This article analyzes the statements on plain style made by Royal Society writers and seventeenth-century women writers. Using scholarship in feminist rhetorical theory, the article concludes that Royal Society plain stylists constructed scientific discourse as a masculine form of discourse by purging elements that were associated with femininity, such as emotional appeals. The article also discusses how women writers, particularly Margaret Cavendish, embraced a plain style more out of concern for their audience than out of a desire to eliminate undesirable feminine attributes. The implications of this historical study for understanding of current practice are noted.

This selection unpacks scientific prose and claim substantiation for Nobel Prize winner, Stan Prusiner, in the transmissible spongiform encephlopathies field (i.e., mad cow disease). Applying linguistic strategies such as M. A. K. Halliday's "favorite clause type," the author examines argumentative strategies in dense scientific prose both in bold and cautious rhetorical styles and invented lexical changes in new scientific development.

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School.” In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every grammatical form is a representation of reality and needs to be taught in relation to stylistic choices; otherwise, grammar instruction is pedantic and leads students to write in a deadening bookish style. Bakhtin describes and analyzes a lesson on the stylistic force of parataxic sentences. He asks students to identify the voice and psychological expression conveyed in examples from Pushkin and Gogol, so they may recover the liveliness in their expression that they had in their younger grades, but at a higher level of cultural development. He finds that after instruction, students use more parataxic sentences, increasing the liveliness of their writing.

Bakhtin claims that students must learn to write lively prose, but they will not until teachers have a grammar of style that links syntax to stylistic qualities such as “lively” and “creative.” It is, however, unlikely that such a grammar could be written, because particular rhetorical effects too often depend on context, perceived intention, and so on. Moreover, such a grammar will not be written until language describing a writer or a writer’s style can be translated into language describing a reader’s response. Even so, some stylistic effects can be linked to some syntactic structures, and parataxis is one of them. Bakhtin’s method of teaching—showing how the same content expressed in different ways can have contrasting rhetorical effects—is sound. Although he focuses on pedagogy, his own language suggests a larger aim: the replacement of bureaucratic language with the language of the people, perhaps even the liberalization of Soviet society.

In “Dialogic Origin,” Mikhail Bakhtin—as teacher-researcher and theorist—presents readers with a remarkable essay on teaching grammar and style to 7th-year students (roughly equivalent to 10thgraders in the U.S. educational system). In doing so, Bakhtin employs some of his most notable concepts (among them dialogism and “hero”)as informing and generative principles of writing pedagogy. Modern readers will find much to value as Bakhtin illustrates contextualized grammar instruction, defines grammar as an element of style, proposes innovative teaching methods, and advocates for theory-based pedagogy. Despite these significant similarities, the essay relies exclusively on stylistics, ignoring the demonstrable rhetorical effects of the stylistic choices illustrated in the pedagogy he outlines. In perhaps his most illuminating move, Bakhtin introduces his notion of hero directly into the language arts classroom, illustrating the concept as fundamental even to the grammar and style of language in everyday and academic (not simply literary) contexts.

This article examines the dialectical nature of Mikhail Bakhtin’s developmental understanding of language learning. In particular, the author discusses the pedagogically illuminating relationship between literary style and everyday style, especially as the latter emerges from and returns to lived life. Drawing parallels with other related oppositions, such as Vygotsky’s spontaneous and scientific concepts, as well as Bakhtin’s early antithesis of life and art, the author emphasizes Bakhtin’s interest in relational (dialogical) rather than formal understandings of grammar, style, and literature. The author concludes with three possible implications of Bakhtin’s pedagogical essay for writing teachers: (a) that we acknowledge the creative expression already present in the everyday speech of our students, (b) that we reconsider the specifically dialogical use of linguistic and literary models, and (c) that we attend to the performative aspect of style and the teaching of style.

