College Composition and Communication
751 articlesOctober 1991
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Abstract
The published draft of the CCCC Statement (CCCC Initiatives on the Wyoming Resolution, CCC, Feb. 1989, 61-72) made me uneasy in its assumption that full-time teaching was the only legitimate model for academic employment in our--or indeed, any-field. Thus, I was pleased when the final version-in response to suggestions made by several of us at the 1989 CCCC meeting in Seattle-acknowledged the legitimacy of fully professional, tenuretrack part-time positions in the teaching of writing (Statement of Principles and Standards, CCC, Oct. 1989, 329-36). Regular part-time faculty are a permanent good in the academy and in our writing programs for two reasons. First, they allow for some variation from the standard male academic career track in one's 20's and early 30's-the track where you graduate from college, start grad school (maybe with a wife to help support you through it), land your first full-time tenure-track job, and write your first book to earn tenure (while your wife bears and watches the kids and provides the support system for 6 or 7 years). Not everyone can easily fit that time frame or career schedule, and our students need to see that different career patterns and work lives are possible. Business and government have been successfully experimenting with professional part-time positions and a number of successful part-time policies also exist in academia, like the ones at Carleton in Minnesota, Central College in Iowa, and Wesleyan in Connecticut, where part-time faculty in all disciplines can earn tenure and sabbaticals just like their full-time colleagues. Second, such professional part-time positions are important because they allow us to build into our writing programs, in a stable and productive way, faculty who have chosen to work part-time in order to have time for their own writing or other work which involves writing-people working as everything from novelists to free-lance journalists to political activists to consultants. These people bring a broad range of experiences with language into the classroom and they can teach our students and us a lot about writing in the nonacademic world. The final version of the CCCC Statement does not suggest
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May 1991
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Symbols in the prehistoric Middle East - developmental features preceding written communication, Denise Schmandt-Besserat a historical view of the relationship between reading and writing, Edward P.J.Corbett sophistic formulae and the emergence of the Attic-Ionic grapholect - a study in oral and written composition, Richard Leo Enos the auditors' role in Aristotelian rhetoric, William M.A.Grimaldi a sophistic strain in the medieval ars praedicandi and the scholastic method, James L.Kinneavy the illiterate mode of written communication - the work of the medieval scribe, Denise A.Troll rhetoric, truth and literacy in the Renaissance of the 12th century, John O.Ward Quintillian's influence on the teaching of speaking and writing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, James J.Murphy l'enseignement de l'art de la premiere rhetorique - rhetorical education in France before 1600, Robert W.Smith technological development and writer-subject reader immediacies, Walter J.Ong a rhetoric of mass communication - collective or corporate discourse, Lynette Hunter.
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“CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric, 1988”, Erika Lindemann and Mary Beth Harding Lynn Z. Bloom “Research in Basic Writing: A Bibliographic Sourcebook”, Michael G. Moran and Martin J. Jacobi LisaJ. McClure “The Writing Teacher as Researcher: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Class-Based Research”, Donald A. Daiker and Max Morenberg Shirley K Rose “Personality and the Teaching of Composition”, George H. Jensen and John K. DiTiberio Lynn Quitman Troyka “Farther Along: Transforming Dichotomieisn Rhetoric and Composition”, Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly Catherine E. Lamb “Writing Better Computer User Documentation: From Paper to Hypertext”, R. John Brockmann Designing and “Writing Online Documentation: Help Files to Hypertext”, William K. Horton Stephen A. Bernhardt “Modern Rhetorical Criticism”, Roderick P. Hart Timothy W. Crusius “Oral and Written Communication: Historical Approaches”, Richard Leo Enos Thomas J. Farrell The Older Sophists, Rosamond Kent Sprague Richard Leo Enos The Student’s Guide to Good Writing: Building Writing Skills for Success in College, Rick Dalton and Marianne Dalton Charles W. Bridges
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This collection of twenty-five brief papers is based on a vital premise: that when classrooms become places where teachers engage in close-up studies of what learning is and how it happens, better teaching and learning result. Teacher-researchers, defining and studying educational issues at the classroom level, with the active help of students and colleagues, tend to see themselves in more productive ways, developing greater self-confidence and autonomy.
