The online work environment brings with it factors that can create problems in crosscultural interactions. Technical communicators, therefore, need to understand how cultural communication expectations can affect discourse in IVOs. This article overviews one area-contact-in which cultural differences could cause online communication problems. The article also uses the theory of symbolic interactionism to examine these problems and to posit strategies for avoiding them.

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ing logic of the market is intricately, if silently, bound to theories of autonomous creativity, the writer is surely caught in a bind. Considering the trials of Coleridge and Wordsworth is enough to drive one into the arms of Trollope, abjuring forever the cycle of hypomania and depression, inspiration and silence. If the market is inescapable, turn its discipline to good effect. Such is Trollope's response to Romanticism: There are those [...] who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till-inspiration moves him. When I have heard such a doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn. To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting (102). Trollope scorns those who wait for inspiration, and embraces the analogy of novel writing to shoe making, pointedly refusing the Romantic separation of Art from craft: A shoemaker when he has finished one pair of shoes does not sit down and contemplate his work in idle satisfaction [...]. The shoemaker who so indulged himself would be without wages half his time. It is the same with a professional writer of books [.. .]. I had now quite accustomed myself to begin a second pair as soon as the first was out of my hands (265). God is on the side not so much of the angels, as of the man who settles down to do his work here on earth, for idleness is a vice, industriousness a virtue. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Sat, 25 Jun 2016 05:12:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Writer's Block, Merit, and the Market 637 Just do it. This familiar marketing slogan is applicable to all walks of life, it seems. Donald Murray, in The Craft of Revision, echoes Trollope and Boice, too, when he urges writers to [make] writing a habit [ . .]. The writing becomes expected in the way you are expected to wait on tables, show up for your job in the emergency room, deliver papers. Roger Simon of the Baltimore Sun explained, 'There's no such thing as writer's block. My father drove a truck for 40 years. And never once did he wake up in the morning and say: 'I have truck driver's block today. I am not going to work' (17). There's something bracing about this. Murray appeals to the complex network of social relations any worker must enter into, which carry obligations that must be honored. The market makes us all interdependent and we are all expected to work, indeed, required to work if we need to earn our incomes. So Murray, like Trollope, urges one to internalize these obligations, which are both ethical and economic, and thus take advantage of the support this network can provide. Replace the Romantic agonies of inspiration with an ethic of work and you will be rewarded. You will have your writing, your copyright, your income, and your peace of mind. Yet the work ethic is by no means our salvation, as Max Weber's magisterial study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, makes clear. Weber argues that Protestants developed in the seventeenth century an ethic that he calls worldly asceticism (120). This ethic is motivated first by religious belief and later, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by the force of capitalist accumulation. For Calvin, the purposeful organization and arrangement of the cosmos is evidence of a divine plan, even if the will of God is mysterious. Obvious in the order of the natural world, this organization extends to the order of society as well, in which every person has a calling, a job to do. Those who are in a state of grace glorify God by fulfilling his commandments, which providentially organize social relations. Each individual Christian must therefore work in his or her calling, regardless of his or her desires, and must work methodically, honestly, prudently, steadfastly, all for the glory of God. As Weber observes, Labor in a calling was [.. .] the ascetic activitypar excellence (133). Alone in an individual relation with God, quit of priestly mediation and Roman Catholic acts of penance, the Protestant went to work and prospered. Such labor is endless since it is not a goal in itself; done conscientiously, it will yield riches on earth that represent prospectively (given the grace of God) the Protestant's reward in heaven. I sketch the theological dimensions of the Protestant ethic to stress the fact that it is predicated on deeply felt belief, and to recall how inextricable this belief is from the discourse of political economy. Weber argues that the logic of utilitarian political economy is an effect of Protestant theology and religious belief. Calvinism holds that This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Sat, 25 Jun 2016 05:12:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The emphasis on the individual in Western culture has blinded us to how social relationships affect literacy acquisition and, conversely, how literacy transforms these relationships. This article deals with the literacy practices, specifically, letter writing, of Lithuanian immigrants who arrived in the United States during the end of the 19th century. For these immigrants, reading and writing were collaborative activities, not the individual, solitary acts that we often assume them naturally to be. Individuals often turned to more literate neighbors for assistance in tasks involving reading and writing, an extension of the concept of talka, the Lithuanian tradition of collective assistance. Parents also frequently engaged the help of sons and, especially, daughters in writing letters to relatives in Lithuania. Letter writing thus not only fostered solidarity between immigrant and their relatives in Lithuania but also between Lithuanian immigrant parents and their increasingly literate, Americanized children.

