Using a mixed-methods, multi-institutional design of general education writing courses at four institutions, this study examined genre as a key factor for understanding and promoting writing development. It thus aims to provide empirical validation of decades of theoretical work on and qualitative studies of genre and the nature of genre…

What aspects of writing are doctoral students metacognitive about when they write research articles for publication? Contributing to the recent conversation about metacognition in genre pedagogy, this study adopts a qualitative approach to illustrate what students have in common, across disciplines and levels of expertise, and the dynamic…

In this article, we examine how children ages 8 to 10 characterized the audiences of digital videos they made in school. Children's perceptions of their viewers reflected, and in many cases complicated, current theorizing about the vast potential audiences of digital texts. Our analysis of videos and interview data surfaces several findings…

Views about what writing is and how it should be taught have varied over the years as well as across contexts. Studies of curricula, teaching materials, and teaching practices have shown a strong focus on skills, genres, and processes, but few have asked teachers about their perspectives on writing. In this article we explore what views, or…

This article investigates the strategies web-writers develop when their audiences respond to them via textual participation. Focusing on three web-writers who want to "continue the conversation," this article identifies five major strategies to accomplish this aim: (a) editing after production, (b) quotation, (c) question posing, (d)…

This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an…

New media are having a significant impact on science communication, both on the way scientists communicate with peers and on the dissemination of science to the lay public. Science blogs, in particular, provide an open space for science communication, where a diverse audience (with different degrees of expertise) may have access to science…

Through interviews with judges and victim advocates, courtroom observations, and rhetorical analyses of victims' reactions to proposed sentences, the authors examine the features that judges and advocates think make victims' arguments persuasive. The authors conclude that this genre, recently imposed upon the court, functions as a mediating device…

This article offers a way of using the theory of audience design--how speakers position different audience groups as main addressees, overhearers, or bystanders--for written discourse. It focuses on main addressees, that is, those audience members who are expected to participate in and respond to a speaker's utterances. The text samples are…

Defines "hedging" as linguistic strategies that qualify categorical commitment to express possibility rather than certainty. Suggests that hedging is central to effective argument in scientific writing. Identifies the major forms, functions, and distribution of hedges in a corpus of 26 molecular biology research articles and describes…

Offers a case study of a child who used school writing activities to perform rather than simply to communicate. Finds that, although the child's language resources contributed greatly to his success with written language, they did not always fit comfortably into the writing workshop used in his classroom. (PRA)

Argues for a distinction between fluency and automaticity of procedures in writing. Presents empirical results that suggest a prominent difference between skilled and less skilled writing is the extent of metacognitive control over writing subprocesses. (MS)

Examines definite constructions in 15 editorial articles from the "Christian Science Monitor." Classifies each construction as either re-evoking, new, or inferable. Argues that inferable constructions are most interesting since they indicate what the writer believes the reader is capable of inferring. Concludes that such conventions make…

Reviews nine studies in the area of audience awareness and social cognition. Notes that these studies provide an interesting, though extremely incomplete, picture of the relationship between social-cognitive abilities and writing performance. (MG)

Evaluates the reader-protocol method of teaching writers to anticipate readers' comprehension needs. Involves asking writers to predict readers' problems with a text and providing them with reader responses. Finds that writers taught with the reader-protocol method improved more than writers in control classes, and increased in their ability to…