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Oh, I said, glancing around the four-person office. Why had he needed to use the couch when there were chairs for the students right in front of each desk? Silently, I resolved to rid myself of it as soon as my successor departed. As it turned out, getting rid of the couch wasn't easy, so I simply disassociated myself from it. I shoved it further along the wall toward an officemate's work area and set up shop. When the semester began, I found I was perfectly comfortable conferring with students from behind my desk. The couch went unused for two years until our department's move across campus finally gave me the opportunity to get rid of it altogether. Unwanted furniture, we professors were told, could be abandoned in our old offices. Happily, I left the ugly thing where I had shoved it and looked forward to a couchless office in our new building. But strange to say, I installed a couch in my new office only months after I moved into it. My reason for doing so had something to do with a change in my attitude toward teaching writing-a change prompted in part by a writing surgeon named Richard Selzer. The connection between surgery and writing is one that Selzer makes often. In a lecture presented recently at our campus, he spoke of the similarity of the tools used in the two arts: the scalpel and the pen. Both mark their passage across a surface with a thin line of color. Both are used with the intention of exposing something to view. Here the parallel ends, for the surgeon uses the
February 1991
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Abstract
As a community-college English instructor immersed in teaching four sections a semester, at least two of which are writing courses, I have very little time to study theories of composition and pedagogy. And yet, out of a desire to improve as a teacher, I read theory in what little time I have. I look outside my classroom to learn what theoreticians have to say about what happens in my classroom. I have, over the years, internalized a view that if I am to find theory I am to do so outside my classroom-in the major journals and at conferences. I have also come to expect that the theoreticians, those writing the journal articles and presenting papers, are most likely to be from universities, and a relatively small number of them. Needless to say, I do not expect the theoreticians to come from the community colleges or from other institutions whose faculty devote most of their time to teaching. In recent years, however, the line between theory and classroom practice has begun to be breached, the dichotomy between the two questioned. When Robert Coles, whose words begin this essay, encourages me to consider theory as rooted in observation, in things observed and people observing, I wonder whether, maybe, even a beleaguered community-college writing teacher can theorize, and I begin to think it is possible. I am further encouraged by events happening in the profession. In this regard, an extraordinary thing happened at the 1990 CCCC Convention, which took place in Chicago. Jane Peterson, while giving the Chair's Address on Valuing Teaching: Assumptions, Problems, and Possibilities, identified herself unequivocally as a teacher who had in the past taught five sections in one semester and would continue to do so. At one point, she turned to the
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December 1990
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October 1990
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Besides the editors, the essayists are Lori Chamberlain, Michael Clark, Dennis A. Foster, Jon Klancher, Randall Knoper, Elaine O. Lees, Mariolina Salvatori, and Nina Schwartz. Donahue and Quandahl present accessible and exciting efforts to explore composition teaching in a new mode perhaps, a pristine paradigm of cultural criticism. Approximately half of the essays investigate the pedagogical agenda implied in the theories of a particular writer Barthes, Lacan, or Burke, for exampleand place such theories in the The remaining essays examine pedagogy as a critical practice. The book does not advocate a single method of instruction but instead reminds us that theory is itself continually modified by the classroom.
