Abstract This article suggests pedagogical practices to help first-generation students gain effective problem-solving strategies for the future transfer of writing knowledge and skills. The retention of first-generation students depends on developing four positive dispositions for learning: success attribution, self-efficacy, expectancy value, and self-regulation. Meaningful writing assignments with a connection to students’ cultural experiences are an essential foundation for improving transfer. Specific reflective activities are detailed for analyzing emotional reactions to writing experiences, evaluating procedural writing strategies, and solving current and future writing-related problems. A reflective problem-solving pedagogy promotes deep learning by emphasizing students’ agency in responding to writing difficulties and their resourcefulness in creating successful solutions.

While place-based pedagogies and place-conscious education have received a great deal of attention in community literacy, these studies have often focused on classroom efforts at engaging students in their communities. This article articulates an extracurricular pedagogy of place through a historical study of a network of creative writing groups in mid-century rural Wisconsin. Rather than thinking of place-conscious education as something that emerges from the classroom, the work of these writers suggests that scholars and educators in community literacy look instead for place-based literacies already at work in our communities.

ABSTRACT R. G. Collingwood's strong, early, inventive interests in aesthetic experience and art activity were of fundamental importance to his lifelong engagement with philosophy and his critique of the available “academic” philosophies. And his work finds reinforcement in the current speculations in the philosophy of art of Alva Noë.

The Internet has helped to change who writes about science in the news, how news is written, and how it is taken up by different audiences. However, few studies have examined how these changes have impacted the uptake of scientific claims in online news writing. This case study explores how online news genres take up knowledge claims from a research article on climate change over a period of one year and shows how shifting boundaries between rhetorical communities affect genre uptake. The study results show that online news writers predominantly use the news report genre to cover research findings for 48 hours, after which they predominantly use the news editorial genre to engage these findings. Analysis suggests that the news report genre uses the press release and the article abstract as intermediary genres, but the news editorial uses only the abstract. I argue that the switch between genres repositions the scientist, the journalist, and the public epistemologically, a reorientation that favors uptake in news media outlets supporting action to mitigate climate change and its effects.

Graduate programs in the sciences offer minimal support for writing, yet there is an increasing need for scientists to engage with the public and policy makers. To address this need, the authors describe an innovative, cross-disciplinary, National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded training program in rhetoric and writing for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduate students and faculty at the University of Rhode Island. The program offers a theory-driven, flexible, scalable model that could be adopted in a variety of institutional contexts.

Review Article| October 01 2017 Beginning Where the Students Are Beginning Nancy L. Chick Nancy L. Chick Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2017) 17 (3): 563–569. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3975703 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Nancy L. Chick; Beginning Where the Students Are Beginning. Pedagogy 1 October 2017; 17 (3): 563–569. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3975703 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. © 2017 by Duke University Press2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article examines the role of narrative in helping students navigate their rhetorical positioning in the public and private discourses of service.

This dialogue considers the future of service-learning in two-year colleges given the issues raised by Kassia Krzus-Shaw, Jennifer Maloy, and Nancy Pine, based on their experiences in two-year college classrooms and contributions to TETYC.

In an effort to expand the range of ways graduate programs prepare students to be scholars and practitioners in technical and professional communication, this article argues for a fresh direct reengagement with stories, storytelling, and narrative as valuable ways of studying and effectively producing the varied texts of the workplace. The previous call for acknowledging the value of narrative traces back almost 30 years, and story is still being used in a variety of compelling ways, even as an overt regard for narrative has not been sustained. What may be lacking is a systematic way to transform assumptions about stories as informal anecdotes into stories as data for rigorous analysis. David Boje’s antenarrative theory and method offers technical and professional communication graduate students, scholars, and practitioners just such a compelling and timely position from which to consider workplace processes and products.

Abstract With this review article, I evaluate Samuel Chambers's The Lessons of Rancière. Central to Rancière's corpus—and to Chambers's evaluation of this work—is the claim that frictive pedagogies can lead to a more radical emancipation by preparing for movements disruptive to politics. In analyzing the connections between pedagogy, emancipation, and movement, I question whether these concepts have been adequately conceived so as to contribute to collective political movements. I conclude by considering how these concepts might be revised and extended so as to sharpen their political effects.

This study accounts for the complex tensions that four FYW multilingual students from Lebanon experience as they strive to reconcile monolingual representations of language—as a fixed, internally uniform, and discrete entity—on one hand with their own commitment toward mobilizing their diverse language resources as fluid, malleable, and intermingling in their academic work. Based on an analysis of the "postmonolingual" nature of their representations of language and language relations as socially embedded and constructed, I argue that diverse, and often contradictory representations circulating in their minds have complicated, even stifled, these writers' translingual academic literacies and abilities.

