This article describes a pilot effort for an accreditation-driven writing assessment in a business college, detailing the pilot's logistics and methods. Supported by rubric software and a philosophy of “real readers, real documents,” the assessment was piloted in summer 2006 with five evaluators who were English instructors and four who worked or taught in business environments. The nine evaluators were each given 10 reports that were drawn from a sample of 50 reports completed in a writing-intensive course. They created 88 individual assessments using a 10-category rubric. While the overarching purpose of the pilot was to determine the effectiveness of the methods used, the results may also be of interest to those involved with the assessment of writing.

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Optometry and ophthalmology have often clashed over scope-of-practice issues. Optometry has won many of these battles and has significantly increased its professional power. While many researchers have analyzed methods of professional empowerment, even in eye care, this study specifically investigates how rhetorical strategies in a field’s professional texts might influence that empowerment. Optometry mobilized itself and elevated its professional status in part through a successful rhetorical campaign beginning in the 1960s. A rhetorical analysis of optometric texts from the 1960s and 1970s reveals (1) the regular use of agonistic, martial rhetoric and (2) not only more serious content but also more serious rhetoric, serving to upgrade the field’s scientific credibility. Through this rhetorical strategy, viewed through Burke’s ideas about rhetoric’s role in identity and division, optometrists constructed an image of medicine as an antagonistic other and used it to unify their members and convince politicians, health providers, and the public that they were qualified for heightened professional responsibilities.

While the importance of “expressive writing,” or informal, self-directed writing, has been well established, teachers underutilize it, particularly in technical writing courses. We introduce the term expressive/exploratory technical writing (XTW), which is the use of informal, self-directed writing to problem-solve in technical fields. We describe how engineering students resist writing, despite decades of research showing its importance to their careers, and we suggest that such resistance may be because most students only see writing as an audience-driven performance and thus incompletely understand the link between writing and thinking. The treatment of invention in rhetorical history supports their view. We describe two examples of using XTW in software engineering to plan programming tasks. We conclude by discussing how a systematic use of XTW could shift the technical writing curriculum, imbuing the curriculum with writing and helping students see how to problem-solve using natural language.

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