ABSTRACT
The Ethnography of Communication, the Rhetoric of the Disciplines and Professions, English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) are loosely associated fields that have emerged over the past four decades and that have substantive interests in communicative practices of disciplinary and professional communities. From Toulmin’s (1958) identification of field-specific forms of reasoning and argumentation to Hymes’ (1971) notion that competence must be seen as communicative rather than linguistic and as grounded in diverse speech communities rather than national languages, these fields have been formed in opposition to the structuralist search for, or indeed assumption of, universal systems of rules that govern communication, thought, and action. However, rather than questioning the basic structuralist trope that abstract rule systems govern performance, these fields have generally challenged structuralist traditions on two other fronts. They have expanded the range of phenomena to be explained (e.g., rules of language use as well as language form), and they have multiplied the number and shrunk the jurisdictions of those abstract systemic governors. This balkanization of national and global systems of logic and language into speech and discourse communities has prompted close attention to, and real progress in, studies of communication, discourse, and rhetoric. However, it has also left intact a number of structuralist ways of doing business. Located on the borders of these fields, I began research on academic writing to explore the complex intersections of writing, response, classroom discourse, and disciplinary enculturation that arise as texts are imagined, produced, read, and deployed within graduate programs in the academy.