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Response to Andrea A. Lunsford, "Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing" ↗
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Robert S. Burton, Response to Andrea A. Lunsford, "Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing", College Composition and Communication, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Oct., 1990), pp. 336-337
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Creating a Computer-Supported Writing Facility: A Blueprint for Action, Cynthia L. Selfe Computer Writing Environments: Theory, Research, and Design, Bruce Britton and Shawn M. Glynn Fred Kemp Critical Perspectiveosn Computers and Composition Instruction, Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe Bruce L. Edwards Reclaiming Pedagogy: The Rhetoric of the Classroom, Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl Sharon Crowley Audience Expectations and Teacher Demands, Robert Brooke and John Hendricks Alice M. Gillam The Psychology of Writing: The Affective Experience, Alice Glarden Brand Robert Brooke Coping with Failure.: The Therapeutic Uses of Rhetoric, David Payne Paul W. Ranieri Critical Thinking: A Semiotic Perspective, Marjorie Siegel and Robert Carey Alice Heim Calderonello Effective Documentation: What We Have Learned from Research,Stephen Doheny-Farina Jack Selzer
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Response to Andrea A. Lunsford, “Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing” Robert S. Burton Reply Andrea Lunsford
May 1990
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The American Community College, Arthur M. Cohen and Florence B. Brawer Nell Ann Pickett Rescuing the Subject.: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer, Susan Miller The Written World: Reading and Writing in Social Contexts, Susan Miller Joseph Harris Writing as Social Action, Marilyn M. Cooper and Michael Holzman Deborah Brandt The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations, David Bleich Joyce Irene Middleton Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research, Chris M. Anson Anne Ruggles Gere Technical and Business Communication: Bibliographic Essays for Teachers and Corporate Trainers, Charles H. Sides Alice Philbin Writing and Technique, David Dobrin Deborah H. Holdstein Worlds of Writing. Teaching and Learning in Discourse Communitieast Work, Carolyn B. Matelene Stephen A. Bernhardt Creative Writing in America. Theory and Pedagogy, Joseph M. Moxley D. W. Fenza
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I recently attended a conference previously unknown to me and to most college English faculty: The Assessment Forum of American Association for Higher Education (AAHE). (I was there to give a paper on measurement of writing ability and on evaluation of writing programs.) The experience of that conference ought to have been routine; after all, I have directed a variety of large-scale writing programs and I have been speaking and publishing on writing assessment for over fifteen years; I have also spent many years as chair of an English department and as a writing program administrator. But experience of hearing papers and discussions at that conference was not at all routine; it was both troubling and enlightening, as well as quite new in unexpected ways. My first reaction to sessions on writing measurement at AAHE was that I had entered a new world. The papers not only made different assumptions about writing than I, as a writing teacher, writer, and researcher, normally make, but came out of a wholly different scholarly community of discourse, one that calls itself the assessment movement. The references were entirely unfamiliar, procedures were different, and approach to subject struck me as insensitive to what writing is all about. But all of these differences seemed to center on way people spoke (and hence thought) about measurement: I was in a foreign country, language was different, and that difference changed everything. I had entered a new discourse community in a field in which I was a well-published specialist, and none of my knowledge or experience seemed to matter. And yet discourse was about measuring writing ability and evaluating writing programs, that is, about what has (however accidentally) become my specialty. I felt disoriented. When I returned home from AAHE I found a flier from Jossey-Bass, publisher of my 1985 book, Teaching and Assessing Writing. I don't expect book to appear on every flier marketing division puts out, but this little
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Drawing on scholarship in a variety of disciplines - philosophy, political theory, sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary theory, rhetoric - the authors outline an approach to the study of literacy that does not neglect the cognitive or individual aspects of literacy but rather sees them as largely shaped by the social forces of our political, economic, and educational systems. Ranging from the first-year writing class to adult literacy programs, the essays point the way to effective teaching strategies, program design, and research opportunities.Seven new chapters - on such topics as collaborative writing, discourse communities, women's literacy, and functional literacy - and eight previously published ones make up the book, providing a comprehensive theory of writing as social action.
