Shows how an editing assignment emphasizing punctuation can help students in a first-year writing class discover new ideas and perspectives as part of the revision process. Considers a class that experimented with editing punctuation for a dual purpose--as a revision heuristic as well as for correctness. Reconsiders editing and revision assignments to take better advantage of editing’s generative powers.

A Group of Their Own: College Writing Courses and American Women Writers, 1880–1940, by Katherine H. Adams; Everyone Can Write: Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing, by Peter Elbow; Teaching Composition as a Social Process, by Bruce McComiskey.

Research has shown that contemporary popular films are a valuable resource in the ESL classroom. However, the short, silent film has been overlooked. Using D.W. Griffith’s The Painted Lady, Kaspar and Singer demonstrate how to use silent films to facilitate the development of ESL students’ critical thinking and writing skills.

Presents a questionnaire that helps gather valuable information about students’ attitudes toward mandatory placement in basic writing courses. Concludes that with the kind of information gleaned from responses to questionnaires similar to this one, educators can better understand the strengths and weaknesses of basic writing programs and revise their curriculum and placement procedures as necessary.

Considers how rhetoric, cognitive awareness, and competing cultures of community college composition students challenge instructors. Discusses issues such as: updating the definition of “student”; historically dynamic biculturalism; collaboration versus negotiated meaning; destabilizing knowledge; inventing the student; and mastering the art of persuasion. Concludes that instructors must be aware that theories, ideologies, and pedagogy influence students and therefore must be current.

Discusses leveling a charge of anti-intellectualism against compositionists who demand that theory result in classroom practice. Suggests the charge ignores the material conditions and intellectual reasons for that demand. Concludes there is a crucial place for theory in composition, even theory for theory’s sake, but teaching in the composition classroom should be the center of the discipline, its epistemological heart.

Describes an internship program at a two-year college in which graduate students from 13 participating area graduate programs teach in the two-year college and receive training addressing pedagogical issues unique to community colleges, thus being immersed in a world of higher within which the rest of their training occurs.

Offers an interview with Robert Wylie, a distinguished two-year college English teacher for almost 50 years. Discusses how important it is for an English teacher to write, important issues in the profession, his views on the best ways to help students improve as writers, his observations about writing assignments, liking students, teaching standards, and his observations as a writer.

Outlines detrimental effects of word processing in the composition classroom on planning, reading, organizing, revising, error detection, and spelling and vocabulary skill development. Discusses strategies instructors can use to teach students to use the computer at each stage of the writing process in ways that encourage and develop the higher-order thinking essential to good writing.

Discusses how reader-response activities combat lack of interest in introductory literature courses. Considers the value of a reader-response approach, activities which liberate students, a student-driven syllabus, and pragmatic concerns. Notes how employing a reader-response approach in the introductory literature course helps maintain the student interest and involvement necessary for a good course.

Notes that teaching composition in a technical college presents a number of challenges. Considers how employers are calling for the hands-on training to be combined with more communication and critical thinking skills so that employees have a broader education that allows them to switch speeds or tasks. Describes activities and course components for technical college writing instruction.

Considers how students and teachers use Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) to respond to writing anxieties. Notes that experiences with TO have encouraged the continuation of experimentation with the theories and practices in and out of the classroom. Discusses how TO places instructors in creatively vulnerable and edifying positions.

Notes how early junior college compositionists sought to socialize a largely working-class student body into a middle-class sensibility. Argues that educators must make time to create historical narratives of two-year colleges as a valuable precursor to fighting for institutional reforms within institutions. Analyzes the manner that curriculum builders in the 1920s and 1930s constructed first-year writing courses at junior colleges.

Discusses how certain strategies can enable successful chat rooms in academic courses. Examines some of the author’s own pedagogical trials, errors, and successes with chat rooms. Offers some strategies for conducting effective participation among students in such settings. Discusses several models of teacher-student interaction for developing the instructor’s role in academic chat rooms.

Presents a sequenced writing assignment on shopping to aid basic writers. Describes a writing assignment focused around online and mail-order shopping. Notes steps in preparing for the assignment, the sequence, and discusses responses to the assignments.

Describes a class discussion in the author’s first-year composition class at a New York City community college, after students read a volume of Sappho’s poetry. Discusses issues of reading comprehension, poetry, gender-preference prejudice, and how they were all set straight by one student from Brooklyn.

