We conducted a post hoc analysis of 771 students’ argumentative writing plans and essays in the Criterion ® database, a digital writing tool, to explore the relations among plan features, essay quality, and writing traits. Students in the study were in Grades 5 to 10 from 68 schools. We found that older students produced writing plans that received higher scores and demonstrated greater genre-specific knowledge than younger students, but regardless of their grade, most students did not consider alternative perspectives or rebut counterarguments in their writing plans. We also found that students’ choice of plan templates was associated with the scores of their plans. Further, factor analysis showed that six of the seven plan feature scores hung together in a single factor (Factor 1) and correlated with multiple trait scores (Factor 2), accounting for most of the shared variance connecting plan scores with writing traits. The “both sides” plan feature loaded on a different factor by its own, suggesting that considering different perspectives is a challenging skill that students may need extra support to develop.

Combining keystroke logging, screen recordings, interviews, and text quality assessment in two mixed-methods studies with technical writers, this research (1) identifies defining variables of technical writing processes and (2) examines their correlations with and predictive power for text quality. Study 1, an exploratory investigation with 10 participants, identified 22 distinct writing behaviors under six categories of information searching, information reusing, content shaping, organization structuring, language styling, and layout designing during planning, translating, and reviewing sessions. These behavioral variables, together with time-related variables, were subsequently analyzed as “process indicators” in a comparative experiment with 43 participants across experience levels. Results of Study 2 revealed significant differences among experience levels in writing speed, planning duration, pause, search, reuse, content shaping, and structuring. Detailed planning and systematic content/structure editing were strongly associated with higher-quality texts. Building on these findings, we propose a process model of technical writing, explain its correlations with writing score, and depict process profiles of different experience levels. We also highlight the importance of information processing skills in enhancing writing efficiency, offering empirical guidance for technical writing instruction and professional training.

This case study investigates how two ESL graduate students, Ian and Sam, use ChatGPT in their research writing after receiving a comprehensive tutorial based on Warschauer et al.’s (2023) AI literacy framework. We analyzed their engagement with ChatGPT across prompt categories including genre, content, language use, documentation, coherence, and clarity. Data were collected from research paper drafts, ChatGPT chat histories, and interviews. Data analyses included coding ChatGPT prompts, textual analysis of drafts, and thematic analysis of interview transcripts . Results show that while both participants utilized ChatGPT for understanding genre conventions and content development, they developed distinct approaches reflecting their individual backgrounds. Ian selectively used ChatGPT for specific assistance needs, while Sam engaged more systematically, particularly for APA style and coherence checks. Both approaches maintained academic integrity and scholarly voice, demonstrating that Generative AI tools can be effectively tailored to individual needs without compromising ethical standards. This study highlights how advanced ESL writers can adapt GenAI tools to their unique writing processes, offering insights into the diverse ways AI can enhance academic writing while preserving individual agency. The findings suggest that AI integration in academic writing can be customized to support diverse writing goals and backgrounds.

This article reports on a qualitative assessment of intercultural competence (IC) in U.S. first-year writing (FYW) courses designed to increase intercultural exposure and interaction among domestic and international students. To measure students’ intercultural development via a series of reflective writings, we designed two innovative qualitative analysis tools: a grounded-theory coding scheme and a mapping procedure aligned to the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity. Our results show that qualitative assessment of reflective writing reveals dynamic, complex IC development trajectories, displaying nonlinearity, nondiscrete phases, and development within phases. Specifically, we noted that reflective writing helped students engage with and become attuned to aspects of cultural difference. Affordances of the FYW context indicated that students strongly engaged the cognitive domain of IC, and that this domain appears to be activated by reflective writing.

• The informality of video essay narration engendered ideation in drafting and script writing for students. • Students felt more responsible and personally invested in their arguments when they narrated and dramatized them in the video making process. • While students admitted that they tended to “gloss over” written drafts when revising, the video making process prompted students to be more self-motivated in the revising process, enabling them to evaluate and develop their arguments. • Unlike oral presentations, as students viewed their video essays as audience members, they could more clearly discern if their arguments lacked coherence or depth. This self-evaluation resulted in students taking the initiative to revise their final written assignments. Although multimodal assignments have increasingly been incorporated into academic writing curricula, research into their impact on student writing remains limited. This study, conducted at a Singaporean university, required students to transform a written essay draft into a video essay and then revise their draft into a written essay assignment. By comparing students’ initial drafts and their final submissions, and analysing interviews and reflective journals, we identified significant benefits stemming from the transmediation between written and multimodal text. Specifically, we found that 1) transmediation enabled students to self-evaluate their writing as they repeatedly listened to their voiceovers, found concrete visuals to illustrate their ideas, and edited their work to fit the concise video format; 2) students broke with habitual, less useful revision practices as they were freed from the conventional and grammatical concerns of written academic text and narrated their arguments colloquially in their voiceovers; 3) students exhibited an improved awareness of audience and medium; and 4) students were more enthusiastic with the course due to the novelty of the multimodal assignment. These findings suggest that including a video essay assignment during the drafting process can serve as an effective tool in advancing students’ abilities to evaluate their own academic writing.

The immigration of Black people from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to the United States can be described as a phenomenon that is not of recent origin (Konadu-Agyeman, Takyi, & Arthur, 2006). The review of legislative policies at the height of the Civil Rights movement in 1965 and the subsequent abolition of restrictive immigration laws made it possible for immigration from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to occur (Hamilton, 2020; Konadu-Agyeman & Takyi, 2006). Cultural practices, epistemologies, ontologies, semiotic resources, and axiologies have been introduced into these new environments as a result of these waves of Black migration (Amoako, 2006; Benson, 2006; Bryce-Laporte, 1972; Dei 2005; N’Diaye & N’Diaye, 2006; Shaw-Taylor & Tuch, 2007; Watson, 2020). This essay proposes the use of theoretical and conceptual frameworks for understanding such phenomena. Black immigrant youth cultural practices and values are explored through Africana phenomenological theoretical perspectives and Sankofa and Tete wo bi kyere conceptual frameworks. This article highlights the importance of studying the experiences of Black immigrant youth through the use of African frameworks as crucial tools for investigating and understand the experiences of Black immigrant youth.

This eight-year longitudinal case study follows one high school English teacher from her practicum and student teaching through three subsequent job sites, with one year off due to prohibitive job stress. To study the developmental path of Caitlin, the teacher, we rely on the metaphor of the twisting path, which comes from Vygotsky’s attention to socially mediated concept development. This development is reliant on engagement with obstacles that promote growth and conceptual synthesis, with some obstacles becoming prohibitive and discouraging and with the path proceeding in a serpentine rather than straightforward way. Our principal data source is a series of biannual interviews conducted either in person or via video-conferencing platforms. We trace Caitlin’s developmental path by attending to her encounters with competing perspectives, policies, and practices informing the English curriculum, especially as they were enforced by different stakeholders. These obstacles were at times internal to her own thinking (e.g., the tension between relational, student-centered instruction and the belief that students need guidance to reach their potential), at times local in terms of English department and schoolwide tensions (especially, contentious battles over canonical versus relational and contemporary teaching), and at times from distant sources in the form of community pressures and externally created policies affecting instruction (in particular, imposed standardized teaching and assessment in conflict with instruction predicated on relationships and teacher judgment). These conflicts were virtually nonexistent in the fourth school she taught in, an alternative school where test scores were far less important than establishing supportive relationships with students through which they experienced care and cultivation. This eight-year longitudinal case study contributes to research that investigates how school contexts affect teachers’ persistence and attrition, with attention to which sorts of environments provided obstacles that benefitted Caitlin’s development, and which were prohibitive.

Employers are increasingly turning to innovative artificial intelligence recruiting technologies to evaluate candidates’ online presence and make hiring decisions. Such social media screening, or social profiling, is an emerging approach to assessing candidates’ social influence, personalities, and workplace behaviors through their publicly shared data on social networking sites. This article introduces the processes, benefits, and risks of social profiling in employment decision making. The authors provide important guidance for job applicants, technical and professional communication instructors, and hiring professionals on how to strategically respond to the opportunities and challenges of automated social profiling technologies.

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This article presents a multimodal genre analysis of crowdfunding proposals, an emerging web-based genre for raising funds from internet crowds for a project or venture. Based on an analysis of nine most-funded Kickstarter crowdfunding proposals, the authors describe the generic move structure using a semiotic approach and examine the role of visual images in constructing meaning within and across moves. The analysis shows that visual images facilitate potential backers’ sense-making in basically two dimensions: rhetorically, functioning to persuade by establishing ethos, logos, and pathos, and compositionally, helping achieve cohesion within and between moves and facilitate move mixing, embedding, and positioning. This study also attests a case-based approach to examining multiple influences on genre emergence.

Guided by argumentation schema theory, we conducted five psychological studies in the United States and China on arguments about vaccination. Study 1 replicated research about arguments on several topics, finding that agreement judgments are weighted toward claims, whereas quality judgments are weighted toward reasons. However, consistent with recent research, when this paradigm was extended to arguments about vaccination (Study 2), claims received more weight than reasons in judgments about agreement and quality. Studies 3 and 4 were conducted in the United States and China on how people process counterarguments against anti-vaccination assertions. Rebuttals did not influence agreement but played a role in argument quality judgments. Both political position (in the United States) and medical education (in China) predicted differences in argument evaluation. Bad reasons lowered agreement (Study 5), especially among participants studying health care. Political polarization apparently heightens the impact of claim side in the argumentation schema, likely to the detriment of public discourse.