During World War II, the US Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) and the Walt Disney Company produced a series of educational films promoting literacy, hygiene, and American (US) values for distribution across the Americas. Through these films, literacy was to move across borders in service of inter-American cooperation. That movement, however, also reinscribed the distance between a modern, powerful, literate United States and a stagnant, resistant, illiterate “other America.” The program’s insistence on film as a pedagogical tool imagined the United States as a site of technical modernity in contrast to its American neighbors. Working in light of recent scholarship addressing how literacy controls and constrains movement, this essay considers the effects of literacy for literacy's others—in this case, the population of what the OIAA termed the “other American republics.” It highlights the American assumptions that circulated within the literacy films and became enmeshed with the reading and writing skills they claimed to provide. Examining how film moved literacy practice and ideology across national borders, this essay demonstrates how thoroughly the contexts and the media of literacy's movement shape the consequences of its transmission.

A veteran writing teacher asks the question—What keeps teaching fresh and new?—and discovers, in the process of writing a teaching narrative, how her teaching voice and writing voice intertwine, both in the classroom and on the page.

This article makes the case for expanding our conception of what it means to provide “professional training” to PhD students in departments of English. Rather than focus exclusively on placing students in tenure-track academic appointments, departments should prepare them simultaneously for careers both inside and outside the academy by focusing on the broad range of skills inherent to doctoral training. Such an approach not only will empower graduate students but also may transform the academy itself.

Preview this article: Vignette: Making Space for Diversity, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/66/1/collegecompositionandcommunication26105-1.gif

The viral video Kony 2012 is the point of departure for our argument that composition’s public turn is marked by a concern with discursive features and digitized forms at the expense of attention to historical context and human consequences. The alternative we propose, critical materialist pedagogy, reconnects discursive and digitized arguments to the extradiscursive interests they serve. By urging teachers and students to “think through the body,” this critical materialist pedagogy tests fetishized appearances against lived reality—and reconnects public rhetoric to embodied examples of struggle and material potential for creative action.

Reviewed are: Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Fitalicinism, and Public Policy Writing Rebecca Dingo Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900 Jane Donawerth Fitalicinist Rhetorical Resilience Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady, editors Writing a Progressive Past: Women Teaching and Writing in the Progressive Era— Lisa Mastrangelo— Fitalicinist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch

Color highlighting is used to connect revision mini-lessons to teacher comments that are easy for students to identify and quicker for teachers to generate electronically.

Little known about the now celebrated 1912 Bread and Roses strike is that prominent Progressive-era reformers condemned the strikers as “uncivil” and “violent.” An examination of Bread and Roses’ controversies reveals how a ruling class enlists middle-class sentiments to oppose social-justice arguments and defend a civil order—not for the good of democracy but against it. The strikers’ inspiring actions to push against civil boundaries and create democratic space can challenge today’s teachers of public writing to question the construction of civility as an a contextual virtue and consider the class-struggle uses of unruly rhetoric for our new Gilded Age.

Books discussed in this essay: Reframing Writing Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning, Linda Adler-Kassner and Peggy O’Neill Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement, Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, editors The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement, John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan, editors Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement, Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee, editors

By examining in turn a son’s craft project, a family photograph, and an image of tectonic plates, the authors demonstrate how objects can elicit rhetorical invention.

Contributors to this symposium recall and reflect on changes of mind they have experienced, noting the relationship of these to larger concerns of English studies as a profession.

These papers were given at the 2011 MLA panel on faculty governance. They present the topic's importance in the face of budget crises and institutional pressure.

While teaching field research methods to freshman composition students, this professor uses online digital video to scaffold note-taking, interviewing, and observation skills.

Today’s composition courses should consider rhetorical strategies historically used by working-class movements, especially because this class still exists despite popular misconceptions that the world has fully entered a post-Fordist era.

Following historian Deborah Lipstadt's 2000 victory over David Irving in a monumental libel lawsuit, Lipstadt declared that the Holocaust would henceforth reign uncontested as historical fact. Yet within the last five years Holocaust denial has grown exponentially, exacerbating the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as tensions between what the general public often defines as the Western and Muslim worlds. While Litvak and Webman's From Empathy to Denial directly engages scholarship in Holocaust and Middle Eastern studies on this issue, their important work also promises to inform ongoing discussions among rhetoricians about belief systems and intolerance. By framing Holocaust denial in Arab cultures as a distinct subject, Litvak and Webman have used place and time as vital tools for analyzing cultural beliefs underlying anti-Semitism in the Middle East. As a counterpoint, Elhanan Yakira's discussion of political philosophies in Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust seeks to restructure the dominant perception of Holocaust denial as hate speech by exploring how many Jewish intellectuals reference the Holocaust to support their own critiques of Israel rather than to justify its policies toward Palestinians. Within these texts lies an implicit notion of kairos, described by John Poulakos in Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (U of South Carolina P, 1995), as the ability to “address issues in their topicality and typicality” and “place a single case within a larger context, a context that helps render the case meaningful” (178). The rich contexts provided by Litvak and Webman and Yakira challenge Western ideological reactions toward Holocaust denial in order to foster more meaningful conversations.

