In this article, we explore how teachers who make their work public through talk and texts may find their composing complicated by issues of authority. These public composing acts include drafting articles, preparing workshop presentations, authoring op-ed pieces and letters to the editor, developing book manuscripts--creating any of the spoken…

Networked electronic text--fragmentary, mutable, connected, and instantly accessible from any computer or handheld device--challenges traditional notions of textual coherence and composition, offering affordances far beyond those possible in traditional, print-based texts, including those made available electronically. Such texts become tools,…

Presents a discourse-based interview with John McPhee focusing attention on particular choices McPhee makes. Notes that probes (statements about McPhee texts by other readers) led to a more general discussion of the writer-reader relationship. Discusses how these two methods together afford an illuminating glimpse of McPhee at work. (MG)

Presents a dialog between two speakers examining the nature of writing discourse, how it is categorized, how it is changing, how e-mail and other media are affecting it, and what is considered acceptable in certain discourses. (TB)

The concept of genre should not be limited to literary genres, but should be expanded to include all types of texts, including those traditionally considered to be nonliterary. Essentially, many things about writing work the way they do because of genre, and a better understanding of genre can give us a better understanding of writing, reading and…

Rather than having established forms available to pour things into, forms frequently need to be built from the ground up. Practically, it is simpler to use assembly line production for academic work, and most of academic writing is relatively linear objective prose. However, boundaries are being crossed in diverse disciplines by a number of…

Discusses the results of a study in which 130 college composition textbooks were examined in order to determine the role that expressive discourse plays in the teaching of writing at the college level. (DF)

To explore student facility with argumentative writing, 40 persuasive essays of 5th, 7th, and 11th grade students were analyzed for their relative percentage of reporting (narrating), interpreting, generalizing, and speculative sentences. Fifth and seventh graders were found to use significantly more narrative and fewer generalizations than older…