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Using sample student analyses of online paper mill Web sites, student survey responses, and existing scholarship on plagiarism, authorship, and intellectual property, this article examines how the consumerist rhetoric of the online paper mills construes academic writing as a commodity for sale, and why such rhetoric appeals to students in first-year composition, whose cultural disconnect from the academic system of authorship increasingly leads them to patronize these sites.

Presents a series of alternatives to the modernist research paper: the argumentative research paper, the personal research paper, the research essay, and the multi-genre/media/disciplinary/cultural research paper. Addresses theoretical implications of alternative research writing strategies. (NH)

In this article, the author offers his critiques on Downs and Wardle's course, Introduction to Writing Studies. Downs and Wardle use their course to alert students to the very misconceptions that prompt the shift from "teaching writing" to "teaching about writing"--namely the inability of first-year composition courses to make good on the pledge to identify and instruct a transferable, universal academic discourse. The author contends that people must not assume that the awareness "teaching about writing" offers will transfer.

This article presents several excerpts from an article written by Joseph Janangelo titled "Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive Hypertexts." In his article, Janangelo suggested that Cornell's work and ideas about composing model intelligent ways to composing persuasive nonsequential text. Janangelo also wondered if the use of hypertexts programs at K-12 levels is leading students to compose with an understanding that linear argumentation is not the only credible form that academic writing can take. This article also presents the critiques provided by Anne Frances Wysocki, Collin Gifford Brooke, and Jeff Rice on Janangelo's article.

One way of helping faculty understand the integral role of writing in their various disciplines is to present disciplines as ways of doing, which links ways of knowing and writing in the disciplines. Ways of doing identified by faculty are used to describe broader generic and disciplinary structures, metagenres, and metadisciplines. The author first explores the ties that link ways of knowing, doing, and writing in the disciplines and describes a procedure to guide faculty in identifying ways of doing in their disciplines. Next, the author places these ways of knowing, doing, and writing in the context of North American genre theory, particularly as applied by Carolyn R. Miller, Charles Bazerman, and David R. Russell. Finally, this project is placed within a critique of the modern university and its disciplinary structures of knowledge and consider the idea of knowing, doing, and writing in the disciplines as a basis for postdisciplinary inquiry. Appended are sample program outcome documents.

In this article, I assert that plagiarism is a literacy practice that involves social relationships, attitudes, and values as much as it involves rules of citation and students' texts. In addition, I show how plagiarism is complicated by a discourse about academic dishonesty, and I consider the implications that recognizing such complexity has for teaching. (Contains 1 note.)

Why do some students prosper as college writers, moving forward with their writing, while others lose interest? In this essay we explore some of the paradoxes of writing development by focusing on the central role the freshman year plays in this development. We argue that students who make the greatest gains as writers throughout college (1) initially accept their status as novices and (2) see in writing a larger purpose than fulfilling an assignment. Based on the evidence of our longitudinal study, we conclude that the story of the freshman year is not one of dramatic changes on paper; it is the story of changes within the writers themselves.

Discusses Mary Augusta Jordan's "Correct Writing and Speaking," a rhetoric text authored for women who studied writing and speaking outside of the formal academy. Suggests that the text's attention to the history of the English language and the evolution of arbitrary standards imposed by cultural forces makes it subversively feminist. (RS)

Presents an extended analogy between different styles of gardening (neat, even rows of vegetables versus scattering of flowers) and different styles of writing (academic versus personal essay). Shows that genre boundaries are as questionable as gender boundaries and that all writing is a means of creating self, not for expressing a self that already exists. (RS)

Presents the text of an account of the author's research. Notes that the text's four layers (scientific report, reflective analysis, personal history, and deliberative appeal) are each indispensable yet individually inadequate to the task. Considers the tensions among possible accounts of the research and what these tensions say about the reading and writing processes of the academy. (RS)

Examines unconventional interpretations given to a poem by a student in a remedial college writing class. Argues that facilitating an underprepared student's entry into the academic community is compromised by efforts to channel student discourse into more common patterns. Calls for an instructional model that places student knowledge making at its center. (SG)

Offers a modest new taxonomy for rhetorical heuristics for arrangement, one of the five major divisions of classical rhetoric. Suggests schemes suitable for academic discourse, such as "obvious before remarkable,""literal before symbolic," and "explanation before complication." Supplies a limited theoretical context for the schemes. (RS)