This article documents a scholarship of teaching and learning project designed to help literature students cultivate the core disciplinary skill of reading for complexity. We offer a close reading of student responses from a collaboratively designed lesson to understand what happens when students read complex texts in introductory literature courses.

A happy coincidence exists between the elements needed to analyze, understand, and produce strong arguments and their analog properties entailed in the map metaphor that we use as prototype in our teaching.

The author reports on and analyzes the inclusion of parody in her sequence of assignments for a graduate composition theory seminar. She contends that having students write parodies of particular theorists and theoretical camps enables them to gain critical leverage that they might not otherwise obtain on a field (in this case, composition studies).

Research Article| January 01 2009 Rhetorical Definition: A French Initiative Nancy S. Struever Nancy S. Struever Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Philosophy & Rhetoric (2009) 42 (4): 401–423. https://doi.org/10.2307/25655367 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nancy S. Struever; Rhetorical Definition: A French Initiative. Philosophy & Rhetoric 1 January 2009; 42 (4): 401–423. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25655367 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 All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressPhilosophy & Rhetoric Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2010 The Pennsylvania State University2010The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Teachers and students often express an aversion to poetry based on their experiences with printbased poetry texts that typically dominate school curricula. Given this challenge and the potential affordances of new and multimodal technologies, we investigate how preservice and inservice teachers enrolled in a new literacies master’s course began to interpret poetry multimodally, through PowerPoint.

Preview this article: Readers Write: Standardized Tests, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/35/3/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege6550-1.gif

Composition teachers can reconcile the conflict between effective writing instruction and educational reform mandates by making timed writing assignments part of the writing process.

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.

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.

This article describes two strategies for grounding grammar instruction in students’ lifelong experience as users of language. In both cases, students participate as active decision-makers in the process of analyzing conventions of language use.

Research Article| January 01 2006 Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives: Multiple Genres, Voices, and Identities Nancy Mack Nancy Mack Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2006) 6 (1): 53–78. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-6-1-53 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nancy Mack; Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives: Multiple Genres, Voices, and Identities. Pedagogy 1 January 2006; 6 (1): 53–78. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-6-1-53 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2006 Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Maxine Cousins Hairston, one of the architects of the contemporary discipline of rhetoric and composition, died July 22, 2005, at the age of eighty three.

These essays are based on a session called “Stories from the Field” at the 2004 meetings of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

At the same time that compositionists have shown a renewed interest in public writing, neoliberal social and economic policies have dramatically shrunk the spaces in which most students’ voices can be heard. In this essay I argue that from twentiethcentury working-class struggles in the U.S. we and our students can acquire the tools necessary to work against this latest wave of economic privatization and concomitant suppression of public voice and rights. If we can resist the common academic assertion that we live today in a radically distinct postmodern, postindustrial society, we can return to capitalism’s long history for examples of the creative and persistent ways in which ordinary people have organized to claim living room.

Why do some students prosper as college writers, moving forward with their writing, while others lose interest? In this essay we explore some of the paradoxes of writing development by focusing on the central role the freshman year plays in this development. We argue that students who make the greatest gains as writers throughout college (1) initially accept their status as novices and (2) see in writing a larger purpose than fulfilling an assignment. Based on the evidence of our longitudinal study, we conclude that the story of the freshman year is not one of dramatic changes on paper; it is the story of changes within the writers themselves.

Abstract This article reports results from a survey of US technical and professional communication undergraduate programs concerning core concepts emphasized and most commonly taught procedures, skills, and tools. Snapshot views of current programs are derived from the results, and the developmental processes and directions of four new programs are described in more detail. The article concludes with challenges for programs to maintain humanistic concerns while also providing effective professional and technical preparation.

Preview this article: Interchanges: A Response to "Point Counterpoint: Teaching Punctuation as Information Management", Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/55/3/collegecompositionandcommunication2766-1.gif

Preview this article: Interchanges: CCCC 2003: Reflections on Rhetoric and War, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/55/2/collegecompositionandcommunication2748-1.gif

Focusing on the references to women and the feminine in The Second Philippic Against Antony, I argue that Cicero's female allusions open up a rhetorical space that exposes the subtle tensions within the Roman social dynamic of men and women. This historically contextualized rhetorical analysis offers a complex understanding of Roman women as both historical entities and rhetorical representations. The article illustrates the importance of understanding not only women in the rhetorical tradition but also mythical portrayals of women as an argumentative strategy. 1

Contract grading promotes quality writing as well as a large quantity of writing. In fact, teachers can use contract grading to support and promote the behaviors, thinking skills, and writing skills they believe will help students create quality writing.

