Paul A Prior

Bio: Paul A Prior is an academic researcher from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The author has contributed to research in topics: Enculturation & Discourse community. The author has an hindex of 22, co-authored 57 publications receiving 2687 citations. Previous affiliations of Paul A Prior include University of Minnesota.

Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy

Abstract: Over the past century, the explosive growth of scientific, technical, and cultural disciplines has profoundly affected our daily lives. However, processes of enculturation in sites such as graduate education that have helped to form these disciplines have received very limited research attention. In those sites, graduate students write diverse documents, including course papers, departmental examinations, theses and dissertations, grant and fellowship applications, and disciplinary publications. Thus, writing is one of the central domains of enculturation--an activity through which graduate students and professors display and negotiate disciplinary knowledge, genres, identities, and institutional contexts. This volume explores this intersection of writing and disciplinary enculturation through a series of ethnographic case studies. These case studies provide the most thorough descriptions available today of the lived experience of graduate seminars, combining analysis of classroom talk, students' texts and professor's written responses, institutional contexts, students' representations of their writing and its contexts, and professors' representations of their tasks and their students. Given the complexities that the ethnographic data displayed, the author found that conventional notions of writing as a process of transcription and of disciplines as unified discourse communities were inadequate. As such, this book also offers an in-depth exploration of sociohistoric theory in relation to writing and disciplinary enculturation. Specific case studies introduce, apply, and further elaborate notions of: * writing as literate activity, * authorship as mediated by other people and artifacts, * classroom tasks as speech genres, * enculturation as the interplay of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses, and * disciplinarity as a deeply heterogeneous, laminated, and dialogic process. This blend of research and theory should be of interest to scholars and students in such fields as writing studies, rhetoric, writing across the curriculum, applied linguistics, English for academic purposes, science and technology studies, higher education, and the ethnography of communication.

What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices

Abstract: Contents: C. Bazerman, P. Prior, Introduction. Part I:Analyzing Texts. T. Huckin, Content Analysis: What Texts Talk About. P. Eubanks, Poetics and Narrativity: How Texts Tell Stories. E. Barton, Linguistic Discourse Analysis: How the Language in Texts Works. C. Bazerman, Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts. M.Z. Buell, Code-Switching and Second Language Writing: How Multiple Codes Are Combined in a Text. A.F. Wysocki, The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media. Part II:Analyzing Textual Practices. P. Prior, Tracing Process: How Texts Come Into Being. K. Leander, P. Prior, Speaking and Writing: How Talk and Text Interact in Situated Practices. G. Kamberelis, L. de la Luna, Children's Writing: How Textual Forms, Contextual Forces, and Textual Politics Co-Emerge. J. Selzer, Rhetorical Analysis: Understanding How Texts Persuade Readers. C. Bazerman, Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Systems: How Texts Organize Activity and People.

Chronotopic Lamination: Tracing the Contours of Literate Activity

Abstract: This chapter explores the chronotopic lamination (Bakhtin, 1981; Prior, 1998) of writers’ literate activity—the dispersed, fluid chains of places, times, people, and artifacts that come to be tied together in trajectories of literate action along with the ways multiple activity footings are held and managed. Twenty-one academic writers (undergraduates, graduates, and professors) participated in interviews where they were asked to draw and then discuss two representations of their processes in writing a particular piece. To further explore writers' multiple streams of activity and the ways texts mediate that activity, we also asked participants to share drafts, final texts, notes, annotated readings or other material they used in their writing. We focus here on four case studies that illustrate our findings. The interviews showed that the writers’ work crossed institutional settings, especially mixing home, community, and discipline, and thus was deeply laminated (multimotivational and multi-mediated). In particular, we found that writers actively engage in what we call ESSP’s (environment selecting and structuring practices), which not only lead to their texts but also contribute to the distributed, delicate, and partly intentional management of affect, sense, identity, and consciousness. A psychology professor reports to us that when she is revising an article for publication she works at home and does the family laundry. She sets the buzzer on the dryer so that approximately every 45 minutes to an hour she is pulled away from the text to tend the laundry downstairs. As she empties the dryer, sorts and folds, reloads, her mind wanders a bit and she begins to recall things she wanted to do with the text, begins to think of new questions or ideas, things that she had not been recalling or thinking of as she focused on the text when she was upstairs minutes before. She perceives this break from the text, this opportunity to reflect, as a very productive part of the process. In some respects, this story is a familiar one in culturalhistorical activity theory (CHAT), a tale of how tools (external aids) mediate activity, altering the flow of behavior. The dryer-buzzer is acting here, in one sense, as an externalized memory system (like such classical examples as a notch on a stick, a knot in a rope, the words on a page), reminding the professor, in effect, to take a break. However, there are other elements of this story that we believe are less familiar and that deserve serious theoretical and methodological attention. Here we see two activity systems—the domestic activity of the home, the disciplinary activity of the workplace—becoming to some degree interwoven, and each is thereby altered. The gendered work (with doing laundry often still associated with “women’s work”) of family household chores is routinely blended into a scientific/disciplinary activity. The psychology paper is revised as the family laundry is done.

In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 1982.

Abstract: Introduction 1. Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle 2. Images of Relationship 3. Concepts of Self and Morality 4. Crisis and Transition 5. Women's Rights and Women's Judgment 6. Visions of Maturity References Index of Study Participants General Index

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays

Abstract: Note on Translation Introduction by Michael Holquist Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel) The Problem of Speech Genres The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis From Notes Made in 1970-71 Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences Index

Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives

Abstract: Introduction - after the science question in feminism. Part 1 Science: feminism confronts the sciences how the women's movement benefits science - two views why \"physics\" is a bad model for physics. Part 2 Epistemology: what is feminist epistemology \"strong objectivity\" and socially situated knowledge feminist epistemology in and after the enlightenment. Part 3 \"Others\": \"...and race?\" - the science question in global feminism common histories, common destinies - science in the first and third worlds \"real science\" thinking from the perspective of lesbian lives reinventing ourselves as other Conclusion - what is a feminist science.

A meta-analysis of writing instruction for adolescent students.

Abstract: There is considerable concern that the majority of adolescents do not develop the competence in writing they need to be successful in school, the workplace, or their personal lives. A common explanation for why youngsters do not write well is that schools do not do a good job of teaching this complex skill. In an effort to identify effective instructional practices for teaching writing to adolescents, the authors conducted a meta-analysis of the writing intervention literature (Grades 4-12), focusing their efforts on experimental and quasi-experimental studies. They located 123 documents that yielded 154 effect sizes for quality of writing. The authors calculated an average weighted effect size (presented in parentheses) for the following 11 interventions: strategy instruction (0.82), summarization (0.82), peer assistance (0.75), setting product goals (0.70), word processing (0.55), sentence combining (0.50), inquiry (0.32), prewriting activities (0.32), process writing approach (0.32), study of models (0.25), grammar instruction (- 0.32).