Copyright (c) 2009 University of Nebraska - Lincoln All rights reserved. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs Recent documents in Faculty Publications -- Department of English en-us Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:15:47 PST 3600 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/72 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/72 Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:14:40 PST Mohan Limaye presents two important concerns in his insightful response to my article ["Categorizing Professional Discourse: Engineering, Administrative, and Technical/Professional Writing," Journal of Business and Technical Communication 6:1 (January 1992), pp. 5-37]. I wish to comment on these points and also to submit a correction to the text of the article. Barbara Couture http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/71 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/71 Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:13:07 PST Rhetorical categories can and should be developed by scholars of professional writing to identify how values held within professions constrain the ways discourse is interpreted in organizational settings. Empirical research (conducted by the author and others), discourse theory, and pedagogical practice in professional writing strongly suggest that at least three categories of professional writing exist: engineering, administrative, and technical/professional writing. The author demonstrates this claim and distinguishes the characteristics of these three categories. Engineering writing is shown to respond to professional values of scientific objectivity and professional judgment as well as to corporate interests. Administrative writing reflects the locus of decision-making authority and promotes institutional identity. Technical/professional writing aims to accommodate audience needs through complying with professional readability standards. Future research should focus on defining the characteristics of these varieties more precisely. Articulated definitions of these three varieties of professional writing can help scholars and practitioners better understand how discourse is framed and interpreted in organizational settings. Barbara Couture http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/70 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/70 Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:11:41 PST We have come a long way in studies of writers in professional settings, learning with each exploration how these behaviors differ from and relate to the processes we have taught beginning writers in our classroom. Studies of these processes have become increasingly more sophisticated since Selzer (1983) treated researchers to his intriguing account of a technical writer's composing processes. Next, we saw case studies of writers designed to produce real-world writing contexts for students--such as Cases for Technical and Professional Writing, which I coauthored with Rymer Goldstein (1985)--and then more detailed descriptions of how writers learn to become proficient communicators in their profession, such as Winsor's (1996) Writing Like an Engineer. Running apace with these studies of individual writers, several researchers now have investigated the complicated role of collaboration in workplace writing-- a dynamic not desired or promoted in literary writing or academic writing in the humanities--conducting studies of specific writer-supervisor relationships, the peer-review process of editing complex documents, and the effects of electronic writing tools on promoting and directing collaborative writing processes. But even though we have come a long way in our studies of writers in professional settings, I wonder whether the conclusions drawn from such research can truly help advance our knowledge about how to improve professional writing practice and its teaching. ... Instructors who are teaching future teachers of technical and professional writing would find Cross's study a valuable tool to show students who have not written in a professional context what that setting is like. Barbara Couture http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/69 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/69 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:13:27 PST What are the implications of the terms we use to describe large-scale text-based electronic scholarship, especially undertakings that share some of the ambitions and methods of the traditional multi-volume scholarly edition? And how do the conceptions inherent in these choices of language frame and perhaps limit what we attempt? How do terms such as edition, project, database, archive, and thematic research collection relate to the past, present, and future of textual studies? Kenneth M. Price considers how current terms describing digital scholarship both clarify and obscure our collective enterprise. Price argues that the terms we use have more than expressive importance. The shorthand we invoke when explaining our work to others shapes how we conceive of and also how we position digital scholarship. Kenneth M. Price http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/68 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/68 Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:38:13 PST This book is about written language functions and about written language research. The essays here are united in their investigation of language as social action-an approach to textual study that crosses traditional boundaries of discipline and method to uncover what written language is, how it works, how it affects readers, and what it demands of authors. The functional approaches to written text presented here are most closely related to the work of scholars from the so-called London School of Linguistics as reinterpreted in the systemic linguistics of Michael Halliday and his followers. The London School challenged investigations of language in isolation, claiming that our understanding of meaning in text is dependent on the 'context of situation,' a concept promulgated by Malinowski ([I9231 1949) and meaning the immediate textual and extra-textual context in which an utterance is performed. This concept was later expanded by both Malinowski (1935) and Firth ([I9351 1957) to refer to the entire cultural environment encompassing a communication event. Both Firth and Malinowski believed that meaning in language arises primarily out of speakers' and listeners' recognition of conventional social situations which are associated with linguistic choice. Halliday agrees with this central premise but also asserts that language itself is as central to meaning as the social activity it reflects. It allows us to achieve a wide variety of meaning potential within a given context: 'Language not only serves to facilitate and support other modes of social action that constitute its environment, but also actively creates an environment of its own, so making possible all the imaginative modes of meaning, from backyard gossip to narrative fiction and epic poetry.' In short, while language is configured-in part by the social action it supports, it can also create a social context within which it means: 'As we