The purpose of this paper is to analyze the genre of the reviewed scientific articles published in the "FJNSc" ("Finnish Journal of Nursing Science") during its history. The aim was to bring a critical approach to writing in nursing science and to discuss the dominant conventions of scientific writing in nursing. A total of 27…

Supervising masters and doctoral dissertations is a key function of teaching in higher education and giving written feedback on draft sections is an essential component of this function. However, the specific types of response that supervisors give to their dissertation students' written work have received limited research interest to date. The…

Drawing from a social constructionist perspective to written scholarly communication, this paper argues that training in academic writing for students in higher education especially in second language contexts should go beyond emphasis on grammatical correctness and paragraphing strategies, and also focus on the rhetorical character of academic…

Thanks to the recent developments in the theory of academic discourse analysis, it is now increasingly accepted that negotiation of academic knowledge is intimately related to the social practices of academic communities. To underpin this position and to reveal some of the ways this is achieved, this article analyzes a relatively wide spectrum of…

In an effort to improve our understanding of intellectual discussion in the undergraduate seminar and how it may be enhanced, three interdisciplinary discussion-based classes taken by primarily first-year students at a liberal arts college were studied ethnographically. Specifically, this article explores the struggles experienced by the students…

This is a response to the Nowell and Boyd (2010) article printed in this journal titled: Viewing Community as Responsibility as Well as Resource: Deconstructing the Theoretical Roots of Psychological Sense of Community. In that article, they argued that the McMillan theory of Sense of Community is a simplistic, needs-based theory that excludes…

This article analyzes literature on university-workplace partnerships and professional writing pedagogy to suggest best practices for workplace mentors to mentor new employees and their writing. The article suggests that new employees often experience cultural confusion due to (a) the transfer of education-based writing strategies and (b) the…

Every discipline has its own specialized language, its membership rites, its secret handshake. In its most benign and neutral definition, jargon signifies "the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group." More often, however, the jingly word that Chaucer used to describe "the inarticulate utterance of birds" takes…

Recent ESP research into academic writing has shown how writers convey their stance and interact with readers across different disciplines. However, little research has been carried out into the disciplinary writing practices of the pure mathematics academic community from an ESP genre analysis perspective. This study begins to address this gap by…

In attempts to find appropriate and authentic materials for students who are developing their academic writing skills, instructors often turn to works written by professional academics. However, genres such as published research articles and textbooks in specific disciplines may not be the most suitable models for what first year composition…

Education policy in Australia has accelerated its aim to increase participation of under-represented groups in tertiary education including students who are culturally and linguistically diverse and have low socio-economic status. These students generally have not had prior access to privileged academic discourse, which can further disadvantage…

I see a parallel between the illiteracy I witnessed while working in the court system and the challenges facing first-year writers at the university. In both cases, problems arise due to unfamiliarity with the discourse community into which one enters. In response, because much of the language governing composition and rhetoric is rife with place…

The idea of joining a conversation through reading and writing is not new; in his 1941 book "The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action," Kenneth Burke suggests that the acts of reading and writing are like entering a parlor where others are already conversing. The author explores the place of professional debate within NCTE and…

This paper examines an often-overlooked contributing factor to minority student collegiate attrition: students' limited knowledge of--and sometimes resistance to--the kinds of academic discursive practices they need to become "full participants" (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in the university setting. Adopting a Vygotskian view of sociolinguistics, we…

The idea of transformative and troublesome "threshold concepts" has been popular and influential in higher education. This article reports how teachers with different disciplinary affiliations responded to the "concept of thresholds" in the course of a cross-disciplinary research project. It describes how the idea was territorialised and enacted…