The three authors writing on Bakhtin’s essay, “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar”—Farmer, Halasek, and Williams—respond to one another, and Bazerman provides a summative comment in the paragraphs that follow. The responses explore further some of Bakhtin’s thoughts concerning rhetoric and its relation to stylistics and his use of the concept of hero as a grammatical category. The discussion of Bakhtin leads to more general questions of the relation between spontaneous utterance and situationality and the implications for the possibility of a systematic grammar of style. Nonetheless, the commentators agree on Bakhtin’s explicit pedagogy and the interanimation of everyday speech with literary examples. The editor’s final comment notes a tension that informs all these responses, that is, between explicit teaching, on one hand, and avoiding formulaic writing, on the other. Bakhtin’s changing view of the relation of dialectics and dialogue is discussed as well.

For students to learn to write in a style that expresses their own identity, teachers have to ease up on the “rules”; and show students how good writing sometimes breaks the rules, most of which are only myths and lore that have developed with no linguistic basis.

One goal of college technical writing courses is to prepare students for real-world writing situations. Business writing textbooks function similarly, using guidelines, sample assignments, and model documents to help students develop rhetorical strategies to use in the workplace. Students attend class, or read and perform exercises in a textbook, with the faith that these skills will apply to workplace writing. In an attempt to better understand the similarities and differences between industry and academe's expectations of one genre of workplace writing, the memo, we compared the perceptions of memo quality by engineering faculty, students, and practitioners. All three groups responded to three sample memos taken from textbooks used by engineering professors in their undergraduate classrooms. The results indicate that students' and engineers' opinions of memo quality were more closely related to one another than to professors' comments, focusing on content, while professors were the most critical of style issues.

At the same time that compositionists have shown a renewed interest in public writing, neoliberal social and economic policies have dramatically shrunk the spaces in which most students’ voices can be heard. In this essay I argue that from twentiethcentury working-class struggles in the U.S. we and our students can acquire the tools necessary to work against this latest wave of economic privatization and concomitant suppression of public voice and rights. If we can resist the common academic assertion that we live today in a radically distinct postmodern, postindustrial society, we can return to capitalism’s long history for examples of the creative and persistent ways in which ordinary people have organized to claim living room.

This article examines two discursive events during a major reorganization at Health Canada in 2000: a new leader’s informal speech to senior managers and his first formal memo to staff. Seen through the dual lens of systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis, these events provide a perspective on the role of discourse in institutional settings. The events particularly illustrate the ways in which a leader’s discursive choices demonstrate conflicts between management styles: the command-and-control style of the old capitalism and that of the new capitalism, which defines the leader as a coach, mentor, facilitator, and motivator rather than as a commander. Unpacking leadership discourse can shed some light on how concealed messages contribute to the success or failure of discursive events, specifically at a time of organizational transformation when such discursive events are particularly important.

Preview this article: Review: Revisiting Racialized Voice: African American Ethos in Language and Literatures by David G. Holmes, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/56/2/collegecompositionandcommunication4048-1.gif

My article traces the development, chronicles the impact, and explains the essence of Herbert Spencer's “The Philosophy of Style” (1852). Spencer's essay has had a significant influence on stylistics, especially in scientific and technical communication. Although in our generation Spencer's contribution to stylistics is not widely remembered, it ought to be. His single essay on this subject was seminal to modern theories about effective communication, not because it introduced new knowledge but because it was such a rhetorically astute synthesis of stylistic lore, designed to connect traditional rhetorical theory with 19th-century ideas about science, technology, and evolution. It was also influential because it was part of Spencer's grand “synthetic philosophy,” a prodigious body of books and essays that made him one of the most prominent thinkers of his time. Spencer's “Philosophy of Style” carried the day, and many following decades, with its description of the human mind as a symbol-processing machine, with its description of cognitive and affective dimensions of communication, and with its scientifically considered distillation of the fundamental components of effective style. We should read Spencer's essay and understand its impact not so much because we expect it to teach us new things about good style, but precisely because: 1) it's at the root of some very important concepts now familiar to us; 2) it synthesizes these concepts so impressively; 3) we can use it heuristically as we continue thinking about style; and 4) it provides a compact, accessible touchstone for exploring—with students, clients, and colleagues—the techniques of effective style for scientific and technical communication.

