This study explores the adoption of new media among an elite, powerful group: state legislators. The case study investigates how five information sources are used by a sample of Louisiana state legislators to meet nine different information needs. These research questions were posed: (1) What roles do the various sources available to legislators play in helping them make voting decisions, and does the importance of these information sources vary with different information needs? (2) How does new information technology fit into the information sources state legislators use in making voting decisions? and (3) Do characteristics such as the officeholder's age, tenure, and education influence how these information sources are used? The legislators in this sample indicate a preference for interpersonal communication channels, specifically statehouse insiders. They do not consider new media to be important sources for information. Their age, tenure, and education have little influence on how they use information sources.

Foreign engineers and scientists must publish their research in professional journals in English, but they often lack the proficiency and skills to do so successfully. The commentary describes a course that teaches these skills to Ph.D. students before they enter the job market. The techniques described are also effective tools for teaching professionals in the workplace.

A review of one two-year college English department’s procedures reveals the complexities of dealing with part-time faculty.

With the explosive growth of writing across the curriculum programs, many institutions are investing in classroom tutoring programs, often called curriculum-based programs to distinguish them from tutoring based in a campus writing center. Curriculum-based tutoring includes attaching tutors to students in courses across the disciplines; assigning tutors to teach adjunct writing workshops; or, in the case of the project I will describe, assigning writing center tutors to work directly with instructors in composition courses.2

university campuses gathered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at a conference we organized to discuss the pedagogy and politics of in the disciplines. Some teams were comprised of writing program lecturers at University of California campuses; teams from other universities consisted of tenure-track faculty in composition and other fields who were developing and teaching in WAC programs at their campuses. Discussion centered around the politics of WAC, institutional constraints, collegial networking, faculty development, and teaching models and objectives. Though participants welcomed such discussion, when group members began to name what they did and to define their goals, a level of conflict emerged that surprised us. Some participants spoke long and heatedly about the primacy of writing to learn, while others argued with equal heat for the power of discourse conventions in specific fields. A gap soon opened between the two groups that seemed almost unbridgeable. Upon reflection, we realized that the conference was playing out in microcosm one of the major conflicts in our field-a conflict variously expressed as voice versus discourse, learning versus performance, process versus form. In this article we explore the theoretical and pedagogical implications of this conflict for writing across the curriculum. We argue that the conflict itself is based on a false dichotomy and that work in the social construction of knowledge-particularly the concept of rhetoric of

Unifying the many definitions and practices of is the notion of training the mind, which suggests that the technique of could usefully supplement courses designed to train people to think and write critically, analytically, or academically. In Riding the Ox Home: A History of Meditation from Shamanism to Science, Willard Johnson argues that meditation has no intrinsic goal or meaning; it is rather technique, way of developing consciousness (3). Coming from Hindu tradition, Ekneth Easwaran similarly defines as a systematic technique for taking hold of and concentrating to the utmost degree our latent mental power (9). Most frequently is discussed within spiritual context, yet for beginning college students, who often report difficulty keeping their minds on what they read, practice in could be as useful as other study techniques frequently taught, such as focused free writing, mapping, and dialogic reading logs. Yet work linking writing and remains on the fringes of our discipline. In this essay I want to review the scholarship on the connections between and writing, analyze objections to the use of in writing classroom, and suggest that writing teachers consider using with apprehensive or blocked writers, population I have studied and seen it serve. Most of my experience with and writing has occurred outside the academy; I've led workshops at bookstore, in therapist's office, and most frequently through Unity, center for spiritual growth. Teaching at spiritual site helped me shift my focus from helping writers produce good prose to helping them enjoy the process of meditating and writing regardless of the outcome. I have also guest taught in elementary and high school classes and typically offer an optional day of meditating and writing in my university writing courses. Despite enthusiastic student response, the marginality of meditative practice within the academy has discouraged me, as an untenured faculty member, from regularly offering to writing classes. Peter Elbow relates similar reluctance to bring new practices into his university classes: The

Not along ago, I received a call from a colleague who teaches technical writing, among other things, in the department and university which gave our field John Mitchell, one of the founders of the Society for Technical Communication and an early definer of our field. My colleague wanted to know how my former department would value, in terms of tenure and promotion, a book on Boston Harbor nautical matters. His department did not value it at all, and unfortunately, neither would have mine. It is this experience, which is too often common to technical communication scholars, that prompts the question in this article's title.

In the United States, the majority of technical writers and technical writing teachers are women. Their dominance of the profession has several causes, including the attractiveness of writing jobs for women, widespread associations of women and superior writing ability, the social acceptability of women in writing jobs, and occupational segregation. Women's dominance of the profession brings with it the risk of diminishing wages and prestige. To avoid this depreciation of the field, professional associations ought to equip technical writers and technical writing teachers with information regarding satisfactory salaries and working conditions, and teachers ought to communicate this information to their students.

