Recent historical examinations of nonliterary, nontheoretical texts within their activity settings have aimed to identify the historically developed communicative and rhetorical resources currently available to writers and to reveal the dynamics of the formation, use, and evolution of those resources. These studies, in examining communal literate…

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled "Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School." In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every…

The three authors writing on Bakhtins essay, "Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar" -- Farmer, Halasek, and Williams -- respond to one another, and Bazerman provides a summative comment in the paragraphs that follow. The responses explore further some of Bakhtins thoughts concerning rhetoric and its relation to stylistics and his use…

Genres, although aligning people to joint activity and joint attention, shape the substantive material or information represented within the bounded space of the text. Each genre creates a space that prompts the production of particular kinds of information to populate that space. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 that mandated the…

Reports on the reading processes of seven research physicists using data gathered from a series of interviews and observations. Reveals reading processes permeated with individual purposes and schema. (FL)