Faced with standardized writing tests, students must write on demand to prompts they haven't chosen. While students have little control over the prompts they must answer or the time and space limitations in which they must answer them, students and teachers have opportunities for meaningful resistance to standardized writing tests in reconsidering…

Science and storytelling have an uneasy relationship. The scientific community frequently disdains stories, seeing them as polluting the purity of objective communication of data. In the peer-review process, for example, scientists who tell stories with their data are seen as "embellish[ing] and conceal[ing] information to evoke a response in…

"Lesson that come easy are not lessons at all. They are gracious acts of luck. Yet lessons learned the hard way are lessons never forgotten"--Don William. The present paper illustrates how to plan effectively for teaching prose in English. The design and strategy of the lesson can be planned prior to the teaching class. Teaching prose is…

In this article, I show how the study of the poems of Charles Reznikoff -- a 20th century American lawyer -- helps teach the critical art of paraphrase to International law students, lawyers from The Temple's LLM Program. Scholars have acknowledged the difficulty of teaching paraphrase to students from civil law countries, acknowledging that it…

While the social, political, economic, educational, and cultural consequences of high rates of incarceration have been well documented, the social psychological dynamics have not received as much discussion. I offer here a first person narrative reflection on the connections between a writing workshops and raising social awareness of the realities…

LaRocque, Kleiman, and Darling (2011) characterized parental involvement as the "missing link" in school achievement. For this reason, especially, middle grades teachers and teacher leaders want very much to reach out to newcomer Latino families--and they do. Although Google Translate™ has emerged as a go-to tool for many teachers and…

Effective communication enhances school-family partnerships. Written communication is a common, efficient way of communicating with families, but potential barriers to effective communication include readability level, clarity of presentation, complexity of format, and structural components. The PROSE Checklist presented in this article can…

This short graphic novel details two very different rhetoricians co-existing simultaneously in Ancient Greece, Sappho and Socrates, and their definitions and performances of rhetoric. While both share certain styles and techniques, a noticeable difference in the ways they create rhetorical prose and oration can be clearly seen, showing that Sappho…

The alarming statistic that just under half (46%) of adult Australians cannot read confidently was a stimulus for Australian libraries to found the National Year of Reading (NYR). The idea for this campaign was based on the success of the United Kingdom's National Year of Reading (National Literacy Trust 2008), a campaign that aimed to build a…

I propose that we think about what a paragraph is by considering its "function," what it does in a piece of writing, whether in a popular novel, a newspaper article, an e-mail, a business report, or a lofty piece of literary criticism. We might think about a paragraph as a "rhetorical dwelling."

The following poetic installation reflects on the artistic-scientistic divide that permeates how research practice is carried out and assessed even within the qualitative paradigm. Some poems question the art-science dichotomy and how it shapes truth-telling practices in both research and teaching. Other poems challenge the mind-body dichotomy.…

Some teaching strategies grow out of the curricula educators inherit or develop through professional reading; others originate in the aromatic humus of their autobiographies. This article presents a proposal that has its origins in the latter. The author recognized that what delights her in prose or poetry is the figurative language a writer uses…

In this article, the author reflects on teaching in a time of war, and she realizes that all of her education, all of her teaching, indeed, all of her life has been "in a time of war" and that she has been constantly influenced by war, rumors of war, fears of war. As she conceived, planned, collected information for, wrote, and revised…

We propose a two-component theory of text signaling devices. The first component is a text-based analysis that characterizes any signaling device along four dimensions: (a) the type of information it makes available, (b) its scope, (c) how it is realized in the text, and (d) its location with respect to the content it cues. The second component is…

They say first impressions can be deceiving. The difficulty of getting to know someone increases when that person is mostly fictional. Whatever the author writes is all readers can know. Whatever they read about the character is all they have to go on. Now take it another step back, and imagine a portrait drawing, painting or print of that…