Citation practices have been and continue to be a concentrated area of research activity among writing researchers, spanning many disciplines. This research presents a re-analysis of a common data set contributed by Karatsolis (this issue), which focused on the citation practices of 8 PhD advisors and 8 PhD advisees across four disciplines. Our purpose in this paper is to show what automated dictionary methods can uncover on the same data based on a text analysis and visualization environment we have been developing over many years. The results of our analysis suggest that, although automatic dictionary methods cannot reproduce the fine granularity of interpretative coding schemes designed for human coders, it can find significant non-adjacent patterns distributed across a text or corpus that will likely elude the analyst relying solely on serial reading. We report on the discovery of several of these patterns that we believe complement Karatsolis’ original analysis and extend the citation literature at large. We conclude the paper by reviewing some of the advantages and limits of dictionary approaches to textual analysis, as well as debunking some common misconceptions against them.

Corpus studies are revolutionizing the study of language practice, including professional communication, by substituting actual examples of practice for prescriptive intuition. Corpora are often put together by researchers who exert much care in what goes into a corpus. Yet professional communicators also experience corpora as commodities in the marketplace, bundles of "writing models" for sale that cross genres of professional and personal communication. When writers purchase these bundles, what are the latent rhetorical strategies they are purchasing? A corpus study of 728 canned letters across 15 genres taken from a best-selling trade book was undertaken. The texts were tagged for rhetorical features and factor analyzed for latent rhetorical dimensions of proficiency. The study concludes that the latent rhetorical proficiencies brought into evidence are heavily weighted on skills of collecting or raising money. While this study requires replication over a wider sample, it illustrates how corpus approaches can help us rigorously retrieve latent rhetorical skills across a collection of rhetorically diverse texts. It further helps us see how corpus studies allow one to maintain close ties between the avowed standards of communication practice and the close description of the practices themselves