Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/0741088320983364
Michael Carter
Scholars in the field of writing and rhetorical studies have long been interested in professional writing and the ways in which experts frame their research for disciplinary audiences. Three decades ago, rhetoricians incorporated stasis theory into their work as a way to explore the nature of argument and persuasion in scientific discourse. However, what is missing in these general arguments based on stasis are the particular arguments in science texts aimed at persuasion. Specifically, this article analyzes arguments from the stasis of value in introductions of science research articles. This work is grounded in the Classical topoi, or topics, cataloging types of arguments and identifying seven topoi. I analyzed 60 introductions from articles in three different science journals, totaling the number of value arguments and arguments comprising the topoi. Findings yielded different proportions in types of arguments, sharp disparities among the journals, and widespread use of value arguments. The broader issue at work in this article is how scientists make a case for the importance of their research and how these findings might inform writing and argumentation in the sciences.
{"title":"The Construction of Value in Science Research Articles: A Quantitative Study of Topoi Used in Introductions","authors":"Michael Carter","doi":"10.1177/0741088320983364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088320983364","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars in the field of writing and rhetorical studies have long been interested in professional writing and the ways in which experts frame their research for disciplinary audiences. Three decades ago, rhetoricians incorporated stasis theory into their work as a way to explore the nature of argument and persuasion in scientific discourse. However, what is missing in these general arguments based on stasis are the particular arguments in science texts aimed at persuasion. Specifically, this article analyzes arguments from the stasis of value in introductions of science research articles. This work is grounded in the Classical topoi, or topics, cataloging types of arguments and identifying seven topoi. I analyzed 60 introductions from articles in three different science journals, totaling the number of value arguments and arguments comprising the topoi. Findings yielded different proportions in types of arguments, sharp disparities among the journals, and widespread use of value arguments. The broader issue at work in this article is how scientists make a case for the importance of their research and how these findings might inform writing and argumentation in the sciences.","PeriodicalId":47351,"journal":{"name":"Written Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0741088320983364","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48673539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1177/0741088320986540
S. Wilder
Scholarship has shown that writing groups are important sites of authority negotiation for student writers, yet little empirical research has examined how groups negotiate authority through conversation or how these negotiations influence students’ developing expertise. Drawing on observations and interviews of an undergraduate thesis and a graduate dissertation writing group, I use the concept of “presentification” to analyze conversational moments in which group members referenced advisors, “making present” advisor authority to influence group collaborations. Specifically, I analyze these moments to show how writing groups can serve as low-stakes communities in which students negotiate their emerging sense of authority. I found that whereas less experienced writers looked to advisors to solve writing problems and used advisor authority to stand in for disciplinary expertise, more experienced writers voiced advisor guidance to help pose writing problems and negotiate their own stance as disciplinary experts. This study thus theorizes one process through which student writers negotiate emerging authority across sites of literate practice and in collaboration with others who may not themselves be members of the same disciplinary community.
{"title":"Another Voice in the Room: Negotiating Authority in Multidisciplinary Writing Groups","authors":"S. Wilder","doi":"10.1177/0741088320986540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088320986540","url":null,"abstract":"Scholarship has shown that writing groups are important sites of authority negotiation for student writers, yet little empirical research has examined how groups negotiate authority through conversation or how these negotiations influence students’ developing expertise. Drawing on observations and interviews of an undergraduate thesis and a graduate dissertation writing group, I use the concept of “presentification” to analyze conversational moments in which group members referenced advisors, “making present” advisor authority to influence group collaborations. Specifically, I analyze these moments to show how writing groups can serve as low-stakes communities in which students negotiate their emerging sense of authority. I found that whereas less experienced writers looked to advisors to solve writing problems and used advisor authority to stand in for disciplinary expertise, more experienced writers voiced advisor guidance to help pose writing problems and negotiate their own stance as disciplinary experts. This study thus theorizes one process through which student writers negotiate emerging authority across sites of literate practice and in collaboration with others who may not themselves be members of the same disciplinary community.","PeriodicalId":47351,"journal":{"name":"Written Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0741088320986540","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48100501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-11DOI: 10.1177/0741088320984796
Raffaella Negretti
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 interplay of genre knowledge and metacognition in learning to write for research. 24 doctoral students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) were recruited from subsequent runs of a genre-based writing course and were interviewed within a 2-year period when they submitted an article for publication, 3 to 11 months after course completion. Over time and across disciplines, doctoral students’ metacognition converges on four main themes: genre analysis as a “tool” to read and write, audience and the readers’ mind, rhetorical strategies, and the writing process. Furthermore, these themes are extensively combined in the students’ thinking, confirming conceptualizations of expertise as an integration of knowledge types. Metacognition of these themes invoked increased perceived confidence and control over writing, suggesting key areas where metacognitive intervention may be promising.