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In her opening address, Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing, Andrea Lunsford challenged the participants at the 1989 CCCC to tell the story of the teaching of writing in multiple voices which encourage differences and diversity. Cautioning against definition by others, particularly by those who would describe writing instruction in reductive terms or define writing instructors in limiting ways, Lunsford warned those present that we could be composed in the discourses . . . of others (75). For those of us teaching in two-year colleges, Lunsford's descriptions of historical precedents of marginalized voices writing themselves into being were particularly evocative. Her imperative for composition studies to remain inclusive, interdisciplinary, collaborative, nonhierarchical, and dialogic was a further articulation of the CCCC 1989 theme of empowerment and of interdependence. Furthermore, the 1990 CCCC theme, community through diversity, includes a strand on English in the two-year college. This focus recognizes the significance of teaching writing in two-year colleges and should provide the opportunity for participants to explore and articulate the strength in diversity among two-year institutions of higher education. Indeed, two-year schools are the largest single sector of higher education in the United States, with approximately one half of all students taking composition in two-year colleges (Facts 3). These 1,224 accredited schools serve more than five-million credit students, and many of those students transfer to four-year schools (AACJC Commission vii). The numbers of students taking composition in community colleges alone indicate the significance of community-college English departments (Raines 29). Yet no major study has been published since the 1965 NCTE and CCCC report, English in the TwoYear College. A follow-up to this report could be a critical contribution to an evolving text on the teaching of writing. In fact, the Association of Depart-
February 1990
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This monograph is designed to help English teachers see what it is that the literary theory of deconstruction has to offer them as they pursue their work. The monograph focuses on the implications of deconstruction for the English classroom in American schools. It includes a discussion of Jacques Derrida's philosophy of reading and writing a review of some American critics' reactions to deconstruction and responses made by English teachers to the theory; and an examination of a deconstructive reading of writing pedagogy as it underscores the appropriateness of much of the lore connected with process pedagogy. The monograph also contains an appendix on How to Read Derrida, three pages of endnotes, a brief glossary of deconstructionist terminology, a 70-item list of references, an 11-item list of Derrida works not cited in the text, a 38-item bibliography of works on Derrida and deconstruction, and a 9-item list of exemplary readings on deconstruction. (RAE) *********************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * ******,,,,,..********************************************************,,,,,,,,,,,,
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October 1989
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A Bridge to Academic Discourse: Social Science Research Strategies in the Freshman Composition Course ↗
Abstract
learning, one that will bring about changes in teaching as well as in student writing. We also need to establish quite clearly that WAC programs certainly do not exclude examinations and more coursework in writing as a means of establishing proficiency, but that WAC is not to be identified solely with writing proficiency. Finally, there is an issue not dealt with directly by my survey, but which has come up in anecdotal comments at the meetings of the National Network of Writing Across the Curriculum Programs and which deserves further study-the matter of change and faculty resistance to it. The idea and the practice of writing to learn goes against the predominant paradigm of education in the university, which valorizes the teacher-centered lecture class. In this paradigm, students are passive rather than active learners; they learn from the expert, not from each other. WAC programs challenge this notion of education, and those of us involved in such programs like to point to the successes we have had in changing faculty attitudes towards writing and learning (See Robert Weiss and Michael Peich, Attitude Change in a Cross-Disciplinary Writing Program, CCC 31 [Feb. 1980): 33-41). But changing attitudes and changing actual classroom practice may be two different things. Faculty resistance to change can be profound, as Deborah Swanson-Owens found in Identifying Natural Sources of Resistance (Research in the Teaching of English 20 [Feb. 1986): 69-97). Such resistance could, over a number of years, gradually wear away even the most firmly established institutional program. But I do not want to end on a negative note. While we need to be aware of the dangers that face the WAC movement in general and second-stage programs in particular, the survey results indicate cause for some cautious celebration. WAC as a movement is strong and is continuing to grow. It is up to all of us involved in such programs to be alert to the dangers, but also to be pleased that we have come this far.
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This revised and retitled edition of Searching includes two additional papers, one by a teacher, and a new chapter entitled Larger Context, which shows how the I Search concept can work throughout the whole curriculum in school and college. As with the first edition, The I-Search Paper is more than just a textbook; it's a new form of instructional help -- a context -- that shows students what authority is in matters of learning and invites them to join the author and teacher in the educational movement called Writing to Learn. To put this book in the hands of all the students in the course is not only to help them carry out an but to introduce them in a delightful way to the resources and tools of intellectual inquiry -- but one that never forgets the emotional or physical side of human activity. This is a rare textbook that treats students as partners in learning. It shows what it is to take charge of one's own learning and suggests that this move is one that productive people keep making throughout their lives.
