Teaching the IMRaD Genre: Sentence Combining and Pattern Practice Revisited

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Authors and Corporations: Wolfe, Joanna, Britt, Cynthia, Poe Alexander, Kara
In: Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 25, 2011, 2, p. 119-158
published:
SAGE Publications
Media Type: Article, E-Article

Not logged in

further information
Physical Description: 119-158
ISSN: 1050-6519
1552-4574
DOI: 10.1177/1050651910385785
published in: Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Language: English
Subjects:
Collection: SAGE Publications (CrossRef)
Table of Contents

<jats:p> The authors describe two pedagogical strategies—rhetorical sentence combining and rhetorical pattern practice—that blend once-popular teaching techniques with rhetorical decision making. A literature review identified studies that associated linguistic and rhetorical knowledge with success in engineering writing; this information was used to create exercises teaching technical communication students to write Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRaD) reports. Two pilot studies report promising results: Preliminary findings suggest that students who were taught this method wrote essays that were perceived as significantly higher in quality than those written by students in a control section. At the same time, however, the pilot studies point to some challenges and shortcomings of exercise-oriented pedagogies. </jats:p>