Innovation in a company's design process is increasingly a matter of cooperation between the company and its customers. New information and communication technology (ICT) possibilities such as electronic communication (EC) media generate even more opportunities for companies to collaborate with customers during the early stages of research and development. This exploratory study examined the design process of five Dutch firms and the cultural and communicative implications of cooperation in the design process between the supplier and the customer using EC media. We found that the selected use of EC media for communication between R&D and customers has a positive effect on the design process. We also discovered that the characteristics of the most suitable EC media depend on the design activity and that the corporate and professional cultures of both the company and its customers involved in the cooperation seem to affect the communication media used. Finally, the future use of new ICT in the design area is discussed.

s Kathleen Yancey points out in her history of writing assessment, evaluation in some form or another has been an important part of college writing courses for over fifty years (“Looking”). Yancey’s history recognizes the often conflicted nature of assessment for the teaching of writing. Although most writing teachers recognize the importance and necessity of regular assessment, they are also rightly concerned about the adverse effects assessment can have on their classrooms and students. This essay focuses on the kind of assessment (I use the words assessment and evaluation interchangeably, distinguishing both from either testing or grading) that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when we talk about classroom assessment we talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. This slippage of assessment, grading, and testing as interchangeable provides a discourse about assessment that is often critical and unexamined. The result of these strong connections among grading, testing, and assessing writing is that any possible connection between the teaching and the evaluating of student writing is seldom questioned or discussed. This has led us as a profession to believe that assessing student writing somehow interferes with our ability to teach it. There are of course some notable exceptions. For example, Edward M. White’s germinal text is called Teaching and Assessing Writing, and he includes the ways in which formal assessments such as holistic scoring can benefit classroom practice; but even White divides assessment and teaching into separate entities that can affect each other. Certainly portfolios have been constructed by some (Elbow, “Foreword”;

Reviews four books: Listening Up: Reinventing Ourselves as Teachers and Students, by Rachel Martin; Disturbing the Peace, by Nancy Newman; Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability, by C. A. Bowers; Assessing the Portfolio: Principles for Practice, Theory, and Research, by Liz Hamp-Lyons and William Condon.

Leading intellectuals tend to assume responsibility for imagining alternatives and do so within a set of discourses and institutions burdened genealogically by multifaceted complicities with power that make them dangerous to people. As agencies of these discourses that greatly affect the lives of people one might say leading intellectuals are a tool of oppression and most so precisely when they arrogate the right and power to judge and imagine efficacious alternatives—a process that we might suspect, sustains leading intellectuals at the expense of others. —Paul Bove (1986: 227)

This article shows how user-centered design can be applied to documentation and reports the results of a two-year contextual design study. The article (1) demonstrates how contextual design can be applied to information and (2) reports some of the study's results, outlining key insights gleaned about users. The study found that users vary widely in their information needs and preferences. Users employ a variety of learning strategies in learning new software and in overcoming problems encountered within applications. Documentation can better meet variances in learning styles and user preferences when tightly integrated into applications, accessible in the user's own language. Additionally, documentation is most beneficial when several assistance options exist for users to choose among, varying according to context, task, and user need. Finally, the article discusses the constraints that affect the implementation of design ideas and explores implications for practice and additional research.

E-mail has significantly impacted the way we communicate in business, possibly going so far as to affect the social structure of organizations. One under-explored affect of e-mail is how it impacts communication in smaller organizations. Given the ability of regular “face-to-face” interaction, is e-mail necessary to boost communication? A report of employee attitudes in one small business did provide an opportunity to observe the impact of e-mail on communications and employee attitudes. As a result, it is suspected that interoffice e-mail may serve to link formal and informal communication channels, particularly in terms of including managers to the informal communications network.

Looks at two representative examples of the impact of multiculturalism on higher education in order to get a concrete sense of how different perspectives can affect understanding of the multicultural transformation of the college curriculum in general and English studies in particular. Notes that the emphasis on educational access should be on “geography of education.”

The assessment of students' writing skills through essays is a common practice in educational institutions. Scoring of essays requires considerable judgment on the part of those who rate the response. When raters assign different scores to an essay, testing practitioners must resolve the discrepancy before computing an operational score to report to the examinee. This study investigated five forms of score resolution that were reported in a national survey of state department of education-testing agencies. The study examined the effect that each form of resolution has on the reliability of the resulting operational scores. It is shown that some methods of resolution can be associated with higher interrater reliability than can others. It is also shown that the choice of resolution can affect the magnitude of the reported score as well as the final passing rate of an assessment.

