Colleges of business grapple with a perceived lack of quality in their graduates’ professional writing and recognize students’ need to learn disciplinary discourses. This article describes the motivation, design, and preliminary outcomes of a business-writing prototype at Auburn University. Writing consultants trained in business communication worked with one class on a substantial writing project. They provided conferencing and written feedback, greatly lowering the faculty workload. Student surveys and informal interviews indicate that students, faculty, and consultants were satisfied with this prototype program.

In this study, I use think-aloud protocol methods to determine how students respond to their teacher’s conversational and nonconversational written feedback on their writing.

This article examines Rachel Carson’s assimilation and revision of scientific uncertainty in her sources, annotations, and drafts for Silent Spring. It argues that Carson’s emphasis on the special topos of uncertainty was not an original invention but instead was Carson’s contribution to an ongoing scientific and political conversation about uncertainty in 1962. Carson transformed this topos into a bridge across the is–ought divide in science-related policy making, using the uncertainty topos to invite the public to participate by supplying fears and values that would warrant proposals for limiting pesticide use. Carson’s adaptation of scientific uncertainty to environmental policy making provides a historical precedent for contemporary invocations of scientific uncertainty in debates surrounding global warming, nuclear power, cancer studies, and Gulf oil drilling. The methods that the authors use to trace the development of this special topos can also serve as a pattern for excavating the histories of other pivotal topoi in the rhetoric of American science and environmental policy.

Although blogs used in the composition classroom have most often been employed as prewriting forums or journals, this article suggests that blogs can also be used effectively as a revision tool in the later stages of writing academic research papers.

Legos Build the Way to Successful Process Analysis Writing, Michelle Rhodes (New Voice) Native American Elder Stories Make Descriptive Essays Easier, Pamela Tambornino (New Voice) Teaching Writing Style and Revision, Eric Bateman Dialect and Language Analysis Assignment, Amanda Hayes (New Voice) A Scaffolded Essay Assignment on Poetry, Jane Arnold (New Voice)

Students are expected to come into the current college classroom already possessing certain skills including the ability to write at the appropriate academic level regardless of discipline and the ability to create well-structured arguments. Research indicates, however, that most students entering college are underprepared in both areas. One strategy that may help students write at a more academic level is teaching students to focus on spending their time on revision. In the current study, we examine two potential sources of difficulty in the revision of argumentative essays: a poorly developed argument schema and a poorly developed global revision task schema. We created and tested the effectiveness of two written tutorials designed to provide college students information to saturate their knowledge base as well as provide them with procedural tasks to complete. We found that without instruction, students focused their revisions on making local wording changes that did not qualitatively improve their essays. An argument tutorial helped students make higher level global changes, include more argument content, and improve the structure of the essay. A global revision tutorial also helped students make more substantive structural changes. Thus, both tutorials helped students improve their revisions, and the tutorials were completed independently by the students successfully.

This article argues for and models an approach to writing program assessment that relies on study of the writing practices of program graduates as a way to inform revisions in curriculum and teaching practices. The article also examines how conducting such assessments can help nondisciplinary publics understand the nature of composition studies.

In response to growing concerns among faculty regarding the lack of attention to the bilingual student population in our pre-service teacher education program, the authors engaged in a shared self-study of the process of revising and implementing a secondary English methods course with explicit attention to the special needs of bilingual/bicultural learners. The paper describes how the second author, an English educator, with support from the first author, a mentor/colleague in bilingual education, identified and negotiated tensions and dilemmas that arose in a process of curricular transformation toward culturally and linguistically responsive teacher education practice. The study highlights several points of disjuncture, or critical turning points, experienced by the English educator and the ways in which she navigated the contradictions that resulted at these points of disjuncture through conversation with her mentor. Our documentation and articulation of this process may assist content area teacher educators in negotiating new knowledge and creating strategies for managing the dilemmas in practice that arise in the design and implementation of revised course curricula aimed at supporting culturally and linguistically diverse learners.

