This book is a major breakthrough for developers of writing assessment programs who must certify the writing competency of undergraduate students. Legislators and accreditation boards across the nation have called for and implemented large scale projects to measure educational outcomes. This single source provides comprehensive information on the history, underlying concepts, and process of conducting a large scale writing assessment program at a specific institution of higher education. The handbook opens with an analysis of the rationale for the assessment of writing during the junior year of the undergraduate curriculum. The authors then turn to a case study of the success of their own institutional wide assessment program. A history is provided of 20th century writing assessment practices; as well, attention is given to defining levels of literacy. After describing an assessment process model, discussion turns to the design of questions, the administration of the assessment, the rating of papers, and the statistical analysis of data. Attention is also given to the design of a course for those who are unsuccessful on the assessment. The study closes with directions for further research and over 200 references in the bibliography.

Rhetoric as a college-level discipline entered the nineteenth century as one of the most respected fields in higher education. The teacher of rhetoric at that time was an honored and respected figure, often occupying a chaired position like Edinburgh's Regius Professorship or Harvard's Boylston Chair. When, however, we look at the teacher of rhetoric a mere century later, what a sad change we find. Rhetoric has changed in a hundred years from an academic desideratum to a grim apprenticeship, to be escaped as soon as practicable. Instead of being an esteemed intellectual figure in community and campus, the rhetoric teacher of 1900 is increasingly marginalized, overworked, and ill-paid. Instead of being a senior professor, he, or she, is an instructor or a graduate student. Instead of being sought by students, rhetoric courses are despised and sneered at, and their teachers have fallen from the empyrean of named chairs to the status of permanent underclass teachers: oppressed, badly paid, ill-used, and secretly despised. In this essay I want to examine some of the issues of labor and status that have surrounded the composition underclass, which is with us today in forms that would be all too familiar to the writing teachers of 1900. The creation of the composition underclass cannot be understood without examining an essential change that took place in America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the shift from oral to written discourse within rhetorical training, with its result an incredible rise in the amount of individual academic work that each teacher of rhetoric must do. This overwork, along with the increasing bureaucratization of the universities, allowed the formation of permanent low-status jobs in composition which were not filled by upwardly mobile scholars, who increasingly gravitated to literary work, which was easier, offered a lighter load, and was given more respect.

When it was first published in 1989, Susan Miller s Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric the Writer established a landmark pedagogical approach to composition based the importance of the writer the act of writing in the history of rhetoric. Widely used as an introduction to rhetoric composition theory for graduate students, the volume was the first winner of the W. Ross Winterowd Award from JAC and is still one of the most frequently cited books in the field.This first paperback edition includes a new introductory chapter in which Miller addresses changes in the field since the first edition, outlines new research, surveys positions she no longer supports. A new foreword by Thomas P. Miller assesses the proven impact of Rescuing the Subject on the field of rhetoric composition.Situating modern composition theory in the historical context of rhetoric, Miller notes that throughout the eighteenth century, rhetoric referred to oral, not written, discourse. By contrast, her history of rhetoric contends oral written discourse were related from the beginning. Taking a thematic rather than chronological approach, she shows how actual acts of writing comment both rhetoric composition. Miller also asserts that contemporary composition study is the necessary cultural outcome of changing conditions for producing discourse, describing the history of rhetoric as the gradual unstable relocation of discourse in conventions that only written language can create. She maintains teachers historians of rhetoric must recognize that the contemporary writing they analyze teach demands their attention to a textual rhetoric that allows theorizing the writer as always symbolically a student of situated meanings.

Preview this article: Graduate Students, Professionals, Intellectuals, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/52/3/collegeenglish9658-1.gif

Empirical studies of gender-based language differences have provided con flicting, discreet conclusions that have little relevance for business- communications instruction. This paper presents informally collected obser vations of male and female students in undergraduate and graduate business- and technical-communication courses. Calling for future formal studies to verify its findings, this study concludes that people-intensive work experience modifies gender-based language differences in written business communica tions of undergraduate and graduate students. However, instruction in audi ence analysis, tone, content design, and style also modify these gender differences. If formally supported, these observations would help teachers argue for the value of business-communications instruction in helping stu dents develop varied and androgynous communication styles important for job-related communications.

time, encouragement, and craft of two master teachers and writers-are attitudes and skills that extend beyond poetry and fiction writing. To value self-investment, to avoid premature closure, to see revision as discovery, to go beyond the predictable, to risk experimentation, and, above all, to trust your own creative power are necessary for all good writing, whether it is a freshman theme, a poem, a term paper, or a 4 C's paper. Yet in academic writing, except perhaps for the dissertation, these are not integral to the pedagogy. Few of us reward risk-taking that fails with a better grade than polished but pedestrian texts. We are more product-oriented, judging assignments as independent of one another rather than as part of a collective and ongoing body of work. No wonder that students interpret our message as Be careful, not creative!

