Daniel Defoe, one of the pioneers of the English novel, primarily earned his living as a journalist, pamphleteer, proposal writer, and freelance business consultant. A born entrepreneur, Defoe's many projects included promoting and marketing the first practical diving bell, designing commercial fisheries and improving London's sewer system, producing a series of popular self-help manuals, and founding and editing the first English technical writing journal, The Projector. These were the products of Defoe's indefatigable pen, and the utilitarian simplicity of his business and technical writing has strongly influenced English prose ever since. This article will examine two major pieces of Defoe's professional writing: An Essay of Projects, (1698) a portfolio of his best proposals, and the landmark The Complete English Tradesman (1725), the first English business writing manual. These and similar texts would form the loam of Defoe's great novels, Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1721), and A Journal of a Plague Year (1722). While Defoe's professional writing shaped his creative writing, his gifts as a novelist—his plain, demotic style, his knack for concise narrative and analytical summary, his ability to create convincing personas through textual documentation—shaped his business writing. Both forms of writing made him the premier spokesperson of a new social and economic order.

Orality has been a feature repeatedly offered to typify African American language habits. Through anthropological studies of contemporary communities as well as literary portrayals and celebrations of cultural heroes such as preachers and political orators, the strong oral traditions of African Americans have figured prominently in discussions of the contexts of their literary works. This article argues for a balance of this image by laying out historical evidence on the literate values and habits of African Americans since the early 1800s. Literary journals, the Black press, literary writers, and literary societies, especially those of women, between 1830 and 1940 highly valued joint reading groups, creative writing efforts, and the role of literature in the lives of African Americans. Considerable work remains to restore accuracy and cross-class representation of African Americans in English studies, so as to resist tendencies to deny variation in the language habits and values of groups included in multicultural literature.

The results of our recent survey of the membership of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, Associated Writing Programs, and the Council of Writing Program Administration indicate the relative health of undergraduate writing programs (major, concentration, or certificate programs, not service courses) in American four-year universities and colleges. During the past five years there has been a significant increase in the number of undergraduate writing programs, including technical and professional writing. But responses to our survey also suggest that while undergraduate technical and professional writing programs comprise the second largest group of programs (behind creative writing) they are not increasing as rapidly as a new kind of undergraduate writing program—a broad-based program that students can complete by taking a wide range of creative writing, composition, journalism, and technical and professional writing courses. The future seems unclear for traditional undergraduate technical and professional writing programs, and faculties need to examine their options in designing or redesigning their programs.

New Visions of Collaborative Writing, Janis Forman Alice M. Gillam Methods and Methodology in Composition Research, Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan Russel K. Durst Gaining Ground in College Writing: Tales of Development and Interpretation, Richard Haswell Robert Brooke Beyond Outlining: New Approaches to Rhetorical Form, Betty Cain Richard M. Coe Portfolios in the Writing Classroom: An Introduction, Kathleen Blake Yancey Karen L. Greenberg Reading and Writing Essays: The Imaginative Tasks, Pat C. Hoy II David Z. Londow To Make a Poem, Alberta Turner Working Words: The Process of Creative Writing, Wendy Bishop Diane Kendig Teaching Hearts and Minds: College Students Reflect on the Vietnam War in Literature, Barry Kroll Lucille Capra Illumination Rounds: Teaching the Literature of the Vietnam War, Larry R. Johannessen Lucille Capra Vietnam, We’ve All Been There, Eric James Schroeder Lucille Capra

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This article collects several examples of technical and creative writing in order to examine whether the differences which have been assumed to exist between the two genres do in fact exist. The formulation of such a dichotomy is traced from I. A. Richards' definition of “poetic vs scientific” writing through C. P. Snow's Two Cultures to Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (Richards' acknowledged source). Coleridge in turn has been shown to be heavily influenced by, in fact to have plagiarized, the work of German idealists, particularly the Schlegels. The German idealists, finally, were working with dichotomies which originate in Cartesian dualism and thus ultimately in the mind/body dichotomy with whose invention Nietzsche credits, or discredits, Plato. The differences and similarities discovered and discussed between the object texts turn out to be governed by Richards' elements of writing—“sense, feeling, tone and intention”—as these elements have been used to dichotomize technical and creative writing. Such previous formulations have attempted to show differences in what Aristotle termed “material cause.” The material causes—the tropes and devices of description—are in fact the same in technical and creative texts. The actual differences and similarities discovered between and among the object texts are, rather, differences governed by Aristotle's “final cause” ( telos).

Richards on Rhetoric, Ann E. Berthoff W. Ross Winterowd Balancing Acts: Essays on the Teaching of Writing in Honor of William F. Irmscher , Virginia A. Chappell, Mary Louise Buley-Meissner, and Chris Anderson Sam Watson A Sense of Audience in Written Communication, Gesa Kirsch and Duane H. Roen Chris M. Anson Beyond Communication: Reading Comprehension and Criticism, Deanne Bogdan and Stanley B. Straw Sandra Stotsky The Writing Center: New Directions, Ray Wallace and Jeanne Simpson Muriel Harris Writer’s Craft, Teacher’s Art: Teaching What We Know, Mimi Schwartz Wendy Bishop Teaching Advanced Composition: Why and How, Katherine H. Adams and John L. Adams Richard Jenseth Textbooks in Focus: Creative Writing: Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy, Joseph M. Moxley Released into Language,Wendy Bishop Writing Poems, Robert Wallace What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter The College Handbook of Creative Writing, Robert DeMaria Chuck Guilford Textbooks in Focus: Technical WritingTechnical Writing: A Reader-Centered Approach, Paul V. Anderson Designing Technical Reports: Writing for Audiencesin Organizations, J. C. Mathes and Dwight W. StevensonTechnical Writing and Professional Communication, Leslie A. Olsen and Thomas N. Huckin Technical Writing: A Practical Approach, William S. Pfeiffer Technical Writing: Principles,Strategies, and Readings, Diana C.Reep Design of Business Communications: The Process and the Product, Elizabeth Tebeaux Carolyn R. Miller