Podcasting has been used by many scholars to teach ancient and contemporary rhetorical principles. We extend this conversation by examining narrative nonfiction podcasting and its potential to work toward social change. We suggest pedagogical principles that amplify the affordances of the genre and acknowledge its constraints for achieving social change.

Abstract This essay argues for shifting the focus of a literary theory and criticism course to the institutional, social, and historical forces that shape English studies. Rather than promoting disciplinary introspection, the authors understand their approach as raising questions regarding elitism and the long historical entanglement of knowledge making with the interlocking forces of racism, colonialism, and sexism.

Drawing on discussions of (de)coloniality and translanguaging, this article reports findings from a classroom-based ethnographic study, focusing on how a self-identified Latina bilingual student resists colonial constructs of language and literacies in her multimodal project. Based on an analysis of the student’s multimodal composition, other classroom writings, and a semistructured interview, I examine how she creatively and critically draws on her entire language and literacy repertoire in her multimodal composing. More specifically, I demonstrate how she draws from and builds on her lived experiences of linguistic injustices and racialization and transforms such experiences into embodied knowledge making and sharing through her multimodal composing. I argue that students’ engagement with multimodality can and should be cultivated, sustained, and amplified as a site of translingual activism and justice with decolonial potential, and I suggest, further, that such a shift requires a change in approaching, reading, and valuing students’ multimodal meaning making.

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The women’s talking group featured in this article theorizes the community literacy practice of thanduk—“setting something aside”—that members practice together. Sanduk—with an s and translated as Arabic for “box”— has a long, well documented history involving informal, rotary credit and savings associations practiced among people in Africa and of African descent. Rather than using the s, the group’s spelling is distinctively Nuer— thanduk—harkening back to indigenous versions of the practice documented throughout areas of East Africa and beyond. Thanduk invokes nommo, a distinctly African spiritual and philosophical value that strives for harmony and balance among interdependent members of a community. This article aims to make legible how the women in this study employ thanduk to thwart the transnational, intergenerational impacts of indirect colonial rule and neoliberal economics in pursuit of individual and collective thriving.

This article presents an ethnographic study on the user experience (UX) design of the photo- and video-editing apps of millennial and Generation Z participants from different cultural groups. The case study calls attention to the implications of rhetorical misrepresentations of reality that photo- and video-editing apps afford and encourages future large-scale studies on the negative psychological and behavioral impacts such apps can have on users’ psychology, behaviors, and well-being. The authors use frameworks in virtue ethics to argue that despite slight variations, photo and video app UX has ethical implications that can negatively impact young adult users. For example, the study suggests that the photo and video app features tend to subvert the traditional Chinese virtues of modesty, honesty, and the middle way and that hyperbolic and playful designs can cause addictive behaviors.

As the discipline of rhetoric and composition engages archival studies, we must not only theorize and narrate primary-source research, but also build archival exhibits. Describing our effort to construct a digital exhibit of primary source material relevant to the history of writing instruction at the University of Texas at Austin 1975–1995 (RhetCompUTX, rhetcomputx.dwrl.utexas.edu), we explain how this project speaks to current historiographic debates about the status and the shape of the discipline. We argue that, to make the shift towards an institutional-material perspective, historians and scholars in rhetoric and composition will need to build our own archives of primary-source material, archives that feature four types of items: items relevant to classroom practice, items documenting the institutional circumstances, items recording the disciplinary conversation, and items capturing the political situation. RhetCompUTX not only features all four types of items, but also encourages the user to see the relations among these layers of practice. By describing this exhibit, by summarizing its argument, and by explaining how we described and assembled its items, we encourage other researchers to build similar archival exhibits and to move towards institutional-material historiography.

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To investigate the generic features of firm-generated advertisements (FGAs) in cross-cultural contexts, this study analyzed 327 FGAs by Dell Technologies and the Lenovo Group on Twitter and Sina Weibo. Integrating affordances and multimodality into genre analysis, the study showed that the FGAs were characterized by (a) flexible move structure, (b) persuasive language, (c) visual illustration, and (d) hyperlinks, hashtagging (#), and mentioning (@) functions. The FGAs on Sina Weibo, compared with those on Twitter, tended to use more language play, emojis, and contextual product pictures and show more emphasis on the niche of products, incentives, and celebrity endorsement.

Empathy competence is considered a key aspect of excellent performance in communication professions. But we lack an overview of the specific knowledge, attitudes, and skills required to develop such competence in professional communication. Through interviews with 35 seasoned communication professionals, this article explores the role and nature of empathy competence in professional interactions. The analysis resulted in a framework that details the skills, knowledge, and attitudinal aspects of empathy; distinguishes five actions through which empathy manifests itself; and sketches relationships of empathy with several auxiliary factors. The framework can be used for professional development, recruitment, and the design of communication education programs.

In the information age, discourse plays an increasingly important role in promoting innovative products. But how language works in the innovation process remains underexplored. This study explores the discursive communication strategies used to introduce innovation by analyzing the content, cohesion, and coherence of product launch presentations by Steve Jobs. It reveals that such discursive communication strategies improve the audience’s understanding, recognition, and acceptance of innovative products. This study contributes to both business communication studies in general and research on innovation communication in product launches in particular.

Informed by Bakhtin's theorization of voice as well as cross-disciplinary studies of scaling, the authors explore how a group of young filmmakers rendered one focal immigrant student's familial history by centering speakers addressing the topic of immigration from multiple levels, thereby connecting multiple social and spatiotemporal contexts in their multimodal storytelling to illustrate the costs of dehumanizing policies. In this case study, drawing from classroom observations, student work, and interviews with both students and teachers, the authors also highlight the importance of teacher agency in creating opportunities for refugee-background students to interactively engage in the language arts classroom. Drawing from interviews, observations, and analysis of student writing, the authors construct a detailed case study of how one student writer negotiated her stance toward the discourse of literary analysis based on her own writerly identity as a creative writer, illuminating the importance of critically attending to the ideological implications of teaching discipline-specific writing.

Increasingly popular, corequisite models include a college-credit course and a support course taken concurrently; to ensure purposeful alignment in the design of such course pairings, one practical suggestion is a curriculum crosswalk.

Research shows that Western and Chinese user instructions use visuals differently. Two basic tendencies may be discerned: Chinese manuals place more emphasis on visuals and their selection of visuals is less strictly confined to usability related functionality. This study investigates whether such cultural differences correspond to user preferences. Three hypotheses were tested: (a) Chinese users value pictures more than Western users; (b) Chinese users appreciate diverting, cartoon-like pictures more than Western users; and (c) Western users appreciate strictly instrumental pictures more than Chinese users. To test these hypotheses, a quasi-experiment ( N = 158) was conducted with cultural background as independent variable and appreciation for pictures as dependent variable. All participants rated 15 pictures, which were presented in the context of user instructions. All three hypotheses were confirmed. Cultural differences regarding the use of visuals should therefore be taken into account when localizing Western manuals for the Chinese market, or vice versa.

In this current era of policy and legislation driving curriculum and instruction in higher education, the field of college reading is grappling with how recent curricular mandates affect learners, particularly mandates that reduce or eliminate college reading instruction by assuming a one-size-fits-all approach. Questioning the ethical implications of this current reality led us to a key question: What are the pedagogical rights of undergraduate students with respect to literacy instruction? We argue here that college readers should have access to individually and culturally relevant literacy pedagogy that is intended to support their coursework and, ultimately, their lives. We therefore propose an initial draft of a bill of rights for college readers.

It is not typically the bent of infrastructure to be continually responsive in a way that is expansive and inclusive; instead, for newcomers or those with alternative histories, aims, vision, values, and perspectives, the inertia of infrastructure is more likely to be experienced as infrastructural breakdowns. We ask: What might wisdom look like in these “structured” encounters? That is, what is the intellectual work of rhetoric on those thin ledges where institutional chronos shapes and limits possibilities for knowledge work and working relationships among people who likely would not have otherwise met? In response, we advance a framework for a constructive approach to infrastructure—one that prizes deliberation over rationalization and actively attends to the warrants underlying calls for public engagement. We first consider the relationship between infrastructure, rhetorical wisdom, and the imagination of possibilities, then lay out a framework for cultivating rhetorical wisdom in response to infrastructure breakdowns.

ABSTRACT Recruitment advertisements published in technical and professional communication (TPC) conference programs and proceedings offer a snapshot of the messages that these programs use to market themselves and distinguish their value in the marketplace of graduate programs. Using an exploratory mixed methods approach informed by Bakhtin's theory of addressivity, we developed a two-phase study to assess recruitment advertisements from three perspectives: from the advertisement content itself, from the students being recruited, and from the TPC program coordinators or directors. Recommendations for improving TPC advertising and promotion are given.

