such gender differences, Ratcliffe notes. She argues that feminist theories of rhetoric are needed if we are to recognize, validate, and address Bathsheba s dilemma. Ratcliffe argues that because feminists generally have not conceptualized their language theories from the perspective of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric and composition scholars must construct feminist theories of rhetoric by employing a variety of interwoven strategies: recovering lost or marginalized texts; rereading traditional rhetoric texts; extrapolating rhetorical theories from such nonrhetoric texts as letters, diaries, essays, cookbooks, and other sources; and constructing their own theories of rhetoric. Focusing on the third option, Ratcliffe explores ways in which the rhetorical theories of Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich may be extrapolated from their Anglo-American feminist texts through examination of the interrelationship between what these authors write and how they write. In other words, she extrapolates feminist theories of rhetoric from interwoven claims and textual strategies. By inviting Woolf, Daly, and Rich into the rhetorical traditions and by modeling the extrapolation strategy/methodology on their writings, Ratcliffe shows how feminist texts about women, language, and culture may be reread from the vantage point of rhetoric to construct feminist theories of rhetoric. She rereads Anglo-American feminist texts both to expose their white privilege and to rescue them from charges of naivete and essentialism. She also outlines the pedagogical implications of these three feminist theories of rhetoric, thus contributing to ongoing discussions of feminist pedagogies. Traditional rhetorical theories are gender-blind, ignoring the reality that women and men occupy different cultural spaces and that these spaces are further complicated by race and class, Ratcliffe explains. Arguing that issues such as who can talk, where one can talk, and how one can talk emerge in daily life but are often disregarded in rhetorical theories, Ratcliffe rereads Roland Barthes The Old Rhetoric to show the limitations of classical rhetorical theories for women and feminists. Discovering spaces for feminist theories of rhetoric in the rhetorical traditions, Ratcliffe invites readers not only to question how women have been located as a part of and apart from these traditions but also to explore the implications for rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy. In extrapolating rhetorical theories from three feminist writers not generally considered rhetoricians, Ratcliffe creates a new model for examining women s work. She situates the rhetorical theories of Woolf, Daly, and Rich within current discussions about feminist pedagogy, particularly the interweavings of critical thinking, reading, and writing. Ratcliffe concludes with an application to teaching.

RHETORICA 232 James L. Kastley, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. vi + 293. At a time when so many are trying to "rethink" rhetoric by making up stories about "the sophists" or parroting de Man's version of Nietzsche, Kastley's book is most welcome. In it, we have a thoughtful and illuminating contribution to the conversation that needs to be promoted about the ways in which the past may meaningfully speak to the present. His list of "required reading" is not the standard one. The book begins with readings of the Gorgias and the Meno that present a Plato who was not an enemy of rhetoric but its subtlest theorizer. The two dialogues, Kastley argues, constitute a critique of the rhetoric of private interests. Socrates, by his practice of refutation (elenchos), gets us to see the inevitable entanglements with injustice and injury that ensnare anyone who engages in symbolic action in political concerns. Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' Hecuba are then shown to address problems of the availability of audience, the crisis of trust, and the consequences of marginalization. In the second half of the book, Kastley reads Austen's Persuasion as an allegory confronting the lost public sphere of discourse, offering rhetoric not as a solution, but as a problem. He then presents critiques ("refutations") of Sartre's views in What is Literature? and, in one of the book's most successful chapters, of de Man's views on rhetoric. In his reading of de Man, he offers an adroit demonstration of the ways in which de Man's position is blind to the dangers of collapsing position to truth and of framing rhetoric in terms of cognition rather than action. The final chapter, "Rhetoric and Ideology," takes us to Kenneth Burke—partly by way of Lentricchia's misreading of him—and to an insightful reconsideration of the nature of ideology and of community that yields a vision of a rhetoric that can use the strategies of classical skepticism as critical devices to "expose the exercises and deformations of power operating as a set of structured relationships" (p. 257). Kastley's readings are not without problems. Not everyone will agree, for instance, that Gorgias (in Plato's dialogue) has the best interests of the community at heart (p. 35); and some may feel uncomfortable with Kastely's tendency to shape his expectations of Reviews 233 dramatic characters and explain their actions as though they were real people. The Socrates Kastley portrays seems less like the Socrates of Plato than that of Cameades's Academy. And if Persuasion shows us how, in the wake of social transformations, it became necessary for women to discover how to speak, cannot the same be said of men? On the other hand, Kastley's argument that Sartre quietly allows Kant in by the back door and his detailing of the paradoxical results of de Man's favoring knowledge over action are both persuasive. Even more impressive is the subtlety with which he thinks through the problems posed by post-Enlightenment thinking to reject the temptation to find some place to stand "outside the rhetorical flux" and move, rather, toward a world in which we act, toward a community that is pluralized, temporal, and a provisional form of sharing, where we might begin to wrestle with the injustice and injury that are inevitable, but not insurmountable. Kastley's "refutations" are, in the end, affirmations; and for those he is to be commended. THOMAS M. CONLEY University ofIllinois Gabriele Knappe, Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp. According to Gabriele Knappe, previous efforts to assess the knowledge, use, and function of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England have failed to distinguish between the tradition of ancient rhetoric proper and elements of rhetorical instruction taken over by grammarians. The goal of the former was the production of prose texts designed to have a specified effect on an audience, while the principal goal of the latter was the proper interpretation of texts and only secondarily their production. Systematic evaluation of all available evidence indicates little or no direct knowledge of...

