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What current theoretical frameworks inform academic and professional writing? What does research tell us about the effectiveness of academic and professional writing programs? What do we know about existing best practices? What are the current guidelines and procedures in evaluating a program’s effectiveness? What are the possibilities in regard to future research and changes to best practices in these programs in an age of accountability? Editors Shirley Wilson Logan and Wayne H. Slater bring together leading scholars in rhetoric and composition to consider the history, trends, and future of academic and professional writing in higher education through the lens of these five central questions.
 
The first two essays in the book provide a history of the academic and professional writing program at the University of Maryland. Subsequent essays explore successes and challenges in the establishment and development of writing programs at four other major institutions, identify the features of language that facilitate academic and professional communication, look at the ways digital practices in academic and professional writing have shaped how writers compose and respond to texts, and examine the role of assessment in curriculum and pedagogy. An afterword by distinguished rhetoric and composition scholars Jessica Enoch and Scott Wible offers perspectives on the future of academic and professional writing.
 
This collection takes stock of the historical, rhetorical, linguistic, digital, and evaluative aspects of the teaching of writing in higher education. Among the critical issues addressed are how university writing programs were first established and what early challenges they faced, where writing programs were housed and who administered them, how the language backgrounds of composition students inform the way writing is taught, the ways in which current writing technologies create new digital environments, and how student learning and programmatic outcomes should be assessed. 
 

Textual Dynamics of the Professions is a collection of fifteen essays examining the real effects of text on professional practices—in academic, scientific, and business settings. Charles Bazerman and James Paradis describe textual dynamics as an interaction in which professional texts and discourses are constructed by, and in turn construct, social practices. In the burgeoning field of discourse theory, this anthology stands apart in its treatment of a wide range of professional texts, including case studies, student papers, medieval letters, and product instructions, and in the inclusion of authors from a variety of disciplines.
    Invaluable to the new pedagogical field of “writing across the curriculum,” Textual Dynamics of the Professions is also a significant intervention into the studies of rhetoric, writing theory, and the sociology of knowledge.