{"title":"Searching for Metacognitive Generalities: Areas of Convergence in Learning to Write for Publication Across Doctoral Students in Science and Engineering","authors":"Raffaella Negretti","doi":"10.1177/0741088320984796","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088320984796","url":null,"abstract":"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 interplay of genre knowledge and metacognition in learning to write for research. 24 doctoral students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) were recruited from subsequent runs of a genre-based writing course and were interviewed within a 2-year period when they submitted an article for publication, 3 to 11 months after course completion. Over time and across disciplines, doctoral students’ metacognition converges on four main themes: genre analysis as a “tool” to read and write, audience and the readers’ mind, rhetorical strategies, and the writing process. Furthermore, these themes are extensively combined in the students’ thinking, confirming conceptualizations of expertise as an integration of knowledge types. Metacognition of these themes invoked increased perceived confidence and control over writing, suggesting key areas where metacognitive intervention may be promising.","PeriodicalId":47351,"journal":{"name":"Written Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2021-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0741088320984796","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44928490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-11DOI: 10.1177/0741088320968061
Chris Lindgren
Coding has typically been understood as an engineering practice, where the meaning of code has discrete boundaries as a technology that does precisely what it says. Multidisciplinary code studies reframed this technological perspective by positing code as the latest form of writing, where code’s meaning is always partial and dependent on situational factors. Building out from this premise, this article theorizes coding as a form of writing with data through a qualitative case study of a web developer’s coding on a data-journalism team. I specifically theorize code as a form of intermediary writing to examine how his coding to process and analyze data sets involved the construction and negotiation of emergent problems throughout his coding tasks. Findings suggest how he integrated previous coding experience with an emerging sense of how code helped him write and revise the data. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings and discuss how writing and code studies could develop mutually informative approaches to coding as a situated and relational writing activity.
{"title":"Writing With Data: A Study of Coding on a Data-Journalism Team","authors":"Chris Lindgren","doi":"10.1177/0741088320968061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088320968061","url":null,"abstract":"Coding has typically been understood as an engineering practice, where the meaning of code has discrete boundaries as a technology that does precisely what it says. Multidisciplinary code studies reframed this technological perspective by positing code as the latest form of writing, where code’s meaning is always partial and dependent on situational factors. Building out from this premise, this article theorizes coding as a form of writing with data through a qualitative case study of a web developer’s coding on a data-journalism team. I specifically theorize code as a form of intermediary writing to examine how his coding to process and analyze data sets involved the construction and negotiation of emergent problems throughout his coding tasks. Findings suggest how he integrated previous coding experience with an emerging sense of how code helped him write and revise the data. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings and discuss how writing and code studies could develop mutually informative approaches to coding as a situated and relational writing activity.","PeriodicalId":47351,"journal":{"name":"Written Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0741088320968061","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47779627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-06DOI: 10.1177/0741088320964265
Gabriel Cutrufello
This article reports on a study that examined papers written by graduate students in the Physical Seminary course at Johns Hopkins University (1892–1913) to investigate how students reused various visuals of the interferometer to construct narratives of late-19th-century Ether research. Their representations of the interferometer focused on the mechanics of the devices by constructing a series of textual-visual relationships, requiring that the reader scan back and forth between the written text and the accompanying visual. These multimodal texts demonstrate how the students used writing activities to create a narrative of equipment development, which highlighted the centrality of trained vision in enculturating graduate students into disciplinary writing practices in the late 19th century. Through an analysis of the specific interactions and the network of visuals the students used to reconstruct a history of Ether investigation, scholars of writing and rhetoric can see how important inclusion of equipment and its detailed discussion was to graduate writing and disciplinary enculturation in the sciences.
