Teaching paradigms of composition

So, next fall I am slated to teach the first Issues in Composition course. In the spring, I am slated to teach the graduate course in composition theory. An interesting way of thinking about how to structure this course has occurred to me this morning as I have been reading Anis Bawarshi's Genre and the Invention of the Writer. The relevant section comes on p. 51 in the section called "The Process Movement in Composition: Reclaiming Invention." The structure that occurs to me as I read this passage, a way of organizing a course on composition (history? theories of invention?):

Part 1: Current Traditional Rhetoric (19th century to 1960s)

Product to Process

Part 2: The Writing Process Movement (1960s to 1990)

Process to Context

Part 3: Post-Process (1990 to present)

I could have students read articles which embody the various positions on writing espoused during these periods. It's interesting to think about how these movements argue for paradigms, ways of thinking about how writing works and that discovering these arguments and having students examine them might be useful. We might also discuss the way that these paradigms don't die and exist simultaneously. Current Traditional Rhetoric is still with us. Among a large cohort of writing teachers, process approaches are still the prevalent way of teaching. Post-process has gotten hold, but certainly not successfully changed public perceptions about how writing works.

Bawarshi's organizing question might be a useful one here: What is involved when we say what writers are doing and why are they doing it? (50)

Instructional

Basic Editing in imovie

Audio Editing in iMovie 09

Vimeo Video School

My reading list for my dream faculty writing class

It has to begin with Gee, "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction." This has to be the first reading...all else can grow from there...

Multimodal Reading List

Assessment:

The New Work of Assessment: Evaluating Multimodal Compositions. Computers and Composition, Spring 2010 Elizabeth A. Murray & Hailey A. Sheets (Ball State University)
Nicole A. Williams (Virginia Tech)

The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media" By Anne Francis Wysocki in What Writing Does and How It Does It (Bazerman/Prior)

Borton, Sonya, and Brian Huot. "Responding and Assessing." Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Ed. Cynthia L. Selfe. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2007. 99-111.

Great Quotes for Syllabi

My preferences, my desires, my subjective states must again and again be modified and repudiated as I am dragged, kicking and screaming, out of infantile solipsism and into adult membership in an inquiring community. (Wayne Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, p. 13)

Laurent Daloz expands on Knowles' definition: "In the end, good teaching rests neither in accumulating a shelf-full of knowledge nor in developing a repertoire of skills. In the end, good teaching lies in a willingness to attend and care for what happens in our students, ourselves, and the space between us. Good teaching is a certain kind of stance...It is a stance of receptivity, of attunement, of listening" (Daloz qtd. in Kiskis, "Reflections on Pedagogy, Andragogy, and Power" In Pedagogy in the Age of Politics, p. 60)

Before there was WAW, there was...

What can be transferred from general composition to other domains, I believe, is the idea that writing in all fields is shaped by an interactive relationship between the way an intellectual community constructs knowledge in writing and the genres it uses to configure that knowledge. In brief, here is how this dynamic works: Writers create texts to "do business" in certain communities of readers and writers. Within those communities, there are specific ideas, often tacit, about what constitutes acceptable subject matters to write about. About each of these acceptable subject matters, there are, within communities of readers and writers, certain status quo ideas, attitudes, and propositions, discursive entitlements Chaim Perelman calls the "starting points for argumentation." Within these communities there are, in addition, specific kinds of rhetorical "moves" or "transactions" that a writer is expected to make in order to lead readers to perceive a central idea or adhere to a thesis. Aristotle, for example, in teaching the art of rhetoric for fourth century Athenian orators, calls these "moves" enthymemes. Within these communities there are also definite ideas, again often tacit, about what functions written texts should serve--that is, the degree to which they should "shift the scene" from the written text at hand to some other arena of action.

All these aspects of "knowledge work"--acceptable subjects, starting points, transactions, and functions of texts--are constrained by the kinds of genres within which the community has chosen to conduct its business. Indeed, as I argue, the genres of different communities actually emerge from the knowledge-work its members must perform. In other words, whether a person writes about a specific subject matter, chooses to detail specifically what she believes her readers presently know and think about the subject, engages in certain kinds of rhetorical moves (for example, definition or comparison and causal reasoning), and urges some specific action depends on the genre she is expected to produce. The choice of genre also dictates, to a finer degree than other prescriptive rules, how the writer must construct paragraphs, sentences, and words.

