Gail Stygall

Areas of Specialization

English Language, Discourse Analysis, Legal Discourse, Forensic Linguistics, and Rhetoric and Composition

Activities and Interests

In recent years, my work has primarily concerned law and language. I have served as a consultant/expert witness in a variety of cases, from assessing the comprehensibility of jury instructions to examining the available definitions of the name of an American Indian tribe, from the likely common understanding of a sentence to a discourse analysis of a complex financial document. I have also been able to teach a Senior Seminar in Language and Law (Spring 2016) which I will teach again in Spring 2018. Having had the opportunity to host three visiting scholars from China, this spring I have traveled to China to teach a short course on Language and U.S. Law at China University of Political Science and Law. That followed a visit to Shanghai as a plenary speaker at the Center for Appliable Linguistics/Language and Law in December, 2016. Although my primary work remains in language and law, I still support work in rhetoric and composition and presented a graduate course in Writing Program Administration in Spring, 2017. In shared governance, I continue as a member of the University of Washington Faculty Senate and as an elected member of the College Council of the School of Arts and Sciences.