Teachers of writing have two options available to them when it comes to teaching paragraphing. There are, broadly speaking, either "laissez faire" approaches, or tightly prescriptivist ones. While the latter approaches have, at times, been challenged, they are entrenched in textbooks and testing rubrics, and are highly influential in…

This collection of essays is intended to increase cultural awareness and provide new information about the nature of writing in a number of the discourse communities central to modern economic life. The book focuses on academe, journalism, industry, computers, finance, and law. Essays and their authors are: "Coming to Terms with Different…

When composition educators talk about either "theory" or "practice," they are not referring to a monolithic and unified field, but instead to any number of competing, ideologically charged metacommentaries. The "problem with practice" refers to its own socially complex and temporally diffuse nature. Applications of…

Professional and disciplinary rhetoric often breaks down when texts cross professional boundaries. An ethnographic study conducted in an Indiana courtroom during a civil trial demonstrates the failure of disciplinary rhetoric. Despite the fact that the plaintiffs in a personal injury case had demonstrated the negligence of the defendant according…

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)

Intellectuals lament the disappearance of community, a nostalgia for the small town that has supposedly given way to the anonymous crowds of the city. Likewise, scholars have talked about "discourse communities" in romantic terms, referring to a place where all share the same values. However, a more urban view of social life, in which…

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…

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…

At Massachusetts Bay Community College a course was designed to create a transition from the process-based basic writing course to the traditional required freshman English course. WTG 100 was designed as an inquiry into academic writing, where students would learn about the various discourse conventions and expectations they would encounter as…

The library can assist in grounding college student writing in reading and inquiry rather than in the mere retrieval of information Fundamental rhetorical goals can best by met by getting students into the library to ask questions, analyze sources, and evaluate claims so they can react to and incorporate the work of other writers into their own…

Many adult literacy programs invite their clients to become authors by articulating their life experiences, ideas, and opinions in writing that is published. Theoretical perspectives from feminist poststructuralism were used to determine what happened when clients were positioned as authors in light of their identities other than authors. The…