The affirmation of individual creativity in writing is what sets this book apart from other process-oriented rhetorics. Conversational in tone, the book's third edition boasts a writer-to-writer perspective that will put students at ease. The book "walks" students through the main elements of writing from discovery and research to…

Teacher researchers in a Professional Development School context identify two important shifts in traditional school cultures in order for teacher inquiry to thrive as a means for teacher development: a shift to community and a shift to uncertainty. PDS teachers in this study spoke about their need for supportive learning communities where they…

Several strands of research in applied linguistics have increasingly focused their attention on the application of genre theory to the classroom. In advanced academics, the genres of disciplinary communities serve gate-keeping functions that students must negotiate in order to succeed in their academic endeavors. Often without explicit…

One intention that an instructor had for her new course called "Writing and Healing: Women's Journal Writing" was to make apparent the power of self-written text to transform the writer. She asked her students--women studying women writing their lives and women writing their own lives--to write three pages a day and to focus on change.…

One of the key means by which knowledge is disseminated in the academic discourse community is the spoken presentation of papers at an academic conference. In contrast to the written research article, the spoken presentation remains relatively under-researched from a linguistic perspective, limiting the knowledge available for explicating this…

In death-averse American society, the field of thanatology is often socially and academically isolating. The purpose of this article is to describe the experiences of a group of death scholars and share insights gained as members of an interdisciplinary team. They discuss the ways in which they have created a special "safe" space for death study…

Contrasts the presentational mode of industrial writing--its strategies and techniques--with the reflective mode of traditional academic essay writing. Details industrial writing techniques and the organizational reasons for such techniques. (SR)

The purpose of the research reported on in this article was to explore how newcomer staff members to the academy experience their entry into the academic discourse community. To this end, a generic qualitative research design was implemented to understand the meaning newcomers have constructed about academia and how they make sense of their…

Raymond William's historical analysis of the "community" and the "individual" is useful for looking critically at the notion of "discourse communities." Recent "social" theories of writing have invoked the idea of community in ways that seem at once sweeping and vague, for they fail to state the operating…

The determiners in English include three categories: predeterminers, central determiners, and postdeterminers. The focus of the present study is the central determiners because they comprise the largest group and because a minimum of one central determiner is required in the generation of any noun phrase. Furthermore, the central determiners have…

This paper focuses on the efforts at Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina to extend the writing efforts of a writing across the curriculum (WAC) retreat into a greater matrix of scholarly activity, not only in the classroom but outside as well. Noting that the initial idea was that an intensive year of emphasizing scholastic activity could…

Research articles and research theses constitute two key genres used by scientific communities for the dissemination and ratification of knowledge. Both genres are produced at advanced stages of individuals' enculturation in disciplinary communities present original research aim to persuade the academic community to accept new knowledge claims,…

Beliefs about distinct differences between expressive and academic discourse unnecessarily complicate the teaching of writing. A composition pedagogy which fails to attend to the complications arising from the rhetorical aspect of language leads to the promotion of reasoning as separable from context. Reasoning then becomes a skill to be learned…

Characteristics that describe composition studies at its best (interdisciplinarity, collaborative, dialogic, radically democratic, maintaining a dynamic tension between "praxis" and "theoria") do not reflect a view of writing which is widely shared either by academics in fields other than composition or by those engaged in…

Argues for the importance of distinct discourse communities, and the importance of a theory and pedagogy that recognizes common practices, common goals, and common values among discourse communities. Analyzes professional samples of scholarship and sample student papers. Suggests that the transaction between writer and reader lies at the heart of…