During a field trip in Detroit on a summer day in 1989, a group of African American fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders talked, laughed, and ate snacks as they walked.  Later, in the teacher’s lounge, Jeanetta, an African American teacher chided the teachers, black and white, for not correcting poor black students for “eating on the street,” something she saw as stereotypical behavior that stigmatized students.

These thirty children from Detroit’s Cass Corridor neighborhood were enrolled in the Dewey Center Community Writing Project.  Taught by seven teachers from the University of Michigan and the Detroit public schools, the program guided students to explore, to interpret, and to write about their community.

According to David Schaafsma, one of the teachers, the “eating on the street” controversy is emblematic of how cultural values and cultural differences affect education in American schools today.  From this incident Schaafsma has written a powerful and compelling book about the struggle of teaching literacy in a racially divided society and the importance of story and storytelling in the educational process.

At the core of this book is the idea of storytelling as an interactive experience for both the teller and listener.  Schaafsma begins by telling his own version of the “eating on the street” conflict.  He describes the history of the writing program and offers rich samples of the students’ writing about their lives in a troubled neighborhood.  After the summer program, Schaafsma interviewed all the teachers about their own version of events, their personal histories, and their work as educators.  Eating on the Street presents all of these layered stories - by Schaafsma, his collegues, and the students - to illustrate how talking across multiple perspectives can enrich the learning process and the community-building process outside the classroom as well.

These accounts have strong implications for multicultural education today.  They will interest teachers, educational experts, administrators, and researchers.  Uniting theory and practice, Eating on the Street is on the cutting edge of pioneering work in educational research.

Economics is not a field that is known for good writing. Charts, yes. Sparkling prose, no.
 
Except, that is, when it comes to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. Her conversational and witty yet always clear style is a hallmark of her classic works of economic history, enlivening the dismal science and engaging readers well beyond the discipline. And now she’s here to share the secrets of how it’s done.
 
Economical Writing is itself economical: a collection of thirty-five pithy rules for making your writing clear, concise, and effective. Proceeding from big-picture ideas to concrete strategies for improvement at the level of the paragraph, sentence, or word, McCloskey shows us that good writing, after all, is not just a matter of taste—it’s a product of adept intuition and a rigorous revision process. Debunking stale rules, warning us that “footnotes are nests for pedants,” and offering an arsenal of readily applicable tools and methods, she shows writers of all levels of experience how to rethink the way they approach their work, and gives them the knowledge to turn mediocre prose into magic.
 
At once efficient and digestible, hilarious and provocative, Economical Writing lives up to its promise. With McCloskey as our guide, it’s impossible not to see how any piece of writing—on economics or any other subject—can be a pleasure to read.

Economies of Writing advances scholarship on political economies of writing and writing instruction, considering them in terms of course subject, pedagogy, technology, and social practice. Taking the "economic" as a necessary point of departure and contention for the field, the collection insists that writing concerns are inevitably participants in political markets in their consideration of forms of valuation, production, and circulation of knowledge with labor and with capital.

Approaching the economic as plural, contingent, and political, chapters explore complex forces shaping the production and valuation of literacies, languages, identities, and institutions and consider their implications for composition scholarship, teaching, administration, and public rhetorics. Chapters engage a range of issues, including knowledge transfer, cyberpublics, graduate writing courses, and internationalized web domains.

Economies of Writing challenges dominant ideologies of writing, writing skills, writing assessment, language, writing technology, and public rhetoric by revealing the complex and shifting valuations of writing practices as they circulate within and across different economies. The volume is a significant contribution to rhetoric and composition’s understanding of and ways to address its seemingly perennial unease about its own work.

Contributors: Anis Bawarshi, Deborah Brandt, Jenn Fishman, T. R. Johnson, Jay Jordan, Kacie Kiser, Steve Lamos, Donna LeCourt, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, Samantha Looker, Katie Malcolm, Paul Kei Matsuda, Joan Mullin, Jason Peters, Christian J. Pulver, Kelly Ritter, Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Tony Scott, Scott Wible, Yuching Jill Yang, James T. Zebroski

When Vladimir Nabokov was up for a chair in literature at Harvard, the linguist Roman Jakobson protested: “What’s next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?” That anecdote, with which D. G. Myers begins The Elephants Teach, perfectly frames the issues this book tackles.  