{"title":"Scanning as a Rhetorical Activity: Reporting Histories of Ether Experiments in the Johns Hopkins University Physical Seminary (1892–1913)","authors":"Gabriel Cutrufello","doi":"10.1177/0741088320964265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088320964265","url":null,"abstract":"This article reports on a study that examined papers written by graduate students in the Physical Seminary course at Johns Hopkins University (1892–1913) to investigate how students reused various visuals of the interferometer to construct narratives of late-19th-century Ether research. Their representations of the interferometer focused on the mechanics of the devices by constructing a series of textual-visual relationships, requiring that the reader scan back and forth between the written text and the accompanying visual. These multimodal texts demonstrate how the students used writing activities to create a narrative of equipment development, which highlighted the centrality of trained vision in enculturating graduate students into disciplinary writing practices in the late 19th century. Through an analysis of the specific interactions and the network of visuals the students used to reconstruct a history of Ether investigation, scholars of writing and rhetoric can see how important inclusion of equipment and its detailed discussion was to graduate writing and disciplinary enculturation in the sciences.","PeriodicalId":47351,"journal":{"name":"Written Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0741088320964265","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42097546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-16DOI: 10.1177/0741088320964766
Tanzina Ahmed
Although community colleges are important entry points into higher education for many American students, few studies have investigated how community college students engage with different genres or develop genre knowledge. Even fewer have connected students’ genre knowledge to their academic performance. The present article discusses how 104 ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse students reported on classroom genre experiences and wrote stories about college across three narrative genres (Letter, Best Experience, Worst Experience). Findings suggest that students’ engagement with classroom genres in community college helped them develop rhetorical reading and writing skills. When students wrote about their college lives across narrative genres, they reflected on higher education in varied ways to achieve differing sociocultural goals with distinct audiences. Finally, students’ experience with classroom and narrative genres predicted their GPA, implying that students’ genre knowledge signals and influences their academic success. These findings demonstrate how diverse students attending community college can use genres as resources to further their social and academic development.
{"title":"“Helping Me Learn New Things Every Day”: The Power of Community College Students’ Writing Across Genres","authors":"Tanzina Ahmed","doi":"10.1177/0741088320964766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088320964766","url":null,"abstract":"Although community colleges are important entry points into higher education for many American students, few studies have investigated how community college students engage with different genres or develop genre knowledge. Even fewer have connected students’ genre knowledge to their academic performance. The present article discusses how 104 ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse students reported on classroom genre experiences and wrote stories about college across three narrative genres (Letter, Best Experience, Worst Experience). Findings suggest that students’ engagement with classroom genres in community college helped them develop rhetorical reading and writing skills. When students wrote about their college lives across narrative genres, they reflected on higher education in varied ways to achieve differing sociocultural goals with distinct audiences. Finally, students’ experience with classroom and narrative genres predicted their GPA, implying that students’ genre knowledge signals and influences their academic success. These findings demonstrate how diverse students attending community college can use genres as resources to further their social and academic development.","PeriodicalId":47351,"journal":{"name":"Written Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0741088320964766","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43559121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-29DOI: 10.1177/0741088320944918
S. Graham
This article offers a longitudinal computational-rhetorical analysis of biomedical writing on opioids. Using a corpus of 1,467 articles and essays published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association between 1959 and May 2019, this study evaluates diachronic shifts in (a) the framing of opioid pharmacology, (b) the relative attention paid to pain management versus opioid dependence risks, and (c) the distribution of statements related to physicians’ primary ethical obligations. The results of these analyses largely disconfirm different current accounts of shifting physician rhetoric around opioids and pain management leading up to the recognition opioid epidemic. Most notably, the results also suggest that biomedical debates surrounding opioids are serving as proxy arguments for shifting primary bioethical obligations from individual patients to public health.