This semester-long qualitative study explores the effects of a high-stakes, direct writing test on 3 teachers and their students in 1 rural Maryland high school. Out of the 23 students in both classes, 14 students had been identified for special education services for physical or learning problems; all had either failed the test once or had not yet taken it. The researchers conducted interviews with teachers and students, observed their classrooms, and collected samples of student writing and other artifacts to address 3 questions: (a) How did the test influence teacher beliefs about writing instruction? (b) How did these teachers adapt their instruction to respond to the demands of the test? (c) How did students who had not passed the test respond to their writing instruction and how did preparation for the test affect their attitudes/beliefs about writing? Our findings suggest that an emphasis on test preparation diminished the likelihood of the teachers’ engaging in reflective practice that is sensitive to the needs of individual students, that the high-stakes assessment process discounted the validity of locally developed standards for assessing writing, and that the criteria for passing the test failed to take into consideration the rich variety of American culture and the complexity of literacy learning.

Structured abstracts contain more information, are of higher quality, and are easier to search and read than are traditional abstracts. However, there is a bewildering variety of ways in which structured abstracts can be printed and little is known about how the typography of structured abstracts can affect their clarity. The aim of this article is to delineate some of these major typographic variables and to comment on their effects upon the layouts of structured abstracts.

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The article describes how the role of an information architect increased in value and how that increased value changed the job description. It goes on to examine how blending knowledge occurs through shifts in terminology, imitation of another field, and selling new concepts.

I value Gypsy Academics and the compassionate way in which Schell combines a feminist and materialist analysis of the historical and economic conditions that have led to the exploitation of adjunct faculty, the majority of whom are women. - College EnglishFully two-thirds of all part-time teachers in English studies are women, many with no permanent faculty standing, no benefits, no job security, and little or no chance for promotion. How does the feminization of writing programs affect the newly formed discipline of rhetoric and composition? Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers illuminates the complex gendered ideologies that surround writing instruction--drawing on feminist theories of women's work, Marxist theories of class and labor, sociological and economic studies of part-time academic employment, and personal interviews with part-time women writing faculty. Eileen Schell contends that part-time faculty members' interests and contributions have been underrepresented in our research narratives and professional histories in rhetoric and composition. Her book attempts to revalue practitioner knowledge and to reclaim the voices and perspectives of part-time women writing instructors as a vital part of the history and growth of rhetoric and composition as a discipline. Both a theoretical and practical study, Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers not only theorizes the structures of gender and labor in writing programs; it also offers administrators, theorists, and practitioners ideas for improving the working conditions and professional status of part-time writing instructors.

Techniques for observing selection and reading behavior in professional documents, such as the thinking-aloud and the click-and-read methods, may affect the reading process to be observed. Such so-called reactivity problems complicate the use of these instruments in experimental research and usability testing. If their influence is unknown, any experimental results obtained with these instruments may be caused by the testing method. One way to detect reactivity effects is to compare different instruments in a series of experimental studies. In this initial study, we compared the thinking-aloud method, the click-and-read method, a combination of these two methods and a silent reading condition. Subjects read and judged a 53-page policy document in one of these conditions. We investigated whether or not different observation instruments caused specific differences in information selection, judgment and knowledge. Thinking aloud did not cause any differences in the selection of information. Both the thinking-aloud method and the click-and-read method affected the judgment task outcome. Thinking aloud led to many positive and few negative judgments, whereas silent reading led to many negative and few positive judgments. The results for the click-and-read method showed a tendency toward the same effect. Neither method affected the knowledge test results.

Uses a qualitative methodology to examine how discourse norms and socialization processes affect the development of technical requirements. Our exploratory investigation of how government personnel develop and review technical requirements indicates that discourse norms and academic technical writing socialization processes affect the technical writing process. Technical writers perceived that requirements in work statements became less precise as more requirements were coordinated in team-based designs. In essence, we found that, in team-based designs, interpretation conflict and technical diffusion were important dimensions when writing and coordinating technical requirements. Our findings suggest that collaborative technical writing is a complex and difficult process in team-based designs where integration and persuasion skills dominate.