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What Is English?, Peter Elbow Sheryl Finkle and Charles B. Harris The Right to Literacy, Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin Marilyn M. Cooper Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, Susan Miller David Bartholomae Rhetoric and Philosophy, Richard A. Cherwitz James Comas Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850–1900, Albert R. Kitzhaber Sharon Crowle A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America, James J. Murphy Sue Carter Simmons Politics of Education: Essays from Radical Teacher, Susan Gushee O’Malley, Robert C. Rosen, and Leonard Vogt Myron C. Tuman Not Only English: Affirming America’s Multilingual Heritage, Harvey A. Daniels Perspectives on Official English, Karen L. Adams and Daniel T. Brink Alice M. Roy Textbooks in Focus: Cross-Cultural Readers Across Cultures: A Reader for Writers, Sheena Gillespie and Robert Singleton American Mosaic: Multicultural Readings in Context, Barbara Roche Rico and Sandra Mano Emerging Voices: A Cross-Cultural Reader, Janet Madden-Simpson and Sara M. Blake Intercultural Journeys Through Reading and Writing, Marilyn Smith Layton Writing About the World, Susan McLeod, Stacia Bates, Alan Hunt, John Jarvis, and Shelley Spear Nancy Shapiro Textbooks in Focus: Great Ideas Readers Current Issues and Enduring Questions: Methods and Models of Argument, Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau Theme and Variations: The Impact of Great Ideas, Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen The Course of Ideas, Jeanne Gunner and Ed FrankelA World of Ideas: Essential Readings for College Writers, Leo A. Jacobus Great Ideas: Conversations Between Past and Present, Thomas Klein, Bruce Edwards, and Thomas Wymer Casts of Thought: Writing In and Against Tradition, George Otte and Linda J. Palumbo Eleanor M. Hoffman Teaching Writing that Works: A Group Approach to Practical English, Eric S. Rabkin and Macklin Smith Janis Forman Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing, Wendy Bishop Will Wells

The American Community College, Arthur M. Cohen and Florence B. Brawer Nell Ann Pickett Rescuing the Subject.: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer, Susan Miller The Written World: Reading and Writing in Social Contexts, Susan Miller Joseph Harris Writing as Social Action, Marilyn M. Cooper and Michael Holzman Deborah Brandt The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations, David Bleich Joyce Irene Middleton Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research, Chris M. Anson Anne Ruggles Gere Technical and Business Communication: Bibliographic Essays for Teachers and Corporate Trainers, Charles H. Sides Alice Philbin Writing and Technique, David Dobrin Deborah H. Holdstein Worlds of Writing. Teaching and Learning in Discourse Communitieast Work, Carolyn B. Matelene Stephen A. Bernhardt Creative Writing in America. Theory and Pedagogy, Joseph M. Moxley D. W. Fenza

Ability to vary one's style is an important skill of mature writing, and it would be useful to have tests of this skill. We developed a cloze test to measure writing flexibility, then asked college students (all good writers) to replace sentences that had been deleted from two short stories. The style of the cloze sentences, for students with experience in creative writing, more closely resembled the original story than the cloze sentences of less experienced students. Style differences, between experienced and inexperienced students, appeared in average sentence lengths, sentence types, and verb-adjective ratios. In another experiment, less experienced students were given explicit instructions to imitate story style; they showed virtually the same adaptability to style as the creative writing group in the first experiment. Thus we have evidence that the cloze test measures style differences between experienced and less experienced writers, and also that responsiveness to style features, distinct from the skill needed to change those features, is a significant component of experienced writing.

This study examined cultural and instructional influences on the comprehension of figurative language by elementary school children in Harlem, New York. Specifically, it examined children’s exposure to and participation in the creative, verbal street game called “sounding” or “playing the dozens,” and it studied the effects of a program of creative writing instruction provided by visiting writers. The results indicate that the special instruction tended to improve the figurative language comprehension of the children. Also, those children who frequently engaged in sounding comprehended figurative language better than those who did not. This latter effect could not be accounted for by differences in general language ability. The results are taken as support for a “language experience” view of the development of figurative language comprehension in preference to any strong form of a “cognitive constraints” view.

Technical writing is one kind of creative writing. Using knowledge of facts, audience, and situation, the technical writer recreates reality in a technical report. Concepts of reality and creativity currently operative in philosophy, the physical sciences, cognitive and developmental psychology, history of science, rhetoric, and linguistics provide a theoretical basis for this creative approach to technical writing and confirm that imagining and reasoning are related rather than mutually exclusive thought processes.

Creative and technical writing share definite, but seldom realized, affinities. Like the fiction writer, the engineer and the scientist must realize that writing is a creative process rather than a reflex action if they are to communicate successfully. Often, professional advancement depends on the ability to present and to interpret factual information coherently and effectively. Although technical writing presents factual information and creative writing fictional information, both crafts adhere to the same underlying rhetorical principles in order to create their desired effects. This article examines those shared principles that make technical writing more than a prosaic exercise and allow writers to express themselves meaningfully. The role of imagination in this craft is also explored.