The letter of recommendation (LOR) is a stylized form of direct sponsorship, a rhetorical appeal that confers favor on a person or object in keeping with the writer’s—or sponsor’s—character, authority, and expertise. In response to Swales’s call to “unveil” the rhetorical features of occluded genres, this research employs a move-step analysis to determine the rhetorical features of a sample of 83 LORs written by college faculty and administrators for a nationally competitive, postgraduate fellowship. This study finds five core moves expressed in its LOR sample: (1) sponsor positioning, (2) applicant performance, (3) applicant attributes, (4) future projection, and (5) audience appeals. Our discussion offers three key insights and provides macro-level takeaways in an effort to raise rhetorical awareness for LOR writers and requestors alike.
推荐信（LOR）是一种文体化的直接赞助形式，是一种修辞呼吁，它根据作者或赞助人的品格、权威和专长，赋予某人或某物以好感。为了响应斯韦尔斯关于 "揭示 "隐蔽体裁的修辞特征的号召，本研究采用了动作步骤分析法，以确定 83 篇由大学教师和行政人员撰写的LORs样本的修辞特征，这些LORs都是为申请国家竞争性研究生奖学金而撰写的。本研究发现，在 LOR 样本中表达了五个核心动作：(1) 赞助人定位，(2) 申请人表现，(3) 申请人属性，(4) 未来预测，以及 (5) 受众诉求。我们的讨论提出了三个关键见解，并提供了宏观层面的启示，旨在提高 LOR 作者和申请者的修辞意识。
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Pub Date : 2024-02-24DOI: 10.1177/07410883231222950
Xian Liao, Pengfei Zhao
Integrated writing (i.e., writing from sources) being a complex process, requires various linguistic and cognitive skills interacting with each other in a dynamic way. While recent studies have increasingly documented that writing processes are driven by a suite of cognitive abilities named executive function (EF), their roles in a literacy activity as complex as integrated writing remain underexplored. To address this core issue, the present study aimed to examine the direct and indirect effects of EF skills on students’ performance of a Chinese listening-reading-writing task. A total of 135 Chinese undergraduates were involved, completing a battery of tests, including a computerized Chinese integrated writing task measuring their writing performance and five EF tasks measuring inhibition, cognitive flexibility, working memory (auditory-verbal and visual-spatial), and planning skills respectively. Students’ integration activities were also recorded using a writing webpage. The path model indicated that inhibition, visual-spatial working memory, and planning skills could significantly and directly predict students’ writing performance and the visual-spatial working memory could indirectly predict writing performance via the mediation of source-text switches while listening. This study offers new preliminary insights into the association between EF and integrated writing among Chinese undergraduates; pedagogical implications for the teaching of integrated writing are also discussed.
综合写作（即根据资料写作）是一个复杂的过程，需要各种语言和认知技能以动态的方式相互作用。虽然最近的研究越来越多地证明写作过程是由一系列被称为执行功能（EF）的认知能力驱动的，但它们在像综合写作这样复杂的读写活动中的作用仍未得到充分探索。为了解决这一核心问题，本研究旨在考察执行功能对学生完成中文听读写任务的直接和间接影响。共有 135 名中国本科生参与了本研究，并完成了一系列测试，其中包括一项测量学生写作表现的计算机化中文综合写作任务，以及五项分别测量抑制、认知灵活性、工作记忆（听觉-言语和视觉-空间）和计划能力的 EF 任务。此外，还利用写作网页记录了学生的整合活动。路径模型表明，抑制能力、视觉空间工作记忆和计划能力可以显著地直接预测学生的写作成绩，而视觉空间工作记忆则可以通过听力时源文本切换的中介作用间接预测写作成绩。本研究初步揭示了EF与中国大学生综合写作之间的关系，并探讨了对综合写作教学的启示。
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Pub Date : 2024-02-24DOI: 10.1177/07410883231222953
Alisa Russell
Many genre scholars have focused on how individuals might build genre knowledge, generally understood as the enculturation processes, gradual stages, or ingredients that lead to one’s facility with a genre in context. While genre knowledge describes whether people can engage genres, it does not describe the various factors that shape how people may engage genres. By consolidating scholarship across Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), this article characterizes genre access as the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genre. Furthermore, this article integrates Network Gatekeeping Theory to develop a micro-level analytical approach for explicitly describing genre access. The author demonstrates and develops genre access as a concept and analytical approach with an illustrative example from a larger ethnographic project. Specifically, this illustrative example explores genre access for the Staff Report, a common genre in local government that proposes recommendations from individual departments to their elected City Commissioners for voted approval. Overall, the purpose of this article is (1) to consolidate and extend RGS’s exploration of the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genres; (2) to identify and name genre access as a fundamental aspect of how genres work; and (3) to provide a micro-level analytical language for researchers to tease out the various factors the shape genre access.