How often do we view the Google search bar as a mnemonic device? It recalls information, follows associative pathways, identifies patterns, and distinguishes between what is relevant in the moment ...

This study examines the effects of inductively versus deductively organized product descriptions on Chinese and Western readers. It uses a 2 × 3 experimental design with text structure (inductive versus deductive) and cultural background (Chinese living in China, Chinese living in the Netherlands, and Westerners) as independent variables and recall, reading time, and readers’ opinions as dependent variables. Participants read a product description that explained two refrigerator types and then recommended which one to purchase. The results showed that Chinese readers rated readability and persuasiveness higher when the text was structured inductively whereas Western readers rated these aspects equally high for the inductively and deductively structured text. The results suggest that culturally preferred organizing principles do not affect readers’ ability to read and understand texts but that these principles might affect their opinions about the texts.

Twitter is widely used by companies to reach various stakeholders, but how they use this social media platform is still unclear. To investigate how companies use Twitter, this study analyzes the content of the Twitter accounts of four large information technology companies, focusing on the arrangement of different Twitter accounts and on message characteristics (content, message elements, and communication strategies). The results show that companies used architectures of different Twitter accounts to serve various stakeholder groups. The companies’ tweets covered diverse topics within the corporate, marketing, and technical communication domains. The tweets focused more on providing information and promoting action than on facilitating dialogue.

This article reports on one university’s experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed “MonsterComp,” including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures, the main motivation behind this experiment was to enhance teacher training and support while still retaining the workshop environment and low student-to-instructor ratio of traditional composition sections. The course involves multiple stakeholders, including the WPA and graduate student program coordinators, graduate student instructors, and course-based coaches from our university's writing center. Assessment of student work, observations of the course, and surveys administered to stakeholders indicate that the course was successful in terms of teacher training and preserving student learning outcomes.

This article offers a methodology for conducting large-scale audience analysis called “big data audience analysis” (BDAA). BDAA uses distant reading and thin description to examine a large corpus of text data from online audiences. In this article, that corpus is approximately 450,000 online reader comments. We analyze this corpus through sentiment analysis, statistical analysis, and geolocation to identify trends and patterns in large datasets. BDAA can better prepare TPC researchers for large-scale audience studies.

This essay addresses the deep division and antagonism in political culture, focusing on rhetorical approaches to citizenship conducive to an agonistic pluralism where a multiplicity of viewpoints exist under a larger framework of cooperation. Specifically, it draws on a diverse set of ideas within the rhetorical tradition and popular culture to examine and advocate for “radical friendliness” as a positive and potentially transformative mode of interaction. Friendliness—the observable, rhetorical dimension of friendship—is geared toward identification and consubstantiality and as such, provides one path toward a more productive democratic community.

Although corporate greenwashing is a widespread phenomenon, few studies have investigated its effects on consumers. In these studies, consumers were exposed to organizations that boldly lied about their green behaviors. Most greenwashing practices in real life, however, do not involve complete lies. This article describes a randomized 3 × 2 experimental study in the cruise industry investigating the effects of various degrees of greenwashing. Six experimental conditions were created based on behavioral-claim greenwashing (an organization telling the truth vs. its telling lies or half-lies) and motive greenwashing (an organization acting on its own initiative vs. its taking credit for following legal obligations). Dependent variables were three corporate reputation constructs: environmental performance, product and service quality, and financial performance. Compared to true green behavior, lies and half-lies had similar negative effects on reputation. Taking credit for following legal obligations had no main effect. Only in the case of true green behavior did undeservedly taking credit affect reputation negatively. Overall, the findings suggest that only true green behavior will have the desired positive effects on reputation.

Educators and researchers from a range of fields have devoted their careers to studying how reading develops and how to support students who find reading challenging. Some children struggle specifically with learning to decode print, the central issue in what is referred to as dyslexia.However, research has failed to identify unique characteristics or patterns that set apart students identified as dyslexic from other readers with decoding challenges. Nevertheless, an authoritative discourse that speaks of a definitive definition, a unique set of characteristics, and a specific form of intervention saturates policy and practice around dyslexia, and teacher educators are under increasing pressure to include this state-sanctioned information in their classes. Literacy educators’ experiences teaching reading in schools and preparing literacy professionals can add valuable perspectives to the conversation about dyslexia; however, currently their voices are largely silent in conversations around dyslexia research, policy, and practice. The current research was designed to address this gap through an intensive interview study, in which we employed a Disability Critical Race Studies framework, along with Bakhtin’s notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse to explore the perspectives, understandings, and experiences of literacy teacher educators regarding dyslexia.

Functional complexity is a widespread and underresearched phenomenon in Web sites. This article explores a specific case of functional complexity by analyzing the content of UNESCO World Heritage Web sites, which have to meet demands from both World Heritage and tourism perspectives. Based on a functional analysis, a content checklist was developed and used to evaluate a sample of 30 World Heritage Web sites. The results show that World Heritage Web sites generally fall short in all content categories. A cluster analysis reveals three types of World Heritage Web sites based on their emphasis on World Heritage content versus tourism content: (a) less well-developed Web sites (no emphasis), (b) Web sites of World Heritage Sites with touristic possibilities (emphasis on World Heritage), and (c) Web sites of touristic attractions with outstanding cultural or natural value (emphasis on tourism). In all, the findings show that functional complexity poses serious threats to the exhaustiveness of a Web site’s information and that evaluation approaches based on functional analysis can be useful in detecting blindspots in the content provided.

While scholars in the field of writing studies have examined scientific writing from multiple perspectives, interest in its thematic structure has been modest. Recent studies suggest that the themes in scientific writing tend to be anchored on one or a few points of departure. There has also been an attempt at quantification using the thematic-density index (TDI), although this has only been tested on abstracts. In this study, we investigated the thematic structure and TDIs of 30 research articles in biology. The results revealed a progressive thematic pattern in the introduction section, followed by an anchored development in the subsequent sections. The anchoring was realized by the pervasive use of the first-person pronoun “we.” The mean TDI was lowest in the introduction section (2.593) and highest in the results section (7.095). The results were consistent across the articles in the corpus, underscoring the uniform way in which the articles were thematically structured, and in turn suggesting a core thematic pattern for scientific research writing in general. Based on these findings, the authors suggest that future studies compare the thematic structure of the introduction section vis-à-vis the other sections, and investigate the possible factors resulting in such a structure.

Argumentation schema theory guided four experiments on the processing of plausible and implausible reasons and warrant statements testing the hypothesis that most reasons produce greater agreement with claims than when claims are presented without support. Another hypothesis was that leaving warrants unstated often produces greater agreement than when the warrant is made explicit. In Study 1, American participants were more likely to agree with claims after they read arguments than beforehand—even those with implausible reasons and warrants. In Study 2, American history and environmental science majors read brief arguments and agreed more with implausible arguments than claims alone. Study 3, with Chinese participants, replicated some but not all earlier results. In Study 4, with Chinese participants, blatantly false claims supported by bogus reasons yielded marginally greater agreement than unsupported claims. These findings suggest that many people have uncritical argumentation schemata with low support thresholds, making them vulnerable to weak and bogus arguments.

The marketing success of green products has spawned the phenomenon of greenwashing, but studies on the effects of greenwashing on consumers are still limited. Using a 4 × 2 randomized experimental design, this study examines such effects by determining whether consumers respond differently to greenwashing, silent brown, vocal green, and silent green organizations selling hedonic products (perfume) or utilitarian products (detergent). The results show that consumers recognized the green claims in the greenwashing condition, which led to an environmental performance impression in between green and brown organizations but also to more negative judgments about the integrity of communication. Regarding purchase interest, greenwashing organizations performed similarly as silent brown organizations, with significantly lower scores than those of vocal green and silent green organizations. No significant effects of product type and no interaction effects were found. Overall, greenwashing has only limited benefits (perceived environmental performance), poses a major threat (perceived integrity), and has no true competitive advantage (purchase interest).

This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an argumentative paper, video transcript, multimedia video, interview transcripts, and observation notes. Data analysis shows that her choice and orchestration of modal resources were shaped by her textual identity construction work, efforts to accommodate perceived audiences, and previous experience with the medium. Remediation with multimedia offered the student more semiotic resources to expand authorship, but the contextual forces of audience and medium bounded her authorial expression. The student’s multimodal writing illustrated discursive processes of negotiating and performing authorial positions for rhetorical goals with awareness of the linguistic, social, and cultural contexts of text production. This investigation ultimately aims to expand aspects of multimodal writing and literacy practice by examining the discursive nature of the design process in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts.

This essay explores the rhetorical qualities of neoliberalism through an analysis of economic and rhetorical theories of conventional wisdom and common sense. I analyze Barack Obama’s health care advocacy to demonstrate how neoliberal language animated his arguments for reform and frustrated his appeals to community. I argue that neoliberalism maintains its influence on political culture in large part because of its deep embeddedness in political language. The essay concludes with a discussion of how rhetors might operate within a culture marked by this prominent and often problematic discourse.

