In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges.
Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops themes that Harris first brought to the field, and contributors here offer explicit recognition of the role that Harris has played in the development of writing center theory and practice. But they also use her work as a springboard from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field.
Lance Massey and Richard Gebhardt offer in this collection many signs that composition again faces a moment of precariousness, even as it did in the 1980s—the years of the great divorce from literary studies. The contours of writing in the university again are rapidly changing, making the objects of scholarship in composition again unstable. Composition is poised to move not from modern to postmodern but from process to postprocess, from a service-oriented "field" to a research-driven "discipline." Some would say we are already there. Momentum is building to replace "composition" and the pedagogical imperative long implied in that term with a "writing studies" model devoted to the study of composition as a fundamental tool of, and force within, all areas of human activity.
Appropriately, contributors here use Stephen M. North's 1987 book The Making of Knowledge in Composition to frame and background their discussion, as they look at both the present state of the field and its potential futures. As in North's volume, The Changing of Knowledge in Composition describes a body of research and pedagogy brimming with conflicting claims, methodologies, and politics, and with little consensus regarding the proper subjects and modes of inquiry.
The deep ambivalence within the field itself is evident in this collection. Contributors here envision composition both as retaining its commitment to broad-based, generalized writing instruction and as heading toward content-based vertical writing programs in departments and programs of writing studies. They both challenge and affirm composition's pedagogical heritage. And they sound both sanguine and pessimistic notes about composition's future.
Drawing on the theoretical work of Jacques Lacan, Marshall W. Alcorn Jr. formulates a systematic explanation of the function and value of desire in writing instruction.
Alcorn argues that in changing the subject matter of writing instruction in order to change student opinions, composition instructors have come to adopt an insufficiently complex understanding of subjectivity. This oversimplification hinders attempts to foster cultural change. Alcorn proposes an alternative mode of instruction that makes effective use of students’ knowledge and desire. The resulting freedom in expression—personal as well as political—engenders the recognition, circulation, and elaboration of desire necessary for both human communication and effective politics.
Responding to James Berlin’s reconception of praxis in the classroom, Theresa Ebert’s espousal of disciplined instructions, and Lester Faigley’s introduction of a postmodern theory of subjectivity, Alcorn follows both Lacan and Slavoj Žižek in insisting desire be given free voice and serious recognition. In composition as in politics, desire is the ground of agency. Competing expressions of desire should generate a dialectic in social-epistemic discourse that encourages enlightenment over cynicism and social development over authoritarian demands.
With clarity and personal voice, Alcorn explains how discourse is rooted in primitive psychological functions of desire and responds to complex cultural needs. In its theoretical scope this book describes a new pedagogy that links thought to emotion and the personal to the social.
Class in the Composition Classroom considers what college writing instructors should know about their working-class students—their backgrounds, experiences, identities, learning styles, and skills—in order to support them in the classroom, across campus, and beyond. In this volume, contributors explore the nuanced and complex meaning of “working class” and the particular values these college writers bring to the classroom.
The real college experiences of veterans, rural Midwesterners, and trade unionists show that what it means to be working class is not obvious or easily definable. Resisting outdated characterizations of these students as underprepared and dispensing with a one-size-fits-all pedagogical approach, contributors address how region and education impact students, explore working-class pedagogy and the ways in which it can reify social class in teaching settings, and give voice to students’ lived experiences.
As community colleges and universities seek more effective ways to serve working-class students, and as educators, parents, and politicians continue to emphasize the value of higher education for students of all financial and social backgrounds, conversations must take place among writing instructors and administrators about how best to serve and support working-class college writers. Class in the Composition Classroom will help writing instructors inside and outside the classroom prepare all their students for personal, academic, and professional communication.
Contributors: Aaron Barlow, Cori Brewster, Patrick Corbett, Harry Denny, Cassandra Dulin, Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth, Mike Edwards, Rebecca Fraser, Brett Griffiths, Anna Knutson, Liberty Kohn, Nancy Mack, Holly Middleton, Robert Mundy, Missy Nieveen Phegley, Jacqueline Preston, James E. Romesburg, Edie-Marie Roper, Aubrey Schiavone, Christie Toth, Gail G. Verdi
Back in print after 17 years, this is a concise history of rhetoric as it relates to structure, genre, and style, with special reference to English literature and literary criticism from Ancient Greece to the end of the 18th century.
The core of the book is a quite original argument that the figures of rhetoric were not mere mechanical devices, were not, as many believed, a "nuisance, a quite sterile appendage to rhetoric to which (unaccountably) teachers, pupils, and writers all over the world devoted much labor for over 2,000 years." Rather, Vickers demonstrates, rhetoric was a stylized representation of language and human feelings.
