Using a single-subjects-with-replicates design, this study investigated conference influence on first graders' knowledge about revision as well as revision activity. Sixteen children participated in group writing conferences with a teacher, in a natural classroom setting, every other week from February through June. Data from three baseline points and seven conference points were summarized. At conference data collection points, students wrote, conferred in groups with a teacher, were interviewed about potential revisions, and revised work in progress. At baseline points, the same events occurred, but there were no conferences. Two main variables were used to evaluate knowledge of the revision process: number of spots suggested for revision and average specificity of suggested changes. The main variable for actual revision activity was total number of revisions made. Final drafts were also rated for quality. Conferences did influence revision knowledge and revision activity for many children. However, the extent of conference influence was mediated by certain entry level student characteristics. Generally, the most positive effects occurred for students who began with the least amount of knowledge about revision, who were initially doing the least amount of revision, and who were initially writing pieces judged among the lowest in quality.

Any writing center coordinator soon finds that a good portion of her job involves efforts to build, maintain, and increase the number of writers using the center's services. Nevertheless, articles on writing centers rarely focus on promoting services and referral issues. Jim Bell's analysis of The Writing Lab Newsletter for a four year period, for instance, shows a dominant interest in tutoring methods (65 articles) with far fewer articles concerned with administrative issues (37 articles), and only 1 1 of those 37 articles focus on promoting the lab (2-3). To find a sound discussion of this issue, I turned to a 1984 survey by Gary Olson, which illustrates just how important an instructor's referral can be in developing a student's attitude toward writing center visits. Olson reminds us that the instructor who threatens students with a referral can devastate a writer who already has a poor self-image ["Johnny, if you don't show some improvement, I'm just going to have to send you to the writing center" ( Further, such demeaning oral referrals in front of a classroom of reluctant students enforces the myth that ". . . the writing center is merely for remediation" (Olson 160). Additionally, in his article "Collaborative Learning in Context: The Problem with Peer Tutoring," Harvey Kail explains why normally well intentioned colleagues might work against their own best classroom interests. Kail reminds us that writing centers threaten the traditional roles of English department members since, through their discussions with students, tutors and coordinators gain clear insights into the workings of an instructor's classroom. Instructors who are threatened by such a possibility may be those who believe the center should perform by what Kail calls the

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This article describes a course design that resulted from an academic and in dustrial collaboration. Unlike most simulation courses, the one described here was developed and taught by university professors and business professionals. One aim of designing the course was to find a way of teaching students that would better prepare them for writing in the workplace. A second aim was for the design-team members, through the experience of planning and teaching, to learn more about writing in the workplace and the teaching of writing. This article gives background on the development of the collaboration and on the decision to design and teach a simulation course, then describes the course and its results.

Gender-studies scholars describe the ways relationships within the family in fluence the gender identity of males and females, while composition special ists study the social nature of writing. In the areas of self-disclosure, control, trust, perceptions ofgroup and ofconflict, congruence, and reward, these gen der roles affect the abilities of men and women to collaborate successfully and determine their responses to interpersonal conflict. Through classroom activi ties and journal keeping, students can learn the limits ofgender roles and have access to a full range of collaborative strategies.

An assessment system for collaborative-writing projects helps create a positive learning experience for all group members by rewarding each individual for his or her participation. Unlike assessment systems that evaluate only the group product, the system proposed here balances product and process, the lat ter embracing individual skills at interacting and contributions to the collaborative composing. The results of a systematic study of students' atti tudes toward their classroom experiences seem to corroborate our perspective as practitioners: With this assessment system, group members felt that they participated fully and practiced effective interactional behaviors, that they be came involved in the collaborative-writing process, and that the reward system was fairer than a single group grade.

(1989). Conflict in collaboration: A burkean perspective. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 113-126.

Previous research on the writing process in the workplace has given inadequate attention to the collaborative nature of work in an organization. Examination of the processes an engineer goes through as he writes a routine and a non-routine document shows that those processes are strongly affected by the degree to which his company has previously accepted the claims he makes as given or as knowledge. Claims are established as knowledge in an organization by being “inscribed,” that is, by having a series of increasingly general symbolic representations assigned to them by a series of writers at work. The inscribing process both resembles the writing process and affects it.

