In this article, we explore how teachers who make their work public through talk and texts may find their composing complicated by issues of authority. These public composing acts include drafting articles, preparing workshop presentations, authoring op-ed pieces and letters to the editor, developing book manuscripts--creating any of the spoken…

Networked electronic text--fragmentary, mutable, connected, and instantly accessible from any computer or handheld device--challenges traditional notions of textual coherence and composition, offering affordances far beyond those possible in traditional, print-based texts, including those made available electronically. Such texts become tools,…

This article, using data from a year-long study of writing processes in an institutional context, looks at the demands made on writers in workplace environments as they make requests of their colleagues. Building on Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, the study takes a view of context as being a key factor in framing requests, in addition…