Chapman/Tate descriptive survey of 38 doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition has given us valuable information about these programs, which, for the most part, have sprung up only within the last ten years. survey, published in the Spring 1987 Review (124-86), revealed our programs' deep structure; it also has raised some questions about the definition, development and direction of our doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition. Few of the 38 programs that sent written materials for the survey listed classical rhetoric as core requirement, and almost half listed no history of rhetoric courses. However, 35 of the 38 programs listed theories of composition course. Because the availability of, as well as the teaching approach to, classical rhetoric can show the foundations on which our programs are built and the theoretical directions they may be taking, I prepared questionnaire on the classical rhetoric course offered in English departments, mailed it to 41 doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition, and eventually received 37 completed questionnaires. survey results not only reveal some foundations and direction of our programs in rhetoric and composition but also point out areas for further study. Does the program offer course in classical rhetoric and, if so, is the course part of the core requirement were two of the primary survey questions. Twenty-eight out of the 37 programs (76%) that sent written materials reported they offer course either in classical rhetoric or wherein substantial part is devoted to classical Eight (23%) do not offer the course, but in six of these eight the course is offered in Speech Communication. Two programs reported that the course is listed but not taught. And two programs reported the course is not offered at all. Four programs reported that the course offered in the English Department is also offered in Speech Communication. 76 percent of programs offering the course differ from the Chapman/Tate percentages because some of the 28 programs defined theirs as course in classical rhetoric where only one-third, about five weeks, or less, is devoted to classical These courses are, in the words of one respondent, a rush through rhetoric. Some courses, titled Rhetoric and (or Composition and Rhetoric), are actually topic courses that can take any focus. In one program it depends on who teaches the course whether it is history of rhetoric or the teaching of composition. Course names are quite varied. Only six are called History of Rhetoric, and two are named History and Theories. (The naming of one course title, survey respondent told me, has long and hilarious story. In 1976 the course had been The of Rhetoric, but that's the title of Richards' book, so the title was changed to Philosophy of Composition, which became the title of Hirsch's book, so the program changed it to its present title, The Rhetorical Tradition and the Teaching of Composition, at which point Knoblauch and Brannon appeared.) Other course titles are Theory and Practice of Rhetoric, Classical and Modern Discourse, Major Rhetorical Texts, Historical Studies, Rhetoric of Written Discourse. I was somewhat surprised that more of the course names didn't have the word written in the title to distinguish the course from the one offered in Speech for the last 75 years. Perhaps crossing departmental lines in the teaching of rhetoric is not the problem it was in the 70's. This subject itself would make an interesting study. classical rhetoric course is core requirement in 50 percent of the programs in contrast to the 91 percent of programs requiring composition theory. (In one program classical rhetoric is required, but it's offered only in Speech Communication.) These percentages suggest that we cannot assume the study of classical rhetoric as foundational for composition studies in our doctoral programs. In fact, it is possible for student to have Ph.D. specialty in rhetoric and composition without having had course in classical question here for further study is, then, how are we to define the rhetoric/composition speialist? next series of survey questions I asked focused on the frequency of the course offering, length of time it has been offered in the program, qualifications of the faculty who teach it, average enrollment and area of stuident specialty. In the majority of programs, the course is offered every other year and has been offered only within the last ten years. Usually, only one person teaches the course, faculty

In their freshman year in college, Puerto Rican students take composition courses in both Spanish and English. Although the rhetorical structure of the final product, the composition, may respond to national writing styles in the two languages, studies show the composition process to be similar. Writing instructors in either language find similar problems in student compositions, regardless of the language code used. One of the difficulties students have in both languages is blocking, or apprehension about writing. Although some aspects of the composition process may be universal, we assumed that in bilingual writers the source of writing block depended on the language used. This article presents the results of a questionnaire designed to determine the sources of bilingual students' apprehension in writing by considering three groups of bilingual writers: graduate students in English, freshman English composition students, and freshman Spanish composition students. The results suggest some insights on the nature of blocking in a native language (Spanish) and a second language (English), which may then lead to ways of helping bilingual students to overcome blocking.