Most research on writing has focussed on the work of single authors working by hand on prose texts. However, much professional work is collaborative, computer-based, not exclusively prose, and not well studied. Some preliminary research suggests that the use of computers will affect the cognitive activities of individual authors in several domains of immediate relevance to composition and technical communication practitioners: planning activities, editing activities, the writing of novice computer users or poor typists, and writing for electronic mail and other electronic communication. Research reported here suggests that the rapidly increasing capability of computer-based writing systems will force communication researchers to 1) broaden their basic conception of and methods of studying “author” to include authoring teams, 2) broaden the type of material studied from that which is purely or largely textual to that which much more frequently includes other types of information, and 3) track changes in “genre conventions” resulting from the increased capabilities of computer-based systems—in short, to assess the impacts of the medium on the message.

The authors introduce the concept of hypertext and focus on how hypertext can facilitate writing activities. A survey of the capabilities of existing hypertext systems and current research activities is included.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

The author suggests that when technical experts team up to produce technical documents, dividing the workload horizontally, with each team member handling a separate chapter or section, does not work very well. He maintains that stratifying the project vertically, with a project team leader, a data gatherer, a writer, an editor, and a graphics person, is a more efficient and more effective method of collaborative writing. The process is quicker and the product is better because team members get to do what they are best at.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Collaboration between student writers appears in various guises: small groups discuss each writer's paper in turn; a pair of classmates exchange papers to read and critique; a whole class evaluates a few students* papers based on an established set of criteria; a student shares her paper with a peer tutor at a writing center. All of these situations attempt to capture and build on the energy and shared learning that occur when students work together. And yet, while both the writing center and the classroom aim for collaborative learning, each context places the students in a different relationship. In the classroom, the students work together as peers under the teacher's guidance; in the writing center, students must work to overcome the disparity of authority inherent in their given roles of tutor and tutee. The difficulty for writing tutors lies in balancing their more powerful position as tutor with the goals of peer collaboration. Thus, collaboration in writing takes different forms and requires different skills in the contexts of classroom and writing center. This paper will use a study of a high school writing center program to illustrate and explain these differences. We hope that this discussion will provide insight into how writing tutors perceive and cope with their roles in a writing center and how the collaboration that occurs in a writing center affects students as writers and as people. Kenneth Bruffee's definition of collaborative learning provides a framework for understanding the difference between classroom and writing center collaboration. In his article, "Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind,1 " Kenneth Bruffee explains that " Collaborative learning provides a social context in which normal discourse occurs: a community of knowledgeable peers" (644). Adapting Thomas Kuhn' s theories about the scientific community, Bruffee emphasizes that a group of people together determine the accepted knowledge, the "normal discourse"

The empowering of writers touches close to interests common to writing centers -no one associated with one-to-one conversation can ignore the benefits of collaboration, the reality and effects of interpretive communities, and the intellectual respect and consideration owed to students by teachers. Yet empowering writers should mean more than simply acknowledging social backgrounds and encouraging self-disclosing discussion and listening (though both activities are of course vital). It should also create opportunities and methods for students to speak powerfully in discourse appropriate to the academy.

Communication instruction at the undergraduate, senior level within the mechanical engineering curriculum is discussed. Faculty collaboration across disciplines and departments and the involvement of students as professionals in their field of study are seen as elements in the process of developing technical communication skills. Faculty-student dialog that supports communication skill development is highlighted.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

It is suggested that students can learn the fundamentals of project leadership, team writing, and production of a major document if the teacher plans and structures the assignments for the project leader so that the project leader and the student writers share the same understanding of the document, know the lines of authority for decisions, and see how individual parts fit into the whole. The principles of cooperation necessary to complete the project also engage the students in issues of professional ethics.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Many engineers and other technical/managerial professionals continually generate writer-centered memos, letters, and brief reports. Because such documents often contain needless repetition, excessive detail, and chronology-based information, an approach for encouraging writers to produce clear, well organized, rhetorically sound prose was developed. Technical writing teachers and communication trainers must 1) make these prose “paladins” aware of the essential ingredients for generating reader-centered prose, 2) familiarize these writers with the major steps involved in the writing process, and 3) operationalize the process through face-to-face writer-editor collaboration — involving peer editorial review. Only through frequent drafting and rewriting and the regular sharing of peer editorial response (oral and written) will clear, rhetorically effective prose accrue value. And only then will technical/managerial writers routinely generate reader-centered documents that communicate.

