In this article, we offer practical suggestions for teaching writing to diverse groups of students who represent the fields of composition studies, basic writing, and ESL.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Although writing instructors have a clear picture of how well our students can write by the end of a composition course, very rarely do we learn how well the students carry over the skills and strategies we teach them to the essays they write for other courses. I collected essays from other courses to determine how effectively students transfer the proficiencies of our writing courses to their other classes and surveyed them about their experiences as college writers. Through this project I was able to develop a new assessment plan for my department.

The use of humorous texts in the writing class can help students improve skills in effective writing while encouraging critical thinking and an increased range in expression. In addition, because of the accessible nature of humor and the focus on purpose and audience that is necessary when writing it, students show a natural inclination toward peer review and recursive writing, with an enthusiasm that is often lacking when working with traditional texts in the writing class.

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In an ESL first-year composition classroom, cooperative learning assists English language learners in developing their ideas, voice, organization, and sense of writing conventions, while simultaneously enhancing their production and comprehension of English.

Hip-hop as content in a first-year writing course offers students a powerful way to connect with their worlds. I draw on Marcel Proust as a kind of rhyme to legitimate hip-hop as a substantive expressive medium to achieve artistry in writing.

Drawing from the theories of Paulo Freire, Patricia Bizzell, and Ira Shor, this article describes a five-year ongoing classroom research project that examines the use of peer evaluation as a process for teaching academic discourse. The findings of the project suggest a critical and democratic pedagogical antidote to the national “standards” movement.

ESL students in their first year of college discuss their feelings about the use of literature in composition courses and offer qualified support for its inclusion.

Today’s students are arriving on college campuses with little knowledge of grammar and usage, so instructors may need to employ alternate strategies of games and electronic activities to provide the practice such students need.

This essay frames the connections between punk principles and writing theory in order to re-form what the author emphasizes in his own composition classroom, in particular the do-it-yourself ethic, a sense of passion and fearlessness, the agency to attack institutions, and the seeking of pleasure.

Discussing and writing about The Breakfast Club can lead composition students to assess their own educational identities and ongoing growth as writers.

This study follows the progress of 238,032 students who enrolled in either an ESL composition, a developmental composition, or a college composition course at one of nine community colleges for a minimum of three and a maximum of eleven years.

This article examines the ideological assumptions and practical consequences of recent state and federal attempts to standardize writing instruction at the secondary level, and it suggests alternative forms of assessment and classroom research available to teachers of composition in high school and college.

Rotating teacher participation in peer workshop groups can enhance the workshop group dynamics, ease instructors’ grading loads, and improve the level of peer feedback and draft revision in composition courses.

The Community College Education program at George Mason University is committed to Ernest Boyer’s philosophy of integration; it encourages better pedagogy and it revitalizes the two-year college classroom.

A Maryland college supports scholarship that helps faculty maintain currency in their disciplines and explore effective pedagogy.

Ethnography is a useful tool for producing the kind of knowledge that a post-process pedagogy argues is necessary for an empowering writing classroom: an awareness of the social situatedness of all acts and the realization that situation drastically affects communication.

This article recounts how a communications and an engineering department developed a collaborative teaching venture—a linked writing course—to provide mentorship for students learning how to write lab reports.

Implementing deracination and the D.I.S.—components of a developing critical thinking pedagogy termed decritique—offer a more critically reflective alternative to classroom peer-review activities that mistakenly focus on a “notion of caring"

While most service-learning courses at the college level establish a hierarchical connection between mentor and student, the service-learning program at Los Angeles City College encourages a reciprocal relationship in which mentor and mentee benefit from each other. First-year composition students are paired with intermediate ESL composition students in a semester-long program.

Reviews of 2 professional books: Honored but Invisible: An Inside Look at Teaching in Community Colleges by W. Norton Grubb and Associates reviewed by Lawrence J. McDoniel; Radical Departures: Composition and Progressive Pedagogy by Chris W. Gallagher reviewed by Alexis Nelson.

In the first-year composition research class, a disproportionate pedagogical focus is placed on the use of the library, rather than on the more difficult and integral problems of how to read, interpret, and analyze information the library offers, how to translate and synthesize this into knowledge, and how to produce a research product worthy of the genre.

This article describes how the author became critically aware of the dynamics of literacy and race in a composition classroom.

Comparing four recent and four older writing handbooks from the perspective of a linguist with experience in the composition classroom reveals both important trends and room for further development.