This study examined developmental differences in adolescents' and adults' use of rhetorical strategies in memos written during a role-play session. Ninth graders, twelfth graders, college juniors, and adult graduate students chose 1 of 11 roles within the context of the role-play situation and exchanged memos persuading each other to adopt a position regarding a policy for off-campus lunch privileges. Five memos written by each of 11 randomly selected participants at each grade level were categorized by t-unit on the basis of a system of 17 rhetorical strategies. Analyses determined the relationship between grade level and memo length, rhetorical strategies (in each of four initial t-units), rhetorical focus, and participants' perceptions of their audiences' “power” before and after the session. Results show that college students and adults were more likely than younger participants to focus their memos on presenting their roles and establishing a relationship with their audience. The memos of younger participants were more likely to use “assertive” or “conditional” rhetorical strategies. Across all grade levels, however, writers were more likely to focus initial memos on establishing relationships and later memos on articulating their positions.

The author discusses his experience as a graduate student in the Technical Communication Program at Oklahoma State University (OSU). He discusses activities that he found particularly valuable being an intern, namely, participating in the Society for Technical Communication (STC), writing for publication, and giving oral presentations.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

The author focuses on criticisms of technical communication education as training that is too narrowly technical. He endorses the implementation of a program of general education that introduces undergraduate students not only to essential knowledge, but also to connections across the disciplines (E.L. Boyer, 1987). This program would include limitations on expansion of the major as a percentage of total credit hours required, and for greater restraint in course development, as well as more focused attention to meeting academic goals and objectives prior to vocational and career ones.

The syllabus for a course in teaching technical writing is presented. The course is intended for graduate students, who will in turn use the course material to teach technical writing to college undergraduates.

The renewed interest in rhetorical studies during past twenty years has caused many scholars to look back to beginnings of education in English as such programs were developed during latter half of nineteenth century. Most would probably agree with William Riley Parker that it was teaching of freshman composition that quickly entrenched English departments in college and university structure (347), and that freshman program continues to account for size and power of most English departments. But in spite of this, until recently graduate education in English has been focused almost exclusively on literary study. Even as progressive a thinker as Richard Ohmann was at one point moved to write, Literature is our subject matter, and, this being so, an inquiry into state of profession must ask how we stand vis-a'-vis literature (Structure of an Academic Field 359). Although Ohmann subsequently repudiated his statement (English in America 20), such an outlook is revealing of climate existing in most English departments for greater part of twentieth century. By seventies, however, scattered voices began to protest pattern and purpose of graduate training in English. John Gerber argued that traditional literary ignored realities of profession, and that graduate education should be devoted to the acquisition of skills, not merely subject matter (315). He specifically encouraged both M.A. and Ph.D. candidate . . . to make writing, theories of writing, and theories of teaching writing an area of specialization (316). Gerber doubted that such a reform in curriculum would come to pass, and, in fact, traditional literary study has changed little since his article appeared in 1977. But reform has taken place, not by revamping entire curriculum, but by opening up new programs in rhetoric-what is still usually termed option (as opposed to mainstream of literary studies). By 1980 William Covino, Nan Johnson, and Michael Feehan were able to identify twenty graduate programs in English offering a concentration in rhetoric (although some of these programs were

The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. Books and articles abound taking one stand or the other on the question of where meaning lies: in the text, in the reader, in the intentions of the author, in the intertext, in the practices of interpretive communities, and so on. For the most part, such talk tends to be seen as a kind of elegant diversion-the stuff of graduate seminars and doctoral thesessomewhat removed from the more practical tasks of teaching our students to read intelligently and to write with conviction. And certainly things seem to go on pretty much as they always have in most classes on literature-that is, texts get assigned to be read and papers to be written, students plow more or less dutifully through both, some haggling over meanings and grades takes place, and students and teachers alike go home at the end of the term, having done Shakespeare, or the Seventeenth Century, or the Modern Novel, or even Literary Theory. The writings of Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish haven't changed that, and I doubt that any theory of reading ever will. But while theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with how many of us try to teach writing. The reasons for this are fairly plain. The meanings of most texts read in literature classes really are pretty stable-not because they hold some sort of intrinsic fixed messages, but simply because they are familiar texts that we, as a community of readers at the university, have long agreed on how to go about interpreting. This isn't the case, though, when we read student writing. Then we are faced with texts that are both new to us and whose meanings have often not yet been fixed even in the minds of their authors. In a freshman writing class the instability of meaning is a fact of life, not a point of critical debate. Nowhere else is the importance of a reader's expectations, of interpretive codes, shown more clearly. Where we look for analysis, our students often appeal to emotion; where we expect example, they call on popular sentiment, what everybody knows. The problem is not that our students are dumb, but that they're not yet members of the club-they don't know the sorts of things we as academics look for when we read. And so one way of looking at our task as teachers of writing is to see it as helping our students to confront the kinds of talk that go on at the university, to think about the values and assumptions that underlie such discourse. Joseph Harris teaches writing at Temple University.