Professional technical communicators and academicians who study and teach technical communication have opposing perspectives on the ethics that should guide the work of communicating technical information. Valuing most the well-being of their profession and the organizations in which they work, the professionals advocate an ethics in which competence is the principle and market success is the purpose that guides good technical communication. The academicians, valuing most the well-being of the larger society in which all technology is situated, advocate an ethics in which responsibility is the guiding principle and the protection of that society's interests is the guiding purpose. The author considers that an alternative perspective founded on rhetoric might be acceptable to both. He makes cooperation the principle and compromise the purpose that should guide technical communication, suggesting an ethic in which open interaction and collaborative judgment become the context in which technical communication functions.

Collaboration between the programming and documentation departments may be the key to writing good user manuals. Although time constraints and the computer culture stand in the way of collaboration, writers and programmers can overcome these problems with respect, good humor, and careful thinking. The authors describe an informal but successful system developed over the last three years at a software company.

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This article presents a rationale for studying collaborative writing and evidence that coauthors can learn about the writing process from each other. Collaborative writing is explored as an instructional activity that can help students expand their repertoire of writing strategies and their mastery of written communication skills. Collaborative writing activities also offer researchers new insights into the writing process. This discussion about collaborative writing is followed by a case study of two coauthors in the fourth grade who represent general findings from a larger study of 43 fourth- and fifth-grade writers. Detailed analyses of the composing sessions, individual texts, collaborative texts, and interviews indicate that coauthors share creative input, evaluative perspectives, composing strategies, and notions about “good writing” when they work together. Collaborative writing, thus, can complement instruction because it is a direct—albeit subtle—form of learning.

Communication skills training is not well established in the British university curricula. For a long time, it has been a neglected issue while priority is given to the acquisition of technical skills. A research project carried out at Aston University examined the question of how communication skills could most effectively be provided for engineering students. From information received from people experienced in the field in Britain, several interesting differences were noted among courses held in a number of institutes of higher education. Such differences included the background of the lecturer (in primarily engineering or communication), the timing of the course in the degree program, and syllabus selection focusing on academic and industrially related skills. Accordingly, a series of recommendations was made concerning methods of course development at Aston University. The main conclusion is that a joint collaborative approach between an engineering department and a communication specialist is likely to be most successful. Further attention also needs to be paid to the specific skills required by practicing engineers in industry.

This study explored the collaborative writing processes of a group of computer software company executives. In particular, the study focused on the year-long process that led to the writing of a vital company document. Research methods used included participant/observations, open-ended interviews, and Discourse-Based Interviews. A detailed analysis of the executive collaborative process posits a model that describes the reciprocal relationship between writing and the organizational context. The study shows the following: (1) how the organizational context influences (a) writers' conceptions of their rhetorical situations, and (b) their collaborative writing behavior; and (2) how the rhetorical activities influence the structure of the organization.

Over last decade collaborative learning has become an important method for college English teachers, who now realize that their own education rarely taught them how colleagues work together learn and make meaning in discipline, and who have rejected philosophically kinds of approaches teaching that isolate learners instead of drawing them together. In addition, problems for education in seventies and eighties-the changes in student populations, growth in number of nontraditional learners in collegiate body, alienating nature of learning in large classrooms with too many students, acknowledged decline of freshmen entry-level skills in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking-these and other challenges an earlier educational paradigm have shaken our faith in conventional teaching strategies and have called question our obsession with major metaphor for learning over last three hundred years, the human mind as Mirror of Nature. As Ken Bruffee has put it, this old metaphor insists that teachers give students as much information as they can to insure that their mental mirrors reflect reality as completely as possible and also insists that we help our students through exercise of intellect or development of sensibility, sharpen and sensitize their inner eyesight (Liberal Education 98). In this ground-breaking essay, Bruffee, drawing upon works of Thomas Kuhn, L. S. Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, M. L. J. Abercrombie, and Richard Rorty, advances an alternate concept of knowledge as socially justified belief. According this concept, knowledge depends on social relations, not on reflections of reality. Knowledge is a collaborative artifact (103) that results from intellectual negotiations (107). Bruffee explores curricular implications of knowledge collaboratively generated, always with one eye on classroom and other on philosophical underpinnings of new paradigm. But Bruffee's model, built on delicate and necessary tension between theory and practice, may not, I suspect, have guided much of what teachers are calling collaborative learning today. I mention this suspicion out of my recent investigations into issue of assessment generally as force in postsecondary

