Against the backdrop of proliferating research on multimodality in the fields of literacy and writing studies, this article considers the contributions of two prominent theoretical perspectives--Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Situated Literacies--and the methodological tensions they raise for the study of multimodality. To delineate…

This article critically explores the value of ethnography for enhancing context-sensitive approaches to the study of academic writing. Drawing on data from two longitudinal studies, student writing in the United Kingdom and professional academic writing in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal, the author illustrates the different contributions…

Recent historical examinations of nonliterary, nontheoretical texts within their activity settings have aimed to identify the historically developed communicative and rhetorical resources currently available to writers and to reveal the dynamics of the formation, use, and evolution of those resources. These studies, in examining communal literate…

Text analysis traditions in France and the United States include discourse analysis, critical linguistics, French functional linguistics, Bakhtinian dialogics, and "generous reading." These frames have not been used, however, in cross-cultural analysis of university student writing. The author presents a study of 250 student texts from French and…

This article analyzes the power of ambiguous metaphors to present scientific novelty. Its focus is a series of papers by the prominent population biologist W. D. Hamilton in which he redefined the meaning of biological altruism. In particular, the article draws on Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad to examine why suggestions of motive are so…

This article examines the dialectical nature of Mikhail Bakhtin's developmental understanding of language learning. In particular, the author discusses the pedagogically illuminating relationship between literary style and everyday style, especially as the latter emerges from and returns to lived life. Drawing parallels with other related…

Fahnestock and Secors "The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism" characterized literary criticism of the 1970s as conservative and self-celebratory. However, although literary theory has since undergone significant change, few rhetorical analyses of recent literary criticism as the preferred genre of a disciplinary discourse community have been…

Scientific popularizations are generally considered translations (often dubious ones) of scientific research for a lay audience. This study explores the role popularizations play within scientific discourse, specifically in the development of chaos theory. The methods included a review of the popular and the semipopular books on chaos theory from…

This article investigates one aspect of scientific style in French: the use of tenses. It investigates the claims made in the literature that the verb system of scientific French is a temporal. The frequency of tensed finite forms in 10 French language journal articles on biological sciences is examined. The rhetorical function of past and future…

This article presents evidence that, from selected spectroscopic articles in the earliest volumes of the Physical Review to other selected spectroscopic articles from the same journal in 1980, a shift in sentence style takes place. This shift is from what M.A.K. Halliday calls the dynamic style (which reflects happenings, processes, and actions)…

Outlines the elements of the human rhetorical potential, arguing for a psychologically plausible theory of meaning. Examines recent work in cognitive neural science to see if the human rhetorical potential is biologically, or neurologically, plausible. Suggests further research on the human rhetorical potential as it relates to discourse…

Follows the slow growth of a body of knowledge about how information could best be communicated without necessary references to overt persuasion from Aristotle's "Rhetoric" through the beginnings of a theory of written discourse in the American nineteenth century. (FL)

Notes that considerations of audience awareness are receiving increased attention in composition theory and teaching. Argues that while audience awareness is often conceived as a unitary, global construct, it in fact has distinctly identifiable dimensions. Discusses the dimensions of social cognition along with their interaction with the composing…

Reports on the reading processes of seven research physicists using data gathered from a series of interviews and observations. Reveals reading processes permeated with individual purposes and schema. (FL)

Reports findings of one study that reanalyzed research data allegedly demonstrating a substantial relationship between social cognitive ability and narrative writing skill, and another that collected original data. Reveals no relationship between social cognitive ability and rated quality of narrative essays. Discusses finding in terms of a…