Although discussion of composition research methods over the last 10 years has culminated in Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) guidelines, these guidelines do not include procedures for verifying qualitative data. Such procedures would entail having a third party check to some degree that the researcher spent the time claimed at the site and that the subjects did what was described and said what was quoted in the published research. This commentary reviews federal policies on research misconduct and government and professional association responses to data faking, noting the additional danger of incompetent investigations of research misconduct. Arguing that the discipline should take appropriate measures to verify qualitative data, I recommend a two-tiered approach.

While most students of style justifiably cite Abraham Lincoln's reading as the major influence on his speaking and writing, five other important influences have been largely ignored. Little attention has also been paid to a study of his composing habits that will help scholars understand just how Lincoln went about the process of putting prose on paper.

This article investigates one aspect of scientific style in French: the use of tenses. It investigates the claims made in the literature that the verb system of scientific French is a temporal. The frequency of tensed finite forms in 10 French language journal articles on biological sciences is examined. The rhetorical function of past and future tenses is examined and six functions of tense choice are isolated. This analysis suggests that tense marking is actually more complex than previous claims have maintained and that tense choice serves to encode (a) temporal, (b) rhetorical, and (c) structural processes in the scientific text. Tense choice is therefore part of the communicative repertoire of the scientific writer, which writers use to create and communicate information, and which is responsive to the rhetorical demands of communicating about science.

Four members of a community college English faculty respond to the question of the appropriateness of advanced graduate training for a community college teaching career

The author stretches the bounds of what we might think can and can’t be done in Pidgin, both by statement and by example: “Lotta times I get back all kine disorganized papahs dat grammatically no even make sense. But wen I tell da students dat […] I like dem write for fun, I walk around da room and I see lotta da kids stay writing in Pidgin like das da voice dat comes most natural to dem. And I’m looking over their shoulders and I’m all like WOW, dey get ideas. Stay organize. And can understand too.”

The author challenges the rhetoric of “inclusion” of the voices of people of color, with its implicit reiteration of a hierarchy of center and margin, to suggest instead the more powerful possibilities offered by alliance. The example of Susan La Flesche Picotte, an enrolled member of the Omaha Nation with mixed ancestry and an unconflicted identity, who was able to ally herself with and participate fully in both European American and Indian cultures, illustrates this complex and productive rhetorical approach and its possibilities for what the author terms “survivance.”

This article describes how readers from a graduate program in anthropology evaluated student writing in a general education course. Readers voiced the concerns of their discipline when they focused on the stance writers assumed and how they made value judgments.

Drawing on data gathered during a fourteen-month study of reading practices among poor and working-class girls, this essay explores the challenges of creating a responsive and critical reading pedagogy across boundaries of class. Set largely in a summer and after-school reading program for pre-teen girls, the study addressed the question of how a pedagogy centered around literature might accord the possibility for girls to read, speak, and value in more than one class-specific voice. The complexities of creating such a critical reading project are explored through narratives that chronicle the interplay of the material, the psychological, and the discursive in girls’ textual preferences and literary responses. Assuming the dual voice of teacher and ethnographer, the author argues for a new poetics of inquiry that can convey the nuanced complexities of reading, voice, and psychological experience among girls growing up in working-poor America.

Last spring our profession lost one of its leading voices—Stephen P. Witte, Knight Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Kent State University. Here, a few of his close friends and colleagues remember Steve and his many contributions to our field.

This article interprets technical communication research about sex differences according to social role theory, which argues that sex differences are enculturated through experiences associated with social positions in the family and the workplace. It reevaluates technical communication research about sex differences in communicative and collaborative styles in the classroom and the workplace and about the effects of the double bind that women experience in the workplace. The article concludes with a recommendation that theoretical frameworks explaining sex differences remain flexible and able to account for social change.

This article provides a cultural-historical analysis of dictation as a composing method in Western history. Drawing on Ong’s concept of secondary orality, the analysis shows how dictation’s shifting role as a form of literacy has been influenced by the dual mediation of technological tools and existing cultural practices. At the dawn of modernism, a series of technological, economic, and philosophical factors converged to promote silent forms of individual authorship over collaborative modes of dictation favored in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Similar changes are taking place today and may help reverse the dominance of silent authorship. If voice-recognition technologies continue to improve in the future, they may help professional communicators bridge the spoken and textual realms and effect changes in our attitudes toward authorship and orality.