Vickers supplements his argument through analyses of the rhetorical and emotional structure of four Renaissance poems. He also defines 16 of the most common figures of rhetoric, citing examples from the classics, the Bible, and major English poets from Chaucer to Pope.
Clear Grammar 4 introduces advanced grammar. Clear Grammar 4, 2nd Ed., includes
Clear Grammar 4 concludes with a review of this volume’s contents of advanced grammar points.
Clear Grammar is a four-level grammar series that features a unique combination of useful grammar information written in clear language with activities that promote more accurate and fluent writing, speaking, reading, and vocabulary usage. Important features of the new editions of Clear Grammar include:
Cold War Rhetoric is the first book in over twenty years to bring a sustained rhetorical critique to bear on central texts of the Cold War. The rhetorical texts that are the subject of this book include speeches by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the Murrow- McCarthy confrontation on CBS, the speeches and writings of peace advocates, and the recurring theme of unAmericanism as it has been expressed in various media throughout the Cold War years. Each of the authors brings to his texts a particular approach to rhetorical criticism—strategic, metaphorical, or ideological. Each provides an introductory chapter on methodology that explains the assumptions and strengths of their particular approach.
Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West returns to familiar cultural forces—the West, anticommunism, and manliness—to show how they combined to suppress dissent and dominate the unruliness of literature in the name of a national identity after World War II. Few realize how much the domination of a “white male” American literary canon was a product not of long history, but of the Cold War. Suzanne Clark describes here how the Cold War excluded women writers on several levels, together with others—African American, Native American, poor, men as well as women—who were ignored in the struggle over white male identity.
Clark first shows how defining national/individual/American identity in the Cold War involved a brand new configuration of cultural history. At the same time, it called upon the nostalgia for the old discourses of the West (the national manliness asserted by Theodore Roosevelt) to claim that there was and always had been only one real American identity.
By subverting the claims of a national identity, Clark finds, many male writers risked falling outside the boundaries not only of public rhetoric but also of the literary world: men as different from one another as the determinedly masculine Ernest Hemingway and the antiheroic storyteller of the everyday, Bernard Malamud. Equally vocal and contentious, Cold War women writers were unwilling to be silenced, as Clark demonstrates in her discussion of the work of Mari Sandoz and Ursula Le Guin.
The book concludes with a discussion of how the silencing of gender, race, and class in Cold War writing maintained its discipline until the eruptions of the sixties. By questioning the identity politics of manliness in the Cold War context of persecution and trial, Clark finds that the involvement of men in identity politics set the stage for our subsequent cultural history.
Composition research consistently demonstrates that the social context of writing determines the majority of conventions any writer must observe. Still, most universities organize the required first-year composition course as if there were an intuitive set of general writing "skills" usable across academic and work-world settings.
In College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort reports on a longitudinal study comparing one student’s experience in FYC, in history, in engineering, and in his post-college writing. Her data illuminate the struggle of college students to transfer what they learn about "general writing" from one context to another. Her findings suggest ultimately not that we must abolish FYC, but that we must go beyond even genre theory in reconceiving it.
Accordingly, Beaufort would argue that the FYC course should abandon its hope to teach a sort of general academic discourse, and instead should systematically teach strategies of responding to contextual elements that impinge on the writing situation. Her data urge attention to issues of learning transfer, and to developmentally sound linkages in writing instruction within and across disciplines. Beaufort advocates special attention to discourse community theory, for its power to help students perceive and understand the context of writing.
In a provocative book-length essay, Patricia Lynne argues that most programmatic assessment of student writing in U.S. public and higher education is conceived in the terms of mid-20th century positivism. Since composition as a field had found its most compatible home in constructivism, she asks, why do compositionists import a conceptual frame for assessment that is incompatible with composition theory?
By casting this as a clash of paradigms, Lynne is able to highlight the ways in which each theory can and cannot influence the shape of assessment within composition. She laments, as do many in composition, that the objectively oriented paradigm of educational assessment theory subjugates and discounts the very social constructionist principles that empower composition pedagogy. Further, Lynne criticizes recent practice for accommodating the big business of educational testing—especially for capitulating to the discourse of positivism embedded in terms like "validity" and "reliability." These terms and concepts, she argues, have little theoretical significance within composition studies, and their technical and philosophical import are downplayed by composition assessment scholars.
There is a need, Lynne says, for terms of assessment that are native to composition. To open this needed discussion within the field, she analyzes cutting-edge assessment efforts, including the work of Broad and Haswell, and she advances a set of alternate terms for evaluating assessment practices, a set of terms grounded in constructivism and composition.