Abstract In 1961, the American Medical Association (AMA) funded a persuasive campaign called Operation Coffeecup. The campaign, which was designed to defeat Medicare, featured a speech by a young Ronald Reagan outlining the dangers of “socialized medicine.” The speech was recorded on a long-play record and distributed to the Women’s Auxiliary of the AMA, a group primarily composed of the wives of doctors who were instructed to write seemingly spontaneous letters to Congress detailing their opposition to the program. This essay investigates Operation Coffeecup mainly through a rhetorical analysis of Reagan’s speech. I argue that “socialized medicine” drew upon a problematic articulation of American culture that privileges the individual at the expense of the larger community. I conclude by discussing the thread of individualism that has persisted in the United States from the pre-Depression era mythos of rugged individualism to neoliberal discourses that shape debates about health policy today.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the visual precepts of rhetoric’s fourth canon found themselves at odds with the iconoclasm of England’s Protestant elite. Under this negative influence, mnemonic imagery disappeared from rhetorical theory. Interest in the fourth canon declined, replaced with a Ramist conception of memory grounded in abstract (and imageless) order. A general outline of this history has been offered by several scholars—most notably, Frances Yates—but new bibliographic data along with recently digitized archives can verify its accuracy. Print, written culture, or “modernist” ideologies alone cannot explain the historical marginalization of the canon of memory.

This article examines the teaching of a multimodal pedagogy in an online technical communication classroom. Based on the results of an e-portfolio assessment, the authors argue that multimodality can be taught successfully in the online environment if the instructor carefully plans and scaffolds each assignment. Specifically, they argue for an increased emphasis within the technical communication classroom on teaching the e-portfolio as a genre that not only exemplifies students’ multimodal literacies but also establishes their identities as technical communicators in the 21st century. This article provides a model for teaching multimodal composition in the online technical communication classroom and calls for more scholarship on teaching the e-portfolio in the digital environment.

Rhetoric and poetics have a long historical relationship; however, there is a dearth of literature in contemporary rhetorical studies that analyzes poems as forms of democratic dissent. This article begins with an assessment of John F. Kennedy’s eulogy of Robert Frost, followed with an analysis of Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art,” a poem that both supports and challenges Kennedy’s defense of poetry. Ultimately, this paper makes an argument for why critics might pay closer attention to poetry as both a medium for expressing dissenting messages and as an example of how language play itself can function as valuable democratic dissent.

This article and its five authors investigate how writing programs, writing instructors, and the profession itself engage in the erasure of race—of blackness and brownness specifically—and perhaps most importantly in a hesitancy to address white privilege.

Usability has been widely implemented in technical communication curricula and workplace practices, but little attention has focused specifically on how usability and its pedagogy are addressed in our literature. This study reviews selected technical communication textbooks, pedagogical and landmark texts, and online course syllabi and descriptions and argues that meager attention is given to usability, thus suggesting the need for more in-depth and productive discussions on usability practices, strategies, and challenges.

This article examines the Guide to Kuan Hua, arguably the world’s first business Chinese textbook series, exploring how a group of business communication experts in late 19th-century China created instructional materials that allowed foreigners to function efficiently in China’s business and bureaucratic environment. Rather than simply focusing on the mechanics of language, editors of the series fostered in students a set of literacies that would help them cope with the tumultuous change in 19th-century China. This study suggests that the experience of 19th-century textbook editors may inform our approach to complex intercultural communication challenges in today’s globalized world.

Interviews with 14 technical communicators reveal that skills in rhetorical invention help them creatively address communication problems. They define creativity in relation to four interrelated exigencies of invention: thinking like a user, reinvigorating dry content, inventing visual ideas, and alternating between heuristic and algorithmic processes. They recognize intrinsic factors such as curiosity and sympathy as motivations for their creativity, while being conscious of the external factors (people, money, and time) that may restrain creativity.

Review Article| April 01 2015 Unlocking the Secrets of Communication in Science and Engineering Learning to Communicate in Science and Engineering: Case Studies from MIT. By Poe, Mya, Lerner, Neal, and Craig, Jennifer. MIT Press, 2010. 256 pages. Xiaoqiong You Xiaoqiong You Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2015) 15 (2): 391–395. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2845225 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Xiaoqiong You; Unlocking the Secrets of Communication in Science and Engineering. Pedagogy 1 April 2015; 15 (2): 391–395. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2845225 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. © 2015 by Duke University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This study applies three models of attribution to examine the public’s responses to corporate crises. Using Kelley’s covariation model and Coombs’s situational crisis communication theory, the study shows that distinctiveness information has strong and robust effects, consistency information has some effects, and consensus information has no effects on attributions of corporate responsibility, purchase intentions, and punitive opinions. Based on Weiner’s model, this study finds that attributions of corporate responsibility result in punitive opinions guided by retributive rather than utilitarian motivations.

Current research suggests that emotional investment is essential for helping students critically engage in learning in the English language arts classroom. Yet, scholarship on the role of emotion in literary response has been limited, focusing chiefly on considerations of the merits of personal response—a focus that reflects dominant theories of emotion as located in the individual. Tethered to the personal, emotion has been conceptualized as a peripheral part of literary engagement—as something to be ignored, leveraged, or gotten beyond in an effort to move students toward more substantial textual engagement. This paper proposes that a sociocultural theory of emotion provides a new lens for considering how emotion engages students in literature learning. In this view, emotion is in the fabric of every classroom context, manifesting as “emotional rules” that have material implications for learning. Constructed using methods from Critical Discourse Analysis, the case study outlined in this paper demonstrates how emotional rules were perceived, taken up, and even transformed by one student, Nina, in two discussion contexts—a seminar circle and a literature circle—playing a central role in the work of literature learning in each context. Our findings advance scholarship on the relationship between response and emotion by suggesting that emotion cannot simply be invited in or left out of the literature classroom in the interest of moving students toward literary engagement, but instead is already fundamentally a part of literary engagement and must be noticed, interrogated, and sometimes disrupted in the interest of expanding interpretive possibilities.

Almost by definition, resisting the insidious convenience of the mainstream food supply requires persistence. This is especially true for food projects requiring fermentation—projects that unfold over days or weeks and require day-to-day science in kitchens where variables can be hard to control and where some degree of periodic failure is almost inevitable. In this article, a team of writers—scholars and community members—dramatizes a joint inquiry from which emerged a composite portrait of what we have come to call mindful persistence—an existential yet collaborative engine that drives our food literacies. Dialogic text features highlight the situated insights of individual writers, indicating that while this team shares an interest in fermentation, this interest does not require or assume identical understandings of the science of fermentation or similar positions in the probiotic debate surrounding contemporary fermentation practices. Instead, what is shared is a mindful persistence that scaffolds reflective action in this dynamic problem space.

Network analysis is one of the instruments in the communication audit toolbox to diagnose communication problems within organizations. To explore its contribution to a communication audit, the authors conducted a network analysis within three secondary schools, comparing its results with those of two other instruments: interviews focusing on critical incidents and a communication satisfaction questionnaire. The results show that network analysis may complement interview and survey data in several ways, by uncovering unique problems or by explaining or corroborating problems that were uncovered by the critical incidents or the survey. The results also show that additional data are sometimes needed to make sense of network characteristics.

In hospitals around the world it is common to find clinician researchers who play the dual roles of clinician and researcher. In major Chinese hospitals, the young generation of clinical doctors, especially those who hold a doctoral degree, is commonly expected to stay research-active. The study reported in this article was conducted at a major hospital in East China, featuring a group of orthopedic surgeons for whom there is an SCI-publication requirement. The study draws upon cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) to illuminate the medical doctors' boundary crossing between clinical and research activity systems. Based on analyses of observations, interviews with 11 research-active doctors, and 2 weeks of activity logs kept by three of the doctors, the article demonstrates how the doctors take the advantage of rich clinical data for research purposes and how they “squeeze time” for research.

ABSTRACT Following recent scholarship, this article investigates the relationship among Adam Smith's lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, his Wealth of Nations, the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and his lectures on jurisprudence. According to Smith, the rhetorical theory regarding genre and style improves practical judgment that is central to both economic and legal affairs. Though Smith's lectures on rhetoric feature no overt mention of these legal or commercial applications, when we read these lectures alongside his lectures and writings on jurisprudence and economics, we see that Smith had developed numerous applications for the practical judgment that he taught his students when, under his guidance, they analyzed literary texts. Noting the interrelation among Smith's work on rhetoric, law, and economics allows us to see that others in the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Hugh Blair and Henry Home Lord Kames, similarly found connections among jurisprudence, political economy, and rhetorical theory.

This article examines changing social media practices, arguing that technical communicators and teachers understand their roles as mediators of information and communication technologies. Drawing on a case study growing out of a colloquium on technology diffusion and communication between the Global North and South, the author proposes that technical communicators be attentive to the participatory nature of social media while not assuming that social media replace the dynamics of face-to-face human interaction.

This study examines how members of a global virtual team chose communication media while managing multiple boundaries. The study is unique in that it considers the perspectives of U.S. managers who teleworked from domestic workplaces and virtual team members located in offices in India. It describes the complex dynamics of the decision-making processes that team members used in attempting to allocate their individual resources in order to meet the demands of a high-performance organizational culture. The findings suggest that managers chose media that met task requirements and maintained the boundaries between their work and personal lives rather than media that would provide the most satisfactory experience.

