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Why don’t more women become scientists? And why do those who do become scientists often face more difficulties than their male counterparts? Every year, about a quarter of a million young men and women in the United States receive their first academic degree in science, mathematics, or engineering. A small fraction will eventually become research scientists. But many who start out with that goal fail to reach it––for reasons that may have less to do with their scientific ability than with their gender.  

Drawing on a wealth of information (699 questionnaires and 200 interviews) from men and women who gave every promise of scientific achievement, Gerhard Sonnert and Gerald Holton illuminate the partly gender-driven dynamics of “the leaky scientific pipeline.”  At the heart of this book are gripping personal life stories of ten women and ten men: half became highly successful scientists, the rest left research science. In their own voices, they talk candidly about their career paths, the obstacles and assists they encountered, the difficulties and rewards of attempting to combine a family life with a science career.           

This highly readable analysis of the gender dimension in scientific careers––and its clear-headed advice––will be of great interest to everyone considering a career in science as well as to teachers, parents, and active scientists. Academics in sociology of science and gender studies as well as decision-makers in the areas of human resources and science policy will also welcome its discussions of general issues and policy recommendations.

In Writing Genres, Amy J. Devitt examines genre from rhetorical, social, linguistic, professional, and historical perspectives and explores genre's educational uses, making this volume the most comprehensive view of genre theory today.

Writing Genres does not limit itself to literary genres or to ideas of genres as formal conventions but additionally provides a theoretical definition of genre as rhetorical, dynamic, and flexible, which allows scholars to examine the role of genres in academic, professional, and social communities.

Writing Genres demonstrates how genres function within their communities rhetorically and socially, how they develop out of their contexts historically, how genres relate to other types of norms and standards in language, and how genres nonetheless enable creativity. Devitt also advocates a critical genre pedagogy based on these ideas and provides a rationale for first-year writing classes grounded in teaching antecedent genres.

Defining a rhetoric as a social invention arising out of a particular time, place, and set of circumstances, Berlin notes that “no rhetoric—not Plato’s or Aris­totle’s or Quintilian’s or Perelman’s—is permanent.” At any given time several rhetorics vie for supremacy, with each attracting adherents representing vari­ous views of reality expressed through a rhetoric.

Traditionally rhetoric has been seen as based on four interacting elements: “re­ality, writer or speaker, audience, and language.” As emphasis shifts from one element to another, or as the interaction between elements changes, or as the def­initions of the elements change, rhetoric changes. This alters prevailing views on such important questions as what is ap­pearance, what is reality.

In this interpretive study Berlin classi­fies the three 19th-century rhetorics as classical, psychological-epistemological, and romantic, a uniquely American development growing out of the transcen­dental movement. In each case studying the rhetoric provides insight into society and the beliefs of the people.

This volume was conceived as a "best practices" resource for writing teachers in the way that Vocabulary Myths by Keith S. Folse is one for reading and vocabulary teachers. It was written to help ensure that writing teachers are not perpetuating the myths of teaching writing.

Each author is a practicing teacher who selected his or her "myth" based on classroom experience and expertise. Both the research and pedagogy in this book are based on the newest research in, for example, teacher preparation, EAP and ESP, and corpus linguistics. The myths discussed in this book are:

§         Teaching vocabulary is not the writing teacher's job. (Keith S. Folse)

§         Teaching citation is someone else's job. (Cynthia M. Schuemann)

§         Where grammar is concerned, one size fits all. (Pat Byrd and John Bunting)

§         Academic writing should be assertive and certain. (Ken Hyland)

§         Students must learn to correct all their writing errors. (Dana Ferris)

§         Corpus-based research is too complicated to be useful for writing teachers. (Susan Conrad)

§         Academic writing courses should focus on paragraph and essay development. (Sharon Cavausgil)

§         International and U.S. resident ESL writers cannot be taught in the same class. (Paul Kei Matsuda)

An essential reference for students and scholars exploring the methods and methodologies of writing research.

What does it mean to research writing today? What are the practical and theoretical issues researchers face when approaching writing as they do? What are the gains or limitations of applying particular methods, and what might researchers be overlooking? These questions and more are answered by the writing research field’s leading scholars in Writing Studies Research in Practice: Methods and Methodologies.

Editors Nickoson and Sheridan gather twenty chapters from leaders in writing research, spanning topics from ethical considerations for researchers, quantitative methods, and activity analysis to interviewing and communitybased and Internet research. While each chapter addresses a different subject, the volume as a whole covers the range of methodologies, technologies, and approaches—both old and new—that writing researchers use, and examines the ways in which contemporary writing research is understood, practiced, and represented.

An essential reference for experienced researchers and an invaluable tool to help novices understand research methods and methodologies, Writing Studies Research in Practice includes established methods and knowledge while addressing the contemporary issues, interests, and concerns faced by writing researchers today.

In Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archaeology of Professional Writing, Jim Henry analyzes eighty-three workplace writing ethnographies composed over seven years in a variety of organizations. He views the findings as so many shards in an archaeology on professional writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

These ethnographies were composed by either practicing or aspiring writers participating in a Master’s program in professional writing and editing. Henry solicited the writers' participation in "informed intersubjective research" focused on issues and questions of their own determination. Most writers studied their own workplace, composing "auto-ethnographies" that problematize these workplaces' local cultures even as they depict writing practices within them.

Henry establishes links between current professional writing practices and composition instruction as both were shaped by national economic development and local postsecondary reorganization throughout the twentieth century. He insists that if we accept basic principles of social constructionism, the text demonstrates ways in which writers "write" workplace cultures to produce goods and services whose effects go far beyond the immediate needs of its clients.

Winner, CCCC Outstanding Book Award 

Until recently, American composition scholars have studied writing instruction mainly within the borders of their own nation, rarely considering English composition in the global context in which writing in English is increasingly taught.  Writing in the Devil’s Tongue challenges this anachronistic approach by examining the history of English composition instruction in an East Asian country. Author Xiaoye You offers scholars a chance to observe how a nation changed from monolingual writing practices to bilingual writing instruction in a school setting.          

You makes extensive use of archival sources to help trace bilingual writing instruction in China back to 1862, when English was first taught in government schools. Treating the Chinese pursuit of modernity as the overarching theme, he explores how the entry of Anglo-American rhetoric and composition challenged and altered the traditional monolithic practice of teaching Chinese writing in the Confucian spirit. The author focuses on four aspects of this history: the Chinese negotiation with Anglo-American rhetoric, their search for innovative approaches to instruction, students’ situated use of English writing, and local scholarship in English composition.  

Unlike previous composition histories, which have tended to focus on institutional, disciplinary, and pedagogical issues, Writing in the Devil’s Tongue brings students back to center stage by featuring several passages written by them in each chapter. These passages not only showcase rhetorical and linguistic features of their writings but also serve as representative anecdotes that reveal the complex ways in which students, responding to their situations, performed multivalent, intercultural discourses.  In addition, You moves out of the classroom and into the historical, cultural, and political contexts that shaped both Chinese writing and composing practices and the pedagogies that were adopted to teach English to Chinese in China.  Teachers, students, and scholars reading this book will learn a great deal about the political and cultural impact that teaching English composition has had in China and  about the ways in which Chinese writing and composition continues to be shaped by rich and diverse cultural traditions and political discourses.

In showcasing the Chinese struggle with teaching and practicing bilingual composition, Writing in the Devil’s Tongue alerts American writing scholars and teachers to an outdated English monolingual mentality and urges them to modify their rhetorical assumptions, pedagogical approaches, and writing practices in the age of globalization.