Coming to Terms is ambitious and principled, and it takes a controversial stand on important issues. This strong new volume in assessment theory will be of serious interest to assessment specialists and their students, to composition theorists, and to those now mounting assessments in their own programs.
The Commentary for the third edition of this successful guide to writing has been revised and expanded in many ways to provide more support for instructors; this includes additional tasks for Units Two and Four to supplement the main text. However, the collegial tone established in previous Commentaries between Swales & Feak and instructors has been retained.
This volume contains commentaries on each of the eight units plus the two appendixes. The format for each unit includes
Drawing on interviews and an array of scholarly work, Beth Daniell maps out the relations of literacy and spirituality in A Communion of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery. Daniell tells the story of a group of women in “Mountain City” who use reading and writing in their search for spiritual growth. Diverse in socioeconomic status, the Mountain City women are, or have been, married to alcoholics. In Al-Anon, they use literacy to practice the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous in order to find spiritual solutions to their problems.
In addition, Daniell demonstrates that in the lives of these women, reading, writing, and speaking are intertwined, embedded in one another in rich and complex ways. For the women, private literate practice is of the utmost importance because it aids the development and empowerment of the self. These women engage in literate practices in order to grow spiritually and emotionally, to live more self-aware lives, to attain personal power, to find or make meaning for themselves, and to create community. By looking at the changes in the women’s reading, Daniell shows that Al-Anon doctrine, particularly its oral instruction, serves as an interpretive tool. This discussion points out the subtle but profound transformations in these women’s lives in order to call for an inclusive notion of politics.
Foregrounding the women’s voices, A Communion of Friendship addresses a number of issues important in composition studies and reading instruction. This study examines the meaning of literacy within one specific community, with implications both for pedagogy and for empirical research in composition inside and outside the academy.
While there have been several studies of writing programs at larger, baccalaureate institutions, the community college classroom has often been overlooked. Authors Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau fill this gap with The Community College Writer, a systematic and unique case study of first semester writing students at a community college. Drawing on surveys, interviews, and samples of classroom assignments, Tinberg and Nadeau use their research at one community college to reach out to instructors throughout the nation, fostering communication between community college faculty members in the effort to establish full-fledged writing programs geared toward student success.
At the heart of the book are the voices of the students themselves, as they discuss both their teachers’ expectations and their own. Through a series of case studies, the authors reveal the challenges students face as budding writers, and their firsthand experiences with writing programs at the community college level.
With this informative study, Tinberg and Nadeau seek not only to encourage dialogue between student and teacher or community college instructors, but to expand the conversation about program improvement to include both two- and four-year colleges, bringing composition faculty together in an effort to improve writing programs in all schools. Included in the volume are seven appendices, including surveys and interviews with faculty and students, making The Community College Writer a comprehensive and practical guide to tackling the issues facing writing programs and instructors.
Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement explores the critical practice of intercultural inquiry and rhetorical problem-solving that encourages urban writers and college mentors alike to take literate action. Author Linda Flower documents an innovative experiment in community literacy, the Community Literacy Center in Pittsburgh, and posits a powerful and distinctively rhetorical model of community engagement and pedagogy for both marginalized and privileged writers and speakers. In addition, she articulates a theory of local publics and explores the transformative potential of alternative discourses and counter-public performances.
In presenting a comprehensive pedagogy for literate action, the volume offers strategies for talking and collaborating across difference, forconducting an intercultural inquiry that draws out situated knowledge and rival interpretations of shared problems, and for writing and speaking to advocate for personal and public transformation. Flower describes the competing scripts for social engagement, empowerment, public deliberation, and agency that characterize the interdisciplinary debate over models of social engagement.
Extending the Community Literacy Center’s initial vision of community literacy first published a decade ago, Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement makes an important contribution to theoretical conversations about the nature of the public sphere while providing practical instruction in how all people can speak publicly for values and visions of change.
Winner, 2009 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award
David Wallace argues that any understanding of writing studies must include the conception of discourse as an embodied force with real consequences for real people. Informed in important ways by queer theory, Wallace calls to account users of dominant discourses and at the same time articulates a theory base from which to interpret "alternative rhetoric."
To examine the practice of writing from varied margins of society, Compelled to Write offers careful readings of four exemplar American writers, each of whom felt compelled within their own time and place to write in response to systemic injustices in American society.