Discusses how the author and a colleague made a short videotape of students talking about their writing experiences. Describes first steps, arrangements and questions, the shoot itself, and crafting the video. Discusses uses of this video, noting the impact this infusion of student voices can have in the composition classroom, influencing the way new writing students approach a writing course.

Presents and describes a narrative writing assignment used by the author in a developmental writing course that helps to demonstrate to students how and why sexist language usage can limit thinking, sometimes injuriously, and that concretely illustrates how language and gender stereotyping interact causally. Describes the assignment, how it is used in class, and class discussions resulting.

Describes how the author uses the poems of Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” in her developmental writing classes to foster literary discussion, build vocabulary, and teach a broad range of essay writing skills.

Describes an AIDS-centered curriculum for a composition class in a New York City community college. Describes selecting a text, assignments, attending a conference, guest speakers, and the research paper. Notes that the subject of AIDS not only provokes reflective writing and much class discussion but also compels writers to express and sometimes change profound ideas about living and dying.

Describes three reading/writing lessons on the topics of linguistics, environmental science, and anthropology used in a discipline-based college-level English as a second language course to illustrate how to use film to teach academic writing skills. Discusses how students analyze a film to help articulate the content of an essay or a book.

Describes the design of a standard first-year composition class in which the author used online discussion forums. Discusses how these design choices helped create a dynamic community of readers, writers, and learners in a writing classroom. Discusses pedagogical goals, and course design. Discusses several reasons why this approach works so well, and offers some cautionary notes.

Describes how the author uses reading response journals in her composition classes. Shows how it actively engages students in the reading/writing process, and how students learn careful, active reading and develop confidence generating ideas and formulating opinions via the structure, freedom, enhanced comprehension, critical thinking, and confidence that these reading response journals offer.

Describes a “distant service learning” unit in a first-year composition course in which students wrote for a nonprofit organization in the classroom. Discusses program activities in relation to the first-year composition curriculum, program activities and the nonprofit organization, classroom implementation and assessment (including scoring guide criteria), and assessing student impact and impact on the nonprofit organization.

Proposes assigning polemics, suasive essays, and paradoxical encomia as a means to help students write in classical civic discourse forms, which enfranchise the personal in the service of the community. Presents guidelines for each assignment.

Claims personal narrative essays, although controversial, touch a unique chord in listeners and in readers. Suggest incorporating critical thinking and modeling by the instructor into personal narrative essay assignments.

Examines how a shift to an online writing course affected underprepared students. Finds the guided writing environment enhanced instruction and improved student retention and pass rates.

Shows how letter writing can motivate basic writers. Describes how the author began teaching his first remedial writing class with a class-wide engagement in letter writing. Discusses how the class developed an active, collaborative, engaged, and inclusive spirit as students learned to put expression first and polishing later.

Describes a writing class activity to encourage peer feedback when peers are reluctant to give it. Notes how it invites personal dialectic and critical analysis while protecting the writer’s originality and sense of control.

Suggests that beginning writers can improve skills when they exchange letters with peers, teachers, and others. Offers a brief historical perspective on the use of letters as a pedagogical device. Outlines current applications of letter writing and exchanges in: English as a second language; technical and business writing; composition and literature classes; and portfolio reflection letters.

Investigates both students’ and instructors’ perspectives on issues dealing with complications of using collaborative groups. Ascertains whether the costs of collaborative writing projects outweigh the benefits. Explores ways in which teachers can maximize benefits and minimize costs. Concludes that collaborative projects are necessary and that problems can be minimized through careful planning and close monitoring.

Suggests that despite culturally induced aversions, aromas do have a role to play in writing instruction. Suggest there are many examples in literature of authors’ treatment of the olfactory sense. Argues that emphasizing smell as a writing stimulant and encouraging olfactory analyses of literary works can serve as valid ways of introducing students to alternative and challenging approaches to writing.

Offers future researchers many opportunities for research in two-year college English. Considers input about issues, problems, and questions which the research community still needs to engage. Assumes that research clusters around several “fault lines” shared by other groups and institutions not directly tied to education; the fault lines selected are identity, technology, diversity, pedagogy, literacy, and methodology.

