In this essay, I offer William James's notion of pragmatic belief as a framework for re-envisioning religious discourses as rhetorical resources in composition teaching. Adopting a Jamesian pragmatic framework in composition teaching, I argue, entails two pragmatic adjustments to current approaches. The first adjustment concerns the way we think…

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton's multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the…

This piece continues the work of scholars in the field who look to uncover the ideological and textual practices of our dependence on the construct of "race" through racialized metaphors. Analyzing the rhetoric of race in "College Composition and Communication" and "College English" since 1990, I assert that our categorization of what "race" is…

While "internationalization" has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different…

Reconsiders the assumptions writing teachers make about students' literacy practices. Chooses students in the "center," neither particularly successful nor recalcitrant failures, to demonstrate a way of reading the rhetorical constructions of students' texts to understand the decisions they make in composing. Sketches implications of…

Studies the relations of discourse and teaching to ideological and cultural production. Argues for the initiation of cultural critique within the research and pedagogical practices of the field of professional writing. Illustrates how such a model of criticism might be developed in professional writing research. (HB)

Offers a framework for analyzing lexical cohesion in academic discourse based on a previous model for analysis of conversational and literary discourse. Discusses the implications of this new framework for teaching expository reading/writing and for research. (HTH)

Examines phonological transfer in developmental student writing (spelling or word configurations that represent what the writer hears). Examines two discourse features--"by strings" and "topic/comment" sentence structures. Analyzes a developmental writing African American student's essay, demonstrating the power and tension in…

Examines unconventional interpretations given to a poem by a student in a remedial college writing class. Argues that facilitating an underprepared student's entry into the academic community is compromised by efforts to channel student discourse into more common patterns. Calls for an instructional model that places student knowledge making at…

Discusses and problematizes the notion of education as a transformative experience for students and teachers. Recounts the literacy history of the author. Discusses the ongoing tension in American culture between difference and unity, and how this tension has influenced composition theory and practice. (HB)