This knowledge work-genre dynamic is what students can learn in general composition that can be transferred to the writing they must do in other courses. It is this dynamic that I believe ought to constitute the "content" of college writing instruction. (188-189)

Joliffe, David. "The Myth of Transcendence." Pedagogy in the Age of Politics: Writing and Reading (in) the Academy. Eds. Patricia A. Sullivan, Donna J. Qualley. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1994. 183-194.

Quan's presentation

ReThinking WAW (order)

It seems to me that a more useful place to start a WAW course might focus on discourse community, move to academic writing to study a bit about how writing functions in academic discourse communities, and then move to individual writers, and spend a bit of time on composing processes of individual writers. I feel like the way I have been doing it has spent too much time on the individual and not enough time on the social. So, a re-organized course might look like:

• Discourse Community/Community of Practice/Activity System (including genre knowledge)
• Academic Discourse Communities
• Composing Process of Individuals

I am also thinking about how a literature review is a nice culminating assignment for this course because it is a great test of academic writing in the sense that students must organize and present a conversation on a particular topic. I'm struck by the distinction between reporting on a conversation and contributing to a conversation and not at all sure that contributing to a conversation need be a part of this course (I do believe it is possible, but I think it is a tall order for a college freshmen). So, a culminating series of assignments:

• Annotated Bibliography
• Literature Review
• Conference Presentation

To resolve the issue of conducting primary or original research, I might ask the student to write a short follow-up paper in which he suggests potential research questions, based on what he has seen in the review of literature. The idea being--now you know what we know, tell us what we should know or have missed or need to know more about, and why. This might be an interesting way to take the project one step forward without committing to an "experiment" or whatever.

My WAW Bibliography

Academic Writing

Bernhardt, Stephen. "Seeing the Text." CCC 37.1 (Feb. 1986): 66-78.

Ketter, Jean & Judy Hunter. "Creating a writer's identity on the boundaries of two communities of practice." Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives. Eds. Charles Bazerman & David R. Russell. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse, 2003. 307-329.

MacDonald, Susan Peck. "Problem Definition in Academic Writing." College English 49.3 (March 1987): 315-331.

Penrose, Ann and Cheryl Geisler. "Reading and Writing Without Authority." College Composition and Communication 45.4 (Dec. 1994): 505-520.

Haas, Christina. "Learning to Read Biology: One Student's Rhetorical Development in College." Written Communication 11 (1994): 43-84.

Haas, Christina. "Beyond 'Just the Facts': Reading as Rhetorical Action." In Hearing Ourselves Think: Cognitive Research in the College Writing Classroom (Eds. Ann M. Penrose and Barbara M. Sitko). New York: Oxford UP, 19-32.

Higgins, Lorraine. "Reading to Argue: Helping Students Transform Source Texts." In Hearing Ourselves Think: Cognitive Research in the College Writing Classroom (Eds. Ann M. Penrose and Barbara M. Sitko). New York: Oxford UP, 70-101.

Rhetoric of 9/11

I've long thought about a course on the rhetoric of 9/11. Plugging 9/11 into comppile reveals some interesting suggested readings...

Thinking through my own ENGL 230 course

I found this quote helpful:

Teachers can also invent projects where writing becomes more clearly a means to an end, to “constitute the class as a working group with some degree of complexity, continuity, and interdependency of joint activity” in order to mirror the rich “communicative relations that contextualize writing in the workplace” as Dias et al. (1999, p. 235) advocate. (326)

Ketter, Jean & Judy Hunter. "Creating a writer's identity on the boundaries of two communities of practice." Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives. Eds. Charles Bazerman & David R. Russell. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse, 2003. 307-329.

I think the key phrase is "where writing becomes more clearly a means to an end"--that's what I'm currently doing in my Business Writing course and, to a lesser extent, in my WAW writing 100 course.

Ketter/Hunter

I just finished reading:

Ketter, Jean & Judy Hunter. "Creating a writer's identity on the boundaries of two communities of practice." Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives. Eds. Charles Bazerman & David R. Russell. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse, 2003. 307-329.

