This dissertation investigates police report writing at the Jackson Police Department in Northwest Arkansas. It presents three primary research questions which are addressed through qualitative methods of interview, observation, and discourse analysis: (1) In what ways does police training address report writing?; (2) What audience awareness do…

For the author, the key analytic question about a popular song is not "What does it mean?" or "What hidden or coded meaning does it express?" but "What does its popularity tell us about the cultural moment when it resonated with its public?" How did the song "create its audience," so to speak? Obviously, a 1973 hit song, if it could time-travel,…

This article describes a study which investigated how explicit strategy instruction may shape student use of metacognitive knowledge and in what ways this knowledge promotes self-regulation in the learning of writing. From a class of a 2-year associate degree programme in Hong Kong, which experienced a 15-week process-oriented writing course…

This study investigated the role of working memory capacity as a factor for individual differences in the ability to compose a text with communicative efficiency based on audience awareness. We analyzed its differential effects on the dynamics of the writing processes, as well as on the content of the finished product. Twenty-five graduate…

Taking an effective authorial stance in research argumentation has been designated as both vitally important and challenging. The study investigated English as a foreign language (EFL) doctoral students' conceptions of authorial stance, the role of domains in affecting their conceptions, and the ties of the conceptions to the participants'…

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects (CCSS) emphasize the importance of writing and specify that students should write for external, and, at times, unfamiliar audiences. Given the relationship between audience specification and quality writing in older…

The language teens use in digital spaces--from social network posts to instant message chats to text messages--often does not adhere to Standard Written English (SWE). Their digital writing involves a combination of written and conversational languages and often has a digital thumbprint that distinguishes the writer. As a means to understand this…

This essay builds upon prior attempts to foster linkages between the disciplines of Composition Studies and professional writing. I take up Jennifer Bay's suggestion that service learning is a site for connection and "hospitality" (in a Derridean sense) between these disciplines, advocating for and at the same time complicating Bay's proposal.…

Whenever the author teaches English 102, a research-focused, second-semester composition course, at least one student asks her whether or not she "allows" Wikipedia. She then redesigned her course to leverage Wikipedia as a source of inquiry. In other words, she "allows" Wikipedia, but through the Wikipedia project, which is designed to address…

The international project described in this paper has been inspired by the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Projects (TAPP). By 2013, the TAPP network had connected classes in writing, usability testing and/or translation at three universities in the US and several partner universities in Europe, Africa and China. The pedagogical import of these forms…

This study explores interactional metadiscourse resources in master's dissertations (introductions and conclusions) of Turkish students written in Turkish and English. Interactional resources were identified according to Hyland and Tse's (2004) framework by using WordSmith Tools (5.0). A statistically significant difference between two groups of…

This study analyzes the ability of advanced Russian learners of English as a foreign language (FL) to compose authentic essays in the target language (TL) reflecting morphosyntactic, discursive, and cross-cultural expectations. Thirty-four students at Russian universities were asked to utilize their TL, English, to write compositions focusing on…

Adolescent writing proficiency is widely considered to be in a state of crisis nationally, and new instructional approaches are needed to raise writing proficiency among all adolescents, with special attention to those students who struggle most (Graham & Perin, 2007). The affordances of digital communication media, such as online discussion…

Most business communication classes teach students to use a writing process to compose effective documents. Students practice the process by applying it to various types of writing with various purposes-reports, presentations, bad news letters, persuasive memos, etc. However, unless students practice that process in other contexts outside of the…

The essay is the most intimate of reading experiences, in which the reader is invited to eavesdrop as the writer works through a thought or excavates a memory. The writer can be explicit, in the first person, or just implicit, as the person behind the words, but he or she is absolutely, powerfully present. It's as if, for those few thousand words,…