Seeks to add another vocabulary to the pedagogy of the creative writing workshop: the language of use and action, of practice and implementation. Investigates how to reform the discursive walls between creativity and theory and ends by suggesting how educators might bring classrooms and communities together.

Suggests that the teaching of both composition and creative writing would benefit from focusing less exclusively on the writing process and products and more on the writing subject. Claims that focusing on the writing subject through the lens of psychoanalysis provides several potential benefits. Concludes psychoanalysis can be a filtrate for the creative writing or composition teacher.

Examines (1) job opportunities available for PhDs in creative writing as contextualized within the larger English Studies job market; (2) arguments for and against training such candidates to be university teaching professionals; and (3) training that might better prepare these candidates for both more productive, successful university teaching careers as well as more productive, successful undergraduate creative writing classrooms.

Waggoner interviews for 2-year college creative writing instructors to find out about the present and future state of creative writing education.

It’s a cloudy Thursday morning in November, and the university writing center is humming. A peer tutor sits at a table near the center of the room, listening to a sophomore explain her essay assignment for a recreational therapy class while a second tutor helps a freshman fine tune his thesis statement for a research paper. In the far corner, a third tutor works at a computer, responding to an on-line submission from a student in a local high school’s creative writing class. The director is conferring with a member of the mathematics department on ways to include meaningful writing activities in an advanced calculus class. It’s a typical day at a college-level writing center, but it raises a question for educators. Are similar scenes occurring in our public secondary schools? As an awareness of the importance of writing as a means of learning has grown, the writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) movement has gained momentum on college campuses. One response to this increased focus on the importance of writing in the learning process has been the establishment of writing centers at hundreds of colleges and universities. These centers are designed to serve the needs of both students and faculty and aim to support learning in all fields. While these programs have flourished in many post-secondary settings, formal WAC programs in general and writing centers in particular still seem to be something of an exception in secondary public schools; however, interest in these practices appears to be growing there as well. A number of publications show an increasing integration of WAC philosophy and strategies into secondary public school settings. Pamela Farrell’s The High School Writing Center: Establishing and Maintaining One not only provides practical information on designing and running writing labs in secondary schools, but also illustrates the variety of forms

Research Article| January 01 2001 English-Language Creative Writing in Hong Kong: Colonial Stereotype and Process Shirley Geok-lin Lim Shirley Geok-lin Lim Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (1): 178–184. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-178 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Shirley Geok-lin Lim; English-Language Creative Writing in Hong Kong: Colonial Stereotype and Process. Pedagogy 1 January 2001; 1 (1): 178–184. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-178 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Like many in our field, I rose up “through the ranks” to my present position as a director of the Writing Center at a small, private college of pharmacy and health sciences. My career path started while I was pursuing an M.A. in English, where I tutored in the university’s Writing Center. Then, when I was back in school to complete a doctorate in education, I once again was given the opportunity to tutor in the university’s Writing Center, and, eventually, to study that Center as the subject of my dissertation. I graduated in the spring of 1996, and by the fall of that year I was hired by my current college to start its Writing Center. Four years later, I am a faculty member in the School of Arts and Sciences and hold administrative responsibility for the entire writing program, as well as for a new initiative on first-year student experience. What a smooth path that narrative above seems to indicate, a path of increasing professional opportunities, from “novice” to “expert,” from tutor to director, from student to faculty member, a “transformation” of sorts that is easily the script that we would write for many in our field. But here is another way of telling that story: My first writing center job came during my second semester of pursuing an M.A. in English/Creative Writing and a high school teaching credential. I would have preferred to be a TA and teach composition in the classroom, but most of my fellow graduate students were experienced teachers and gained the coveted TA positions. Instead, I tutored in the university’s Writing Center for $7 per hour, a rate that did not change in the three years that I worked there. I worked primarily with basic writing students, who came to the Writing Center as a course requirement and who were made to sift through a grammar/usage workbook, completing exercises on modals and subject/verb agreement and nouns and antecedents (which still happens, though now these exercises are computer Sherwood, Steve. “How to Survive the Hard Times.” The Writing Lab Newsletter 17.10 (1993): 4-8.

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.

