While writing is a critical part of the medical profession, longitudinal studies exploring the social apprenticeship and genre knowledge development of medical practitioners are almost nonexistent. Through interviews and writing samples, this article traces a 10-year journey of one writer's engagement with the Patient SOAP note, following his…

Using rhetorical genre theory, the authors theorize the engineering design process as a type of embodied genre enacted through typified performances of bodies engaged with discourses, texts, and objects in genre-rich spaces of design activity. The authors illustrate this through an analysis of ethnographic data from an engineering design course to…

Although retrospective project reports are common in the materials development literature, accounts of textbook writing sessions are rare; so too are accounts of open textbook production. Open textbooks are learning resources that are free to use and oftentimes adapt by virtue of their copyright permissions. The authors used concurrent…

This article reports on a study that examined papers written by graduate students in the Physical Seminary course at Johns Hopkins University (1892-1913) to investigate how students reused various visuals of the interferometer to construct narratives of late-19th-century Ether research. Their representations of the interferometer focused on the…

Assessing text quality as an indication of underlying skills still remains challenging; irrespective of the approach, many studies struggle with reliability or validity problems. If writing is considered problem-solving, a report must make the reader understand the described situation and call for its mental reconstruction. Therefore, text quality…

Drawing on a three-year ethnographically oriented study exploring contemporary professional social work writing, this article focuses on a key concern: the amount of time taken up with writing, or "paperwork." We explore the relationship between time and professional social work writing in three key ways: (a) as a discrete, measurable…

At a multinational company, daily written communication between staff, supervisors, customers, and suppliers is frequently conducted using digital tools (e.g., emails, smartphones, and texting applications) often across multiple nationally, linguistically, and conceptually defined borders. Determining digital tools' impact on intercultural…

In science disciplines, students need sufficient and well-designed support to successfully gain writing competence along the different stages of their writing development. This study examines effective inquiry-based writing pedagogies and the contextualization of scientific writing instruction for supporting student writers in the scientific…

In this article, I argue that technical reporting and documentation processes function to mitigate uncertainty and enable complex systems in the endeavor of big science. The argument draws on two years of field research investigating technical reporting and documentation processes at a federally funded supercomputing center dedicated to scientific…

Drawing on a text-based ethnography of digital writing in a biology laboratory, this article examines the text trajectory of a scientific manuscript and a scientific team's related writing for public audiences, including for citizen scientists. Using data drawn from texts, observations, interviews, and related artifacts, the author examines how…

In an increasingly globalized world, writing courses, situated as they are in local institutional and rhetorical contexts, need to prepare writers for global writing situations. Taking introductory technical communication in the United States as a case study, this article describes how and to what extent global perspectives are incorporated into…

According to research in educational psychology, advance organizers lead to better learning and recall of information. In this research, the authors explored advance organizers from a business perspective, where larger documents are read under time pressure. Graphic and verbal advance organizers were manipulated into six versions of an advisory…

The history of writing to learn college science is tied to the development of laboratory methods. Such student-centered learning was widely hailed in the 1890s as student enrollments increased dramatically and a backlash grew against lecture and recitation methods. However, as the author shows using archival examples from Dartmouth College,…

Presents a case study of several environmental impact statements (EISs) produced by the Bureau of Land Management. Reveals that to determine a document's effectiveness, its social and cultural context must be considered, along with characteristics of the text's organization and style. Recommends a genre theory approach. (MM)

Examines how conflicts between management and workers over division of labor are enacted in two manuals--the official manual operationalizing Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations and a "translation" of the official manual--governing tax examiners' work in an IRS Service Center. Finds that systemic differences between the manuals…