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Pub Date : 2024-02-24DOI: 10.1177/07410883231222954
Brad Jacobson
Developing academic writers must continually position themselves discursively as they negotiate institutional, programmatic, and disciplinary contexts. The inextricable relationship of writing and identities raises questions of access to social identities in schools, a particularly salient issue when considering the complexities and challenges of the high school to college transition for students from historically marginalized groups. This study focuses on Jain, a first-generation Latino college student, as he positions himself as a writer over 18 months in response to a range of school-based writing tasks. My analysis finds that Jain’s identity negotiations are influenced by a history of social positioning in schools, as his stance-making patterns and sense of self as a writer reflect resources and opportunities he encounters. This study adds to research demonstrating the role teachers and institutions can play in (in)validating certain aspects of students’ identities and influencing belonging in school spaces, indicating a need for educators and researchers across K-12 and college contexts to continue to challenge the standardization of school writing and the prevalence of assessments that limit curricula and constrain identities.
{"title":"Social Positioning and Learning Opportunities in One Student’s Textual Transition to College Writing","authors":"Brad Jacobson","doi":"10.1177/07410883231222954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07410883231222954","url":null,"abstract":"Developing academic writers must continually position themselves discursively as they negotiate institutional, programmatic, and disciplinary contexts. The inextricable relationship of writing and identities raises questions of access to social identities in schools, a particularly salient issue when considering the complexities and challenges of the high school to college transition for students from historically marginalized groups. This study focuses on Jain, a first-generation Latino college student, as he positions himself as a writer over 18 months in response to a range of school-based writing tasks. My analysis finds that Jain’s identity negotiations are influenced by a history of social positioning in schools, as his stance-making patterns and sense of self as a writer reflect resources and opportunities he encounters. This study adds to research demonstrating the role teachers and institutions can play in (in)validating certain aspects of students’ identities and influencing belonging in school spaces, indicating a need for educators and researchers across K-12 and college contexts to continue to challenge the standardization of school writing and the prevalence of assessments that limit curricula and constrain identities.","PeriodicalId":506839,"journal":{"name":"Written Communication","volume":"6 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140434383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-24DOI: 10.1177/07410883231222952
Joachim Grabowski, Moti Mathiebe
Assessing text quality as an indication of underlying skills still remains challenging; irrespective of the approach, many studies struggle with reliability or validity problems. If writing is considered problem-solving, a report must make the reader understand the described situation and call for its mental reconstruction. Therefore, text quality may not only comprise linguistic aspects but also the cognitive-functional power of a text. The presented study aims at exploring the functionality of students’ reporting texts in relation to general text-quality measures, using a corpus of accident reports written by German fifth- and ninth-graders (n = 277) prompted by a pictorial stimulus of a bike accident scenario. An online tool was developed in which 277 university students graphically reenacted the situation from one respective text according to the existence, position, and color of the involved elements. Thereafter, the match of the resulting spatial reconstructions with the original situation was assessed by two raters. While most subscales showed sufficiently high interrater reliabilities, the aggregated functionality score (α = .74) had medium-high correlations with other text-quality ratings and was comparably dependent on grade, education level, and linguistic family background. However, the correlational pattern, regression analysis, and factor analysis showed that the functionality score also contributed unique portions of variance to the assessment of writing skill that were not represented by rating measures. Moreover, the direct indication of whether a text allows for the reader’s adequate cognitive representation is evident. Altogether, the approach of indicating text functionality through practical understanding offers a sound, though empirically laborious, alternative for text-quality measurement. Results are discussed with regard to the didactical strategy according to which students can improve their writing when they observe whether others can make use of their texts.
{"title":"A Direct Functional Measure of Text Quality: Did the Reader Understand?","authors":"Joachim Grabowski, Moti Mathiebe","doi":"10.1177/07410883231222952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07410883231222952","url":null,"abstract":"Assessing text quality as an indication of underlying skills still remains challenging; irrespective of the approach, many studies struggle with reliability or validity problems. If writing is considered problem-solving, a report must make the reader understand the described situation and call for its mental reconstruction. Therefore, text quality may not only comprise linguistic aspects but also the cognitive-functional power of a text. The presented study aims at exploring the functionality of students’ reporting texts in relation to general text-quality measures, using a corpus of accident reports written by German fifth- and ninth-graders (n = 277) prompted by a pictorial stimulus of a bike accident scenario. An online tool was developed in which 277 university students graphically reenacted the situation from one respective text according to the existence, position, and color of the involved elements. Thereafter, the match of the resulting spatial reconstructions with the original situation was assessed by two raters. While most subscales showed sufficiently high interrater reliabilities, the aggregated functionality score (α = .74) had medium-high correlations with other text-quality ratings and was comparably dependent on grade, education level, and linguistic family background. However, the correlational pattern, regression analysis, and factor analysis showed that the functionality score also contributed unique portions of variance to the assessment of writing skill that were not represented by rating measures. Moreover, the direct indication of whether a text allows for the reader’s adequate cognitive representation is evident. Altogether, the approach of indicating text functionality through practical understanding offers a sound, though empirically laborious, alternative for text-quality measurement. Results are discussed with regard to the didactical strategy according to which students can improve their writing when they observe whether others can make use of their texts.","PeriodicalId":506839,"journal":{"name":"Written Communication","volume":"10 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140435093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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