The following article focuses on Latino students’ difficulties with higher education because of dual constructions of identity from and toward the Anglo mainstream. First, the article addresses Other perception: the potential problems Latino students (Mexican Americans) encounter in higher education based on how others perceive their individual and group identity. Second, it addresses self-perception: the contradictory expectations that Mexican Americans have of the mainstream in higher education. The discussion of these issues is presented in a letter format that primarily speaks to audiences outside the mainstream.

Punctuation is often learned without teaching and more often not learned despite much teaching. Jointly, these facts suggest that real punctuation decision rules are very different from and probably much simpler than the rules we teach. This article argues that the punctuation system does have features that generally make systems learnable, such as binary contrasts, limitation of parallel categories to seven or fewer options, and repeated application of the same criterion to different kinds of entities. The simplicity that allows some readers to learn this system unconsciously also makes it possible to figure out consciously the system’s underlying information–management rationales, which in turn motivate both conscious learning and use.

In a departure from traditional paradigms, in this work Latinos examine their own experiences in US schools and offer theories born from positions of expertise and first-hand knowledge as researchers and educators.

Research Article| January 01 2003 Metacognition in the Classroom: Examining Theory and Practice Nancy Joseph Nancy Joseph Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2003) 3 (1): 109–114. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-1-109 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nancy Joseph; Metacognition in the Classroom: Examining Theory and Practice. Pedagogy 1 January 2003; 3 (1): 109–114. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3-1-109 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. © 2003 Duke University Press2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: From the Classroom You do not currently have access to this content.

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subject-object, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses.

In this essay, I turn to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course to push beyond the usual subjectobject, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and as exceeding any single construction of who we all are. I also argue for placing writing and the problems of composing at the center of such courses. I begin with a scene written by a student in my service learning course, U.S. Literacy Politics. The scene, taken from her final paper for the course, recounts her first night at a downtown community center, where students likeJanis serve as literacy partners and mentors. Shifting back and forth between present and past tense, Janis writes:

(2002). Review of Writing Centers and Writing Across the Curriculum Programs: Building Interdisciplinary Partnerships. Technical Communication Quarterly: Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 476-478.

While active learning strategies enable students to grasp important concepts, they also help students become enthusiastic and confident writers and interpreters of literature.

Preview this article: Reflections on the Missouri CWA Surveys, 1989-2001: A New Composition Delivery Paradigm, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/53/4/collegecompositionandcommunication1472-1.gif

Presents an assignment in which students look through a handful of poetry collections or anthologies, seeking 20 poems they like and thus understand or want to understand to some extent. Describes the benefits of this assignment, including honing students’ interpretive skills, dispelling their misconceptions about the genre, and continuing their "initiation into art."

Reflects on the author's long, demanding, and rewarding career as a teacher and administrator in community colleges. Describes how she found herself an advocate of change in the profession in the 1970s, the differences she sensed and thrived upon in the community college experience, and how flexibility was the key to successfully teaching the wide array of community college students.

Argues that introducing students to literary criticism while introducing them to literature boosts their confidence and abilities to analyze literature, and increases their interest in discussing it. Describes how the author, in her college-level introductory literature course, used Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree” (a children’s book) to introduce literary criticism, increase enthusiasm for literature, and build confidence in making meaning.

The teacher-student conference is standard in the repertoire of teachers at all levels. Because it's a one-to-one encounter, teachers work hard to make it comfortable; but because it's a pedagogical moment, they hope that learning occurs in the encounter, too. The literature in this area often suggests that a conference is a conversation, but this doesn't account for a teacher's need to use it pedagogically. Laurel Johnson Black's new book explores the conflicting meanings and relations embedded in conferencing and offers a new theoretical understanding of the conference along with practical approaches to conferencing more effectively with students.

Preview this article: Responses to "After Wyoming: Labor Practices in Two University Writing Programs, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/51/3/collegecompositionandcommunication1389-1.gif

Describes a study unit for ESL (English Second Language) students on language and identity. Explores the dichotomy of attitudes and behavior occurring when a nonnative speaker tries to embrace a new language and culture. Concludes that reading and writing about multicultural literature in the ESL classroom helps students gain language skills and better perspectives on the diversity of American culture.

Studies five preschoolers’ response to four genres of picture books: fantasy, realistic, poetic, and information. Finds (1) distinct patterns of response for each genre; and (2) personal associations to the characters, events, images, and topics seemed to form the basis for interpretation.

Preview this article: Playing with Reality: Writing Centers after the Mirror Stage, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/51/1/collegecompositioncommunication1362-1.gif

This article argues for a social perspective of the new technical communication service course, a conclusion supported by several premises: the technical communication profession wants and needs accountability, accountability is demonstrated by evaluation, assessment requires that we define literacy, evaluating technical communication literacy requires portfolio evaluation, portfolio assessment supports the social perspective of learning, and the social construction concepts imply teaching strategies. The argument proceeds from a case study that demonstrates reliability, stability, and validity in its technical communication service course assessment, tasks, and instructor community. This article demonstrates that portfolios can help us both conceptualize and evaluate the new technical communication service course.