The published draft of the CCCC Statement (CCCC Initiatives on the Wyoming Resolution, CCC, Feb. 1989, 61-72) made me uneasy in its assumption that full-time teaching was the only legitimate model for academic employment in our--or indeed, any-field. Thus, I was pleased when the final version-in response to suggestions made by several of us at the 1989 CCCC meeting in Seattle-acknowledged the legitimacy of fully professional, tenuretrack part-time positions in the teaching of writing (Statement of Principles and Standards, CCC, Oct. 1989, 329-36). Regular part-time faculty are a permanent good in the academy and in our writing programs for two reasons. First, they allow for some variation from the standard male academic career track in one's 20's and early 30's-the track where you graduate from college, start grad school (maybe with a wife to help support you through it), land your first full-time tenure-track job, and write your first book to earn tenure (while your wife bears and watches the kids and provides the support system for 6 or 7 years). Not everyone can easily fit that time frame or career schedule, and our students need to see that different career patterns and work lives are possible. Business and government have been successfully experimenting with professional part-time positions and a number of successful part-time policies also exist in academia, like the ones at Carleton in Minnesota, Central College in Iowa, and Wesleyan in Connecticut, where part-time faculty in all disciplines can earn tenure and sabbaticals just like their full-time colleagues. Second, such professional part-time positions are important because they allow us to build into our writing programs, in a stable and productive way, faculty who have chosen to work part-time in order to have time for their own writing or other work which involves writing-people working as everything from novelists to free-lance journalists to political activists to consultants. These people bring a broad range of experiences with language into the classroom and they can teach our students and us a lot about writing in the nonacademic world. The final version of the CCCC Statement does not suggest

Anne Cassebaum, A Comment on "The Wyoming Conference Resolution Opposing Unfair Salaries and Working Conditions for Post-Secondary Teachers of Writing", College English, Vol. 51, No. 6 (Oct., 1989), pp. 636-638

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her face curved gently into a soft oval, her skin too light for our Italian heritage, her eyes wide, brown. Waist-length, almond colored hair fell where it pleased. Her voice softly drew me near, overcoming sixteen years of shyness. We talked, walked, picked wild strawberries and laughed with our mouths full, the red juice spilling a little even as we lurched to catch it. Her voice never wavered, never rose beyond that tone that made me catch my breath to hear every word. Like Shakespeare's Dark Lady or Wyeth's Helga, she kept me from seeing any of the rest of that sunny July day. I returned home that summer to begin my first play, dedicating it to her. To her presence. To what she could inspire in me. For fourteen years between that first play's performance and our family reunion last summer-caught in the fast-paced life of college, high-school teaching, graduate school, and gaining tenure-I forgot the sense of beauty Marla could inspire in me. Until last summer when I saw her again. Almost instantly, I felt guilty for all that writing I'd put off in 14 years. All those ideas, feelings, insights I'd been excited about but then failed to commit to paper. Still, though I regretted the waste, that feeling of beauty had returned. Only this time even stronger because now I better understand what is at stake. Plato, Shelley, Steven Weinberg are right. Beauty evokes in all of us a universal urge to breathe it in, to seek it out again and again, to share it, often to write about it, to force others to feel it even though it defies such attempts. And isn't this awe for life what we continuously search for in our lives, even in our work places? Don't we all hunger for that feeling when our instincts tell us we've thought the right thought, made the right moves, heard the right words, said just the right thing to express our feelings, relate an idea, delight an audience, or move another human to action? There is in us that urge to think, act, hear, say just what fits the occasion. And we usually know intuitively when what just passed did in fact fit; we would change nothing to improve it. We yearn, we might say, to partake of the beautiful.

Jeanie C. Crain, A Comment on "The Wyoming Conference Resolution: Opposing Unfair Salaries and Working Conditions for Post-Secondary Teachers of Writing", College English, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Jan., 1988), pp. 96-99

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Linda R. Robertson, Sharon Crowley, Frank Lentricchia, The Wyoming Conference Resolution Opposing Unfair Salaries and Working Conditions for Post-Secondary Teachers of Writing, College English, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Mar., 1987), pp. 274-280

In spite of the recent proliferation of technical writing programs, textbooks, and professional associations, quantitative information on the people and work involved in technical writing is scant. This article reports the responses of 122 technical writers in the San Diego area to a questionnaire asking them about the tasks they perform, documents they produce, skills they consider significant, audiences they write to, working conditions, types of companies they work for, and education and training. The pilot survey also identified other demographic information such as salary and length of service as technical writers and in their present position.