If you teach writing, you should write. That elementary but radical insight, probably first voiced by Janet Emig fourteen years ago in her influential monograph, Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, has become one of the key components of the new paradigm for teaching composition, endorsed by virtually everyone in the profession who consults or publishes about ways to improve the teaching of The reasoning is simple: Teachers who do not engage in the writing process themselves cannot adequately understand the complex dynamics of the process, cannot empathize with their students' problems, and are in no position either to challenge or to endorse the recommendations and admonitions of the textbooks they are using. Nor can they do as many writing teachers suggest and say, Let's just throw away the textbook and work on our writing. The writing teacher who doesn't write is in no more position to diagnose difficulties and offer advice than a soccer coach who has never played soccer. In fact, much of the success of the National Writing Project's workshops for teachers all over the country has come because its leaders have started teachers writing and talking to each other about But just because so many people in the profession now accept the principle and recommend that writing teachers should write doesn't mean that those who believe in the theory find it easy to practice. In fact, if you are one of the new generation of writing teachers who believe strongly that you should write, you may only have made your life more difficult. You are now enlightened, but as a result you may feel guilty and frustrated; guilty because you aren't writing, frustrated because you don't know what to do about it. Probably the first thing you should realize is that you're not unusual. We don't have good data on how many writing teachers don't write, but a few years ago The Chronicle of Higher Education published figures estimating that at least two-thirds of college professors publish nothing after the dissertation. And if you think about the faculty in your department you may realize that few of them seem to be writing, including those who teach composition. So you shouldn't feel as if you are the only sinner and that everyone but you is It's not true. But knowing that you have plenty of company doesn't help your problem.

Summaries of expository texts were obtained from undergraduate students and examined for the nature of text-to-summary mapping by asking judges to identify the text sentences of origin for every summary sentence. The analysis revealed that simple omission and one-to-one mapping of text sentences into summary sentences were the most favored strategies. Following these in order of frequency were the combining of pairs, triples, and longer runs of text sentences that were predominantly adjacent in the texts, showing a strong tendency to preserve the original order of text sentences. Although writers did not select the same text sentences for omission, it was possible to identify a core set of text sentences that was always preserved in summaries of the larger texts. These sets, when compared with randomly selected sets in their original order, appeared as meaningful and coherent “mini-texts” to independent judges. The results are discussed in the light of Brown, Day, & Jones's (1983) identification of a “mature” summarizing strategy in which narrative texts are reorganized and condensed by combining text sentences across paragraphs. It is suggested that the “mature strategy” does not appear in these results because the structure of expository text resists easy reorganization, and because a severe length constraint was not imposed.

A group of graduate students in English and language education were given a series of instructor-designed and self-designed reading and writing tasks. They wrote formal papers in response to these tasks and kept retrospective journals describing their reading and writing strategies. The study looks at the nature of introspective accounts and the usefulness of such accounts in studies of the composing process. Several writing tasks are described and analyzed, and three brief case studies are presented. The study concludes that retrospective journal accounts are a rich source of information because they permit consideration of the complex context within which composing occurs.