Telework—the performance of paid labor activities at sites other than conventional workplaces and through the use of communication technologies—has not been considered a legitimate work form in China. Analyzing in-depth interviews thematically, the authors found that teleworkers from the post-80s generation not only legitimized their work form pragmatically and morally but also elevated it as a better choice for more achievement, flexibility, autonomy, efficiency, and professional development. Although they evaluated their choice positively, these teleworkers also acknowledged the unique challenges in cultivating guanxi (building relationships) and careers in China when working remotely. The authors suggest that telework in China offers a contested site for studying the dialectic tensions between traditional Chinese values and Western business discourses.

In this article, the author discusses his experiences teaching a class on the Vietnam War, a controversial subject that divided a nation along generational, class, and racial lines. He argues that learning takes place in the encounter of differences — where students consider perspectives, worldviews, and cultures different from their own. As a literature teacher, he claims to use writings by American soldiers and journalists, North and South Vietnamese soldiers, Vietnamese Buddhists, and ethnic American poets in order to have students reflect on the many perspectives on the war, perspectives that may challenge their preconceived notions about Vietnam, likely deriving from family, history, and cultural productions such as Hollywood films. In teaching this class, he discovered that, like his students, his views were interpolated by history, politics, and culture; to teach ethically, he had to reflect on his own subject positions as both an Asian American, who identifies with the struggle of other minorities, and a Cambodian, who must come to terms with his country’s historical tensions with Vietnam. Overall, the article demonstrates the importance of humanities teaching — where students learn, through language, creativity, and the imagination, to reflect on the experiences of other people and become responsible world citizens.

This study explores the interactive relationship between apology, as a crisis-response strategy used in the current Toyota recall crisis, and product involvement in influencing the restoration of the organization’s reputation and customers’ future purchase intentions. The authors measured the impact of the interaction between participants’ perception of an apology and their product-involvement levels using a 2 (perception of apology: high sincerity vs. low sincerity) × 2 (product involvement: high vs. low) experiment design. The results showed that an apology was an effective strategy for repairing the organization’s reputation for those participants who were highly involved and perceived the strategy as highly sincere, but it did not increase their purchase intentions.

This article analyzes a group of Gambian-American college writers creating an alternative public to challenge the patronizing norms operating in prevailing “aid-to-Africa” rhetorics. These young rhetors evoked performative genres and hybrid discourses so that members of their local public (the African nationals, African American professionals, white educators, fellow students, Muslim elders, conservative Christian community leaders) might themselves embody more productive self-other relations as they considered together the issue that drew them together publicly: the often hidden and insidious ways that cultural gender norms limit young African women’s ability to thrive, whether in the U.S. or in the Gambia.

This article compares economic and rhetorical writings by examining two nineteenth-century American rhetorician-economists, Samuel Newman and David Jayne Hill. Both men directed both their rhetorical and their economic writings toward a common purpose—making citizens comfortable with new and uncertain instruments of (monetary and linguistic) representation. Considering the economic and rhetorical writings on representation, we come to understand how rhetoric (both theory and pedagogy) fits into the emerging and quickly morphing capitalism of industrializing and financializing America.

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is widely recognized as the worst oil spill in international history (Oceana: Protecting the World's Oceans, n.d.). Within days of the April 20, 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig that had killed 11 people, remote underwater cameras revealed the BP pipe was leaking oil and gas on the ocean floor about 42 miles off the coast of Louisiana ( National Museum of Natural History, n.d.). Since the explosion, teams of researchers and scientists have begun studying the disaster and its impacts.

Web sites increasingly encourage users to provide comments on the quality of the content by clicking on a feedback button and filling out a feedback form. Little is known about users’ abilities to provide such feedback. To guide the development of evaluation tools, this study examines to what extent users with various background characteristics are able to provide useful comments on informational Web sites. Results show that it is important to keep the feedback tools both simple and attractive so that users will be able and willing to provide useful feedback on Web site pages.

Complex Worlds: Digital Culture, Rhetoric and Professional Communication is a collection of 11 essays (in four parts) that explores the complexity of digital technology in educational, industrial, ...

Abstract Since the 1950s, technical communicators have been trying to predict future developments in technology, economics, pedagogy, and workplace roles. Prognosticators have included founders of the profession, academics, business leaders, and practitioners. This article examines their predictions to determine what they reveal about technical communication as a discipline. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank the following people for their assistance: Xiaoyan Huang, Jie Chen, Prasad Patankar, and the interlibrary loan staff at Missouri S&T. These people assisted by requesting, downloading, and photocopying articles and (in a few cases) correcting citations. The authors would also like to thank the journal's editors and copy editors for their contributions. Notes Full citations for in-text source references are either within the text as part of the annotated bibliographies (divided by publication years: 1952–1990, 1991–2000, or 2001–2010) or within the end-of-text list titled "Additional References." Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid Wright David Wright has a PhD in Technical Communication from Oklahoma State University. He is currently Assistant Professor of Technical Communication in the Department of English and Technical Communication at Missouri S&T. Edward A. Malone Edward A. Malone is Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Director of Online Graduate Programs in the Department of English and Technical Communication at Missouri S&T. Gowri G. Saraf Gowri G. Saraf has a BE in Instrumentation Technology from R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore, India, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Tessa B. Long Tessa B. Long has a BA in Spanish from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Irangi K. Egodapitiya Irangi K. Egodapitiya has a BA with majors in English, sociology, and management from the University of Peradeniya, near Kandy, Sri Lanka, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T. Elizabeth M. Roberson Elizabeth M. Roberson has an AS in Business Administration, a BS in English, and a BS in Writing from Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, and an MS in Technical Communication from Missouri S&T.

Abstract Rhetorical analysis of John Locke's monetary arguments reveals that Locke relied on a core enthymeme that deployed several rhetorical devices (including a narrative diegesis, a dissociation and hierarchization of terms, and several metaphors) to synthesize two contradictory and common beliefs about money's value—money's value is determined by supply and demand; money's value is determined by substance. Moreover, this analysis revitalizes the conversation between economists and rhetoricians by presenting rhetorical analysis as a way to discover causal mechanisms. Finally, locating causal mechanisms allows an historical understanding of how debates have been shaped by the available means of persuasion. Acknowledgments Special thanks to James Aune, Martin Medhurst, and the editor and anonymous RSQ reviewers for their feedback at various stages in this article's production. Notes 1The stalled nature of the conversation is nowhere better captured than in Fabienne Peter's “Rhetoric Vs. Realism in Economic Methodology.” 2For another social-scientific discussion of causal mechanisms, see Sayer 105–117. 3My description of a “deep-seated” mechanism depends on the assumption that a social formation can be productively imagined as a stratification of numerous causal powers, some deeper and more pervasively effective. What we immediately witness at the top of a formation is thus “overdetermined” by the causal mechanisms layered beneath. For a fuller exploration of this concept, see Andrew Collier's “Stratified Explanation and Marx's Conception of History.” 4For a fuller explanation of how England's various parties formed into a “military-financial state,” see Dickson (chs. 1–3) and Carruthers (chs. 2–3). 5Aristotle asserts that “an ability to aim at commonly held opinions [endoxa] is a characteristic of one who also has a similar ability to regard the truth” (33). Pierre Bourdieu differentiates between orthodoxy and heterodoxy (Outline 164–171). According to Bourdieu, crises can disrupt all the rhetorical resources available to a population, both the heterodox and the orthodox, creating a space for an allodoxia, a new, potentially revolutionary, set of assumptions (Language 132–133). 6For more on the term “crisis of representation” and its relation to seventeenth-century England, see Poovey 6. 7Although they disagreed about recoinage, Locke and Nicholas Barbon believed that commodities' values are set by the intersection of supply and demand (Barbon Trade 15–19; Locke Some Considerations 66). 8James Thompson contends that Locke made an “ontological” appeal to the “ineluctable being of silver,” thus strictly emphasizing its substance value (63). Thompson, on the other hand, also notices that Locke accredited the socially constructed forces of supply and demand with value creation (61). He therefore concludes that Locke contradicted himself. 9Vaughn dubs Locke's model a “proportionality theory of money,” but given the overwhelming use of the term “quantity” in post-Lockean monetary theory, I choose this term to emphasize the model's persistence in subsequent arguments. 10James Thompson rightly notices the central importance of security in Locke's monetary theory. Locke wanted a stable monetary system that guaranteed transmission of value: “The return is always the same, for the ideal is an exchange system, or a system of debit and credit, in which one receives what he gave” (58). Karen Vaughn notes that Locke was an unusual metalist because he did not believe in money's ontological value, while he did believe that the substance (silver) was necessary to guarantee stability (35). 11For further treatment of Locke's economic writings and his theory of natural law, see Appleby; Finkelstein 165–170; and Vaughn 131. For a dissenting perspective, an argument that money had no place in Locke's imagined state of nature or in his theory of natural law, see Tully 149. 12In this paragraph, I rely on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's explanation of dissociation, hierarchy, and the topic of order (80–83, 93–94, 411–415). 13For a fuller review of the Bill, its enactment, and its effects, see Horsefield (61–70) and Feavearyear (135–149). 14Marx contended that Locke emphasized one side of money's contradictory composition, its substance (Contribution 159). Eli Heckscher similarly contended that Locke accepted the mercantilist equation of metal and value, saying that Locke confused Juno for the cloud, money for what money represented (209). Additional informationNotes on contributorsMark Garrett Longaker Mark Garrett Longaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, PAR 3, Mailcode B5500, Austin, TX, 78712, USA.

