Results by title

681 books match the query 'English language' and 15 start with f

cover of Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring

Facing the Center

Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring

Harry C. Denny

Utah State University Press, 2010

In the diversity of their clients as well as their professional and student staff, writing centers present a complicated set of relationships that inevitably affect the instruction they offer. In Facing the Center, Harry Denny unpacks the identity matrices that enrich teachable moments, and he explores the pedagogical dynamics and implications of identity within the writing center. 

The face of the writing center, be it mainstream or marginal, majority or miority, orthodox or subversive, always has implications for teaching and learning. Facing the Center will extend current research in writing center theory to bring it in touch with theories now common in cultural studies curricula. Denny takes up issues of power, agency, language, and meaning, and pushes his readers to ask how they themselves, or the centers in which they work, might be perpetuating cultures that undermine inclusive, progressive education.
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cover of Faculty Writing Support: Emerging Research from Rhetoric and Composition Studies

Faculty Writing Support

Emerging Research from Rhetoric and Composition Studies

Jaclyn Wells

University Press of Colorado, 2025

This edited collection offers 11 studies that illustrate the different ways writing studies researchers can use their training to study how faculty write. Moving beyond the lore that often dominates conversations about faculty writers, Faculty Writing Support explores how our discipline can expand its understanding of how faculty write and how they can be supported. The contributors raise questions about how graduate students transition to faculty writers, what types of support faculty writers want at different stages of their careers, and how and why faculty write together. Drawing on research methods including surveys, interviews, case studies, and audio recordings of writing groups, the contributors to Faculty Writing Support offer a first look at grounded research interventions with faculty and advanced graduate student writers. The collection acts as a call for writing studies to turn its disciplinary attention to faculty writing within higher education.
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cover of Failing Sideways: Queer Possibilities for Writing Assessment

Failing Sideways

Queer Possibilities for Writing Assessment

Stephanie West-Puckett

Utah State University Press, 2023

Failing Sideways is an innovative and fresh approach to assessment that intersects writing studies, educational measurement, and queer rhetorics. While valuing and representing the research, theory, and practice of assessment, authors Stephanie West-Puckett, Nicole I. Caswell, and William P. Banks demonstrate the ways that students, teachers, and other interested parties can find joy and justice in the work of assessment.
 
A failure-oriented assessment model unsettles some of the most common practices, like rubrics and portfolios, and challenges many deeply held assumptions about validity and reliability in order to ask what could happen if assessment was oriented toward possibility and potential. Working to engage a more capacious writing construct, the authors propose queer validity inquiry (QVI) as a model for assessment that values failure, affect, identity, and materiality. These overlapping lenses help teachers honor parts of writing and learning that writing studies faculty have struggled to hold onto in a world overly focused on quickness and efficiency in schools.
 
Through programmatic and classroom examples, Failing Sideways privileges what is valued in the classroom but traditionally ignored in assessments. Reimagining what matters in the teaching and learning of writing and using assessment data differently, this book demonstrates what writing can be and could do in a more diverse and just world.
 
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cover of Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies

Feminist Rhetorical Practices

New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies

Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch

Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

From two leading scholars in the field comes this landmark assessment of the shifting terrain of feminist rhetorical practices in recent decades. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch contend the field of rhetorical studies is being transformed through the work of feminist rhetoricians who have brought about notable changes in who the subjects of rhetorical study can be, how their practices can be critiqued, and how the effectiveness and value of the inquiry frameworks can be articulated.

To contextualize a new and changed landscape for narratives in the history of rhetoric, Royster and Kirsch present four critical terms of engagement—critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization—as the foundation for a new analytical model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating feminist rhetorical inquiry and the study and teaching of rhetoric in general. This model draws directly on the wealth of knowledge and understanding gained from feminist rhetorical practices, especially sensitivity toward meaningfully and respectfully rendering the work, lives, cultures, and traditions of historical and contemporary women in rhetorical scholarship.

Proposing ambitious new standards for viewing and valuing excellence in feminist rhetorical practice, Royster and Kirsch advocate an ethos of respect and humility in the analysis of communities and specific rhetorical performances neglected in rhetorical history, recasting rhetorical studies as a global phenomenon rather than a western one. They also reflect on their own personal and professional development as researchers as they highlight innovative feminist research over the past thirty years to articulate how feminist work is changing the field and pointing to the active participation of women in various discourse arenas and to the practices and genres they use.