Teaching students writing, reading, and thinking across the curriculum requires the acceptance of a premise, relatively simple on its face, but imbued with substantial promise for reinventing the formidable tradition of making writing the central cog of the intellectual machinery that facilitates learning. The premise is that all teachers in all disciplines should be actively involved in students' writing, reading, and thinking and should not function as mere judges and graders of purportedly finished writings. I expect to be encouraged by the administration of my college to require more writing, revision, and rewriting in courses that I teach in the future, and to expand the audiences for written work to include the class, the writing laboratory, professors in collaborative teaching arrangements, and others. The college will be participating in one of the national writing programs, and we must also assist our students in completing the writing requirements of the testing program that is mandated for all institutions in the state system of higher education. Recognizing that writing is a process and a mode for also helps students to read with more understanding of the structure of language. Writing and reading are connected, interactive processes requiring students to cooperate in the act of learning. Our students need instruction and practice for reading in their subjects. Reading assignments need to go beyond the text to include materials that offer balance, put the subject into perspective, and place it in the context of real-world points of reference for our students. Discipline-based reading helps students to acquire the learning and expected characteristic of the field. Reading also adds to the value of the writing within the subject or discipline by defining and illuminating basic practices, procedures, and values of the field. Reading and related writing in chemistry and other scientific areas are also forms of social behavior that we must teach if students are to be successful thinkers and scholars in the discipline. That is not revolutionary, it is merely practical. I invite my colleagues in the hard sciences to join the enterprise and re-

In the basic writing program at The University of Akron, we have been using peer tutors as facilitators of collaborative learning in the classroom for two years. One day a week, each tutor has a group of six to eight students who are usually working on rough drafts. Recently, when I

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eighth or ninth on a list of ten items. Last year it appeared again, first on the list. Teachers of literature have also begun to talk about collaborative learning, although not always by that name. It is viewed as a way of engaging students more deeply with the text and also as an aspect of professors' engagement with the professional community. At its 1978 convention the Modern Language Association scheduled a multi-session forum entitled Presence, and Authority in the Teaching of Literature. One of the associated sessions, called Negotiations of Literary Knowledge, included a discussion of the authority and structure (including the collaborative classroom structure) of communities. At the 1983 MLA convention collaborative practices in reestablishing authority and value in literary studies were examined under such rubrics as Talking to the Academic Community: Conferences as Institutions and How Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost Got to be Valuable (changes in interpretive attitudes in the community of Miltonists). In both these contexts collaborative learning is discussed sometimes as a process that constitutes fields or disciplines of study and sometimes as a pedagogical tool that works in teaching composition and literature. The former discussion, often highly theoretical, usually manages to keep at bay the more

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The technical report and proposal are strategic documents that must cogently define, rationalize, and sell their high-technology products in the world of competitive procurement. Because these documents are created by group authorship, there is a need to coordinate the multiple engineer-authors, provide them with strategy information, and help them develop arguments that justify their design approaches. Conventional methods of subject outlining, trial-and-error writing, and post-manuscript reviewing do not cope with these needs. The Stop (Sequential Thematic Organization of Proposals) technique applies five principles to solve this problem: It (1) recognizes the passage unit of discourse to gain expository-descriptive coherence; (2) uses the essay (with thesis sentence) to enhance strategic discussion; (3) restricts outlining to establishing topical architecture and introduces prewriting (via storyboards) to discover and exercise argument, explanation, and visualization; (4) uses pre-reviewing (via real-time, walk-through group dynamics) to permit team/corporate review of the story plan prior to manuscript drafting; and (5) stresses group writing to infuse both the marketing and the technical strategy and design approach into the document. Twenty years of applying STOP has shown it to be a thoroughly practical system, even though intellectually demanding and unforgiving of lazy writing. This paper reviews the principles, practices (including misconceptions), and lessons of STOP as developed, refined, and learned during those years.