In a globally networked learning environment (GNLE), 16 students at a university in Sweden and 17 students at a university in the United States exchanged peer-review comments on drafts of assignments they prepared in English for their technical communication classes. The instructors of both sets of students had assigned the same projects and taught their courses in the same way that they had in the previous year, which contrasts with the common practice of having students in partnering courses work on the same assignment or on linked assignments created specifically for the GNLE. The authors coded the students’ 816 comments according to their focus and orientation in order to investigate the possible differences between the comments made by the L2 students in Sweden and those made by the L1 (English as a second language) students in the United States, the possible impact of peer reviewing online, and the influence of the instructors’ directions on the students’ peer-reviewing behavior.

The concepts of drafting and revision were developed out of process theory and research done in the early 1980s, an era when word processing was not as pervasive or standardized as it is now. This paper reexamines those concepts, drawing on an analysis of two decades of previous college-level studies of writing processes in relation to word processing and an exploratory survey of 112 upper-level undergraduate students who use computers extensively to write and revise. The results support earlier studies that found students’ revision is predominantly focused on local issues. However, the analysis suggests that the common classroom practice of assigning multiple drafts to encourage global revision needs to be rethought, as more drafts are not necessarily associated with global revision. The survey also suggests that printing out to revise may be on the decline. Finally, the analysis suggests the very concept of a draft is becoming more fluid under the influence of word processing. The study calls for further research on students’ drafting and revision practices using more representative surveys and focused qualitative studies.

Kip Strasma Responds to “Gender and Peer Response” by Elizabeth Tomlinson, and Tomlinson responds to Strasma’s “Spotlighting.”

This case study examines written peer response materials generated by small groups with varying gender compositions. Based on those observations, I offer several pedagogical implications.

Based on a study of observable changes author-users made to three Wikipedia articles, this article contends that Wikipedia supports notions of revision, collaboration, and authority that writing studies purports to value, while also extending our understanding of the production of knowledge in public spaces. It argues that Wikipedia asks us to reexamine our expectations for the stability of research materials and who should participate in public knowledge making.

With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy and composition.

There has been little discussion of hospitality as a practice in college writing courses. Possible misuses of hospitality as an educational and ethical practice are explored, and three traditional and still tenable modes of hospitality are described and historicized: Homeric, Judeo-Christian, and nomadic. Application of these modes to instructional situations may lead to new and sometimes counter-establishment methods, in terms of course objectives, shared labor of teacher and students, writing assignments, response to writing, and assessment of student work. Perhaps the most radical form is transformative hospitality, which accepts the possibility that host and guest, teacher and students, will all be changed by their encounter, a potentiality that is characterized by risk taking, restlessness, and resistance to educational entrenchments. Traditional hospitality as practiced in writing classrooms does not mark a return to student-centered pedagogies of past decades but does stake out a position that might be considered marginal apropos the current political and educational climate in the United States.

This article describes a process of peer evaluation that is aimed at developing students’ sense of audience and at elevating the status of peer reviewers, whose opinions on successful writing are too often viewed as less trustworthy than those of their instructors.

The authors' goal was to model the role played by the relationship between a writing teacher and her students in the feedback and revision cycle they experienced in an English-as-a-foreign-language context. Participants included a nonnative teacher of English and 14 students enrolled in her English writing class in a Korean university. Data came from formal, informal, and text-based interviews; semester-long classroom observations; and students' drafts with teacher comments. Findings showed that caring was enacted in complex and reciprocal ways, influenced by interwoven factors from the greater society, the course, the teacher, and the student. Students' level of trust in the teacher's English ability, teaching practices, and written feedback, as much as the teacher's trust in particular students based on how they revised their drafts, played a great role in the development of a caring relationship between them.

This essay aims to explore the widely varying terminology associated with a typical classroom activity, peer review.

