Creating Rhetorical Complexity: Using Popular Science Articles to Teach Abstract Writing

The paper describes a communication intensive intervention which centers on a must-pass, in-course assessment. Students were asked to read technical content, found in third-party popular science magazines, for the purposes of writing an abstract. The abstract-writing assignment is a complex reading-writing task, as students were required to read critically; internalize content; and produce prose that meets the expectations of the discourse community. The student was required to take on a ‘new’ writing persona—the microprocessor researcher, identifying and replacing the conversational, idiomatic and sometimes subjective language of the magazine article with impersonal, succinct, factual writing. This work-in-progress presents excerpts from student writing. Excerpts are both exemplary, showing how students negotiated the rhetorical demands of the exercise; and weak, suggesting that the writing scenario is indeed complex and that there is need for additional writing scaffolds.