Preface 1. THE CONTEXTS OF TEACHING PERSPECTIVES Richard Fulkerson: Four Philosophies of Composition James Berlin: Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class Edward P.J. Corbett: Rhetoric, the Enabling Discipline Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner: The Problematic of Experience: Redefining Critical Work in Ethnography and Pedagogy TEACHERS Peter Elbow: Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process Donald M. Murray: The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference Lad Tobin: Reading Students, Reading Ourselves: Revising the Teacher's Role in the Writing Class Dan Morgan: Ethical Issues Raised by Students' Personal Writing STUDENTS Mina P. Shaughnessy: Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing Vivian Zamel: Strangers in Academia: The Experiences of Faculty and ESL Students Across the Curriculum Todd Taylor: The Persistence of Difference in Networked Classrooms: Non-Negotiable Difference and the African American Student Body LOCATIONS Hephzibah Roskelly: The Risky Business of Group Work Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe: The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class Muriel Harris: Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors APPROACHES Min-Zhan Lu: Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence Mariolina Salvatori: Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition Gary Tate: A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition Carolyn Matalene: Experience as Evidence: Teaching Students to Write Honestly and Knowledgeably about Public Issues 2. THE TEACHING OF WRITING ASSIGNING Mike Rose: Writing Courses: A Critique and a Proposal David Peck, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Mike Rose: A Comment and Response on Remedial Writing Courses Richard L. Larson: The Research Paper in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor: Teaching Argument: A Theory of Types Catherine E. Lamb: Beyond Argument in Feminist Composition RESPONDING AND ASSESSING Brooke K. Horvath: The Components of Written Response: A Practical Synthesis of Current Views David Bartholomae: The Study of Error Jerry Farber: Learning How to Teach: A Progress Report COMPOSING AND REVISING Nancy Sommers: Between the Drafts James A. Reither: Writing and Knowing: Toward Redefining the Writing Process David Bleich: Collaboration and the Pedagogy of Disclosure AUDIENCES Douglas B. Park: The Meanings of Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford: Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy Peter Elbow: Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience STYLES Robert J. Connors: Static Abstractions and Composition Winston Weathers: Teaching Style: A Possible Anatomy Elizabeth D. Rankin: Revitalizing Style: Toward a New Theory and Pedagogy Richard Ohmann: Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language

During 1919-80, a team of eight teachers and eight researchers at the Center for Research in Writing, working collaboratively, derived a grounded description of the unique and characteristic qualities of writing instruction in the classrooms of the eight teachers. This description was developed through the procedure of progressive coding, which is a method for the continuous analysis of a phenomenon. Progressive coding consists of systematically and repetitively comparing the description of a behavior with the actual behavior and then refining the description to make it conform to the behavior as perceived by the participants. The description of writing instruction in these classes, coupled with an analysis of the institutional context in which the instruction took place, has called into question some common assumptions about writing instruction and the present institutional ways of supporting it. During 1979-80, a team of teachers and researchers at the Center for Research in Writing derived a grounded description of the unique and characteristic qualities of writing instruction in eight elementary school classrooms.1 This description features the teachers' perceptions of the instruction in which they engaged. Framed in an institutional context, it calls into question some of the common assumptions about writing instruction and the present conventional ways of supporting it. Most of the findings of this study resulted from two characteristics of its inquiry, one of which made the other possible. The inquiry was collaborative: the teachers were participants - not subjects, but colleagues of the researchers on the team. And the inquiry was progressive: we engaged in ongoing data analysis, coding information as we gathered it and evaluating our description of behavior by stages. This procedure for evolving a grounded description has particular consequence for writing instruction, since it provides a controlled means of generalizing information beyond the limits of this study; it can be used in framing questions raised by the findings it has already generated and in forming hypotheses about writing instruction for further testing.