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On November 2, 2016, Theresa Jarnagin Enos unexpectedly passed away at her home in Tucson, Arizona, leaving behind a trailblazing legacy of work in writing, teaching, scholarly editing, (wo)mentori...

Contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities we’ve found most reliable in producing B-quality writing over fourteen weeks. Higher grades are awarded to students who produce exemplary portfolios. Thus we freely give students lots of evaluative feedback on their writing, but students can count on a course grade of B if they do all the required activities—no matter our feedback. Our goal in using contracts is to enable teachers and students to give as much attention as possible to writing and as little as possible to grades.

“Voice” is no longer a hot term in composition journals. Yet it continues to deserve scholarly attention, in part because it is still often referred to in classrooms and seems applicable to new forms of electronic communication. At the same time, we should avoid taking an either/or stand on the usefulness of “voice” as a term. This is a case where we should embrace contraries, by advocating concepts of “voice” on certain occasions and resisting the term on others.

Written words are laid out in space and exist on the page all at once, but a reader can only read a few words at a time. For readers, written words are trapped in the medium of time. So how can we best organize writing for readers? Traditional techniques of organization tend to stress the arrangement of parts in space and certain metadiscoursal techniques that compensate for the problem of time. In contrast, I’ll describe five ways to organize written language that harness or bind time. In effect, I’m exploring form as a source of energy. More broadly, I’m implying that our concept itself of “organization” is biased toward a picture of how objects are organized in space and neglects the story of how events are organized in time.

A response to Wayne Booth's essay in the same issue a "rhetoric of assent."

Booth and Elbow engage in a dialogue about what has become even more important in recent years, namely how we come to believe what we believe and convince others to believe with us. Booth speculates that one needs to commit oneself to combating both dogmatism and skepticism by embracing the rhetoric of assent, and offers rules to help us “learn how to listen“; Elbow agrees with Booth on a number of points but argues for the special value of dissent, perhaps even “unreasonable” dissent, before going on to offer specific classroom practices that can advance their common goal of critical thinking.

Introduction Part I: Premises and Foundations 1. Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard: Reflections on the Inability to Write 2. A Map of Writing in Terms of Audience and Response The Uses of Binary Thinking Part II: The Generative Dimension 4. Freewriting and the Problem of Wheat and Tares 5. Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience 6. Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting Part III: Speech, Writing, and Voice Part III: Speech, Writing, and Voice 7. The Shifting Relationships Between Speech and Writing 8. Voice in Literature 9. Silence: A Collage 10. What Is Voice in Writing? Part IV: Discourses 11. Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues 12. In Defense of Private Writing 13. The War Between Reading and Writing - and How to End It 14. Your Cheatin' Art: A Collage Part V: Teaching 15. Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond Mistakes, Bad English, and Wrong Language 16. High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing 17. Breathing Life into the Text 18. Using the Collage for Collaborative Writing 19. Getting Along Without Grades - and Getting Along With Them Too 20. Starting the Portfolio Experiment at SUNY Stony Brook Pat Belanoff, co-author 21. Writing an Assessment in the Twenty-First Century: A Utopian View

Considers how the history of relations between composition and literature has involved a vexed tangle of misunderstanding and hurt. Suggests that both fields would benefit from thinking through some of the vexations. Argues for maintaining the marriage between composition and literature. Admires the situation in schools where there is no tension between literature and composition.

he history of relations between composition and literature has involved a vexed tangle of misunderstanding and hurt.Both fields would benefit if we could think through some of the vexations.That's what I'm trying to do here.But I won't talk about the most obvious problems: political and material issues of power, money, and prestige.These matters cannot be ignored, but I will mention them quickly and pass on.Composition has been the weak spouse, the new kid, the cash cow, the oppressed majority.When writing programs are housed in English departments, as they so often are, teachers of writing are usually paid less to teach more under poorer working conditions-in order to help support literature professors to be paid more to teach less under better working conditions.I'm hoping that these material vexations might be starting to recede just a bit now-as composition gets stronger and more secure, as writing programs find they can prosper outside English departments, and as literature itself struggles because of weak support for the humanities (not to mention frequent attacks on "professors" and all of higher education).Even the virus of relying on part-timers and adjuncts is increasing in mainstream literature, too.I ask only that we not forget how hard it will be to get past the deep legacy of anger, hurt, and guilt.I won't even address the much-discussed question of whether writing and literature should marry, stay married, or divorce.

In the first section, the author addresses the most theoretical criticism of private writing as a false or misleading concept—that writing is inherently or essentially social. The author distinguishes and explores the various forms or senses in which this claim is true; in doing so, the author explores the limitations of certain kinds of totalistic forms of argumentation. In the second section, the author also addresses criticisms that acknowledge the existence of private writing but asserts that it is misguided or harmful. In the final section, the author suggests possibilities for empirical research that might not only throw light on theoretical disputes about the nature of private writing but also provide some concrete help to teachers of writing.

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Peter Elbow, Response to Glynda Hull, Mike Rose, Kay Losey Fraser, and Marisa Castellano, "Remediation as Social Construct,", College Composition and Communication, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Dec., 1993), pp. 587-588

(1993). The war between reading and writing— and how to end it. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 5-24.

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Peter Elbow's widely acclaimed and original theories on the writing process, set forth in Writing without Teachers and Writing with Power, have earned him a reputation as a leading educational innovator. For this book Elbow has drawn together twelve of his essays on the nature of learning and teaching to suggest a comprehensive philosophy of education.

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