Review Article| April 01 2004 Letting Our Students' Voices “Out at Last” Jane Greer Jane Greer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2004) 4 (2): 331–336. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-2-331 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jane Greer; Letting Our Students' Voices “Out at Last”. Pedagogy 1 April 2004; 4 (2): 331–336. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-2-331 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. © 2004 Duke University Press2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Roundtable: The Pedagogical Wallpaper: Teaching Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” You do not currently have access to this content.

Contrary to literary historians, humanist influences did not produce modern English prose style. Instead, technical or utilitarian discourse is inextricable from the development of modern English prose style. Modern English resulted from written text shaped by five factors: (a) brevity induced from accounting/administrative format; (b) aural/oral-based text, written to be heard and seen, that produced conversational style; (c) persistence of indigenous subject-verb-object syntax found in the earliest English documents; (d) a growing Renaissance book market of literate middle-class readers responding to speech-based prose; and (e) English scriptural renditions of the late Renaissance that associated colloquial speech with Protestantism. Of all writing produced before 1700, only a small amount was humanistic; the bulk was utilitarian. The Royal Society’s demand for “plain English” prevailed because the call for precise language by these early scientists reflected the indigenous nature of a plain English that had surfaced as early as 900.

English departments are increasingly under pressure to offer writing courses online, but research that informs effective pedagogies—including effective ways to respond to students’ drafts—is still limited.

This article suggests ways of writing a truly effective cover letter, an extremely important document in the search for a job. First, features gleaned from 13 model letters in technical writing textbooks yield figures on the number of words, sentences, and paragraphs per letter, plus the average number of words per sentence and paragraph, information helpful to those with little or no knowledge of how to write a strong cover letter. Second, the article surveys what the textbook writers offer as advice about the rhetorical principles that should be employed in composing cover letters. One piece of advice given by almost all of the experts is that writers should try to exude an energetic attitude, yet these same authorities do not delineate just how to display such a posture in the letters themselves. Third, examination of the letters reveals that one way that experts insert verve into cover letters is to use verbals, particularly gerunds, participles, and infinitives. In fact, 92.58% of the sentences in the 13 model letters have some type of verbal in them. The advantage of employing verbals is that while they are used for other parts of speech, they still retain the residue of action in their meaning. Fourth, the article describes the results of a survey to determine the acceptance of such constructions in the minds of two sets of readers: first-year writing students and third-year technical writing students. In both groups, more than 75% of the students preferred a paragraph with verbals in it over a paragraph devoid of verbals. Finally, the article suggests “sentence combining” as a procedure for teaching technical writing students how to combine basic sentences into verbals to garner variety and economy, one of the hallmarks of technical writing.

Is there a difference in the dominant leadership style between technical and non-technical superiors? Which leadership style of superiors will give their subordinates more freedom on the job? By using House's Path-Goal Model [1] in a study involving a survey of subordinates of 100 technical and 100 non-technical companies in Singapore, I found that technical superiors tend to adopt a supportive leadership style, while non-technical superiors adopt a more achievement-oriented one. This manifests in significant differences between the two kinds of superiors in the extent of the leader's position power (formal authority), the degree of autonomy subordinates want, and the extent subordinates control their goal achievements.

In 1996, New York University professor of physics Alan Sokal wrote a parody of an academic article he titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” This parody escaped detection by the editors and was published in the journal Social Text. Sokal outed his own hoax in the academic magazine Lingua Franca, after which prolonged discussion about the hoax took place in both academic and popular venues. This article explores the rhetorical dimensions of Sokal’s hoax, defining the hoax as a rhetorical genre, relating the Sokal hoax to some 19th-century American scientific hoaxes, explaining why this hoax inspired such intense reactions, and identifying some of the stylistic and the generic exaggerations. The impassioned discussion of this hoax may be explained by the dynamics of its rhetorical context, which drew in Social Text ’s editors as it flattered their professional vanity and revived the debate over the culture wars. But the textual dynamics of Sokal’s hoax have been largely ignored, even though closer attention to genre, style, and argument might have prevented the hoax. Rhetorical understanding thus requires attention to both texts and contexts.

