Christine M. Tardy

A Genre System View of the Funding of Academic Research

For many researchers, grant proposals are a high-stakes genre crucial to their work; this pivotal genre does not exist in isolation but as part of a complex reticulation of genres that interact to form a genre system. This article explores the genre system of academic research funding in terms of the following questions: (a) What is the nature of the genre system of grant funding? (b) What are the roles and functions of that system? and (c) What does exploration of the system reveal about genre knowledge and how writers develop such knowledge? Findings suggest that grant writing is fundamentally a social activity, that the intertextual networks of the genre system serve to navigate writers through that system and to build the writers’ knowledge of the system, and that knowledge of a genre system may differ in important ways from knowledge of an isolated genre.

Current Conceptions of Voice

Providing an overview to the concept of voice is no simple feat. It is a term most writers have heard or used, perhaps even in their early days of writing, and that many have strong feelings about, whether positive or negative. I myself avoided its use for many years, leery of its imprecise meaning and its often literary and aesthetic overtones. Indeed, one of the thorniest issues with the notion of voice is the broad range of meanings ascribed to it. Metaphorical interpretations are multiple and subject to arguments about how far the metaphor can accurately be extended. It is perhaps this polysemous nature of voice that has made it a somewhat controversial concept in academic writing, and surely this definitional ambiguity has as well contributed to scholarly disputes over the role it should play in the academic writing classroom (e.g. Elbow, 1999; Ramanathan and Atkinson, 1999; Stapleton, 2002; Helms-Park and Stapleton, 2003; Matsuda and Tardy, 2007; Stapleton and Helms-Park, 2008).

`Press 1 for English': textual and ideological networks in a newspaper debate on US language policy:

This article examines 180 texts that together form a newspaper-mediated debate of language policy in reaction to US Senate legislation declaring English the national language of the United States. Drawing on theories of genre networks and intertextuality, the article examines the ways in which dominant texts and ideologies within this corpus of texts are taken up, dropped, and perpetuated through linked genres over a 37-day period. The analysis begins by describing the social backdrop in which the debate occurred, the Senate legislation, and the Senate discussion. Next, the article details the newspaper framing of the Senate legislation and the subsequent uptake of an assimilationist ideology, through a range of discursive strategies employed by both newspaper writers and readers.

We Are All Reviewer #2: A Window into the Secret World of Peer Review

Reviewers play a key role in scholarly publishing, with the image of the peer reviewer often looming large in the process. For newer scholars, the anonymous peer reviewer can be a somewhat mysterious and intimidating figure. This chapter aims to demystify this figure by examining the gatekeeping process through the reviewer’s perspective. I share an overview of the publication process and the reviewer’s role in it, and then delve into issues that junior scholars commonly encounter as they become socialized into publication norms and practices. The chapter includes discussion of common pitfalls in this process for newer writers and offers recommendations, drawing on existing research as well as my personal experiences as a reviewer and journal editor.