Studies profoundly deaf children’s responses to picture book reading in a preschool environment as compared to responses of hearing children. Finds that in spite of a severe delay in learning language, deaf children’s responses to the picture books were similar to those of hearing children. Concludes that deaf children learned a great deal about language by reading picture books.

t was not until I had embarked upon my coming out as a deaf person that I considered my rites of passage, and dwelled on my acts, both deliberate and unconscious, both past and present, of passing. Because my coming out was a mid-life event, I had much to reflect back on and much, too, to illuminate ahead of me. This through an identity crisis, as it were, and the rites of passage then involved in uncovering the paths of my lifelong passing as hearing, took place in a hall of mirrors. (Later I would come to know this place as the art and act of rhetoric.) I first saw myself mirrored in several students I met at Gallaudet University (the world's only liberal arts university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students). I was thirty-two and finishing my PhD, writing a dissertation-that quintessential act of literate passing. What's more, I was finishing it by doing an ethnographic sort of study on deaf student writers at Gallaudet University; thus I was using the guise of an academic grant and a PhD-producing project as a professional foil to make a personal journey to the center of Deaf culture. I was always good at finding a way to pass into places I shouldn't normally be. So, there I was, doing time as a teacher and researcher at Gallaudet, collecting data for my study, taking a sign language class, living with a Deaf woman and faculty member at Gallaudet, going to Deaf gatherings, tutoring some of the students. Mostly, I was trying to pass in ways that were both familiar and unfamiliar to me: to pass (unfamiliarly) as D/deaf-and doing a lousy job of it-and to

Describes a doctoral student’s experience of studying the deaf or hearing culture from the standpoint of her life and work as a hard-of-hearing person. Discusses the student’s (almost) passing in and among the “D/deaf and H/hearing” worlds.

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The idea for this symposium began when Sheryl Fontaine and Susan Hunter told Rick Gebhardt about two studies they had made of manuscript reviewing practices in composition studies--one surveying experiences and perceptions of authors and one dealing with journal referees. The subject of peer reviewing seemed an important one for a field working, as ours is, to definie its scholarly identity. Rick sensed that his efforts to bring blind refereeing to composition's oldest journal might prove useful in exploring the subject and, for addtional views, he contacted several of CCC's consulting readers. Carol Berkenkotter, who had been studying peer reviewing in the sciences, agreed to attempt a brief theoretical perspective. Phillip Arrington decided to explore the subject personally, from his experiences both as author and referee. And Doug Hesse chose to use personal experience, chaos theory, and MLA panels to discuss referees' reports as scholarship.