May 1989
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Abstract
Last year I became a student writer again-and a novice at that. For although I'd been teaching and writing nonfiction for years-both academic articles and feature stories-I never wrote much fiction. And although I dabbled in poetry, even had a few poems published once, I never before took a course in poetry writing. Frankly, I didn't have the guts in college, never thought of myself as creative enough to risk such public exposure. The budding confidence I felt in fourth grade when my suspense thriller, Thunderstorm, was published in a class booklet had been buried under too many years of exposition, both for school and work. I didn't really recover it until long after graduation, when I received a fellowship that gave me released time from full-time teaching in order to take two creative writing courses at Princeton University: one in fiction writing with Russell Banks, author of the much-acclaimed Continental Drift; the other in poetry writing, with Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Carolyn Kizer. These were undergraduate courses incidently, because that's all Princeton offers, so except for three other older women (i.e., over 40) in the poetry class, the rest of my peers were under 22. It was a remarkable experience-to wear the shoe on the other foot and be a student again. For one thing, I realized how much more I enjoy learning now than I did at 20 when my future loomed before me like a huge, unmarked field. And how much more focused I am in energy once scattered on a million other concerns. For another thing, I've toughened up over the years. Twenty-five additional years of living and writing have helped me know and risk more, personally and intellectually, than I would ever have dared, even ten years ago. I have more of life to draw upon and more laurels to rest upon, as needed. These assets, I've found, are shared by other over-30 adults--even if, like many of my returning students, their extra writing experiences are mainly in letter or report writing. Life experience and writing success notwithstanding, I was surprised at my own vulnerabilities as a writer. Many of my fears, confusions, and needs were not as different from my younger counterparts' as I would have predicted. Remembering what it
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This book constitutes an interesting guide to recent developments in vocabulary studies. As will be made clear below, this review addresses researchers and others interested in issues concerning computational morphology and lexicography in a Machine Translation (MT) environment. For this reason we focus more on relevant chapters of the book than on those which concern pure language teaching and language learning issues. The book is divided into three parts. Part one contains four chapters devoted to the analysis of lexis with a particular emphasis on its role in discourse contexts. Part two consists of three chapters dealing mostly with issues related to language learning, language teaching and lexicography. Part three includes two case studies in lexical stylistics based on informant analyses. Chapter 1 explores the notion of word. A definition based on orthographic criteria (i.e. a word viewed as a sequence of letters bound on either side by a space or a punctuation mark) is taken into consideration. Nevertheless, it is observed that such a definition is violated by the existence of a great number of multi- word units (e.g. instead of, post box, etc.). On the other hand, the phonological criterion for defining a word as a string of phonemes containing only one stress is also not felicitous, firstly because it only concerns spoken language and secondly because a stress can be used as a demarcator of strings for emphatic purposes. Other problems relate to the existence of several forms for only one lexical meaning (e.g. verbal allomorphs of the same inflectional paradigm: bring, brings, brought, bringing), as well as to the appearance of the same form for different meanings (e.g. the different meanings of the word/a/r). The case of idioms (e.g. to kick the bucket) involving more than one text word which, semantically, can be substituted by a single word is also problematic. In attempting to provide a good criterion for defining a word, Carter uses the valuable concept of lexeme which helps to override most of the problems mentioned above (e.g. the existence of different form variants for the same word). He correctly observes that are the basic contrasting units of vocabulary in a language. When we look up in a dictionary we are looking up lexemes rather than words (p. 7).
February 1989
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In a style that combines scholarly care with remarkable readability, North examines the development of the field of composition in a way it has not been examined before. Rather than focusing on what people claim to know about teaching writing, he concerns himself primarily with how they claim to know it. Eight groups of knowledge-makers are treated in separate chapters: Practitioners, Historians, Philosophers, Critics, Experimentalists, Clinicians, Formalists, and Ethnographers. Each of these chapters orients the reader by tracing the mode's first uses in the field and listing its best known and most important adherents; then goes on to explain how the mode of inquiry works, illustrating key points with painstaking analysis of well-known studies. In his final three chapters, North turns from these individual modes to consider the field as a whole: How have these different ways of making knowledge come together? What is Composition now, and what is it likely to become?
December 1988
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Peter Elbow's widely acclaimed and original theories on the writing process, set forth in Writing without Teachers and Writing with Power, have earned him a reputation as a leading educational innovator. For this book Elbow has drawn together twelve of his essays on the nature of learning and teaching to suggest a comprehensive philosophy of education.
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October 1988
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for the Classroom is an anthology of essays by teachers using Paulo Freire's methods in their classrooms. These essays, collected from professional journals, represent some of the best experimental teaching done to adapt Freire's liberatory pedagogy to North American classrooms. The articles show the creative enthusiasm many teachers gain from Freire's ideas, as well as the critical literacy and political awareness students gain through this approach. The book offers critical theory side by side with actual reports of teaching practice, so that philosophy is brought down to earth in terms familiar to practicing teachers. Included in the volume is a Letter to North American Teachers written by Paulo Freire expressly for this book, along with an essay by Cynthia Brown discussing the original methods used by Freire.
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The language of speculation journals and the teaching of English journals and the arts and humanities journals and the quantitative disciplines.