Contrary to critics and scholars interested in the series’ therapeutic value, Harry Potter encourages post-9/11 subjects to neither heal nor mourn. Instead of taking up the potential pain and transformation in realizing and coming to terms with the deaths of his parents, Harry’s reattachment to the institution precludes his abilities to mourn constructively and his orphanhood effectively gets effaced over the course of the series. This article suggests that the therapeutic value ascribed to Harry Potter indicates a hope that it will serve as a pedagogical device to produce loyal, patriotic citizen-subjects that will hold on to rather than mourn loss.

Book Review| September 01 2010 Patient Tales: Case Histories and the Uses of Narrative in Psychiatry Patient Tales: Case Histories and the Uses of Narrative in Psychiatry. Carol Berkenkotter. Tracy R. Routsong Tracy R. Routsong Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2010) 13 (3): 516–519. https://doi.org/10.2307/41936467 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Tracy R. Routsong; Patient Tales: Case Histories and the Uses of Narrative in Psychiatry. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2010; 13 (3): 516–519. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41936467 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 All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A sharp increase in the proportion of informational text with the corresponding expansion of cognitive demands and conceptual structures is a widely held explanation for the decline inreading achievement at the fourth-grade level. In this study, differences in the proportion of informational text across the second, third, and fourth grades were examined in order to determine if this perennial explanation for the fourth-grade slump was supported. Available print materials in 15 classrooms (5 per grade) and time spent with texts in written language activities were coded and analyzed by text type following Duke’s (2000) data-collection procedures. The proportion of informational text in classrooms was slightly higher in grade 2; in classroom environmental print it was highest in grade 3, followed by grade 4 and then grade 2; in classroom written language activities it showed a marked increase from grades 2 to 3, with that increase sustained in grade 4. Total instructional time with informational text was an average of 1 minute in grade 2 and 16 minutes in grades 3 and 4. The most common instructional activities with informational text were reading to complete a worksheet and round-robin reading.

“Centers and Peripheries” introduces the two goals of Pedagogy's special issue: to investigate what might be possible in the small college department as well as to suggest how these possibilities might inspire comparable intellectual work in other professional and institutional contexts. The article surveys a selection of published writing produced within the small college department and points to the practices of smaller institutions and departments in which faculty and students collaborate and envision scholarly and creative activities within the mission and values of a particular institution. It suggests that if the current traditional conception of the discipline has rendered a great deal of the work of the profession invisible, then it would make sense to talk more about what our colleagues are actually doing outside the doctorate-granting institution. The article concludes that representing more fully what we do will require us to move beyond general claims for teaching as a form of scholarship and away from decontextualized arguments about the value of teaching.

Research Article| January 01 2010 Who We Are, Why We Care Mark C. Long Mark C. Long Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2010) 10 (1): 257–262. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-036 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mark C. Long; Who We Are, Why We Care. Pedagogy 1 January 2010; 10 (1): 257–262. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-036 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. © 2009 by Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

As a distinct geographically situated production of public record of daily events that is often imbued with the ideals of the community it serves, the daily newspaper, and the editorial pages in particular, holds a powerful space in the collective mind as a forum and litmus for community opinion. This essay provides a case analysis of community opinion on sustainability and sustainable development in the small island nation of Bermuda through letters to the editor in the country’s daily newspaper, The Royal Gazette. These letters, published in that powerful space through invested and dynamic local media literacy sponsorship, illustrate the potential for effective discourse on environmental sustainability that, at least in Bermuda, constitutes productive community activism in its own right and also fosters additional literate social action.

This article explores the social meaning of locale in mobile communication research and introduces an approach of user localization to study technology integration. It investigates how locale forms an essential role in mobile communication in the way that practice, agency, and identities are articulated into a user localization process of incorporating technology into user's everyday life. It argues that the use of mobile communication technology is both a complex and dynamic interaction with its surrounding social, cultural, technological, and economic conditions, and an articulation work of self and locale.

This article describes the authors' work as formative evaluators of a mixed-reality science museum installation, Journey with Sea Creatures. Looking beyond the focal point of the screen to the spatial and temporal surroundings of the exhibit, the authors employed a technique they call retrospective narrative mapping in conjunction with sustained on-site observations, follow-up interviews with museum visitors, and the development of personas to better understand the user experience in multimodal informal learning environments. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.

This essay aims to explore the widely varying terminology associated with a typical classroom activity, peer review.

This article investigates the introductions of 40 professional speeches from a rhetorical perspective to address the problems audiences seem to have with presentations about engineering. The authors use an exordial model that they derived from classical manuals on rhetoric. This model enumerates and groups rhetorical exordial techniques into 3 main functions: attentum, benevolum, and docilem . The study shows that rhetorically complete introductions are rare. Most of the speakers seemed to prefer a content-oriented, direct approach ( docilem) in their introductions and seldom used techniques to garner the audience's attention ( attentum) or sympathy ( benevolum). The article concludes with an evaluation of the exordial model and a discussion of the study's pedagogical implications.

In today's networked, technological context, the human being “consist[s] of a biological core surrounded by extended, constructed systems of boundaries and networks” (p. 7); our bodily senses are a...

This collaboratively written essay offers an account of a group of graduate students preparing to teach a literature course at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The students, guided by their professor, Dale Bauer, immerse themselves in current debates about teaching by reading Patrick Allitt's I'm the Teacher, You're the Student, Shari Stenberg's Professing and Pedagogy, Paul Kameen's Writing/Teaching, Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe, and one textbook, Mariolina Salvatori and Pat Donahue's The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. The essay references a range of additional writing on the college and university classroom—including works by bell hooks, Ira Shor, Jane Tompkins, and Elaine Showalter. The essay includes excerpts from teaching statements the students composed as they worked through the current debates in literature pedagogy.

While content management systems (CMSs) might be a new concept to many.people in our field, content management as a practice within our discipline is not; our field has been studying it and practicing it for years, though under different headings: single sourcing, knowledge management, and course management (such as in the form of WebCT and Blackboard). We started our work on this special issue with a rather ambitious mission-to bring together some diverse perspectives on content management and CMSs, to both theorize and operationalize the content management practice, and to rationalize our participation in the broad domain of content management discourse. Grounded on the premise that technical communication requires information and knowledge management, this special issue is one of the first systematic and deliberate attempts to extend our perspectives, both theoretical and practical, about technical communication from the relatively static sphere of document design to the more dynamic horizon of content (information/knowledge) management.

Medical personnel in hospital intensive care units routinely rely on protocols to deliver some types of patient care. These protocol documents are developed by hospital physicians and staff to ensure that standards of care are followed. Thus, the protocol document becomes a de facto standing order, standing in for the physician's judgment in routine situations. This article reports findings from Phase I of an ongoing study exploring how insulin protocols are designed and used in intensive care units to transfer medical research findings into patient care “best practices.” We developed a taxonomy of document design elements and analyzed 29 insulin protocols to determine their use of these elements. We found that 93% of the protocols used tables to communicate procedures for measuring glucose levels and administering insulin. We further found that the protocols did not adhere well to principles for designing instructions and hypothesized that this finding reflected different purposes for instructions (training) and protocols (standardizing practice).

While peer review is a common practice in college composition courses, there is little consistency in approach and effectiveness within the field, owing in part to the dearth of empirical research that investigates peer-review processes. This study is designed to shed light on what a peer reviewer actually reads and attends to while providing peer-review feedback.

A brochure that had been revised on the basis of feedback from readers using the plus-minus evaluation method was evaluated again using the same method. This article compares the results of these two successive evaluation studies to examine the dynamics of evaluating and revising using a troubleshooting method based on verbal self-reports. The findings show that the plus-minus method does not necessarily lead to a decrease in the number of problems readers find in a revised document. But the types of problems readers find are significantly different. For example, after the brochure was revised, it had fewer clarity and structural problems, and readers could focus more on credibility issues.

An economistic version of cultural studies is important to technical writing scholarship presently because capitalism's broad trends find manifestation in and are affected by local practices like scientific and professional communication. By examining their own field against the backdrop of macroeconomic eras and pressures, technical writing theorists can obtain a better understanding of the sociocultural context in which their discipline is situated, and they can better map methods of effective political action for technical communicators.

Commentary| October 01 2005 Where Do You Teach? Mark C. Long Mark C. Long Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2005) 5 (3): 371–378. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-3-371 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mark C. Long; Where Do You Teach?. Pedagogy 1 October 2005; 5 (3): 371–378. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-5-3-371 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. © 2005 Duke University Press2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Commentaries You do not currently have access to this content.

Using a method of topical rhetorical analysis, inspired by K. Burke, to discuss the Ebonics debate, this article demonstrates that conversations about education, particularly writing instruction, have adopted a market rhetoric that limits teachers’ agency. However, reappropriation of this market rhetoric can help writing teachers to imagine and actuate a more empowered and long-sighted agency for themselves. Rhetorical analysis can therefore help educators to understand how local language practices shape their interaction with the rapidly changing material environment of fast capitalism.