Examines the communication problems that can arise in policy-making situations requiring public input and assent when the ethical and cultural assumptions of technical people representing a government entity differ from those of the citizen participants. Technical people often operate from an "ethic of expediency" that values clear, precise technical data as the basis for decision-making, but when citizen participants hold sharply different cultural values and interests, they may perceive such communication as privileging the interests of government over their own. Drawing on Habermas's (1979) concept of the "ideal speech situation", the authors present a case study in which engineers representing a city government attempted to gain the assent of a minority community to a well drilling project. The study suggests that the engineers' communication, although presented in good faith, did not meet Habermas's "claims to validity" and was thus seen by community residents as ideologically distorted. Because they did not trust the communication, the residents could not enter into consensus building, and the project remains at impasse. The engineers' propensity to frame the situation as a technical space for rational decision-making, from which cultural concerns and political motives could be excluded, made them blind to reality as the citizen participants perceived it. Government representatives in such situations have an ethical obligation to observe cultural difference and to create a communicative context in which consensus building is possible.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

This study investigated the effectiveness of an approach to improving revising skills that integrated strategy instruction, peer response, and word processing. Seventh and eighth grade students with learning disabilities were taught a systematic strategy for working in pairs to help each other revise their writing. The strategy was designed to guide students in both the social and cognitive aspects of response and revision. Cognitive support included a set of evaluation criteria, specific revision strategies, and an overall strategy for regulating the revision process. Social interaction was guided by a predictable structure for listening and responding to each others’ writing. A multiple probe design across pairs was used to assess instruction. On the pretests, students made few substantive revisions and did not improve the quality of their papers by revising them. Following instruction, all students made more substantive revisions, the proportion of revisions rated as improvements increased from 47% to 83%, and second drafts were rated as significantly better than first drafts. Furthermore, the overall quality of final drafts increased substantially from pretests to posttests. The gains were maintained at one and two-month maintenance testing and generalized to handwritten compositions.

For pt.I see ibid., vol.32, no.2, p.83-93 (1991). The authors explore the two-year Danish CIM/GEMS project in computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) at the Technical University of Denmark to show how writing is an act of technology and knowledge representation, a vehicle of their transfer to a user community, and, if successful, an accommodation of technology to its users. They address creators and users of system documentation who need documentation for CIM implementation. The authors argue that documentation is often better for representing and explaining a CIM system than the actual system itself, and they recommend that documentation production be viewed not as a separate, end-of-project activity but as an integrated part of technical development. Planned and regular documentation production can in fact be a stimulus and aid to technical development, possibly even shortening the project life cycle.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

The application of work force diversity and business ethics to advance employee growth and satisfaction while improving production and profits for corporations is described. An ethics/diversity synergy model that involves accommodation of change and assimilation into the organizational environment is discussed. A comprehensive, targeted corporate communication program combining consistency, continuity, and content that serves as a vehicle for the ethics/diversity synergy model is described. Activities and communication channels that enhance the ethics/diversity synergy model are examined.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

