In clinical nursing simulations, a group of students provide care for a robotic patient during a structured scenario. As care is transferred from one group to another, they participate in a patient handoff, with outgoing students passing key information onto incoming students. In healthcare, the nursing handoff is a critical and perilous communication moment that is mediated by a range of participants and texts. Drawing on observations and video recordings of 52 simulation handoffs in the United States, this article examines how two student-designed texts – a collaborative patient chart and individual notes – are leveraged during the handoff. I also consider how handoff talk and writing changes as student nursing knowledge increases over the course of a year. By focusing on textual mediation of the simulated nursing handoff, this article contributes to existing research on professional writing pedagogy and to nursing scholarship on the handoff. Ultimately, it argues that a textual mediation framework can help bridge classroom and professional contexts by evaluating student writing not for how successfully it meets a set of imposed criteria but for how effectively it supports classroom activities.

Contemporary scholarship in rhetoric has recognized Ralph Waldo Emerson's interests in rhetorical theory. James A. Berlin, for example, who identifies Emerson's romantic rhetoric, in opposition to the rhetoric of the late eighteenth century, as a precursor of several modem tendencies, deals adequately with Emerson in his survey of nineteenth-century American writing instruction (42-57). Berlin's treatment of Emerson will be assumed here, qualified by Judy F. Parham's point that the tension between private and public in Emerson is a productive one (80). However, although he implies that Henry David Thoreau's position does not differ significantly from Emerson's, Berlin does not treat Thoreau's theoretical statements separately. Similarly, although dozens of literary scholars have investigated Thoreau's rhetorical practices, to my knowledge no analysis has been done on his rhetorical theory.l My intention is to show that Thoreau presents a theoretical version of eloquence distinct from Emerson's. Although this presentation is by no means unified in terms of a quintessential reduction, a consistent version does emerge across various works and personas, one fundamentally incompatible as well with the psychological rhetoric Thoreau studied in Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric and the opinions of Harvard's Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, Edward T. Channing. Thoreau's thoughts on eloquence, I suggest, should be aligned with a much different tradition in order to highlight their unique character.

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