Valuable to new and established scholars of rhetoric, Feminist Rhetorical Practice: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies is essential for understanding the theoretical, methodological, and ethical impacts of feminist rhetorical studies on the wider field.

Winner, 2014 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award

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cover of Field Of Dreams

Field Of Dreams

edited by Peggy O'Neill, Angela Crow, and Larry Burton

Utah State University Press, 2002

One of the first collections to focus on independent writing programs, A Field of Dreams offers a complex picture of the experience of the stand-alone. Included here are narratives of individual programs from a wide range of institutions, exploring such issues as what institutional issues led to their independence, how independence solved or created administrative problems, how it changed the culture of the writing program and faculty sense of purpose, success, or failure.

Further chapters build larger ideas about the advantages and disadvantages of stand-alone status, covering labor issues, promotion/tenure issues, institutional politics, and others. A retrospective on the famous controversy at Minnesota is included, along with a look at the long-established independent programs at Harvard and Syracuse.

Finally, the book considers disciplinary questions raised by the growth of stand-alone programs. Authors here respond with critique and reflection to ideas raised by other chapters—do current independent models inadvertently diminish the influence of rhetoric and composition scholarship? Do they tend to ignore the outward movement of literacy toward technology? Can they be structured to enhance interdisciplinary or writing-across-the-curriculum efforts? Can independent programs play a more influential role in the university than they do from the English department?

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cover of Figures of Speech: Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolutions

Figures of Speech

Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolutions

Tim Cassedy

University of Iowa Press, 2018

Tim Cassedy’s fascinating study examines the role that language played at the turn of the nineteenth century as a marker of one’s identity. During this time of revolution (U.S., French, and Haitian) and globalization, language served as a way to categorize people within a world that appeared more diverse than ever. Linguistic differences, especially among English-speakers, seemed to validate the emerging national, racial, local, and regional identity categories that took shape in this new world order. 

Focusing on six eccentric characters of the time—from the woman known as “Princess Caraboo” to wordsmith Noah Webster—Cassedy shows how each put language at the center of their identities and lived out the possibilities of their era’s linguistic ideas. The result is a highly entertaining and equally informative look at how perceptions about who spoke what language—and how they spoke it—determined the shape of communities in the British American colonies and beyond. 

This engagingly written story is sure to appeal to historians of literature, culture, and communication; to linguists and book historians; and to general readers interested in how ideas about English developed in the early United States and throughout the English-speaking world. 

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cover of First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground

First Semester

Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground

Jessica Restaino

Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

Jessica Restaino offers a snapshot of the first semester experiences of graduate student writing teachers as they navigate predetermined course syllabi and materials, the pressures of grading, the influences of foundational scholarship, and their own classroom authority. With rich qualitative data gathered from course observations, interviews, and correspondence, Restaino traces four graduate students’ first experiences as teachers at a large, public university. Yet the circumstances and situations she relates will ring familiar at widely varying institutions.

First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground presents a fresh and challenging theoretical approach to understanding and improving the preparation of graduate students for the writing classroom. Restaino uses a three-part theoretical construct—labor, action, and work, as defined in Hannah Arendt’s work of political philosophy, The Human Condition—as a lens for reading graduate students’ struggles to balance their new responsibilities as teachers with their concurrent roles as students. Arendt’s concepts serve as access points for analysis, raising important questions about graduate student writing teachers’ first classrooms and uncovering opportunities for improved support and preparation by university writing programs.
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cover of First Time Up: An Insider'S Guide For New Composition Teachers

First Time Up

An Insider'S Guide For New Composition Teachers

Brock Dethier

Utah State University Press, 2005

"First time up?"—an insider’s friendly question from 1960s counter-culture—perfectly captures the spirit of this book. A short, supportive, practical guide for the first-time college composition instructor, the book is upbeat, wise but friendly, casual but knowledgeable (like the voice that may have introduced you to certain other firsts). With an experiential focus rather than a theoretical one, First Time Up will be a strong addition to the newcomer’s professional library, and a great candidate for the TA practicum reading list.

Dethier, author of The Composition Instructor’s Survival Guide and From Dylan to Donne, directly addresses the common headaches, nightmares, and epiphanies of composition teaching—especially the ones that face the new teacher. And since legions of new college composition teachers are either graduate instructors (TAs) or adjuncts without a formal background in composition studies, he assumes these folks as his primary audience.