The last twenty years have seen a great expansion, as well as considerable shift of emphasis and focus, in publication about English composition. On even a cursory count, there are now over two dozen journals regularly publishing material in the field, not to mention books, course texts, research reports, or ERIC documents. However, as active composition researchers well know, there is no single bibliographic resource giving both full and focussed annual coverage of this output, nor any very certain means of identifying and retrieving the items previously published on a given composition topic.' There are available, of course, many orientatory bibliographies and research guides to composition, and these have real usefulness, but one needs to make a clear conceptual distinction between the selective or interpretive bibliographical guidance such guides offer and the more basic bibliographical control we increasingly need-on-going, systematic, non-judgmental coverage of activity in the field. Part of the problem with orientatory guides is their rapid obsolescence: as Edward Corbett has noted, Nothing-not even last year's hemline-dates as quickly as a published bibliography.2 But in addition to being dated, discursive and orientatory guides pose other problems: nearly all the existing guides are avowedly selective in their coverage, most of them are silent about the kinds of searching from which they were compiled, they are often biased one way or another in their selection of material, and, most fundamental of all, there are disturbing gaps in the chronological coverage they provide. The research consequences of current problems in composition bibliography have not been widely understood, and in this paper I want to explore four special features of the composition field that have made bibliographic control difficult. It is only when researchers, teachers, graduate students, librarians, and bibliographers recognize the special nature of composition re-

Preview this article: The Effects of Genre and Tone on Undergraduate Students' Preferred Patterns of Response to Two Short Stories and Two Poems, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/20/1/researchintheteachingofenglish15622-1.gif

Here is one aspect of technical communication that has seldom been explored in such revealing depth. Indeed, Sternberg makes a deep penetration of the ways to prepare a successful dissertation and still keep your sanity.

Preview this article: Opinion: The Graduate Student, Forty-five Years Later, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/47/8/collegeenglish13241-1.gif

This study investigated the assumption that proficient writers, unlike nonproficient ones, adapt their essays for a particular and occasion. Good and poor writers wrote a persuasive essay for a real that expressed topic-relevant attitudes and opinions in an interview presentation. Essays were then coded for ideas mentioned in the interview. Results showed that good writers take greater advantage of information than poor writers, but that good and poor writers both favor adaptations from explicit statements over more subtle statements. Studies of in human communication help to show how individuals manage in a world of diverse attitudes and opinions. Researchers in related disciplines, recognizing that effective discourse requires an understanding of situation including aspects of have shown many ways that people alter their messages for different contexts. In the field of writing, however, situational influences have received relatively little attention, though today's textbooks devote many more pages than before to matters of and intention. Overall, there seems to be little consensus about just how aspects of are manifested in writing. I use the term here and elsewhere as a general term to denote issues of awareness and adaptation. Where necessary, I distinguish between awareness, which refers to a writer's or speaker's focus of on readers or listeners irrespective of the communicator's language behavior, and adaptation, which refers to the audience-conditioned language behavior resulting from this awareness. What constitutes adaptation and how it can be measured is a question not always faced squarely by researchers. Some investigators have adopted quite general (and vague) criteria. In a study conducted by Flower and Hayes (1980), for example, categories labeled audience and reader and response to the larger rhetorical problem were used in analyzing protocols for evidence of awareness. Similarly, Hilgers (1980) rated adaptation in students' writing samples according to the criterion attention to the specific needs of the audience. This article is adapted from the author's doctoral dissertation from the Department of Language Education, University of Georgia, 1984, under the direction of Donald L. Rubin. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

The work in editing which is outlined here ensures that graduate students become aware of editing processes through experience and research, through practice and theory. By developing and using levels of edit and editorial dialogue in editing workshops and by researching and examining their own and other people's techniques, the students develop their own theories of editing processes. And through their group editing and their individual editing experiences and research, the graduate students learn basic editorial values and editing techniques that they can use to help others communicate well. Included is an appendix of selected resources on editing processes consisting of approximately 150 items.

Like all second editions, the new version of Richard Graves' Rhetoric and Composition: A Sourcebook for Teachers implies the success of the first edition. But that success itself also radiates questions about the nature and purposes of the courses that might use the book, about the texts with which it competes in the marketplace, about what prompts a second edition, and about the relationship of such textbooks and courses graduate education in English. All these questions frame the larger issue of the continuing emergence of composition studies. Any course using the Graves book (or one of its competitors) is a relatively new one because composition instructors have had rely, until recently, on an informal curriculum for their training. To be sure, there have been exceptions such as Fred Newton Scott, who in the early decades of this century trained graduate students at the University of Michigan in what might today be described as composition studies. And Herbert Cheek reports in his retrospective Forty Years of Composition Teaching (College Composition and Communication, 6 [1955], 4-10) that some universities began by 1940 to have distinguished specialists in linguistics, in semantics, and in logic who were graduate students how apply what they could learn about these subjects composition teaching (p. 9). Most instructors of writing have, however, learned through the informal curriculum of ideas gleaned from self-sponsored reading, orientation sessions, and conversations with other instructors, rather than in graduate classes. When Harold Allen made his 1951-52 tour of forty-seven composition programs, he found only five graduate courses on composition, and not all of the five were offered regularly (Preparing the Teachers of Composition and Communication-A Report, CCC, 3 [1952], 3-13).