This study examines the revision histories of 10 Wikipedia articles nominated for the site's Featured Article Class (FAC), its highest quality rating, 5 of which achieved FAC and 5 of which did not. The revisions to each article were coded, and the coding results were combined with a descriptive analysis of two representative articles in order to determine revision patterns. All articles in both groups showed a higher percentage of additions of new material compared to deletions and revisions that rearranged the text. Although the FAC articles had roughly equal numbers of content and surface revisions, the non-FAC articles had fewer surface revisions and were dominated by content revisions. Although the unique features of the Wikipedia environment inhibit strict comparisons between these results and those of earlier revision studies, these results suggest revision in this environment places unique structural demands on writers, possibly leading to unique revision patterns.

The next entry into our “Re-Visions” feature—a series that offers reconsiderations of particularly significant work in CCC—is a reappraisal of Joseph Janangelo’s “Joseph Cornell and the Artistry of Composing Persuasive Hypertexts,” which originally appeared in February of 1998 (volume 49.1, 24– 44). In addition to commentaries by Anne Frances Wysocki, Collin Gifford Brooke, and Jeff Rice is a “comment on the comments” by Joseph Janangelo. The subject of these commentaries is readily available for reference at the CCC Online Archive (www.inventio.us/ccc). I welcome your feedback on this feature and suggestions for subjects of future “Re-Visions.”

Drawing on the second phase of a 2-year study of students' linguistic and compositional processes, this article describes students' reflections on their online revision processes, those revisions made during the process of translating thoughts into written text. The data collected were from classroom observation and post hoc interviews with 34 students, who were observed during a writing task in the English classrooms and interviewed subsequently to elicit their reflections and understandings of their own revising processes. The analysis indicates that students tend to conceptualize revision as a macro-strategy and as a task that is predominantly undertaken as a posttextual production reviewing activity. It also indicates that students engage in multiple revising activities during writing, including many revisions that are not concerned with simple matters of surface accuracy, and many students are able to talk about these perceptively and with insight.

Identifying the approach used by those revision experts par excellence—that is, professional editors—should enable researchers to better grasp the revision process. To further explore this hypothesis, the author conducted research among professional editors, six of whom she filmed as they engaged in their practice. An analysis of their work approach strategies showed their detection strategies to consist in anticipating errors and in comparing the author's text with the editor's knowledge, which appears in a range of states: certitude, uncertainty, and ignorance. Furthermore, the participating editors used problem-solving strategies to automatically solve more than half of the problems encountered in the text. Otherwise, they used immediate or postponed strategies. This description of professional editors in action opens a number of avenues for the further research and development of in-class instruction of self-revision and professional editing.

While peer review is a common practice in college composition courses, there is little consistency in approach and effectiveness within the field, owing in part to the dearth of empirical research that investigates peer-review processes. This study is designed to shed light on what a peer reviewer actually reads and attends to while providing peer-review feedback.

This is the second installment in the Re-Visions series’ an occasional series for which I invite essays that reconsider important work previously published in the pages of CCC. The full text of Nancy Sommers’s “Responding to Student Writing” (CCC, May 1982, 148–56) is available at www.inventio.us/ccc.

The use of humorous texts in the writing class can help students improve skills in effective writing while encouraging critical thinking and an increased range in expression. In addition, because of the accessible nature of humor and the focus on purpose and audience that is necessary when writing it, students show a natural inclination toward peer review and recursive writing, with an enthusiasm that is often lacking when working with traditional texts in the writing class.

In preparing Suzanne Bordelon’s article for the February issue of CCC, the editorially unthinkable happened: An earlier version of her fine article replaced the final, wellrevised version as it went to the printer. In addition to my profuse apologies to Professor Bordelon, I have decided to publish the correct version of the article, delaying until September my publication of Janet Eldred’s review essay of several books on technology. The silver lining, in this instance, is a teachable moment, a rare glimpse for readers of CCC into an accountable but ultimately human (and I hope humane) editorial process: Bordelon’s article, quite good to begin with, was judged an “accept with revisions,” and she revised the article extensively and well, passing muster with a final read by one of the first reviewers and me.