Myers explores more than a century of debate over how writing should be taught and whether it can or should be taught in a classroom at all. Along the way, he incorporates insights from a host of poets and teachers, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, John Berryman, John Dewey, Lionel Trilling, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Saul Bellow. And from his exhaustive research, Myers extracts relevant background information on nineteenth-century educational theory; shifts in technology, publishing, and marketing; the growth of critical theory in this country; and the politics of higher education. While he shows how creative writing has become a machine for creating more creative writing programs, Myers also suggests that its history supplies a precedent for something different—a way for creativity and criticism, poetry and scholarship, to join together to produce not just writing programs but good writers. 

Updated with fresh commentary on what’s happened to creative writing in the academy since the first edition was published ten years ago, The Elephants Teach will be indispensable for students and teachers of writing, literature, and literary history.

The Embodied Playbook discovers a new approach to understanding student literacy in a surprising place: the university athletics department. Through analysis of a yearlong case study of the men’s basketball team at the University of North Georgia, J. Michael Rifenburg shows that a deeper and more refined understanding of how humans learn through physical action can help writing instructors reach a greater range of students.

Drawing from research on embodiment theory, the nature and function of background knowledge, jazz improvisation, and other unexpected domains, The Embodied Playbook examines a valuable but unexplored form of literacy: the form used by student-athletes when learning and using scripted plays. All students’ extracurricular prior knowledge is vital for the work they undertake in the classroom, and student-athletes understand the strengths and constraints of written text much as they understand the text of game plays: through embodying text and performing it in a competitive space. The book focuses on three questions: What are plays and what do they do? How do student-athletes learn plays? How can teachers of composition and rhetoric better connect with student-athletes?

The Embodied Playbook reveals the literacy of the body as a rich and untapped resource for writing instruction. Given the numbers of students who are involved in athletics, whether intramural, community-related, or extracurricular, Rifenburg’s conclusions hold important implications not only for how we define literacy but also for how writing programs can serve all of their students most effectively.

While events in the Middle East-North Africa region dominate world news, it is an area little understood by the rest of the world—not only historically, politically, and culturally but also within the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition and Second Language Writing. The editors and contributors to this collection share scholarship that addresses how writing programs and writing-across-the-curriculum initiatives—in the region and outside of it—are responding to the increasing globalization of higher education and contributing to international discussions about World Englishes and other language varieties as well as translingual approaches to writing and writing pedagogy.

Contributors: Samer Annous, James P. Austin, William DeGenaro, Rula Diab, Michele Eodice, Juheina Fakhreddine, Aneta Hayes, Tom Highley, Amy Hodges, Rima Iskandarani, Najla Jarkas, Holly Johnson, Brenda Kent, Malakeh Raif Khoury-Khayat, Nasser Mansour, Ryan T. Miller, Maureen O’Day Nicolas, Saman Hussein Omar, Silvia Pessoa, Mysti Rudd, Zane Siraj Sinno, Michael Telafici, Connie Kendall Theado, Martha Townsend, Hacer Hande Uysal, Margaret Willard-Traub

Since the Renaissance, what has been considered the “best” style of writing has always been connected with the dominant cultural agenda of the time. In this book, Kathryn Flannery offers a demystifying perspective on theorists who have argued for an essential distinction between “content” and “style,” and focuses on the importance of understanding written prose style as a cultural asset. She addresses the development of prose criticism, the evolution of English teaching, the history of Francis Bacon and Richard Hooker's writing, and a modern discourse on stylistics.

Launched in middle schools in the fall of 2005, the "Writers Matter" approach was designed to discover ways to improve the fit between actual English curricula, district/state standards and, more recently, the Common Core Curriculum Standards for writing instruction. Adapted from Erin Gruwell's successful Freedom Writers Program, "Writers Matter" develops students' skills in the context of personal growth, understanding others, and making broader connections to the world.

 

Empowering Young Writers explains and expands on the practical aspects of the "Writers Matter" approach, emphasizing a focus on free expression and establishing connections between the curriculum and students' personal lives. Program creator Robert Vogel, and his co-authors offer proven ways to motivate adolescents to write, work diligently to improve their writing skills, and think more critically about the world. 

 

This comprehensive book will help teachers, administrators, and education students apply and reproduce the "Writers Matter" approach more broadly, which can have a profound impact on their students' lives and social development. 

 

What happened to the bold, kicky promise of writing instruction in the 1960s? The current conservative trend in composition is analyzed allegorically by Geoffrey Sirc in this book-length homage to Charles Deemer's 1967 article, in which the theories and practices of Happenings artists (multi-disciplinary performance pioneers) were used to invigorate college writing. Sirc takes up Deemer's inquiry, moving through the material and theoretical concerns of such pre- and post-Happenings influences as Duchamp and Pollock, situationists and punks, as well as many of the Happenings artists proper.

With this book, already a cult classic, began a neo-avant-garde for composition studies.

