Presents eight separate short descriptions of teaching tips or classroom activities for composition classes submitted by teachers, including tips on writing exchanges, grammar problems, peer evaluation, revision, mock quizzes, critical thinking regarding television news, computer–assisted commenting, and an educational and entertaining end–of–term review activity period.

Argues that student self–assessment and reflection need to be central components of writing instruction and that the response sequence between teacher and student should routinely include them. Offers examples of this sequence with two students, and presents nine specific classroom strategies that put self-assessment and reflection at the center of the writing process.

Describes how one teacher uses life writing (reading and writing about transformative life experiences) in her basic writing class to engage students and to help them understand the power and purpose of reaching out to a variety of audiences. Discusses grading life writing.

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.

Ponders F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essays about his "crack-up" and relates them to the many complex aspects of the struggles of a teacher using post-structural literary theory and teaching two-year college students.

Describes how one professor uses a classroom trial (based on Hemingway’s short story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber") to prepare students for writing analytical essays about the story by teaching them to interrogate the text and by helping to cure the weaknesses of text-reticence and dubious deduction.

Describes how a professor teaching a "Writing Arguments" course focused on two cases involving the death penalty to show students how arguments are constructed, and how students can form strong arguments of their own. Notes that this approach does not force students to choose sides when they stand somewhere in the middle. Describes four class writing assignments.

Describes the experience of a college teacher teaching, for the first time, an introduction to literature course with a whole-language approach. Describes how she abandoned her position as imparter-of-knowledge and as authority, and joined the students as one of many readers and writers. Discusses how class activities were structured and notes students’ enthusiasm.

Makes a case for using advertising as the common subject matter in a composition course, and for analyzing advertisements as a means of teaching argumentation. Discusses seeking a social-epistemic curriculum in the heterogeneous writing class. Shows why the close analysis of print advertisements provides an ideal opportunity to discuss questions of what constitutes a good claim.

Argues that connecting classroom practice to writing center tutorials prepares students to generate dialogic and democratic tutorials. Describes a liberatory writing center (rather than a skill-and-drill site of remediation). Describes classroom practices that help students develop critical approaches to the power arrangements they encounter both inside and outside the academy. Notes implications for two-year colleges.

Discusses Margaret Atwood’s "provocative and funny" short story "Rape Fantasies," and describes how, when teaching this story the author encourages students to sympathize with Estelle (the narrator) before they judge her (instead of rushing to achieve closure and begin interpretation).

The Research Paper and the World Wide Web, by Dawn Rodrigues; Assessment of Writing: Politics, Policies, Practices, ed. by Edward M. White, William D. Lutz, and Sandra Kamusikiri; Teaching the Argument in Writing, by Richard Fulkerson; Poets’ Fall, by Jon Conlon.

Uses role-playing, dramatic monologues, and "tableaux vivant" to interpret Robert Browning’s poem "My Last Duchess" in an introductory literature class at Westchester Community College. Notes that performative strategies illustrate connections in the poem that often remain unnoticed on a first reading.

Offers strategies for teaching grammar, literature, essay writing, democracy in letters to the editor, and oral presentations of the research paper.

Peter Elbow reiterates his philosophy of teaching writing, including to start with personal and experiential writing, to look more at how the writing does and doesn’t work rather than the "quality" of the writing, to use lots of freewriting.

Offers suggestions for teaching dyslexic students from a graduate student who teaches composition and is himself dyslexic. Recommends the following strategies: one-on-one help, study skills assignments, individual strategies, step-by-step process, oral discussion, topics of interest to the student, and questions to build confidence.

Considers why basic writers write in "phrases patched upon phrases." Examines how language is patterned and acquired to clarify a framework for teaching basic writers. States that speaking and writing, two different ways of organizing and presenting information, have different structures. Explores what cognitive psychology can say about how the mind processes and produces language.

Describes how a cooperative program between a community college (Spokane Falls) and a university (Eastern Washington) produced a successful teaching internship. Finds that, besides the ways in which interns learn from the experience, working with interns can benefit community college educators and offer them an opportunity for self-assessment and for introspection concerning their own planning and teaching.

Relates how an English teacher, a fan of Willa Cather, searches for Cather’s past in the physical environment, the Nebraska prairie, which formed her as a person and an author. Shows how this search led the teacher to examine her own past.

Recounts a veteran instructor’s experiences with teaching new subjects, American literature and poetry writing, after many years away from graduate school. Muses about the reality of teaching undergraduates. Considers teaching as a rhetorical act and finds that learning is more likely to occur when teachers approach teaching as a rhetorical act rather than an enactment of theory.

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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.

With the Toulmin analysis, determining an argument’s warrants can be especially tricky and frustrating for students. Using cartoons is an effective strategy for teaching the importance of warrants in a way that students can easily understand and enjoy.

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This article profiles a group of college students with learning disabilities, outlines strategies used to help those students in their 100-level expository-writing class, and illustrates persistent writing problems with three student writing samples.

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This essay demonstrates how the concept of multiple intelligences can be applied to college composition.