Through an examination of the work of the nineteenth-century American rhetorician Henry Noble Day the author suggests that the causal relationship usually identified between economic formations and genres such as exposition is not a purely one-way process. Day’s rhetorics, he argues, were not only shaped by the economies of Taylorism but also were themselves engaged in a sociohistorical process of class formation, suggesting that such a study of the connections among managerialism, current-traditional rhetoric, and class formation raises important questions for our own work today.

The authors gave the following talk at the 2004 NCTE Annual Convention in Indianapolis upon receiving the Alan C. Purves Award, presented to the RTE article from the previous volume year judged most likely to have an impact on classroom practice (“The Road to Participation: The Construction of a Literacy Practice in a Learning Community of Linguistically Diverse Learners,” v. 38, pp. 85-124).

By wedding a historical materialist understanding of class formation to pedagogical efforts at teaching ethics in the professional writing classroom, language-arts instructors can intervene at an important postindustrial juncture between culture and economics. They can take a vital role in the formation and political developmentof elite and influential knowledge workers, making them more critical of the links between diachronic economic developments and locally experienced institutions such as communication practices and organizational constructions.

After World War II, the United States government and citizenry were concerned with truth, propaganda, democracy, and national security as they entered the Cold War era. This was a time when technocrats, engineers, and scientists could lead our free-world government through the perils of our tense relationships with Russia, Red China, and Korea. In the early 1940s, Rudolf Flesch began developing what he termed a “scientific rhetoric” to help writers of functional documents more effectively communicate technical information to a general public. He came up with a readability formula to help writers evaluate whether their writing was effective and this readability formula has profoundly shaped notions of “clear writing” for the last 60 years. This article explores Flesch's development of this readability formula, placing his work in a historical context, as well as discussing how the readability formula fit into a larger project to make effective writing more of a science than an art.

This research provides a framework identifying dynamic tensions that occur as subordinates try to maintain a sufficient degree of politeness while reporting to superiors on workplace tasks. Building on politeness theory, the framework suggests how conventional politeness dimensions, such as deference, solidarity, and non-imposition are challenged by organizational obligations and workplace tasks requiring confidence, direction, and individuality. The framework evolved from a series of analyses of two samples: one consisting of e-mail between international project teams and their domestically located supervisors, the other of Asian and U.S. business undergraduates' responses to two workplace scenarios involving critiquing a superior's work. Analyses revealed competing communicative dimensions relevant to subordinate-to-superior interactions, including dimensions that are underdeveloped in politeness literature. Examples from these data suggest that managing a sufficient equilibrium between these dimensions requires a substantial knowledge of rhetorical and linguistic alternatives.

This article describes a year-long process in which a group of fourth- and fifth-grade students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds learned to participate in reading, writing, and talking about books in a literature-based instructional program.

The article consists of two parts: One introduces the concept of positioning as a framework for inspecting and relating major tendencies regarding research on writing; the other gives a historic outline of how research on writing in Norway first emerged. The triadic semiotics of Bühler, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Halliday are combined, and then related to the concept of positioning, which is used as a framework for the historical part. A triadic understanding of communication and didactics is outlined for the purpose of studying positioning of research on writing. Reviews of didactics, research, and stil are presented before overall developmental patterns of general tendencies in the early research writing are described. Central parts of the framework and the historical part are finally compared to an overview offered by Nystrand, Green, and Wiemelt.

Reviews three books: Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language, by Stephen Parks; (Re)Visioning Composition Textbooks: Conflicts of Culture, Ideology, and Pedagogy, edited by Xin Liu Gale and Fredric G. Gale; Exploring Literature: Writing and Thinking about Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay, by Frank Madden.

Discusses two recent novels that employ techniques more familiar to science fiction than to historical fiction to probe questions of history and authenticity. Considers how these novels expose the way that those who attempt to bear witness to the history of slavery are ostracized, pathologized, and even institutionalized.

frican American writers are still writing slave narratives. One hundred thirtynine years after emancipation, more than four decades after the Civil Rights movement, the experience of slavery, the costs of escape, and the pain of remembering still compel attention. Yet even as the racial realities of modern America press literary scholars, historians, filmmakers, and others to keep our dark national history fresh in our collective consciousness, the march of time makes our peculiar institution seem reassuringly distant to some, and less recoverable than ever. As we began the twentieth century, thousands of ex-slaves were still alive, many testifying to their experiences (albeit often in compromised ways) through public forums such as the Work Projects Administration interviews. As we enter the twentyfirst century, no survivors remain, and very few who have actually beheld or spoken to a former slave. An experiential and bodily connection to slavery has been lost. No one alive bears the physical scars of African American enslavement, those visible

Review Article| January 01 2002 On Becoming a Teacher Mark C. Long Mark C. Long Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2002) 2 (1): 135–142. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-1-135 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mark C. Long; On Becoming a Teacher. Pedagogy 1 January 2002; 2 (1): 135–142. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-1-135 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. © 2002 Duke University Press2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Reader feedback is generally considered to be valuable input for writers who want to optimize their documents, but a reader-focused evaluation is often time-consuming. For this reason, we have developed Focus, a software tool for collecting reader comments more efficiently. The design and rationale of the software are described in this article. In a small-scale evaluation study, the results we obtained using Focus were compared to the reader feedback collected under the plus-minus method. It appeared that the number of problems detected per participant did not differ, but there were differences in the types of problems found. Focus participants appeared to comment more from a reviewer's and less from a user's perspective. Although the two methods are not interchangeable, Focus can be said to be a promising evaluation tool, deserving further research.

A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880–1940, by Katherine H. Adams; Everyone Can Write: Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing, by Peter Elbow; Teaching Composition as a Social Process, by Bruce McComiskey.

What is the influence of demographic variables such as gender and educational level on the reader feedback collected under the plus-minus method? To answer this question, an analysis was made of the problems detected in four public information brochures. The average amount of feedback per participant did not vary among the four brochures, but the severity of the problems did. Male participants mentioned more problems than female participants, but the problems detected by female participants were on average more severe. Highly educated participants detected more problems than participants with a lower level of education. No differences in problem types mentioned were found between male and female participants, and only one difference was found between the two educational levels: Highly educated participants focused more strongly on the structuring of information. In general, brochure characteristics had more effect on the types of feedback collected than the two demographic participant characteristics.

Riding the third wave of rhetorical historiography Lives of Their Own: Rhetorical Dimensions in Autobiographies of Women Activists by Martha Watson. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 149 pp. Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education 1885–1937 by Susan Kates. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 157 pp. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth‐Century Boston by Dorothy C. Broaddus. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 136 pp. The Resistant Writer: Rhetoric as Immunity, 1850 to the Present by Charles Paine. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 261 pp. Progressive Politics and the Training of America's Persuaders by Katherine H. Adams. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. 169 pp. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique by Bruce Horner. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. xxvi + 308. Rereading Aristotle's Rhetoric, edited by Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 2000. xi + 237 pp.

Technology is commonly described in magical terms, not only in advertising but also in journalism and technical communication. This article provides some background on the use of magical language in technical contexts, gives examples of magical discourse in technology advertisements and newsmagazine articles, and proposes a technical communication pedagogy of media analysis. The proposed pedagogy involves students in conducting diagnostic critiques of media texts and affords them the opportunity to examine critically their own unwitting use of magical language in technical discourse.

Plato on Rhetoric and Language by Jean Nienkamp. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates for Hermagoras Press, 1999. 220 + ix pp. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse by Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997. 381 + xii pp. Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth‐Century American Literature and Culture by Caroline Field Levander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 186 pp. The Evolution of English Prose 1700–1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture by Carey McIntosh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 276 + xi pp.

Augustus is often described as the emperor who transformed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble. When he returned victorious to Rome in BCE 29, Augustus embarked on a project to rebuild Rome with the splendor its new imperial status demanded. Despite the tranquility and prosperity enjoyed by most Romans during the Early Empire, many also felt a sense of loss. Much had changed in their social order at the end of the Republic. The nobility and the lower classes began to share more interests and Roman society took on a more egalitarian and commercial nature. Under Emperor Augustus, the function of rhetoric was stripped from legislative arenas and confined mainly to legal courts and ceremonial competitions. In the spirit of renewed patriotism and pragmatism, principles of rhetoric were also applied to writing about technical subjects, such as engineering and architecture. Both Vitruvius and Cicero used his writing to persuade Roman citizens to reclaim their heritage: of building arts in Vitruvius' case; of philosophy and meaningful public oratory in Cicero's case.

The Presentation of Technical Information. 3rd ed. Reginald Kapp. Letchworth, Hertfordshire, UK: The Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators, 1998. 136 pages. User‐Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts. Robert R. Johnson. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. 195 pages. Ethics in Technical Communication: Shades of Gray. Lori Allen and Dan Voss. New York: Wiley, 1997. 410 pages. The Dynamics of Writing Review: Opportunities for Growth and Change in the Workplace. Susan M. Katz. Vol. 5 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1998. 134 pages. Essays in the Study of Scientific Discourse: Methods, Practice, and Pedagogy. Ed. John T. Battalio. Vol. 6 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998. 264 pages. Outlining Goes Electronic. Jonathan Price. Vol. 9 in the ATTW Contemporary Studies in Technical Communication. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp., 1999. 177 pages (including bibliography and indexes). Wiring the Writing Center. Ed. Eric H. Hobson. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 1998. 254 pages. Inventing the Internet. Janet Abbate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. 264 pages.