Sarah Grimké, a privileged white woman advocating for abolition, is forced to defend her right to speak as a woman; Frederick Douglass begins his public career almost as a curiosity (the articulate ex-slave) and ends it as one of the most important rhetors in American history; Gloria Anzaldúa writes not only in multiple languages and dialects but from marginalized positions related to gender, race, class, sexual identity, and physical abled-ness; David Sedaris uses his privileged position as a middle-class white male humorist to speak unabashedly of his sexuality, his addictions, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
Through these writers, Wallace explores a range of strategies that comprise alternative rhetorical practice, and demonstrates how such practice is inflected by social constraints on rhetorical agency and by how writers employ alternative discourses to resist those constraints. Grounding and personalizing Compelled to Write with rich material from his own teaching and his own experience, Wallace considers a number of implications for teachers of writing.
“What any body is—and is able to do—cannot be disentangled from the media we use to consume and produce texts.” ---from the Introduction.
Kristin Arola and Anne Wysocki argue that composing in new media is composing the body—is embodiment. In Composing (Media) = Composing (Embodiment), they havebrought together a powerful set of essays that agree on the need for compositionists—and their students—to engage with a wide range of new media texts. These chapters explore how texts of all varieties mediate and thereby contribute to the human experiences of communication, of self, the body, and composing. Sample assignments and activities exemplify how this exploration might proceed in the writing classroom.
Contributors here articulate ways to understand how writing enables the experience of our bodies as selves, and at the same time to see the work of (our) writing in mediating selves to make them accessible to institutional perceptions and constraints. These writers argue that what a body does, and can do, cannot be disentangled from the media we use, nor from the times and cultures and technologies with which we engage.
To the discipline of composition, this is an important discussion because it clarifies the impact/s of literacy on citizens, freedoms, and societies. To the classroom, it is important because it helps compositionists to support their students as they enact, learn, and reflect upon their own embodied and embodying writing.
Cindy Johanek offers a new perspective on the ideological conflict between qualitative and quantitative research approaches, and the theories of knowledge that inform them. With a paradigm that is sensitive to the context of one's research questions, she argues, scholars can develop less dichotomous forms that invoke the strengths of both research traditions. Context-oriented approaches can lift the narrative from beneath the numbers in an experimental study, for example, or bring the useful clarity of numbers to an ethnographic study.
A pragmatic scholar, Johanek moves easily across the boundaries that divide the field, and argues for contextualist theory as a lens through which to view composition research. This approach brings with it a new focus, she writes. "This new focus will call us to attend to the contexts in which rhetorical issues and research issues converge, producing varied forms, many voices, and new knowledge, indeed reconstructing a discipline that will be simultaneously focused on its tasks, its knowledge-makers, and its students."
Composing Research is a work full of personal voice and professional commitment and will be a welcome addition to the research methods classroom and to the composition researcher's own bookshelf.
2000 Outstanding Scholarship Award from the International Writing Centers Association.
In a data-driven world, anything can be data. As the techniques and scale of data analysis advance, the need for a response from rhetoric and composition grows ever more pronounced. It is increasingly possible to examine thousands of documents and peer-review comments, labor-hours, and citation networks in composition courses and beyond. Composition and Big Data brings together a range of scholars, teachers, and administrators already working with big-data methods and datasets to kickstart a collective reckoning with the role that algorithmic and computational approaches can, or should, play in research and teaching in the field. Their work takes place in various contexts, including programmatic assessment, first-year pedagogy, stylistics, and learning transfer across the curriculum. From ethical reflections to database design, from corpus linguistics to quantitative autoethnography, these chapters implement and interpret the drive toward data in diverse ways.
Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy identifies and explains key aspects of the work of Cornel West—the highly regarded scholar of religion, philosophy, and African American studies—as they relate to composition studies, focusing especially on three rhetorical strategies that West suggests we use in our questioning lives as scholars, teachers, students, and citizens.
In this study, author Keith Gilyard examines the strategies of Socratic Commitment (a relentless examination of received wisdom), Prophetic Witness (an abiding concern with justice and the plight of the oppressed), and Tragicomic Hope (a keep-on-pushing sensibility reflective of the African American freedom struggle). Together, these rhetorical strategies comprise an updated form of cultural criticism that West calls prophetic pragmatism.
This volume, which contains the only interview in which Cornel West directly addresses the field of composition,sketches the development of Cornel West’s theories of philosophy, political science, religion, and cultural studies and restates the link between Deweyan notions of critical intelligence and the notion of critical literacy developed by Ann Berthoff, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux. Gilyard provides examples from the classroom to illustrate the possibilities of Socratic Commitment as part of composition pedagogy, shows the alignment of Prophetic Witness with traditional aims of critical composition, and in his chapter on Tragicomic Hope, addresses African American expressive culture with an emphasis on music and artists such as Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and Kanye West.