Deals with a successful attempt to improve the linguistic proficiency of international graduate students at Tennessee Technological University. Without proper guidance by skilled English language instructors at the very beginning of their graduate program, these newly arrived students may find themselves at a disadvantage in the American classroom because they lack the necessary aural comprehension and oral proficiency to take advantage of the learning environment. A pilot program at Tennessee Technological University has demonstrated that the international student's ability to process technical and nontechnical English efficiently in oral and aural models can be improved without requiring the student to take time-consuming intensive English programs on arrival in the US. Concentrated aural practice in the areas of listening acuity, inferencing, and problem solving yielded gains in proficiency over a short period. Graduate faculty members have reported improvements in student attitudes and in course work, as well as greater ease in communicating with these students.

Questionaire responses from faculty members in 190 academic departments at 34 universities were analyzed to determine the writing tasks faced by beginning undergraduate and graduate students. In addition to undergraduate English departments, six fields were surveyed: electrical engineering, civil engineering, computer science, chemistry, psychology, and master of business administration programs. Results indicated considerable variability across fields in the kinds of writing required and in preferred assessment topics.

This book tells you virtually everything you care to know about letter writing; resumes; interviews; sales and customer relations letters; libraries and their resources; note-taking; the differences between a summary and an abstract; preparing and using questionnaires; designing visuals; writing instructions; sales, progress, trip, and incident reports; and various types of oral reports, from telephone conversations to formal speeches. It is written for undergraduate students preparing for such careers as (I quote from the first chapter) “executive secretary, computer operator, forestry, law enforcement, dental hygienist, and nurse.” This comprehensiveness is either a strength or a drawback, depending on the use you wish to make of the book. A teacher's guide is available.

Native and international science, engineering, and humanities graduate students at The University of Texas at Arlington experience real-world communication situations in an interdisciplinary, projected-oriented technical communication course team-taught by a technical writer and a mechanical engineer. The course simulates the writing requirements of industry and helps students prepare theses and dissertations. A special feature for international students is a supplementary weekly laboratory session devoted to intensive review of writing fundamentals. The course, which has been offered three times since 1976 with enrollments of eleven, five, and nine students, has been received well by science and engineering students for whom it was initially designed and by humanities students who now also enroll. Even though in some cases the progress that a foreign student makes in one semester is limited, all students have found the course of great benefit. The interdisciplinary team approach is an effective way of teaching graduate-level technical communication, providing engineers an opportunity to learn to express ideas to humanists and providing humanists an opportunity to learn to communicate effectively with engineers and scientists.

This chapter is based on the writings of Ward Edwards and the recollections of two of his graduate students whom he influenced deeply.

Preview this article: Research Paper Instruction in the Undergraduate Writing Program, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/44/8/collegeenglish13670-1.gif

Technical writing required of employees in business and industry has been investigated, but the writing demands on graduate students have not been systematically surveyed. To find out what kinds of writing are required of graduate engineering students, twenty-five engineering faculty members from the Engineering College at the University of Florida listed the kinds of writing assigned to graduate classes during the academic year 1979–80. Since the faculty members were asked to rank-order the writing kinds from most frequent to least frequent, the Friedman analysis of variance and the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test were used to test for differences in the rank ordering. The tests showed that faculty assigned examinations, quantitative problems, and reports most frequently, that they assigned homework and papers (term and publication) less frequently, and that they assigned progress reports and proposals least frequently.