A terrific article which nicely makes the case for the value of an internship for students. Here are the passages which spoke to me, in particular:

"Erin’s story of negotiating the transition between writing for academia and writing for work is unique. But her experience suggests one way in which students might learn about writing in different communities. Erin’s consciousness of her identity as a writer is heightened by her work on the boundaries of two contrasting communities of practice as she thinks about and comes to understand the constraints and freedoms afforded by each community. Her participation in the two communities of practice enhances her understanding of writing as a complex interaction between the writer’s identity and social cultural practices of the community. As do Dias et. al (1999), we see that the ways of learning about writing and the purposes of writing activity in academic and workplace communities of practice can differ, but we learn through this study that Erin benefits more from her participation in each because of her participation in both." (326)

"...our study shows the benefit of providing opportunities for teachers and students to explore how contrasting communities of practice define successful writing activity and how writing activity operates in the cultural and political sphere of each community. Thus, we believe, academic communities of practice should provide students with opportunities to write in non-academic contexts and should encourage students to reflect about and discuss how these non-academic contexts frame writing activity. At the same time, students may benefit from discussing how the academic contexts in which college writing often occurs also affect writing activity. Such discussions should include how writing activity, both in academia and in other contexts, is a means of operating purposively in the world." (327)

Resources about Online Teaching

Hewett, Beth L., & Crista Ehmann Powers (Eds.). (2007). Special issue: Online teaching and learning: Preparation, development, and online communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 16, 1.

Potential Apps for Teaching

Poll Everywhere

Prezi

Ooovo

Chatzy

Profile of a RIC student's mother

I would say that my participant had an interesting and long workplace journey to get to where they are now. It started when Marie came to the United States in 1988 from Haiti with her first daughter and she had to learn English right away in order to get a job. Her mother was a seamstress so she learned those skills and worked at a factory. Then, she had her second daughter and attained a GED at a Community college in Massachusetts so she could learn something new and get a better job. Marie attended Mass Bay community college and had a job as an assistant teacher at a Boston Public School working with the Bi-lingual Haitian students and special needs students.

Marie entered the nursing program and while Marie was in school, she was laid off from her job, once again. Marie then went to work at the Fernald State School, which was a school for mentally challenged individuals. One day, Marie had an accident while trying to move and carry one of her patients to another bed, where she fell and injured her back. From there, she could not continue nursing school or work on her feet.

Later, Marie recovered and got a job as a telephone support specialist for Nynex, a telephone company which today is Verizon. From there she was laid off once again and decided to go back to school. She attended Clark University to study novel network. Marie graduated and got her first support job was at Stream International in 1997. From there, her career started fishing to its stability. She worked there for three years then moved from her old job to a higher paying job called Hale and Dorr for two years. Marie left Hale and Dorr in 2002 work at a law firm called MINTZ, LEVIN, COHN, FERRIS, GLOVSKY AND POPEO, P.C. in South Boston, Massachusetts. She was doing the same job but got better pay and a better position and is currently still working there.

Rhetoric of Iraq war

Blogs, leaked docs, body counts

Iraw Body Count (website)

NY Times: The Iraq Archive: The Strands of a War

The archive tells thousands of individual stories of loss whose consequences are still being felt in Iraqi families today.

Synthesis of books which synthesize writing research

There is a terrific review essay:

Anson, CHris. "A Field at Sixty Something." CCC 62.1 (Sept 2010): 216-228.

Anson gives me some things to think about in planning a grad course in comp/rhet. Specifically, this passage near the end:

Reading any of these carefully edited volumes would be a good start. In fact, as dull as research syntheses can sometimes be in style and content, those new to the field of writing studies could do worse than plowing their way through any of the three research handbooks, and an even better graduate course might ask students to do so in parallel with selections from Miller's massive anthology. And although it's likely that each book will draw a different audience (for Smagorinsky, members of CCCC and NCTE; for MacArthur, Graham, and Fitzgerald, members of the American Educational Research Association and colleges of education; for Bazerman, scholars of literacy writ large, across disciplines; for Miller, college compositionists)... (227)

Digital and multimedia composing

Patty Ericson's webpage (with links to courses she has taught)...

Susan Delagrange

Susan's The American Experience course.

Ohio STate Digital Literacy Institute

Compfaqs syllabi for digital composing

THE DIGITAL STORY OF THE NATIVITY:

from Newkirk

But sadly, writing in secondary schools is colonized by literature instruction and serves as a vehicle for analysis. With the whole world to explain, explore, and argue about, why should literature be the dominant topic of analysis? If we accept (as I do) the claim that extended analytic argumentation is difficult for most students, it stands to reason we don't compound this task by choosing as a topic a difficult and complex novel. To do so violates a basic maxim of teaching: that when teaching any new skill, you don't compound the problem by adding difficulties...In choosing literary analysis as a main form of writing, we are asking students to write in a form they don't read, to enter a conversation they know nothing about, to learn a genre that is virtually nonexistent in the wider culture, and to disregard topics and controversies where they might actually have some stake. This is not to say this form should not have a place in the curriculum, only that it should not dominate, as I believe it does. (Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones, 154)

Bibliography

Boiarsky, Carolyn R., ed. Academic Literacy in the English Classroom: Helping Underprepared and Working Class Students Succeed in College. Portsmouth, NY: Boynton/Cook, 2003.