learn how to mean, we learn to predict each [language and context] from the other' (Halliday 1978: 3). Halliday conflates textual and contextual meaning, defining language as SOCIAL SEMIOTIC. This view of language as social semiotic has dramatic consequences for scholarly investigation of written discourse. If we accept it, then we must break down barriers within traditional investigatory fields that limit our examination of language. Barbara Couture http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/67 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/67 Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:35:51 PST As scholars and writers, we no doubt have more than once uttered 'I tried to write that piece today, but I didn't have any good ideas.' And oddly enough that lament often follows tireless sessions when we have generated lots and lots of ideas on paper, but none we regard as 'good.' Though the problem of distinguishing a 'good' idea in writing has plagued generations of writers and many more readers, scholars have not yet produced a FUNCTIONAL DESCRIPTION of the written communication of a valued idea. In my view, a functional description of effective ideation in written text should balance expectations for completeness and utility. A COMPLETE description would reflect all the kinds of semantic choice realized in any kind of actual written discourse that conveys ideas effectively in any kind of situation. (We are a long way from a 'complete' description of this kind; nevertheless, scholars of written discourse in a variety of settings have identified several features that support and clarify the communication of ideas.) A USEFUL description would have heuristic value for writers, aiding their efforts to generate ideas that communicate effectively for themselves and to their readers. They can appeal to many handbooks advising how to organize literary and expository texts and ensure audience appeal, but none that I have seen provide a comprehensive, manageable heuristic for effective ideation. In this chapter, I define effective textual ideation and propose a functional scale of linguistic features that promote it. My scale describes effective ideation as a function of linguistic choice, ranging from more elliptical to more explicit expression. In developing this scale, I begin from the premise that an effective idea in text conveys a message about a topic with clarity and exigence for both the writer and reader in a given context. Textual scholarship in several disciplines suggests that clarity and exigence are addressed through two kinds of meaning systems: TEXTUAL LOGIC and SEMIOTIC CONVENTION. These two systems are realized in written text through a range of grammatical and lexical features that make more or less explicit reference to their underlying structures. Experimental modeling suggests that we can explain effective textual ideation by analyzing on an 'explicitness' scale those linguistic choices that convey conceptual logic and contextualize the discourse. As my analysis of a sample written text shows, a network describing effective ideation must account for both kinds of semantic systems in order to accurately explain ideation in written text and to have heuristic utility for writers. Barbara Couture http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/66 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/66 Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:33:05 PST Approximately 325 bibliographical references (15 pages) on public intrusions into private lives. Barbara Couture http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/65 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/65 Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:29:01 PST "I tried it, but I didn't inhale." It is hard not to smile at the irony of former president Bill Clinton's wan attempt to place himself on the right side of the law in public when disclosing his private use of marijuana. And the irony is doubly inflected for us, knowing--as we do now--about his duplicitous public admission that he never "had sex" with Monica Lewinsky. Perhaps there is no figure in American life for whom private life and public rhetoric are more intertwined than for our nation's president. This consequence of public life in America's most visible office is well known and well accepted. Lately, the conflation of private life with public rhetoric has become the norm for many of us in far less visible positions, with interesting and perhaps problematic consequences. Some intrusions of public discourse into private life are legislated and involuntary: none of us who travel by air nowadays escape the public questions of a stranger about the contents of our baggage, questions often accompanied by a search of our most intimate personal belongings--including our persons!--amid a crowd of onlookers. Other such intrusions are voluntary: some of us cheerfully encourage the ubiquitous distribution of our private dalliances in public chat rooms on the Internet, for instance. Barbara Couture http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/64 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/64 Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:12:28 PDT This is the first publication of Jeremy Bentham's essay on "Paederasty," written about 1785, The essay, which runs to over 60 manuscript pages, is the first known argument for homosexual law reform in England. Bentham advocates the decriminalization of sodomy, which in his day was punished by hanging. He argues that homosexual acts do not "weaken" men, or threaten population or marriage, and documents their prevalence in ancient Greece and Rome. Bentham opposes punishment on utilitarian grounds and attacks ascetic sexual morality. In the preceding article the editor's introduction discussed the essay in the light of 18th-century legal opinion and quoted Bentham's manuscript notes that reveal his anxieties about expressing his views. Jeremy Bentham http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/63 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/63 Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:12:26 PDT In Dicken's Bleak House the nineteenth-century social order is portrayed with a power and vividness elsewhere unmatched in English fiction. Decaying slums with their filthy tenants, a sedately proud but hopelessly outmoded aristocracy, lawyers and clients lost in a fog of legal obfuscation, a confused and silly parliament engaged in a perpetual game of musical chairs; the magnitude of these symptoms of social distress is impressive, and equaled only by the completeness of the failure of those in power to deal with them. Whatever the dramatic weaknesses and confusions of the book, this satirical image of society is communicated to the reader with unforgettable brilliance, chiefly through a wealth of descriptive detail that is perhaps subtler and more suggestive than in any other by Dickens. The purpose of this essay is first to relate this social satire to what I believe to be the central theme of Bleak House and then to show how the incidental detail, functioning through symbolism and fantasy, sharpens, develops, and intensifies the novel's satiric meaning. Louis Crompton