This essay examines the pedagogical practices of the poet, civil rights activist, andteacher Melvin B. Tolson who taught at Wiley College from 1923 to 1947. Tolson’s complex classroom style, which mixed elements of classical, African American, and current-traditional rhetoric, produced a pedagogy that was at once conservative, progressive, and radical, inspiring his students to academic achievement and social action. Tolson demonstrates that it is possible to instruct students in the norms of the academy without sacrificing their home voices or identities.

An earlier version of this article was delivered as the Chair’s Address at the Opening General Session of the CCCC convention in New York, March 2003. I review the current mission and position statements of the organization by calling attention to the ways in which our current social and political climate challenges our ability to meet our goals and support our positions. I weave into my text the “voices” of historical black women who called for response in their own time and even in ours.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, people began filing into a community movie theater in Oakland, California known for its alternative films and sofa seating. They had gathered to watch the digital stories created by young people from the community—three-to-five minute multi-media compositions consisting of a narrative recorded in the author’s voice accompanied by photographs, video, and music. The event began with a story by Randy, “Lyfe-n-Rhyme.” “Mama’s only son is mama’s only gun with a guillotine tongue,” rang one rhythmic powerful line, as images of Randy and his mother morphed into photographs of the county jail, while the music of Miles Davis floated in the background. So proceeded Randy’s social critique and commentary on life and opportunity, or the lack thereof, in his city and country.

Review Article| October 01 2003 Theory without Method, Criticism without Voice Marshall Brown Marshall Brown Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (3): 451–457. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-3-451 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Marshall Brown; Theory without Method, Criticism without Voice. Pedagogy 1 October 2003; 3 (3): 451–457. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-3-451 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search 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: Roundtable: : The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism You do not currently have access to this content.

Helping one to imagine himself or herself a writer is much more complex than nurturing a more stable grasp of sentence clarity or spelling. Rather, it involves the ability to nurture the personal introspection and cultural scrutiny that makes writing a source for reflection and transformation.

Intercultural rhetoric, like the project of empowerment, is the site of competing agendas for not only how to talk across difference but to what end. The practice of community- based intercultural inquiry proposed here goes beyond a willingness to embrace conflicting voices to an active search for the silent resources of situated knowledge in an effort to build a collaboratively transformed understanding.

Background: Previous research suggests that there are advantages to writing in groups or in pairs compared with writing individually, and that men write differently from women. However, as far as we know, no one has yet used new technology to assess published academic articles written in these different modes. Method: We assembled 80 papers from recent issues of the Journal of Educational Psychology as follows: 21 authored by individual men, 21 by individual women, 19 by pairs of men, and 19 by pairs of women. We then used two computer-based measures to assess various textual features of the Abstracts, the Introductions, and the Discussion sections of these 80 papers. Results: Several differences were found between these various parts of the journal articles (e.g., the Discussions were more readable than the Introductions and these in turn were more readable than the Abstracts). However, there were few differences between the writing of pairs or individuals, or between that of men and women. Conclusions: There was no real evidence to support the notion that writing in pairs would lead to better quality articles or that there would be differences between the readability of papers produced by men and women. Such differences may occur, however, before peer review.

Scientific and technical jargon—specialized vocabulary, usually Latinate—plays a vital role in scientific and technical communication. But its proper use continues to be a point of discussion because of our concern with audience adaptation, rhetorical exigence, rhetorical purpose, and ethics. We've focused on teaching students—and on convincing scientists, engineers, and other writers/speakers—to gear their specialized language to the recipients of their communication, to the occasion calling for their communication, to what they wish to accomplish through their communication, and to the ethical goals of safety, helpfulness, empowerment, and truth. These are exactly the sorts of things we should be doing. My contribution to this conversation is a reinforce ment and, I hope, an extension of the argument that we should also be teaching and convincing students and professionals: 1) to fully appreciate what makes jargon either good or bad; 2) to carefully distinguish jargon usage from other aspects of scientific and technical style; and 3) to recognize that in every context, even in communication among experts, jargon should be used judiciously—that is, in the most helpful, least taxing way.