Finn, Patrick J. Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working-Class Children in Their Own Self Interest. Albany: SUNY, 1999.

See, also, folder called: "Working Class" in RIC folder on my computer

Honesty Conference

Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices

Faculty Teaching Writing Across the Disciplines

While English and language arts teachers have a disciplinary advantage in understanding and applying writing process principles, teachers in other disciplines have more problems. Their impulse is to use the model they remember form their own high school or undergraduate schooling rather than the process(es) they engage in as publishing professionals. Typically, they assign specific topics, providing few if any directions on how to write the paper. They read and comment only on the final draft, using intermediate drafts (if any) to ensure against plagiarism. Revision opportunities are few. Instructors in Writing Across the Curriculum faculty development programs often have to spend considerable time convincing participants of the inadequate pedagogy of this approach; even when teachers are unhappy with the papers written in this traditional manner, they are often reluctant to change--usually on the grounds that responding to drafts is too time consuming. ("The Great Paradigm Shift," Bloom, p. 44).

And so, you ask, what are those "writing process principles" to which Bloom refers in that first sentence? Here they are:

1. Writing is an activity, an act composed of a variety of activities.

2. The activities in writing are typically recursive rather than linear.

3. Writing is, first and foremost, a social activity.

4. The act of writing can be a means of learning and discovery.

5. Experienced writers are often aware of audience, purpose, and context.

6. Experienced writers spend considerable time on invention and revision.

7. Effective writing instruction allows students to practice these activities.

8. Such instruction includes ample opportunities for peer review.

9. Effective instructors grade student work not only on the finished product but on the efforts involved in the writing process.

10. Successful composition instruction entails finding appropriate occasions to intervene in each student's writing process. (Olson, qtd. in Bloom, p 33)

Bibliography (Legal Writing)

All of these are from the book

Matalene, Carolyn B. Worlds of Writing: Teaching and Learning in Discourse Communities of Work. New York: Random House, 1989.

In the Law the Text is King (Teresa Godwin Phelps)

To English Professors: On What to Do with a Lawyer (John Warnock)

Rhetoric and Bricolage: Theory and Its Limits in Legal and other Sorts of Discourse (James C. Raymond)

White, James Boyd, "The Invisible Discourse of the Law: Reflections on Legal
Literacy and General Education." In Literary for Life: The Demand for Read- ing and Writing, ed. RichardW. Bailey and Robin Melanie Fosheim, 137-50. New York: Modern Language Association, 1983.

White, James Boyd, "The Invisible Discourse of the Law: Reflections on Legal
Literacy and General Education." In Literary for Life: The Demand for Reading and Writing, ed. RichardW. Bailey and Robin Melanie Fosheim, 137-50. New York: Modern Language Association, 1983.

Bazerman, C. (1994). Systems of Genres and the Enactment of Social Intentions. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the New Rhetoric (pp. 79-100). London: Taylor and Francis.

Writing Videos

Peter Elbow -- On Writing

Peter Elbow -- On Spelling and Grammar

50 Years of Research on Writing: What Have We Learned?

What Does Revision Look like? Ask Obama

From Fallows.

The blow-up version.

Masters and Doctoral programs

Here are a couple I've bookmarked:

Rhetoric Society of America's listing of grad programs in rhetoric: http://associationdatabase.com/aws/RSA/pt/sp/resources_gradprograms

Doctoral Consortium in Rhetoric & Composition: https://www.msu.edu/~ahaas/consortium/members.htm

There's also the Master's Degree Consortium of Writing Studies Specialists:
http://www.mastersinwritingprograms.com/programs.html. The list is hardly
comprehensive, but maybe others will add their programs to the list because
of this discussion.

There's actually a new website for the Doctoral Consortium of Programs in
Rhetoric and Composition: http://www.cws.illinois.edu/rc_consortium/

Internships (sources)

ILL Request:

Freedman, A. & Adam, C. (2000). Bridging the gap: University-based writing that is more than simulation. In P. Dias & A. Pare (Eds.), Transitions: Writing in academic and workplace settings (pp. 129-144). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Hill, C.A. & Resnick, L. (1995). Creating opportunities for apprenticeship in writing. In J. Petraglia (Ed.) Reconceiving writing, rethinking writing instruction (pp. 145-158). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

For more resources, see Beaufort in Research in Composition, p. 236 (top)

Anson, Chris M., and L. Lee Forsberg. "Moving beyond the Aca demic Community: Transitional Stages in Professional Writing," WC 7 (1990): 200-31.