The first book to comprehensively connect the ideas of one of America's premier scholars of religion, philosophy and African American studies with composition theory and pedagogy, Composition and Cornel West will be valuable to scholars, teachers, and students interested in race, class, critical literacy, and the teaching of writing.
In the face of the gradual saturation of US public education by the logics of neoliberalism, educators often find themselves at a loss to respond, let alone resist. Through state defunding and many other “reforms” fueled by austerity politics, a majority of educators are becoming casual labor in US universities while those who hang onto secure employment are pressed to act as self-supporting entrepreneurs or do more with less. Focusing on the discipline of writing studies, this collection addresses the sense of crisis that many educators experience in this age of austerity.
The chapters in this book chronicle how neoliberal political economy shapes writing assessments, curricula, teacher agency, program administration, and funding distribution. Contributors also focus on how neoliberal political economy dictates the direction of scholarship, because the economic and political agenda shaping the terms of work, the methods of delivery, and the ways of valuing and assessing writing also shape the primary concerns and directions of scholarship.
Composition in the Age of Austerity offers critical accounts of how the restructuring of higher education is shaping the daily realities of composition programs. The book documents the effects and implications of the current restructuring, examines how cherished rhetorical ideals actually leave the field unprepared to respond effectively to defunding and corporatizing trends, and establishes points of departure for collective response.
Despite its pervasiveness and its significance, composition has an unstable status within the curriculum. Writing programs and writing faculty are besieged by academic, political, and financial concerns that have not been well understood or addressed.
At many institutions, composition functions paradoxically as both the gateway to academic success and as the gatekeeper, reducing access to academic work and opportunity for those with limited facility in English. Although writing programs are expected to provide services that range from instruction in correct grammar to assisting—or resisting—political correctness, expanding programs and shrinking faculty get caught in the crossfire. The bottom line becomes the firing line as forces outside the classroom determine funding and seek to define what composition should do.
In search of that definition, the contributors ask and answer a series of specific and salient questions: What implications—intellectual, political, and institutional—will forces outside the classroom have on the quality and delivery of composition in the twenty-first century? How will faculty and administrators identify and address these issues? What policies and practices ought we propose for the century to come?
This book features sixteen position papers by distinguished scholars and researchers in composition and rhetoric; most of the papers are followed by invited responses by other notable compositionists. In all, twenty-five contributors approach composition from a wide variety of contemporary perspectives: rhetorical, historical, social, cultural, political, intellectual, economic, structural, administrative, and developmental. They propose solutions applicable to pedagogy, research, graduate training of composition teachers, academic administration, and public and social policy. In a very real sense, then, this is the only book to offer a map to the future of composition.
Composition in the University examines the required introductory course in composition within American colleges and universities. Crowley argues that due to its association with literary studies in English departments, composition instruction has been inappropriately influenced by humanist pedagogy and that modern humanism is not a satisfactory rationale for the study of writing. Crowley envisions possible nonhumanist rationales that could be developed for vertical curricula in writing instruction, were the universal requirement not in place.
Composition in the University examines the required introductory course in composition within American colleges and universities. According to Sharon Crowley, the required composition course has never been conceived in the way that other introductory courses have been—as an introduction to the principles and practices of a field of study. Rather it has been constructed throughout much of its history as a site from which larger educational and ideological agendas could be advanced, and such agendas have not always served the interests of students or teachers, even though they are usually touted as programs of study that students “need.”
If there is a master narrative of the history of composition, it is told in the institutional attitude that has governed administration, design, and staffing of the course from its beginnings—the attitude that the universal requirement is in place in order to construct docile academic subjects.
Crowley argues that due to its association with literary studies in English departments, composition instruction has been inappropriately influenced by humanist pedagogy and that modern humanism is not a satisfactory rationale for the study of writing. She examines historical attempts to reconfigure the required course in nonhumanist terms, such as the advent of communications studies during the 1940s. Crowley devotes two essays to this phenomenon, concentrating on the furor caused by the adoption of a communications program at the University of Iowa.
Composition in the University concludes with a pair of essays that argue against maintenance of the universal requirement. In the last of these, Crowley envisions possible nonhumanist rationales that could be developed for vertical curricula in writing instruction, were the universal requirement not in place.
Crowley presents her findings in a series of essays because she feels the history of the required composition course cannot easily be understood as a coherent narrative since understandings of the purpose of the required course have altered rapidly from decade to decade, sometimes in shockingly sudden and erratic fashion.
