The Deliberative Process: An Analysis from Three Perspectives

Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres, 2012

The ability to evaluate one's material and establish a connection with readers is now acknowledged to be a key feature of successful academic writing . As other authors in this collection have noted, academic argument involves presenting a position on things that matter to a discipline and this expression of a point of view has to be accomplished in a context of certain community and genre conventions. These conventions simultaneously place constraints on individual

Across the Disciplines, 2013

A comparison of published statements about the source-use skills of sophomores in the 1990s and those revealed by the more recent Citation Project study of researched writing suggests that many of the assumptions driving pedagogy, policy, and curricula need to be revised and that faculty working across the disciplines should work with students on reading and source-use skills when they assign researched writing. The Citation Project studied research papers by 174 first-year students at 16 US colleges and universities, producing a data-based portrait of student reading and source-use skills. Those students work from one or two sentences in 94% of their citations, cite the first or second page of their sources 70% of the time, and cite only 24% of their sources more than twice. While 78% of the papers include at least one incidence of paraphrase, 52% include at least one incidence of patchwriting, with students moving back and forth between the two within the same paragraph. Like earlier small-scale and single-institution studies, this research presents an image of students moving into their sophomore year only sometimes demonstrating expert reading and still mostly shaping what they read and write "at the point of utterance." They need help to manipulate sources into academic conversations and arguments. The Typical Sophomore Reader of 1990 In 1990, Margaret Kantz published a description of "a typical college sophomore," whom she named Shirley. Shirley, she tells us, is "a composite derived from published research, from my own memories of being a student, and from students whom I have taught at an open admissions community college and at both public and private universities" (p. 74). Shirley is "a typical college student with an average academic preparation" she assures us (p. 75). Now if Shirley was a sophomore in college in 1990, it is just possible to imagine that her daughter is a sophomore in 2012, entering a WAC class after successfully completing first-year writing. Let's call her Ashley, the most popular girls' name in

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2016

When reading educators encounter a student's interpretation of a text that is different than that which an author may have intended, they have to determine if such an interpretation is valid according to their criteria for students. Much of this rests with educators ' conceptions of the reading process and the role of the reader in the interpretation of a text. If educators recognize the role that students ' background knowledge plays in the interpretation of a text and the potential for valid interpretations that may differ from that of the author, then through what criteria do educators evaluate and judge students ' interpretations? The main criterion will be a student's ability to produce textual evidence in support of his or her interpretation. A. Collins, J. S. Brown, K. M. Larkin, L. M. Phillips and Kang offer various models of thinking through which students may critically examine their own

Applied Linguistics, 2002

Successful academic writing involves both clear exposition and appropriate audience relationships, but the use of directives potentially undermines the harmony of such relationships. Because they instruct the reader to perform an action or to see things in a way determined by the writer, directives are potentially risky devices which are often regarded as bald-on-record threats to face . The widespread use of this feature in academic writing however suggests a more complex rhetorical picture. In this paper I explore the use of directives through an analysis of a 2.5 million word corpus of published articles, textbooks, and L2 student essays, and through interviews with insider informants on their perceptions and practices. The study reveals that directives are used for very dierent strategic purposes and indicates considerable variations in the ways they are employed across genres and disciplines. The weight of imposition carried by directives crucially depends on these purposes and participants' perceptions of rhetorical context. The view that academic writing is an interactive accomplishment is now well established. A writer's development of an appropriate relationship with his or her readers is widely seen as central to eective academic persuasion as writers seek to balance claims for the signi®cance, originality, and correctness of their work against the convictions and expectations of their readers. Utterances must both carry appropriate authority and engage readers in ways that they are likely to ®nd both credible and persuasive. A growing literature has attempted to show how features such as hedges ), citations (Thompson and Ye 1991), pronouns (Kuo 1999 and stance markers (Hyland 1999) are deployed to create rapport. These studies point to the need for writers to establish relatively harmonious connections with their readers, taking their views, beliefs, and expectations into account and strategically addressing them as intelligent equals in a shared disciplinary endeavour.