This article presents findings from case studies of two Latina bilingual high school writers engaged in a year-long research and writing project. Both young women demonstrated unique patterns related to their approaches to inquiry and performance of literacy practices. By using an ecological framework to integrate a multiple literacies perspective…

The study examines the development of the registers of academic writing by African American college-level students through style and grammar: indirection inherent in the oral culture of the African American community and the paratactic functions of "because." Discourse analysis of 74 samples of academic writing by 20 African American undergraduate…

Generally, researchers agree that verbal working memory plays an important role in cognitive processes involved in writing. However, there is disagreement about which cognitive processes make use of working memory. Kellogg has proposed that verbal working memory is involved in translating but not in editing or producing (i.e., typing) text. In…

Although the rhetoric of expertise stemming from the hard and social sciences has been well researched, the scholarship has not tended to focus on acts of public expertise by scholars from the humanities. This article reports a case study in the rhetorical practices of a theologian, acting as a public expert, first attempting to affect decision…

Genres embody typified discursive activity that is situated in an ecology of texts, people, and tools. Within these settings, genres help writers compose recognizable information artifacts. Increasingly, however, many professions are becoming mobile, and mobile technologies (e.g., personal digital assistants [PDAs]) are creating problems of…

Previous studies of the professional discourse of literary studies have focused solely on published scholarly articles and have produced contradictory evidence regarding the knowledge-building function of literary argument. In this study, 9 English department faculty members use a "think-aloud" procedure to read four lyric poems and compose a…

This article describes five political scientists' interview-based accounts of appropriate and inappropriate use of the pronouns "I" and "we" in academic writing. The informants talked about pronoun use with reference to one of their own journal articles and also by referring to other informants' texts. Beliefs about appropriate and inappropriate…

This article, using data from a year-long study of writing processes in an institutional context, looks at the demands made on writers in workplace environments as they make requests of their colleagues. Building on Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, the study takes a view of context as being a key factor in framing requests, in addition…

This article examines writing conference discourse in one English as a Second Language (ESL) basic composition course. The study is based on a 25,000-word corpus of 10 writing conference interactions between the instructor and seven students. Through a microlevel analysis, the authors demonstrate how and to what degree the writing conference can…

This study charts the terrain of research on writing during the 6-year period from 1999 to 2004, asking "What are current trends and foci in research on writing?" In examining a cross-section of writing research, the authors focus on four issues: (a) What are the general problems being investigated by contemporary writing researchers? Which of the…

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…

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…

This article examines the appropriation of academic biliteracy by three French-speaking students at an English-medium university in the Canadian province of Quebec. Drawing on Hornberger's continua model of biliteracy, Bourdieu's critical social theory, and philosophical hermeneutics, the author conceptualizes individual biliterate development as…

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…

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled "Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School." In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every…