Dethier’s voice is casual, but it conveys concern, humor, experience, and reassurance to the first-timer. He addresses all major areas that graduate instructors or new adjuncts in a writing program are sure to face, from career anxiety to thoughts on grading and keeping good classroom records. Dethier’s own eclecticism is well-represented here, but he reviews with considerable deftness the value of contemporary scholarship to first-time writing instructors—many of whom will be impatient with high theory. Throughout the work, he affirms a humane, confident approach to teaching, along with a true affection for college students and for teachers just learning to deal with them.

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cover of Flash Effect: Science and the Rhetorical Origins of Cold War America

Flash Effect

Science and the Rhetorical Origins of Cold War America

David J. Tietge

Ohio University Press, 2002

The ways science and technology are portrayed in advertising, in the news, in our politics, and in the culture at large inform the way we respond to these particular facts of life. The better we are at recognizing the rhetorical intentions of the purveyors of information and promoters of mass culture, the more adept we become at responding intelligently to them.

Flash Effect, a startling book by David J. Tietge, documents the manner in which those at the highest levels of our political and cultural institutions conflated the rhetoric of science and technology with the rhetorics of religion and patriotism to express their policies for governance at the onset of the Cold War and to explain them to the American public.

Professor Tietge details our cultural attitudes about science in the early years of the Cold War, when on the heels of a great technological victory Americans were faced with the possibility of destruction by the very weapons that had saved them.

In Flash Effect we learn how, by symbolizing the scientist as both a father figure and a savior—and by celebrating the technological objects of his labor—the campaign to promote science took hold in the American consciousness. The products of that attitude are with us today more than ever.

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cover of Flesh Becomes Word: A Lexicography of the Scapegoat or, the History of an Idea

Flesh Becomes Word

A Lexicography of the Scapegoat or, the History of an Idea

David Dawson

Michigan State University Press, 2013

Though its coinage can be traced back to a sixteenth-century translation of Leviticus, the term “scapegoat” has enjoyed a long and varied history of both scholarly and everyday uses. While WilliamTyndale employed it to describe one of two goats chosen by lot to escape the Day of Atonement sacrifices with its life, the expression was soon far more widely used to name victims of false accusation and unwarranted punishment. As such, the scapegoat figures prominently in contemporary theories of violence, from its elevation by Frazer to a ritual category in his ethnological opus The Golden Bough to its pivotal roles in projects as seemingly at odds as Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics and René Girard’s theory of cultural origins. A copiously researched and groundbreaking investigation of the expression in such wide use today, Flesh Becomes Word follows the scapegoat from its origins in Mesopotamian ritual across centuries of typological reflection on the meaning of Jesus’ death, to its first informal uses in the pornographic and plague literature of the 1600s, and finally into the modern era, where the word takes recognizable shape in the context of the New English Quaker persecution and proto-feminist diatribe at the close of the seventeenth century. The historical circumstances of its lexical formation prove rich in implications for current theories of the scapegoat and the making of the modern world alike.
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cover of Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody

Free Verse

An Essay on Prosody

Charles O. Hartman

Northwestern University Press, 1996

To make sense of "free verse" in theory of in practice, the study of prosody—the function of rhythm in poetry—must be revised and rethought. In Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody, Charles Hartman develops a theory of prosody that includes the most characteristic form of twentieth-century poetry.
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cover of From Liberation to Remediation: The Rhetoric of General Education

From Liberation to Remediation

The Rhetoric of General Education

Kelly Ritter

Utah State University Press, 2026

Ever since its origins as a post–World War II movement designed to democratize education and promote civic engagement, General Education has been the source and subject of political battles. From Liberation to Remediation explores how Gen Ed’s initial goal of providing a common intellectual foundation for all students has been gradually undermined, resulting in a growing perception that General Education is unnecessary for high-achieving students and is instead a remedial path for those deemed underprepared.
 
Kelly Ritter addresses how lawmakers, for-profit testing companies, and even universities fuel public misconceptions of what Gen Ed can provide for our democracy and the role that a broad-based college education plays in social uplift. Tracing the history of the public rhetoric that persuades parents and students to see these courses as a set of interchangeable precollege credits to gain (or game) by any means necessary, she examines how positive and negative public responses to the curricula affected the position of core subjects in US universities, focusing on first-year writing. She also explores the role local, state, and organizational politics played in Gen Ed’s positioning, including decisions related to race, social class, and educational attainment; the impact credit-by-exemption and seamless transfer had on the quality and import of Gen Ed programming in both high schools and colleges; and the perceived use-value of the courses themselves in the face of rising college costs. Finally, she considers which student populations have benefited from the denigration of Gen Ed’s value and which have been left behind.
 