Winner of the Ross W. Winterowd Award for most outstanding book in composition theory.

The authors of Academic Writing for Graduate Students have written a book for the next level of second language writing. English in Today's Research World offers students a very high level of writing instruction, with a specific focus on the projects students undertake--such as dissertations and conference abstracts--at the end of their university work or as they begin careers in research or academia.
In addition to instruction on writing for publication, English in Today's Research World provides needed advice on applications, recommendations, and requests--types of communications that are particularly vulnerable to influences from national cultural expectations and conventions and that, therefore, place the NNS writer at increased disadvantage.
The text is both a reference manual and a course book, so that researchers can continue to use the book after they have completed their formal education. New ESL/EFL teachers can use English in Today's Research World as a reference book for themselves or as a teaching aid in the classroom.

In this rich reference work, Beth Levin classifies over 3,000 English verbs according to shared meaning and behavior. Levin starts with the hypothesis that a verb's meaning influences its syntactic behavior and develops it into a powerful tool for studying the English verb lexicon. She shows how identifying verbs with similar syntactic behavior provides an effective means of distinguishing semantically coherent verb classes, and isolates these classes by examining verb behavior with respect to a wide range of syntactic alternations that reflect verb meaning.

The first part of the book sets out alternate ways in which verbs can express their arguments. The second presents classes of verbs that share a kernel of meaning and explores in detail the behavior of each class, drawing on the alternations in the first part. Levin's discussion of each class and alternation includes lists of relevant verbs, illustrative examples, comments on noteworthy properties, and bibliographic references. The result is an original, systematic picture of the organization of the verb inventory.

Easy to use, English Verb Classes and Alternations sets the stage for further explorations of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax. It will prove indispensable for theoretical and computational linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, lexicographers, and teachers of English as a second language.

With over 25,000 English entries and their Basque equivalents in six major dialects, this volume is the most complete reference to the Basque language to date for English-speaking people. This useful resource is the very first of its kind to become available to both the casual student and the serious scholar of the Basque language. The Biscayan, Guipuzcoan, Labourdin, Low Navarrese, Zuberoan, and Batua dialects are included in order to cover all the different regional and formal dialects used in the body of Basque literature, both written and oral, and to present the language in a form familiar to American Basques who may know little of Batua. Whenever possible, the authors also include words relating to modern society.

What kind of language did ordinary men and women use in the seventeenth century? Everyday English 1500-1700 addresses this question by bringing together and explaining more than sixty nonliterary texts from the early modern period, ranging from witnesses' depositions to church wardens' accounts, and from letters and journals to constables' presentments and scurrilous abuse shouted in the marketplace.

This unique source book of essential documents designed for courses on Early Modern English is designed as a teaching text with full guidance to each text, including glossary, explanatory and background notes, and suggested topics for linguistic evaluation. Everyday English takes an up-to-the-minute approach by focusing on language as it was used and spoken at the time.

This wide-ranging collection for the first time makes available to students a corpus of examples of the ordinary, nonstandard language of the man and woman in the street, coming from areas as diverse as England, Scotland, and America. The emphasis throughout is on providing as much assistance as possible to the reader to aid understanding and appreciation of both the linguistic features and the everyday lifestyles of the time.

"The only book a really conscientious teacher of the history and structure of Early Modern English would use for source texts." --Roger Lass, University of Cape Town

Bridget Cusack was lecturer in English Language, University of Edinburgh.

Soliday provides an overview of the contemporary theory and research in Writing across the Curriculum programs, focusing specifically on the implementation of the Writing Fellows Program at the City College of New York. Drawing on her direct observations of colleagues and students at the school, she addresses the everyday challenges that novice writers face, such as developing an appropriate "stance" in one's writing, and the intricacies of choosing and developing content. 

The volume then goes on to address some of the most pressing questions being asked by teachers of composition: To what extent can writing be separated from its situation? How can rhetorical expertise be shared across fields? And to what degree is writing ability local rather than general? Soliday argues that, while writing is closely connected to situation, general rhetorical principles can still be capably applied if those situations are known. The key to improving writing instruction, she maintains, is to construct contexts that expose writers to the social actions that genres perform for readers. 

Supplementing the author's case study are six appendixes, complete with concrete examples and helpful teaching tools to establish effective classroom practices and exercises in Writing across the Curriculum programs. Packed with useful information and insight, Everyday Genres is an essential volume for both students and teachers seeking to expand their understanding of the nature of writing.