A s a field of professional inquiry intertwined with the practice and teaching of its own subject, composition studies has enjoyed the steady pace of its own recent evolution.Few composition scholars twenty years ago would have imagined the rate at which the field is now developing, exploding beyond its boundaries, creating new alliances, and locating new sites for inquiry and knowledge production.These current transformations owe in part to the inevitable burgeoning of a theoretically interdisciplinary field with a strong orientation toward self-reflection.They also owe to unprecedented changes underway in higher education, changes pressured by shifts in the politics and economics of university administration, the advent of new technologies, population changes that affect student demographics, and the creation of alternative structures and contexts for teaching and learning.Composition, in seeking a disciplinary identity, is questioning the ways it creates and mediates knowledge and the ways in which that knowledge informs and is informed by various contexts for research and practice.This collection focuses on the ways in which composition reconsiders established dichotomies, examines new connections among areas of inquiry, and suggests avenues for inquiry that have transformative consequences for the sites of theory, research, and teaching.When we first proposed this volume of essays, we sought submissions that reconsidered the relationship among theory, research and practice, expecting that our focus would primarily be on the changing face of composition research.Our open call and invitation to individual scholars, however, resulted in very few reports of research studies, but rather in contributions that reflect the extent to which the theory/research/practice relationship now occupies our disciplinary thinking.Since the publication of Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987), the past decade has seen attention to research methodology largely displaced by conflict between theory and practice.This conflict, still rooted, one might argue, in the desire for a unified theory, often centers on the extent to which any theory employed by compositionists must grow, if not from research, then from practice, or at least edgment of "what is contradictory, and perhaps unknowable" (9).Many of the authors in this volume (Rose and Lauer; Chiang; Grimm, et al.; Okawa) build into their essays acknowledgement of their positions as scholars and researchers and examine their "findings" as cultural and ideological products.At that same time, some of them are quick to point out the limits and consequences of new theories and methodologies for composition as a disciplinary community (Seitz; MacDonald; Neff; Ray and Barton).Increasingly, compositionists have more confidence in the recognition that teaching makes knowledge, and that practice, overdetermined as it is, continually calls into question the traditional purpose of theory-to explain unaccounted-for phenomena and solve new problems.Lore, as North distinguishes it from traditional disciplinary knowledge production, can, Harkin argues, be thought of as postdisciplinary theory, because it allows for practitioners' often contradictory attempts to solve writing problems with more than one cause, rather than using theory in the traditional way to contain situations (134).Beth Daniell has argued that while composition theories may lack the authority to dictate pedagogy, as rhetoric, they are what persuade us to teach writing in the ways that we do (130).At the same time that theories may contain the discipline by "serving the interests of . . .groups within that discipline" (131), they are what enable us, she says, to "create a community in which we can figure out what we, individually and collectively, believe about our work" (135).In that rhetorical and political sense, theory is practice.But, as several of the authors in this volume (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) ask, whose "work" and whose interests define us and remain at the center of composition as a discipline?Can theory, research, and practice in ever new relationships intersect and hold an expanding community together or drive it apart into separate communities whose power and authority may be in jeopardy?Composition's calling into question its knowledge comes at a time when the authority of that expert knowledge may be at risk.In the wake of shrinking graduate programs and the responsibility-centered-management of academic departments in the new corporate universities, the literature components of some English departments are beginning to reclaim an expertise in the teaching of writing or, in some instances, to efface that expertise, deeming it no longer necessary, politically appropriate, or cost-effective.Much composition scholarship in fact contributes to this withering away of the more public conception of composition.Our growing understanding of complex context-specific literacy practices runs counter to institutional conditions that assume composition is an essential set of transparent skills to be conveyed one-time-only to first year students by exploited instructors.If retooled writing courses do result from the disciplinary boundary crossing of compositionists into deconstruction, feminist, multicultural, and cultural studies, what in the experiences of teachers and students justifies or interrogates these theories in practice?How does interdisciplinary inquiry expand avenues and change how and what we research and teach?What locates theorists, courses, teachers, and programs that might grow from this research within "composition"?Several of the authors in this volume locate their concerns about composition's "identity crisis" in a disjuncture between theory and pedagogy, whether questioning composition's attempts to achieve more disciplinary status (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) or its failure to focus more attention on knowledgebuilding inside the field (MacDonald; Neff).

This article summarizes the scholarly discussion about negative messages and reports the results of two pretests and two experiments using negative letters. The results show that buffers did not significantly affect college students' responses to simulated letters refusing credit and denying admission to graduate school and that strong resale was counterproductive. Students responded least favorably to rejection when they were surprised by it and when their other options were limited. On the basis of these experiments and the published literature, the author recommends that negative letters normally begin with the reason for the refusal. If the reason makes the company look good, then it should be spelled out in as much detail as possible. If an alternative or a compromise exists, then the writer should suggest it. Although a positive ending is not necessary, if one is used, then a bland positive is better than a strong one, especially in letters to clients or customers.

