A Synthesis of Professor Perspectives on Using First and Third Person in Academic Writing

A Synthesis of Professor Perspectives on Using First and Third Person in Academic Writing

A Writing Course with research on the affective elements of writing at the center

Beyond Knowledge and Skills: Writing Transfer and the Role of Student Dispositions

States, Traits, and Dispositions: The Impact of Emotion on Writing Development and Writing Transfer Across College Courses and Beyond

On Writing, by John McPhee

Excerpt from Omission:

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.

Except from Draft No 4:

First drafts are slow and develop clumsily, because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. The first draft of a long piece on California geology took two gloomy years; the second, third, and fourth drafts took about six months altogether. That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that, it seems as if a different person is taking over. Dread largely disappears. Problems become less threatening, more interesting. Experience is more helpful, as if an amateur is being replaced by a professional. Days go by quickly, and not a few could be called pleasant, I’ll admit.

One word to describe these two...meandering.

Writing as Therapy/Healing (Pennebaker)

Writing and Healing from Trauma: An Interview with James Pennebaker

750 Words

http://750words.com

Nearly Universal Authorship

A Writing Revolution

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

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_Breaking the Rules_ by Ed Schuster

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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

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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

Vids on Writing

Tamu study on commenting practices of teachers:

Part I



Part II