The current job market favors young technical writers who are skilled in the way of the computer both as a subject of writing and as a production tool. In the technical writing classroom students can be exposed to this important technology through assignments that include computerized instruction, word processing, text analysis, artificial intelligence, and communications.

Teaching with great literature gives me the feeling of being anointed yet unworthy; still feel compelled to bring great works into my classroom. Any teacher of freshman composition needs to be grounded, but an adjunct teacher of freshman composition needs to be especially grounded. So, ground myself on the likes of Martin Luther King, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Einstein, Lao Tzu, Gertrude Stein, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Stafford, Plato, and James Joyce. feel somewhat brazen in doing so, for am not a superpowered specialized scholar, but love these works and believe in their power of conversion. believe they are not meant to be our sacred and closeted gems, but our air and food and water and shelter. It has been my experience that there has been a shift in composition courses, away from reading literature until basic skills have been learned. have found that literature can be used to teach grammar and pass on the goods at the same time. The writers mentioned above are on my guest list, and for the most part am in the business of toying with my guests. Halfway through the semester, hand out a section of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech where I've deliberately tampered with grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and expect my students to right my wrongs. count on their ears, which believe more dependable than their ability to memorize a list of ever-changing rules. I've reduced the Tomorrow .. . passage in Macbeth to a discussion of subject and predicate. But it's with my most precious saint of words, Mr. Joyce, that I've truly tested my students. At the end of the semester, my students must add punctuation and in other ways make articulate the last six hundred words of Molly Bloom's poignant rambling soliloquy-the so-called stream of consciousness.' This exercise has on occasion gotten me into the deeper waters of the English Department. At first glance it appears to test the student's ability to tolerate tedium, but when students look at it a second time, they realize that they are being called upon to translate the stuff of dreams into the stuff of tangible communication-which is indeed hard work. When readers take it upon themselves to look at this block of unpunctuated prose, they will see that the option is to either sink or swim. One either remains barred from the private sea of consciousness, and, dumbstruck and resentful,

The lack of a scientific background of many of our technical writing students and the continual amalgamation of the sciences make a technical terminology course an important adjunct to the technical writing curriculum. This course consists of three distinct phases: a compilation of terms already known by the students, an expansion of that list into a comprehensive list of the major technical terms in approximately fifteen scientific fields, and an indepth study by each student into a particular field. This course would help to create scholars who were conversant in most major fields of study. This would make the students more flexible in their job searches. What is more important, it would help them understand the forces that shape our civilization and thereby broaden their control over those forces.

The author argues that a job seeker who tailors each resume and application letter to capture the interest of a particular employer is far more likely to elicit a response than a job seeker who simply sends copies of a standard resume and letter to every employer. In a highly competitive job market, he advocates careful orchestration of the whole employment-seeking process from resume preparation to personal presentation during an interview.

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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

TEACHING WOMEN'S POETRY IS, I think, nearly always a struggle: it is an effort to overcome most students' resistance to reading poetry at all, to encourage them to be open to the personal immediacy, the urgency, the language, and rhythm that characterizes so contemporary women's poetry. Teaching lesbian poetry is even more difficult: both teachers and students bring to it a multi-layered set of assumptions that must be dealt with before the poetry itself can be explored. An unknown to most teachers, lesbian poetry, like lesbianism, is understandably threatening. When we think about teaching lesbian poetry for the first time, uwhat most of us feel is scared. We hesitate to write about it in detail (if at all) for the same reasons that we hesitate to emphasize it-or even discuss it-in class and out: the fear of losing our job, of being denied tenure; the fear that, regardless of our sexual and affectional preference, we will be dismissed by our students as just a lesbian; the concern that students who feel hostile or skeptical, or even friendly toward feminism and the women's movement, will be irretrievably lost if too much attention were directed toward the issue of lesbianism; the doubts about our colleagues' reactions to what we teach and how we teach it; the threat that the validity of a hard-earned women's course, women's studies program, or women's center w ill be undercut, and funding jeopardized, if it becomes perceived as a dyke effort.1 Nothing can be said that w ill allay these fears, most especially for those of us uwho are lesbians. For those of us who want to remain in academia, the choices are painful. We can choose to be public about our lesbianism and run the attendant gamut of

`Being published' is sometimes regarded as a criterion for academic tenure and promotion. This paper is an analysis of some of the well known strategies in the academic-success game. Each strategy is evaluated in terms of efficient use of time, publishability of the results, and side effects. In general, an academician must develop a `marketing' orientation.