The essays in this book are informed by Crowley’s long career of teaching composition, administering a composition program, and training teachers of the required introductory course. The book also draw on experience she gained while working with committees formed by the Conference on College Composition and Communication toward implementation of the Wyoming Resolution, an attempt to better the working conditions of post-secondary teachers of writing.
Edited by four nationally recognized leaders of composition scholarship, Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity asks a fundamental question: can Composition and Rhetoric, as a discipline, continue its historical commitment to pedagogy without sacrificing equal attention to other areas, such as research and theory? In response, contributors to the volume address disagreements about what it means to be called a discipline rather than a profession or a field; elucidate tensions over the defined breadth of Composition and Rhetoric; and consider the roles of research and responsibility as Composition and Rhetoric shifts from field to discipline.
Outlining a field with a complex and unusual formation story, Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity employs several lenses for understanding disciplinarity—theory, history, labor, and pedagogy—and for teasing out the implications of disciplinarity for students, faculty, institutions, and Composition and Rhetoric itself. Collectively, the chapters speak to the intellectual and embodied history leading to this point; to questions about how disciplinarity is, and might be, understood, especially with regard to Composition and Rhetoric; to the curricular, conceptual, labor, and other sites of tension inherent in thinking about Composition and Rhetoric as a discipline; and to the implications of Composition and Rhetoric’s disciplinarity for the future.
Contributors: Linda Adler-Kassner, Elizabeth H. Boquet, Christiane Donahue, Whitney Douglas, Doug Downs, Heidi Estrem, Kristine Hansen, Doug Hesse, Sandra Jamieson, Neal Lerner, Jennifer Helene Maher, Barry Maid, Jaime Armin Mejía, Carolyn R. Miller, Kelly Myers, Gwendolynne Reid, Liane Robertson, Rochelle Rodrigo, Dawn Shepherd, Kara Taczak
A collection of twenty-four essays assessing and challenging the current state of writing instruction, Composition Studies in the New Millennium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future emerges from presentations given at the national Writing Program Administrators conference held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 2001. Like its acclaimed and widely-used predecessor, Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change, this timely collection by leading scholars in composition studies responds to concerns about the evolution and future of this field of study.
Charting new directions, the contributors grapple with seven distinct questions: What do we mean by composition studies—past, present, and future? What do and should we teach when we teach composition? Where will composition be taught, and who will teach it? What theories and philosophies will undergird our research paradigms, and what will those paradigms be? How will new technologies change composition studies? What languages will our students write, and what will they write about? What political and social issues have shaped composition studies in the past and will shape this field in the future?
In addressing these queries, the essayists approach composition studies from perspectives ranging from rhetorical to cultural, political to economic, administrative to technological; and they do so with a style and organization appropriate for composition instructors, scholars, and administrators at all levels, from teaching assistants to college presidents. The result is an invaluable vision of the future of composition studies in the new millennium.
Connors provides a history of composition and its pedagogical approaches to form, genre, and correctness. He shows where many of the today’s practices and assumptions about writing come from, and he translates what our techniques and theories of teaching have said over time about our attitudes toward students, language and life.
Connors locates the beginning of a new rhetorical tradition in the mid-nineteenth century, and from there, he discusses the theoretical and pedagogical innovations of the last two centuries as the result of historical forces, social needs, and cultural shifts.
This important book proves that American composition-rhetoric is a genuine, rhetorical tradition with its own evolving theria and praxis. As such it is an essential reference for all teachers of English and students of American education.
The CondensedESL Writer’s Handbook is a reference work for ESL students who are taking college-level courses. Because its purpose is to provide help with the broad variety of writing questions students may have when working on school assignments, the text focuses on English for Academic Purposes. Unlike other handbooks on the market, this book’s sole purpose is to address the issues of primary importance to language learners.
The Condensed Handbook complements a student writer’s dictionary, thesaurus, and grammar reference book. It would be suitable as a text for an advanced ESL writing course.
The Condensed Handbook is concise and easily navigated; is accessible, with clear and direct explanatory language; and limits its focus to the grammatical and style aspects of writing and reference material.
Included as special features in the Condensed Handbook are:
• The explanatory language is appropriate for ESL students, in contrast to the more complex and idiomatic language of other English handbooks.
• The level of detail is more manageable for ESL students, compared to what is in other English handbooks.
• Many of the examples of paragraphs and exercise sentences were written by ESL students; this encourages users of this Handbook to realize that they too can also become effective writers.
• Additional samples of MLA and APA reference entries.
The Full Handbook (978-0-472-03403-1) and Workbook (978-0-472-03404-8) are also available.
In nineteen essays illustrating its many aspects, this book offers an argument for what it takes to construct a complete rhetorical education.
