This is a written version of the acceptance speech the Mike Rose gave at the CCCC Convention in St. Louis on March 22, 2012.

The author discusses graduate courses he has taught that help students turn their academic prose into publically accessible opinion writing.

Last spring our profession lost one of its leading voices—Stephen P. Witte, Knight Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Kent State University. Here, a few of his close friends and colleagues remember Steve and his many contributions to our field.

We live in a time of the celebration of high technology and symbolic analysis, even predictions of the end of common work, yet physical work, work of body and hand, surrounds us, makes everyday life possible. For about six years now, I have been involved in a research project exploring the thought it takes to do physical work, the cognitive processes involved in various blue collar and service occupations like waitressing, hairstyling, plumbing, welding, industrial assembly, and the like. The study has led me to consider the way we categorize occupations, define intelligence, and think about learning and schooling. Of particular interest to readers of RTE will be my findings in the realm of literacy and numeracy. A number of people have already done important research on job-related literacy. What follows is in line with their research, though I would like to use it to help us reconsider some of the traditional ways we define and discuss written language, numbers, and graphics.

Glynda Hull, Mike Rose, Kay M. Losey, Marisa Castellano, Reply by Glynda Hull, Mike Rose, Kay M. Losey, and Marisa Castellano, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Dec., 1993), pp. 588-589

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Each year a large number of students enter American higher education unprepared for the reading and writing tasks they encounter. Labeled “remedial,”“nontraditional,”“developmental,”“underprepared,”“nonmainstream,” these students take special courses and participate in special programs designed to qualify them to do academic work. Yet, we do not know very much about what it is that cognitively and socially defines such students as remedial. This article describes a research project on remediation at the community college, state college, and university levels designed to provide such information. We focus on a piece of writing produced by a student in an urban community college, examining it in the context of the student's past experiences with schooling, her ideas about reading and writing, the literacy instruction she was receiving, and her plans and goals for the future. Our analyses suggest that the student's writing, though flawed according to many standards, demonstrates a fundamental social and psychological reality about discourse—how human beings continually appropriate each other's language to establish group membership, to grow, and to define themselves in new ways.

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You don t know what it is, wrote Flaubert, to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word. Writer s block is more than a mere matter of discomfort and missed deadlines; sustained experiences of writer s block may influence career choices. Writers in the business world, professional writers, and students all have known this most common and least studied dysfunction of the composition process. Rose, however, sees it as a limitable problem that can be precisely analyzed and remedied through instruction and tutorial programs. Rose defines writer s block as an inability to begin or continue writing for reasons other than a lack of skill or commitment, which is measured by passage of time with limited functional/ productive involvement in the writing task. He applies the information processing models of cognitive psychology to reveal dimensions of the problem never before examined.In his three-faceted approach, Rose develops and administers a questionnaire to identify blockers and nonblockers; through simulated recall, he selects and examines writers experiencing both high and low degrees of blocking; and he proposes a cognitive conceptualization of writer s block and of the composition process.In drawing up his model, Rose delineates many cognitive errors that cause blocking, such as inflexible or conflicting planning strategies. He also discusses the practice and strategies that promote effective composition.

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