IN THE SPRING SEMESTER OF 1978 I taught a seminar on contemporary women's fiction to twelve women graduate students. Taught is really the wrong word. Officially, I was responsible for the course, for grades, for leading discussion; actually it was that rare experience, a class that ran itself. This was partly because the students had designed the course-a course in which some of their own unpublished work would be discussed in the same way as already published fiction-and therefore felt responsible for it. But it was also because a real sense of community developed as our established critical methods failed us and we groped towards formulating new ones. The words with which one of the students, Marilyn Johnson, introduced her project for the course suggest the atmosphere that developed:

Several months ago, a colleague and I presented a proposal to the Ph.D. graduate committee at Arizona State University for a new concentration on the Ph.D. level in rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. Our proposal seemed reasonable enough. What we were proposing was that graduate students be given a series of options on the Ph.D. level, so that those whose primary interest was belles lettres could choose from among the traditional areas of English and American literature. However, those whose primary interest was language, or a broader conception of letters as exemplified by the bonae litterae of the Renaissance, could do half of their work in the traditional areas of literature and half of their work in rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. We argued that students seeking degrees in order to teach and to do research face a job market very different from the one that students encountered as recently as eight or nine years ago, and drastically different from what most teachers encountered when they began. We reminded the committee of the results of the MLA Job Information List, published in the February 1978 ADE Bulletin, which showed a preponderance of job opportunities for people in the areas of rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. For example, of the 405 jobs advertised in '76-'77 for people with Ph.D.'s in English, 56 of those jobs were in rhetoric and composition, 53 in linguistics, and 29 in creative writing. Then in descending order, there were 18 openings in American Literature, 18 in Black Studies, 17 for generalists, 15 each in Old and Middle English Literature, 19th Century British Literature, and American Studies, 13 in Renaissance Studies, 8 in 19th Century American Literature, 7 in Colonial Literature, and so forth. We emphasized that the opportunity for serious research and scholarship in rhetoric and composition has never been better. The professional membership in the Conference on College Composition and Communication has increased dramatically over the past few years. The MLA has recognized the

As technical writing programs grow, English departments may alleviate the problems of the unprepared instructor by offering technical writing theory and pedagogy courses. Such courses should combine theory and pedagogy with assignments that are practical and introduce graduate students to the theoretical issues in the field. This article provides a syllabus and the reactions of students who completed such a course.

(1980). Doctoral programs in rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 190-194.

It should be clear to graduate students and fledgling writers in all branches of science that they oeed to write about their work and to publish their results.The present book addresses this need and has some unique qualities-it is far more readable than most books of its kind and is liberally sprinkled, with humorous but pithy observations.Books on technical writing frequently are devoted to longwinded exposition on the virtues of

LAST SPRING I VOLUNTEERED to teach an English graduate course entitled Teaching of Writing to Speakers of Dialect. Of course everyone speaks a dialect, but the graduate students were no fools. They knew that this verbose title was a euphemism for teaching students in remedial courses to write. After consenting to do the course, I panicked. I am and therefore thought by my department to know something about dialect problems. Of course I felt just about as much in the dark (forgive the racist imagery) on this matter as most of my colleagues, though I regularly taught the remedial, freshman English course which enrolls mostly and Spanish-speaking students. Now I was going to be unmasked as being as unenlightened and unexotic as my white colleagues. Heaven forbid! I scurried around to the graduate students who might take such a course and made them promise that they would not pre-register, hoping that the course would fold for lack of enrollment. But, alas, it didn't. So on the first day of class, I went to the assigned room, met my ten white English graduate students, confessed my ignorance, and began to teach what proved to be a fairly useful course, i.e., I learned a lot by teaching it. We began the course as all good graduate courses begin and end, with the students doing most of the work. We tried to make a complete annotated bibliography from 1964-77 on black dialect and from four journals which publish in this area: English Journal, College English, College Composition and Communication, and Florida Foreign Language Reporter. We dittoed our bibliographical finds each week and also starred and commented on the most interesting articles. The students murmured about the amount of time our comments took each week, but I found the practical ideas for teaching writing which came from these articles and the students' comments most helpful. The articles were also helpful, especially when compared with the readings in our three texts,' in eradicating the naivete with which some of the students began the course: they wanted me as a teacher of remedial composition to tell them how to teach dialect writers in twenty-five words or less, and if not in so few