In response to a mail survey of the career opportunities they offer teachers of technical writing, twenty-four programs that prepare students for careers as technical writers and editors indicated that their technical writing faculty enjoy about the same teaching loads, salaries, and chances for promotion and tenure as do equally qualified and experienced teachers of literature at their schools. The programs also indicated that they have a growing number of openings on their faculties for teachers of technical writing. Finally, the programs ranked and rated seventeen qualifications that might be offered by applicants for those positions; the most significant conclusion drawn from the rankings and ratings is that the programs look more favorably upon experience — both in teaching and in working as a technical writer or editor — than they do upon formal study of technical writing or the teaching of it.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1975, a small group of persons in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan began to meet to discuss some tentative approaches to long-range planning. impetus for these meetings came not from a single and isolated matter but rather from a complex of events and experiences, some of them shared by everyone involved in the Department's work (some, indeed, shared by everyone in the profession) and some of them growing out of individual experiences. Falling enrollments in the humanities, new courses and new approaches to teaching within a discipline that at one time seemed comfortably defined as historical and literary (and English), the changing job market for graduates in the humanities: these were some of the factors to which we were all responding. Individually, some members of the group had been responsible for innovative programs that had already shaped changes in a particular way. Tim Davies and Jay Robinson had been deeply committed to the Doctor of Arts in English program at Michigan. Hubert English had served as chairman of both Freshman English course and graduate program. He knew various constituencies and could chart the alterations in their needs and expectations perhaps better than anyone else in the Department. My interest grew out of experience in the University Long-Range Planning Committee and out of a personal conviction that we needed to look ahead for ourselves to see if, in Curt Gowdy's memorable phrase, our future was still ahead of us. If we did not, it seemed altogether possible that others would look for us and make decisions based on criteria that we might find unacceptable. After a good deal of debate about the methods we might use and the purposes any sort of planning might serve, we settled on the creation of a descriptor questionnaire of a type that had been used by Claude Eggertsen of the Education School at Michigan in an attempt to define The Future Environment of the University of Michigan.' Our aims, of course, were far more modest than his. We simply wanted to know how members of the Department of English Language and Literature saw their discipline and their efforts within that discipline,

ing predominantly white Italian working-class students. My students arrive from high school with elaborately constructed ideology. A whole host of opinions on sexuality, war, racism, welfare, socialism, labor, and revolution has been imposed on them by their daily experience and by the authorities in their lives. Luckily, there is no unanimity in their manner of thinking, but their dominantly conservative mode of thought indicates how potent the bourgeois mass media, the conservative parochial and lower education systems, the patriarchal family, and the male-dominated job market remain in fashioning their consciousnesses. Radical education designed to foster counter-consciousness has to be as com-

Recent cuts in the defense budget and slackening of the economy have created significant unemployment among engineers. This unprecedented major reversal in the job market has confronted many engineers with problems they have never before faced. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, starting in the spring of 1970, instituted a series of employment workshops to communicate the techniques, methods, and plan of attack to find jobs. These sessions achieved significant changes in attitude and motivation to help these engineers. This paper will present some observations, from these sessions, of the psychological blocks to logical thinking and how they can be overcome. Some specific case histories will be described and the results of a follow-up survey of the success of the participants of the Philadelphia workshops will be presented.

at which the men are employed, but most of the young women who apply for teaching jobs are unmarried. If they marry while they are employed, they either quit teaching to take up housekeeping or they go away with their husbands if the husbands move. Thus they leave the teaching field to go into situations from which they may not find a way out and back into teaching. As with men, the greatest number of women who enter the college field do so after completing a Master's degree. Since it is the practice of many colleges and universities not to retain an Instructor (which is the rank usually given a college teacher who has only the M.A.) longer than three or four years, the woman with an M.A. cannot expect to be permanently retained in a Department unless she does a significant amount of post-Master's work-usually from 30 to 60 hours of graduate work beyond the M.A. Though, of course, many women make an adjustment to this demand, as they also do to the simultaneous demands of marriage and a career, many do not; and it is these who for themselves

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1 This article is based on a master's thesis prepared by Miss Auguste under the direction of Mr. Nalven at Queens College, where he is a part-time faculty member. 2 B. Folta, comparison study in the syntax in speech and writing of grade one students using the initial teaching alphabet and students using traditional orthography (USOE Bureau of Research Project No. 7-E-145. Lafayette, Indiana: Lafayette Public Schools. 1968). 3 Lenora Sandel, comparison between oral and written responses of first-grade children in I.T.A. and T.O. classes (USOE Project No. 7-8220. Hempstead, N.Y.: Hofstra University, 1967). 4 A. Mazurkiewicz, A comparison of I.T.A. and T.O. reading, writing, and spelling achievement when methodology is controlled, in The initial teaching alphabet and the world of English, A. J. Mazurkiewicz, ed. (New York: ITA Foundation, 1967), pp. 59-63.