The editors take an approach that is pragmatic and pluralistic, based as it is on the assumptions that a rhetorical education is not limited to teaching freshman composition (or any specific writing course) and that the contexts in which such an education occurs are not limited to classrooms. This thought-provoking volume stresses that while a rhetorical education results in the growth of writing skills, its larger goal is to foster critical thinking.
Composition has been a microcosm of the corporatization of higher education for thirty years, with adjuncts often handling the hard work of writing instruction. We've learned enough to know that change is needed. Influenced by the efforts of organizations such as New Faculty Majority, Faculty Forward, PrecariCorps, and national faculty unions, this collection highlights action, describing efforts that have improved adjunct working conditions in English departments. The editors categorize these efforts into five threads: strategies for self-advocacy; organizing within and across ranks; professionalizing in complex contexts; working for local changes to workload, pay, and material conditions; and protecting gains.
Contributors to this collection include contingent and tenure-line faculty from private, public, and community colleges, as well as writing program administrators and writing center faculty. Their voices address contingency, exploitation, and solidarity in activist terms deriving from institutional realities and cases. Collectively, they offer creative and constructive responses that can enact labor justice and champion the disciplinary energies of all members of our collegial community.
Contributors: Janelle Adsit, Jacob Babb, Chris Blankenship, Rebekah Shultz Colby, Richard Colby, Anicca Cox, Sue Doe, Tracy Donhardt, Dawn Fels, Barbara Heifferon, Desirée M. Holter, Justin Jory, Jeffrey Klausman, Michelle LaFrance, Sarah Layden, Carol Lind, Maria Maisto, Amanda Martin, Mark McBeth, Tim McCormack, Joan Mullin, Dani Nier-Weber, Glenn Moomau, Michael Murphy, Anna K. Nardo, Rolf Norgaard, Courtney Adams Wooten, Lacey Wootton, Allison Laubach Wright
Compares the sounds, phonology, and prosody of General American English and Southeastern Brazilian Portuguese.
A Counter-History of Composition contests the foundational disciplinary assumption that vitalism and contemporary rhetoric represent opposing, disconnected poles in the writing tradition. Vitalism has been historically linked to expressivism and concurrently dismissed as innate, intuitive, and unteachable, whereas rhetoric is seen as a rational, teachable method for producing argumentative texts. Counter to this, Byron Hawk identifies vitalism as the ground for producing rhetorical texts-the product of complex material relations rather than the product of chance. Through insightful historical analysis ranging from classical Greek rhetoric to contemporary complexity theory, Hawk defines three forms of vitalism (oppositional, investigative, and complex) and argues for their application in the environments where students write and think today.
Hawk proposes that complex vitalism will prove a useful tool in formulating post-dialectical pedagogies, most notably in the context of emerging digital media. He relates two specific examples of applying complex vitalism in the classroom and calls for the reexamination and reinvention of current self-limiting pedagogies to incorporate vitalism and complexity theory.
Eeny, meeny, figgledy, fig.
Delia, dolia, dominig,
Ozy, pozy doma-nozy,
Tee, tau, tut,
Uggeldy, buggedy, boo!
Out goes you. (no. 129)
You can stand,
And you can sit,
But, if you play,
You must be it. (no. 577)
Counting-out rhymes are used by children between the ages of six and eleven as a special way of choosing it and beginning play. They may be short and simple ("O-U-T spells out/And out goes you") or relatively long and complicated; they may be composed of ordinary words, arrant nonsense, or a mixture of the two.
Roger D. Abrahams and Lois Rankin have gathered together a definitive compendium of counting-out rhymes in English reported to 1980. These they discovered in over two hundred sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including rhymes from England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Representative texts are given for 582 separate rhymes, with a comprehensive listing of sources and variants for each one, as well as information on each rhyme's provenience, date, and use. Cross-references are provided for variants whose first lines differ from those of the representative texts. Abrahams's introduction discusses the significance of counting-out rhymes in children's play.
Children's folklore and speech play have attracted increasing attention in recent years. Counting-Out Rhymes will be a valuable resource for researchers in this field.
Research article introductions are central to Creating Contexts: Writing across Genres with the CaRS (creating a research space) model used as a starting point. This volume focuses on introductions for other kinds of texts that are also part of the graduate student writing experience such as course papers and critiques, proposals, and dissertations.
This volume represents a revision and expansion of the material on introductions that appeared in English in Today's Research World.
