This article traces a decline in CCCC sessions on language along with a shift toward more reductive definitions. It analyzes early CCCC treatment of language issues, the Students’ Right document, changes in demographics and linguistics, and shifts within English departments that have left us overdue for professional reexamination of our role as teachers of language.

Researchers studying science communication have criticized the sensationalism that often appears in journalistic accounts of science news. This article looks at the linguistic sources of that sensationalism by analyzing the journalistic coverage of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study of hormone replacement research, which was abruptly canceled in July 2002 and became the subject of many news articles. The article uses a coding system to analyze seven magazine and newspaper articles that appeared shortly after the WHI study was halted. The coding shows a high incidence of concrete nouns in the journalistic accounts and looks at the ways the syntax of their attributions are ordered to emphasize vivid nouns, the ways their verbs contribute to narrative, and some of the narrative devices employed in the journalistic reporting.

Susan Peck MacDonald here tackles important and often controversial contemporary questions regarding the rhetoric of inquiry, the social construction of knowledge, and the professionalization of the academy. MacDonald argues that the academy has devoted more effort to analyzing theory and method than to analyzing its own texts. Professional texts need further attention because they not only create but are also shaped by the knowledge that is special to each discipline. Her assumption is that knowledge making is the distinctive activity of the academy at the professional level; for that reason, it is important to examine differences in the ways the professional texts of subdisciplinary communities focus on and consolidate knowledge within their fields. MacDonald s examination concentrates on three sample subdisciplinary fields: attachment research in psychology, Colonial New England social history, and Renaissance New Historicism in literary studies. By tracing, over a period of two decades, how members of each field have discussed a problem in their professional discourse, MacDonald explores whether they have progressed toward a greater resolution of their problems. In her examination of attachment research, she traces the field s progress from its theoretical origins through its discovery of a method to a point of greater conceptual elaboration and agreement. Similarly, in Colonial New England social history, MacDonald examines debates over the values of narrative and analysis and, in Renaissance New Historicism, discusses particularist tendencies and ways in which New Historicist articles are organized by anecdotes and narratives. MacDonald goes on to discuss sentence-level patterns, boldly proposing a method for examining how disciplinary differences in knowledge making are created and reflected at the sentence level. Throughout her work, MacDonald stresses her conviction that academics need to do a better job of explaining their text-making axioms, clarifying their expectations of students at all levels, and monitoring their own professional practices. MacDonald s proposals for both textual and sentence-level analysis will help academic professionals better understand how they might improve communication within their professional communities and with their students.

This article proposes a method for examining how disciplinary differences in knowledge making are created or reflected at the sentence level. The method focuses on the grammatical subjects of sentences as key indicators of disciplinary knowledge making. Grammatical subjects of all sentences in sample academic journal articles were classified by a system identifying (a) the kind of abstraction or particularism involved and (b) the ways in which the researcher may or may not have foregrounded research methods and warrants. Findings from the sample articles in subfields of psychology, history, and literature indicated that psychology articles were more likely to foreground research methods and warrants and least likely to be particularistic. History articles tended to be intermediate. Literature articles were most likely to be particularistic and least likely to focus on research methods and warrants.

Writing in the humanities may, typically, be distinguished from writing in the social sciences in its treatments of abstractions. Writing about literature is here characterized as data-driven, in that it begins with a text and proceeds up the ladder of abstraction by interpretive classifications which are likely to diverge from one interpreter to another. Social science writing is described as conceptually driven, in that writers begin with communally defined abstractions which then drive the selection and discussion of data; the divergence between writers' abstractions characteristic of data-driven writing is less likely to occur in conceptually driven writing. This article describes how the difference shows up in professional academic writing, some of the confusion students experience in trying to shift from one kind of writing to another, the strengths and weaknesses of each kind of writing, and the benefits to be gained from alternating between the two kinds.

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Being male provides many socialably accepted behaviors that provides many opprotunities for the males. Males can do just about anything and it is accepted in todays society. They are allowed to do these things without being looked upon as being weird. Males are thought of being the stronger of the two sexes. This is probably true strength wise. Males are provided Better job opprotunities. Just about any job a male takes is accepted as a good job. Males are just more accepted in everything they do in our society. This example from a developmental student is extreme, but in varying degrees many inexperienced writers have difficulty knowing when and how to use specifics. We could decide that such students are more cognitively immature-or even cognitively deficient-but I believe a far more plausible explanation is that knowing how to be specific is a very complex skill, while the advice we often give in textbooks and in class is overly simplistic. Students like Joan need to learn to use specifics, but merely enjoining them