Preview this article: Editor's Choice: The Cookies of Fortune, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/61/2/collegeenglish1115-1.gif

Preview this article: Poems, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/61/1/collegeenglish1107-1.gif

Compares 20 years of teaching college writing (and reading countless drafts of student papers) to an immigrant father’s working 40 years in the family store in Terre Haute, Indiana (and selling 350,000 coats).

Aims to redefine what happens in the margins through a practice called “sideshadowing,” adapted from Bakhtinian theorist Gary Saul Morson’s examination of narrative technique. States that sideshadowing redirects the attention to the present moment, its multiple conflicts, and its multiple possibilities. Argues for sideshadowing’s potential to transform students’ (and teachers’) understandings of what a “good” essay is.

This article examines the critical perspective as an alternative to our current descriptive, explanatory research focus. The critical perspective aims at empowerment and emancipation. It reinterprets the relationship between researcher and participants as one of collaboration, where participants define research questions that matter to them and where social action is the desired goal. Examples of critical research include feminist, radical educational, and participatory action research. Adopting the critical perspective would require that scholars in professional communication rethink their choices of research questions and sites, their views of the ownership of research results, and the types of funding they seek for research initiatives.

The famous Awk is a well-known designation, but this label does not refer to a well-defined concept. The authors report here on an empirical study of the predominant types and patterns of awkward sentences in student writing. They suggest that four general types of syntactic problems—mismanagement of clause structure in errors of embedding, of syntax shift, of parallel structure, and of direct/indirect speech—are associated with four general patterns of semantic problems—mismanagement of idea structure in errors of subordinating ideas, of starting and finishing ideas, of adding ideas, and of incorporating ideas from sources. The authors argue that awkward sentences arise from a complex combination of semantics and syntax, as student writers struggle to manage the relationships among multiple ideas as well as the relationships among multiple clauses. These findings are used to suggest a number of possible pedagogical approaches to the problem of awkward sentences, including the use of read-aloud editing, the targeted teaching of grammar for syntactic editing, and the separation of ideas from sentence form for semantic editing.

Preview this article: Review: Telling Tales about Teaching Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/59/8/collegeenglish3663-1.gif

[This book] is a must for those committed to voicing the personal conflicts writers experience and to turning those confusing and sometimes dismaying moments into productive sites for questioning textual relations. - Journal of Advanced CompositionIn Getting Restless, Nancy Welch calls for a reconception of what we mean by revision, urging compositionists to rethink long-held beliefs about teacher-student relations and writing practices. Drawing primarily on feminist and psychoanalytic theories, she considers how revision can be redefined not as a process of increasing orientations toward a particular thesis or discourse community, but instead as a process of disorientation: an act of getting restless with received meanings, familiar relationships, and disciplinary or generic boundaries--a practice of intervening in the meanings and identifications of one's text and one's life. Using ethnographic, case-study, and autobiographical research methods, Welch maintains two consistent aims throughout the study: to show how composition teachers can create for themselves and for their students environments that encourage and support revision as restlessness and as a process of intervening in a first draft's thoroughly social meanings and identifications to demonstrate how composition's process legacy is revitalized when we understand that our means to form and change communities- to form and change constructions of authority--are located in revision. In achieving these ends Welch examines three academic sites: a campus writing center, undergraduate writing classrooms, and a summer workshop for K-12 teachers. This book will appeal to a wide audience, including classroom and writing center teachers, historians and theorists in composition and rhetoric, feminist theorists, and those engaged in literacy studies, teacher education, and connections/tensions among teaching, writing, and psychoanalysis.

he Metaphor of Constructivism Remembering Bartlett Understanding as Construction Other Metaphors: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction Composing as Construction Discourse Synthesis: Four Studies Textual Transformations in Written Discourse Authoring Identity Constructive Criticism References Name Index Subject Index

Preview this article: Reviews, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/24/3/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege3833-1.gif

This article examines contributions of selected theories to technical communication's understanding of environmental discourse and uses a dialogical synthesis to construct a model of stakeholder analysis. The model, with its interactive variables of stakeholder knowledge, attitude, and desired behavior, is applied to a pollution prevention document and calls for an active research emphasis in determining effective communication strategies.

In learning how to write, one has to cope with many demands on language proficiency, organization skills, and intellectual ability. A checklist of what is required can help to clarify all these demands and to turn them into manageable items or units for practice, implementation, and evaluation. The skills involved in designing and applying checklists resemble those required for dealing with the writing tasks on campus and/or at work. The focus of this article is on using checklists to improve the skills of one kind of writing—the report, among students from two faculties in a tertiary institute. The reports are for different purposes, situations, and readers. The article will discuss the different approaches in adopting a checklist to facilitate the report-writing process. It will highlight using students' work or authentic materials as an input to their own learning and helping them to integrate the skills learned with their work on the campus and in the workplace.