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

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

When Edward P. J. Corbett was editor of College Composition and Communication, his fairly rigid standards for article length undoubtedly had the effect of forcing some loose thinking to a fairly sharp point. It also had the effect of pushing some discussions into an awesome degree of compression that made them less available to casual readers than they might have been otherwise. On the other hand, they offer a rewarding read now, if one is willing to commit the mental energy to put them together with the world. To my mind, a classic illustration of this sort of essay is George Yoos' An Identity of Roles in Writing and Reading from the fall, 1979 issue. In that paper, Yoos provided a model for reading and writing processes that finds reciprocity between writing and reading strategies at four different levels-at the level of objective expression or of content, at the level of face-adjustment or ethical appeal, at the level of audience, and at the level of logic or truth. Under this system, both writer and reader perform in roles defined by these four topics, and if one is generally accentuated in any specific situation, it is pretty clear that accommodation or sensitivity to all roles can provide a highly enriched perspective on writing. However, any conceptualizing like this, anchored in Collingwood, Croce, and George Herbert Meade (the names cited here) is probably going to seem rather alien and have some apparently rough points for present day readers. One of these is Yoos' flat assumption-deriving from Collingwood and Croce-that Kinneavy's effort to see expression as a mode of communication is wrong, and that the need to keep expression separate from communication is basic to an understanding of the writing process. Our present pedagogical tendency of using personal expression as a way to develop fluency and authenticity will tend to make readers unreceptive to the basic truth that writing will always be writing, that is, texts in which expression can be found, but which should never be confused with expression. To ignore this fact is to run a far graver risk of creating writing anxiety than would be possible by framing writing as an impersonal formalistic game. Another rough point would have to be Yoos' notion of the faceadjustment role, which he identifies with ethical appeal as a matter of clear about what one is doing. Yoos draws a clear distinction between this and the audience role which involves a strategic awareness and management of how different audiences will react, and, from the reading point of view, a reader's awareness of how these audiences are being managed. These are very subtle distinctions that take us quite a way back to a classical view of rhetorical operations (pace Knoblauch and Brannon). More generally, Yoos makes it clear that the relation between writing and reading is much deeper than writing scholars tend to acknowledge, in spite of the years of research into reading and writing connections. Certainly the kind of mirror-imaging that his essay provides-in which, say, an objective-expressive is one the writer plays by getting what he or she knows down into words, and that the reader reads for to see what the writer really knows, as a ground to be comprehended before processing rhetorical and logical acts-involves a complex conceptualizing of the communication process that promises a very rich critical

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.

Learning disabilities were included among the list of handicaps for which special educational services were mandated and reimbursable by the federal government when the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (Public Law 94-142) was passed in 1975. Although the term disability is difficult to define, probably the most useful definition for the educator is the widely quoted federal definition of learning disabilities provided in the December 29, 1977, Federal Register.

When writers make frequent grammatical errors, they often spend a substantial part of composing time making decisions about grammar. Studies of unskilled writers with normal hearing indicate this hyperconcern for correctness. There have been reasons to believe, however, that the attention of deaf writers who make errors is less consumed by grammatical decision making. The present study was undertaken to determine whether representative deaf writers devote as much attention to grammatical decisions as unskilled hearing subjects. Ten deaf subjects and five hearing subjects wrote and edited accounts of two short stories that were signed and spoken on videotape. Under all composing conditions, the deaf subjects' rates of pausing were substantially lower than those of the hearing writers. Combined with subjects' patterns of error correction, these findings suggest that the deaf subjects devoted substantially less attention to grammatical decision making during composition.

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A review of recent research in the field of technical writing and communication indicated that although the methodologies employed were sound, they were not fully articulated. An attempt to use a double-blind research design in the writing classroom by dividing the students into competing teams that reviewed each other's work led to some interesting reactions by the students as well as to some the need to introduce more open-ended assignments in our classrooms. Asking our students to come up with competing solutions to the same problem and requiring them to design means of testing their effectiveness can develop their abilities in critical thinking and group dynamics. At the same time this approach will allow teachers to pursue their own research on various problems in technical communication. The result is a unit which has pedagogical effectiveness and suggests new directions for writing research.

The author hypothesized that flashing target prepositions and verb inflections would result in greater recall of passages presented on a video screen. Thirty-four prelingually deaf freshmen were shown two passages on a video screen in a crossed-cell experiment. Eighteen students saw target prepositions and verb inflections flashed in capitals in a lesson on Newton but not in a lesson on Roemer. Sixteen students saw target prepositions and verb inflections flashed in capitals in the lesson on Roemer but not in the lesson on Newton. No statistically significant difference was shown between the groups of students nor between the two lessons. Students obtained scores of 97% on the targets when they were flashed in capitals and only 83% when not flashed (p<;0.0005).