Abstract Educational institutions are employing a variety of processes to support Web‐based courses. In our efforts to help faculty mount such courses, we found it helpful to divide course material into knowledge‐based versus skill‐based elements, and to develop activities that capitalize on the unique environment of the Web. In this article, we discuss our successes and failures, and cover some legal issues we discovered that affect how we use both preexisting and student‐produced materials.

In this article we explore how some contemporary language usage presents challenges for technical editing. Drawing on scholarship in the rhetoric of science and in critical linguistics, we argue that language does affect our perception of reality. Consequently, the language used in some technical documents needs to be reconsidered or even challenged by technical editors. Present textbooks on technical editing do not directly confront this issue, though some scholars have begun to challenge the use of terms such as “studgun.”; We conclude by demonstrating how a critical analysis of metaphors in everyday technical documents would help students question these language choices and draw attention to the consequences of using them.

We have here four books, a sort of mini-groundswell, dealing in different ways with “affective issues” in composition, to use McLeod’s relatively focused term, or with “the domain beyond the cognitive,” to use the more expansive phrasing of Brand and Graves. (Fulkerson 101).

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.

Commentary: When this essay first appeared more than 10 years ago, it built on a small but substantial body of scholarship that declared scientific writing an appropriate field for rhetorical analysis. In the last 10 years, studies of scientific writing for both expert and lay audiences have increased exponentially, drawing on the long-established disciplines of the history and philosophy of science. These newer studies, however, differ widely in approach. Many take the perspective of cultural critique (e.g., the work of Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar), whereas others use the tools of discourse analysis (e.g., Greg Myers, M.A.K. Halliday, and J. R. Martin). But, application of rhetorical theory also thrives in the work of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, Charles Bazerman, Jean Dietz Moss, Lawrence J. Prelli, Carolyn Miller, and many others. Randy Allen Harris offers a useful introduction to this field in Landmark Essays on Rhetoric in Science (1997). “Accommodating Science” applies ideas from classical rhetoric and techniques of close reading typical of discourse analysis to the question of what happens when scientific reports travel from expert to lay publications. This change in forum causes a shift in genre from forensic to celebratory and a shift in stasis from fact and cause to evaluation and action. These changes in genre, audience, and purpose inevitably affect the material and manner of re-presentation in predictable ways. Two concerns informed this study 10 years ago: the impact of science reporting on public deliberation and the nature of technical and professional writing courses. These concerns have, if anything, increased (e.g., the campaign on global warming), warranting continued scholarly investigation of the gap between the public's right to know and the public's ability to understand.

To understand how context affects language use, students can analyze the relationship between the power dynamics in an organization and the linguistic politeness strategies in memos written to subordinates. Although this assignment offers a viable approach to understanding how power influences language, students should recognize that multiple variables can affect actual language use. They can also scrutinize the responsibility they implicitly assume when they perpetuate—or perhaps attempt to change—an organization's communication style.

The authors define international editing as editing documents for a multilingual readership or multinational distribution. They argue that international editing embodies and represents corporate global strategies, which directly affect editing choices. They describe three global strategies-ethnocentric, polycentric, or geocentric-and four categories of editing-linguistic, socio-cultural, political, and technical-on which editors can focus to produce business and technical documents that consistently align with corporate global strategies.

The relation between writing in formal schooling and writing in other social practices is a central problem in writing research (e.g., critical pedagogy, writing in nonacademic settings, cognition in variable social contexts). How do macro-level social and political structures (forces) affect micro-level literate actions in classrooms and vice versa? To address these questions, the author synthesizes Yrjö Engeström's systems version of Vygotskian cultural-historical activity theory with Charles Bazerman's theory of genre systems. The author suggests that this synthesis extends Bakhtinian dialogic theory by providing a broader unit of analysis than text-as-discourse, wider levels of analysis than the dyad, and an expanded theory of dialectic. By tracing the intertextual relations among disciplinary and educational genre systems, through the boundary of classroom genre systems, one can construct a model of ways classroom writing is linked to writing in wider social practices and rethink such issues as agency, task representation, and assessment.