This article explores narrative theory and research in fields closely allied with professional communication to clarify the value of narrative to our discipline. It addresses the move in many fields to reconceptualize research as narrative. Placing narrative within a postmodernist frame, it examines the centrality of ethnography within a postmodernist view. The importance of ethnography in research is related to two key narrative questions that ethnographic theorists in other disciplines are addressing: Who is telling the ethnographic story? For what purposes is the story told? This article supports the importance of taking a critical stance toward these questions and discusses the implications of postmodernist ethnographic theory for research in professional communication.

Preview this article: Revising a Writer's Identity: Reading and "Re-modeling" in a Composition Class, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/47/1/collegecompositionandcommunication8710-1.gif

I always thought it was unfair to compare people you've just met to people you've known before. But as I was sitting in class today, I realized I was doing that with you. My first semester here I got into a [composition] class that was marvelous. Jim and the style he used helped take down the bricks that had formed my writing blocks. It was like seeing and feeling and breathing for the very first time. It was exciting. Today, I thought, This woman will have to be pretty good to be as good as he was. Then I mentally slapped myself.

Preview this article: Repositioning Remediation: Renegotiating Composition's Work in the Academy, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/47/1/collegecompositionandcommunication8711-1.gif

I think basic writing programs have become expressions of our desire to produce basic writers, to maintain the course, the argument, and the slot in the university community: to maintain the distinction (basic/normal) we have learned to think through and by. The basic writing program, then, can be seen simultaneously as an attempt to bridge and preserve cultural difference, to enable students to enter the normal curriculum but to insure, at the

When working with graphics and illustrations, technical communicators face ethical questions at almost every step. The visual rhetorics available offer help with evaluating visual components but little guidance on ethical issues. This article presents examples of ethical conflicts, describes some of the prominent visual rhetorics, and discusses ethical issues that need to be addressed. Some steps for improving ethical awareness related to graphics and illustrations are suggested.

Scholars in professional communication have called for a reexamination of pedagogy, asking that it instruct students not simply in the forms of workplace discourse but also in the connections between that discourse and socially responsible communicative action. This article posits that narrative can provide a basis for a pedagogy of social action—for a pedagogy, that is, that enables students to understand the workings of power and cultural reproduction in professional settings and that fosters reflection, critique, and dialogue. The article first reviews narrative theory supporting this claim, then discusses ways that teachers can use narrative to help students critique examples of professional discourse and their own composing choices. The article closes by discussing both the concerns about and the possibilities for such a pedagogy.

This article claims that the debate over research in professional communication is grounded in ideology. The article discusses the ideologies of two research perspectives: a functionalist perspective, common in much social scientific research, and a critical interpretive perspective, currently emerging in disciplines other than our own. The article sets recent discussions of research in professional communication within a functionalist framework, then posits that a critical interpretive ideology provides an alternative. The interests advanced by both perspectives are discussed, and the viability of critical interpretive research in professional communication is supported.

The Construction of Negotiated Meaning. A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing. Linda Flower. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 334 pp. Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing: Rethinking the Discipline. Lee Odell, ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. 329 pp. Audience and Rhetoric: An Archaeological Composition of the Discourse Community. James A. Porter. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992. 185 pp. Approaches to Computer Writing Classrooms: Learning from Practical Experience. Ed. Linda Myers. Albany: State U of New York P, 1993. 225 pp. The Digital Word: Text‐Based Computing in the Humanities. Ed. George P. Landow and Paul Delany. Cambridge: MIT P, 1993. 362 pp. Electronic Quills: A Situated Evaluation of Using Computers for Writing in Classrooms. Bertram C. Bruce and Andee Rubin. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993. 232 pp. The Tech Writing Game. Janet Van Wicklen. New York: Facts on File, 1992. Marketing Yourself with Technical Writing: A Guide for Today's Professionals. William M. Vatavuk. Boca Raton, FL: Lewis Publishers, 1992. Technical Writer's Freelancing Guide. Peter Kent. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 1992. 160 pp.

Technical communicators are becoming increasingly involved in product development, often playing important roles on design teams. This shift brings with it the possibility for technical communicators to play more critical roles in balancing gender biases in technology. Feminist critiques of technology offer a range of perspectives for both educators and practitioners. Because discussion of feminism and technology in relation to technical communication is relatively new, the possibilities for applications of these theories are broad.

Understanding Scientific Prose. Jack Selzer, ed. Wisconsin UP, 1993, 388 pp. A History of Professional Writing Instruction in American Colleges: Years of Acceptance, Growth, and Doubt. Katherine H. Adams. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1993. xi + 192 pp. Technical Writing: Contexts, Audiences, and Communities. Carolyn R. Boiarsky. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1993. 652 pp. Technical Communication. 3rd ed. Rebecca E. Burnett. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1994. 742 pp. Technical Communication: Problems and Solutions. Roy F. Fox. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. 610 pp. Communicating Technical Information: A Guide for the Electronic Age. Donald Pattow and William Wresch. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993. 600 pp.