For ENGL 230 (next time)--from Beaufort

THIS COURSE NEEDS TO START WITH A LITERACY NARRATIVE: literacy and work...students will reflect on the role that writing played in a specific workplace. Most of them have some experience with work--what role did writing play in this workplace? What did you write? What did others write that you read? The purpose is to help them begin to see the action-oriented nature of most workplace writing.

The Beaufort chapter, "Writing in the Professions" in Research on Composition is chocked full of interesting ideas for readings for a Business/Professional writing class.

"Framing" Quotes

"No amount of preparation in school can equip one fully for context-specific writing tasks in professional life" (229).

"The writing classroom is only one school for writers" (234).

Academic vs. Business Writing

An others (Rivers, 1989; Woolever, 1989) offer general observations about the differences in purpose, structure, and style of academic writing compared with most business-oriented texts. Although such generalizations are perhaps too broad, they nonetheless confirm socially driven textual features and give in broad strokes some of the differences between academic and business writing.

The citations are:

Woolever, K. R. (1989). Coming to terms with different standards of excellence for written communication. In C.B. Matalene (Ed.), Worlds of writing: Teaching and learning in discourse communities of work (pp. 3-16). New York: Random House.

Rivers, W.E. (1989). From the garret to the fishbowl: Thoughts on the transition from literary to technical writing. In C.B. Matalene (Ed.), Worlds of writing: Teaching and learning in discourse communities of work (pp. 64-79). New York: Random House.

Discourse Community/Activity System Matters

English teachers read expository texts by students and workplace writers and grade the professionals lower, thus demonstrating the effect of discourse conventions on the evaluation of writing:

Freedman, S.W. (1984). The registers of student and professional expository writing: Influence on teachers' responses. In R. Beach & L.S. Bridwell (Eds.), New directions in composition research (pp. 334-347). New York: Guilford Press.

(PE1404.N48 1984 )

Kain, Donna & Elizabeth Wardle. "Building Context: Using Activity Theory to Teach About Genre in Multi-Major Professional Communication Courses." Technical Communication Quarterly 14.2 (2005): 113-139.

Ethnographies of Writing in Workplace Settings

Brown, R.L. & Herndl, C.G. (1986). An ethnographic study of corporate writing: Job status as reflected in written text. In B. Couture (Ed.), Functional approaches to writing: Research perspectives (pp. 11-28). London: Frances Pinter.

Doheny-Farina, S. (1986). Writing in an emerging organization. Written Communication, 3, 158-185.

Doheny-Farina, S. (1989). A case study of one adult writing in academic and nonacademic discourse communities. In C.B. Matalene (Ed.), Worlds of writing: Teaching and learning in discourse communities of work (pp. 17-42). New York, Random House.

Doheny-Farina, S. (1992). The individual, the organization, and kairos: Making transitions from college to careers. In S.P. Witte, N. Nakadate, & R.D. Cherry (Eds.), A rhetoric of doing: Essays on written discourse in honor of James L. Kinneavy (pp. 293-309). Carbondale: SIUP.

Tech Tools

MacSpeech Dictate

ENGL 231 Midterm Essay (Response/Grade)

Bilodeau, Mary

Caparco, JP

Hanson, Jon

Laguerre, Josh

Leger, Levbert

Hajjar, James

Polanco, Steven

Rado, Corrado

Usler, Chris

Wapenyi, Richie

Textbooks for Grad Course (Comp Studies)

James D. Williams' Preparing to Teach Writing: Research, Theory, and Practice

Sullivan and Tinberg's _What is "College-Level Writing"_

Tate's Sourcebook; Villanueva's Crosstalk, T. R. Johnson's Teaching Composition

Lindemann's A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers

Bibliographic Research in Composition Studies (Parlor Press 2009)

Moore, Cindy and Peggy O'Neill, eds. Practice in Context: Situating the Work of Writing Teachers. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002.

