David Kaufer

IText: Future Directions for Research on the Relationship between Information Technology and Writing.

Most people who use information technology (IT) every day use IT in text-centered interactions. In e-mail, we compose and read texts. On the Web, we read (and often compose) texts. And when we crea...Most people who use information technology (IT) every day use IT in text-centered interactions. In e-mail, we compose and read texts. On the Web, we read (and often compose) texts. And when we create and refer to the appointments and notes in our personal digital assistants, we use texts. Texts are deeply embedded in cultural, cognitive, and material arrangements that go back thousands of years. Information technologies with texts at their core are, by contrast, a relatively recent development. To participate with other information researchers in shaping the evolution of these ITexts, researchers and scholars must build on a knowledge base and articulate issues, a task undertaken in this article. The authors begin by reviewing the existing foundations for a research program in IText and then scope out issues for research over the next five to seven years. They direct particular attention to the evolving character of ITexts and to their impact on society. By undertaking this research, the authors urge the continuing evolution of technologies of text.

Novelty in Academic Writing

Authorial newness or innovation has become a subject of growing interest in the sociology of science. We review some of this literature and elaborate constituents of a theory of authorial novelty. We also discuss some parameters that account for the changing assumptions of novelty across disciplinary communities. Finally, we show that many of the insights required in a parameterized theory of newness have not yet made their way into theories of rhetoric or written composition.

Some Concepts and Axioms about Communication Proximate and at a Distance

An important element of written and other technological forms of communication is that they accommodate “distance” between sender and receiver in a way proximate communication does not. Despite its importance, the notion of distance has remained pretty much undeveloped in theories of written communication, and the reference points for developing it have remained scattered across various, often noninteractive, literatures such as social theory, network theory, knowledge representation, and postmodernism. Synthesizing across these diverse literatures, we formulate a set of concepts and axioms that lays down some baselines for the general communication context, proximate or at a distance. Our baseline concepts include, among others, relative similarity, signature, reach, and concurrency. We then move beyond these baselines to concepts and axioms that accommodate the specialized distance characteristics of written (also print and electronic) communication. These concepts include asynchronicity, durability, and multiplicity. We conclude by discussing how these concepts and axioms matter to (a) the theoretical modeling of proximate and written systems of communication (including print and electronic systems); and (b) the educational challenge of teaching communication at a distance in the proximate space of the writing classroom.

Presence and Global Presence in Genres of Self-Presentation: A Framework for Comparative Analysis

We review Perelman and Olbrechts-Tytecas original formulation of presence as a technique of argument associated primarily with the selection of individual rhetorical elements, and the recent extension of the notion by Gross and Dearin, where presence is understood as a second-order effect that denotes the systematic expression and inhibition of patterns of rhetorical elements across an entire text or rhetorical artifact. We argue for an additional extension to this more global notion of presence, one that makes it not only global within a text or class of texts, but also comparative, allowing the analyst to make rigorous comparisons of expressed and inhibited rhetorical patterns across different texts, or different classes of texts, including different rhetorical genres. A return to the original conception of presence allows us to make this extension, and we illustrate global presence within this newly proposed comparative framework by analyzing two genres of self-presentation in classroom practice: the cover letter and the self-portrait. We show the close ties between global presence and genre as ways of theorizing deep similarities across texts.

Genre variation and minority ethnic identity: exploring the ‘personal profile’ in Indian American community publications:

Indian Americans, along with other Asian American groups, are victims of the ‘model minority’ stereotype in American public discourse. This article explores the relationship between this stereotype and the nature of personal profiles published in the Indian American community. To explore the relationship systematically, I employed a controlled comparison between profiles in Indian American publications and a ‘control’ minority whose various identities are less directly implicated in this stereotype. A corpus study was undertaken involving the coding and analysis of 135 profiles, divided between Indian American and African American community publications. The African American publications, including Caribbean and Continental African Americans, functioned as controls because of the low or irrelevant standing of Americans of African descent on this stereotype. Results show that profiles from the Indian American publications reinforce the high standing of Indian Americans on the stereotype, in contrast to those of the African American controls, which show little sensitivity to the stereotype one way or another. I explore reasons why Indian American publications reinforce the stereotype, in spite of the negative implications that follow from its status as a stereotype, and suggest that these reasons have functional value for cross-generational communication in the Indian American community.

Teaching Language Awareness in Rhetorical Choice Using IText and Visualization in Classroom Genre Assignments

This article introduces an IText system the authors built to enhance student practice in language awareness within commonly taught written genres (e.g., self-portraits, profiles, scenic writing, narratives, instructions, and arguments). The system provides text visualization and analysis that seek to increase students’ sensitivity to the rhetorical and whole-text implications of the small runs of language they read and write. The authors describe the way the system can create possibilities for classroom discourse and discussion about student writing that seem harder to reproduce in traditional writing classrooms. They also describe the limitations of the current system for wide-scale use and its future prospects.

Foregrounding norms and ironic communication

Researchers in literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, and rhetoric have identified three principal communicative functions of irony: (1) to give emphasis or reinforcement to the values of a friendly listener, (2) to attack or ridicule the values of an hostile or unsuspecting listener, and (3) to undermine an opponents intellectual position. This essay goes further by (7) arguing that a process called the “foregrounding of norms” is crucial to ironic comprehension and (2) arguing that differences among these three ironic outcomes owe to differences in the target audiences personal relation to these norms as well as to the type of norms foregrounded.

The War on Terror through Arab-American Eyes: The Arab-American Press as a Rhetorical Counterpublic

This article employs theories of counterpublics to investigate the Arab-American press before and after 9/11 as a counterpublic to the American war on terror. We use Squiress categorization of counterpublics as (1) assimilative enclaves, (2) satellites seeking separation, or (3) resistant counterpublics, actively dissenting. Using a corpus of 113 articles from Arab American News, we argue that the Arab-American press circulated stories consistent with (1) and (2) but not (3). We conclude that a strategy of active resistance required greater standing of the Arab-American point of view in mainstream American thought than Arab-Americans enjoyed.

Discriminating political styles as genres : A corpus study exploring Hariman's theory of political style

Abstract Five years apart, Hariman (1995) and Fairclough (2000) produced major theoretical statements about political language and style. Their work grew out of different intellectual traditions and took on different subject matters. Hariman, drawing on the textual criticism model of American rhetorical studies, defined style as a cultural repertoire of persuasive techniques that can work across texts, media, institutions, and other modes of communication. He analyzed four major styles—realist, republican, courtly, and bureaucratic—that have had significant literary exposition and political effect. Fairclough, writing from the tradition of critical discourse analysis, focused more narrowly on the political style of Tony Blair and New Labour, and studied whether New Labour represented an emergent new language distinct from older instantiations of Labour Party rhetoric. Important for this analysis is Faircloughs distinction between political style and genre, which motivated a methodology combining theoretical analysis and corpus analysis. We show how the same combination of methods can illuminate Harimans theory, particularly in respect to the problem its theoretical sophistication presents for application through close reading of individual texts. The corpus study validates or refines many of Harimans central claims, and provides one model for better coordination of two important programs of research on political discourse.

Collaborative Argument across the Visual-Verbal Interface.

The essay begins with an intellectual framework for describing a visual‐verbal interface. Applying the implications of the framework to collaborative work, the authors illustrate ways in which they used this framework to observe and teach collaborative teams of graphic designers.