This essay uses Jürgen Habermas' theory of communicative action to explore the issue of empowerment. The essay first describes a communicative situation now common in public life, where scientific and technological forces are arrayed against citizenry over concerns with public import. Next, the essay discusses Habermas' critique of communicative practices and his vision of the way in which the technocratic consciousness has usurped communicative action in social life. Third, the essay applies Habermas' theory to the situation previously described, supporting the claim that in such situations empowerment may remain only a communicative ideal.

As teachers integrate social theory into the technical communication classroom, it is clear that they interpret the connection between writing and culture in different ways. The result is a range of socially based pedagogies rather than a single paradigm for writing instruction. This essay describes four of these social pedagogies—the social constructionist, the ideologic, the social cognitive, and the paralogic hermeneutic—distinguishing them by their pedagogic aims and classroom practices. The essay closes by discussing the implications of the differences among socially based pedagogies for both _ teachers and programs in technical communication.

Preview this article: The Effect of Portfolio-Based Instruction on Composition Students' Final Examination Scores, Course Grades, and Attitudes Toward Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/27/2/researchintheteachingofenglish15414-1.gif

Business and technical communication have conventionally been separated in academe—a separation that formalist rhetorical theory has supported. Epistemic rhetorical theory, however, suggests that this separation does not reflect the profession's current understanding of workplace discourse. This article demonstrates that the labels business and technical communication are not helpful in understanding two workplace documents: a memorandum and a report. The article then explores the increased explanatory power in two epistemic theoretical approaches, social construction and paralogic hermeneutics, after which the article discusses the radical implications of these approaches for a curricular dialogue concerning workplace writing. Finally, the article describes interests inside and outside academe that preserve the status quo and thus mitigate against curricular change, positing that such change would be difficult, but not impossible, to achieve.

Preview this article: Resisting the Faith: Conversion, Resistance, and the Training of Teachers, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/55/4/collegeenglish9302-1.gif

Preview this article: I Stand Here Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/55/4/collegeenglish9304-1.gif

Although “community”; is an important concept for writing, writers have been unclear about how a sense of community relates to the writing process or to the documents produced. This study reports a comparison of several technical reports showing the influences of a writer's identification with a community on features of the resulting document. Features most affected were personal and community references within the document, writer's stance toward the reader, and definition of the rhetorical problem.

Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness by Patricia Bizzell. Pittsburgh, U of Pittsburg P, 1992; pp. 295.

Public relations writing has been neglected as a research topic in professional communication. This article uses rhetorical theory from a number of fields to examine a topic of recent concern—shared, or negotiated, meaning—in relation to two very different samples of public relations writing: the public relations texts produced by political-advocacy organizations involved in the midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s and an entry from an organizational newsletter. More specifically, the article studies the role of four rhetorical elements—exophoric and intertextual references, metaphors, and narratives—in generating a shared meaning. In doing so, the article develops the thesis that narratives were particularly important to this public relations writing because they provided a comprehensive, compelling framework for belief and thus contributed greatly to the shared meaning created by writers and readers.

Although narration has been recognized as a complex mode of discourse, its role in professional communication has not been widely studied. This article examines narration in one form of professional communication—direct solicitations— and links narration to an important research issue: the social construction of knowledge, or the social justification of belief, through language. The direct solicitations are described, and the role of narration in justifying belief socially, for direct solicitations, is then discussed by examining narration and analysis as two means for organizing and expressing experience. The interweaving of these two means in direct solicitations is illustrated, but finally the importance of the narrational over the analytic in giving shape and significance to experience is asserted. Thus, the central role narratives play in justifying belief socially, for direct solicitations is described. Three sample narratives from three direct _ solicitations illustrate this discussion.

ESL in America looks at the social economic, and political contexts of second language and bilingual education.

Preview this article: Between the Drafts, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/43/1/collegecompositionandcommunication8892-1.gif

When composing, writers give shape to the meaning they construct, and they signal a possible configuration for meaning through the organizational patterns they supply for their readers. This study examined writers’ options in organizing comparisons–texts that are often considered to have a canonical pattern. Thirty college students wrote their comparisons through discourse synthesis, integrating content cued by two informative texts, each text dealing with one of the two topics to be compared. Analyses focused on the organizational patterns the writers generated and on the content they included. Of the two major ways of organizing comparisons–organization by aspect and organization by object–organizing by aspect was the format used by most writers in this study. However, there was much variability within this format in how writers combined material for the comparison. Writers could focus on specific aspects, could separate aspects into those that were similarities and those that were differences, or could generate macro-aspects to subsume several related aspects. In selecting source material the writers preferentially included content that was symmetrical, in that it related information that was available for both objects being compared. And almost half of their additions also contributed to symmetry by balancing their treatments of the two objects. Chunking of content in a systematic way, especially by generating macro-aspects for topical focus, was a strong predictor of holistic quality ratings, stronger than measures for the nature of the content that was included. These higher-rated papers providing readers with macro-aspects tended to be written by students with higher verbal ability and more extensive topic knowledge. The study points out the variability within comparison discourse and demonstrates the complexity of the choices writers must make in structuring comparison texts