Literacy Reflection Feedback

"When you write, you don't follow somebody else's scheme; you design your own. As a writer, you learn to make words behave the way you want them to.... Learning to write is not a matter of learning the rules that govern the use of the semicolon or the names of sentence structures, nor is it a matter of manipulating words; it is a matter of making meanings, and that is the work of the active mind." (Ann Bertoff)

WTNG 100.08

Alverez, Dayana

DePina, Belinda

DePina, Neila

Hall, Alex
Jones, Stanley

Kenney, Thomas

Laurito, Talia

Lindstrom, Taylor

Lizotte, David

McLeod, Megan

Mozzetta, Michael

Olea, Alejandro

Paquette, Britnie

Rampino, Brianna

Saravia, Karen

Sionna, Tara

Tabora, Lexie

Vota, Katie

Zahov, Victor

WTNG 100.15

Aidala, Ashley

Auger, Joanne

Arsenault, Lindsey

Gannon, Nick

Gutauskas, Alicia

Hayes, Jill

Johnson, Anika

Moriarty-Barrows, Cali

Rojas, Diana

Tutt, Darnel

CAGS

Certificate in Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, and Rhetoric

UMASS Certificate in the Teaching of Writing

Post-Baccalaureate Graduate Certificate in the Teaching of Writing in High School/Middle School (Illinois State University)

The Post-Baccalaureate Graduate Certificate in the Teaching of Writing in High School/Middle School is designed for certified middle and high school teachers of any subject who are inter- ested in pursuing study of current theory and practice in compo- sition in an atmosphere emphasizing the special needs of the high school/middle school teacher. Middle or Secondary Teacher Certification is required for admission to the certificate program. The Post-Baccalaureate Graduate Certificate is earned upon completion of the following 18 hours of courses:

409.01 Major Figures in the Teaching of Writing in High School/Middle School
409.02 Teaching of Grammar in High School/Middle School
409.03 Writing Assessment in High School/Middle School
409.04 Using Technology to Teach Writing in High School/Middle School
409.05 Applying Rhetoric to the Teaching of Writing in High School/Middle School
409.06 With permission of the Graduate Program Director, an appro- priate 400-level course focused on composition or the teaching of composition may be substituted for one 409 course.

The Post-Baccalaureate Graduate Certificate does not automatically lead to a graduate degree, but the credits earned for the certificate may all be applied toward an M.A. or Ph.D. in English Studies.

Jing

Also, a warning: I think Jing calculates the number of times that
files are stored and accessed (not just their number and size) before
you reach the limit for free access and need to subscribe. Either way,
I ask students to tell me when they've accessed their Jing session
from Screencast and then I delete their files to make space (you can
also store them locally).

Places to Publish Student Work

Welcome to the website for Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in

Writing and Rhetoric, a peer-reviewed journal for undergraduates.

The “young scholars” in our title is not a marker of a scholar’s age but rather of his or her experience with discursive inquiry in writing, rhetoric, and related topics. Thus, we invite all young scholars in the field to submit their work!

Young Scholars in Writing publishes excellent scholarship on topics tightly related to composition, rhetoric, and/or literacy studies. To be eligible for the Spotlight on First
Year Writing, a piece must have been written in a lower-division composition course
or by a first year student. Research papers on topics unrelated to composition,
rhetoric, and/or literacy studies will not be considered.

Xchanges

Turnitin and Plagiarism

Turnitin.com, a Pedagogic Placebo for Plagiarism

Sean Zwagerman, "The Scarlet P: Plagiarism, Panopticism, and the Rhetoric of Academic Integrity" (CCC 59:4 / JUNE 2008).

Turnitin Bibliography

Reading Study

Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:16:36 -0600
From:
Subject: short survey on undergraduates and recreational reading

Hello, all -

I'm a new fellow-traveler on this list, intrigued to see so many
familiar names. With my colleague XXXXXX and a student
researcher, I am working on an article on a survey we took of our
students on recreational reading practices. We also surveyed academic
librarians, and now I would like to get some feedback from faculty who
teach undergraduates, particularly those who tend to pay attention to
their reading practices as an aspect of their teaching.

Among the questions we're investigating are: how do college students
feel about books and reading? Do their reading practices differ when
reading for fun rather than reading critically? What role does
pleasure reading play in life-long learning? What can academic
libraries do to encourage reading?

I have put together a survey addressing some of those issues that
might only take you a couple of minutes, unless you choose to comment.
It would make our article much richer if we have some faculty
perspective in the mix.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PL7QRHB

Thank in advance - and sorry for exacerbating chronic surveyitis.

Business Rhetoric

From WPA-L (Jan 26, 2010)
Subject Heading: Readings for rhetoric in business writing?

