This article adopts the perspective of rhetorical theory to examine student, teacher, and client assessments of community service writing projects created by students in a technical writing course. The study compares both students’ and clients’ assessments of the benefits of the service-learning experience and the teacher’s and clients’ evaluations of the documents. It highlights significant discrepancies in the teacher and client assessments stemming from different views of the rhetorical situation. Analysis of these differences leads to recommendations concerning best practices for organizing, evaluating, and conducting classroom research on community service writing in a technical writing context.

This article analyzes “Timestyle” in order to identify the persona in the Nation and World sections of Time, a weekly newsmagazine. The sample for the study consisted of articles by 30 staff writers, articles that were randomly selected from Time' s 1988 issues. These articles were analyzed in six categories adapted from Walker Gibson's Style Machine: (a) word size and familiarity, (b) subject words and pronouns, (c) verbs, (d) modifiers, (e) sentence length and subordination, and (f) other effects of tone. The analysis suggests that Time' s narrative voice is a powerful one. The narrator has the power to put us at ease, engage our feelings, secure our trust, and divert our attention.