IN A RECENT ARTICLE IN College and Communication, a graduate student just through a doctoral examination in History and Theories in describes his need keep myself in one theoretical piece. . ., to get my future in composition straight, get it to take on some shape or direction (Stephen North, Composition Now: Standing on One's Head, 29 [1978], 178). One of his examiners called his synthesis of history, theory, pedagogy a mishmash; he is now laboring to find sensible relations between theory and the teaching of freshman composition. In spite of a dutifully upbeat conclusion, the article conveys frustration and insecurity-a nagging fear that the whole enterprise has been in some fashion hollow and suspect: it's rather like lying on your back in the backyard on a clear summer night and calling that astronomy (180). The anxiety described and dramatized here strikes me as largely justified and likely to become common as graduate programs in the theory and teaching of composition proliferate. What composition studies now offer is a potpourri of theory, research, speculation, some of it close to pedagogy, some far removed, some of it speculative and contemplative, some scientifically and experimentally oriented, some of it jargon-ridden and pretentious, enough of it so provoking and stimulating that the pervading sense of excitement and challenge seems justified. What composition research does not offer is a shapely coherence that makes it definable as a discipline. On the contrary, the spirit of the moment calls for ranging across multiple

RECENTLY I WRAPPED UP a lecture on a modern American novel with the statement, underlying theme of the book, then, is that in a universe shorn of transcendental values, of codes divinely ordained, each person must necessarily work out his own destiny. When one of the graduate students in my class raised his hand, I prepared either to repeat or to amplify my somewhat grandiloquent assertion. But the student proved less perplexed than querulous. He said, That's about all I got out of it, too. What it took this author four-hundred pages to get across, a good philosopher could convey, and less ambiguously, in a chapter. I think novels are basically a waste of time. It was the kind of challenge that the English professor is trained to meet, and indeed my first impulse was to let loose traditional arguments that must at last pummel the young iconoclast into an admission of the inimitable sweetness and light of belles-lettres. The hovering presences of Sidney, Shelley, Arnold, and a host of descendent apologists beckoned me to verify my professional mettle by exonerating darling poesy (using the word in its broad Aristotelian sense) from the charge of inessentiality. Instead, I sided with the heretic. With something of a guilty thing surprised, I dismissed the imagined importunities of my venerable judges, and to the student said, You may have a point. The student's plaint crystallized my own vague yet persistent dissatisfaction with fiction. Years before, I had been an avid consumer of novels of all sorts-an enthusiasm that partially accounted for my decision to pursue studies in language and literature-but as time wore on I became progressively less attached to fiction, the whole of belles-lettres in fact, and simultaneously more oriented to philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. The evolution in taste finally reached a stage where the time I spent on such disciplines was tenfold what I devoted to fiction. The disparity of attention was significative not merely of an English professor's attempt to balance his knowledge of genres, but reflected instead an intrinsic preference for analytical writing. Though I do not maintain that novels are a waste of time for everybody-each person must arbitrate his or her own tastes-they do seem virtually so for me. Given my occupational affiliation with belles-lettres, I flinch at the admission, for my fancy teems with visions of colleagues and students disdaining one so foul as to besmirch what he teaches. While my academic training and associations increase the difficulty of appraising in a disinterested fashion the bases for my literary prefer-

A summer program at the Naval Underwater Systems Center offers from two to four temporary positions each year, where graduate students in technical writing are introduced to a wide variety of assignments in technical communications. The program, now in its sixth year, provides practical professional training for technical writers and editors.

THE CURRENT back to the basics hue and cry reminds me of the story in Honey in the Horn where an oldtimer, working at the local sawmill, cut his own pay from $1.50 to $1.00 a day. When asked why he would do such a fool thing, the old man replied, Fractions make my head hurt. The profession's reaction to the public outrage that students can't write reminds me of that old-timer. We, too, seem to be attempting to avoid complication by reverting to a simpler number. To illustrate what I mean: In 1974 the Carnegie Foundation for the Improvement of Teaching gave the Modern Language Association a modest grant to finance a study of the state of the English undergraduate curriculum. Primarily, the officers of the foundation wished to know the answer to this question: How is the English profession responding to the students who are now going to college? One of the activities in the study was a national survey of the teaching of freshman composition. Four hundred thirty-six college and university teachers, directors of writing, and department chairmen from forty-nine states and Puerto Rico responded to MLA's inquiry and answered such questions as, What do you consider the main purpose of the course you teach? What is the average size of your freshman composition classes? How are the texts selected for the course?2 Quotations from this survey illustrate the divergent opinions and philosophies held about the college freshman English course.

Preview this article: Wanted: More Writing Courses for Graduate Students, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/27/2/collegecompositionandcommunication16592-1.gif

Preview this article: Final Excerpts from A Handbook for Teaching Assistants, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/36/6/collegeenglish16978-1.gif