My personal favorites, if we're talking about graduate students who
need to understand the rhetorical situation, would be some of the
'ethnographies' of business writing:

Bargiela-Chiappini, F., & Nickerson, C. (Eds.). (1999). Writing
Business: Genres, Media and Discourses. Essex, UK: Pearson Education
Limited.

Beaufort, A. (1999). Writing in the real world: Making the transition
from school to work. New York: Teachers College Press.

Boden, D. (1994). The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action.
Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

Henry, J. (2000). Writing workplace cultures: An archeology of
professional writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Matalene, C. B. (Ed) (1989), Worlds of Writing: Teaching and Learning
in Discourse Communities of Work. New York: Random House.

Odell, L., & Goswami, D. (Eds.). (1985). Writing in Nonacademic
Settings. New York: Guildford.

Spilka, R. (Ed.) (1993). Writing in the Workplace: New Research
Directions. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Grammar/Usage books ...for me?

Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:33:08 -0500
From: Emily Isaacs
Subject: Favorite big, fat grammar and usage reference book -- for yourself, not students

Folks,

Do you have a favorite grammar and usage reference book for your own use? I am perfectly happy with any number of the handbooks for use in class, but I'm finally read to own a big, fat grammar book that will give me lots of explanations and discussion.

Emily

---

_Breaking the Rules_ by Ed Schuster

---

Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:17:48 -0600
From: Quinn Warnick
Subject: Re: Favorite big, fat grammar and usage reference book -- for yourself, not students

Emily,

I like _Garner's Modern American Usage_ (Bryan A. Garner, Oxford), for precisely the reasons you mentioned: it is LONG on explanation and discussion, without being over pedantic. In fact, Garner begins the book with an essay called "Making Peace in the Language Wars," in which he tries to find some common ground between the "prescribers" and the "describers." I have the 2nd edition, but a 3rd edition just came out:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195382757/

I first read about Garner's guide in a wonderful essay by David Foster Wallace, "Tense Present." If you're interested, you can download a PDF version of that essay on this page:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557

Good luck finding a guide that works for you!

- Quinn

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An old one, but not as old as I, is
Quirk, Randolph and Sidney Greenbaum. *A Concise Grammar of Contemporary
English*. New York: Harcourt. 1973. Print.
It is a revision of an even older book *A Grammar of Contemporary
English*.

Huddleston and Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is equally big and fat (and useful).

Ron Cowan has written The Teacher's Grammar of English.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention Martha Kolln's Understanding English Grammar.

In addition to Chuck Schuster's fabulous Breaking the Rules, I would recommend Steven Pinker's Words and Rules.

Sequencing Assignments

Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 11:29:31 -0500
From: Paula Mathieu
Subject: articles on sequencing, inquiry or cohesion of a writing course

Hello colleagues and happy new year.

I hope the question I have is not too vague:

For the graduate course I am teaching (to prepare new teaching fellows to teach the first-year writing course) I am looking for an essay(s) or book that addresses issues of having an overarching inquiry or structure holding a composition course and the assignments together. I'm not talking about a 'topic' per se, although a topic could be one form of inquiry. I'm trying to help students construct syllabi that connect writing genres with a purpose and audience and construct assignments with some sense of deliberate sequence. Typically, our graduate students draft syllabi that are a collection of four or five unrelated assignments in no particular order. I'm hoping to engage them in thinking about the logic of a course overall, with issues and questions that get explored throughout the semester.

I have had success helping students think on the assignment level, but less so in having them think about the goals and issues keeping the course together more broadly. Can any recommend possible readings to address this?

Many thanks for your help.

All the best,
Paula

---

Ideas for English 101, ed. Richard Ohmann and W. B.
Coley (NCTE, 1975). Articles by Elbow, Coles, Bruffee, Winterrowd et al.

David Jolliffe's book, Inquiry and Genre (Allyn & Bacon 1999)

[Chris Anson: David's book is terrific for its wedding of theory and practice. Its most important contribution is to show how wrongheaded we are to assign new domains or topics for students' writing every couple of weeks--as if they can write authoritatively about something they haven't had nearly enough time to investigate. David's pedagogy in this book (which didn't get the attention it deserves) argues that students become more authoritative, confident, and successful writers in relation to their immersion, over time, in a specific area of inquiry (duh).]

Kenneth Dowst's "The Epistemic Approach," in Donovan and McClelland's Eight
Approaches to Teaching Composition, in which Dowst refers to several
assignment sequences and principles for constructing them.