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Word processors, as teaching machines, are currently caught in something of a backlash. Just a few years ago, we heard they possessed almost magical powers for student writing and writing instruction. Now, before some of us have even had a chance to try them for ourselves, researchers have begun to tell us that computers do not really help student writers much after all. On the contrary, they warn, when students' performances with text editors are judged against their performances with pen and paper, inexperienced writers, those whose typical revising behaviors are actually editing behaviors, continue to edit exclusively and with increased frequency on the word pro-
May 1988
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Classrooms filled with glassy-eyed students provide an experiential base for Alice S. Horning s new comprehensive theory about basic writers.Horning explores the theory of writing acquisition in detail. Her examination of spoken and written language and redundancy give a theoretical base to her argument that academic discourse is a separate linguistic system characterized by particular psycholinguistic features. She proposes that basic writers learn to write as other learners master a second language because for them, academic written English is a whole new language.She explores the many connections to be found in second language acquisition research to the teaching and learning of writing and gives special attention to the interlanguage hypothesis, pidginization theory, and the Monitor theory. She also addresses the role of affective factors (feelings, attitudes, emotions, and motivation) in the success or failure of writing students.
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February 1988
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Drawing upon previously unpublished archival materials as well as historical accounts, Gere traces the history of writing groups in America, from their origins over a century ago to their recent reappearance in the works of Macrorie, Elbow, Murray, and others.From this historical perspective Gere examines the theoretical foundations of writing groups, challenging the traditional concept of writing as an individual performance. She offers instead a broader view of authorship that includes both individual and social dimensions, with implications not only for the teaching of composition but also for theories of rhetoric and literacy.
December 1987
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The Bibliography of Composition and is an annual, annotated, descriptive bibliography of work in rhetoric and composition. Its first vcdume contains 3,853 citations for titles appearing in 1984 and 1)85. The bibliographers received assistance from important authors and editors of publications in rhetoric, who stressed that subject-area bibliographies are an important way of asserting the legitimacy of a profession. The bibliography is a comprehensive, descriptive work encompassing the many disciplines that make up rhetoric and composition. The Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors and convention programs of the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication helped define the terms and subjects covered in the profession. Next, the bibliographers mapped and clustered the terms, which cover works on written communication in English or other languages, the processes whereby people compose and understand written messages, and methods of teaching people to communicate effectively in writing. To write the entries, 152 teachers and researchers have volunteered their services, and use a handbook to create consistent 25to 50-word annotations that are descriptive rather than evaluative. They try to use original materials rather than copy from advertisers whenever possible, although most publishers will not provide examination copies. In the bibliography all entries are listed once, numbered, and cross-referenced. Computers are used for alphabetizing and typese'Aing, and it is projected that computers will be used more and more in future editions. (SEC) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** The Development of The Longman Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric
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To get a clear view of any scene or activity, one needs a room with a view. It is helpful if the room commands an expansive view-at least on three sides. (The blindside provides a convenient excuse if the viewer fails to note some important feature of the scene.) And if the view is to be truly retrospective and prospective, one cannot be stiff-necked. It takes an ounce of temerity and a pound of arrogance for me to do a survey of the composition scene, because I am not at all confident that I am any more qualified than the next teacher of English to explore the territory. My room with a view has been paid for, as yours has, with a lot of toil and trouble: teaching composition for several years at one or more schools; talking shop with colleagues; listening in on the grapevine; reading the journals and the pertinent books; attending conferences and conventions. But maybe the one experience I have had that most teachers have not had was a six-year tour as the editor of a major composition journal. An editorship sets up a marvelous vantage point from which the view can be as expansive as the one that a forest ranger gets from his mountain-top tower. Even if my eyesight is not 20/20, I can still point out salient features of the landscape to the interested spectator. Despite the myopia of the guide, the survey of the scene, whether retrospective or prospective, can be both fascinating and instructive for the spectator.
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October 1987
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Twenty-three stimulating papers, including essays by Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, and William Strong, selected from the more than sixty presented at the Second Miami University Conference on Sentence Combining and the Teaching of Writing.Sentence combining has not only survived the paradigm shift in the teaching of writing but continues to stimulate provocative, creative thinking about the writing process itself. No longer an end in itself, but a tool, sentence combining has become a method of teaching about ways of thinking, of perceiving, and of organizing reality.