The material presented in this volume is appropriate for graduate students and others already working in their chosen academic fields. The material has, in fact, been used with each of these groups in both writing courses and writing workshops. We believe that the material would also be suitable for those wishing to pursue a course of self-study. To target these different possible uses, we have included a variety of topics and tasks that we hope will deepen users’ understanding of how to create a writing context for their work. Tasks range from evaluating text commentaries to open-ended questions and have been designed to generate lively classroom or workshop discussion as well as thoughtful consideration by an individual user.
On the surface, postcolonial studies and composition studies appear to have little in common. However, they share a strikingly similar goal: to provide power to the words and actions of those who have been marginalized or oppressed. Postcolonial studies accomplishes this goal by opening a space for the voices of “others” in traditional views of history and literature. Composition studies strives to empower students by providing equal access to higher education and validation for their writing.
For two fields that have so much in common, very little dialogue exists between them. Crossing Borderlands attempts to establish such an exchange in the hopes of creating a productive “borderland” where they can work together to realize common goals.
Translingualism perceives the boundaries between languages as unstable and permeable; this creates a complex challenge for writing pedagogy. Writers shift actively among rhetorical strategies from multiple languages, sometimes importing lexical or discoursal tropes from one language into another to introduce an effect, solve a problem, or construct an identity. How to accommodate this reality while answering the charge to teach the conventions of one language can be a vexing problem for teachers. Crossing Divides offers diverse perspectives from leading scholars on the design and implementation of translingual writing pedagogies and programs.
The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1 outlines methods of theorizing translinguality in writing and teaching. Part 2 offers three accounts of translingual approaches to the teaching of writing in private and public colleges and universities in China, Korea, and the United States. In Part 3, contributors from four US institutions describe the challenges and strategies involved in designing and implementing a writing curriculum with a translingual approach. Finally, in Part 4, three scholars respond to the case studies and arguments of the preceding chapters and suggest ways in which writing teachers, scholars, and program administrators can develop translingual approaches within their own pedagogical settings.
Illustrated with concrete examples of teachers’ and program directors’ efforts in a variety of settings, as well as nuanced responses to these initiatives from eminent scholars of language difference in writing, Crossing Divides offers groundbreaking insight into translingual writing theory, practice, and reflection.
Contributors: Sara Alvarez, Patricia Bizzell, Suresh Canagarajah, Dylan Dryer, Chris Gallagher, Juan Guerra, Asao B. Inoue, William Lalicker, Thomas Lavelle, Eunjeong Lee, Jerry Lee, Katie Malcolm, Kate Mangelsdorf, Paige Mitchell, Matt Noonan, Shakil Rabbi, Ann Shivers-McNair, Christine M. Tardy
Cross-Language Relations in Composition brings together the foremost scholars in the fields of composition, second language writing, education, and literacy studies to address the limitations of the tacit English-only policy prevalent in composition pedagogy and research and to suggest changes for the benefit of writing students and instructors throughout the United States. Recognizing the growing linguistic diversity of students and faculty, the ongoing changes in the English language as a result of globalization, and the increasingly blurred categories of native, foreign, and second language English speakers, editors Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda have compiled a groundbreaking anthology of essays that contest the dominance of English monolingualism in the study and teaching of composition and encourage the pursuit of approaches that embrace multilingualism and cross-language writing as the norm for teaching and research.
The nine chapters comprising part 1 of the collection focus on the origins of the “English only” bias dominating U.S. composition classes and present alternative methods of teaching and research that challenge this monolingualism. In part 2, nine composition teachers and scholars representing a variety of theoretical, institutional, and professional perspectives propose new, compelling, and concrete ways to understand and teach composition to students of a “global,” plural English, a language evolving in a multilingual world.
Drawing on recent theoretical work on genre, complexity, performance and identity, as well as postcolonialism, Cross-Language Relations in Composition offers a radically new approach to composition teaching and research, one that will prove invaluable to all who teach writing in today’s multilingual college classroom.
Braun’s in-depth study documents English professors and the challenges they face in both career and classroom as they attempt to gain appropriate value for digital teaching and creation within their field, departments, and institutions. Braun proposes that to move English studies into the future, three main questions must be addressed. First, what counts as a text? How should we approach the reading of texts? Finally, how should we approach the production of texts? In addition to reconsidering the nature of texts in English studies, she calls for crucial changes in higher-education institutional procedures themselves, including new methods of evaluating digital scholarship on an even playing field with other forms of work during the processes for promotion and tenure.
With insightful expertise, Braun analyzes how the new age of digital scholarship not only complements the traditional values of the English studies discipline but also offers constructive challenges to old ideas about texts, methods, and knowledge production. Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work is the first volume to offer specific examination of the digital shift’s impact on English studies and provides the scaffold upon which productive conversations about the future of the field and digital pedagogy can be built.
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