Most of the literature on the assignment traditionally called the research paper focusses on first-year students, and often centers on what they don’t know or can’t do. This article seeks to expand the conversation to one about the skills and knowledge displayed by senior students, and about their perceptions of the universe of academic research and their place in it. It does so by means of a qualitative study of 13 senior students at the University of Calgary. Through interviews, I probe their understanding of their own research processes, how they think they learned to do what they do, and, most important, their understanding of what it means to conduct academic research.

This article reviews the deeply conflicted literature on learning transfer, especially as it applies to rhetorical knowledge and skill. It then describes a study in which six students are followed through their first co-op work term to learn about which resources they draw on as they enter a new environment of professional writing. It suggests that although students engage in little one-to-one transfer of learning, they draw on a wide range of internalized rhetorical strategies learned from across their academic experience.

This article traces the uncomfortable relationship between writing studies and the concept of learning transfer. First it reviews three stages in the changing attitudes toward learning transfer in writing theory that is influenced by rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and situated learning. Then it reviews learning transfer theory itself, an area that is seldom explicitly referred to in writing studies. The article concludes with a synthesis that brings transfer theory to bear on writing studies, suggesting directions for developing research and pedagogical practices related to business and technical communication.

Academically oriented first-year seminars can be good venues for teaching many of the concepts important to WAC programs, including extended engagement with a research topic and situated writing. A qualitative study of a first-year seminar program at the University of Calgary highlights faculty members’ and students’ responses.

In short, we explore here the general question of why we might want to turn the people we study into audiences for our work, and then the more particular questions of how we might do so usefully and without adopting the colonial, self-righteous attitude evoked by our title. (Segal, et. al 73).

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It has been twenty years since Richard Young, Alton Becker and Kenneth Pike brought out their challenging and revolutionary book, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. Though cast in the mold of a rhetorical handbook, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (like many of the best rhetorical handbooks, including Aristotle's Rhetoric) attempted to do more than relay the accumulated rhetorical wisdom of its age in a predigested form suitable for students. It was an attempt to synthesize a complete rhetorical system, a system that in some ways built on and in some ways departed from the classical model. Arguing that Profound changes are taking place in the system of Western values that has for centuries guided conduct (8), Young, Becker and Pike wanted to rethink rhetoric from its foundations, using concepts borrowed from problem-solving theory, game theory, dialogic communication, linguistics, and Carl Rogers' nondirective therapy. Out of these materials they created a rhetoric that they claimed offered new goals, new ways of creating ideas, and new ways of managing the rhetor-audience relationship. I would like to focus primarily on Young, Becker and Pike's use of principles. I see this as their most interesting, possibly most enduring, and certainly most controversial contribution to modern rhetoric, a contribution that escapes the bounds of the eighteen pages in which they explicitly discuss Rogers and subtly but pervasively dominates the entire work. The propriety and the pedagogical utility of Young, Becker and Pike's Rogerian rhetoric has been debated before, by Andrea Lunsford, Diane C. Mader, and Lisa Ede among others. This debate has centered chiefly on two questions: whether rhetoric as developed by Young, Becker and Pike is genuinely different from Aristotelian rhetoric and on whether it is fair to its main source, therapy. This debate is far from trivial and it is far from closed; this article to some extent will continue it. But it is time to step back and, from our twenty-year vantage point, ask some larger questions that enclose and put into perspective these more local questions of fairness to sources. To do so, let us look at Young, Becker and Pike's version of rhetoric both in its historical context and in the context of the larger rhetorical sys-

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