Investigates English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students’ native literacy-learning experiences, via written learning autobiographies of 26 students from at least eight different countries. Discusses writing instruction in students’ native languages; most satisfying writing assessment in their native languages; and differences between writing in their native language and English. Draws five conclusions for ESL instruction.

Examines the author’s daughter’s experiences of being socialized into the language of Iceland through the eight-year-old’s immersion in Icelandic culture. Shows how play-based activities with native-speaking peers was critical to her language and literacy development. Argues that authentic activity in social life is the key to learning literacy concepts.

An introduction, even a short one, makes audiences more willing to listen to a speech, think more highly of the speaker, and understand a speech better than when no introduction is given. Two experiments at Delft University of Technology support this conclusion. Subjects viewed videotapes of professional presentations on the topic of Sick Building Syndrome. In one experiment, subjects rated the effectiveness of three introductory or “exordial”; techniques in gaining audience attention: an anecdote, an ethical appeal, and a “your problem”; approach. Results indicate that audiences do respond to exordial techniques, and in a predictable manner. In the second experiment, two speeches with anecdotal openers were tested against one without any introduction. The anecdotes led to significantly higher ratings of the presentation's comprehensibility and interest, as well as the speaker's credibility. The presence of an anecdote also resulted in higher retention scores. Oddly enough, the relevance of the anecdote did not seem to make a difference in the ratings.

When the idea of culture is expanded to include institutional relationships extending beyond the walls of one organization, technical writing researchers can address relationships between our power/knowledge system and multiculturalism, postmodernism, gender, conflict, and ethics within professional communication. This article contrasts ideas of culture in social constructionist and cultural study research designs, addressing how each type of design impacts issues that can be analyzed in research studies. Implications for objectivity and validity in speculative cultural study research are also explored. Finally, since articulation of a coherent theoretical foundation is crucial to limiting a cultural study, this article suggests how technical writing can be constituted as an object of study according to five (of many possible) poststructural concepts: the object of inquiry as discursive, the object as practice within a cultural context, the object as practice within a historical context, the object as ordered by language, and the object in relationship with the one who studies it.

African‐American Orators: A Bio‐Critical Sourcebook, edited by Richard W. Leeman. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 1996; xxvi+452. Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth‐Century America, edited by Thomas W. Benson. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1997. 200 pp. Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, edited by Alan G. Gross & William M. Keith. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press. 1997. 371 pp. Reading in Tudor England, by Eugene R. Kintgen. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996; 235 pages. Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory, edited by Christopher Lyle Johnstone. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. Paper, 196 pp.

Technical writing is rooted in books of Hermetic secrets and mining lore. Hermetic texts, written in the early centuries A.D., were based in experiential/experimental knowledge of illiterate people and were written as recipes for manipulating nature. Set against the legitimate, text-based academic knowledge of the time, this proto-scientific knowledge was called “secret” to give it authority through revelation. In the mid-1500s, Agricola combined the traditions of Hermetic secrets and handbooks to compile mining lore into De Re Metallica, in which he sought to write clearly and simply, illustrate information with graphics, and rationalize the use of occult knowledge based on its utility. This early technical text paved the way for philosophers, such as Francis Bacon, to legitimate scientific knowledge based on experience/experiments as being more “beneficial” for social organization than knowledge based on a priori textual authority and speculation in the then-dominant Scholastic tradition.

The literature on formative text evaluation pays scant attention to the revision phase following data collection. This article describes a small-scale experiment in which five professional writers were asked to revise brochure fragments on the basis of feedback from readers. The feedback consisted of readers' comments, selected from the results of a pretest of the brochures, regarding their acceptance of the information and their appreciation of text elements. Despite the wide variety of solutions that resulted, some interesting tendencies were found: In response to problems with factual acceptance, writers often decided to add information; in response to problems with normative acceptance, they often chose to substitute material; and in response to appreciation problems, they either deleted the problematic passage or substituted a different phrase.

This article presents a review of the literature on reader-focused text evaluation. First, an account is given of the document characteristics that can be evaluated. Then the possible functions of evaluations are considered, a distinction being made between verifying, troubleshooting, and choice-supporting research. Finally, an overview is presented of methods appropriate for the various document characteristics and evaluation functions. Relevant research findings on the methodological strengths and constraints of each method are discussed.

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This article reports on how three English-speaking advisors and their non-native English-speaking doctoral students used citations and related writing techniques to make new knowledge claims in science dissertation writing. The study focuses on the introductory chapter of the dissertations. The research data consist of drafts of the students’ dissertations, analysis of the draft texts, observations during writing conferences and lab meetings, background interviews, and in-progress interviews. The study investigated: 1) the selection of cited works; 2) how the students and their advisors contextualized their research and made claims to novelty; 3) how the advisors inducted their students into the disciplinary culture and its citation practices; and 4) the influence of language and cultural differences on the students and their advisors. The findings revealed that the academic advisors played an important role in helping their three graduate students learn how to construct new knowledge claims. The study also found no negative influence from the students’ native language and culture on their acquisition of academic language and conventions.

Are technical writers able to predict the results of a reader-focused text evaluation? In this article we report a study with fifteen technical writers, who were asked to point out the reader problems in a public information brochure. The brochure was also evaluated with thirty readers from the target audience (using a combination of the plus-minus method, a questionnaire, and user protocols). The results of both kinds of text evaluation show little overlap. The technical writers only predicted a small proportion of the reader feedback, and produced a lot of new problem detections. In addition, there was little agreement among the technical writers with regard to their problem detections.

Using new media in supporting students learning to write is a challenge for technical writing teachers. In this article we describe our effort to convert the paper course material to an on-line advisory system, called Ganesh Helper. Through the logging of students' actions and observations it was possible to assess some aspects of the use of Ganesh Helper (searching, browsing, and switching between writing and reading) while the students were writing part of a report. A questionnaire taught us that a majority of the students found the helpviewer easy to use and useful. But in the case of Ganesh Helper most of the students still preferred the textbook to the helpviewer.

In learning how to write, one has to cope with many demands on language proficiency, organization skills, and intellectual ability. A checklist of what is required can help to clarify all these demands and to turn them into manageable items or units for practice, implementation, and evaluation. The skills involved in designing and applying checklists resemble those required for dealing with the writing tasks on campus and/or at work. The focus of this article is on using checklists to improve the skills of one kind of writing—the report, among students from two faculties in a tertiary institute. The reports are for different purposes, situations, and readers. The article will discuss the different approaches in adopting a checklist to facilitate the report-writing process. It will highlight using students' work or authentic materials as an input to their own learning and helping them to integrate the skills learned with their work on the campus and in the workplace.

In the study of law, postmodernism's interpretive turn has given rise to a wealth of scholarship analyzing the relationship of law's rhetoric to its social, cultural, and political contexts. This shift has influenced some teaching of “substantive” law school courses. At the university level, the interpretive turn has prompted composition scholars to reconsider how the teaching of writing is implicated, but no similar shift has occurred in legal writing pedagogy. Instead, those teaching legal writing largely teach as they were taught, emphasizing the use of rhetoric as a tool for successful lawyering. Legal writing professors must move beyond this narrow conception of rhetoric to help students become adept at the discourse of the legal community and capable of critically evaluating it.

In using a community model of communication based on consensus, we adopt a double-edged notion that encompasses both harmony and coercion within the community. But the possibility that any one of us might engage in coercion and/or terror when we intend to create harmony is something we would rather not acknowledge. So we use the metaphor “community” only in its benign aspect, in its possibility of harmony, to describe communication. This article explores how ideas of harmony and coercion play out in the metaphor of community and suggests four dimensions as continua along which communities could be described: choice/chance, time/space, abstract/concrete, affinity/proximity. If we break up the clearly bounded, either/or approach to modeling community, we can better accommodate the ambiguity we intuitively understand as an important part of communication.

Technical communication curricula vary because faculty use a variety of approaches to develop them. This essay suggests guidelines for curriculum and program development in technical communication based on a review of the relevant survey literature on the professional roles played by technical communicators, a review of academic literature on technical communication programs, and a review of the relevant demographic data on technical communicators. It then discusses the implications of the above for designing technical communication curricula and programs.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes We would like to acknowledge Richard L. Enos for his careful readings of initial drafts and for his thoughtful suggestions along the way. We would also like to thank James Murphy for his useful comments regarding our manuscript. Finally, we are especially grateful to Takis Poulakos not only for his scholarship that works to open up a space for Isocrates but even more so for his insightful readings and challenging comments that indicated a tincture of hope in earlier drafts of our paper.

Abstract Karen Burke LeFevre's Invention as a Social Act Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. xi + 173. Chaïm Perelman, Rhetoriques. Edited with a preface by Michel Meyer. Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1989, 470 pp.

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