Recognizing that students shudder at revision and see it as a perfunctory task to satisfy only their teachers, the author offers an approach that motivates students to revise thoughtfully without increasing teachers’ reading workload.

Drawing on globalization literature, this article analyzes key themes in globalization discourse, discusses their implications for professional communication programs, and links the themes specifically to the literacies professional communicators need to develop in the context of globalization. The article proposes a framework for professional communication literacies in this context to facilitate dialogue about the implications of globalization for literacies in professional communication programs and help teachers and program developers design and revise courses and programs that foster global literacies. It concludes by suggesting specific examples for applying this framework to the development or revision of teaching materials, courses, and programs.

The authors respond to the charge that reading for intentionality necessarily leads critics into a naive conception of agency. They argue for methods that hold authors, texts, and audiences in productive tension. Genetic criticism is offered as a perspective in which the author may be integrated within this tension. Using Di Gregorio and Gill's study of Darwin's marginalia and Campbell's examination of Darwin's notebooks, the authors apply genetic criticism to Darwin's writings to demonstrate that intentionalist readings offer scholars a useful critical resource.

Montaigne composed his essays through an elaborate and extensive process of additions, a revision process that was ongoing throughout the quarter century he was working on them. His painstaking practice of addition helps complicate the "self" Montaigne often tries to convey—that of a casual, digressive, "open" writer. The revisions also supply a metacommentary on his writing project (including his tendency to make additions). In these self-reflective additions, he openly grapples with the dominance of writing mentors, particularly Seneca and Plutarch, and he works out a theory of audience for his work.

Abstract The way rhetorical analysts now use the term appeals—meaning to plead or to please—has outstripped the available theories, particularly those derived from Aristotle. Indeed, Aristotle's ethos, pathos, and logos may not even be appeals in the modern sense. A revised model relates author and author positions to values in a triangulating relationship. Appeals also appear as techniques for working through varying media, not only media defined semiotically but also as forms of resistance related to cultural differences. Examples from criticism, film, and advertising provide a foundation for replacing a modes approach to rhetorical appeals with a genre approach.

Rotating teacher participation in peer workshop groups can enhance the workshop group dynamics, ease instructors’ grading loads, and improve the level of peer feedback and draft revision in composition courses.

Tracing the revisions Frederick Douglass made as his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) metamorphosed into My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and ultimately into the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892), the author suggests that, while much attention has focused on Douglass’s seizing a “forbidden literacy” in transforming himself from object to subject, the crucial, and ever-increasing, role of African American vernacular traditions in his writing should be recognized.

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John Hollowell, Michael P. Clark, Steven Mailloux, Christine Ross, Responses to "Education Reform and the Limits of Discourse:Rereading Collaborative Revision of a Composition Program's Textbook", College Composition and Communication, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Dec., 2004), pp. 329-334

This article reports findings from a study of writers and reviewers in two complex organizations. The author analyzes the differences between the content, conduct, and resolution of document reviews mediated by hard-copy text and those mediated by textual replay (a series of screen-captured images of the writer’s on-screen writing activity) plus hard-copytext. The results show that reviews mediated by textual replay directed greater attention to issues concerning writing and revision processes. The reviewers offered more tentative revision suggestions and more often enlisted the writers’ participation in articulating, proposing, and implementing the revisions. The article concludes by considering ways that textual replay could be further designed to support the range of joint activities that document review comprises.

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This article presents a systematic method for examining and evaluating written commentary. When used by writing instructors in authentic responding contexts, these reflective models can help instructors better understand their commenting practices in light of current response theories, establish clearer goals for making written commentary, and develop new commenting strategies that provide increased revision options for students.