{"title":"The Opioid Epidemic and the Pursuit of Moral Medicine: A Computational-Rhetorical Analysis","authors":"S. Graham","doi":"10.1177/0741088320944918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088320944918","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a longitudinal computational-rhetorical analysis of biomedical writing on opioids. Using a corpus of 1,467 articles and essays published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association between 1959 and May 2019, this study evaluates diachronic shifts in (a) the framing of opioid pharmacology, (b) the relative attention paid to pain management versus opioid dependence risks, and (c) the distribution of statements related to physicians’ primary ethical obligations. The results of these analyses largely disconfirm different current accounts of shifting physician rhetoric around opioids and pain management leading up to the recognition opioid epidemic. Most notably, the results also suggest that biomedical debates surrounding opioids are serving as proxy arguments for shifting primary bioethical obligations from individual patients to public health.","PeriodicalId":47351,"journal":{"name":"Written Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0741088320944918","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45149920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-25DOI: 10.1177/0741088320938804
T. Lillis, Maria Leedham, A. Twiner
Drawing on a three-year ethnographically oriented study exploring contemporary professional social work writing, this article focuses on a key concern: the amount of time taken up with writing, or “paperwork.” We explore the relationship between time and professional social work writing in three key ways: (a) as a discrete, measurable phenomenon—how much time is spent on writing? (b) as a textual dimension to social work writing—how do institutional documents drive particular entextualizations of time and how do social worker texts entextualize time? (c) as a particular timespace configuration of lived experience—how is time experienced by professional social workers? Findings indicate that a dominant institutional chronotope is governing social work textual practice underpinned by an ideology of writing that is at odds with social workers’ desired practice and professional goals. Methodologically, this article illustrates the value of combining a range of data and analytic tools, using textual and contextual data as well as qualitative and quantitative frames of analysis.
{"title":"Time, the Written Record, and Professional Practice: The Case of Contemporary Social Work","authors":"T. Lillis, Maria Leedham, A. Twiner","doi":"10.1177/0741088320938804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088320938804","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on a three-year ethnographically oriented study exploring contemporary professional social work writing, this article focuses on a key concern: the amount of time taken up with writing, or “paperwork.” We explore the relationship between time and professional social work writing in three key ways: (a) as a discrete, measurable phenomenon—how much time is spent on writing? (b) as a textual dimension to social work writing—how do institutional documents drive particular entextualizations of time and how do social worker texts entextualize time? (c) as a particular timespace configuration of lived experience—how is time experienced by professional social workers? Findings indicate that a dominant institutional chronotope is governing social work textual practice underpinned by an ideology of writing that is at odds with social workers’ desired practice and professional goals. Methodologically, this article illustrates the value of combining a range of data and analytic tools, using textual and contextual data as well as qualitative and quantitative frames of analysis.","PeriodicalId":47351,"journal":{"name":"Written Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0741088320938804","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45420687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-13DOI: 10.1177/0741088320939541
S. Read
In this article, I argue that technical reporting and documentation processes function to mitigate uncertainty and enable complex systems in the endeavor of big science. The argument draws on two years of field research investigating technical reporting and documentation processes at a federally funded supercomputing center dedicated to scientific research. A central question the study sought to answer was, “How does one build a new supercomputer?” One of the answers that emerged is that supercomputers are built by the genre assemblages of documents that mitigate financial, political, and technological uncertainties, and their attendant risks, that are inherent to technoscientific cutting-edge enterprises. Given their centrality, these genre assemblages function as essential infrastructure for the U.S. national laboratory system and for big science endeavors in general. In conclusion, this article argues that documentation that mitigates uncertainty serves an important infrastructural function for organizational life more generally.
{"title":"How to Build a Supercomputer: U.S. Research Infrastructure and the Documents That Mitigate the Uncertainties of Big Science","authors":"S. Read","doi":"10.1177/0741088320939541","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088320939541","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I argue that technical reporting and documentation processes function to mitigate uncertainty and enable complex systems in the endeavor of big science. The argument draws on two years of field research investigating technical reporting and documentation processes at a federally funded supercomputing center dedicated to scientific research. A central question the study sought to answer was, “How does one build a new supercomputer?” One of the answers that emerged is that supercomputers are built by the genre assemblages of documents that mitigate financial, political, and technological uncertainties, and their attendant risks, that are inherent to technoscientific cutting-edge enterprises. Given their centrality, these genre assemblages function as essential infrastructure for the U.S. national laboratory system and for big science endeavors in general. In conclusion, this article argues that documentation that mitigates uncertainty serves an important infrastructural function for organizational life more generally.","PeriodicalId":47351,"journal":{"name":"Written Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0741088320939541","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42380768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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