Drawing on archival research and case studies, From Liberation to Remediation raises important questions about equity, access, and the role of General Education in US higher education’s future and demonstrates that recovering the original post-war democratizing principles and practices of Gen Ed is critical to the continuance of a literate, empathetic, and civic-minded democracy for the twenty-first century.
 
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cover of From Military to Academy: The Writing and Learning Transitions of Student-Veterans

From Military to Academy

The Writing and Learning Transitions of Student-Veterans

Mark Blaauw-Hara

Utah State University Press, 2021

Grounded in case-study research, this book explores the writing and learning transitions of military veterans at the college level. Providing meaningful research into the ways adult learners bring their knowledge to the classroom, From Military to Academy offers new ways of thinking about pedagogy beyond the “traditional” college experience.
 
From Military to Academy is a detailed picture of how student-veterans may experience the shift to the college experience and academic writing. Grounding his research in the experiences of student-veterans at a community college, Blaauw-Hara integrates adult learning theory, threshold concepts, genre analysis, and student-veteran scholarship to help readers understand the challenges student-veterans experience and the strengths they bring as they enter the academic writing environment. Each chapter takes a different theoretical approach to frame student-veterans’ experiences, and Blaauw-Hara ends each chapter with specific, actionable pedagogical suggestions.
 
Composition studies scholars especially have demonstrated an ongoing interest in and commitment to understanding the experiences of student-veterans from military service to postsecondary education. From Military to Academy helps college writing faculty and writing program administrators understand and support the growing numbers of student-veterans who are making the transition to higher education.
 
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cover of From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame

From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow

How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame

Mark Monmonier

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Brassiere Hills, Alaska. Mollys Nipple, Utah. Outhouse Draw, Nevada. In the early twentieth century, it was common for towns and geographical features to have salacious, bawdy, and even derogatory names. In the age before political correctness, mapmakers readily accepted any local preference for place names, prizing accurate representation over standards of decorum. Thus, summits such as Squaw Tit—which towered above valleys in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California—found their way into the cartographic annals. Later, when sanctions prohibited local use of racially, ethnically, and scatalogically offensive toponyms, town names like Jap Valley, California, were erased from the national and cultural map forever. 

From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow probes this little-known chapter in American cartographic history by considering the intersecting efforts to computerize mapmaking, standardize geographic names, and respond to public concern over ethnically offensive appellations. Interweaving cartographic history with tales of politics and power, celebrated geographer Mark Monmonier locates his story within the past and present struggles of mapmakers to create an orderly process for naming that avoids confusion, preserves history, and serves different political aims. Anchored by a diverse selection of naming controversies—in the United States, Canada, Cyprus, Israel, Palestine, and Antarctica; on the ocean floor and the surface of the moon; and in other parts of our solar system—From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow richly reveals the map’s role as a mediated portrait of the cultural landscape. And unlike other books that consider place names, this is the first to reflect on both the real cartographic and political imbroglios they engender. 

From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow is Mark Monmonier at his finest: a learned analysis of a timely and controversial subject rendered accessible—and even entertaining—to the general reader.
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cover of Fulfulde (Maasina) - English - French Lexicon: A Root-Based Compilation Drawn from Extant Sources

Fulfulde (Maasina) - English - French Lexicon

A Root-Based Compilation Drawn from Extant Sources

Donald W. Osborn

Michigan State University Press, 1993

The Lexicon brings together lexical material from a wide range of published and non-published sources to create an extensive compilation of the vocabulary of Fulfulde as it is spoken in that part of central Mali known as Masina (in Fulfulde, Maasina). The Lexicon is intended primarily for non-Fulfulde speakers who are learning the language at the intermediate or advanced levels and who need access to a comprehensive reference source on Fulfulde vocabulary. Scholars, development workers, and others whose research or fieldwork involves use of the Fulfulde of Masina may find it helpful as well in clarifying nuances of meaning and standardized spelling for the less familiar terms they might encounter. It is also intended that the present work, beyond the matter of organizing vocabulary, will contribute significantly to the expanding lexicographical and linguistic investigations of Fulfulde.

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