Using school leave legislation as the focus for analysis, this article proposes 'empowerment identity' approach to work-family legislation as an alternative or complement to the commonly used accomodation and antidiscrimination approaches. In many households, working parents struggle to meet routine demands of parenting, such as caring for a sick child or attending a child's school activity. Interestingly, one of the most common forms of state-level legislation designed to address the routine demands of parenting is school involvement leave legislation. Although state school involvement leave statutes vary widely in how and for what reasons they permit time away from work for parents to attend a child's school functions, they represent the common view that the purpose of work-family legislation is to (1) accomodate episodic parenting needs when those needs interfere with work obligations or (2) prohibit discrimination by an employer when a worker-parent requires time away from work to attend to those caregiving needs.

After analyzing exisiting school involvement leave legislation and demonstrating that this legislation takes both accomodation and antidiscrimination approaches to regulating school involvement leave, this article suggests that an alternative approach to critiquing and crafting work-family legislation, particularly school involvement leave legislation, is the empowerment identity approach. An empowerment identity apprach, adapted from organizational communication theory, frames legislation as a discursive structure in which worker-parents should be empowered to construct individualized worker-parent identities through language related action. Accordingly, after explaining the empowerment identity approach, this article concludes that school involvement leave statutes, fall short of full empowerment but have the potential to empower parents to accomplish plural, individualized, and authentic identities as both worker-parents and as important stewards of their children's educations.

The language used to describe work-family issues reflects certain ways of thinking about the interconnectedness and segmentation of work and family. "Accommodate" or "accommodation" is a word that is often used in discussions about policies that apply to work and family. This article uses a cluster method of rhetorical analysis to look at the history of "accommodation" in legal discourse. It concludes that the use of the word "accommodation" in other legal contexts can constrain the ways of envisioning the roles, relationships, and possibilities for work and family in discussions about work-family policies.

Part of the teacher-student relationship is created in the commenting process. Students make conclusions about the ethos of their writing professor based on the way in which students view the comments written in the margins of their papers. This article explores marginalia as discourse, composition theory, and rhetorical theory and develops principles that can underlie an ethos of commenting.

The article examines how transitions work to connect ideas and enhance the persuasive power of legal writing.

The article examines the thesis sentence in legal writing, a particularly important tool in helping legal readers quickly understand the critical content of paragraphs.

This article discusses how to construct a persuasive roadmap paragraph.