Jackie Cornog is chair of the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology in Boston.

The author calls for teacher-scholars in the two-year college to reveal in their scholarship the generation of their triumphs and their failures.

TETYC publishes articles for two-year college teachers and those teaching the first two years of English in four-year institutions. We seek articles in all areas of composition (basic, first-year, and advanced); business, technical, and creative writing; and the teaching of literature in the first two college years. We also publish articles on topics such as staffing, assessment, technology, writing program administration, speech, journalism, reading, ESL, and other areas of interest.

In this Cross Talk, Mark Blaauw-Hara, the author of “Mapping the Frontier: A Survey of Twenty Years of Grammar Articles in TETYC,” and one of the manuscript’s reviewers, Andy Anderson, engage in a brief conversation about the essay, its content, and the processes of writing, reviewing, and revising.

The author synthesizes twenty-four articles on grammar from the last twenty years of the journal, tracing two major trends.

“A Defining Moment: Trying to Pin Down the Meaning of ‘College-Level’ Writing” from Joel B. Henderson, Editor of “TYCA to You”

As we begin a fresh academic year, anticipating new challenges, frustrations, and, we hope, rewards, I find myself thinking of Kenneth Burke’s “unending conversation” (The Philosophy of Literary Form, Berkeley: U of California P, 1941, 110–11). In our classrooms we continue that unending conversation in our discipline, engaging with the knowledge built in the past, beginning to build new knowledge.

The preceding two essays focused on the challenges presented by students’ selfdisclosures in their writing. The authors, Janet Lucas and William DeGenaro, have read each other’s essays and provided the following brief responses. This cross talk between the writers continues, in a more deliberate way, the cross talk generated by their essays.

While it is often ridiculed, the subject of the paranormal offers an effective means to encourage student involvement and support critical-thinking skills in first-year writing courses.

While some scholars in English and other disciplines disparage personal narrative writing by students, it can serve as a conversational bridge between students’ home cultures and academic culture and as a contact zone where those cultures can clash yet be explored;however, instructors and others who work with student writing must be prepared to hear and respond empathetically to emotionally difficult revelations such as the one discussed in this essay.

Of interest to instructors of first-year writing, this paper delineates the challenges faced by professors of first-year writing who lack formal graduate training in composition and rhetoric, and it explores the strategy that enables them to become excellent teachers despite such challenges.

Responding with strategic empathy to the traumatic stories students share with us provides an opportunity to break down an elitist binary between teacher and student. Joyce Carol Oates’s novel them can serve as a cautionary tale for understanding the dangers of disregarding student trauma.

Composition teachers can reconcile the conflict between effective writing instruction and educational reform mandates by making timed writing assignments part of the writing process.

Introducing Web-based literary hypertexts in an introductory writing course motivates students to ponder both the changing techniques of writing and reading and their own attitudes toward these two interrelated activities in a wholly new way. Evaluating a novice literature launches novice readers and writers on a journey to becoming “experts” at facing with confidence the many challenges that college and life will bring, including a fundamentally new approach to reading and writing.

An effective assignment design for writing classes unfolds at the crossroads of theory and practice; instruction and reflection; and experience and serendipity.

This article explores the efforts of an instructor of at-risk students to implement into her course a generative theme that urged students to explore the conditions of their admittance as provisional students.

This article uses one basic writer’s experience with assessment as a vehicle to explore whether the assessment practices struggling writers encounter on their essays effectively usher them into academic discourse or simply scare them away from that ambition entirely.

English composition instructors who use the personal interview to foster socialization among students and to generate quick and easy writing experiences may overlook the valuable learning opportunities that the personal interview can also bring to an English composition classroom if the assignment is integrated into the classroom through a structured approach.

To understand better the subtle relationship between history and English, first-year students in an introductory literature class compare Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem about the 1876 deaths of General George Armstrong Custer and his men with historical accounts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in order to discover how historical and poetic truths are related.

The author discusses his goal to imbue more reader-response criticism into a religious student’s language experience.

This article details a strategy for empowering students in a first-semester composition course through cultural literacy by using Jane Tompkins’s essay “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality,and the Problem of History,” in my first-semester college composition course.

The professional e-mail assignment allows students to gain digital literacies via community, critical engagement, and application.

This article describes a combination of a research essay and a creative writing assignment that encourages rigorous academic research while allowing students to get “outside the box” of traditional academic research papers.

Revisiting an episode of his own biased language in the classroom, the author tries to resist a conventional interpretation of events in the hope of raising useful questions.

This article explores the ways that a literature course with a focus on survival stories can provide students with models for their own survival and healing.

Our students need to be able to adhere to standard written English to succeed in their other classes and to get jobs at the end of their schooling, and it’s the responsibility of writing teachers to help them do so. In this article, the author provides a research-based theoretical underpinning for effective grammar instruction as well as several specific strategies—based on experience and research—for addressing grammar productively.

A user-friendly online data-graphing program helps students comprehend strengths and weaknesses in their writing and enhances composing decisions.