In a landmark collaboration, five co-authors develop a theme of ordinary disruptions ("the everyday") as a source of provocative learning moments that can liberate both student writers and writing center staff. At the same time, the authors parlay Etienne Wenger’s concept of "community of practice" into an ethos of a dynamic, learner-centered pedagogy that is especially well-suited to the peculiar teaching situation of the writing center. They push themselves and their field toward deeper, more significant research, more self-conscious teaching.

Thomas P. Miller defines college English studies as literacy studies and examines how it has evolved in tandem with broader developments in literacy and the literate. He maps out “four corners” of English departments: literature, language studies, teacher education, and writing studies. Miller identifies their development with broader changes in the technologies and economies of literacy that have redefined what students write and read, which careers they enter, and how literature represents their experiences and aspirations.
Miller locates the origins of college English studies in the colonial transition from a religious to an oratorical conception of literature. A belletristic model of literature emerged in the nineteenth century in response to the spread of the “penny” press and state-mandated schooling. Since literary studies became a common school subject, professors of literature have distanced themselves from teachers of literacy.  In the Progressive era, that distinction came to structure scholarly organizations such as the MLA, while NCTE was established to develop more broadly based teacher coalitions. In the twentieth century New Criticism came to provide the operating assumptions for the rise of English departments, until those assumptions became critically overloaded with the crash of majors and jobs that began in 1970s and continues today.<br><br>
For models that will help the discipline respond to such challenges, Miller looks to comprehensive departments of English that value studies of teaching, writing, and language as well as literature.  According to Miller, departments in more broadly based institutions have the potential to redress the historical alienation of English departments from their institutional base in work with literacy. Such departments have a potentially quite expansive articulation apparatus. Many are engaged with writing at work in public life, with schools and public agencies, with access issues, and with media, ethnic, and cultural studies. With the privatization of higher education, such pragmatic engagements become vital to sustaining a civic vision of English studies and the humanities generally.

From the outset, experimental writing has been viewed as a means to afford a more creative space for students to express individuality, underrepresented social realities, and criticisms of dominant socio-political discourses and their institutions. Yet, the recent trend toward multimedia texts has left many composition instructors with little basis from which to assess these new forms and to formulate pedagogies. In this original study, Patricia Suzanne Sullivan provides a critical history of experimental writing theory and its aesthetic foundations and demonstrates their application to current multimodal writing.

Sullivan unpacks the work of major scholars in composition and rhetoric and their theories on aesthetics, particularly avant-gardism. She also relates the dialectics that shape these aesthetics and sheds new light on both the positive and negative aspects of experimental writing and its attempts to redefine the writing disciplines. Additionally, she shows how current debates over the value of multimedia texts echo earlier arguments that pitted experimental writing against traditional models. Sullivan further articulates the ways that multimedia is and isn’t changing composition pedagogies, and provides insights into resolving these tensions.

Kelly Ritter and Paul Kei Matsuda have created an essential introduction to the field of composition studies for graduate students and instructors new to the study of writing. The book offers a careful exploration of this diverse field, focusing specifically on scholarship of writing and composing. Within this territory, the authors draw the boundaries broadly, to include allied sites of research such as professional and technical writing, writing across the curriculum programs, writing centers, and writing program administration. Importantly, they represent composition as a dynamic, eclectic field, influenced by factors both within the academy and without. The editors and their sixteen seasoned contributors have created a comprehensive and thoughtful exploration of composition studies as it stands in the early twenty-first century. Given the rapid growth of this field and the evolution of it research and pedagogical agendas over even the last ten years, this multi-vocal introduction is long overdue.

Exploring Options is designed to help student writers develop their knowledge and use of academic language to meet the demands of college- and university-level writing assignments. It draws on the research identifying lexical and grammatical patterns across academic contexts and provides authentic reading contexts for structured vocabulary learning. Recognizing that vocabulary choices in writing often require consideration of grammatical structure, Exploring Options focuses on specific kinds of lexico-grammatical decisions—that is, the ones involving the interaction between vocabulary and grammar--that students face in shaping, connecting, and restructuring their ideas. The book helps writers learn how to effectively use resources such as learner dictionaries, thesauruses, and concordancers to improve academic word knowledge.
 
Following a unit on using resources for vocabulary development, the contents are divided into three parts: Showing Relationships within Sentences, Connecting and Focusing across Sentences, and Qualifying Statements and Reporting Research. Part 1 focuses on verbs and modifiers that express increases and decreases, verbs and abstract nouns that describe change, connectors and verbs describing causal relationships, and parallel structures. Part 2 explores the words that help connect ideas and add cohesion. Part 3 discusses how to express degrees of certainty and accuracy and the use of reporting verbs.