Contract grading promotes quality writing as well as a large quantity of writing. In fact, teachers can use contract grading to support and promote the behaviors, thinking skills, and writing skills they believe will help students create quality writing.

This article makes an argument that audiotaped response to student writing is particularly useful in teaching two-year-campus students. The argument is grounded in a historical overview of response literature in TETYC, student surveys, and a case study of one undergraduate student.

Review of 3 professional books, English Composition as a Happening, by Geoffrey Sirc; The Plagiarism Handbook: Strategies for Preventing, Detecting, and Dealing with Plagiarism, by Robert A. Harris; and Rational Irrationality: The Art of Teaching Composition, by H. James Jensen.

After considering complaints of boredom as a significant factor in our classrooms, the second part of this article analyzes the responses of thirty-two first-year writing students to questions about boredom.

This article describes the development and implementation of an online writing course for advanced ESL students.

Considers how although students’ frustration level may rise with the inclusion of computer technology in writing classes, so too do the number of "wow moments" – those times when students finally achieve something for which they have long struggled. Examines the efficacy of including technology in first–year writing courses. Finds that a sizable majority of students indicated that the use of computers had some positive effect on their writing.

Reviews four books: Writing with Elbow, by Pat Belanoff, Marcia Dickson, Sheryl I. Fontaine, and Charles Moran; Opening Spaces: Critical Pedagogy and Resistance Theory in Composition, by Joe Marshall Hardin; Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators, by Rebecca Moore Howard; The Politics of Writing in the Two–Year College, edited by Barry Alford and Keith Kroll.

Reviews briefly the literature associated with the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s "Students’ Right to Their Own Language" statement. Explores the status of standard English at community colleges in Michigan, as expressed in first–year composition course objectives and descriptions. Considers the history of the standard written English objective at Delta College, a community college in mid–Michigan.

Examines six shifting boundaries: time and space, authorship, writing skills, medium, availability, and the senses.Addresses what the new perimeters might mean for teaching writing at the college level, for student writing, and for instructional management. Considers the challenges of plagiarism.

Discusses implications of "readarounds" with the author’s first–year English composition students. Notes that readarounds consist of student drafts circulated around an entire class, evaluated according to three or four criteria, and praised viathe lavish use of highlighters. Concludes readarounds teach students to make valid suggestions on peer drafts and to evaluate the supportive feedback of a live audience.

E-mail peer response teaches students about audience and text more effectively than synchronous peer response.

This article explores the possibilities of the paperless classroom achieved through e-mail strategies and the use of Blackboard, an e-learning software platform.

This article describes three approaches with which grammar may be welcomed back into the composition classroom.

Pedagogical triangulation is a threefold method for teaching that involves a holistic approach to classroom collaboration. The specific elements of pedagogical triangulation are described, along with the results of applying this approach in a first-semester college English class.

Suggests that students need to learn to "read" the cultural texts surrounding them. Argues that there is great need for including analyses of popular culture in the college curriculum. Presents a unit to help students gain a greater appreciation for the influence that advertising has upon them and the subtlety with which it manipulates people, mainly to their detriment.

English Teachers’ the Unofficial Guide: Researching the Philosophies of English Teachers; B. Marshall. Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines; M. H. Kells & V. Balester. Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom; D. L. Wallace & H. R. Ewald. Talkin’ That Talk: Language, Culture and Education in African America; G. Smitherman. Writing Simple Poems: Pattern Poetry for Language Acquisition; V. L. Holmes & M. R. Moulton.

Discusses how social identity plays a significant role in defining the nature of classroom interaction. Describes how unresolved conflict emerged when the development of authentic student voice in narrative autobiography was the primary and perhaps only objective. Presents an example of the ways in which asymmetrical power relations influence how discourse works in the expressionist composition classroom.

Considers how the introductory business writing course is appropriate for the development of critical literacy, especially for students at second-tier, working-class colleges. Notes that the opposition between labor and management offers rich opportunities for the critical examination of corporate rhetoric, opportunities that are as relevant in business writing class as they are in other courses.

Reviews three books: Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language, by Stephen Parks; (Re)Visioning Composition Textbooks: Conflicts of Culture, Ideology, and Pedagogy, edited by Xin Liu Gale and Fredric G. Gale; Exploring Literature: Writing and Thinking about Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay, by Frank Madden.