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…

Metadiscourse guides how readers interact with a text and process the information they find. Because texts differ in purpose and audience, so do patterns of metadiscourse use. This research examines the patterns of metadiscourse use in topic-based writing, developed following a structured authoring method. The resulting writing is modular,…

Science reporting in the media often involves contested issues, such as, for example, biotechnology, climate change, and, more recently, geoengineering. The reporter's framing of the issue is likely to influence readers' perception of it. The notion of framing is related to how individuals and groups perceive and communicate about the…

This article examines students' literacy practices during Mass and other Catholic religious services in a multilingual, multiethnic urban Catholic school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It discusses three dimensions of their literacy practice: (a) how parents, teachers, and priests draw on the tradition of Catholic schooling and ritual to structure…

Although keystroke logging promises to provide a valuable tool for writing research, it can often be difficult to relate logs to underlying processes. This article describes the procedures and measures that the authors developed to analyze a sample of 80 keystroke logs, with a view to achieving a better alignment between keystroke-logging measures…

This article explores the indexicality (the ideological process that links language and identity) of "standard" edited American English and the ideologies (specifically, standard language ideology and Whiteness) that work to create and justify common patterns that associate privileged White students with written standardness and that disassociate…

The authors suggest that writing should be conceived of not only as a verbal activity but also as a visuospatial activity, in which writers process and construct visuospatial mental representations. After briefly describing research on visuospatial cognition, they look at how cognitive researchers have investigated the visuospatial dimension of…

Writers typically produce their writing in bursts. In this article, the authors examine written language bursts in a sample of 33 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment. Comparisons of the children with specific language impairment with an age-matched group of typically developing children (n = 33) and a group of younger,…

This study examines the relationship between patterns of cognitive self-regulatory activities and the quality of texts produced by adolescent struggling writers (N = 51). A think-aloud study was conducted involving analyses of self-regulatory activities concerning planning, formulating, monitoring, revising, and evaluating. The study shows that…

Recent research has emphasized the close connections between writing and the construction of an author's identity. While academic contexts privilege certain ways of making meanings and so restrict what resources participants can bring from their past experiences, we can also see these writing conventions as a repertoire of options that allow…

Studies of blind manuscript review have illustrated that readers often form impressions of or speculate about unknown authors' identities in the manuscript review task. In this article, the authors extend that work by examining the discursive and nondiscursive features that play a role in readers' active construction of author voice. Through a…

An extensive body of scholarship has documented the way disciplinary texts and activities are produced and mediated through their relationship to a wide array of extradisciplinary discourses. This article seeks to complement and extend that line of work by drawing upon Witte's (1992) notion of intertext to address the way disciplinary activities…

Those who focus on the study of visual information continue to search for effective ways to conceptualize that inquiry. However, many visual examples are better categorized as visual/verbal collaboration, complicating analysis. When analysis is based on the assumption that visual and verbal modalities perform in similar ways, important…

Investigates readers' perceptions of bias in a Colorado ballot booklet intended to explain a tax cut proposal. Finds that readers were more likely to perceive the ballot booklet to be biased in favor of the proposed tax measure than against it. (SC)

Examines the relationship between current concepts of reading processes and contemporary theories of literary response. Argues that text-based reading theories are isomorphic with the New Criticism, and that reader-based theories of reading are isomorphic with reader-response criticism. Maintains that literary theory ignores interactive…