Christiane Donahue

Christiane Donahue is past director of the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric, professor of Linguistics, and director of the DartWrite digital portfolio initiative at Dartmouth, Hanover, NH, USA. She teaches writing and focuses on research about writing, translingualism, cross-cultural comparison of university student writing, and writing research methods.

She pursued her PhD in Linguistics in France; her participation in multiple European research projects, networks, conferences and collaborations informs her understanding of writing instruction, research, and program development in European and US contexts.

The project

Title: Writing Entailment: Aligning Paper Types, Text Features, and Outcomes

"University writing in given national, institutional and disciplinary contexts is generally embedded in fairly well-known and widely used academic text types. Ideally, the choice of academic text type and corresponding textual features should be aligned with the desired learning outcomes (pedagogical objectives) in the context. But what are the characteristics that tend to be “trained” (U. Eco) by a given type of text? We analyzed more than 600 works by American first-year university students of three types: “The aim is to identify the textual characteristics that tend to be associated with each given text type, and then to check alignment in relation to the expected outcomes of the assignments."

Hosting institution: Université Paris Nanterre - Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Selective Bibliography

• Teaching and Studying Transnational Composition, Editors Christiane Donahue and Bruce Horner, Modern Language Association (MLA) Press. 2022.
• Donahue, Tiane. “Linguistics Research as Lost ‘Text.’” Lost Texts in Rhetoric and Composition. Ed. Deborah Holdstein. MLA Press. 2023.
• Donahue, Christiane. “The Disciplinary Culture of Citation in Scientific Articles in the Humanities.” Nueva Revista del Pacífico. Co-authored with Fabiana Komesu and Juliana Assis. 2023.
• Donahue, Tiane. “Comparative Analysis, Grids across Contexts: The Careful Work of Exchange.” Journal der Schreibwissenschaft (JoSch: Journal of Writing Studies). Co-authored with Daniel Bart and Bertrand Daunay. May 2023.
• Donahue, Tiane. “Le Copier Coller dans le Monde de l’Ecrit Universitaire aux Etats-Unis: Perspectives.” Recherches. December 2021.