Abstract: Contemporary scholars have focused on two concepts in Vico's tkinking: the imaginative universal and the sensus communis. For Vico these concepts emerge from the human race's first experience of religion. For over a century Vico scholarship has been divided over how to view this experience. This division falls along Aristotelian lines: that is, the primitive religious experience can be seen either as poetic—God and religion are made by the human imagination—or it can be viewed as rhetorical—God and religion are discovered. Vico derives his idea of natural law from the concepts of the imaginative imiversal and the sensus communis, and their relation to religion will affect decisively the status of Vico's theory of natural law. As a matter of fact, Vico's thinking on this issue is better understood, first, within the context of Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Body, and second, in the context of the Baroque rather than in the context of Aristotelian categories of religion and poetic. Viewed within these contexts, the origin of religion is a theophany that is neither made nor discovered but witnessed, and the development of natural law is an historical process only understood in retrospect. Vico thus differs radically from other Enlightenment thinkers, especially Hume, in his account of primitive religion and provides a basis for natural law that is neither superstitious nor rationalistic, but religious.

Historically, the Bible has occupied a prominent—though sometimes disruptive—position in American education. The 1963 Bible study benchmark case, Abington v. Schempp (1963), ruled that the Bible is worthy of study, and that such study is constitutional. Both religious and educational organizations support a literary study of the Bible in public schools because it is great literature and because it is foundational for understanding Western culture. The purpose of this study was to determine the current, actual place of Bible literature in high school English classes and the reasons that affect its place. The study used quantitative and qualitative methods: survey, interviews, and observations. It included observations of three models of teaching Biblical literature: a) a full-year elective course, b) a required grade unit, and c) a Bible unit in a humanities course. The study found that Bible literature seems to play an extremely small role in high school literature programs. While 81% of high school English teachers reported it was important to teach some Bible literature, only 10% taught a Bible unit or course. High school textbooks average one fourth of one percent (.260%) from the Bible. Though 55% of college English instructors personally recommended that secondary English majors take a Biblical literature course, only 38% had done so. The wide gap between recommended study and actual study of the Bible is filled with misinformation, contradictory attitudes, and confusion. Two problems of teaching Bible literature are: dealing with religious beliefs and non-beliefs of teachers, parents, and students; and overcoming ignorance. Some college professors, administrators, English department chairs, and librarians did not know what Bible literature was taught in their schools or that teaching Bible literature was legal.

Contemporary scholars have focused on two concepts in Vico’s thinking: the imaginative universal and the sensus communis. For Vico these concepts emerge from the human race’s first experience of religion. For over a century Vico scholarship has been divided over how to view this experience. This division falls along Aristotelian lines: that is, the primitive religious experience can be seen either as poetic—God and religion are made by the human imagination—or it can be viewed as rhetorical—God and religion are discovered. Vico derives his idea of natural law from the concepts of the imaginative universal and the sensus communis, and their relation to religion will affect decisively the status of Vico’s theory of natural law. As a matter of fact, Vico’s thinking on this issue is better understood, first, within the context of Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Body, and second, in the context of the Baroque rather than in the context of Aristotelian categories of religion and poetic. Viewed within these contexts, the origin of religion is a theophany that is neither made nor discovered but witnessed, and the development of natural law is an historical process only understood in retrospect. Vico thus differs radically from other Enlightenment thinkers, especially Hume, in his account of primitive religion and provides a basis for natural law that is neither superstitious nor rationalistic, but religious.

With this collection of essays, the concept of writing program administration as a significant expression of scholarship comes of age. Featuring the insights of many prominent composition scholars and writing program administrators, this book has a dual message. First is that writing programs represent a different presence in the academy, one that can pose a critique to accepted practices and elicit institutional change. Second is that WPAs can creatively use this different and liminal status to help writing programs resituate themselves at the center, rather than at the margins, of their institutions. Divided into three sections, the book's first features essays on defining the differences between writing programs and other, more familiar academic units; the ethical dimension of writing program administration; technology's place in writing programs; and the critical role of two-year institutions. In the second section, four veteran WPAs suggest ways to build liaisons with other members of the campus community. The book's final section reflects on how writing program administrators can imagine their work both to make it possible to accomplish and to make its differences understandable and appreciated by those who judge WPAs. Resituating Writing is a resource that will help composition specialists locate their scholarship and teaching within broad political and intellectual frameworks. It provides persuasive evidence of the unique scope of the WPA's work for other administrators whose decisions affect writing programs. And it is particularly relevant for graduate students as they prepare for their own future responsibilities as teachers and administrators.

