Argues that writing teachers ultimately need to view their prompts rhetorically. Argues that writing teachers should consider carefully the role that students have as audiences, writing audience responses to teachers' texts through their essays. Argues that a rhetorical analysis of the prompt will help students criticize the cues of a real-world…

In their recent article, "Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities," Devitt, Bawarshi, and Reiff maintain that genre analysis can enable outsiders to a discourse community "to connect what community members know and do with what they say and how they say it--their language practices" (542). Genre analysis,…