Describes a system of contract grading in an introductory college composition which the author devised and has used for two years, in which all students sign a contract that delineates requirements for a course grade of “B.” Discusses these requirements, how students can raise their grade, and student responses. Notes that a continued dialog about students’ writing is often the quite satisfying result.

Argues that networked classrooms offer a number of opportunities for effective writing instruction. Argues that shared discourse in the networked-computer classroom has three levels forming a continuum of interactivity: students sending messages “at,” “to,” and “between” each other. Offers classroom examples of each level of discourse.

Describes an assignment for a sophomore-level technical-writing course which teaches students to respond to different audiences with different needs by having them analyze and then respond to actual complaint letters (on the same topic but from two very different people). Includes successful and unsuccessful responses generated by the students.

Argues that postmodern language theory offers useful insights into long-standing writing problems encountered by writing instructors. Discusses a postmodern view of language, how language shapes reality, the contributions of Jacques Derrida, and deconstruction and composition. Applies these ideas to two pedagogical ideologies, and suggests some innovative classroom practices.

Offers seven brief descriptions of class projects and assignments used successfully in writing classes of all sorts, from first-year composition classes to business communication to computerized writing labs.

Describes a writing assignment in which students study and imitate the language of a minority author. Discusses how the assignment helps negotiate conflicts when students resist multicultural literature, as their creative responses mediate between themselves and works they might otherwise find foreign and antagonistic.

Investigates English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students’ native literacy-learning experiences, via written learning autobiographies of 26 students from at least eight different countries. Discusses writing instruction in students’ native languages; most satisfying writing assessment in their native languages; and differences between writing in their native language and English. Draws five conclusions for ESL instruction.

Describes a project for composition classes in which groups of five to six students conceive, write, design, print, and bind a book of their writings. Discusses methodology, defining form and content of the books, offering guidance, use of in-class time, evaluation, grading, and the results. Notes that the quality of student writing dramatically improved.

Reviews three books: Turns of Thought: Teaching Composition as Reflexive Inquiry, by Donna Qualley; Gypsy Academics and Mother?Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction, by Eileen E. Schell; Reflection in the Writing Classroom, by Kathleen Blake Yancey.

Describes how the author uses the off-campus interview of a working professional as a foundation unit upon which to launch a first-year college writing course. Discusses teaching strategies to prepare for this real interview, and notes that the working professionals interviewed can become the writing instructor’s best ally in motivating first-year college students.

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 a first-year college composition course and the daily preparatory writing assignments, “inquiry response papers,” that form its core. Describes how these assignments, in which students respond to their homework reading, have led to a collaborative, dialogic classroom where students realize and express their own voices, and have fostered a more intrinsic motivation within students.

Describes a grading system used in a college composition class that shifts the focus away from letter grades and toward continuous student progress. Describes how it is based on a personalized, flexible standard that challenges each student’s particular skills as a writer, and encourages real improvement in student writing.

Describes a course in the first-year college composition sequence (with substantial research and argumentation components) that is organized around a career focus on social services practice. Describes how the students learn about connections between writing, thinking, problem solving, composition class, and their chosen profession.

Describes an intermediate college writing class that uses Paulo Freire’s essay “The Banking Concept of Education” as its philosophical foundation to encourage students and teachers to engage in critical thought, critical writing, and critical action. Describes several assignments that evolved from the essay, and its implications. Shows how students experienced writing as “critical action.”

Describes a vocabulary activity the author uses in first-year composition classes which is effective, interesting, and fun for students who write an ongoing serialized short story with required vocabulary words chosen weekly from assigned student readings.

Reviews six books: Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work, by Jane Maher reviewed by Judith A. (Jay) Wootten; Your Choice: A Basic Writing Guide with Readings, by Kate Mangelsdorf and Evelyn Posey reviewed by Lynn Summer; Constructing Knowledges: The Politics of Theory Building and Pedagogy in Composition, by Sidney I. Dobrin reviewed by Julie Drew; Academic Advancement in Composition Studies: Scholarship, Publication, Promotion, Tenure, ed. by Richard C. Gebhardt and Barbara Genelle Smith Gebhardt; Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. by Gary A. Olson and Todd Taylor; Writing for Academic Publication, by Frank Parker and Kathryn Riley reviewed by Cynthia Simpson.