Presents brief guidelines for developing writing assignments based on the author’s description (a politicized representation) of postmodern cultural studies. Discusses a composition assignment in which students critique the formal and the hidden curriculum of a class they have taken in the recent past, and in which they also become writing members of the institutions and communities they critique.

Describes how one teacher adapted the Toulmin argumentation model to improve discussion in introductory literature classes. Describes the method and its application to literary texts. Shows how it enables students with no particular attraction to literature to invent and respond to arguments about a text, ground those arguments in the text, and warrant them to their classmates’ satisfaction.

Details a first-year college composition course that blends journalism instruction with first-year composition. Describes how students learn about news gathering and news writing techniques common to feature writing and complete a profile writing project which encourages a level of discourse that bears closer kinship to everyday workplace writing. Discusses course design, implementation, and evaluation.

What Is Composition and Why Do We Teach It? A Review Essay; Teachers, Discourses, and Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom; When Writing Teachers Teach Literature: Bringing Writing to Reading; Science and Technology Today: Readings for Writers; Writing Off Center: An American Issues Reader for Composition; The Shape of Ideas; Border Talk: Writing and Knowing in the Two-Year College.

Publishing student writing from all levels of an English program motivates students, provides instructional models, and validates the process approach.

Reviews six books: City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College, by James Traub; The Writer’s Presence, ed. by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan; The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, by Neil Postman; From Community to College: Reading and Writing across Diverse Contexts, by Jeff Sommers and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson; Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only, by Linda Brodkey; Juxtapositions, by William Vesterman.

Modeling established poetic forms can help students write poetry.

Reviews of 6 books: Writing With: New Directions in the Collaborative Teaching, Learning, and Research, ed. by Sally Barr Reagan, Thomas Fox, and David Bleich reviewed by Howard Tinberg; Opening Arguments: A Brief Rhetoric with Readings, by Erik Muller reviewed by June Hadden Hobbs; Ideology, by Mike Cormack reviewed by Libby Allison; Images in Language, Media, and Mind, ed. by Roy F. Fox reviewed by David J. Cranmer; Understanding Ourselves: Readings for Developing Writers, by Ellen Andrews Knodt reviewed by Audrey Roth; Changing Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy, by Miles Myers reviewed by Smokey Wilson.

Reviews of 3 professional books: Revising the Rules: Traditional Grammar and Modern Linguistics by Brock Haussamen reviewed by David J. Cranmer; Grammar in Many Voices by Marilyn N. Silva reviewed by David J. Cranmer; Writings from the Workplace: Documents, Models, Cases by Carolyn R. Boiarsky and Margot K. Soven reviewed by Lois Birky.