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

Recent studies identify gendered differences in communication and collaboration styles which suggest consequences for professional writing classrooms. If, indeed, men tend to stereotype women as clerks, prefer hierarchical collaboration, and value product over process, and, too, if gendered differences tend to increase counterproductive dissent, then the gender balance of writing groups might affect their dominant styles in those respects. However, when I analyzed the behaviors of over sixty student groups in my professional writing classes, I did not find gender balancing to have such effects. Instead, however, I observed other gender-related effects on collaboration: tendencies to stereotype men as technical experts and to self-segregate into gendered working teams. These findings suggest new perspectives on the role of gender for collaborative groups in professional writing classrooms.

This review of the relationship of law and art in the litigative context explores ways in which the methodologies of the novelist and other artists can be invoked by the lawyer in structuring and developing a case and presenting it to a court. To the litigators who transcend the form books and stereotypes and see their cases with a fresh eye, neither the law nor the facts are fixed in stone but rather created to meet the deepest realities of the case within the context of our most fundamental values and beliefs. Litigators, by the way they define and project the issues, can affect, even determine, what law and facts are legally relevant and dispositive. They must devise and write the story that threads the client's way out of the labyrinth. Mastery of the formal requirements of litigative writing is only a necessary first step. Freewriting; Hemingwayesque choice of words and syntax; harnessing the symbolic, often hidden, power of language; achieving the dramatic potential of case presentation—all these and more from the creative artist's repertoire empower litigators to win their cases. Resort is made not only to the applicable statutory, regulatory, and case law but also to the processes of the like of Cezanne, Conrad, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Joyce, Aristotle, and Faulkner.

Supra-textual design encompasses the global visual language of a document and operates in three modes: textual, spatial, and graphic. The rhetoric of supra-textual design includes structural functions that provide global organization and cohesion and stylistic functions that affect credibility, tone, emphasis, interest, and usability. Supra-textual rhetoric extends to other documents through conventional codes and through sets and series. Because writers may not control the end product of supra-textual design, intention may also be a rhetorical factor.

Many teachers of technical and business communication consult in business, industrial, and governmental organizations. To make the consulting experience successful and to understand the communication problems in an organization, the consultant should be aware of how the organization's culture may affect communication practices of members and should learn to read the various signs of organizational culture. Effective reading of cultural signs may be critical to the consultant's success or failure.

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Few, if any, studies on collaboration examine interactions between software manual writers and graphic designers. This study analyzes these collaborations, inquiring into the ways in which writers' and designers' processes of collaboration directly affect the form and substance of a finished manual. We argue that when these developers have dialogue, draft iteratively, and jointly make decisions, they produce manuals that could not possibly be developed through linear, assembly-line collaborative processes. We characterize three possible models of collaboration—assembly line (linear drafting), swap meet (iterative drafting and joint problem solving), and symphony (codevelopment in every aspect)—and use as a case study our own collaboration in developing a manual, detailing the concerns that writers and designers bring to a manual project. Analyzing our collaboration as an example of a swap-meet model, we examine four design problems that we faced and explain the ways in which our collaborative processes uniquely shaped our solutions to these problems.

Much of the talk about the information revolution so far is just that-talk. A provocative mix of promises, hopes and hyperbole, some of it will come true over time. Most of it will not. Technology is moving at ever-increasing speeds, and predictions about technology are accelerating even faster. Yet practical needs and wants rarely keep pace. The purpose of this paper is to explore the disparity between the promises and possibilities of the information revolution. It examines the factors that traditionally affect new technologies, and the role of end-users in affecting outcomes.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

MA students in professional writing and editing researched technical writing in specific workplace cultures. Their research is interpreted in light of recent theory on authorship as a cultural rather than individual phenomenon. Students' constructs for understanding their own writerly selves are discussed, as are constructs that emerged for the interpretations of selves and others in workplace cultures. Teaching technical authorship meant addressing such constructs, implicating issues of status, affect and effect, representation, and expertise.