This article echoes Robert J. Connors’s call for a reexamination of sentence pedagogies in composition teaching and offers an explanation of the unsolved mystery of why sentence combining improves student writing, using insights provided by work in contemporary research in linguistics and in language processing. Based the same insights, I argue that we invite words and phrases, the true members of sentences, to important positions in writing classes and describe practical methods for doing so.

This article represents stories of eight former composition students, Appalachian working class women, who move from silence in the academy to voice in their communities to a more self–confident identity without destroying the community from which they came. The author argues that compositionists need to consider the two–edged nature of literacy; how literacy serves first generation, nontraditional learners; the intergenerational effects of literacy; the importance of expressivist writing as a transition into academic literacy; and the importance of region and class in multicultural conversations.

One of the signatures of scientific writing is its ability to present the claims of science as if they were “untouched by human hands.” In the early years of experimental education, researchers achieved this by adopting a citational practice that led to the sedimentation of their cardinal method, the analysis of variance, and their standard for statistical significance, 0.05. This essentially divorces their statistical framework from its historical conditions of production. Researchers suppressed their own agency through the use of passive voice and nominalization. With their own agency out of the way, they imbued the methods, results, and presentational devices themselves with the active agency of the situation through the use of personification. Such a depiction creates the impression that the researchers and audience stand on equal epistemic ground as interested witnesses to the autonomous activity of a third party, the method, which churns out the brute facts of science.

This article describes the authors’ progress in establishing the validity and reliability of the Listening Styles Inventory (LSI) following their initial report in an earlier study (Barker, Pearce, and Johnson). The LSI provides managers with a self-administered tool for determining their own perceived listening effectiveness. The authors examined the data provided by 359 respondents in diverse managerial groups using factor analysis, Cronbach’s alpha, Spearman’s rank order coefficient, structured interviews, expert observation, the Statistical Analysis System General Linear Model (GLM) procedure (analysis of variance), and a Tukey Student Range (honestly significant difference or HSD) test. The results yielded further evidence of the validity and reliability of the LSI as a self-administered diagnostic listening tool. The authors conclude that the LSI in its present form can serve as a guide for assessing a manager’s perceived listening effectiveness, but further research is needed to refine the instrument and to test other managerial groups.

This study explores the connection between writing and working memory, specifically the role of the subvocal articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice). The authors asked the 18 participants to type sentences describing 24 multipanel cartoons. In some conditions, the participants were required to repeat a syllable continuously while writing. This activity, called articulatory suppression, interferes with the articulatory rehearsal process. Results indicated that interfering with the articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice) interferes with writing by slowing the rate of writing, increasing mechanical errors, changing the temporal microstructure of text production, and increasing the perceived difficulty of the writing task. The authors applied their model of written text production to provide a theoretical account for these results.

Describes how the author’s habit of fabrications and stories as a 10-year-old became a source for writing fiction. Notes how he pursued journalism as a profession, but was frustrated by its limitations. Considers how as a professional field, composition continues to contemplate and struggle with issues of power and representation in research and writing. Addresses the issues of power and representation and the ethical concerns that such issues entail.

We regularly chastise students for placing quotation marks around words that are not direct quotations. Yet, as this research shows, professionals use nonstandard quotations routinely and to rhetorical advantage. After analyzing the various purposes nonstandard quotations serve, I argue student use of the marks jars us not because it departs from good practice but because, through them, students invoke voices we do not want to recognize.

Argues that the conflicts and contradictions of community outreach (such as service learning) call for an intercultural inquiry that not only seeks more diverse rival readings, but constructs multivoiced negotiated meanings in practice. Presents a case study in which students use the practice of intercultural inquiry to go beyond a contact zone into confronting contradictions, inviting rivals, and constructing and negotiating meaning through the eyes of difference.