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

This accessible and versatile text has been used in college English, creative writing, and composition courses, as well as middle and high school classrooms, college remedial and honors programs, graduate seminars, and teacher training courses. Chapters move through the writing process as students find a focus, choose a genre, develop a draft, and find a voice. Murray is professor emeritus of English at the University of New Hampshire. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

In summer of 1987, Donald Stewart began a survey of English departments, attempting to uncover changes in curriculum that had resulted from changes in discipline. Stewart reported results of his survey in a 1989 CCC article, is an English Major, and What Should It Be? Stewart acknowledged limitations of his study: he was considering only 194 colleges, and only 108 of these actually responded to his request for information beyond catalogue description. Furthermore, many of respondents indicated that their curriculum was constantly being revised. Still, survey provided an important window on English major, particularly with regard to options in creative writing and rhetoric/composition. Stewart found that only 74 of 194 colleges surveyed, or 38%, offered students chance to specialize in some aspect of writing in addition to literature. The majority of English departments surveyed by Stewart (55%) offered only literature emphases, with optional electives from other areas of English. Based on his findings, he made a call for the establishment, in all departments, of options in creative writing, linguistics (where departments of linguistics do not exist), and composition and (193). In our survey of writing concentrations or majors within English departments, we wanted to follow up on Stewart's survey to see if more undergraduates were able to specialize in composition and rhetoric.1 The initial impetus for this survey came from an e-mail discussion among writing program directors about concentrations in writing and rhetoric being offered in their departments. After several writing program directors informally announced new courses and writing concentrations, we thought a review of these changes

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

John Paul Russo. I. A. Richards: His Life and Work. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 843 pages. Robert J. Connors, ed., Selected Essays of Edward P. J. Corbett. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. xxii + 359. W. Ross Winterowd, The Culture and Politics of Literacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 226 pages. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. xii + 557 pages. Chris Anderson, ed., Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. xxvi + 337, 1989.

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!

Last year I became a student writer again-and a novice at that. For although I'd been teaching and writing nonfiction for years-both academic articles and feature stories-I never wrote much fiction. And although I dabbled in poetry, even had a few poems published once, I never before took a course in poetry writing. Frankly, I didn't have the guts in college, never thought of myself as creative enough to risk such public exposure. The budding confidence I felt in fourth grade when my suspense thriller, Thunderstorm, was published in a class booklet had been buried under too many years of exposition, both for school and work. I didn't really recover it until long after graduation, when I received a fellowship that gave me released time from full-time teaching in order to take two creative writing courses at Princeton University: one in fiction writing with Russell Banks, author of the much-acclaimed Continental Drift; the other in poetry writing, with Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Carolyn Kizer. These were undergraduate courses incidently, because that's all Princeton offers, so except for three other older women (i.e., over 40) in the poetry class, the rest of my peers were under 22. It was a remarkable experience-to wear the shoe on the other foot and be a student again. For one thing, I realized how much more I enjoy learning now than I did at 20 when my future loomed before me like a huge, unmarked field. And how much more focused I am in energy once scattered on a million other concerns. For another thing, I've toughened up over the years. Twenty-five additional years of living and writing have helped me know and risk more, personally and intellectually, than I would ever have dared, even ten years ago. I have more of life to draw upon and more laurels to rest upon, as needed. These assets, I've found, are shared by other over-30 adults--even if, like many of my returning students, their extra writing experiences are mainly in letter or report writing. Life experience and writing success notwithstanding, I was surprised at my own vulnerabilities as a writer. Many of my fears, confusions, and needs were not as different from my younger counterparts' as I would have predicted. Remembering what it

More often than not, when people write about the relationship of literature and writing, they either argue about the place of literature in composition classes (as Barbara and Francis Lide do in Literature in the Composition Class) or discuss, in the spirit of writing-across-thecurriculum, how to use journals, response assignments, and critical essays to teach literature (an approach Joseph Comprone takes in Integrating the Acts of Reading and about Literature). My purpose in this essay is different from either of those. I hope to suggest a number of the values-for student understanding and appreciation of literature, and for the effective teaching of literature and writing-that can come from having students work at their own creative writing in undergraduate literature classes. For some years, Twentieth Century and Fiction Writing alternated in my teaching load. One course features works in which literary technique is quite important and often very challenging for students, and the other course helped students develop some mastery of literary technique. By thinking about how to make both courses work well, I discovered that many of the activities and exercises of the fiction writing class helped literature students to understand key concepts of technique and to appreciate the subtlety and craft of the works they read. For those unfamiliar with typical exercises of fiction-writing classes, let me offer a brief list of activities that carry over into literature classes:

In a challenging essay on Emerson as an essayist, William Gass complains about all the his colleagues are writing, those awful objects full of footnotes and scholarly defenses. He wishes that more of us would turn to writing again-informal, experimental, open-ended, personal pieces, like Emerson's (25). No one would dispute, I think, that the article in Gass' sense dominates the scholarly journals. To get something published anymore we need to pretend that everything is clear, that our arguments are unassailable, that there are no soggy patches, no illicit inferences, no illegitimate connections (Gass 25), and that means submitting articles rather than essays. Why is that? Why has the essay as a form declined in the academic world, even as has gained in popularity outside the academic world? As Joseph Epstein has recently said in his own essay about the essay, it is a sweet time to be an essayist; the essay is taking up the slack for the novel (411). Why is that true outside of academe when the opposite is the case inside? Chesterton gives us one perspective on these questions in the opening paragraphs of his autobiography, a book, like all of Chesterton's books, which is nothing more than a long, associative set of essays. Chesterton is a quintessential essayist, quick to write and generalize, informal yet detached, always playing over the field of his own immediate experience and reading. In these opening paragraphs of the autobiography, he quickly claims the ground that I think all essays claim when he admits that he has no first-hand knowledge of his own birth and the circumstances of his early childhood and so must accept on faith the evidence of his existence: Of course what many call hearsay evidence, or what I call human evidence, might be questioned in theory, as in the Baconian controversy or a good deal of Higher Criticism. It is possible, by employing the skeptical methods of contemporary philosophy and criticism, to argue that he was never born at all. He cannot prove that he was. But I prefer Chris Anderson is assistant professor of English and Composition Coordinator at Oregon State University. His book, Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction, was published last year by Southern Illinois University Press, and he has edited and contributed to another book for Southern Illinois, Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy, to be published this fall.

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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.

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

With the making of poetry, or not-thinking represents a real, an ironic, choice. At the heart of the continuing controversy over the value of the university a life devoted to poetry is the anti-institutional, even anti-intellectual role that poets in their work and personal styles have taken up h9recent years. In the study and practice of any art other than poetry we find less conflict and confusion, fewer outright attacks on the university-or on any other institution-as a helpful ally. But poetry as a living art particularly commits itself to the personal above all else-to personal survival-which with us often goes along with an anti-institutional stance. Richard Hugo, a fine poet and teacher from Montana, talks about our loss of crucial life-supports in a new book about the teaching of poetry-writing, Triggering Town (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). The accelerated rate of loss . . . accounts, he claims, for the increasing number of people writing poems (p. 73). He points to the essential appeal of such activity on campus when he says, A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters (p. 65). What's irreplaceable in poetry is its personal quality: the intimate, unique gesture, the private, even quirky, perception of people and place, idea and language. Perhaps it is simply economic determinism, but since more and more often poets do work at universities, the open romantic gesture of entire disdain the academy as a stultifying place an artist is encountered much these days. Such resistance takes more covert forms: inner exile, clownishness, views favoring severe primitivism . . . and various honorable forms of not thinking such as Zen Buddhism espouses. social critic Martin Green made a title a provocative book out of Auden's

Technical writing requires creativity but not Lewis Carrolllike creative writing. Self-control and self-criticism are needed to achieve simplicity and clarity of expression. Generally, the core of the paper should be written first because the act of writing often furthers or changes the development of the subject and therefore affects both the introduction and the conclusion of the text. The introduction should provide context and perspective for the results and conclusions. A common fault is covering too much material in too wordy a fashion. It is often better to rewrite with a sharper outlook than simply to cross out words. Vague or defensive statements and generalized descriptions are good candidates for elimination. Mathematics may often be moved to an appendix and charts or graphs used to clarify the numerical work. Good judgment rather than haste should prevail in technical writing.

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Medical and science writing are identified as areas of specialization for writers. The role of creative distractions and the use of the nonconscious are explained. Research, self-judgment, criticism, and practice exercises are cited as methods to solve basic problems. Solutions to the problems of specialization, expertise, and the “shifting audience” problem are also offered. The creative possibilities in medical and science writing are illustrated in the juxtaposition of fiction and nonfiction writing. Four major areas of career opportunities are presented for the medical or science writer.

Here, then, are six different reasons students are drawn to writing classes. Some students may be touched by only one, others by a combination. They lead to different types of creativity, but each can serve as a dynamic catalyst. 1. Partially conscious therapy: Of course the protagonist isn't really my father but .. . Such writers may be highly neurotic and aware of it, struggling perhaps with a vague angst. Or they may be relatively stable but working with a difficult personal problem: a separation, a rejection, a death in the family. Vague and ill-defined moods often take on the distortion and lack of co-

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