The chapter "Designing Writing Courses" in Erika Lindemann's A Rhetoric for
Writing Teachers gives some attention to sequencing.

Betty Pytlik's piece on sequencing: "Sequencing Writing Assignments to Foster Critical Thinking." In The Critical Writing Workshop: Designing Writing Assignments to Foster Critical Thinking. Ed. Toni- Lee Capossela. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook/Heinemann, 1993. 71-93.

New Media titles

Suppose you wanted students to do a multimedia project. Well, those don't just grow on trees. They might need a script and a storyboard, probably a planning document for where their various resources are coming from. If they're shooting any video, some plans for that. The various components of the text itself, and the writing together of those components -- it's a lot of small projects coming together to one big one. I would look in the literature on teaching multimodality
for tons of other project ideas -- a particularly rich book for this is Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe, and Sirc's book from USU press, Writing New Media (ISBN 0-87421-575-7).

Doug Downs, WPA-L, 1/6/2010

SofM Faculty Development

Please click here for the URL for our google doc.

Notes on Teaching Writing Online (Warnock)

What have I found useful about this book?

• The three specific rationales for teaching online writing courses ("I specifically find online writing instruction promising because I believe--and this is a core premise of this book--that online writing instruction provides the opportunity for not just a different approach, but a progressive approach to the way teachers teach writing--an evolution of sorts in writing instruction" [xi])
• Chickering and Zelda Gamson's seven principles for undergraduate teaching (p. xiv)
• Icebreakers (p. 6-8)
• The idea, throughout the book, that students should use a specific subject line when sending me emails. For example, Section 15: Homework Question. I've never done this before. This, along with teaching them how to write an email to a professor, is a good idea. Then, set up Smart Folders in Apple Mail to accommodate these different kinds of emails.
• Helping students decide whether an online course is the right one for them--have them fill out a learning style survey (p. 43)
• Escape Clauses (giving students info on how to drop the class without penalty, etc.) (p. 43)
• Does BB9 have "pop up" reminders? ("scheduling reminders are often embedded in course documents") (p. 57)
• Rather than give students the PDFS, give them the citation information and have them go to the library page and download the documents themselves. This gets them at least a bit of exposure to the library website and learning a bit about how databases work and where academics publish their work. (p. 62)
• Quizzes (p. 64-65)

Chapter 8 is very useful--it's all about online discussion.

• Useful language on p. 79-81 for how to talk with students about online posting
• Primary and Secondary (follow-up) posts, how to grade them and language to explain all this to the students 83-84.
• Offering multiple prompts instead of just one per week.
• Student generated prompts (87)
• Having students use Discussion Board posts in their coursework (88-89)

Who is A Writer (Video)

This featured video, "Who Is a Writer: What Writers Tell Us " was NCoW's inaugural project.

Compiled from footage gathered from across the U.S., the writers in this video tell compelling stories that demonstrate that everyone is a writer, contrary to what we might read or hear in the media.

Join the conversation. Learn about the various ways you can contribute by making video or audio recordings of your own interviews, by sharing writers' work, or by contributing lessons or ideas for using NCoW in your teaching or other work.

Learn more about the NCoW and the WPA Network for Media Action by following the links above.

What is Composition/Rhetoric, Rhetoric/Composition, Writing Studies?

From What Direction for Rhet-Comp?

Composition/Rhetoric scholars are also very busy doing the following: teaching writing to college students--including analytical and expository writing, writing for social change, business writing, technical writing, writing for the web, literary journalism, creative non-fiction; teaching future teachers how to teach writing; helping their fellow professors incorporate writing into their own classrooms more effectively; making connections in the community (with schools, neighborhood centers, literacy organizations); developing curriculum for first-year composition and many other courses; hiring, supporting, and advocating for better working conditions for instructors of first-year composition (including part-timers, grad students, and non-tenure-line full-time faculty).

Oh, and they also do research! They research how writing and reading actually function in people's daily lives; how writing has been taught down through the ages; how people learn to write; how various technologies affect writing, reading, and learning; how the teaching and learning of writing are affected by multi-cultural societies, immigration, racism, class differences, family background, and other factors; how we can best evaluate people's writing abilities and what they actually learn in writing classes; whether what students learn in first-year composition transfers to other courses; and yes, the rhetorical strategies used by Presidents and CEOs and advertisers and bloggers.

What Rhet/Comp Folk Really Do
Posted by Steve Fox , Director of Writing at IUPUI on December 30, 2009 at 7:15pm EST