Gary A. Olson presents six in-depth interviews with internationally prominent scholars outside of the discipline and twelve response essays written by noted rhetoric and composition scholars on subjects related to language, rhetoric, writing, philosophy, feminism, and literary criticism. The interviews are with philosopher of language Donald Davidson, literary critic and critical legal studies scholar Stanley Fish, cultural studies and African American studies scholar bell hooks, internationally renowned deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller, feminist literary critic Jane Tompkins, and British logician and philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin. Susan Wells and Reed Way Dasenbrock provide distinctly divergent assessments of the application of Donald Davidson s language theory to rhetoric and composition, and especially to writing pedagogy. Patricia Bizzell and John Trimbur explore how Stanley Fish s neopragmatism might be useful both to composition theory and to literacy education. And Joyce Irene Middleton and Tom Fox discuss bell hooks s notions of how race and gender affect pedagogy. In two frank and sometimes angry responses, Patricia Harkin and Jasper Neel take J. Hillis Miller to task for seeming to support rhetoric and composition while continuing to maintain the political status quo. Similarly, Susan C. Jarratt and Elizabeth A. Flynn express skepticism about Jane Tompkins s vocal support of composition and of radical pedagogy particularly. And Arabella Lyon and C. Jan Swearingen analyze Stephen Toulmin s thoughts on argumentation and postmodernism. Internationally respected anthropologist Clifford Geertz provides a foreword; literacy expert Patricia Bizzell contributes an introduction to the text; and noted reader-response critic David Bleich supplies critical commentary. This book is a follow-up to the editor s (Inter)views: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy, already a major work of scholarship in the field.

Recent advances in graphing software and output devices have given new tools to graphic artists and have enabled writers and technicians to compose graphs that rival those of professional artists. The products of both professionals and novices suggest, however, that the users of such software either intend to distort data and manipulate their readers or that they do so out of ignorance. This article describes and illustrates seven types of distortion in graphs, explains the mechanisms of distortion, and recommends methods for the avoidance of distortion. The seven types include manipulations of scale ratios, of the second dimension, of the third dimension, of color, of composition, of symbolism, and of affect.

Despite the media hype, it is not yet known if the new digital technologies of multimedia, interactive television, and the information superhighway will ever be accepted by the mainstream marketplace. If the information superhighway and interactive television are accepted, both benefits and dangers are inherent within the system. Depending upon who finances and controls the network and its contents, the system could be one of increased democracy and activism or one of government regulation or commercial self-interest and exploitation. The system could be one of active communicators or one of passive consumers. The information superhighway could unify the nation and eventually the world, or stratify people into the information rich versus the information poor. It is crucial for all people to learn about and understand the technology and understand how it could affect their lives.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Considers the social and political ideologies that affected the design of illustrations of the female body in English Renaissance medical manuals. Through a semiotic analysis, we examine medical illustrations explicitly tied to female bodies-anatomical illustrations of female genitalia, a clitorectomy and a hymenectomy-to show that the ways in which a body or surgical procedure was visually represented served to create the "other". We learn, by extension, how social and political ideologies affect the decision-making of modern-day technical communicators.

Workers at a Canadian industrial site read a vignette asking them to send a message to a co-worker and then rated their preferences for available message channels. We explored the respondents' preferences for either a word-processed or a handwritten message. The results indicate that (a) main effects and interactions involving hierarchical level, message length, message complexity, anticipated reaction, communication task, need for documentation, and communication across work shifts affect preferences for wordprocessed versus handwritten messages; (b) the cost control perspective can explain preferences for word-processed versus handwritten messages; and (c) scholars should distinguish between various types of written messages rather than grouping all written messages together in a single category.

This study examines the way side effects information is presented in patient information leaflets about drugs. In a field experiment, we tested the effects of two attempts to improve a side effects paragraph in a leaflet about a nonsteroid anti-inflammatory drug. First, a short introductory passage on the nature of side effects was added. Second and more importantly, we changed the frequency descriptors (FDs) for the side effects. A preliminary study had shown that the frequencies associated with common Dutch FDs are much higher than the writers of patient information leaflets and package inserts mean to convey. In our experiment we replaced the original FDs by lower-assessed FDs. For instance, soms (sometimes) was replaced by zelden (seldomly). Replacing FDs led to lower recall for the side effects mentioned in the leaflet. It also decreased the number of side effects experienced. Contrary to our expectations, lower FDs did not significantly increase the confidence in the safety and effectiveness of the drug, nor did they increase therapy compliance; incompliance was extremely rare in our sample of patients. Adding an introductory passage on the nature of side effects lowered FD interpretations. It did not significantly affect any of the other dependent variables.

Because technical communicators are expected increasingly to participate in environmental communication, technical communication practitioners, researchers, and teachers should be aware of current practices in public environmental debate and related reform movements. This essay uses a controversial case in which a Mohawk community clashes with the Environmental Protection Agency 1) to explore how alternative worldviews affect environmental remediation efforts; and 2) to serve as a template for the development of a feminist perspective on how communicative practices in environmental policy making should be reformed.