Global multi-cultural reader. Perspectives - short quotes at beginning of each chapter. Myths/folktales at beginning of each chapter. Includes some student essays. New: chapters on gender and pop culture; 2 essays in each chapter with potentially polarizing situations so students can practice argumentative writing; pedagogy offers increased attention to rhetorical strategies.

Reading theory is important because meaning is not located solely in texts, but instead results from an interaction between reader and text. Although guidelines for developing such consensual meaning have been derived for the informational level of communications, the arguments underlying this level are not well understood. Reading theory offers insights on this issue. Background is given on reading theory and on guidelines that have already been formulated. The inability of current guidelines to account for the reader impact of one type of persuasive business communication is demonstrated. Three aspects of reading—inferring, reasoning analogically, and learning—are discussed, and their role in building consensual meaning, for persuasive business communications, is demonstrated in sample texts. Four guidelines are proposed for persuasive business communications, to supplement those guidelines already developed.

Preview this article: Poems, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/53/5/collegeenglish9563-1.gif

Preview this article: Comment and Response, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/53/4/collegeenglish9578-1.gif

One of the most effective communication links between corporate management and investors is the annual report. The letter to the shareholders in the report exemplifies the one-on-one communication attempt by chief executive officers and other high level executives with owners. This article examines thirty shareholder letters written by executives who are classified as highly successful based on their own annual salaries and/or the return to shareholders or company performance. The researchers found the letters written by these successful executives to fall within accepted readability levels. The letter writers adhere to convention in the use of numbers and the use of compound adjective. Section headings are not frequently used. The tone of the opening paragraph is usually equivocal or positive even though the first sentences frequently reflect a lack of “you attitude.” In general, the reports written by these successful executives conform to modern-day standards.

Research on newsletters, a major form of organizational communication, has largely been practical rather than theoretical. Certain theories, such as those in organizational theory and mass communication, can be applied to newsletters as forms of organizational communication and as media. Rhetorical theory, however, has not been used to understand how newsletter writing achieves its effects. This study applies rhetorical theory to newsletters produced by two political-activist organizations. The newsletters and the organizations are described, as background for the study. Three aspects of rhetorical theory (schema theory, social construction, and theories about audience) are presented, and their application to the newsletters is illustrated with sample passages. An agenda is suggested for further research on rhetorical theory and newsletter writing.

This article considers the complex processes involved in readers' and writers' construction of textual meaning: how people construct meaning from texts through reading and for texts through writing. Building meaning through reading entails organizing, selecting, and connecting. Readers use previously acquired knowledge to operate on textual cues, organizing mental representations that include material they select from the text and connect with material they generate. This constructivist characterization of the reading process extends also to literate acts in which people are writers as well as readers, those acts in which they compose texts by drawing from textual sources. To meet their discourse goals, writers perform textual transformations associated with the operations of organizing, selecting, and connecting as they appropriate source material for uses in different communicative contexts. They dismantle source texts and reconfigure content they select from these sources, and they interweave the source material with content they generate from stored knowledge. The article describes the kinds of transformations that occur through reading and writing, and proposes a way to think about tasks that invite writers to transform extant texts. Theoretical issues are raised, and suggestions are made for further research.

Preview this article: Review: Critical Thinking/Critical Teaching, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/51/6/collegeenglish11281-1.gif

This article discusses the impact of possible sex-based differences in communication styles on the technical writer's job. Linguistic research proposes a male and female style of communication. While it is helpful to acknowledge possible differences in communication styles, technical writers must be concerned with the moral and legal implications of sex stereotyping. To explore these issues, the article discusses what it is technical writers do, and who they interact with on a daily basis. It then reviews linguistic research, and linguistic folklore. Finally, the article determines that technical writers can choose to use both male and female traits to acknowledge multiple audiences, and improve the quality of their documents.

A review of the current literature suggests that the concept of purpose has not received sufficient theoretical or pedagogical attention. In this article, theoretical depth is provided by a discussion of four components of purpose: purpose as associated with discourse types, purpose from the writer's viewpoint, purpose as it relates to situation, and purpose from the reader's viewpoint. Research is cited, and examples from computer documentation are used to illustrate each component. Cooperation and conflict among components are examined in a sample document, and classroom applications are discussed.

Preview this article: Comment and Response, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/47/7/collegeenglish13254-1.gif

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.