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This study reports about a yearlong study of the initiation of novice grant writers to the activity system of National Institutes of Health grant applications. It investigates the use of cognitive apprenticeship within writing classrooms and that of social apprenticeship in laboratories, programs, departments, and universities, which introduced students to the genre system of National Institutes of Health grant proposals and helped them in moving from peripheral participation to more central participation. While cognitive apprenticeship employs devices such as modeling, scaffolding, coaching, and collaboration to enhance learning in formal settings, social apprenticeship requires socialization, interaction, and collaboration with experts, colleagues, and peers in informal settings to acquire disciplinary knowledge and experiences. The study suggests that writing instructors should acknowledge and incorporate resources in other activity systems in which students participate, i.e., their laboratories and home departments, and teach genre systems rather than specific genres to better facilitate students' enculturation to activity systems of disciplinary discourse communities.H ow can writing instructors help to better initiate postgraduate writers to new disciplinary discourse communities, for instance, advanced disciplinary writing, writing for publication, or grant writing, by incorporating existing resources inside and outside the writing classrooms? points out that disciplinary activities and discourses, or in his term, disciplinarity, are open, interactive systems shaped by history, institutional sites and practices, and sociocultural values and beliefs. Therefore, learning takes place not only in formal educational settings such as writing classrooms but also in informal settings, i.e., interacting with peers and experts, attending workshops and training sessions, and going to conferences. Haas (1994) examines an undergraduate biology student's "growth in rhetorical sophistication" in both reading and writing through instructional support and mentoring in a laboratory (p. 75). Winsor (1996) talks about the socialization of engineers through interaction with experienced engineers and exposure to professional discourses. Blakeslee (2001) investigates how physicists managed to speak to audiences from different scientific fields by interacting with their audiences in conferences, seeking personal feedback, and immersing themselves in discourses produced in those fields. Carter (1990) points out that a continuum exists in students' development of expertise and general and local knowledge and that cognitive apprenticeship offers the opportunity to focus on the "authentic activity of practitioners" and situated learning and collaboration (p. 283). Beaufort (2000) explores the social apprenticeship model existing in a workplace setting where newcomers were introduced to a hierarchy of writing tasks and changed their writing roles from newcomers to old newcomers to new oldtimers to, finally, oldtimers. Although she ind...

This essay examines how Chinese governments, local communities, and overseas Chinese in North America responded to the perceived health risks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and H1N1 flu through the use of public and participatory rhetoric about risk and quarantines. Focusing on modes of security and quarantine practices, I examine how globalization and the social crises surrounding SARS and H1N1 flu operated to regulate differently certain bodies and areas. I identify three types of quarantines (mandatory, voluntary, and coerced) and conduct a transnational comparative analysis to investigate the relationships among quarantines, rhetoric, and public communication. I argue that health authorities must openly acknowledge the legitimacy of public input and actively seek public support regarding health crises. Only by collaborating with concerned communities and citizens and by providing careful guidance for public participation can health institutions ensure the efficacy of quarantine orders during emerging epidemics.